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.

It’s interesting how many people seem to jump on the “blaming women” band wagon. Not at all. As I have said multiple times a man is absolutely to blame for his own behaviours and actions.

Bouledeneige
I don't think its the wrong question. My XH betrayed me and my very young children in the worst way. I despise him for it and they have now seen him for who he is. But he didn't do it alone. The woman he did it with laughed about me possibly discovering it and wanted me to find out. She later married a more prominent (and married at the time they met) member of his profession - she clearly was not a feminist and played them for professional advantage.

What an earth does feminism has to do with this?
What a silly thing to say.
Feminism isin’t about protecting your status symbol!

@HeartInMyHand this woman has just bared her soul about the most painful moment anyone can endure and your take on it is a sentence about feminism trying to link back to the OPs original question and you attack her for it. Really? There is pain behind many of the posts made here myself included. Have some empathy.

There seems to be this concept that men or women who are married can be taken away against their will.

If a marriage is happy and sound, no amount of 'come on' from another person will break it up.

(Having sex while married but with no emotional investment or a plan to leave is different - but that's not what the OP asked- she is talking about leaving for someone else.)

You can't 'steal' someone's wife or husband.
They choose to leave and most probably would have anyway. Sure, it makes it harder if they leave for someone else, but that person has not stolen them.

But that's what your subject line said.

Read it again.

Are you still hurting?

Is this about you?

Can you ask for help if you are struggling?

My husband left me whn I had just given birth to our second child and we were in the mortgage crisis of the late 80s. He vanished for 3 weeks and was devastated. He was actually the nicest bloke you could have met - his head was just turned and it was an outlet for the pressure he no doubt felt.
We never got back together and I never married again. I came across the girl he left me for recently and she is married with 3 girls. I often wonder how she would feel if I sent her husband and kids a letter saying what she did. They probably wouldn't recognise her either.
My point? It's not always the person, but is the things they do that are scummy

Yes, we all KNOW that the married man with children is the more guilty party. We're not stupid, OP included.
And believe me, no one knows this more than me
But at the end of the day - and feminist principles aside - this wasn't actually the point of the OP's question.

Yes, it is literally 100% the man’s fault. In 100% of cases.

This is so interesting, and I agree, one man I had a relationship with, I later realised that I wasn't really that crazy for him, I wanted what he had, his freedom. We were the same age but he worked between two cities, back and forth as and when, no children, no x wife, no serious x gf, phoned his parents when it suited him............ I was rooted in one spot because of my children's schools, worked 9 to 5. I really envied him his freedom and I think that that was what I was attracted to, even though it wasn't a character attribute.

Marriage is a contract between two people. Noone else.

Not everyone thinks about the nuclear family in the same hallowed way. Some people find the idea of monogamy deeply oppressive. People are allowed to have other ideas about sex, and to form other sorts of relationships, and to have multiple relationships. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with choosing any of this.

I get that can be hugely hurtful and destructive if you have signed on for an exclusive relationship, and it turns out your husband hasn't, but is the terrible pain mainly about the husband rejecting a monogamous life, when that's been the contractual pact, and with it a strong emotional expectation? It's a terrible rejection, made worse if there has been deceitfulness?

Isn't this one of those gambles about entering into a long term monogamous relationship, and of having children? They are inately fragile unions, that require both parties to still want the same things, or compatible things, over long periods of time, when we all know that life moves in unexpected directions for all of us?

I don’t agree. This is a forum mainly for women so op is asking about this from a womens perspective. I am really interested in this because when I was younger I was vehemently opposed to getting involved with married men/men with partners and would have been mortified to be responsible for the destruction of another another woman’s home life. I would love to hear views on why women do this to other women. Perhaps someone else can start another thread about men for those who are interested.

fyi I was cheated on when I was married and wasn’t the slightest bit interested in the actions of the ow. To this day - many years later - I have no idea of her identity. As far as I was concerned he was the one I had beef with. Although, now I think about, it he used to drive her around in my car and taunt me with the fact he did that. I wonder if she felt an iota of sympathy for me.

I find it interesting how many on the thread seem to believe that the women that do this are tricked, lied to or generally have no agency of their own to make the decision.

The only quibble I have about this is that many people who cheat profess themselves committed to monogamy. The fact that they hide the chesting suggests a different agenda to what you propose.

My exhusband had an affair. She was 17. He was 32. Our children were 3 and 2. Turns out ( now she has just divorced him) that he told her I was mentally ill and he had to divorce me ( I divorced him. She was genuinely horrified when I showed her the decree absolute). He told her lie after lie after lie about it all. His mother ( married 3 times. Reinvented herself totally each time) backed up his lies so at 17, not massively bright and with no life experience she just accepted everything he said as gospel.

I think a lot of women have experience of married men chatting them up by using those tactics. When I online dated I was told stuff like we are more like friends, she tricked me into having children, we have seperate bedrooms, we've agreed to stay together for the kids etc. I've never dated a married man but I've had a lotnof offers from them and bone of them ever said anything like 'my wife is too tired for sex, want to be FWB?', it was always some elaborate tale of how they were friends or he felt he had to stay otherwise she might kill herself or the children will fail all their a levels or she will 'bleed him dry' or whatever.

Women without kids are not idiots or cruel. Why would their lack of motherhood make them more likely to do a morally bad thing?

I expect there are as many reasons as there are affair partners if you are looking for nuance.

With a pair of colleagues they were both very status driven. Him professional status, her having the 'right' things - cars, house, holidays.

He enjoyed being newly married professional man but was annoyed when his wife 'got' pregnant. He did enjoy being 'new dad' but then wife didn't match his professional status.

The OW infiltrated herself into his marriage. Became his work wife. She would go with them on outings and also go away with him on a lot of unnecessary work trips.

In a fairly short time the marriage ended and the affair couple got together officially and married fairly quickly (destination wedding which DC didn't attend).

They now enjoy a Double Income No Kids lifestyle.

In many ways they were both quite shallow. I don't know whether his first marriage would have lasted but having a third person in it didn't help.

I'm surprised too at the number of people that think the woman should not be held in any way responsible for having an affair with a married man. To me it shows a lack of self respect, self esteem, morals and basic respect for others.

Obviously if the man has lied and is leading a double life then that is different story but there are plenty of desperate women who have no self respect out there too.

Please don’t unrail the thread, Choccy. It is a fascinating topic to many of us. It might even give ow a chance to vent/offload. This thread is not about men. Let’s keep it that way.

Because women are people and some people are opportunists.

Don't believe the guff about if a marriage is happy and sound, nobody is going to have an affair either.

Some people are perfectly happy in their marriages and still have affairs.

Yes, I agree with this.

I think that they often do not initially tell their new lover that they have children and sometimes do not tell them they are married.
It often seems to happen when their wife is pregnant or soon after their baby is born, they run from the responsibility perhaps? I'm not saying this to excuse their behaviour (which is repugnant) but because sometimes couples have not mutually decided to have a baby, be it accidental or not.
They're pathetic men boys, even if their marriage or partnership isn't perfect they should still support a family for whom they are responsible, even if they did not deliberately choose to have that family.

I think there is an assumption that the women who have been cheated on have somehow brought it on themselves. Either by being too old or too opinionated or withholding sex. I think this is where the script comes into play. We were always arguing. You never loved me. What do you expect. Of course we were never going to last.

Certainly for me and for many women who I've sought support from either in real life or online we are completely blind sided by the whole thing. You see a change in behaviour. Unexplained hostility. You may even still be having sex. Sex was happening much more regularly than I've ever known in my 27 year relationship. Sadly I welcomed the extra attention. My self esteem was on the floor.

When I found out the woman he was having an affair with was in her late 50s I really struggled with not blaming her entirely. There have been many stories on here from women who were young and either had affairs or flirtatious behaviour with older married men. There is a difference there because young women will not fully understand the implications I think. When you get to your 50s the scales fall from your eyes and you see life and relationships in a whole new way and your motivation for developing them has to be centred around your own well being.

I think men who look for affairs or who have responded to flirting have something missing inside them. An ability to look at themselves closely and examine their own motives for why they are seeking out this kind of attention. Sometimes it's the same for women. It is at its heart utterly selfish. If you don't examine yourself and work on yourself you hurt everyone around you. If you care about your family and friends you need to think about how your actions affect others. That's just basic decency but you are failing yourself if you don't. Knowing that my ex has failed himself is the only way I've been able to begin recovery from what happened and examine my own role in it. And working on my self esteem has been key to that.

It is blaming women.

It’s holding women to higher moral bar because we expect, and almost excuse, men who are dirty dogs but the question of ‘why oh why do the women do it?’ infers that they should be more chaste and selfless.

Women can be just as self serving and lacking in integrity as men. Society (and you op) expect them to ‘be better’ and socialise them as such - so to a degree it seems as if it’s true. But it’s just a way of keeping women controlled and blamed for men’s actions.

Ultimately a woman who fancies and wants to have sex with a married man doesn’t owe anything to his affiliations. He can say no. He can choose. His decision alone marks the betrayal.

Having fathered children is not an indicator of a man 'getting it together' and not having them isn't an indication that the man has no job or house.

You're forgetting all the feckless men who move from partner to partner, scattering children all over the place whom they don't then support.

Being childfree (for both sexes) is generally beneficial to your job prospects and ability to afford a house.

@screamingabdabz because of an imaginary sisterhood?

I agree with pp.... the OW fancies the man, and has no interest in, or obligation to, his family set up.

Sometimes she's been lied to (we aren't happy / we're separating anyway / we're almost divorced), which would undermine any moral obligations she might feel.

Also, your question seems to suggest it's worse when people have affairs when their children are young... it's bad if their children are any age, but probably worse if they are teens / young adults in my experience. Younger children don't know or understand what's happening, and are more likely to accept their new life as given. Teens / YA who are also going through other big stuff - exams, applying for uni, their own romantic heartbreak, trying to find a job, can siffer much more.