Ended an affair

[Amidelusional]

I ended a affair today. He was married, I'm not. Met at work and he's 10 years older with grown up children (I'm mid 40s). It's been physical for a few months, but lots of messaging before this. I'm heartbroken, but I know I have no one else to blame but myself. I believe the feelings were real for both of us, but maybe I'm just kidding myself. There was none of the "my wife doesn't understand me" stuff, just an overwhelming connection, unlike anything I've experienced before. I know OW get a lot of shit on here (with good reason). Maybe I'm looking for a dose of reality, I don't know. Or some hope that this will pass and I'll get over him. We're not in the same office so low risk of having to see each other, thankfully

Maybe we should amend the wedding vows to add in "until I don't get enough sex" and "until I feel the need to seek excitement elsewhere" and "until we have children and I don't enjoy the responsibility it brings"?

Might make things simpler?

Life and love are complicated, people are complex, life is not black and white….all the these things are true, but the right or wrong of infidelity is black and white. the choice to be unfaithful is a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ choice.
When a betrayed wife is distraught on here and says that her husband’s reason for cheating was accusing her of ‘not enough sex’, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone reply “Well, what do you expect? I‘m sure your husband is a decent guy who loves you and his mistress, he just needs more sex in his life and doesn’t want to hurt you so he sleeps with other women behind your back without telling you. By the way, I’d get an STD check if I was you, but it’s no big deal, you should have pleased him more in bed.”
Nobody should have to put up with a sexless marriage, I’m not saying that, but a decent guy should be honest about his issues with their sexual needs and his partner can either agree or not, without the sexual and mental health risks and agony of betrayal.
Suffering immense guilt is the price of doing something bad that you know you shouldn’t be doing to somebody else. If you still do it anyway, feeling guilty about it but carrying on regardless doesn’t make you a nicer person. You still did it. Guilt is your conscience telling you to stop, because you’ve fallen short of your standards.
Relationship issues do not cause infidelity, there are unsatisfactory relationships where cheating does not occur, because nobody makes the decision to cheat.
The cheating partner’s cowardly and selfish inability to face and be honest about those issues and what the uncomfortable consequences of dealing them might mean, is what causes the infidelity.
Put the blame where it actually lies: the decision to cheat is the sole responsibility of the cheat, not their partner or relationship.

Maybe the connection was entirely genuine. I certainly wouldn’t automatically dismiss it as a tissue of lies and future-faking because he didn’t end his marriage. You say yourself you’re unsure whether you would have wanted that, anyway. The intensity of snatched moments and secrecy is no guide to whether you would have gone on to have a happy relationship once there were no barriers to you being together, and you were dealing with the reality of living together and bringing up your young child. Strong connections can be situational, like friendships— their impermanence is doesn’t make them less real, it just means that the needs of two people were being met by a specific conjunction of circumstances at one point.

I’ve noticed with two male friends who ended their apparently happy marriages because of affairs, and who went on to marry/longterm cohabit with their affair partner, that in fact they’re leading striking similar lives in their subsequent relationships.

One ran a very successful business with his first wife and complained after the marriage ended that he hadn’t been happy for years because he was leading her life, the business was her vision. Yet now he’s running a new business with his second wife (hospitality) and it’s also very much her vision. I think it’s easier for him to go along with someone else’s project and complain he’s serving someone else’s idea, than to risk putting his own out there.

And I remember saying to the second friend that he’d caused his wife and children so much pain by ending the marriage out of the blue, that he owed it to everyone to make sure that the life he made for himself afterwards was what he really wanted and chose. Five years on, and the dynamic in his new household is pretty much exactly what it was in his first, and he’s retreated to the kind of sofa-bound, routine-bound life that made him say he was ‘sleepwalking’ through his first marriage.

The marriage wasn’t the issue in either case. Both men just brought themselves with them into a new relationship. I wouldn’t say either is actively unhappy, more defaulted to who they always were.

I think your self-protective instincts kicked in for a reason, though, OP. Listen to them.

Years ago, I was the OW too. Fell for the "my wife doesn't understand me" bullshit. Saw each other for a few months until the day he said that I was affair number 19. His feet didn't touch the ground as I threw him out. Guaranteed, you will not have been the only one! I have been happily married for 22 years but before I met DH, my motto was "once a cheat, always a cheat" and never went near another married man!

You heard him lie and felt unnerved. Listen to that feeling because it’s telling you the truth.

I'm starting to feel more pissed off about it all now. It feels like there was a deliberate building of intimacy on his part. We never said I love you but he used the word a lot (lots of love sign off on email etc) even though I never did. We were in contact every day. I spoke to him the night before his dad's funeral. It just feels so fucked up looking back on it all now, but I still really miss him. Angry at myself probably more than him though, I can only control my actions. I should have known better

@Amidelusional look at today positively instead of kicking yourself about the past.
You ended it, you did the right thing, you’re not helping him abuse his wife’s trust any more, you stopped believing a liar. You did yourself a huge favour.
The past is done, we can’t change it, we can only learn and go forwards.

You aren't the first and you won't be the last to have a married man use you. Of course they lay it on with texts etc, they compartmentalise. They have their real life and real relationships and their flings are just that, a little distraction without any strings like responsibility etc.

Just learn from it amd don't be taken in again, find a single bloke. Good luck.

You seem to have lots of sympathy for yourself but little for his wife.

Excellent post @NotSoFar

You take yourself with you into every relationship unless you can make significant changes to learned behaviour. It makes sense that subsequent relationships will end up having similar issues.

Situations are never black and white though as I know from bitter experience.

The only one gaining anything from this was him.

Why waste your life on someone already spoken for?

Agree. It’s all very poor innocent me me me.

The poor wife is the only innocent victim here. He’s a lying cheating scumbag - not character traits that are attractive in a sexual partner. But the OP knew he wasn’t single and still willingly jumped into bed with him - not sure the hard done by victim self pity is deserved.

Totally disgraceful what you done.

“The excesses of love soon pass, but its insufficiencies torment us forever.”

Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

OP, Marriage does not satisfy a lot of people. They want more. They are tormented by the insufficiencies of their chosen partner (He chose his wife! No-one forced him). Those insufficiencies create deep feelings of wanting more like an addict needing another, a stronger "hit". Your AP was an addict, addicted to the high your attention gave him. This is not a sustainable situation.

You did well to cut it off - frame him as an addict and yourself similarly as an addict and looked into how to treat Addiction effectively.