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.

So it wasn't really for your now husband that you left your marriage as you went on to see someone else. He wouldn't leave his marriage at first - that's a bit of an insult too. It's not certainly Love Story is it ?

I saw posters saying many 2nd marriage were better than 1st. I think it's not a fair comparison, if the 1st marriage had to go through having young kids, raising them, aging parents, whilst still at the lower pay grade. These are more stressful stage in life, and most people will feel the pressure.

Then boom, all of sudden, kids are more independent, career progressed, and some people start to think their life shouldn't just be like this. Instead of joining their partner together, to create a new stage of life, they chose to cheat.

This is different to OP's situation though.

Life isn't black and white unfortunately.
Op was clearly in the wrong marriage from the start. Does that mean she should stay in it forever? I appreciate an affair isn't ideal but life doesn't always follow a perfect trajectory

The legal and practical aspects of a marriage ending can take an age yes. But interpersonal honesty is possible 24/7.

Absolutely - I wouldn’t call yours an affair. The something clicked, and he moved out and away from his existing relationship before he moved in with you. It was obviously right decision because you’re still together 🙂 We often stay in things longer than we should and it’s possible that was it for him as well. That’s when things can move quickly and be genuine at the same time.

🤣 🥤

I don't think once a cheater, always a cheater - people can make bad choices, regret it deeply, and then better themselves so they never repeat those behaviours.

But - you've said you don't feel any remorse or regret for lying, betraying, and acting with rank cowardice, which means you'll do it again to your new husband if the circumstances are right. You might not believe you will, but old patterns of behaviour will always repeat themselves if you don't regret them, and haven't worked to change them.

You might not, but you think your current husband feels remorse for cheating, instead of doing the right thing and leaving his wife before beginning a liaison with you? Or is he also just as likely to have his head turned by someone else as he was when he was married to his first wife?

Also, what do you think your children would think of you, if as teenagers or adults, they ever found out that your relationship had begun because you both cheated on your significant others with each other for months, and still don't regret the way you behaved?

I’ve always felt abusive situations are different. Especially for women , historically.

Still no need to cheat before ending it with the first person though.

Charles and Camilla I think were different though - they were unable to officially be together for very unique social and political reasons. It’s not the case for the majority of the rest of us.

Additionally, all of the celebrity couples mentioned could have had multiple affairs during their second marriages, but have just learnt to be more discreet!

Emotional immaturity is at the root of these things, I find.

I do agree - we don’t know what’s going on in their 2nd marriages! (Re-read your post sorry lol! Haven’t had my coffee yet)

Including that they were both married to other people. It’s still an affair if it’s with your ex. The other two examples were just straight up affairs. Tom Hanks has also said that his relationship with his wife Rita Wilson, began when he was married to his first wife. They’re seen as the ultimate in successful marriages.

Seen by whom, though? We don’t know what’s going on behind closed doors. Also royalty and the expectations placed upon them is different to celebrity. So I can see how Charles and Camilla happened. Not so much Tom and Rita 🙂

I think you're being very naive to think you can somehow 'stave off' an affair by being aware that you're both willing to cheat, and 'neutralising the issue' by 'making sure those circumstances don't arise'. People don't have affairs because their relationships are bad, they have them because they're people who are willing to have affairs instead of dealing with their issues ethically.

Add to that the fact that having young babies/toddlers is a prime time for husbands to cheat, and yours already has a track record of doing so...all I can say is that I'd be worried if I were you, if he's still in a line of work where he travels on business.

I’m not privy to all the ins and outs of their conversations obviously, but he told his ex when we got together officially and I assume she put 2+2 together. Fortunately she had already started dating the person she went on to marry, which I think made it a bit easier.

He completely infantilised her, and they were deeply codependent. That happened to an extent in my marriage too (me in parent), but my ex-H was clearly a car crash and I was less willing/able to ignore my own needs, so although my marriage was clearly the one with problems other people knew about, under the surface his was much more f-d up, and at least as much because of his baggage as hers. I think the dynamic absolutely helped him conceal the affair.

I'm surprised your mutual friends took it so well considering they must have known his ex-wife too if they were childhood sweethearts. You knew her and still pushed him to leave her. Bit of a sad story really and I do believe it will come back around eventually

I don’t know if Love Story is reference to a particular film or something but no, it definitely isn’t a straightforward love story 😅

I don’t think him taking longer to leave his marriage is insulting though. We all have to work things through at our own pace, and I’m pleased he didn’t rush through it. He did actually tell me in the few weeks after I finally ended the affair that he would leave, and I told him to bugger off and work out whether he actually wanted to end the marriage, or was just hurt from us ending. By that point I’d left my marriage for no one, I was angry with him and thought he should jolly well have to go through the same process if he was serious.

I broadly agree that in the right/wrong circumstances, I could have an affair again. However, not being filled with regret and remorse doesn’t mean we haven’t worked to change them - we have very consciously put practices into place to try to guard against the dynamics that led to our first marriages failing.

My husband simply would never have left his ex-W if he hadn’t had an affair. They never fought, were going through all the steps people do in life, without ever asking himself if he actually wanted the next thing on the list. They were each other’s first relationship, he had never been dumped or dumped anyone and wouldn’t have known where to start.

I imagine as teenagers, they would be as judgy as most teenagers. I hope that as adults, they will appreciate life is more about the shades of grey. Although I do think it often takes personal experience of something like an affair that sets your self-image on fire to make people realise that to their core.

I think there’s a lot of truth in that, but people don’t generally think of emotional maturity as being willing to simply walk away from a marriage that’s not working before “giving it their all”. So people stay in dysfunctional marriages longer than they should, and then they have affairs.

I also firmly believe emotional maturity and age don’t have much to do with each other!

Yes I was thinking the same thing. All extremely immature.

Do you not think that failing to deal with issues is characteristic of a bad relationship?

”Dealing with our issues” - ie ensuring genuine open communication between us - is exactly how we do try to make sure the circumstances for an affair don’t arise. We both believe our affair was a symptom of a failing marriage, so the best (only?!) defence against an affair is making our marriage as strong as it can be. We’ve both done a lot of individual therapy and we have scheduled “state of the union” conferences which we run like a self-guided couples counselling session. A lot of people think it’s weird, but it forces us to have the difficult conversations than otherwise get avoided and create the distance someone else could creep into.

I’m not worried about him having an affair currently, for both positive reasons - we’re very happy with each other - and negative - oh god we are both so tired with the kids. He switched to a role that didn’t haven’t overnight travel when our eldest was born so he could be home with us more.

I was surprised too tbh, but in reality mutual friends often aren’t that mutual. We actually have more mutual friends with my ex than his. Pretty much all our mutual friends were delighted about it - I think we lost one friend over it, and she just slowly pulled away as she became closer to his ex. Also it had been a good chunk of time between them splitting up and us officially getting together.

I didn’t push him to leave his wife, once I ended my marriage I told him I wasn’t willing to continue the affair and he needed to go work out what he wanted. While there was some ongoing emotional turmoil we didn’t so much as snog for 18 months after that.