Affairs, Why Do They Happen?

[TwinkleStar88]

Hi,
I’m not sure why I’m writing this but maybe I’m looking for clarity with regards to the reasons behind affairs.
Within the last few years many family members/friends/colleagues have either been involved in affairs, or have been the victim of an affair. Whether this is emotional/physical it’s very much happening. My SIL also was involved in an affair over a year ago, which shocked all of us, very happy marriage on the outside, a beautiful home, two children, no money worries, a supportive husband etc and I’ve never really worked out why she did it, she seemed happy but clearly wasn’t happy, is it possible to have an affair and still be happy, or is an affair a symptom of an unhappy marriage?
I worked in an office many years ago with a few of the males openly admitting to ‘having fun on the side!’ Again, they had children, even photos of their family on their work desk.
As time has gone by I am seeing this more and more, it’s often highlighted on this thread many times too.
Why do so many seemingly happy people have affairs? Is it unhappiness, boredom? The need to feel wanted by more than one person?
This has also made me question my marriage and wonder if it could happen to me! Totally unreasonable I know!

@ShimmyAndShine

Because of Biology. Marriage all well and good in the olden days when people died in their 40s/50s....till death do us part wasnt that long. But humans weren't designed to live and love just one other person for 50+ years....it's not natural and even less so for men whose evolutionary priority is fertilising females. People grow and change( that is a good thing) and people aren't the same people at say 40 than they were at 20

You here this a lot but I think it is pseudo scientific. Humans are perfectly capable of pair bonding over life and many do it.

As for the idea that men's primary priority is to fertilise females _ i just don't think that is true. We aren't a species where the male has his time in a mating season and then bogs off to leave the females to raise the young in the few months of their infancy. Humans are highly unusual in the enormous length of time that their young are dependent on their parents to support and care for them, and in the volume of work that this requires. Not to mention the almost incapacitating burden of pregnancy, child birth and breastfeeding on human females (more so that other species) . So it helps massively if fathers stick around to take part in this work. Most human societies seem to be based around a long-term pair bonding of male and female and there is a reason for that.

So you are honestly saying that if one partner is out of sexual action because of an illness, a birth injury, a trauma, and therefore not meeting the expectations of the other partner, that is a justifiable reason to have an affair or end a relationship?

No I am not saying that. I am talking about when sex is permanently removed from the relationship. That should have been clear to you given the post you were responding to previously, which was about the permanent end of sex.

It wasn’t clear, because you were quoting from a post about a man having an affair with his colleague because he wasn’t getting any from his ill wife...

So the parallels with the incel mindset stand
The idea that sex is some sort of basic human need and can’t be withheld from men regardless of wider circumstances is EXACTLY the shit they spout

Not all men are like this.
Personally I find the stereotype insulting
Women have sex drives too. Mostly. Though according to this thread, not all.

It was clear. That post was about a woman with an degenerative condition and the poster was clear that her young husband was facing a life of celibacy. You have completely misrepresented that post to suit your own agenda. Your incel parallels absolutely do not stand.

So you stand by it being totally justifiable for a man to cheat on his wife and hook up with a colleague, because the wife was unable to have sex with him because of her medical condition?

I think the original poster puts it better than I can. Sometimes in life there are no good choices.

Following their thinking, he had two options and two options only: divorce his wife so he was free to have a sexual relationship with another, or remain married and accept early in his adulthood that he would remain celibate and his only intimacy with another adult would come from providing bodily care. I very much doubt either of those options would have meant less suffering than what he actually chose to do

@nothereagain

I think the original poster puts it better than I can. Sometimes in life there are no good choices. Following their thinking, he had two options and two options only: divorce his wife so he was free to have a sexual relationship with another, or remain married and accept early in his adulthood that he would remain celibate and his only intimacy with another adult would come from providing bodily care. I very much doubt either of those options would have meant less suffering than what he actually chose to do

You know what, I’m sorry but how about he allow her to have her own agency and fucking make a choice herself based on the transparent facts? Who is he to play God with their relationship? Who is to - quite frankly - play her for schmuck? I hope none of you supporting his actions are the types to complain about the patriarchy because this is, quite frankly, a man making decisions for a woman, that she might otherwise not take.

What if a slip-up happens - as they, inevitably usually do - and she finds out? How would the discovery that the partner she’d doted on - that she’d made herself vulnerable to thanks to her condition and had to trust implicitly - was actually cooing in someone else’s ear and sharing intimate moments (which she is unable to experience herself) any less damaging, destructive to her mental health and traumatising than being honest and breaking up?

No, this is all about him being too cowardly to have that conversation. About him wanting to avoid consequences. About him being scared she will say “well if sex is that important to you then go and find someone else”.

I hate to conform to the dreary stereotype but I do wonder if it's in part men looking for the v excitement of a sexual thrill even if home is ok. I remember being shocked aged about 20 when a much older married man tried it on with me in a nightclub. "But you're married!!" I naively thought.

Unfortunately now it's just a sad and predictable part of life... And I can't help hating men a bit when they do this, especially when I know their wives. Interestingly the male perspective from male friends when I talk to them about it is I must have been doing something to "tease" them, and some women's responses are "well that kind of thing doesn't happen to me" both implying that it's mine, the woman's fault in some way. Fortunately I have a selection of intelligent, emotionally aware, astute friends who know that the fault for want of a better word lies wholly with them, and them violating boundaries.

Not being able to have sex with your partner because of a medical condition / trauma etc is not comparability to the much more common scenario in which the woman withholds sex as a means of punishing the male partner for inadequate parenting / household / emotional support, which is very, very common in my experience. And I have plenty of women friends who very frankly say that their sex life is basically based on a reward system.

Of course, it would be equally fair to say there are many men who are so useless and inadequate as partners that their wife or girlfriend is at the end of their rope and is pushed to having to use sexual manipulation to get any basic support from them. But either way this is all about the expectations of relationships and poor communication about expectations already discussed.

I had an exit affair. It’s all very well saying the right thing to do is leave an unhappy relationship before starting another and in principle I agree. But sometimes it takes another person to make you realise how unhealthy and unfulfilling your relationship is. I was married to a gaslighting alcoholic who used our children and my fear of his ability to parent them alone in the event of a split to prevent me from leaving him. And my own childhood growing up in a home with a clearly unhappy couple who modelled that marriage meant being with someone who made you unhappy and just accepting it - conditioned me. I needed someone to tell me this wasn’t normal and to experience an alternative. It wasn’t just the whirlwind of the new.

I think honesty is always the best policy. Very few relationships are affected by the physical inability of one of them to have sex. But yes - in those circumstances no-one should feel obligated to have to be celibate for the rest of their life. But cheating (as opposed to an open marriage) still isn't ok. There are women on this board now discussing the crushing heartbreak of never enjoying intimacy- and they should leave their spouses if it can't be fixed, without being made to feel endlessly guilty for wanting a loving and intimate relationship.

Not being able to have sex with your partner because of a medical condition / trauma etc is not comparability to the much more common scenario in which the woman withholds sex as a means of punishing the male partner for inadequate parenting / household / emotional support, which is very, very common in my experience. And I have plenty of women friends who very frankly say that their sex life is basically based on a reward system.

Or, you know -
Difficult to imagine that a man, who acts like a lazy fool around the house, children and in the relationship, would be sexually attractive to anyone.

Probably he would be as lazy and inadequate in bed so sex would be a chore also.

@nuitdesetoiles - but there are both men and women who seek thrills through crossing a line when it comes to fidelity. And it happens in same sex relationships also.

This will be unpopular, but I think sometimes people genuinely fall In love with "the one",
When they already have a spouse. I don't think it's always seedy and Intentional. Sometimes marriages just aren't working, one is worried to leave, kids.
Domestic violence.
A lot of reasons.
And no I'm not talking about me 😂

@imalmosthere - statistics seem to show its very rare. Around 5% end in marriage to affair partner with a failure rate worse than average (75% ending in divorce) - so mostly no - not 'the one'. Most affairs will not last beyond discovery, or beyond two years if undiscovered. Makes you wonder at all the pain and angst really!

I'm not going to say I can give much clarity as to why people have affairs, but I think it's worth pointing out what affairs actually are.

They involve lies, omissions, manipulation, gaslighting, and misappropriation of family time and money, - aspects that the people involved usually choose not to consider.

People cheat to gain an advantage, by deception, of keeping the security of a committed relationship while 'trying on another one for size'. In this way they can avoid intimacy and responsibility for both relationships while playing the victim and claiming that 'their partner made them do it'.

The common denominator of affairs IMO are poor coping skills, entitlement issues and a total lack of empathy.

Having an affair to try and solve marriage problems (real or imagined) is like firebombing your house because the kitchen tap's leaking.

@imalmosthere

This will be unpopular, but I think sometimes people genuinely fall In love with "the one", When they already have a spouse. I don't think it's always seedy and Intentional. Sometimes marriages just aren't working, one is worried to leave, kids. Domestic violence. A lot of reasons. And no I'm not talking about me 😂

Agree with this

Quite a lot of pages back I think Seadad phrased it well that some people are unhappy at a certain point being ‘in’ a committed relationship rather than with ‘that’ relationship— it’s a subtle difference and I think it’s very common indeed. They don’t have any specific huge issues in their relationship but feel generally trapped, bored and a bit ‘is this it’ . Now I think many people feel like this at times but just depends whether you act on it or let it pass.

@category12 yes, which is why I went on to say exactly that

That's not what I took from your post at all. You seemed to be pushing a "women as manipulators" narrative - whereas I would say a bloke who is a useless partner becomes unsexy. You resent the fuck out of him, you don't want to fuck him. It's not the same thing as withholding sex as manipulation.

Totally agree category 12

In the case of my DParents they were miserable and the marriage was dead for years, then one of them met someone and realised that they didn't have to live like that forever for the sake of the children. Everyone was shocked, because they seemed like the last couple you could imagine having an affair and divorce. Those shocked people didn't live in the same house as them. It's easy to say they should have just split before it got to that point, but in the real world it isn't that easy to walk away from a marriage, mortgage etc, and who wants to be the one to break up a family.

When I was young and naïve I foolishly thought that you would just communicate and deal with any issues before they got to that point where you might consider an affair. Now as my own marriage is failing and DH refuses to engage in any sort of discussion about how to deal with it, I have a lot more sympathy for what my DParent was going through.

I have no intention of having an affair - but then I imagine my DParent didn't either! FWIW they are both much happier apart than they ever were together.

@MerlinsSaggyLeftTit - you say "Now as my own marriage is failing and DH refuses to engage in any sort of discussion about how to deal with it, I have a lot more sympathy for what my DParent was going through." - yes, relationships can corrode. But an affair is still a selfish and cruel betrayal of trust that can't be justified by unhappiness. A person can cross a line, they can engage in an infidelity- but to consciously decide to do that over and over again, as an alternative to confronting and dealing with the very real issues in their primary relationship- is not explained by 'unhappiness'.
You obviously need to lay it on the line to your DH and explain that unless he works with you on the issues at stake, then your marriage is in jeopardy. What noone can say is - well I told him I was unhappy so now I don't have to consider my marriage vows. Although this is a common rationalisation that cheaters employ. You can blame a partner for your unhappiness, you can even blame them for the breakdown of a marriage. And a moment of infidelity- even thoughts of infidelity can be a wake up call as to the perilous state of the situation. But an affair is continued because of the selfish desires of two people, not the problems at home.

When I was young and naïve I foolishly thought that you would just communicate and deal with any issues before they got to that point where you might consider an affair. Now as my own marriage is failing and DH refuses to engage in any sort of discussion about how to deal with it, I have a lot more sympathy for what my DParent was going through.

Exactly this, I know of some cases where people were blue in the face from stating that they weren't happy, where the 'wronged' spouse was as much if not more at fault in the marital problems but refused to deal with issues or even see that there was an issue because a set up suited them. In such a scenario, it is easy to see how someone can fall for someone who does listen to them, or who shows love, attention etc. I think too that sometimes, almost bizarrely and possibly subconsciously, it seems the easier route to blow up a marriage than to go through the very painful process of trying to end it with someone who is resistant to doing so.

@Seadad I don't disagree with you, and as I said in my post I do not plan on having an affair, despite the major issues in my marriage. I just wanted to share an example that isn't just "they shagged about because they could" Of course that happens, but it isn't the only reason for an affair.

@theleafandnotthetree I think you've hit it right on the head there about it sometimes seeming like the easiest option to go nuclear rather than just discreetly slip off stage left, whether that is a conscious decision or not. My Dparents would never have separated without that affair happening, and would probably still be utterly miserable together today.