It also doesn’t have to mean anything for a woman. Monogamy is an outdated idea and sex outside the marriage isn’t such a big deal. You don’t blow up your life over it

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I had a good relationship with my spouse and still cheated, PP. It’s just sex and doesn’t mean anything. What matters is who you come home to. People make such a big deal out of it for no reason.

you are a sociopath. Your poor spouse. Does your spouse think it's nbd?

I’m a spouse and I haven’t cheated, and don’t intend to, but I don’t think it would be a dealbreaker for me if he did. I think I’d rather talk about it before hand but maybe I’d prefer to just never know. It’s not that important to me, tbh.

Easy to be so breezy about your spouse cheating when it hasn't actually happened to you.

Wait until you're cheated on and then come back and tell us how you feel about that.

Especially if the cheating is not a one night stand, but an ongoing, sustained affair over time, while you're carrying on thinking your spouse is a full and engaged participant in your life as a couple and/or family. No one who's in an affair is fully present in his or her marriage or committed relationship. If you're fine looking back over many months or even years of your own life and realizing you weren't in the relationship you thought you were in -- well, great for you for being able to slough it off without emotion, I guess. But again: You're talking only hypothetically. As far as you know.

FWIW, from someone who's been in both situations, it feels better to hear about it by the talk-about-it-before route than the confess-after route. I agree with the previous PP and also feel that it's not that big a deal, except in occasional moments of self-doubt.

Men can compartmentalize sex more easily than women. When a husband has an affair, it doesn't have to mean that he's unhappy in his marriage or that he's not getting enough sex. It doesn't have to mean anything at all, actually.

When a wife has an affair, it's usually because she's at least 95% out the door anyway. A wife's affair is almost always an exit affair, and although circumstances obviously vary, she will usually leave the marriage to be with the other man. If the Other Man is truly not available to her, maybe she will stay in the marriage but it's only a matter of time before she leaves for someone else.

In Samantha Silva's case, her affair partner was 62ish and had been married for more than 25 years when they started fooling around. Silva was 52 and had been married for 23 years. It would be interesting to know why he decided to leave his marriage. I suppose Silva alluded to that slightly, that both of them were in good enough (but not great) marriages and were "happy enough" etc. Still. 25+ years. It must have been true love, right? Especially if they are still together now, 12 years later. I'm also curious why they never married. I'm so nosy but that's what Silva gets for airing her dirty laundry.