And you could reverse this and say that the OW believe it in order to feel better about it and quash the horrible thought that they weren’t a side piece fantasy and didn’t get used. A form of self soothing.
It might have been genuine affection, it might have been love. Who knows? The odds are more against it than for it though. The affair lasted a year but how much actual time together doing normal stuff was that? Was it all just meals out, short dates followed by sex?
Add up the amount of time over a year that you would spend with an unattached partner compared to a few stolen hours a week, hardly ever a weekend or even a whole night together, birthdays, Christmases, holidays together…. sometimes no normal stuff in there at all.
Easy to get infatuated and mistake the really huge dopamine kick affair relationships give for love, when most of the time you’ve been dressing your best, going on one long first date, being told what you want to hear and learning what they want to hear from you. You know bugger all about them and their lives, apart from what they choose to tell you. You ‘fall in love’ with this version of them and they ‘fall in love’ with the affair version of you.
If it’s real love and the marriage is really dead, they’ll eventually sort their lives out and leave for you. OP has had a year long affair with ‘real love’ then suddenly nothing? Whatever hit the fan here shows it didn’t take him long to make a choice and thus far he’s sticking to it.
If tested in the real world for a proper year together and it endured, then I’d agree that he really did love OP.
Cheating men aren’t all Machiavellian moustache-twirling villains, however, I honestly think they believe what they’re saying until forced to examine it. I think cynical booty call guys are the ONS brigade, longer affairs suggest more at play.
Far more often though, with hindsight they see it as a colossal painful mess, feel guilty, ashamed and embarrassed and would rather leave it in the past.
It’s not uncommon for them to have compartmentalised so efficiently, that the horror of the two worlds colliding actually comes as a shock. It’s been guilt inducing and terrifying to ponder “What if?” questions during the affair, so they are rigidly avoided until forced into their faces by discovery or a near miss. That’s when the U-turn from “I love you and you’re the only good thing I have in my life” turns into “Wtf have I done? I’m going to lose everything.” It hits home hard and they’re gone in a puff of panic and shame.
Time will tell, he’ll either come back because he realises he loved OP, or worse, he’ll only come back because his wife threw him out and he has nowhere else to go. Best case scenario is that he won’t come back at all, because he realises he’s jeopardised everything he truly values, or has realised what a fuck up he’s made of himself and his relationships and takes some time out to get that sorted.
Affairs and real-world conditions relationships are two different animals.
Infidelity is common because like it or not, to many it feels bloody amazing to get noticed, validated, flirted with again. The secrecy makes it more exciting than a normal relationship and obstacles in the way increase longing and reinforce the ‘us against the world’ bonding. It’s a huge high on acid compared to normal relationships.
It’s a false situation however, the ‘flush of a new relationship’ phase lasts far, far longer in affairs than in normal relationships, which is often what accounts for the longevity. When the situation becomes humdrum or routine or starts to lose novelty, it either fizzles out or the cheat, desperate for the high, moves on to a new flirtation.
It’s way more often the situation than the person which is causing the high and being maintained, despite not feeling like that at the time. These liars lie to themselves too, especially with so much at stake.
When the desperate just-caught husband says “She meant nothing to me” the bit he’s not saying is “but the situation, the affair bubble itself, meant everything to me. It felt bloody amazing.” Nobody would do this to themselves and their lives if it didn’t feel bloody brilliant.
Time is the only thing that will show if he really loved OP or not.