Hiker,

I'm not insulted by your questions. I'm trying to understand the same things you are. That's why I chimed-in in the first place.

You have a point about the timeline. But the thing is, relationships don't usually go from good to bad in the blink of an eye. They deteriorate over time. In my case, I think both my H and I were depressed and in denial about just how bad things had gotten between us. And it was easy to avoid the whole thing because we're both "busy" people and we work semi-opposite schedules. I will say that I was beginning to entertain ideas of divorce before I ever met OM... but I wasn't even close to taking action.

If I had not had the affair, who knows how much longer my H and I would have gone on as we were. Maybe "forever". But I can assure you, while that may have been considered a "victory" for the instutituion of marriage (infidelity-free until death do us part)... It would NOT have been a victory for any of the real live human beings in our family. Not me. Not my husband. And certainly not our precious children. My H and I were miserable. And our girls were being emotionally and spiritually damaged.

But I think the level of depression and denial for both me and my H was so high in the years leading up to my affair.. that something dramatic had to happen to shake us awake and force us to either fish or cut bait.

Post-affair, I'm pretty sure things will not slip back into that state. I won't tolerate it, and I don't think my H would either.

So that leaves us with two possible paths. Either recovery or divorce. If we divorce, it appears Pittman and Big K would file us away under the "ruined by infidelity" banner -- despite all the other problems and issues in our marriage, pre-affair.

But what if we recover? Would they then proclaim "The Cookie marriage was SAVED by infidelity!" Would Pittman then go out and write a bunch of books about how affairs can make bad marriages better??!! Of course not.

See what I mean, though?

If a marriage is "bad"... and there's an affair... And the two spouses use that as a wake-up call to make positive changes... people say things like "Our marriage is better than ever, not BECAUSE of the affair, but because of the hard work we did after the affair." I've seen words to that effect on these boards a number of times.

Yet... if a marriage is "bad"... and there's an affair... followed by a divorce... there seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to say "Oh, that marriage failed BECAUSE of adultery."

In other words, they seem to be saying that affairs can be the catalyst for (but not the cause of) an improved marriage. But affairs are almost always the cause of (but not the catalyst for) divorce. That's intellectually dishonest, IMO.

But I think the question you posed, Hiker, is a good one. Why do some couples not reconcile after an affair ends?

Assuming the affair is really, really over... even in the FWS's wildest dreams... I can think of serval posibilities, and most of them would be the same reasons people D when there's no adultery in the mix:

1. The BS can't forgive/move forward. In that case, I'd concede that the A caused the D... but from everything I've read, it's pretty rare for that to happen.

2. The FWS can't forgive past hurts. Again, I'd think this would be rare.. but for people with a deep fear of being hurt/deep need to keep walls up to protect themselves... certainly possible.

3. One or both spouses refuse to make changes/do the work necessary to build a better marriage. (This senario could be, as you put it, the affair trashing the marriage by destroying any desire to recover what's left of it. Or it could just be a stubborn unwillingness to put in any effort. Some people are like that, you know?).

4. Maybe one of the spouses changed so much during the years the marriage was falling appart, s/he finds it impossible to reconnect with her/his spouse once they do start trying to rebuild.

5. Maybe one of the spouses never really loved the other in the first place.

That's just off the top of my head.


--SC

Except, perhaps, in the case of an affair. At least from the BS's perspective, things go to he** in a handbasket pretty quickly once one spouse thinks they're in love with someone else.



I agree that something dramatic may be required for married folks to take action to fix their marital problems, it's just that that dramatic action need not be an affair. It could be one spouse or the other suddenly deciding to talk "divorce." The other spouse may go into crisis mode and take whatever action might be required to save the marriage.

If someone told me 3 or 4 years ago that I would be making a mistake by not giving my wife 15 hours a week of undivided attention I would have said "baloney." "We're happy right now and we don't have that kind of time anyway."

It took a crisis -- the threat of losing my wife one way or another -- for me to realize that I need to actually work at marriage. (I guess this may help me the next time around.) But in any case, it didn't need to be an affair to teach me this lesson. I'm certain I would have responded if she had just conveyed a sense that things had reached a critical point in our relationship. I didn't get that message until it was too late.

So what I am saying is that, yes, a crisis may be needed to bring things to the point where someone will take action in solving marital problems, but that crisis need not be infidelity.

Clearly, people who suffer through this and want to recover their marriage want things to be better than before so they can avoid the conditions that bring on the affair. But to say the affair deserves any credit for making the marriage better is kind of like saying "if it wasn't for that hurricane washing my home and all my possessions into the sea I wouldn't be living in this new house."

The great promise of MB is that your marriage CAN be better than ever after an affair, but it can also be better than ever without one spouse or the other having an affair.

As we can see everyday on this forum, affairs create complications far beyond whatever marital problems occurred prior to the occurrence of the affair.

I think all your reasons for why some couples fail to reconcile after an affair are valid. I do get the impression that reason #1 is not all that unusual though. Sometimes it doesn't show up until later down the line. Once the BS feels fairly secure that the WS has returned, it does seem as though the resentment that resides within the BS can actually increase with time.

Hiker,

Please let me clarify that I am in no way suggesting that anyone should go out and have an affair to shake-up a miserable marriage. YIKES!

And I agree that if something dramatic is needed to spark change, it doesn't necessarily have to be an affair. My own situation is evidence of that. I told my H I didn't love him and was thinking of leaving him about three weeks before I told him about my affair (which had been over for more than a month at that point). And he immediately snapped out of his funk and started making changes.

I also agree with your analogy: "But to say the affair deserves any credit for making the marriage better is kind of like saying 'if it wasn't for that hurricane washing my home and all my possessions into the sea I wouldn't be living in this new house.'"

But by the same token... in marriages that were flatlining before the affair happened... saying that the affair is to blame for the failure of the marriage might be a bit like saying "The man with the raging infection throughout his body died because he broke his arm."

(Your analogy is better than mine, but you get what I'm trying to say, right?)

From my point of view, I'm not that interested in whether more marriages would survive if there was no infidelity. Rotten marriages that last forever are no benefit to anyone -- not those stuck in the miserable situation, nor society at large. I'd like to see more marriages THRIVE!

Hiker, you say your wife never gave you a chance to work on your marriage. That's... well... it's just sad. I'm sorry about that. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/frown.gif" alt="" /> I don't really know your story. Do you have children?

My DH is trying so hard to be a better husband, father and person. And he's doing it. I feel I owe it to him, our girls, and even myself to try too. Some days I think we're going to make it. Some days I'm not so sure.

--SC

Is it because he is trying too hard, say, like getting on your nerves with his efforts? On the days you aren't sure your marriage is going to make it . . . is it because you don't feel very loving toward him?


Yes. A son who will be five soon. I don't know how I'm going to explain the divorce to him. I'll survive. It is his welfare that is my biggest concern.

SM,

I am glad that you and your husband are a recovery success. However, from a learning perspective for those who may be new to the site as well as for casual conversation regarding this thread, it would have been a whole lot better had you told your husband that you were unhappy, thinking of leaving and so on WITHOUT the affair. I assume that you ultimately told your BH about the affair and that this was one large elephant the two of you had to eat? Whereas, had the same results been able to have been obtained by simply communicating better regarding your true feelings about the state of your M this is one huge obstacle that would not have been necessary to overcome to have a thriving M.

I guess my point is that if most people in M's would simply communicate there feelings to their spouse and then commit to having the M that both of them really want then most M's can be given new life and certainly don't need an affair as a catalyst towards that goal.

I also concur that affairs are not the best catalyst for fixing a broken marriage - and can be the straw that breaks the camel's back, so to speak.

MP & I we're both unhappy with a lot of things in our marriage, but neither of us were willing to budge from our positions.

When MP got back from her first trip, she told me that she was ready to up and leave - me, the kids, the house, everything. It was a pretty intense weekend, starting about midnight on a Friday night. When she told me that she was ready to leave, and I could tell she was sincere, it was a Saturday afternoon.

I realized then that things needed to change, and I had a lot of work to do on my part. The next night (Sunday) I asked her point blank if she had done anything with OM, and she said yes.

So in 24 hours, I was hit with my wife being ready to just walk away, and then finding out she'd had an affair. I did start making immediate changes, but it still took a few months for the affair to end.

My point in all this is simply to reiterate what Hiker and others have said. There are better ways to get your spouse's attention than having an affair. If MP had up and left me, I'm pretty sure that would have got my attention.

MP has (or did until recently, I haven't asked her lately) a good deal of resentment because it "took an affair" to wake me up. I've pointed out to her that it didn't require an affair - she had other options that she chose not to use.

So yes, affairs are not the catalyst of choice. If a marriage attempts to recover and fails down the road, is it because of the affair?

Harder to say. From my perspective, I think it would be because the parties involved didn't learn sufficiently from the affair, so the affair would definately play a role in the dissolution of the marriage; but with all things, there would probably be a number of reasons.

HAP & Bird --

I couldn't agree more. Anyone can say they would have made changes if only they'd known how unhappy their spouse was... but in my case, I have actual evidence that my husband would have taken action under those circumstances --three weeks worth of evidence before he had any clue I had cheated.

However, I'm not sure I would have told him how miserable I was, had it not been for the affair. I don't think I was fully aware of how miserable I was. It had happened gradually, over a long period of time. It's like I had slowly slipped into an emotional/spiritual/sexual coma. It was only after the affair.. and that brief feeling of "being alive" again for the first time in such a long time... that I realized how bad things were and that I didn't want to live like that anymore.

Again -- I am NOT saying affairs are a good way to fix broken marriages. Believe me... I wish I had faced my problems and addressed them w/o the added burden of knowing that I cheated on my H. But the reality is, I probably would have let things fester until I was SO fed up and SO full of resentment that I was at the point of no return.

Hiker --

It's not that my H is trying too hard or getting on my nerves with his efforts. It was that way in the beginning... while I was in withdrawl from the affair... but he quickly picked-up on the things he was doing that had that effect on me and changed his tactics. I'd say the man has done a near perfect plan-A (even though I'm pretty sure he's never even heard of plan-A. He's not an MBer).

The problem is me. And it has many layers.

Passion. You asked me before if I still have feelings for OM. The answer is no. He's a dirtbag. But you also asked me if I miss the passion of the affair -- and to that I would have to answer 'yes'. It's not that I sit around longing for it. But I'd be lying if I said I don't want that back.

I've never really had that with my husband. He has apparently felt that way toward me. But I haven't felt that way toward him. In fact, I question whether I ever really loved him. We were good friends. I could be myself around him. And he adored me. And although I never would have admitted it at the time, I think I was shocked that someone could feel that way about me even though I'm not perfect. So I talked myself into the idea that I wanted a marriage built solely on friendship. I realize some people really do want that... and that they can have long, fulfilling marriages based on friendship with little or no passion. Turns out, I'm not wired that way.

Intimacy. I have problems with emotional intimacy. I'm used to keeping secrets, keeping parts of myself hidden, and keeping walls up to protect myself. I know I said I could be myself with my husband. And that was true... to a point... in the beginning. But as time went on and there was more and more conflict in the marriage... I withdrew more and more. Now, I'm having a hard time opening back up again about certian things. And on a closely related note...

Years of growing apart/different views about things. When I met my H, I was in my early 20's. Right out of college. We were married when I was 25. All I wanted out of life at that time was to have a kick-azz career and to party -- in that order. H was cool with that. Since he was in the same field, he knew how much effort and commitment it would take for me to succeed in my career, and he was willing to support me in that. And he liked to party too.

Over the years, my views on things and my priorities started to change -- especially after having kids. When I tried to talk to my H about some of these things, he was generally dismissive. So I quit sharing my thoughts and opinions and feelings with him. This went on long enough that I feel like I morphed into a whole new person who views the world differently than I used-to... and MUCH differently than my H does now. Six or so years worth of developing a whole new perspective on life, a perspective that now seems incompatable with my husband's perspective on things most of the time.

So that, from my point of view, is what we're up against almost a year after D-day... even though my affair is long over and my H has forgiven me for it.

Now do you see why I say, if we were to divorce, it wouldn't be a cut and dried case of infidelity causing the failure of the marriage?

--SC

(Bird -- I'm glad to see you. Did you know that Rinderella was looking for you a few days ago? She was concerned about you and wanted an update).

smartcookie,

Thanks for taking the time to explain your situation to me. I wonder what Dr. Harley would say about marriages where the spouses grow apart, change priorities, values, etc.

Smartcookie,
I am new to the boards (WW). I have to tell you I agree with you. My marriage is so similar to what you have described. I think maybe some can't understand it unless they are in that kind of situation. My affair was a surprise to me -- a surreal experience -- that woke me out of a coma of marriage. I have seen it described as a "split self affair". I would appreciate it if I could email you as I would like to talk to someone who understands what a marriage like this is really like. Thanks.

Here's another Pittman quote outlining some generalized differences between men and women having affairs:


and here:

I understand the generality of it, as my H told me that he was 'lookin' for love' <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/rolleyes.gif" alt="" /> (not just the proverbial roll in the hay). Oh, dang, now I'm gonna have that confarnded song stuck in my head.

About the second quote, crap, I wish I was the spectator...

SC,

Questions...

You mentioned the lack of passion...not missing OM but missing the passion of the A.

So...would you say that your M just sort of skipped the passion step? Or do you think that it is possible to sustain it...in which case...I would wonder what you were referring to when you say passion because my understanding is that it is always a limited time offer [new romance chemicals].

In any case..having missed out on the passion with your H...and assuming it is a limited thing in any relationship...what exactly are you saying when you say that this is a challenge in your marriages success?

Even if you HAD at one time been passionate about him...that time would have passed by now regardless...the only way to reclaim new romance passion is with...well...new romance right?

So I'm a little comfused on the issue...especially as it seems to be the primary one...every other issue you describe seems very common in ANY marriage.

I agree with Pittman that passion, or what he calls the "in love" state, is often the force that brings couples together. But the "in love" state is a passive force, a sort of "I am powerless to resist this feeling" kind of love; not the same kind of love that comes from a sense of commitment and that recognizes the foibles and flaws in our mate but accepts them just the same. That mature kind of love is an active force, relying on our desire to love despite the ups and downs of the relationship.

The fact that passion usually fades with time is not an indication that one loves their mate less, it is only an evolution of their love from an almost involuntary state to a voluntary one.

That is not to say passion cannot be rekindled on a temporary basis from time to time. Witness the reunion of couples who have been forced to endure lengthy separations for months and have missed each other, such as servicemen and women stationed overseas. Even after years of marriage these reunions can be very passionate.

My guess is that Smartcookie loves her husband more than she realizes. If Smartcookie's husband were to suddenly lose all interest in restoring the marriage and decide to leave, she would then get a good idea of the strength of her feelings for him.

Security in a relationship is a kind of enemy to passion, and conversely, the loss of security can fuel passion.

I knew an elderly woman who often complained that she married her husband to get away from her family; that she never really loved him the way most couples love each other. When he died of cancer I never saw a person more despondent over their spouse's death, and she turned her house into something akin to a shrine to him.

tempinsanity,

I'm with you. I'd have much rather been on the sidelines watching than have been an unwilling participant.

SC - I understand the logic you are talking about cause and effect. I guess the point is, no one will ever know. The A changes you, it changes your S.

Let me ask a direct question. You say you miss the passion. What if this marriage, the one you have right now, was the only option for that passion?

What if your choices were to forego that passion forever, or create in the M you have right now? What would you do different?

I think this is a big example of how an A changes people. Most BS are viewing their sitch was what I described above. While I think many WS are viewing it entirely differently. They know, they have proof that another exists to stir that passion.

I think if you had that mindset, you would see better results. I also think if you told your S you had that mindset, and asked him to adopt the same, you would see some passion.

Just my 2 cents.

Hiker,

I would imagine the Harleys would say that their principles can help marriages that have grown apart, come back together. For my H and me: We're doing a much better job meeting each other's EN's. That has actually been fairly easy. Eliminating LBs is a little more challenging, but we're doing a pretty good job at it. I struggle with radical honesty. But trying to POJA is like bashing into a brick wall. We can't seem to make it work regarding relatively trivial matters -- like whether or not to accept a free piano that was offered to us. Much less, the big stuff -- like our kids' education (I want them to go to alternative schools, he doesn't want to spend the money and would just as soon send them to public schools).

With regard to the "typical" difference between a man's and a woman's affair... hmmmmm. I guess mine doesn't quite fit Pittman's description. I barely knew OM and never thought I was "in love" with him. Harley's description of affairs as addictions seems to hit the bull's-eye in my case. As I've said, my emotional and spiritual relationship with my H was in the toilet. I was depressed. But another thing that made me vulnerable was our sex life, or lack thereof.

My H had developed a serious porn habbit. But I had no idea. All I knew was that the sex between us had become so... just "yuck"... that even the thought of sex with my H repulsed me. As I said, I didn't know what was going on. I did try a few times to talk to my H about it, but he quickly brushed my concerns aside (of course, to protect his secret). So, I decided there was something wrong with me. I had pretty much come to the conclusion that, in my ripe old mid-30's, I had become frigid.

Then whamo! Along comes flirtatious OM, and the first time he spoke to me, I was hooked. Seriously. It was like a wave of electricity running through me, and I was so surprised I could even feel that way anymore, it was overwhelming. Even before I knew about the concept of affairs being addictions... it FELT like an addiction to me. After one dose, all I wanted was more.

Noodle and Hiker,

I know there's plenty of research and writing, and annecdotal evidence, to support your views of passion. But not everyone agrees. Aren't Dr. David Schnarch's well known books all about keeping passion alive in long term relationships?

As for annecdotal evidence to the contrary -- I have a good friend who married a man with whom she felt a high degree of passion some 20 years ago. Over the years, they've had your typical ups and downs, and they went through a really rough patch a couple of years ago, during which they were both considering divorce. These days, they still have their "cool" phases. But she tells me that when they click, she feels just as passionate toward him as she did in the beginning. And he has expressed the same thing.

And here's what "Send me on my way" wrote in a post back in January re: the woman he met when he was 19... married... divorced... and remarried:


Hiker... you also wrote:


This could be true. I know it's a cliche'... but sometimes we don't know what we've got until it's gone... or there's a real threat of it being gone. I know this is a real possibility.

rprynne,


That's a good way to look at it. The question is, can passion be "created". Rekindled -- I can wrap my brain around that. But created out of thin air???. My H is passionate with me. I just don't feel the same way back. Which just makes me feel worse. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/frown.gif" alt="" />

--SC

SC
you can email me at [email]14thebooks@optonline.net.[/email] Thanks.
14thebooks

14tb -- got it.

Smartcookie,

I think there has to be a kind of intricate balance of affection between two people to maintain passion for any length of time. When one person obviously feels a much stronger love for his/her partner than is reciprocated that balance is upset.

In long term relationships, people tend to have ups and downs in the strength of their feelings for their partner. I've heard this described in terms of how much is put into the marriage by each spouse; sometimes one spouse puts in 90 percent of the effort and the other 10 percent -- sometimes that is reversed. I think it is those times when you're at 50-50 that you have the best chance for passion in your relationship.

Of course, there are always exceptions to general statements about human nature and relationships. Certainly there are couples whose passion for each other lasts longer than with most couples, but I don't take that as a sign that couples whose passion has waned have any less love for each other.

I never got "butterflies" in my stomach coming home from work and seeing my wife, but I can tell you that before her affair I wouldn't have traded her for anyone else in the world. There was a feeling of love, admiration, respect, and security that gave me a sense of structure and purpose to my life and which provided a foundation upon which everything else in my life could be built.