AIBU to think affairs are more common than we think

[YukiCarrot]

Just reading about Matt Hancock in the news, was pretty shocked.

This, coupled with some affairs I know of IRL has really rattled me, my trust in men is at an all time low. (i know women have affairs to!)

Has your DP/DH had an affair? Do you know of people who have?

@thepeopleversuswork

Agreed.
Financial independence for women would actually sort out so many of the problems we face, along with men paying for their children.

Just stop for a moment and imagine what the world would look like if there were financially independent women everywhere,

ImaHogg

I am interested in your anecdote about your sister, and in particular the fact that you point out that your sister is still with (presumably) the person she cheated with 16 years later.

Do you think people analyse a cheater who leaves their spouse for another and then remains with that other for a long time (rather than it break down quickly after) as "proof" that actually (i) the first relationship was wrong and the adultery relationship was meant to be together and/or (ii) the longevity of the relationship (you say 16 years) justifies the facts of how it started.

Just curious - I have heard people make these types of assumptions before (i.e if a relationship continues for a long time the duration itself is evidence it is a good or sucessful relationship)

@CounsellorTroi

I'm another one in a long happy marriage of 31 years. We have no children, I wonder if that makes a difference?

To be honest, I would think it very well might.

To people that say people who have affairs aren't bad people. How is destroying the person you are in a relationship with a good thing? Not to mention potential diseases transmitted that put them at risk as well. Now if you have children it gets even messier.

Honest question, if you found out your mother/father had an affair with someone would you still look at them in the same eyes? I sure would not.

Who is it (apart from the OP) who thinks they are uncommon?

@NEVERQUIT3331

To people that say people who have affairs aren't bad people. How is destroying the person you are in a relationship with a good thing? Not to mention potential diseases transmitted that put them at risk as well. Now if you have children it gets even messier.

Honest question, if you found out your mother/father had an affair with someone would you still look at them in the same eyes? I sure would not.

I would have clapped my mother on the back if she'd had an affair, I would love to see her experiencing the kind of love and romance she deserves. And my Dad, well he was a pretty dickish husband but he and my mother are wholly incompatible so I wouldn't have been surprised and would not have been outraged if he had. I just don't have those kind of absolutist ideals about people

@comebacksunshines

Go out and find someone with similar views to yourself and marry them, cheating is a shitty way to treat another human being and we don’t need society restructuring to accommodate the needs of selfish bastards, that think of only their own needs.

You've missed the point. I don't want to marry anyone, thank you. I don't want my financial security to depend on whether or not I shag the same bloke for the rest of my life. You get married and stay faithful if you want to. I'd rather not have morals from the Victorian age underpinning my finances.

Unfortunately common.

The ones I know of are men who cheated while their partner was pregnant or had a young baby. Like they felt left out 🙄

Some people seem to be missing the point of my thought experiment. I was not condoning cheating or trying to make it easier for people to cheat (in my entirely fictional scenario). I was trying to think of a way to reduce cheating by acknowledging that lifelong monogamy is probably not natural or desirable.

Financial independence would be crucial, as well as a more practical approach to co-parenting.

Step one - don’t base the financial and social structures of society on fairy tales.

@thepeopleversuswork

It would require both partners to maintian financial independence, which would be a major change of mindset for a lot of people, that is certainly true, but I doubt it would stop women wanting children.

Financial independence for women is the key to it IMHO. It largely removes the necessity for marriage anyway and means that women who do get married are protected if they want to leave or get left. I think combining finances with someone is insanity.

UK is exceptionally bad at supporting working mothers but it annoyes me when people assume it's the norm. Financial independence for women is completely normal in many European countries including country I'm originally from. Both my mum and my grandmother worked full time while rasing children just like majority of other mothers. Women get 80% pay on maternity leave for a year and if they decide to take more time to look after children their work place is protected and they can go back to the same job after few years. There are also affordable and free nurseries and free after school clubs. There are regulated, family friendly working hours and it's very uncommon for mothers of primary school children to not work full time or to not be able to progress in their careers.

Despite all that marriage is still very popular because there is so much more to it then protecting a mother when she can't work.

@ZoeCM

It would require both partners to maintian financial independence, which would be a major change of mindset for a lot of people, that is certainly true, but I doubt it would stop women wanting children.

Yes, but women would generally choose to have children with men who tell them they want to be with them for life. I don't think most women would just shrug and say, "No man loves me enough to want to stay with me for life, so I'll just settle for one who outright admits he'll leave once the kids have grown up." Women with very low self-esteem would accept that, but others would wait until they found men who told them they wanted to grow old with them (whether it was true or not). Those men wouldn't disappear. And we'd end up back where we started.

Not if that expectation wasn't the norm though, that's the point.

And actually, as we see on numerous threads here, it's often women who are discontent in the relationships once the child rearing bit is done, but having surrendered their financial independence to the father of their children, they feel trapped.

We saw the video set to the shaggy music and weren't surprised at all!!

Me and my colleagues were wondering if the BBC would sign him up for strictly or he he was more likely to want to be on "I'm a celebrity get me out of here"!!

What a depressing and odd thread.
Most people saying it's acceptable to betray the person you married in exchange for a drunken shag.
It's gross, really.
Animalistic.

Women get 80% pay on maternity leave for a year and if they decide to take more time to look after children their work place is protected and they can go back to the same job after few years.

How does this work in practice? What if the job no longer exists? Does the person who was doing the job have to vacate it to make room for the returning mother?

Having inadvertently (naively) become the OW many years ago (no - I'm not proud of it) I can tell you how easily it happens when two people who 'connect' spend a lot of time together. Add to that one person who's unhappy in their current relationship and it's a recipe for disaster. I wasn't married so wasn't the cheater but I blame myself as much for letting it happen (ie it's not just the men) and I think often about the DW. If karma is a thing, she moved on, remarried and had kids and I'm still single.

[quote thepeopleversuswork]@comebacksunshines

Go out and find someone with similar views to yourself and marry them, cheating is a shitty way to treat another human being and we don’t need society restructuring to accommodate the needs of selfish bastards, that think of only their own needs.

You've missed the point. I don't want to marry anyone, thank you. I don't want my financial security to depend on whether or not I shag the same bloke for the rest of my life. You get married and stay faithful if you want to. I'd rather not have morals from the Victorian age underpinning my finances.[/quote]
I think that its you living in the Victorian era.
No one is forcing you to marry, or have children.
Marriage for some is a public declaration of love, for others its a financial contract and for others its both. You are at liberty to adjust your vows to suit and there is no need to marry in a religious setting. If you want to be free to shag whoever you want, dump them when the kids are grown. Then don't vow to be faithful and forget about the in sickness and in health bit.
I can respect your views, but not everyone shares them. We are all different. If you find a partner that shares your views on shagging around then that's wonderful, it wouldn't work for me.
I'm not a particularly religious person, but there is a reason that people makes vows of fidelity and its not just because it might jeopardise the woman's financial security , it's because it's also an incredibly shitty and hurtful thing to do to another human being, that some of the posters on this thread seem to be overlooking in their plans for a new world order.

I don’t doubt that affairs are common, but at the same time I would devastated if my DH had one. Obviously it’s a possibility, but I decided to marry and have children with him as I judged him trustworthy. Doubtless people will be along to tell me how naive I am, but I honestly don’t see the point of embarking on a long term commitment with someone if you don’t think the two of you will last and avoid infidelity.

A few years back my cousin blew up his marriage through infidelity. Clearly the infidelity was a symptom not the cause of the ending of the marriage. But the way he went about it and all the lies involved have left his teenage kids refusing to talk to him. I cannot see how he can think it was worth it. Whereas I’m sure it would have been possible for the marriage itself to end without the level of acrimony involved as a consequence of the affairs.

After seeing this from afar, DH and I talked about it and made a promise to each other that if we felt our feelings changed we would talk. Not cheat. I would be devastated if our marriage were to end, particularly if I was the only one who didn’t want it to. But the possibility of betrayal and lies towards me by my best friend and father of our children would be so much worse.

@comebacksunshines

Maybe I'm not explaining myself clearly enough. I'm not saying I want to shag around and be unfaithful because as you say it is a shitty and hurtful thing to do. I'm basically saying the exact opposite. I don't want to be in a relationship which is based on obligation and duty and I think marriage is in most cases a very poor structure for the expression of love.

I would very much like to be in a lifelong, faithful relationship, as would most people I think. And I currently am. But I also recognise that this is a very difficult thing to achieve and that remaining unhappily with the wrong person for decades in pursuit of this ideal is not a good place to be. Remaining with the wrong person because you married them 20 years ago is hellish for all concerned, not least for the children caught in the middle of it. I don't believe in flogging this particular dead horse because society thinks its the right thing to do.

The reason I am suggesting reframing marriage is that so many women depend upon it for their financial security and I think its an incredibly risky way to live. I think there should be other ways to protect women financially which don't require them to basically gamble everything on this one highly risky horse.

That doesn't mean I don't approve of, or aspire to, lifelong commitment. I very much do. I'm in a committed, monogamous relationship. I'm just not naive enough to think that this is a sensible basis upon which to base the financial planning for the rest of my life.

My DH was clubbing (and quite promiscuous) from aged 14. By the time he met me at 22 he was very ready to settle. I'm seven years older and I think we'd both sort of 'done our time' sexually, including the odd affair while in previous relationships, and we both wanted a bit of stability.

We married at aged 29 and 36 and haven't looked back really. Our sex life was wild but is now not what it was, but I still adore him and would like to think it's reciprocal.

He's my best friend.

I don’t get where you are coming from .
Marriage is based on whatever you make it. Duty and obligation are the by product of a loving and respectful relationship, they are only an issue when those conditions are not there.
Maybe it’s the circles we mix in, but I can think of only a handful of women that are financially dependant upon their partners. The rest have returned to full time employment after having children. Choosing to stay at home seems to be a rarity. Divorce for most women doesn’t leave them financially destitute.
The only people I know spending 20 years in loveless marriages remain in them because of the perceived status they believe it gives them and they are too cowardly to end the relationship, preferring to use religious vows as an excuse to stay.
If they want to stay because they get a few nice holidays a year (with someone they don’t like, let alone love) and a bigger house, then that’s their choice to make, but no ones forcing it on them.
I think some of the posters on here are projecting their own insecurities on this thread.

Never had an affair and nor has DH. I know he wouldn’t have an affair, I’m not naive he just wouldn’t and to be honest I’d know because we are together all the time when he’s not working. If he suddenly developed hobbies or started going out that would be a red road!

I know of one couple where the husband has an affair years ago. There are probably more that I don’t know about though.

Marriage for some is a public declaration of love, for others its a financial contract and for others its both.

By law, it's a contract that brings the state into the relationship to a greater extent, affecting one's legal and financial rights and responsibilities. My feelings on marriage doesn't affect that it's how I was able to immigrate, that it meant when my spouse and I went through university at different times we got additional money -- our choice to marry set up and has had ripple effects through our entire adult lives in very practical ways no matter how either of us felt.

The government incentivizes marriage through the legal and financial rights it gives based on it, though there are also disincentives in the related responsibilities depending on one's position. It's questionable how much they should do that. My oldest wouldn't even have British citizenship if his father and I hadn't married as he was born at a time where a British father could only pass on his citizenship if married to a non-British mother. That's had issues which is why the law has changed, but it doesn't change that many people are still impacted by the law using marriage as a functional tool to decide who people are and their status in society that doesn't care how people feel.

I ended up with medical issues that took me out of my career and the work force in general for a while so I lost my financial independence, I still wouldn't call myself that, but I'm protected by my relationship and its standing with the law to a limited extent. Whether that's the best way to protect people is questionable, just as there have been many questions about the times the law treats people as individuals and the times the law treats people as a marriage or a household.

There are likely ways this could be improved, but how is a difficult question with so many factors in how the law works in social engineering with most consequences being unintended, but none of this is how people frame their own marriages. Making it an individualistic concept doesn't change that the reality is our marriages are viewed the same in the eyes of the law and someone by wider society no matter how we define it within our lives, how happy we are in it, how well we're treated in it, how much we benefit or are harmed by it, how financially independant we are -- it really doesn't matter much within the systems around us.

@tentimesaday

What a depressing and odd thread. Most people saying it's acceptable to betray the person you married in exchange for a drunken shag. It's gross, really. Animalistic.

I don’t think anyone is saying it’s ok to do it, their point is, it seems staying with one partner for 50 years is an unrealistic expectation- based on the amount of affairs that go on.

@JanuaryJonez

My DH was clubbing (and quite promiscuous) from aged 14. By the time he met me at 22 he was very ready to settle. I'm seven years older and I think we'd both sort of 'done our time' sexually, including the odd affair while in previous relationships, and we both wanted a bit of stability.

We married at aged 29 and 36 and haven't looked back really. Our sex life was wild but is now not what it was, but I still adore him and would like to think it's reciprocal.

He's my best friend.

How long have you been married?