If you’ve had an affair I’d appreciate your opinion

[Pelagi]

Which sounds a bit odd, I expect. But stay with me! I have been thinking about what my marriage was like in the decade before I separated from my husband, and wondering what was going on in his head.

We separated when I found out that he was having an affair, so I asked him to leave. In the subsequent months I found out that actually he had previously had at least two affairs, the earliest one starting when our youngest was less than a year old (she was 11 when we separated) and the next one starting a bit later and going on for some years. Then there were a couple of other “flirtatious friendships“ that he kept secret from me but I don’t think they were actual affairs. And then finally the one that I found out about. So really there was some kind of infidelity going on for most of the last 10 years that we were married.

Reading on here about people who are stuck in unhappy relationships and feel they can’t leave, or feel they have to stay together for the sake of the children, or are with dreadful spouses, makes me wonder whether that was him. In particular, what does it say about me? Which is why I am asking for an opinion if you have had an affair. What kind of husband/wife did you have?

To be honest I think I will probably never really understand. But it’s coming up for a year since we were separated and I thought I might get some views from people who have had affairs themselves, and not left. Maybe if I get some views now, then I can just totally close it off at a year and maybe accept that I will never really know.

Obviously don’t feel that you can’t answer if you haven’t personally had an affair, some people have knowledge of this sort of thing anyway. But I’m guessing that those who have will have particular insight into what goes on.

I should say, I’m not about to get judgy, but I know that some people on here are prepared to explain their thoughts around affairs, which is why I ask

While I can't offer much advice as I have not had an affair I am currently going through the same where my W has had an affair with a co-worker and has ended our 22 year relationship and 11 year marriage.

One thing I can say to you is that the affair is never your fault, its as simple as that. Perhaps things in your marriage contributed to him being unhappy and he should have spoken up about that but be under no illusion that this was a choice he made and its more to do with him as a person as it is about you.

I think you would be very surprised how many people (a lot and both women and men) go from their marriage to someone waiting in the wings and often its not healthy for them or the relationship itself.

Don't focus on the why because you will probably never hear answers that will satisfy you. Most people that leave a marriage for their affair partner usually follow the same script saying things like "I love you but I am not in love with you", they will then shift the blame for their affair on the marriage or the left behind spouce so that they ensure the guilt they are living with is easier to deal with, they might even say "But we can still be friends" because they need to tell themselves that how they are handling the situation is the right way for everyone.

The problem is when something like this happens the left behind spouce will often engage with their spouce and the more they tell you how bad the marriage is and how you've not did this or done that its very easy to take that to heart and to start believing what has been said. As the broken hearted we need to know what happened and so we take these "answers" as truth and we will usually feel that we where inadequate and that we where at fault (the blame game makes it easier to comprehend).

Once you've had enough time to processing your thoughts and feelings and understand that the Affair was NOT your fault and you can work on yourself you will see that perhaps there where issues that lead up to the affair BUT again marriage is 50/50 and so if someone is unhappy in the marriage its important to communicate that. Keep in mind you yourself may have had unhappy times in your marriage but you did not have an affair because if affairs made a happy marriage we'd all be at it.

One affair I could, at a push, say it was a shitty reaction to a bad relationship. But at least 3 over a decade?? Come on! That just him being a shitty person who is selfish and needs his ego constantly flattered by random without thought for you or the multiple OW. He just wanted to have, and eat, multiple cakes. It's all on him!

I’d say often it’s Just not about the wife or husband at all. Nothing wrong. No terrible marriage. The affair partner is not ‘better’ than the spouse.
Just a massive dopamine hit for the person who moves into affair territory which is very hard to pull back from. Our natural animal instincts really.

@Wellthisisrubbish

I’d say often it’s Just not about the wife or husband at all. Nothing wrong. No terrible marriage. The affair partner is not ‘better’ than the spouse. Just a massive dopamine hit for the person who moves into affair territory which is very hard to pull back from. Our natural animal instincts really.

I agree with this as well there is a lot of chemistry involved when it comes to the chemicals in the brain. An affair can mimic exactly the behavior of a drug addict.

Norepinephrine surge and serotonin and then the old reward system dopamine.

This is why they can be become so cold and unloving to their spouce. Again I will point out however they do NOT loose inhibition and can still make a choice.

Name changed for this one.

Man here, in case anyone thinks that’s relevant.

My DW left me briefly for another man completely out of the blue. She came back but not before things were said that can’t be unsaid and things divulged that can’t be unknown. It completely broke me and left me emotionally destroyed, it temporarily - permanently. That was almost 2 decades ago and I have felt the pain of it every moment of every day since. We had kids since and counselling (total waste of time) but her refusal to discuss what happened has held me in a holding pattern of existential crisis for more than half my adult life now. From the outside, she is perfect in every way but her past actions have left me incapable of feeling that she truly loves me. I do love her - but the trauma she embedded in me is just too deep. You can hurt someone so completely that they never come back from it. Naturally this has had a crippling effect i
on what was once a healthy, cherished sex-life but resentment, insecurity and lack of trust (that she’s with me out of compromise, not genuine love) has eaten that completely away.

One day I woke up and realised I had had a choice forced upon me: Put up with this misery forever, walk away and split up my family or find someone to fulfil that need for intimacy in all its forms. A month later the last option presented itself and I haven’t looked back. That was over 3 years ago now. I don’t feel guilty. I love my DW and I wish this wasn’t the situation but I didn’t ask for this, I didn’t deserve this and she doesn’t get to complain how I choose to heal the wounds she caused.

So to all those people who trot out the tired old mantra that “you’re never to blame for their affair”, I say this: The World is not as cookie cutter as you like to imagine it is. You can treat people so badly and remove all their options that they feel they have nothing to lose by having an affair - so why the hell not?

@Lockdowntown how long did you wait until the DW came back to you originally? We talk about the dynamic of affairs in that it usually takes between 4 - 6 months for the unfaithful to get to know their AP and between 6 - 18 months for the chemicals in the brain to normalise.

Talking about your situation I guess I disagree the way you went about things to heal yourself, you always had the choice to end your marriage if you where unhappy and to walk away before you embarked on a new relationship but that's just my opinion. Perhaps you felt at the time that it wasn't a clear choice but it was and of course its easier to blame your Wifes infidelity that drove you to your affair, yes it may have been a contributing factor but there where choices.

Lockdowntown so you are still married and are having an affair but you feel that you love your DW? This is not love. THIS IS NOT LOVE. There is no love in your marriage. There is some facsimile of a relationship but it revolves around mistrust, resentment, a justification that DW can't object as it is all her fault and finally, you are in another relationship. For the love of God, get a grip and see that you are living in a toxic relationship where you are just hurting each other.

...and your DW DOES get to complain. We all get to do whatever we want. What you mean is that you don't care whether she complains or nt because as far as you are concerned it is all her fault. You have decided that her past actions justify your current actions. Love does not work like that Petal.

It’s not always a popular opinion on here but some people cheat just because they can / the opportunity arises . Or issues with them self’s

Please don’t beat yourself up thinking it must be all your fault etc there is no peace to be gained from doing that .

I have never had an affair, and this is from a different perspective:

I worked in a predominantly male industry and observed some men were simply lifelong serial cheaters.

In the main, their wives were lovely women and practically worshipped the ground they walked on.

I think it was the thrill of the chase, boredom with domesticity and escapism etc.

They usually went with practically anything in a skirt and more often than not their wives were more attractive.

Name change here too. Similar situation to @Lockdowntown here.

He had various indiscretions over probably 8 years. Always denied anything physical but some things didn't add up and I caught him out in several lies I never got to the bottom of. I realised the trust had gone completely and my self esteem was shot but (perhaps cowardly) didn't want to push it and didn't want to tear my family apart. I truly wish I had done it then now.

Someone came along who paid me lots of attention, and I'm not saying I didn't play a part at all, as I had free choice completely. But he chased me and seemed to be everything that was missing. We had an affair for nearly 3 years. At the beginning it was more a case of me not feeling guilty because why should I? He didn't.

Within those years of the affair husband and I had various conversations around our relationship and he made massive efforts to change. In those conversations though he drip fed some more information on his indiscretions which left me thinking I probably still didn't have the full story so again, I felt why should I feel guilty about how I get my happiness when he destroyed mine for years?

This sounds way more bitter than it was. Ultimately I made a conscious decision even when things were improving at home to stay in the affair because I knew/know I don't love my husband the right way anymore and it was making me miserable to be without AP (we had chosen to call it a day so I could concentrate on home several times). I chose to have my cake and eat it as I didn't have the guts to tear my family apart, nor the guts to hurt my (now doting) husband. But the other man brought laughter, consideration, kindness where my husband doesn't. I got all I wanted but across 2 relationships.

I have recently ended things to focus on a future that sits more comfortably with the person I always thought I was and wanted to be.

@Lockdowntown I believe that affairs and how the situation is handled by the person who had the affair can cause emotional damage and irreversible damage to the relationship where you can never fully trust them again. Good on you for leaving, it doesn’t matter how many years later - it was her fault the relationship failed. Glad to hear you’ve found happiness now.

Yeahmetoo are you with your DH still? How will you ever be able to be happy in the relationship. SOunds too broken

I was the other woman to a husband who had had two previous affairs of different levels.

His wife was his first love and everything. By the time I met him (my boss) he was in his mid thirties, I was in my early twenties.

It was nothing to do with his wife, she was a good wife and mother and he loved her. He was just an insecure man child. I was something shiny and new that he hadn't played with before. Something that stroked his ego. As were the other two women.

He claimed that he had been in love with one of the two women and when I broke it off with him, he was prepared to leave his wife.

Again, it was nothing to do with her at all. Or me, really. It was all him. He was insecure.

Artandlove I read it that Lockdowntown is still with his DW and is having an affair now with someone else...and justifies that he is allowed to because she had one.Maybe I got it wrong.Hope so or it is all kinds of messed up

@Wellthisisrubbish

I’d say often it’s Just not about the wife or husband at all. Nothing wrong. No terrible marriage. The affair partner is not ‘better’ than the spouse. Just a massive dopamine hit for the person who moves into affair territory which is very hard to pull back from. Our natural animal instincts really.

This ^. We are still hardwired like cave men and women. Normally, and there's a consensus, it takes me about two years to get over someone I've had the dopamine hit from. Enough time to meet, impregnate, give birth, provide, move on... That's human nature, old school style, and what we are wired to do. No getting away from it. Of course, we can choose not to live like that and commit to a long term relationship. Mental and self awareness versus hormone hits. You decide!

Helpful website:

www.growingself.com/married-and-have-a-crush/

@Lockdowntown
While I believe that affairs are not always black and white (sometimes they are and the person is just a selfish shitty greedy person) I think you need to take some responsibility for your behaviour and what you're doing.

What age was she when this happened? She's probably a completely different person now than she was then if this was almost 2 decades ago.

She deserves to be loved properly and have real intimacy now too.
You should end it. If you can't forgive and forget after all these years that's fine but it's not ok to punish her and take away her choice now, and her chance to be with someone who only wants her.

@Artandlove
It doesn't sound like he left, it sounds like he's been cheating on her for the last 3 years, using her affair 2 decades ago as justification even though they had kids in the meantime.

I’ll answer this from a slightly different perspective in the sense that I have never had an affair; but DP and I are in a very happy, straightforward, mutually enjoyable open relationship and I believe that most often, an affair says very little about either the partner who has one or the partner who is cheated on, except that monogamy is difficult for many people, we are biologically programmed for sexual variety, and long term relationships can be a bit of a slog.

I’m not in an open relationship because DP isn’t “good enough” for me or vice versa; but because we both acknowledge our relationship is better, stronger and healthier because we accept that the societal expectation that one person should be able to fulfil all your desires and needs for decades on end is unrealistic.

It isn’t your fault in any way that your XH was unfaithful. It was almost certainly nothing about you that “drove” him to it or pushed him away. Equally, I don’t think it makes him a terrible person - just somebody who probably shouldn’t have decided to enter a monogamous marriage or made the wedding vows he did.

Oh I thought he’d married after he eventually left.

OP, it doesn't say anything about you at all.
As I said to the pp I don't always think affairs are black and white. That tends to be for singular affairs though.
For serial cheats I tend to think they are quite pathetic individuals who jump at every little bit of excitement that comes their way from the opposite sex (or seek it out).

@lmwghb - she came back after 2 weeks. In that time, I’d already taken an overdose. We began counselling straight away - during which, she had another affair - blaming it in her own personal breakdown. What followed was 17 months of gaslighting, trickle-truthing, minimalising, history changing, blaming, lying and eventually stonewalling. At no point was there an explanation. There still hasn’t been. I did however, get to watch her mourn for her AP when I felt she should have been proving her love for me - that was fun. I was in a relentlessly traumatised emotional state and my career blew up as a result so I didn’t even have that to focus on. I have been diagnosed as having cPTSD.

As for:
“you always had the choice to end your marriage if you where unhappy and to walk away before you embarked on a new relationship”.
I fell for the conventional wisdom that it takes a minimum of 2 years to recover from an affair, so I ploughed through those hard years - I did all the hard emotional miles, not her. And when I’d done them and things still weren’t right, I convinced myself to keep going, not give up when I’d worked so hard, come so far. I wish I hadn’t. I wish I’d given up before even trying, but I’d invested and I kept on investing. The more I put in the more I was afraid to walk away. This is why so many people stay in bad relationships for too long, sometimes a lifetime - hanging on, waiting for that corner to be turned. Like @damnthatanxiety you make the mistake that we are always capable of rational decisions based on an absence of emotion or other external factors. The fact is, traumatised people don’t have the same capacity to make sane decisions as others do. It took me years to come to terms with this - I didn’t just suddenly know that on day one. When you take that ability away from a person, you can’t surely complain when they think and behave in a way you don’t agree with.

As for It being a toxic relationship - yes it is. I can’t disagree. People can spend a lifetime in such relationships without realising it - especially when they are being lied to, but I have children I will not intentionally walk away from. If my secret comes out and she kicks me to the curb, then fine. I tried to be discreet and it didn’t work out. I can live with that. I desperately want her to say or do the one thing that will make it all make sense and in a way that I can live with and forgive her for put behind us. I spent years scouring the internet for that holy grail but all I learned was that life isn’t fair and that good people can get shat on. I was a different person once and that person would have agreed with you, but life grows you up in ways you don’t necessarily want but hey ho.

@Lockdowntown my situation is different but I relate to everything you said. Sometimes you just have nothing to lose, so why the hell not.

So, I haven’t had an affair in my own marriage but I was party to one in the past. Typical story I expect- aged man-child 20 years older than me when I was a teenager.

Anyway, he had a several years long affair with me that only ended when his wife found out. I, it later transpired, was not the first. We didn’t go the distance because he was a complete lunatic, even by the standards of the kind of lunatics you’re meant to get mixed up with when you’re young. So these were my observations:

1. He had a massive ego. He really did believe that he was something quite special- and he was clever and funny but he was really just a a balding, middle aged, middle manager, he was nothing amazing. But I do think that he truly believed that his wife wouldn’t be able to survive without him, or that it would break her so spectacularly to be left by such a legend. You could see the cogs turning in his brain when it was discussed: she relied on his superior intellect and amazingness for everything- how would she ever cope without him? He believed on some level that her life without him would be unbearable.... even though what her life with him was was being cheated on by a mediocre man with a teenage mistress.

2. He was a hideously insecure soul despite all of his seeming self-belief. He had had a really rough, dysfunctional childhood and I don’t think that there had ever been enough love in his life, especially as a kid. It made a weird kind of sense that he would keep several irons in the fire where women where concerned: keep two (or more!) women on the go and there’ll always be one left to love you when the other one/however many inevitably disappear. His mum had left the family home and he was always trying to stop his ever being that lonely kid again, so he surrounded himself with women to be his mum. His wife was the best at this, I guess.

3. He was monumentally selfish. On a scale that I’ve never seen before or since. What he wanted wasn’t just the first priority, he truly believed he DESERVED to have what he wanted, however ridiculous that was logically.

All of those things combined to make a really broken person who stuck with his wife because he was broken and insecure but who also cheated on her because he was broken and insecure AND selfish.

I do believe that he loved his wife, but in a way I think he loved all of the women that he cheated on her with too. He was just a sad guy who had he not been so selfish might have made better choices.

I expect not all of the above is true about your ex, but I bet some of it is- particularly the selfishness element. One thing is for sure: you are better off without him.