Why do women have affairs with men with young children

[Thegreenpotter]

As the title says. Why?

Do they have no concept of the toll that having young children can take on a relationship?

How can they feel ok playing a part in breaking up a family?

This is not to suggest the blame lies with the other women, far from. Just more a curiosity as to why and how they can do so from a moral perspective.

That is a scenario as old as time.

My response would be to ask why the DH isn't busy with baby as well ?

My exH was OK taking our baby round to his parents to show him off but wasn't interested in feeds/poop/any medical matters/bathing him etc etc. His excuse was that he was tired because he was a shift-worker !

I asked him to come off shifts and he did, but still did sweet FA for our little one.

We had numerous rows about his idleness and he eventually started an affair with a single girl at work. He told her his wife was a shew, a nag etc.

I divorced him and they married. Years down the line they had a baby. She had repeated problems with depression and was in a secure unit more than once. Her mother had to move in to help look after him and baby because he couldn't cope.

Being with him wasn't the big dream she thought it would be. They lost the big house they had because she couldn't work and they couldn't afford the mortgage any more.
She told him that 'she wasn't as happy as she thought she would be, being with him'.
I know this because he told me that himself, when he came to collect our DC for the w/e once. Every time I see him he has a long face and I'm always smiling.

'Karma is a bitch' - as they say......

I'm not berating you, and I do understand that age definitely comes into play with how women are duped, hoodwinked or even feel peer pressure by their friends to live it up and abandon their morals for a story to tell.

And herein lies the problem…

I was neither duped, hoodwinked or pressured by my friends…..I did it because I wanted to and for no other reasons than my own. The idea that women knowingly get involved with a MM without there being a “deep and complex” reason for it is what some posters just can’t wrap their head around - it’s like they refuse to accept that it can happen.

I just don’t understand why it’s impossible to believe that sometimes a woman starts an affair with a MM for just as selfish reasons as the man does and there doesn’t need to be any hidden reasons for it, or any lying and hoodwinking going on and she she doesn’t need to have some deep-seated trauma either in order for society to find an a way to explain why she’s doing it.

In hindsight I can see that what I did was selfish, but at the time I just really
fancied him and he fit the bill of what I was looking for at the time in my life. It really was that simple.

@Bluebellsandharebells LOVE karma!!

Nobody said I had to do anything with the anger for OW. If it makes any difference I didn't do any of those things with my ex either, I kicked him out, I was done. My anger was for me and me alone. It gave me the strength to leave him and get past the fear of being a single parent with a tiny baby. But the reality is that actions have consequences. He bore far more of those immediate consequences than she did, which is the way it should be. I kicked him out of our home and moved nearer family shortly after, so he lost his home and was no longer part of a relationship and a family unit. He missed out on huge chunks of our DD growing up purely from not being an everyday part of her life. But I made sure she knew how I felt. Just the once. And she's bearing more of those consequences of her actions a few years down the line now he's done to her what they did to me. She's had a taste of her own medicine. She did the pick me dance so damn hard to get him once I kicked him out, I was quite amazed as he'd shown himself to be disloyal and no prize. For his part, he has 2 children that he now has no contact with. His family and wider support network of friends wanted nothing more to do with him eventually. I guess if you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes. On both sides. Like I said in a PP, I hated them both for a long time. But after a while my hatred towards her waned. In fact I've said that at some point I'd be open to sitting down with her and having a chat. We do have DDs who are half sisters after all. And I know what she's been through. In his case, there will never be room for reconciliation.

But I guess my main point is, I felt how I felt and I will never feel ashamed about that. Nobody gets to tell me how I should have felt and who I should have directed it towards. You have your opinion, that's fine, you're entitled to it. But I will never apologise. I wasn't the guilty party, I was the one who's life was utterly destroyed by the careless actions of 2 people, and at one of the times in my life where I was at my most vulnerable. Whether others agree with my feelings or not, they were what they were and I won't deny them. I really think we need to get away from the thought that it's ok to act like a dick towards others, behave appallingly and destroy lives and it be ok because you weren't the married party so you don't owe anyone anything.

I was the one who's life was utterly destroyed by the careless actions of 2 people,

I hear your anger. Of course you're allowed to feel how you feel @Survivingmy3yearold

But I can't agree with this. Your life was utterly destroyed by 1 person, not 2.

In my marriage I had a few opportunities to have an affair. One of those opportunities would have been really easy to keep a secret and my husband would never have known.

But I chose not to. I chose my husband. I chose my children. I chose my family life. I chose to remove myself from situations where I would be alone with that man. I chose the commitment I made many years before over fleeting pleasure that was meaningless.

Your partner made his choices too.

Affairs don't start in the bedroom. They start in the head, when someone in a committed relationship makes choices which aren't good choices for their partner/family unit.

Personally, I like the similarity a poster pointed out between having an affair with a married man with small kids and shitting on someone’s carpet - neither are something you promised not to do 😂.

Emotions are not contractual, so it is plainly wrong to claim someone has not had an active role to play in inflicting harm on another, just because they never made anyone any promises or broke any laws. People have choices, not just men.

It is obvious the man is to blame if he chooses to have an affair. It is also obvious to all but the cloth eared that it is antisocial behaviour to shit on someone else’s relationship, especially when vulnerable children will be affected by this. Yes, the relationship may already have been dysfunctional, or going through strain, and yes the person who made promises that they broke is to blame for the affair itself, but they are not solely responsible for the pain caused, nor even the breach of trust. We need to have a certain amount of trust that the people around us will not all happily shit on our carpets or our relationships.

@Thereasonidid you make a fair point that an affair is almost a choice made before a willing partner is met.

But there's also a distinction between:

•blaming the woman for causing the affair (she seduced him, he wanted to be loyal but was turned). I think this is rare. Few people are going to lay this amount of blame

And

•Blaming the woman for her role in the affair. For example, knowingly continuing after finding out he has young children, sending nudes, having sex in wife's house/bed, diapering wife in conversations, asking MM to leave family, taunting wife after affair...

Regardless, people are entitled to feel how they feel. You'd be annoyed if a guest weed on your bathroom floor (going with the shitting example) but a wife supposed to be entirely neutral to someone who had sex with her DH? It doesn't make sense.

Anyone would be pissed, unless you're a very bizarre person who doesn't feel normal emotion (or OW had no idea at all, so no fault).

And your absolving women, both are responsible.

@Thereasonidid but he didn't have the affair on his own. She made a conscious choice to engage in an affair with a man in a relationship with a newborn baby at home. I've had opportunities to be the OW, but I don't behave in that way. I didn't just think, yes, why not! I fancy him and want to sleep with him, who cares about the wife and kids, I don't owe them anything so I'll just have what I want regardless of the hurt it might cause. I'm sure those men eventually found a willing participant. And that's the key for me, a willing participant. Someone willing to engage in an action that they know has the potential to cause untold harm. That's just not how people should behave and I will always take a dim view of it. In the case where women are duped and lied to and genuinely have no idea that there is a wife/partner and children at home, then that's very different and I wouldn't hold blame there. But that's not what happened in my case.

There are many willing participants in breaking relationships @Survivingmy3yearold

The gang of friends who persuade you to have one more pint, that turns into several. "She can put the baby to bed, stay for another"

The hobby that becomes an obsession "you don't need to ask her permission to go mountain climbing again this weekend, just go"

And many more.

All are choices made by the person in the relationship. There are so many threads here on MN about relationship break down because of wrong choices a partner makes because of willing participants in their life. It's just more subtle and less easy to vilify than OW.

@Thereasonidid I agree, yet those things don't lead to the catastrophic life altering consequences in quite the same way. On those nights where he went out and didn't come home until the next day, yes I was cross, and long term they would have no doubt taken a huge toll on our relationship. But that visceral, earth shattering reaction when I found out about the affair, nothing can quite compare with that. I don't know if you've ever experienced it, but it was the single scariest moment of my life and started a whole roller coaster of emotions. In the space of maybe a minute I felt anger, shame, embarrassment, despair, fear and a whole host of other emotions. My legs buckled and I felt physically sick. I felt used and dirty and my mind raced to the last time we'd been intimate and whether he'd been thinking of her, whether he'd passed on any std's, whether they'd had sex in our bed when I'd been away at my mum's, had she been in our home. Suddenly lots of little dots joined together to make a much bigger picture and the realisation that my family unit and relationship were in shreds was devastating. It threw my reality completely out of whack. She was a part of that. I really don't think staying out for a few more beers and letting someone else deal with the baby is quite in the same league. Yes, I agree that it's not good, however in my case I did speak to his friends regarding the encouragement to stay out and forget about the Mrs and baby at home, and I asked them not to do it. They apologised and acknowledged they were wrong.

@Confessiontimes "In an open relationship monogamy is not practiced, "

Yes, but there still needs to be rules about how many other people are being slept with, rules about safe sex, std testing, where the sex is taking place, weekends away or not. etc etc.

Open relationships favour women more than men on a sexual basis, as it is easier for women to get sex.

So the guys could be getting left out in the cold...

You've hit the nail on the head here!

Often rules/boundaries are established in open relationships but also rules do get broken so infidelity plays a role in all different relationship dynamics.

100% agree with this

I would put the friends in the same league @Survivingmy3yearold because I'm coming from the perspective that there were willing participants all round him. He'd already made his choices to go their way and not yours.

I used the pub as a generic example, not knowing he'd done that to you. The fact he had tells me he'd already made his choices to check out of the relationship. Those were the subtle ones you knew about and felt you could try to control. I have no doubt his friends knew things were rocky with you two, but still encouraged him to stay out anyway. Willing participants, just more subtle.

His head had already turned away from you and his family and he was doing whatever was available to keep away.

@Thereasonidid we'll have to agree to disagree. If he wanted out of the relationship, he knew what to do. I'm of the opinion that people are human, and if everyone left their partner/spouse every time they didn't come home from the pub with their mates or something similar than no relationship would ever survive. I will call out shitty behaviour where I see it. People deal with things in different ways, and I don't think it's up to anyone else to tell others how they should feel and who they should blame. She will always bear some responsibility for me. I do feel that I could sit and have a civil conversation with her now, which is more than can be said for him, although there are many other factors at play there. I get that if it hadn't been her, it would have been someone else, but that doesn't mean she shouldn't bear some responsibility for her choices and actions. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

@Walkaround absolutely on the nail- I don't think any of us who have been in this position don't blame our partners 100% -but in that position you cannot help but think the OW if she knows the score is 100% a shitty person too to go along with it.. she isn't to blame, but yes she is a shitty person .

I think this makes sense.

I was very able to keep the fact he was married in a box under my bed because I knew his marriage was already broken and so I didn’t feel like I was damaging something that wasn’t damaged in the first place.

I knew he couldn’t have a happy marriage otherwise he wouldn’t have been with me. Happy husbands in fulfilled marriages don’t have affairs. Yes in circumstances they may have a lapse and have a one-night stand and heavily regret it, but that is very different to having a long-term affair with a woman which is not what happy husbands do. There may be 101 reasons why he’s not happy but ultimately, if he’s having an affair with another woman then something isn’t right within the marriage.

Their wife may have trouble accepting this, or they may totally refuse to accept it and swear blind their marriage was a happy one but it couldn’t have been. It may have been a happy marriage from her point of view and she may not have known her husband was unhappy, but ultimately something about the marriage was led to him to have an affair with someone else.

There are many unhappy husbands and wives out there who don’t have affairs but there are also lots of men and women who do have affairs because it fills some kind of hole in their life.

I never asked my MM anything about his wife or his home life or why he was having an affair with me because it all seemed so irrelevant. I knew he was clearly unhappy in his marriage or he wouldn’t be cheating on her with me so in my eyes I wasn’t “destroying a marriage” because it was already broken.

Yes he shouldn’t have had an affair and he should have spoken to his wife about how he was feeling, but we all know that this is usually a rarity in such circumstances.

After I had ended things with my MM he and his wife broke up anyway a few months later as he confessed to her what he’d done.

He didn’t have to tell her but I think having the affair made him realise that in some way their marriage wasn’t a good one otherwise the affair wouldn’t have happened in the first place.

I think this thread keeps throwing up two different ideas:
the differences between blame/ fault and what constitutes morally reprehensible behaviour.

I don’t think anybody disputes that married men are to blame for having the affair, even those who preface their post with this briefly then say more about the OW. The OP specifically asks about OW so to bang on at the same length about men who have affairs, whilst of course valid in its own context, isn’t what the OP specifically asked. I don’t think it necessarily means that posters who are focusing their anger more on the OW, think that the OW deserves more condemnation, they’re just giving their viewpoint on OW and trying to stick to the topic raised.

If the thread had said ‘why do MM with small children have affairs?’ I’m pretty certain that men would get a total savaging and it would be far clearer to see that most women do actually blame the MM, not the OW.

However part of the answer to the ‘why’ of the OP’s point, hinges on how far the OW feels or doesn’t feel culpable for participating in something they know will devastate the betrayed spouse. That’s a separate issue which doesn’t take culpability for the affair itself from the MM at all. Why the OW does this with a clear conscience appears to hinge on whether or not the OW takes responsibility for the consequences of her actions as well as those of the MM.

It’s every bit as easy for the betrayed spouse try to feel better by blaming the OW and deflecting the blame/ hate from their husband as it is for an OW to deflect the uncomfortable fact that they have participated in seriously hurting someone else by blaming the MM for the hurt that they are going to cause, too.
I just can’t sign up to the belief that it’s ok to deliberately join in doing things that you know will hurt somebody else in full knowledge, even if you think the person you are joining in with is to blame for initiating it. I would never tell either of my children that.

If the thread had said ‘why do MM with small children have affairs?’ I’m pretty certain that men would get a total savaging and it would be far clearer to see that most women do actually blame the MM, not the OW.

The point is, it never does. It's always this question.

It's much easier to see why someone would have an affair with someone else's marriage and family at stake than their own. The MM's behaviour is much less explicable - that's his wife and his kids - and yet the question is almost always on the OW.

That's sexism. And it dilutes men's responsibility.

And the puzzlement that so many posters always display - the reason they're always asking, because they truly can't guess - is, I think, genuine. It truly does not compute with them that women have sexual urges that are outside of what's right. That's why they ask the question in the first place - because they can't see the obvious. And when OW give them answers that are honest, they don't believe it. They accuse her of lying, of delusion, of low self esteem, of wanting to compete with the wife, of wanting the MM to have a full committed relationship with them even when she's clear that she doesn't want any more than she's got.

We don't ask why MM have affairs because we know why. We don't like it, but we're familiar with the idea that men have sexual urges that don't align with perfect morals. It doesn't puzzle us.

So we don't ask.

@WantingToEducate why do you assume a man who is lying, betraying & manipulating their own wife who I assume he lived with is telling you the truth about the state of their marriage?

Don't you get that he's lying to you both?

@WantingToEducate is that really how you feel, that because he had an affair his marriage was obviously damaged and so you didn't do anything wrong? Well I guess you've got to make yourself feel better about the awful thing you willingly did to somebody else and make it all someone else's fault somehow 

@Thewookiemustgo yes, I've given my experience with the OW and been jumped on because I didn't outright say that I blame my ex more. I thought that went without saying and the thread was specifically about the OW and why they do it I will also be having conversations with my children as they grow up regarding behaviour towards others and taking responsibility when your behaviour has been unacceptable and you've hurt others

Well seeing as we never spoke about his marriage or his wife, I don’t know what lies you think he would have told me?