Reply to S/O How do you justify having an affair?

Forum Index » Relationship Discussion (non-explicit)

Reply to "S/O How do you justify having an affair?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]I know someone whose spouse became incredibly incapacitated and needed full time care. She wasn't going to divorce him because he needed her health insurance, but the marriage was for all intents and purposes dead, and here's the key . . . he was incapable of consenting to an open marriage. In that instance, I think getting her needs met elsewhere was fine.

But 99.99% of spouses ARE capable of consent and it's not OK to bring secret sexual partners into an explicitly monogamous relationship without your partner's consent. All of the "justifications" for cheating are really justifications for ending or opening a relationship. It's that the cheater wants to have their cake and eat it too, keeping their clueless partner on the hook but having fun on the side.

By conflating a relationship that might need to end/be opened with a justification to cheat, the cheater unilaterally throws a grenade into the marriage that may explode at any time. "I never meant to hurt you" is a really dumb thing to say after lobbing a grenade . . . "I hoped the grenade I threw wouldn't explode!" impresses no one with its logic. You could have sat your partner down and said, "OK, so I'm really at a point where I want to sleep with someone else. Where should we go from here?"

The desire to sleep with a new person often comes first and the justification gets filled in later. And yes, it's very human to bond with someone new and want to jump their bones, but we also have self-awareness which we can use to catch feelings of attraction in their early stages. These things don't "just happen". . . we choose to keep spending time with someone we think is attractive, to send vaguely flirty texts, etc.

We're all somewhere on a spectrum of self realization and if you are disconnected from your inner dialogue and don't notice when you are making up lame excuses to justify a primal urge, then you're probably on the less actualized side of things.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics