My wife reacted VERY strongly to D-then-18's criticisms and concerns about her mother's behavior during the affair. To this day, I think it was more my in-laws' (particularly my mother-in-law's) and my daughters' (particularly the daughter I'm talking about)'s disapproval of my wife's affair that did more to end it than anything I felt about it.
My daughter wrote her mother a strong, yet beautiful, 5-page handwritten letter, in which she told her how hurt she was, and how embarrassed and ashamed she was, after reading things my wife had inadvertently left on the home computer -- and even scolded her mother for leaving that where my daughter's little brothers (S-then-14 and S-then-10) could have found it! My wife and my daughter are EXTREMELY close (they are also spitting images of each other), and it hurt my wife very deeply to have to read those words from her. She took it well THAT NIGHT, but in the days and weeks that followed, she got real snotty about it, and made a couple of comments to me about how she "didn't appreciate it" how our daughter and how my MIL were reacting to all of this. I remember telling my wife "You don't get to choose how they react to what you did. What makes you think you get to choose how they feel and how they handle this traumatic news in their life with someone they love???"
I basically told her she had to sit there and take it.
