I disagree right back at you.

To me six months, as in anything measured in months is short term.

When things have to be measured in years, then it's long term.

How is one year eleven months short term, then two years one month long term?

In six month how many times did the affair partners do It?

Once, twice, nine times?

In a year, how many times did the affair partners do It?

One dozen, twenty four, fifty two, one hundred times.

Six months short term the odds are good they banged in the single digit range.

One year long term the odds are good that they easily reached double digits, with a fair shot at triple digit totals.

Well go give yourself a medal!


How is 5 months short term and 6 months long term? LOL. Thanks for your opinion.


and your point is what precisely???

Going by your definition, most affairs would be long term.

Most affairs END within 2 years. MOST AFFAIRS.

So in my opinion anything over 2 years is long term by definition.

Thanks for playing.

Long term is just an arbitrary characterization, and frankly, it doesn't matter to me if we call my WW's A long term or normal.

Every case is different, and trying to assign an arbitrary date where an A becomes a LTA (and by implication, much more difficult to recover from) is patently ridiculous.

I agree and disagree. Granted trying to label and arbitrary length of time to define a LTA is a waste of time.

However, to think that such things as LTA, multiple A's, OC, inter-racial A's, doesn't make R more difficult, if not impossible is "patently ridiculous".

I still see quite a bit of BH "fog" from you where you are still trying to justify attempting to R with a serial cheater.

I wasn't trying to say that it's ridiculous to say that LTAs aren't more damaging, just that trying to assign an arbitrary date where an A becomes an LTA is ridiculous. I believe my WW had a LTA though for sure, and on top of that, it ended right in the middle (it didn't come to its own resolution, they both still claimed to be in love when it ended).

What exactly is a serial cheater, and how does my WW qualify there?

To complicate matters, when does the A actually start? Perhaps it's my naivity, or the fact that I'm a woman, but my feeling is that LTA/VLTAs begin as EA's and upgrade to PAs later on. Also, I thought the 2 year thing was that most As end 2 years past discovery (please correct me if I'm wrong). In any case, it's possible for an A to have been going on a long LONG time without self-destruction until discovery occurs.

What makes this even more difficult is that waywards naturally lie about such things so how can you even know arbitrarily or otherwise if it is a LTA/VLTA or not?

Edited to add, a serial cheater is a WS who has one A after another after another (presumably 1 OP at a time but since I'm not a wayward I have a tough time visualizing this so I could be wrong).

To my mind, a serial cheater is anyone who has multiple A's (more than 1), and considering that you have another active thread titled "Second Affair", where you told us about her first A in 1995, I think she qualifies as a serial cheater and likely unworthy of your efforts, but that's just MHO.

I'm pretty sure I only have one active thread. My WW was in middle school in 1995.

Sorry for the confusion, but my WW has only told me about one A, and there is only one A to my knowledge. It lasted about 8 months in the physical realm, about a year total.

What makes a VLTA so frightening?
A VLTA is a character issue. Not a slip up from a person's basic character, but a function and a symptom of their baseline character.

The VLTA requires the WS intentionally creat a lifestyle where he/she is comfortable with constant deception and lying. Lying and deception are not bothersome to the WS in a VLTA. Recovery from a VLTA involves the WS completely resetting everything about themselves. This turns out to be not a likely proposition.

It does take time for the character of the WS to deteriorate to such a reptilian level. At least 2 years in their lies to become comfortable with what they are doing - UNLESS the WS began the marriage as a baseline dishonest individual.

Those are just my off the top of my head ideas. Open for debate of course

I'm sorry ... mistaken identity ... similar usernames with a mixture of letters and numbers ... MY FAULT and I'm sorry for any added stress.

~emphasis mine

A threadjack of sorts...MyRev...Maybe you'd like to explain on another thread - dunno - but I'm certainly curious about your inclusion of "interracial affairs" as being "more difficult, if not impossible" to recover from. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me...How do you figure?

As a matter of fact only, mine wasn't an "interracial affair"...your comment just leaves me scratching my head, so I had to ask...

Mrs. W

P.S. Totally agree with Pep, FWIW...

I agree...to me the difference btwn a VLTA and a Short term affair is the not time related. It has to do more with the wayward spouses mentality.

For example, my wife's affair was with her old boyfriend from high school. He lived 750 miles away. If, instead of falling head over heels in what she thought was some soulmate affair with him she had instead undertook to set him up as some long term friend with benefits wherein she'd take the occassional trip to see her mother in her hometown and hook up with OM when she got the chance but, in between such episodes, merely contacted him like a friend while maintaining a certain decorum of friendship she could have continued the compartmentalized affair for years without me really knowing. She could have even attempted to incorporate him into our lives and when I came to town with her...she'd invite him and his girlfriend (or even his wife) out to dinner with our family.

These types of affairs are indicitive of a wayward that doesn't really crave intimacy with anyone. They like their non-intimate marriage AND their non-intimate affair. They are difficult to recover with because they don't really want, crave or need a truely intimate relationship with anyone. They take and take and take from those around them and their husband and their OM(s) are just objects.

This is atypical of most affairs. Most waywards can't pull this off because their feelings follow their actions and even if they start off trying to separate the relationships, their feelings change and they become romantically "in-love" puppies that can't help but get caught sending dozens of text messages, emails, phone calls and contact with the OP. Their relationship with OP escalates into someone they feel they just can't not be with.

Men typically pull this off more than women. We generally call them serial cheaters because these men can compartmentalize their lives and carry on extra-marital relationships with many women over many years. When their OW gets too attached or troublesome they break it off and move on to another one (or two, or three). Serial cheating husbands are always working women and looking for their next conquest. On the other hand, women that do this, perhaps, tend to like the security and safety of one long term OM instead of many but they tend to be just as twisted as their male serial cheating counterparts.

Just my opinion.

Mr. Wondering

SDCWman,



Define affair. Here we are interested in extramarital affairs. That is, adultery.

Seems to me, once the adulterers divorce their spouses whatever they may do with each other is no longer an extramarital affair. This is not a technical issue, either. You cannot commit adultery against a non-extant spouse. Unmarried people may boink whomever they want, right? That may be fornication, but it’s not adultery. It may be an affair of some kind, but it’s not an extramarital affair. (I am ignoring certain New Testament scripture about this, for the moment. But legally, secularly, if one is divorced, then one is not married. If one is not married, one does not have a spouse. If one does not have a spouse, one cannot commit adultery against him or her.)

Notice I have no strong feelings about how successful such a post-extramarital relationship would be. I agree with you though: long term success of any affairage is highly unlikely. Adulterers do not know how to have a good and healthy intimate relationship with anyone, let alone with each other. They do not even know what real love is. And they never will.

Now, as far as what constitutes an LTA for an adulterer…

According to Dr H, 90 some percent of all affairs die out within two years. I don’t know what the mean length of an affair is, but if more than two-sigma of them are over within two years, an affair that last statistically significantly longer than two years is not just quantitatively different, it is also qualitatively different in some regard.

The working definition we used on MB a couple of years ago was four years. There may be breakups and hiatuses in those years. There may only be intermittent contact and maybe sex only a few times a year. But adultery that lasts twice as long as the 90'th percentile extramarital affair gets the label Long by those of us trying to deal with them.

My wife’s adultery was active for 10 years. I call that a Very Long Term Affair. Although, I tend to mean the word adultery for the A in VLTA more often than I mean the word affair .

eta: My wife's VLTA is not the record holder around here. Not even close. There are several at 14, 15, 18 years. I know of one that went on for over 20 years. These kinds of affairs have been called unofficial bigamy by some experts. It is like having a second, secret, spouse. In fact, some of these LTA's have OC's. The WH LTA adulter was maintaiing them like a second family. And the WW LTA adulteress simply keeps the paternity secret.

Affair=Infidelity=adultery. I am defining any of these terms to mean an inappropriate relationship that takes place (or at least begins) while 1 (often both) of the partners are MARRIED to other people. What defines inappropriate? Any relationship outside of the marriage with a member of the opposite sex (I'm excluding the rare homosexual A here) that involves ROMANTIC dialogue, attachment, & activity--emotional, physical, or both. An affair is characterized by secrecy and deception toward the BS, regardless of whether sex has taken place or not and regardless of whether "feelings" have been overtly discussed or not. Married people do NOT properly initiate, maintain, or indulge in social or personal relationships with members of the opposite sex in the absence of their spouse's knowledge and/or physical presence. I.E. they do NOT have personal conversations or social lunches with an opposite sex co-worker under the guise of a "work meeting". That is secrecy and deception and is an EA at the very least. Dr. Pittman has some very good advice for anyone wondering if a particular extra-marital "relationship" is appropriate or not...he says simply: "ASK YOUR SPOUSE!" We both know that WSs do NOT tell and do NOT ask.


Yes, I understand. Legally, once divorced you are no longer married. Once unmarried, the xWS technically is no longer committing adultery. This strikes me as a distinction (a purely LEGAL one) without a difference. Morally, as you alluded to above, a WS is STILL MARRIED to their BS, even after the paper-shuffling is done. Adultery releases the BS from the M (if they voluntarily choose) but does NOT release the WS. Even for those non-Biblical/non-religious BSs out there, I would bet that they mentally view a continuing post-divorce relationship as ongoing adultery/cheating if it began during the marriage--whether or not the (now) xBS ever cares to hear from or see their xWS ever again.

I know that many, probably ALL, WSs/xWSs rationalize their A (which they KNEW was wrong at the time) by claiming "I am divorced now--It is not adultery!" Heck, my WW even proclaimed herself divorced during the affair for many months before she was legally. You have to wonder a few things from WSs about these "legal" distinctions:

1) If you were "through" with the M, why didn't you get a D BEFORE starting a new romance?
2) If the "relationship" was entirely innocent while you were legally married, why did you conceal, whitewash, and lie about it to your spouse?
3) If you had been emotionally well-adjusted and legally single at the outset, would the OP be your ideal choice of a "soulmate" and romantic partner?
4) If the tables were turned, would you feel what your WS did was "ok" because "we are divorced now"?

We all know that the truthful answers to #3 & #4 is "NO!" and the reasons for #1 & #2 are because a relationship that began as adultery is NOT made mentally, morally, (or even socially) "whole" or "acceptable" by a judge's signature on a divorce decree. It is eerie how often ongoing affairees marry each other as soon as the divorce(s) are legally complete...usually literally before the "ink is dry". I wonder, if you 2 are "soulmates" and "BFFs" and "meant to be", what is the rush? It seems that the adulterers are desperate to put an air of "legitimacy" to their activities. Single people who date and commit to each other "the right way" don't seem to have this need to "prove" anything to the world.

We agree. Adulterers enter the relationship (and affairage if it goes that far) under dubious and deceitful circumstances. They do so with unrealistic and highly romanticized expectations of "feelings" and "soulmate-dom" being the answers to the character and marital deficiencies they are experiencing (real, imagined, and/or exaggerated). Remarkably, these people seem to nearly universally convince themselves that their A is "special" and "different this time" despite the fact that the OP is almost always someone they would never have considered as a dating partner under "normal" circumstances...the OP is almost always a big "step down" by any measure and has more baggage and issues than the wayward and the betrayed spouse. Pittman and others write about this baffling phenomenom extensively.


I'm not sure what the point would be to quibble about how long an A has to last to be considered LT or VLT. I suppose that if someone maintains a secret "double life" for many years, their marriage means nothing to them and probably has not for a great deal of time. Such a person has so completely sold out their integrity and values (if they had any to begin with) as to make the issue meaningless. I do not know the particulars of your situation and do not apply the following to you. Pittman writes about "marital arrangements" in which affairs or dalliances go on for for many years seemingly without any emotional effect upon either the WS or the BS. He notes that infidelity "can stabilize truly bad marriages" (which are those that exist in name only) but "destroys good, serviceable, and salvageable ones" (i.e. marriages in which emotional/sexual commitment & fidelity are expected and were practiced as the norm before the affair).

Since women rarely purely-sexually philander and tend to be biologically pre-disposed to emotional monogamy, they are usually forced "off the fence" and "make a choice to follow their heart" fairly quickly (less than "years"). Adultering wives separate and initiate divorce at far higher rates than adultering husbands...under the guise of "my marriage was over and I fell in love with OM". In fact, except under highly extreme circumstances, a woman does not leave and divorce a faithful husband who wants to renew the marriage UNLESS and UNTIL she ALREADY HAS ANOTHER MAN/LOVER TO GO TO. Battered women's shelters are full of wives who refuse to permanently leave wantonly abusive husbands despite every legitimate reason to do so. Female adulterers are almost always the "romantic affair" type of infidelity participants, whether long or short-term.

I don't believe we have any serious disagreements.


Ah, yes. The marital aide, as he calls it. This applies to maybe one in maybe ten-thousand adulteries. Marriages long extremely dysfunctional for both spouses. Sometimes these are so-called open marriages. And quite often they are late stage affairages. The adulterer will have major issues of one kind or another. Or will be responding to major issues in the other spouse (like consuming addictions). In which case the spouse usually does not care.

But sometimes there is a clueless betrayed spouse locked in that room too.

Not quibbling. You asked. I gave you my working defintion.

You are correct. These marriages remind me of my (now former) brother-in-law and his wife. Back long before my xWW went off the "deep end" and our marriage was healthy & mutually fulfilling & faithful, we would pal around with them on occaision. Trips, dinners, events, visiting each others houses, etc.

We would be amazed by the nature of their "relationship" and I do use that term lightly. They would usually take separate vacations, maintained entirely separate finances/accounts, had vastly different interests they rarely co-participated in, paid for their meals with separate checks, lived apart for vast periods of time (during his doctoral studies), and even kept completely separate domestic duties...there were HIS dirty dishes to clean and HERS, that was HIS laundry to put away and HERS to be washed, etc., etc. Heck, they barely seemed to care about each other at all...

It was BIZARRE to say the least. We would openly wonder: "Why are you two even married???" I do not know if they had an "open" arrangement or "aids" or if either of them were having other relationships (they both seemed pretty asexual)...they ended up divorcing, to no one's surprise, but after a long period of "married in name only" limbo.