Phillie - he's managed to make a compote of every lame excuse men give for cheating. Her went home with a female co-worker because he didn't want to come home to an "empty" house? How is a house empty when his family is sleeping there? And he was enjoying blowing off steam about a bad shift at work? Opportunity #1 to do the right thing: go home, wake up your wife, tell her about your bad day, and have sex with her. They're talking, and she suddenly kisses him - opportunity #2 to do the right thing: push her away, tell her you are not going to cheat on your wife, leave immediately, go home to your wife. Things went from A to Z very quickly - opportunity #3 to do the right thing: stop at "A", you frikken' fool, push her away, leave immediately. No, he's not necessarily a bad man - if this was truly the one and only time - but it was not a "weak moment", it was a bad action. He has not taken responsibility for his action - he has offered you every classic cheater's excuse in the book, with the exception of "She reminded me of you." For Shrinking, when people press you for your weight-loss "secret", tell them you ate less and exercised more. Guaranteed to make them lose interest.

It sounds as if she is making the excuses more so than he is. She thinks that he is trying to make up for. He did tell her what he did without issue as well. There is a difference between excuses and explanation. An explanation is him telling her what he did and what he was thinking at the time. An excuse tells her what he did with a justification for the behavior.

Let me ask you this; how could he explain to his wife why he did it without making an excuse, if she wants to know?

How could he "explain" it? He could say, "I'm an idiot, and I did the wrong thing." There's only one "why" as to why he did it - he did it because he wanted to. Every human action is preceded by a decision - whether conscious or not. I do agree that it sounds like she is trying to prop up his excuses herself. I think that's because she wants to forgive him, and there's nothing wrong with that. But if he continues to see his action as a series of inadvertent circumstances, he will not take responsibility, and that makes it more likely that he will do it again. Let's not forget, he chose to accompany a woman to her home when both of them had been drinking - if he had asked himself at that decision point, "What would my wife think of this? Is there a chance this will lead to a wrong action?" I think he would have made a better decision. I won't claim to be able to read the guy's mind, but in my experience, a man does not go alone with a woman to her home without it passing through his mind that sex might result. I also wonder if he spontaneously made this confession, or if it was a pre-emptive defense ... in other words, if he was afraid she was going to find out. Bottom line, she is having problems getting past this; in my opinion, she is right to have these problems, until he is willing to man up and admit that it wasn't some sequence of unavoidable circumstances, but his own decision, for him to have cheated.