You have been doing the same thing my H did in the beginning with the coworker that he had a PA/EA with for over 9 months. Professional friends, lunches, conversations,etc. He kept up the lunches until the "dessert cart" <img border="0" title="" alt="[Roll Eyes]" src="images/icons/rolleyes.gif" /> finally arrived and temptation was too great to pass it up.(MLC maybe?) We had a wonderful, fullfilling and stable marriage. He tells everyone that his making the worst decision of his life had nothing to do with anything lacking in his marriage or his W. He deeply regrets what he has done to me, our marriage and to himself.(It has been he## for him to forgive and live with himself.) She had a SO that she had lived with for over 6 years. She dumped him, moving him out into an apartment, right after he had a stroke so she and my H could have a private place to spend more time together.The man was so depressed he had to an assisted living home.This was done by a woman who impressed my H with her kind ways and caring personality. In the early part of their "professional friendship" she had told my H that she and her SO had a wonderful relationship; the best she had ever known. <img border="0" title="" alt="[Confused]" src="images/icons/confused.gif" />
Stop the lunches and all contact with this coworker,please. My H says that he began to see the "signs" that you are already seeing but enjoyed it and convinced himself it was all right,too.(sound familiar?) The OW ended up being a mental case and he never imagined she would ever be a problem.To be honest with you, this coworker sounds like she is a bit unstable,too and believe me that will become a major problem for you if you don't stop this now. The OW that my H was with called me 3 times saying some real nasty, mean things and threatened to burn our house with us in it.(sore loser!)After he ended the A. When she told me that he was great sexually, I told her he got that way from being with me for 13 years! <img border="0" title="" alt="[Big Grin]" src="images/icons/grin.gif" /> <img border="0" title="" alt="[Big Grin]" src="images/icons/grin.gif" />
Have lunch with your wife. Call in lunch. Send out for lunch. Take your lunch. Find the backbone and let go of your ego long enough, to tell this woman that there will be no more lunches, phone calls or conversations. Speak and continue on your way. There is no other way.
I am new at this but I am going to try to send you part of an article that I hope will help you. It was a God send to me in helping me to stop trying to blame myself for my H's bad choice. I had people tell me that something had to be lacking in our marriage or in me for him to have an A and that is not the case. It wasn't that he wasn't GETTING enough at home,he wasn't GIVING enough! The problem was within himself, not within his marriage.(sound familiar?) That applies to more than sex! I will say a prayer for you that you will do the right thing,NOW.
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</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial"> </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Psychology Today/ July-August 1998
Shattered Vows: Getting Beyond Betrayal
By Shirley Glass, Ph.D.
Hold on to your wedding ring: It is difficult, but not impossible, to repair the damage caused by infidelity. Increasingly, that’s what couples want—likely the White House occupants, too. But let go of most of your assumptions; In an interview with Editor at Large Hara Estroff Marano, our leading expert Dr. Shirley Glass challenges just about everything you think you know about the most explosive subject of the year.
Q: What is the single most important thing you want people to know about infidelity?
Dr. G. Boundaries. That it is possible to love somebody else, to be attracted to somebody else, even if you have a good marriage. In this collegial world where we work together, you have to conduct yourself by being aware of appropriate boundaries, by not creating opportunities, particularly at a time when you might be vulnerable.
That means that if you travel together, you never invite someone for a drink in the room; if you just had a fight with your spouse, you don’t discuss it with a person who could be a potential partner.
You can have a friendship, but you have to be careful who you share your deepest feelings with. Although women share their deep feelings with lots of people, particularly other women, men are usually most comfortable sharing their feelings in a love relationship. As a result, when a relationship becomes intimate and emotional, men tend to sexualize it. -
Q: Infidelity appears to be the topic of the year. What has struck you most about the reaction to what may or may not be some kind of infidelity in high places?
Dr. G. Whatever horror or dismay people have about it, they’re able to separate the way the President is performing in office and the way he appears to be performing in his marriage. That’s especially interesting because it seems to reflect the split in his life. We don’t know for sure, but he apparently is very much involved in his family life. He’s not an absentee father or absentee husband. Whatever it is that they share—and they do share a lot, publicly and privately— he has a compartment in which he is attracted to young women, and it is separate from his primary relationships.
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.
That’s how I got into this.
Q: Because?
Dr. G. Being a woman, I believed 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.
I was in graduate school when I heard that a man I knew, married for over 40 years, had recently died and his wife was so bereaved because they had had the most wonderful marriage. He had been her lover, her friend, her support system. She missed him immensely. I thought that was a beautiful story. When I told my husband about it, he got a funny look that made me ask, What do you know? He proceeded to tell me that one night when he took the kids out for dinner to an out of the way restaurant, owned by one of his clients, that very man walked in with a young, blonde woman. When he saw my husband, his face got red, and he walked out.
Q: How did that influence you?
Dr. G. I wondered what that meant. Did he fool his wife all those years and really not love her? How is it possible to be married for over 40 years and think you have a good marriage? It occurred to me that an affair could mean something different than I believe.
Another belief that was an early casualty was the hydraulic pump theory—that you only have so much energy for something. By this belief, if your partner is getting sex outside, you would know it, because your partner wouldn’t be wanting sex at home. However, some people are even more passionate at home when they are having extramarital sex. I was stunned to hear a man tell me that when he left his affair partner and came home he found himself desiring his wife more than he had in a long time, because he was so sexually aroused by his affair. That made me question the hydraulic pump theory.
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.
Q: What research have you done on infidelity?
Dr. G. My first research study was actually based on a sex questionnaire in Psychology Today, in the Seventies. I analyzed the data looking at the relationship of extramarital sex, length of marriage, and gender difference on marital satisfaction and romanticism.
I found enormous gender differences: 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. Everybody’s marital satisfaction went down the longer they were married, except the men who had affairs. But in early marriages, men who had affairs were significantly less happy. An affair is more serious if it happens earlier in the marriage.
Explaining these gender differences was the basis of my dissertation. I theorized that the men were having sexual affairs and the women emotional affairs.
Q: Are affairs about sex?
Dr. G. Sometimes infidelity is just about sex. That is often more true for men. In my research, 44 percent of men who said they had extramarital sex said they had slight or no emotional involvement; only 11 percent of women said that. Oral sex is certainly about sex. Some spouses are more upset if the partner had oral sex with an affaire than if they had intercourse; it just seems so much more intimate.
Q: What is the infidelity?
Dr. G. The infidelity is that you took something that was supposed to be mine, which is sexual or emotional intimacy, and you gave it to somebody else. I thought that we had a special relationship, and now you have contaminated it; it doesn’t feel special any more, because you shared something that was very precious to us with someone else.
There are gender differences. Men feel more betrayed by their wives having sex with someone else; women feel more betrayed by their husbands being emotionally involved with someone else. What really tears men apart is to visualize their partner being sexual with somebody else.
Women certainly don’t want their husbands having sex with somebody else, but if it’s an impersonal one-night fling, they may be able to deal with that better than if their husband was involved in a long-term relationship sharing all kinds of loving ways with somebody else.
Q: Why are affairs so deeply wounding?
Dr. G. Because you have certain assumptions about your marriage. That I chose someone, and the other person chose me; we have the same values; we have both decided to have an exclusive relationship, even though we may have some problems. We love each other and therefore I am safe.
When you find out your partner has been unfaithful, then everything you believe is totally shattered. And you have to rebuild the world. The fact that you weren’t expecting it, that it wasn’t part of your assumption about how a relationship operates, causes traumatic reactions.
Q: And it is deeply traumatic.
Dr. G. It’s terrible—unless you cheated on each other during your engagement, or you or your partner came from a family where everybody cheated on everybody, or you come from certain cultures where the women don’t take it that much to heart, because that’s the way men are thought to be.
The wounding results because —and I’ve heard this so many times—I finally thought I met somebody I could trust.
Q: It violates that hope or expectation that you can be who you really are with another person?
Dr. G. Yes. Affairs really aren’t about sex; they’re about betrayal. Imagine if you were married to somebody very patriotic and then found out your partner is a Russian spy. Someone having a long-term affair is leading a double life. Then you find out all that was going on in your partner’s life that you knew nothing about: Gifts that were exchanged, poems and letters that were written, trips you thought were taken for a specific reason were actually taken to meet the affair partner.
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