Here's the deal: this woman - a friend-of-a-friend of the author's - is unhappy in her marriage. But because she's got kids, and kids "need a father," she's lining up a new one before the divorce. Says Babble's Jeanne Sager,

But what does this teach your kids? That it's OK to lie? That your daughters need to have a man around at all times. . . and at all costs? The idea that a woman needs to have a man is as outdated as that old quote about fish and bicycles. So too is the idea that a single parent can't provide for a child what a couple can - or that, say, two lesbians can't provide for a child what a heterosexual couple can.

Also...their father's still going to exist, right? I mean, does he need a "replacement?" And won't having a brand-new daddy be kind of...jarring? Sager adds that kids won't learn anything about the realities of divorce this way: that sometimes things don't work out and life goes on. Obviously, this plan is, to say the least, flawed, and it doesn't exactly need us pointing that out. If this is for real, the kids are going to have bigger issues than understanding what constitutes a typical divorce. "I cheated on your father for you" will make for a hefty therapist's bill, to say the least. So: we are going to go on the assumption that this is an isolated situation and not a standard rationale for unhappy people who are afraid of being alone. Because otherwise it's going to be really hard to get through the week.
Would you Cheat FOR the Kids? [Babble]

In their enduring quest to provide an arbitrary 10 answers for any question (and there are generally only about five), AskMen has presented the world with "Top 10: Reasons Not To Tell Her You’ve Cheated" and, correspondingly, the Top 10 reasons to come clean. (Which, I guess, frees the site from flagrant emotional irresponsibility?) They're about what you'd expect, a mix of the obvious, the self-justifying and the same-thing-differently-worded-to-make-10-answers.

Pro honesty rationales include: guilt/paranoia will kill you; she'll hear it somewhere else; and (oddly at #2) "it's the right thing to do." The "Don't Tell" list is a combination of self-righteous (it would only hurt her; it's "selfish" to tell; it meant nothing) and the self-serving (she'll leave you; she may be cheating too!; she won't find out.)

But there is really only one answer: where sex has taken place, nowadays, secrecy is not an option. Whatever the emotional rationale for concealing such a mistake, health consequences render the debate moot — or should. But grown up life is disappointingly messy and I'd be lying if I said that was my first thought when I got The Confession — not least because I'd never had to consider that stuff before. I remember when my friend asked me if I was sorry to have been told, my response: "No, I'm sorry he did it in the first place!" I mean, as long as it had happened I'd rather have known, and I'd rather have known a lot sooner. Strange as it sounds, while ignorance may have been bliss, retroactively the period of obliviousness felt like the worst part. In some ways unburdening oneself is selfish; but so is keeping a partner in the dark and not arming them with the facts of a situation, emotional and otherwise. (Although, given that that's only maybe four arguments, we should probably defer to AskMen.)

Top 10: Reasons Not To Tell Her You’ve Cheated [AskMen]