Reply to Long term affair... trying to wrap my head around if it’s even possible to get over your DH’s 3 yr

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[quote=Anonymous]Q: Is this compartmentalizing characteristic of people who get into affairs?

Dr. G. It’s much more characteristic of men. Most women believe that if you love your partner, you wouldn’t even be in an affair; therefore, if someone has an affair, it means that they didn’t love their partner and they do love the person that they had the affair with. But my research has shown that there are many men who do love their partners, who enjoy good sex at home, who nevertheless never turn down an opportunity for extramarital sex. In fact, 56 percent of the men I sampled who had extramarital intercourse said that their marriages were happy, versus 34 percent of the women.

The misconception is that if a man had an affair, it meant that he had a terrible marriage, and that he probably wasn’t getting it at home--the old keep-your-husband-happy-so-he-won’t-stray idea. That puts too much of a burden on the woman. I found that she could be everything wonderful, and he might still stray, if that’s in his value system, his family background, or his psycho dynamic structure.

Many of our beliefs about the behavior of others come from how we see things for ourselves. A man who usually associates sneaking around with having sex will, if his wife is sneaking around, find it very hard to believe that she could be emotionally involved without being sexually involved. On the other hand, a woman usually can not believe that her husband could be sexually involved and not be emotionally involved. We put the same meaning on it for our partner that it would have for us. I call that the error of assumed similarity.

I found enormous gender differences:[b] that men in long term marriages who had affairs had very high marital satisfaction--and that women in long-term marriages having affairs had the lowest marital satisfaction of all. [/b][/b]Everybody’s marital satisfaction went down the longer they were married, except the men who had affairs.[b] But in early marriages, men who had affairs were significantly less happy. An affair is more serious if it happens earlier in the marriage.

Only 10 percent of people who leave their relationship for affairs end up with the affair partner. Once you can be with the person every day, and deal with all the little irritations in a relationship that make it less romantic, you’re into Stage Two--disillusionment.

Several people have told me they wish the affair had never happened; they wish they had worked on their marriage instead. Once they got into an affair, it was too compelling. But now that the affair has settled into a reality based relationship, it is too late to go back to the marriage; they destroyed too much.

https://www.shirleyglass.com/psychologytoday.htm
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