AMA My marriage started as an affair.

[LavenderRoseBush]

I’ve been contemplating this post for a while and been hesitant for obvious reasons. But I’ve seen a few posts recently making the assumption that people who have affairs are somehow a breed apart, rather than a significant proportion of the population. So here goes!

To pre-empt the most obvious questions: we were both married, and neither of us had kids.

My husband and I were both married to other people when we got together, we both knew it was going to be tough and it was. Both sets of parents were against us at first, and that was hard, and a lot of people in our small town ignored us at first. I don't think either of us realised how difficult it was going to be, but we muddled through.
We both said if we can get through this we can get through anything as long as we're together. It hasn't been plain sailing by any means but we're still very happy together and have been married for 55 years.
Was it worth it? Yes.

I am good at getting the truth behind people's narrative.

I can tell that really, you're not, from what you've said and which bits I think aren't true.

It's a good methodology for establishing fact, isn't it?

As you have nothing to back that up I'll disregard it entirely

I do agree that I don't think there are such things as soul mates and that there are many people who can fit into a role in your life.

How about holding hands under a cushion in the presence of your partners and friends?

I don't have a question OP but I just wanted to say thanks for actually answering other people's questions on AMA. Quite unusual these days!

It's just so painfully childish that I almost disbelieve it happened that way. But that fits in with the general picture – love confessions within weeks, and so on. Affairs are a very melodramatic thing, I suppose.

@TheresMillionsOfGeoffreys, no, not at all, I just get irritated by people getting so sanctimonious.
people have affairs for many reasons. It’s not a black and white as most Mumsnet tees seem to think.

@Blueuggboots I think that many people recognise it is not black and white but also they know how people who have affairs often construct a tale to justify it.

How did you sleep at night knowing that you were deceiving the closest people to you? Knowing that his poor wife must have thought she was crazy from the gaslighting? Sure she may have moved on since then but let me tell you something as someone whose husband had an affair. What that shit does to your nervous system, the anxiety, the heaviness in your chest, the sleepless nights, the pain and trust issues going forward, the antidepressants needed to cope with ptsd symptoms…… I don’t know how you selfishly get to move forward with your lives, and the victims are the ones that pay the price.

I was desperately unhappy in my marriage but stuck it out as long as I could so my child could have stability and a family unit for longer. Things got worse and one day I discovered he was having an affair. I felt absolute, pure giddy relief. Now I could get divorced without guilt! So while I'm pissed off for sticking it out that long, in the end I think he did me a favour with his affair. He's no longer with her.

I hear this. I am currently going through divorce. I had an affair and he was also married.
I split up within a month us talking. My soon to be ex is an alcoholic and I had been promised that he would sort himself out because he was making me mentally and physically unwell with his behaviour.

There were so many horrible incidents over the years of our marriage and his treatment of me was awful. He did find out I was talking to someone else and thinks that I destroyed the whole marriage and we could have carried on if it wasn't for me. I didn't realise how checked out I was but leaving seemed like such a huge and daunting thing.

100% this!!

I suspect the combination of concealed physical intimacy and alcohol is how most affairs start tbh 😂

I was (unhappily) married with no kids and had an affair 30 years ago with an older single man. I'm now very happily married to him.

If I were going to make something up, it would be a lot less cringy!

The very fast “love yous” (it may actually have been that first night rather than the first phone call, it’s a bit hazy now) were because of the grey area with being friends and of course people do love their friends. It wasn’t initially a clear “in love”. But yes, I think affairs are probably nearly always melodramatic, at least in some ways.

It's the ex wife I feel sorriest for in all of this, not so much the OP's ex-husband (even allowing for the fact that we only have her side of events) I also think that OP's current husband comes off looking worse than OP.

I appreciate you are coming from a place of pain and won’t like any answer I can give you, so I’ll just respond straight.

I simply didn’t think about it very much. I was obviously in a lot of emotional turmoil, and very consumed with how I felt about my ex-H, my marriage, what was happening with DH, what it all meant for the future etc. I’ve written upthread about what my marriage was like at that point, and I think the reality is I didn’t care whether I hurt ex-H, and was made yet more furious by him not even noticing I was spending hours a night messaging, going out late, randomly having nights away etc.

Even at the time, I did feel more guilty about his ex-W. I dealt with that basically by making it his (DH’s) problem. “I’ll worry about my marriage, you worry about yours” sort of thing.

I do generally think feeling guilty over something you can’t change is a waste of time, unless it spurs you into behaving differently. I don’t think I’ll have an affair again, for many, many reasons, but one is a better understanding of both the slippery slope and the damage a full blown affair causes to everyone involved. I do feel bad about the pain we caused ex-W. I also believe it’s up to her to process what happened and move on with her life. I hope she’s happy. If she’s not, that’s up to her to work on.

I did have many years of therapy where we picked over the bones of both my marriage and affair until there was really nothing more to discuss and I could make peace with it being part of my past, and move on. Someone upthread said I seemed to have all the answers. That’s because most of the questions I’ve already asked myself, and thought about at some length.

Do you think the dynamics might have changed if you had been fully found out in the traditional sense while both still married? Or do you think it would still have ended this way?

Fair play to you that you've been honest. I won't lie, I still judge you for having done a shitty thing, and I personally believe that what goes around comes around and that your DH sounds untrustworthy. I hope for your sake either that I'm wrong, or that if I'm right that you will have the self awareness and capacity for introspection to be able to move on and not wallow.

I still think that in this post you are very flippant about your husband's ex wife. There is something that just bit more awful about you cheating with a friend that you knew, had socialised with etc. It is far worse than if she had not known you. She mingled with you etc yet you did this. It's an appalling betrayal not reasoned by oh she was more of the friend of so and so. As someone else has said it brings everyone into it.

You add a joke into all of your posts I notice. I'm not sure why - either you do think it's all gone and water under the bridge so 😂 or it's your self defence.

Oooh, I’ve never thought about this! I think once the affair was in full swing, being caught would likely have ended up in the same situation of me leaving ex-H, him trying to work things out with ex-W (if she wanted to) that ultimately failing and us getting together (assuming reasonably short time scale and I’m still single). Obviously much trickier in terms of friends and family, but I think both of us would have thought - well sod it, now we’ve had all the opprobrium we might as well give it a go. Someone upthread talked about a similar experience fifty years ago, which made a lot of sense to me.

I think the only way it would likely have ended with us not together is if we had been caught very early in the first six weeks or so - definitely before sleeping together. My marriage would have ended immediately, but for DH the balance of guilt in leaving ex vs wanting to be with me might have been more in favour of cutting me off and never talking ever again. I don’t believe his ex-W would have chucked him out, especially when it was “just” an emotional affair - their whole dynamic was him being the strong, steady one and her being the helpless dependent and I think that would have continued indefinitely.

I don’t mean to come across as flippant, but there’s no point pretending to feel more guilt than I do, especially on AMA where I assume people want the truth. I agree knowing the affair partner makes it worse for the cheated on spouse on a lot of levels. However I have always (even pre-affair) felt that it’s the spouse who makes and breaks vows and bears the guilt. Obviously if it’s a close friend that’s a different thing, but simply being in the same social circles as someone else doesn’t mean much to me in terms of promises.