One woman learns through experience how men deceive themselves when they have affairs.
The last time I saw him was on a train. As we approached my stop, he looked straight at me and said, ”I feel invigorated, like I’m about to die.” Then he kissed me until the doors opened. I sighed, turned around, and walked away.
The affair had started unexpectedly and ended as soon as he grasped how easily it could destroy his life. He had a lot to lose. I had less. I was single, childless, but wanting. I was looking for a partner, not a lover. For a moment, I believed he could be the one. If he didn’t have a child, he told me, it would be much simpler.
I knew even the best case scenario—he leaves his wife, we live happily ever after—would carry serious costs. Still, I fantasized about it, and so did he. Initially I was much more skeptical of our future prospects than he was. I had had an affair in the past, although a strictly emotional one. That experience shook my understanding of how a man is supposed to make a woman feel. He accepted and celebrated me in a way I didn’t realize was possible. I gave up on what I had with a decent, if emotionally flawed, individual because of that affair.
That guy didn’t have kids, though his fiancée was older and was starting to demand them. Didn’t he owe it to her? he asked me. If so, I would never, ever want to be her.
They married just months after he had asked me, in writing, if I would move away with him. It was a question I refused to respond to while we were both in relationships. Eventually the momentum of his life before he met me won, and now they have a child and I hear he works 100 hour weeks and his wife sometimes feels like a single mother. When it ended, I poured my heart out and thanked him. I asked him if he had anything to say to me and he said, “Some things are best left unsaid.”
From that experience, I learned how men deceive themselves when they have an affair, and that the incumbent partner usually wins. I know exactly how hard it is to leave someone who wants you to stay because I have done it. I sometimes wonder if it’s harder for men. Not that it should be easy for anyone. I’m looking for my forever and I have little desire to be a homewrecker. But these men sought me out—they chased me in a way that I have gradually learned some men need to chase a woman—and each let me believe they had the courage to take a completely insane risk. Each time, I believed him.
Six years after the emotional affair ended, I lay in bed with my married lover, and he started to discuss steps forward for me and him. I was in awe of his optimism. I knew reality would curb it. Although we were infatuated with each other, we had only just met. I was sad for him. He and his wife had been together for five or six years, married for three, with an adorable child and another on the way. He hadn’t wanted the second.
What had gone wrong in his life? In my eyes he had it all—a family of his own, a satisfying if not perfect work life—and he was still deeply lonely. We never went into the details of his marriage. It was none of my business.
“Do you have the patience for this?” he asked me hopefully one morning as we were saying goodbye. He honestly thought it was up to me.
We agreed it had to stop, no matter what any distant future might hold for us. Yet we continued to interact online, sending each other flirtatiously ambiguous messages. After a while, he started slipping away. As I gathered through unsophisticated cyber stalking techniques, he appeared to have rededicated himself to family life. It was what we had discussed, the only possible path forward, but the reality of it hit hard.
The next day we spoke on the phone for the first time in weeks. What happened to that package you were supposed to send me? I asked him. What was it going to be?
A passage from a book, he said. “You know how sometimes things find you, just at the right moment?” he asked. He said it was a story of closure and how people come together during poignant moments but it was all ephemeral and…
I stopped him right there.
“Fuck you,” I said. “That’s complete bullshit.”
I had heard some version of the ”let’s just enjoy the moments” crap several times already. It was over, really over, and I was devastated. Because his action was equally predictable, perhaps, I found myself as shocked as I had been the first time he kissed me, grasping both of my hands, his icy wedding band burning my finger.
—Photo credit: Ed Yourdon/Flickr
About Anonymous
Yup yup…BTDT…in short, it was a DISASTER for my ex’s family and an utter waste of my youth on a narcissist…
I think because of that experience (among others), I don’t trust men, even married ones at cocktail parties or alumni events….Just this week I was having a casual conversation with someone who went to my high school….and at photo op time, he was hugging me a little too tight for the camera (he was Ivy League, married, with 4 kids!)…my GF pointed out to me that he seemed to be crushing on me (and we had just met!)….Lucky my friends and husband were all nearby to run interference!
Because you couldn’t tell him to behave appropriately or simply remove yourself from his grasp?
This happens because as women we want to be loved. This can stop if woman take their stand and DO NOT HAVE AFFAIRS with married men no matter what love words or whatever they say. In the end you are going to be left in the lurch, used like toilet paper flushed down the drain, trash thrown away for the next one that he can con. They have no respect for woman who fall for their lies. Never happened to me as I do not have affairs, but I have seen it over and over and I am embarassed for us a woman.
Everyone wants to be loved, not just women. I also think you’re a little too hard on… EVERYONE.
Yes, not one man in history has ever left his wife for another. Not one. They ALWAYS have complete disrespect for the woman they have an affair with, right? ALWAYS!
How can a woman expect to be honestly and sincerely loved by a man who is unfaithful and untrue to the woman he took to the chapel and made those very same, if not even more profound, vows to? What makes these women think they are better, or more deserving, of his love than his own wife and mother to is children? It is naive and downright foolish. If you ask me, accepting the advances of known married men and wanting them to love you, is being a home wrecker. Whether you like it or not.
Find love somewhere else and stop ruining other women’s lives. I don’t care how you justify your deplorable actions of, “well.. they came to ME! So THERE!”
This is like saying that a person who breaks any promise in their entire life will never do anything else but break every single promise they make. It’s transparently false.
Well, you brought it on yourself. It’s not just men who cheat. Every one of them cheats with a woman. Do the math.
The math isn’t THAT straightforward, but it is indeed true.
For instance, I had a couple lesbian friends, both of which cheated with each other before they got into a relationship. “It was with good reason, though, we were in love.” Love is a good reason to have a lie of a relationship? Love is a reason to “test out the waters” with this new girl before breaking up with your guy?
That wasn’t love. That was a cop out, because neither of them could go two seconds being single. They were afraid to risk that lack of attention. So they figured, “Try out this new girl, at least if it doesn’t work out, I have a backup. And if it DOES work out, then I could just ditch my current relationship for it.”
One of their exes is a coworker of mine.
The same holds true for many closeted gay men as well. You can’t go into an affair of a relationship, and then blame SOMEONE ELSE for the pain you feel. You can’t act like “he came to me” or “he had this way of how he said things”. It’s called hypo-agency. You act like the situation was placed upon you, and that you yourself weren’t an active participant. All this talk of objectification these days, and people don’t realize when they objectify themselves by not owning their own actions.
All women AND all men need to take a stand by not having affairs with married people. And why would they want to anyway??? If they cheat with you, they may very well cheat on you too.
Yep!
They are like Quakers. They spend half there time praying FOR you and the other half preying ON you.
So, you will get cheated on by them.
Real Talk!
“From that experience, I learned how men deceive themselves when they have an affair”…
I would also contend that you should have learnt how women deceive themselves in the same situation. Perhaps it is time to learn from the mistakes of the past. The reality of a life together with commitments will often win out on a momentary infatuation. I would suggest looking past men wanting adrenaline rushes in the future and start looking at men who are serious and grown up.
“The reality of a life together with commitments will often win out on a momentary infatuation.”
I disagree. One man will never make a woman happy over a lifetime. It just is impossible. Women need serial lovers.
She is a grown woman and selfishly wanted the attention, affection, sex……he was offering. He wnated the same thing too. She was NOT innocent in this affair.
“I disagree. One man will never make a woman happy over a lifetime. It just is impossible. Women need serial lovers.”
Was this sarcastic? Because it conflicted with the rest of your post.
I do want to talk about that point as well, though. If it is a valid claim that women need serial lovers, then it is just as valid a claim that men need serial sex partners.
In fact I believe it was Japan:
In Marriage, both partners were monogamous both emotionally and in family, but were sexually polygamous. In this way, it kept them both emotionally and sexually fulfilled.
In fact, this is likely how it worked in the past, and how it works in many African tribes. The men are emotionally dedicated to one girl, but sexually available to many girls. The women are emotionally dedicated to many men, but emotionally exclusive with one man.
I’m not saying this is the best way to go about things, but what I’m saying is, a woman can’t use the evolution cop-out without allowing the same excuse for men. Whatever happened to keeping those impulses in check?
Correction: “but SEXUALLY exclusive with one man.”
“One Man will never make a woman happy over a life time”
This is a gross generalisation, it is true that perhaps some women cannot be happy with one man, just as true is the fact that there are women who have been happy with one man for a life time.
To think that you may have the insight to announce the you speak on behalf of all women is incorrect. Not all women need serial lovers. I have one lover, my husband, and he is it for me and has been for a long time, no impulses to fight, he serves every purpose.
Good for you.
I use to have a crush on a married man that worked in my field. I only saw him a few times a year at business meetings. He was quite nice, handsome , articulate and always had a friendly smile for me. However, if he had ever done anything inappropiate toward me, I would have lost all respect, and thus all liking for him. I could never respect a man that cheated his wife (and children) out. But this man was always a professional. So I didn’t mind my harmless crush on him. I just appreciated him. I never was inappropiate with him or vice versa. I think people that don’t respect themselves that much, cheat. Because if you respected yourself, you wouldn’t put yourself in the spot of desrespecting yourself and those you love. If you were happy with yourself, you wouldn’t fall for empty lines and promises being made while different actiosn where going on. So I would say to anyone who cheated or is cheating, to think about what that says about how much you like yourself or don’t. And start with that. I think there is some amount of self-loating involved with people who cheat. Men or women.
Erin, I’m sorry, but for a certain subset of cheaters I just don’t think this is true.
A good friend of mine has cheated on basically every girlfriend he has every had. This has caused him no end of anguish, and prevented him from forming any kind of adult long term relationships. He has often admitted of being jealous of men who can form long term relationships, and wishes he were like them.
But he’s not, and it may not be his fault. There is considerable evidence that some amount of cheating may be genetic (look up DRD4 or vasopressin receptors and their links to cheating, there’s a fair amount of evidence).
Even if you don’t accept genetic explanations, in my friend’s case, his father cheated on his mother repeatedly during his childhood (which may also lend credence to the genetic explanation). He was raised in a household with a pretty clear message about the way grown men behave, and it clearly did not involve learning how to form a lasting bond with your partner.
To boil his struggles and his painful childhood down to “lack of self respect” seems at least slightly insulting. We are all subject to forces beyond our control, that does not mean we stop having self respect.
So what happens when you unintentionally fall in love with that “harmless crush”? What if you work together closely everyday, and the very fact that he is always appropriate and respectful (along with many other fine qualities) causes you to come to love him deeply? What if he is everything you ever wished for in a man, and your own marriage is desperately wanting in so many areas, no matter how many years you have faithfully tended to it? I would be much more concerned about my partner being in love with another than I would be about a sexual affair. Don’t kid yourself. A harmless crush and deep respect for someone can pose just as much of a risk to a relationship as a sexual fling. One is not so superior to the other when it comes to fidelity.
“I would be much more concerned about my partner being in love with another than I would be about a sexual affair.”
I have never been able to understand this. For me, sex and/or an emotional bond with a third party is one and the same.
Yes. Exactly. Because EVERY relationship is EXACTLY alike, so we can sit back and judge people by what our lives have been like.
Unfortunately that’s sort of how our minds work. We use past events and examples as a way to quickly come to a conclusion about present events. Apparently that’s why the whole ‘life flashing before your eyes’ thing happens when you’re about to die. Your brain is like, shuffling through everything desperately trying to find something that will inform your present situation. Or, so I heard on QI anyway.
Point is…it’s difficult not to let past bad relationships colour the present ones. I’m not saying it’s a good thing…it’s just how people work.
Mike, If your friend is a reasonable male with a reasonable mind, then his choices are his fault. Good and bad. If he knows enough to know that cheating isn’t right, if he knew enough to hide what he was doing from his partners, then he knew what he was doing was wrong. Then he had control and choices in how he proceeded. And it certainly sounds like he knew what he was doing.
But I do sympathize with your friend’s childhood experience. I think that would be a very difficult situation to grow up in and one that would clearly alter how one sees or practices relationships themselves. But there is a point when we need to realize we are adults ourselves capable of making choices. And while I agree our choices are influenced by factors we might not always had control of, such as parents that had unpredictable relationships or other extenuating factors, while growing up. As adults, we know better.
I’m not going to get into my whole history but I had some experience with both my own dad and brother that lead me to a very familiar pattern with men. How I thought about them and how I interacted with them. But when I started realizing what was going on, I put, and still am putting in, alot of work to change some of those old patterns and beliefs. So while I had some unfair things happen to me, and I believe we all have, as an adult, I am responsible for how I treat others (men in this case) no matter what happened with men in my past.
I do think when we treat people ill, it comes down to a lack of respect.And I think it also comes from a lack of respect of ourselves. Because respect for others starts with respect for yourself. I think your friend sounds like he just may have a lack of respect for himself. Possibly from how he saw his his father disposable treat his own mother. However, as a grown man, aware of the issues he was dealt in life, he’s capable of making choices independent of what happened to him as a child to heal himself and his life.
Of course, all things in life are very complicated. But the heart of this issue for me is a lack of respect. And I don’t think that’s insulting at all. I think it’s getting to the heart about why people may do things, how they may really feel about themselves, fixing that, and then fixing the problem.
By the way, your friend could and probably is strong in a lot of areas of his life. But in his relationships, there is a lot going on there that he both needs to admit to and own if he ever wants to over come it. People who respect themselves and other people don’t treat other people with desrespect.
Erin,
Respectfully, the arguments you are using are the same ones that were used to deny non-heteronormative sexuality for years. Constantly it was insisted that everything dealing with sexuality was a “choice” and that people who were not monogamous-heterosexual were “making a choice” to be deviant, even though they “knew it was wrong.”
I do not know how to put this any more clearly: I knew him for years and I remain unconvinced that he could help himself.
Now, maybe it was closer to an addiction than a truly polyamorous sexual identity, I’m not him so it’s impossible for me to say. But I do know that if you had seen him, year after year, with the pain it caused him, there’s no way you would be saying “He’s just making consistently bad choices!”
We live in a society that expects relationships to fit a certain mold, yet we have no evidence that everyone can or would fit into that mold. When someone doesn’t fit in there’s going to be pain, but that doesn’t mean it’s the fault of the person who doesn’t fit in.
“We live in a society that expects relationships to fit a certain mold, yet we have no evidence that everyone can or would fit into that mold. When someone doesn’t fit in there’s going to be pain, but that doesn’t mean it’s the fault of the person who doesn’t fit in.”
I agree with you Mike. I think it is easy for people to sit in judgement and say someone should know better or be able to control themselves more but that’s lightweight thinking. I applaud you Erin for reigning in your feelings for the married man you were crushing on but as someone else asked, if you had worked with him on a daily basis would that have been so easy? It’s easy for me to not sleep with someone I see a few times a year that I am attracted to but a very different story if I see them every day. It’s like putting a delicious cake in front of me and telling me not to take a bite.
Speaking of which, It’s funny, we don’t punish people for overeating (not a lot anyway given that almost 50% of Americans are obese so it’s kind of normal now). For most obese or overweight people it absolutely is a question of impulse control whilst others blame their genes, but should someone cheat, something that can also be a question of impulse control or genetic predispositions, upbringing etc all hell breaks loose and the sanctimonious god squad come to town. In a perfect world no one would cheat, no one would be fat and no one would fail at school because they can’t be bothered studying. That’s not life yet we are not as harsh on other people who fall short of expectations. Why is sex the thing we choose to judge people on so unequivocally. Personally I think expecting people to have the same sexual partner for life (after marriage or some sort of commitment) is harsh, unnecessary and self limiting.
Note: My comment was in response to Erin’s post, not Mike’s, even though it appeared right after Mike’s.