Don't understand affairs

[diploc]

Having read recently on these boards about the terrible upset affairs cause, I was thinking - are a lot of affairs really just about fantasy?
Rather than being in love with the other person, could an AP really in actual fact be in love with the idea of an idealised love?

Beautifully put @Thewookiemustgo. I think I said similar earlier in post — affairs take the mundane out of a relationship and hence its very easy to feel heightened emotions when it becomes about dinner dates, shared taste, good sex, compliments, and not worming the dog, bin collections , house moves and annoying relatives etc . Most people get fed up of the Groundhog Day of life but some people are more susceptible than others to interest and flattery from others

@Thewookiemustgo

I think some affairs are about fantasy, some aren’t. Really hard to generalise or categorise as someone will always have had a different experience to anything posted here. Each set of circumstances or people involved are all different so there as many reasons/types of affair as there are people. Two things strike me about affairs which seem to be a commonality: the difficulty in being able to separate the magnifying effects that the secrecy and risk have on their feelings, and the utter devastation and agony affairs cause. Sooo...fantasy or reality? The affair relationship is real in that it’s actually happening, but it is operating within a kind of ‘fantasy’ environment. If not fantasy, then fake at the very least. Normal out-in-the-open relationships don’t function like this, snatched moments are more exciting than a sure-thing dinner date next Tuesday. The thrill of the chase in any relationship is always exciting. Affairs are one long ‘thrill of the chase’ as the resolution of the relationship is perpetually in question. Risk, uncertainty, longing.... huge magnifiers of emotions and the bread and butter of affairs. And if you like that kind of high, in an affair relationship it never lets up. Also believing that “anyone who would risk this much to be with me must really love me..” is far more romantic than single people risking next to nothing except possibly hurt pride if you get stood up: “he’s asked me on a date next week so he must like me, hope he turns up”. Normal relationships operate without anywhere near this level of risk, so the initial excitement and thrill of the chase is more short lived. Therefore it’s hard to know if the feelings experienced in the affair situation are as real as they undoubtedly seem, or will carry over into a ‘normal’ relationship once both parties are single. The only way to know this is to change the situation and both become single, let reality intrude and remove the illicit aspects of the situation which magnify the longing, the idealising of the affair partner, the adrenaline rush, the ‘if only”s . Once this happens because of discovery, more often than not the rose tinted specs are removed and “Oh shit what have I done?” takes over. Yes, sometimes if it’s an exit affair and the primary relationship was truly dead, the feelings remain and the relationship lasts, but more often than not people go back to their primary partner, if they’re allowed to. Idealising stops and in being finally forced to weigh up both relationships instead of demonising one and glorifying the other, one or both affair partners see that actually their primary relationship holds far more value to them. Sadly an affair partner who wanted the affair relationship and is left in the dust, continues to view the person they had the affair with as their soulmate, because they are still in the (now empty) affair bubble. They have no idea how someone who ‘loved’ them and ‘couldn’t live without them’ last week has just told them it’s over and gone home for good. The painful longing and idealising continues for them, because they never got the chance for the mystery and exciting to become the ordinary and mundane. Excuses for the departure of the AP soften the blow “he loves me but he’s nobly being dutiful to his wife and family...he’s enduring his awful marriage for his children...he really loves me but it wasn’t meant to be...we are soulmates who just met at the wrong time....” But actually these post rationalisations just perpetuate and magnify the feelings even more. Reality still hasn’t hit. The deserted AP remains in the affair bubble, still idealising and longing, but without their affair partner, with agonising results, as you often see on here when OW threads crop up. Deserted women agonising about the affair break up and trying to stay non contact, and refusing to see any negative aspects of the man who left them, or even being able to describe his negative aspects then saying ‘but I can’t resist him....he’s my soulmate...etc’. Still clearly in the (now empty) affair bubble and trying to cling to the way it used to make them feel. The comparison to drug addiction springs to mind. “I know it’s really bad for me but it felt so good and I want to carry on chasing the high.” Did the high really come from the affair partner themselves, or did the emotional magnifying lens of the affair bubble distort how they would have viewed them in a relationship which operated under ‘normal’ conditions? The nature of affairs skew your feelings. Impossible during the affair to view affair partners without the affair magnifying lens, and view primary partners without the affair minimising lens. Affair storylines in soap operas always boost viewing figures. Do we like to see that our favourite heroes and heroines are flawed, like us? Do we enjoy vicariously watching others risk everything? Do we enjoy seeing affair ‘love’ as idealised romantic love, the kinds of feelings we all want in our relationships? Watching the fantasy on tv is a far better option than trying to create the fantasy in real life, which leads me to my second point about what is true about all affairs. Uncharacteristically short for me: somebody, usually everyone, involved in an affair gets hurt. Badly.

An insightful post, thank you.

I've never been the victim or or perpetrator of an affair, (afaik), but I imagine it varies.

My brother did it. So did my dad...so did my mum and I think my granny too! My brother was the only one whose marriage ended over it. It was a very, very stupid mistake. He did believe he was in love. The OW was quite innocent and naive...maybe not the brightest spark. She actually said the words "it was a love that just couldn't be ignored" to my sister who snort laughed behind her hand. The reality was, my brother was in a shit marriage. His now exw just wasn't suited to him at all and he wanted out. The OW looked like an ideal way out. He is now happily single and exw is about to get married again and seems really happy. OW and dbro don't speak at all. Massive falling out. He is good friends with his exw. I think it's all worked out for the best really, but it was messy and he caused so much hurt to exw and OW. I was livid with him.

My mum and dad were bloody awful for each other. No idea why they stayed together but they were truly, madly in love with each other, but still had affairs. Weird and not for me, but it worked for them. They were together till death did they part etc.

I think I do understand affairs, but I'd never embark on one if I could help it (which let's face it, of course I could help it). Too much mess. Almost never worth it.

@cleanbreak2022

As someone who was the betrayed partner and what I have since found a out, in my exp case it has all been fantasy.

He has created a life that simply didn't exist, it was the narrative he had always wanted to be true for himself, but it never was.

He has now lost everything, including AP, the fantasy has come crashing down and he is left with people believing he is a sociopath.

The creation of an alternative narrative ties in with my thoughts about affairs mostly being about idealisation. Whether that be idealisation of the person, or just idealisation of love/lust itself, I'm not sure. I would guess it's ultimately the latter because we all project qualities onto people, qualities we hope they have.

In your case @cleanbreak2022 he sounds very much like a glass half empty kind of person. Those sorts never look at what they have, they always notice even the slightest of things they feel lacking in their lives. They are perfectionists, except in their own behaviour. I wonder if something is laid down in childhood which results in someone becoming a glass half-empty kind of person?

The creation of an alternative narrative ties in with my thoughts about affairs mostly being about idealisation. Whether that be idealisation of the person, or just idealisation of love/lust itself

People have given you lots of examples of many and diverse reasons why people have affairs. I really don't think you can find a unifying theme here as you are trying to.

@diploc thanks! More bloody insight than I’d prefer to have though.
I agree with you about idealisation. We all project the person we are, which can conflict with the version of ourselves we want other people to think we are, whether we are in affairs or not. We think that the term ‘personality’ refers to the ‘real’ us, but the word comes from the Latin word ‘persona’ which literally means ‘mask’ or ‘character’ and the Greek prosopon meaning ‘appearance’ or ‘face’. In other words personality is the way in which we want others to see us, rather than the essence of who we really are.
This concept goes berserk in affairs, where you get the mask of mystery of a new unknown person (and body/sex) to unravel and you get to put on the mask of whoever you want to be with them, not the husband/wife/father/mother etc you are in everyday life. This gets fed into by both parties, who start to listen really carefully to what the other person needs to hear in order for the image of their ‘perfect’ selves to stay intact and thus continue the affair. If the personality being projected is succeeding, if it gains flattery and attention, makes them feel important, needed, desired, beautiful, handsome, virile, sexy, powerful .... then on goes the list of the relational four star petrol being poured over the fire of their egos and boy does it ever feel good.
Why go home when in Oz you can feel young, attractive, desirable and longed for? It’s no coincidence that the movie starts in black and white and only moves to glorious technicolour when Dorothy is in a fantasy kingdom. Despite all the excitement of Oz, where does Dorothy long to be?
Thing is, more often than not, there’s usually no place like home. Pity it takes some people a destructive trip to Oz to realise it.

"People are entitled to agency over their own lives. And to do that they need to have knowledge over their own lives. And that includes knowledge of what their relationship actually is. They get to decide if they want to stay with a partner who has started a relationship with someone else. The cheater has no right to keep all that power to themselves."

@lastoneintown completely agree. I didn't find out about the many affairs and one night stands until after my husband and I split up. I was most angry about the fact that he'd taken any choice away from me, as I would not have stayed with him or had another child with him.

I've been following this thread to try to understand and I'm still not sure. Apparently my ex had numerous types of affair, from longer term to one night stands, I think they started approx after we'd been together for three years, and continued for another 10 or so. I had no idea, I'd have said he hadn't time as he was so career driven and busy with work. How wrong I was.

[quote Thewookiemustgo]@diploc thanks! More bloody insight than I’d prefer to have though.
I agree with you about idealisation. We all project the person we are, which can conflict with the version of ourselves we want other people to think we are, whether we are in affairs or not. We think that the term ‘personality’ refers to the ‘real’ us, but the word comes from the Latin word ‘persona’ which literally means ‘mask’ or ‘character’ and the Greek prosopon meaning ‘appearance’ or ‘face’. In other words personality is the way in which we want others to see us, rather than the essence of who we really are.
This concept goes berserk in affairs, where you get the mask of mystery of a new unknown person (and body/sex) to unravel and you get to put on the mask of whoever you want to be with them, not the husband/wife/father/mother etc you are in everyday life. This gets fed into by both parties, who start to listen really carefully to what the other person needs to hear in order for the image of their ‘perfect’ selves to stay intact and thus continue the affair. If the personality being projected is succeeding, if it gains flattery and attention, makes them feel important, needed, desired, beautiful, handsome, virile, sexy, powerful .... then on goes the list of the relational four star petrol being poured over the fire of their egos and boy does it ever feel good.
Why go home when in Oz you can feel young, attractive, desirable and longed for? It’s no coincidence that the movie starts in black and white and only moves to glorious technicolour when Dorothy is in a fantasy kingdom. Despite all the excitement of Oz, where does Dorothy long to be?
Thing is, more often than not, there’s usually no place like home. Pity it takes some people a destructive trip to Oz to realise it.[/quote]
It was quite the opposite for me. It showed me there was A LOT more out there than home. Oz opened my eyes and changed my life.

I was most angry about the fact that he'd taken any choice away from me, as I would not have stayed with him or had another child with him
That is one thing that I have remained annoyed about, on a smaller scale in my case - but long-term decisions I made while he was having the affair, that he let me make, knowing that our marriage could blow apart any minute and I'd be left in the shit. But tbh he was always quite inconsiderate so it was just one of several times I was left in the shit.

It was quite the opposite for me. It showed me there was A LOT more out there than home. Oz opened my eyes and changed my life.
I didn't have the affair, but it opened up my eyes and changed my life - and not all negatively. It gave me the chance to meet new, more considerate partners: I had no idea what I'd been missing.

Well there is that point of view @ravenmum

I'm not justifying affairs at all because there is NO justification whatsoever, but even my ex-DH is a different person now, for the better. I think we were both stuck in the doldrums and I think the divorce that came as a result of the affair (my choice, not his) gave us both a new lease of life. Not saying it wasn't hard for anyone because it was, but he seems more...motivated? More interested in hobbies, friends, activities - when we were together I felt that he had no lust for life at all.

@PleaseBeSeated

I think that some people have affairs as a way of keeping going in their marriage/primary relationship. They don't want to end it for whatever reason either they still love their spouse but aren't getting what they need from the marriage, or they want to stay for the children, or for some other reason so an affair is a type of 'spoonful of sugar' that makes life bearable in difficult circumstances, with no notion of ever ending the primary relationship.

This. I think everyone saying they can’t imagine pursuing an affair haven’t been trapped in an unhappy relationship.

@hereforthetea absolutely.
As I prefaced an earlier post, not all situations are the same and some affairs do lead to meaningful long term relationships.
I wasn’t generalising or saying all affairs are this way, but the commonalities of fantasy and pain are.
From my experience of my husband’s infidelity, plus friends and even family’s experience of infidelity, including being the OW or OM, not just the victims of the perpetrators, the majority of affairs in my experience were based on fantasy or a need for attention or reinvention in some way.
The way they originally thought they felt about their AP after discovery ended rapidly thus. It even surprised the people having an affair at how quickly once reality hit that their feelings went from all-consuming to ‘get me the fuck out of here’.

I only know one one couple out of eight cases where the marriage broke up in favour of the AP. And they don’t seem that happy in that they often need to remind me and others how marvellous their ex-AP-now-partner is versus how awful the ex-wife is, like the ‘it’s ok and totally understandable we had an affair because....’ narrative never ends. Weirdest example of this was I once met a mum of one of my DC’s new friends when they started secondary school for the first time, and within 10 minutes of introducing herself and their family set-up, she’d told me that her husband was their second marriage, he had been her AP when she met him but his wife was still a vindictive blah blah blah and her husband was an uncaring blah blah blah so she didn’t feel in the least bit guilty. I sat there wondering why on Earth she felt the need to tell me, a total stranger up to that point, 16 years after the event, about how she got together with the father of my DC’s new friend. Bizarre over-sharing. But she still felt she needed to explain it. On went the narrative.
One broken marriage of one of my friends (teenage child found out, absolute emotional carnage) sadly ended in a suicide over the guilt. Oz can be a wake up call in many ways indeed.
Affairs can be a signal that you have put up with a shit relationship for too long, absolutely agree with you. But if statistics and my (albeit thankfully limited) experience are to be believed, these cases are the minority.
The chances of paradise really being paradise are statistically low. Not impossible, as in your case, but low.

I have never had a physical affair but have definitely crossed serious lines emotionally, I had a few serious relationships before my husband, two in which I was in love. Both ended years ago for valid reasons. A few years ago, I began obsessing over one of them, thinking I'd made a mistake, I should of ended up with them, we reconnected online and they said all the same things. It felt really intense and exciting and like I was alive again. I came to my senses a few weeks later and blocked him off everything and I remember feeling so embarrassed that I had said any of that stuff to him, and that I wasn't in love with him at all, and I was mortified really that he now thinks I've spent years pining after him when really, I hadn't thought about him at all.

Then last year, I did the exact same with the other ex. Telling myself they were my soul mate. Obsessively looking through every old conversation, every photo I could find in my archive, stalking his social media. I added him one night in the midst of a frenzy and I woke up the next morning to see he had accepted and messaged to say how excited he was to see my name and to see how beautiful I still was and I felt these butterflies in my stomach for all of five seconds before I just felt disgusted in myself again.

Thankfully, I have enough self awareness to realise if I'm doing this to multiple ex's, it has absolutely nothing to do with them or any feelings I have towards them, but clearly the issue lies very much in myself. I started counselling at this point and was honest with dh about the issues we had in our marriage, as really it had nothing to do with these ex boyfriends but I just wasn't feeling happy or fulfilled in my marriage or in myself. It's so easy to sabotage everything and run to the excitement but those shiny men don't stay new and shiny for long and you'll remember all the issues they had soon enough.

No one is perfect, and sometimes when feelings are gone we need to be brave enough to walk away, but sometimes you can catch yourself in time and work on the cause. My husband and I are in a much better place now and have worked on bringing a spark back to us rather than chasing it elsewhere. I also really benefitted from counselling because I really did latch on to my memories of young love and desperately want to relive them and it really helped me to work through the reasons behind that and how to enjoy them as memories but not something to try and recreate.