Nothing Is Emotionally More Draining Than Exit Affairs

Sometimes you are in a quandary. You know you should end a relationship, but you don’t know exactly how. It comes with being alive that naturally, feelings, circumstances, and desires change over time. And communicating wishes, dreams, and emotional issues with our partner is a very delicate and difficult thing to do. Especially when a relationship has been on the rocks for quite some time.

Maybe inertia has crept into the relationship, and the window to revive the relationship has closed. The relationship is over, but it’s hard to get out. And unfortunately, this has been the case for a long time.

And then, out of nowhere, someone appears who changes everything.

Suddenly, someone is interested in you and wants to know everything about you. Then, finally, there’s this person who wants to spend time with you, bringing you back to life. You start to feel attraction, eroticism, and sexual tension again, something you’ve been missing for such a long time.

Therefore, would you stay, or would you take this opportunity to end the relationship you’re in?

An affair to prove that the relationship is over.

Obviously, we can’t know how someone else will act in a given situation. And in all honesty, we sometimes don’t even know exactly why we act the way we do. It’s never easy to perfectly rationalize human behavior, let alone our own actions. However, from an outside perspective, exit affairs are above all one thing: strategic.

Therefore, exit affairs seem to be a means to distract from exploring and discussing long-simmering relationship issues while simultaneously underscoring the end of the relationship. Therefore, the conclusion is obvious, that this kind of affair has to be a mixture of embarking on an enticing experience and a separation action all in one move. If you then also look at the figures that state that up to 40% of married couples struggle with infidelity, then you conclude that affairs are selfish, at least to some degree. And, as a society, we condemn it.

Because society condemns affairs, many go to great lengths to conceal their affair. However, with exit affairs, the case is different. When someone has an exit affair being afraid of what the partner might do when the affair is discovered isn’t a priority. Since these affairs occur shortly before the relationship is officially over, exit affairs seem to be a convenient explanation for the relationship’s failure. It’s by design that these affairs constitute the final stroke.

Emotions, pain, and broken promises.

But if you end a relationship and at the same time still have an affair, does that affair have a future and become a new relationship? Can you really deal with so many different emotions, which are quite the opposite?

Basically, the question arises of how someone can recover from the end of a relationship while maintaining a romance simultaneously. Unfortunately, numbers indicate that most people can’t. According to Shelly Glass and relationship researcher John Gottman, only a fraction of affairs evolve and blossom into new relationships. Furthermore, they found that 75 percent of all affairs-related marriages end in divorce.

And how does a person feel when they discover that they have been cheated on after a long-term relationship? The emotion of being discarded and deceived can be very painful for the heartbroken partner. Exit affairs are more difficult because the anguish of adultery is compounded by the sadness of being replaced.

When so many different demands, emotions, and personal views converge on one action, there can only be losers. It is the case that an affair ends a broken relationship. However, I am not sure that this act ends a relationship faster than an honest conversation.

Isn’t it true that we all wish to be treated with respect and don’t want to wonder if and how we should have behaved differently so that the partner just wouldn’t have started an affair? The feeling that a person you love can just get up, leave everything and go already hurts like hell. Then also to become clear with the feeling that one was replaced again much more.

And the person who started an affair has to deal with the demands, emotions, and essence of another person and make an effort for this person, to a certain degree anyway. Escaping from a relationship into an affair seems to me almost emotionally unmanageable. So I guess it’s not surprising that many affairs never become relationships.

After all, the goal of the affair was to end the relationship, not to find new love. But maybe I misunderstood everything or made the wrong considerations — who knows, so much can happen in love, some of it is not fair, most of it is unbelievable, and some things are simply unlikely.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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