First let me say that I am not about to attack you. I think that, by and large, women are wonderful people, and you are a woman before anything else. I know there are OWs and OMs out there who are just rotten people. I happen to grasp the concept that there are a lot of husbands and wives, betrayed and betrayers who deserve that label, too. More importantly, I know that most are just people who made really lousy decisions. But since you are an OW, I have questions for you.<P>You have done something I honestly don't understand; something you had to know would bring you great suffering. At some point in your relationship, you knew that your lover was married. In all likelihood, you knew before you became emotionally involved and almost certainly before you crossed the sexual line. But, still, you did it, you crossed all the lines.<P>1. What did you say to yourself that enabled you to go forward with the relationship, knowing he was married?<BR>2. What did you envision coming from it?<BR>3. What were your thoughts about his wife, and his children if there were any?<BR>4. You knew that he was dishonest by virtue of the fact he was having an affair. (He <I>had</I> to lie to his wife.) Did you believe in your heart that he was being truthful to you about his wife and the whys and wherefores of his marriage? <P>It seems obvious that the whole point of an affair is to never move past the point of first impressions. Affairs are founded on the idea that they won’t grow into anything more. I take into consideration that in an affair both parties can be and are on their best behavior almost always. Each person eats up the unreality of what is being so artfully (means deceitfully, by the way, not artistically) manufactured specifically for his or her consumption. Affairs can exist only as long as the reality of the lovers’ warts is hidden. I just don’t understand the attraction of a dead-end relationship like that. <P>If you were an extremely well Kept Woman, though I wouldn’t have any respect for you, I’d understand it as a business deal. But that happens a lot more in Hollywood than in real life. (Kind of like all the really gorgeous, really sexy hookers with hearts of gold in the movies. The real hookers I’ve seen are dirty, raggedy, scary-looking people with hearts of desperation.) Seems like most of the OWs that I have known or known about get very little. They are more likely to bend over backward for their lovers than the other way around. Like I said, OWs really are women first.<P>I don’t mean to sound callous, but does one simply close one’s eyes to reality, and believe that there is a future in the affair? Or is it more like being unhappy enough in life to accept that it’s all you deserve? Or was it initially just about sex and got out of hand?<P>My husband does not get emotionally involved when he has sex with other women. Though I think he likes the women well enough, I believe he looks to get the ego strokes, and then to f***. Its almost as if he creates an opportunity, or maybe allows a woman to create the opportunity (so he can feel less guilty? more studly?) then convinces himself that he was just swept up in the moment. Sometimes I think he kind of preys on lonely women. Yeah. I do know how that sounds. And how it makes me look. (Imagine how it all makes me <I>feel</I>.) I don’t know enough about what his infidelities have been like to be very clear about the dynamics. I just know that he doesn’t seem to have any problem finding women who are willing to oblige him. What can be their motivation?<BR> <BR>I know that DrH says that anyone could find himself or herself in an affair, but I find a real difference between being involved with someone who is single and being involved with someone is already in a relationship. I hate the notion but I can understand looking outside your marriage when your needs are not being met within it. (In fact, below you'll see that I have to plead guilty to it.) But I don’t comprehend getting into a relationship where you know beforehand that your needs won’t be met. <I>Can't</I> be met. (For married people to have affairs with married people and expect it to really be about something seems the most bizarre relationship of all. Each unavailable, but expecting the other to be available.) <P>I knew my husband and was very much in love with him for years. I’ll even come clean and admit that he was the affair I had during my first marriage. Neither of us had ever really wanted to stop seeing one another, but for a variety of reasons did. I worked very hard at my marriage but ended it a couple of years later when it became obvious that it really was as hopeless as I thought it was when my affair first started. We ended up getting involved again. After a great many ups and downs including living together for a while and just about every painful thing a non-marriage relationship can suffer, I ended that relationship and left town. We had virtually no contact, despite the fact that we did have a daughter together (I didn't know at the time I left that I was pregnant), although he had never seen her. I never lost any of what I felt for him. I just tried to get on with my life.<P>He got married. A couple of years later he came to the city I lived in for his father’s funeral. He came by my home and made it clear that he still cared about me and wanted to make love. He wasn’t conning me, it wasn’t just an attempt to get me into the sack. Still, my reply was that I don’t have sex with married men. I still loved him with all my heart, but to me he was married and therefore not available. Period.<P>He divorced that wife, without any input from me of any kind. He was in and out of other relationships, including another very short-lived marriage, for the several years we were estranged. We both finally recognized how much we loved each other and have been together for the last 7 years, married for 5. Still, when he was married to someone else I could not imagine going to bed with him any more than I could imagine robbing a bank.<P><BR>If you've gone into your story before and answered, please let me know where I can find your posts. (Finding relevant stuff on the boards when you don't know if it exists let alone where it is so tedious.)<P>Thanks in advance.<BR>

1. What did you say to yourself that enabled you to go forward with the relationship, knowing he was married? I know how selfish this sounds (and it is) but I believed that the "marriage" was something that he needed to deal w/, not me. <BR>2. What did you envision coming from it? I really didn't know what would become of it. I knew that I cared for him deeply. I know that he quit wearing his wedding band (his wife aware of this) and that he went to see a divorce attorney. When we found out I was pregnant, he was leaving his wife and filing for divorce and asked a close friend of ours if he could stay w/ him until the divorce was final. I told him that I did not want him to leave his wife just because I was pregnant. <BR>3. What were your thoughts about his wife, and his children if there were any? During the affair, I really didn't think about his wife. Since things came to a head, I think about her a lot. I feel awful for what she has been through. She is innocent in all of this, just as our son is. At the time of affair, they did not have any children.<BR>4. You knew that he was dishonest by virtue of the fact he was having an affair. (He had to lie to his wife.) Did you believe in your heart that he was being truthful to you about his wife and the whys and wherefores of his marriage? Yes, of course I believed him. He was the one coming to me saying how bad the marriage was, how they didn't communicate, how she was physically striking him, how tense/stressful it was all of the time. Today, I still believe that WHAT he was saying was true. I should have encouraged him to see a counselor or something, not try to fulfill what was lacking in his marriage. <P>I was immature/non-spiritual at the time and didn't respect the commitment of marriage. I have had to work through a lot of guilt over the last 2 years. I've even told myself that I don't such a wonderful, healthy son. I've wondered if son is better off w/ MM and W. I have become a much more spiritual person with a kinder heart. I have prayed for forgiveness and I know that I am forgiven. We all reap the consequences of our actions. I am raising our son single-handedly and he has to wake up every day of his life and know that he has a son whom he never held as a baby or never kissed him goodnight.<P><BR>

Thanks, justme.<P>I guess I still don't understand what's in it for most OWs. It sounds as if you were not allowing yourself to do much thinking, even about yourself. Were you happy?<P>I just spent a few minutes on the TOW board and found it very depressing. It seems that for the most part they are a very sad bunch of girls. Most of them seem very young judging by their English usage. Others just sounded very shrill, like the harpies they seem to believe the Ws are. Very pitiful. Are so many so young do you suppose, because most women need to be that naïve to fall for the MM's stories?<P>It also sound as if you must be by nature a much more thoughtful person than you let yourself be then.<P>BTW, I've been a single mom. I've done all the self-recriminations and questioning my worthiness. I did finally learn that the notion of putting your child, or children in general, before everything is not good for kids. You <I>must</I> take care of yourself first, and if you are married you <I>must</I> put your spouse and your marriage before your kids. If you are not doing well, your kids will suffer. If a marriage is not strong and happy, the kids will not be strong and happy. Of course it means <I>honestly</I> taking care of yourself, doing what is right, not simply being self-indulgent. Kids need to feel secure above just about anything except food, clothing, and shelter. They feel secure when their caregivers <I>are</I> secure. I now have a 19 year old son who lives in another state, but calls me all the time just to say he loves me. He is also honest and faithful in his relationship with his girlfriend. My almost 13 year old daughter is the light of my life and taking steps to enter University when she's 14. Single moms can do just fine for their kids. <I>You</I> can do just fine for your son.<p>[This message has been edited by dragantraces (edited May 09, 2000).]

dragantraces,<P>Truly, by nature, I am a thoughtful person. I often put others needs before my own. I really don't know what overcame me. <P>In terms of TOW board, I visisted a couple of times...only to give an "after the fact" perspective. I wish I could explain to others contemplating an affair how hurtful and how painful it will be when it ends...because believe me, it will end. Nobody wins! It's hard to say if age is a factor, I guess it depends on when the person matures. I was 27 and you would think that by that time I would have been mature. I will tell you from the bottom of my heart that I believe God puts us through terrible times so that we will be on our knees before Him, asking for his salvation and forgivenes. After the affair and the birth of our son, I realized that I couldn't live my life or carry the load without Christ. <P>We all deserve a true commitment, deserve someone who will be monogomous. I am worthy of happiness BUT I can tell you that I still carry a load on my shoulders for allowing such a thing to happen. I cannnot count the buckets of tears that I have cried.<P>So, for all the betrayed, there are some of us out there who truly are remorseful.

I think you are wrong in thinking all people just assume an affair has no future. I think alot of OM and OW dearly want to have a future with their lover and are out to get it! And sometimes they do. I wasn't. For me I fell in love with the man who will soon be my H at work. Seems to happen a lot doesn't it? As long as I didn't cross the line and become sexually intimate I didn't see it as an affair. I do now but I didn't then. Once we crossed the line we were both overcome with guilt but in some ways we felt even more trapped as our need for each other was now not just emotional but physical. When those kinds of needs are there they can be strong and people get very good at denial in terms of who might be hurt. I think that all relationships go through a fantasy phase and with affairs it lasts longer because of the little time together and that it is a secret. But for all relationships the fantasy has to end sometime. If the fantasy ends and the two are still together, this is when the affair gets really dangerous to the marriage. This is when it becomes a real relationship and this can happen long before getting caught. It did with us and it did long before it became physical. For us it was the guilt over actually being adulterers that forced the end to the affair. We then were out of contact totally for over a year. He did try to contact me twice but I made clear through a friend that I was getting on with my life and to not contact me while he was married. He did not contact me again until he was out of the house and had filed for divorce. We did start to see each other again shortly before the divorce was final but we will not be intimate until we marry and we did not even hold hands while he was not divorced.<P>Del<P>Oh and we are now in couples counseling so that we can make sure we are really ready to marry.

To be honest, I didn't set out to have any kind of affair. I met the other man in a married chat room. We had lots in common and just started "typing away." I knew he was married and he knew I was married, and I never gave it any more thought. It was the first time I had ever been in a chat room, so I certainly wasn't anticipating anything but a few laughs. The OM asked me for my email..I gave it to him thinking that was the end of that and went to work. <P>To most people who don't know the addictive quality of this, the whole concept of falling in love with a virtual stanger sounds goofy. I was right along with you. From that day on, the OM emailed me at least a half a dozen times a day. The man could write incredible letters, so for someone who literally had nothing in her lovebank, I fell victim to his charms. A month into it, he started calling me at work every day...then the I love you's started. I was floating through my days...giddy and happy; I could never remember feeling like I did then. Did I know what I was doing? Yes and no. But this feeling he gave me was too wonderful, so I tried not to question it. Yes, I wondered what kind of man would say things like he had to me and had a wife, but the mind is a funny thing. I learned to justify everything we were doing. I often felt guilty about the OM's wife because I couldn't figure out why someone who was only married a year in a half was not happy. He would tell me that our relationship was helping him sort things out, so not wanting to think he was lying, I chose to believe him. I wanted to believe he had made a mistake....and now he found me. Corny? YES!!! Unrealistic? YES!!!! Because we had never met and lived 300 miles apart, I figured nothing was realy going on. The months rolled on...I spent more time communicating with the OM then my own H. Not a day went by there wasn't email or phone calls or both. I felt like I was living a double life. We had talked about meeting...fortunatly we were discovered before that could happen. <P>I never thought about anyone suffering...because in my head I was not doing anything but writing to someone. It hadn't ocurred to me that I no longer wanted my H to touch me because I was so in love with the OM. I hadn't physically done anything, so this was okay. I refused to acknowledge that it was not appropriate to receive long, sexy letters and say intimate things to OM on the phone while I was work. I also didn't want to think about how I spent an awful lot of time dreaming about being physical with the OM. I was so high on the feeling he gave me I know I wasn't thinking straight. I am not making excuses...its just what happened.<P>I know how I got there, it just suprises me that I did what I did. I can't imagine how I would have survived if this thing had turned into a PA, but I know if my H hadn't of called his wife, it was going there. I quess I should consider myself lucky.<P>I realize now that because I was unhappy, I should have taken care of that first, but in reality I know my H would not have listened. The EA has been over for 11 weeks, the marriage is no better. The old problems are still there, but that is another story. I am still having tremendous pain from the withdrawl. I have not and will not contact the OM because he is supposedly working his problems out with his W. I can see things much clearer now, and am more capable to rectify my problems. <P>This whole thing has made me realize that we are all vulnerable to this. Never say never. I did, and look what I did. I thought myself too smart, too moral, too educated, and too anything else to participate in something as sordid as an affair; especially over the internet. Well, quess what, I wasn't so smart. I actively participated for five months, I wrote things to this person I never would have imagined possible, there were times I would have happily run off with him and not looked back. I have been in counseling since February trying to deal with a divorce, the affair, and the withdrawl. Life has not been fun. It scares me more to think that even now, I don't think I would have the strength or willpower to say no if he came back. I just keep working away at this and someday, I hope to have peace again and feel like a complete person.<P>