Why do they do it? And why do women get involved when they know there are children going to be hurt?

[InTheRedCorner]

I just don't understand why anyone would do it to the children.

No one is forced to get involved, why not walk away, not answer the text, reply to the email, respond to the flirty look or comment.

My poor girls are finally asleep but still hicuping and so so sad.

I know 100% that the blame lies solely at his door but I just don't get it from the other females point of view, she knew he had us, she must have realised I had married a wanker but why allow herself to get involved, what about the children?

You may be able to tell that I'm raw and hurting this evening and I may well regret posting this but it's all so fucking lonely and such a waste of my life.

Affairs are complicated and all different. People all feel differently about fidelity. It is pointless trying to generalise about why they happen.

I'm quite uncomfortable with the implications constantly seen that women must be the guardians of all other women and children because men are just given to having affairs.

In all cases it is absolutely the person who made the commitment to the family that is to blame and who is responsible. I think it is a big mistake to focus on the ow/om.

Big mistake because it is symptomatic of letting the h/w/p off the blame/responsibility btw which just prolongs the agony and time you spend with a partner who is not even your friend...

They do it because 'all's fair in love and war'. He'll have told them he's unhappy at home, 'the wife doesn't understand me', he's on the verge of leaving or some such. They could be lonely and grateful for any kind of attention. Maybe they don't think it'll ever come to light... so no harm done.

Wouldn't really waste too much time thinking of motivations.

And I think someone else's moral choices/feelings about the morality of infidelity are not really your business and not something it is helpful to you to be concerned about.

Yes, I understand your point but, being the 'OW' in a long and ongoing EA, the decision to pursue and continue this lie with him and not with me. I agree with the poster upstream who mentioned compartmentalising, though. And - not only to make you feel better - I am sure he is devastated.

I have changed my name to post this as I did have a long-ish affair with a married man, a long time ago.

I hope I am less stupid than I was then, but as to offering an insight, well perhaps I can help a little bit. (I don't expect any sort of validation, it's not a perspective I'm proud to have on the subject)

At the time I had had one relationship of a few years, was still a virgin and was very lonely and pretty vulnerable (mental health issues). I was desperate to be loved.

This man came and knocked on my door and we got talking. He was friends with my neighbour. It was like a switch had been turned on, and I felt very strongly for him.

He seemed to want to do it - to be outside of his familiar life, to break free, he was not happy, his life with his family was great but he felt lost in it I think. Like, the actual 'self' he wanted to cling to, was lost, was not recognised. It didn't fit with how he felt he really was.

Love isn't such a simple thing is it, I suppose - in the relationship I had had, I'd 'loved' the boy I'd been with but at the same time part of me wasn't involved, the sad, unhappy, depressed, loner in me was being pushed to one side, it didn't fit in with this lovely, happy person I was living with, in fact with any sort of positive relationship really.

So I wanted to go and look for someone who recognised that side of me - the tragedy I needed to play out I suppose. I wasn't 'myself' with my boyfriend. I got obsessed with a pop star and realised that I couldn't sustain a relationship with someone so happy and wholesome, and we broke up, though I stopped short of being unfaithful (not that we had that sort of physical relationship anyway, we were very young).

I understood then, the thing about loving someone but loving yourself more. Still though I thought it was very wrong to lie, to be unfaithful. I couldn't justify the married man's behaviour. I wanted us to be together.

My own upbringing involved a mother who was very controlling and didn't want me to spend time with my own father, who was the only person I felt actually liked me. So you can see there was big potential for transference there. In a way, his wife became the representation of my mother, in my head, and he became my father, all the time I was seeking to get him to 'do the right thing' and tell her that actually, he loved me, and wanted to be with me. It was fucked up.

I didn't want to cause any hurt but at the same time, I felt I needed him very much - whenever we broke up, we both crawled back to one another, it was very very painful. He was also playing out his own childhood mess, boarding school at a very young age meant that he was very able to compartmentalise, he had a 'home' and a 'school' and I think sometimes they got mixed up - he had some anger going on towards his parents (wife I suppose) that he wasn't even conscious of.

So it was all massively wrong. I was stupid and inexperienced, he was over a decade older than me, and I was very, very deeply in love. I felt like every breath I took was for him, was to be with him, and he was my first proper sexual partner.

So there is a picture of how it felt. Even now I am ashamed to be in my own skin, for what I helped him do, for what I did. The hurt was never intended but it was kind of irrelevant, to us - our own needs were driving us.

I'd never lied in my life until I met him. I hated lying though it was fascinating too. I felt like this 'love' was worth doing anything for. I was really wrong about that. I feel like I kind of sold my soul. It's not nice and I can never take it back.

Still we are close. He married again (not me) and I still see him. And the other day we looked at each other and I said, you know, we can't take back the awful thing we did, but half of my heart would do it again. The other half is scared of how wrong, how 'evil' I was capable of being. He said he knows what I mean.

I wish I had never met him but at the same time I have never been so happy, so 'complete' as I felt in those days.

It's fucked up and it's horrible. I guess what you can take from this as someone who has been betrayed is that the person betraying you was to blame. Not anything you did - in fact the more 'ok' you are, or were, the more lovely and competent and sound, the happier you were, the more likely it is that they would have needed someone else to play out the miserable, screwed up and deeply wrong side of their character with.

Also I think he justified it to himself by thinking, genuinely, that his family needed him, and needed to carry on as it was, so he was doing them a favour not telling them.

I genuinely think that if no one had let his wife know, he would have carried on indefinitely. He thought it was hurting them less if they could still have the life they were used to, while he sought 'solace' elsewhere, on the quiet,

and I wonder if he was right about that.

"I'm quite uncomfortable with the implications constantly seen that women must be the guardians of all other women and children because men are just given to having affairs"

I think that is very well put Offred.

I don't think that it's women must been seen as the guardians of other women.

It's why would anyone do that to another person. Man or woman.

Some men have affairs, some don't, some women have affairs, some don't.

If you take the gender out of it, you are left with the why?

In this case, the DH is the most wrong by far, but the OW
Is still wrong.

The OW/OM in any affair situation are not blameless. They cannot excuse their behaviour. Yes the married partner is the one who broke vows. But knowingly sleeping with someone else's spouse is wrong. They can use every reason in the book, but it's just excuses. The bottom line is, they chose to get into a relationship (physical or emotional) with someone else's spouse. So they should be held accountable for their own actions.

Do not treat people in a way you would not like to be treated. It's simple way to live, but very effective.

But they're human beings too, not saints. No-one is. Just because there's a ring on a finger or people have moved in together, 'shit happens'. People behave badly, make poor choices, make mistakes. Break the law and you can be carted off to jail but when it comes to breaches of morality there is no accountability so it's down to everyone to operate their own standards and value system. Some people have different standards to others, that's all. We have to live with that.

Ok but ow/om are not doing anything to someone's w/h/p are they? They don't have any relationship or commitment to them, sometimes they don't know about them, sometimes they don't particularly care about them and that's not nice but I'm not sure why they should be made responsible for their lover's choices?

I'm saying this as a person who's ex (father of two dc) slept with over 50 other people during our relationship. Some of them who were friends shat on the relationship they had with me in my mind but I don't feel they are responsible for my ex's responsibilities to me and the dc at all. That's too much to ask of someone I think.

Absolutely it is common for people to expect ow to be responsible for the wife and children's hurt. I see it commonly and I think it is because that is the natural feeling you have after the shock of discovering your lover is a liar and a cheat, it is part of the readjustment to feel like blaming the ow and I was tempted by those feelings at first too, normal, but not healthy and not rational. IMHO anyway.

Some people don't have a strong moral code, or are selfish or unpleasant. They owe you nothing (the 'they didn't make a vow to you' argument often comes up), but they must be deeply unpleasant individuals to enter into such an affair knowingly. Of course the husband is most at fault and that's where the majority of blame should rest.
Also the possibility they have been lied to about the relationship status by the (not necessarily yours) husband.

Oops, husband or wife, corrects self, woman have affairs too of course

I genuinely think that women do it because they've been fed some utter bullshit from the DH about his family. I have had married men come on to me in my early twenties and the pictures they tried to paint were things like: the DW has given him the cold shoulder, he and the DW sleep in separate beds and he hasn't had sex for 5 years and you can bring him back to life, that she is militant and strict and anal and the DCs have an ordered, miserable, safety obsessed life with her, with no creativity or adventure, but he can see in the future with the OW camping trips, Alton Towers, adventure holidays etc. Also the bullshit line "my DCs would love you! You need to meet them."

It's utter cunt crap/

And it is part of this "men are visual creatures, they also instinctively want to shag about and need constant variety of experiences, women are less sexual and feel insecure about what men just have to do so they have to lie to women about it, it isn't really their fault it is just how men are" woman blaming narrative that is really common.

Or "our marriage wasn't very good so I can understand it" often the relationship is shit because the cowardly partner has disengaged either before in order to seek and affair or after because they are investing in one. The commitment I think is one of communication as well as fidelity. If the relationship was crap that doesn't affect the cheating partner's blame worthiness I think.

they do it because they do not care - as my stepmother memorably said to my mum when she was the OW when asked about the effect her actions might have on me and my brother "I do not give a fuck"

When my exH left me for an old flame, I'm very sure she did not care about me. Not in a malicious way but, she'd never met me, had no ties to me, and wasn't responsible for me in the slightest. OK I was devastated at the time and would have happily killed both of them had I had the opportunity but, the more I think about it, why should she have defended my marriage on my behalf? She owed me nothing...... Besides which, she saved me from having to spend more years with Mr Fuckwit

I always wonder why there are these strange posts about women not being saints or moral guardians of men's fidelity, when there have been no posts suggesting that they are. Nor have there been any posts conferring more blame on third parties than the married men themselves.

Why is not possible to have a discussion about the motivations of people who do harm in their own right, without points that haven't even entered the discussion being attacked?

I'd be the first person to challenge anyone who suggested that women as a sex should have a higher morality than men or were more to blame for infidelity than men, but I can see no reason to attack unwritten and unexpressed thoughts and I find it very puzzling when other posters do this.

Because the men chase them. I speak from personal experience - I have always turned down the attached men that have chased me, I find it a deeply off-putting trait in a man, but they always, always chase the woman, very cleverly, making her believe they are a "good guy".

And they also pick on vulnerable women. My friend recently separated from her husband, and is surrounded by predatory men, all of them attached, wanting to have dinners with her to make her feel better, or help her with something. She hasn't chased any of them, but having been in a relationship for years, doesn't know the signs to spot of a creepy man. Until I pointed out the phrase "I have no plans to get married" with reference to the long term girlfriend and mother of his two kids wasn't exactly a marker of a nice guy.

They also use the internet. And lie.

The thought was implied. If women should always say 'no' to a married man because to say 'yes' would mean harming wives and children then they are being accused of malice aforethought when the truth is probably anything but. If we were to hold everyone up for public opprobrium for the sin of having hurt other people's feelings through thoughtlessness and selfishness, there wouldn't be anyone that didn't qualify.

Both sexes should think before becoming involved with someone's spouse/partner.

Whichever way round you gender it, the OM/OW is not a neutral party in an affair.

This question comes up over and over again on here.
I think it comes down to moral decency (or lack of it), selfishness and lack of self respect.
Of course the shitbags men are more to blame - they are the ones breaking their vows and lying but the OW surely has a moral duty to respect that a man with a family is off limits. Even if she feels no loyalty to the wife (because the marriage is dead etc etc...) then who on earth would willingly inflict such pain on a child by pulling his/her world apart?.
All this "we couldn't help our feelings" stuff is bullshit. If we all acted on every single impulse or feeling we have the prisons would be even fuller than they are now.
Intheredcorner - I have been where you are too. I was pg with ds2 and ds1 was 3. I have never felt more devastated or desperate in my life but now 10 years on I am very happy with my new DP and I think he did me a favour. I still feel for my dc though, especially ds2 who has never lived with his daddy and will soon have to watch him be a proper dad to a new baby with his shiny new girlfriend.
Keep strong - you will get through this. My ex had another affair and left the OW for a woman who shat all over him and will admit that I enjoyed watching karma come and bite his arse!!!

It's not a "we can't help our feelings" thing it is a 'OW/M are not responsible for another person's commitments' thing.

Not everyone feels the same way about marriage or fidelity. Not every situation is the same. Although I think all affairs are wrong, for example, the nastiness of the cheater can hugely vary i.e. the difference between darkesteyes' cheating in a sexless marriage and the horrible man who recently left his wife pregnant with their fourth child saying he'd cheated all along because he never loved her.

The ow/om are fairly materially irrelevant to the situation, the decision to cheat is being made by the one with the commitment. The ow/om is making a decision to be with that person not to devastate a wife/children.

I think Offred has put it very well, and Cogito - particularly this If we were to hold everyone up for public opprobrium for the sin of having hurt other people's feelings through thoughtlessness and selfishness, there wouldn't be anyone that didn't qualify.

For me there are two key points about the ow/om and why they are not as culpable as some would have it:

• no one can be the guardian of someone else's morality. I had an extremely Catholic boyfriend once who went to confession every time we kissed. Was I by association guilty for that 'sin'? His mother thought so, I didn't. His morals, his problem- people have different morals. The person who is responsible for not hurting their spouse/partner is the one doing the cheating, not the one with whom they cheat.

• is it an associated moral 'sin' to have a relationship with someone you know to be 'taken'? Possibly. It's genuinely not possible to care actively about the whole world - if it were someone in the same friendship circle then I would say the ow/om has a duty of care but a complete stranger? Why should they be accountable? A Cogito pointed out, that's not realistic.

And I do strongly agree with Offred's points that this is part of a woman blaming dialogue. There is no 'sisterhood' that owes it to you to look after you while men are void of volition or accountability.