You ladies might want to read this:
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Marriage and the Family
Affairs Mean Don’t Mean Your Marriage is Bad
Do you think you had an affair because your marriage was bad? Here's a little test you can try at home. Ask yourself when it was that you had the lowest opinion of your marriage? Was it the week or the day before you started your affair? If you are like most people the answer is no. This is not to suggest that your marriage or anyone's was always in a state of perfect nuptial bliss. But if someone asked your opinion back then the chances are you would have said your marriage was a good one and that you expected it to last. A basic belief in its worth and long-term survivability is something you held close and didn't seriously question.
An affair is most often not something carefully planned in order to remedy a bad marriage. In truth, they usually begin rather haphazardly at a Christmas party or on a business trip, vacation, or something like that. Affairs can happen in good marriages because both partners are responsible for their marriage, but only one partner is responsible for an affair. Now ask yourself when you had the lowest opinion of your marriage and felt the greatest amount of doubt that it would last forever? Let us guess, during your affair perhaps?
Suddenly you began to feel like you loved your spouse but weren't in love, that you were comfortable but not very excited, and you were no longer certain that your marriage would endure. Some people say that as their affair progressed they could "feel their marriage dying" as the search for happiness turned away from the spouse. Before long you begin to think that "real love" is outside the marriage instead of inside the marriage. All the while your marriage is engaged in a competition with the thrill and newness of the intimacy of the affair, something no long term relationship can really be measured against, and with one of its partners, you, putting your best energy and effort into the affair. Now the affair relationship has two people fully devoted to it and the marriage has only one, your spouse. Not surprisingly, against such competition the marriage slowly weakens or dies. The spouse is perceived as dismissive and uncaring, the affair partner as more appreciative and caring. The spouse seems remote or distanced, the affair partner close and connected. Sometimes you even begin to feel angry with your spouse. Most significantly, you are more satisfied with yourself outside of the marriage than in it because you feel successful in the affair and failing in the marriage.
So what is now missing from the marriage that was not missing before? The answer is you. Your passion, your interest, your affection, your devotion, your honesty, your reliance, your faithfulness, and the fullest measure of your love are no longer present. Now, suddenly but not surprisingly, the marriage doesn't seem so good, not as good as it was before, and it has become stale and lifeless primarily because you are not fully in it.
The distance you correctly sensed between you and your spouse is the distance you created in order to have your affair close. The loss of intimacy you felt is the intimacy you had to give up in order to let another form of intimacy exist. It is impossible to be intimate with your spouse when you are walling off your spouse in order to lead a secret life with someone else. The deception and secrecy of the affair, the sharing of one's deepest feelings with the affair partner, as well as the diversion of interest, are all incompatible with spousal intimacy. For in the end, intimacy is born of privacy, when you give up the privacy of your marriage you are simultaneously giving up the intimacy of your marriage.Much of this is the simple result of losing the sexual privacy of your
marriage because it is so powerful in breaking down all other barriers. Many have noted the instant connection and powerful attachment formed from but a single sexual liaison with someone outside the marriage. It seems like there is no going back. Once you have let someone see what you are like in the most private part of your marriage what is left to hide? Soon the remaining areas of privacy are lost as well. Not only are your vulnerabilities given up, but the frailties of your spouse, the arguments you had, the things he or she said or did, and how those things made you feel are trotted out for the affair partner's comments and sympathies, however biased those may be. Your marriage is now open for inspection by an intruder, it is no longer private, and the intimacy you think has been lost is the intimacy destroyed by the affair.
In contrast, preserving the secrecy of the affair actually builds intimacy with the affair partner and this begins to replace the diminished intimacy of the marriage. The affair and not the marriage becomes the joint enterprise, the place for sharing and building. People having affairs feel that their affair partners “know” them better than their spouses without realizing the paradox this presents. Their spouses cannot “know” them because they are acting in unknowable ways. Almost by definition the person you are having an affair with suddenly knows you better than your spouse because that person knows more about your life at that point than your spouse does, and of course accepts you fully. This feeling of being “known” is often the affair’s most powerful lure, even though it derives from the inherent nature of the affair itself. The more secrecy and involvement that occurs in the affair the less “known” people feel by their spouses because the ability to live in secrecy automatically distances the spouse. People also become more open and relaxed in their affairs than they are in their marriages and enjoy the feeling of being able to do or say anything without constraint. When people are open in their affairs and hiding in their marriages it is no surprise that they soon begin to feel better in their affairs. In the affair the partners can discuss their spousal relationships and even their spousal sex lives with each other but the reverse is never true, they cannot discuss such intimate aspects of their affair with their spouses. Likewise, they can talk about other things without the weight or consequence of spousal reaction or disapproval and feel more accepted. “Our special thing,” is how the participants usually describe it.
Needless to say the marriage is no longer a special thing because of the new connection formed with the affair partner based upon the breaking down of reservations and the selfishly appealing enjoyment of talking with someone who always wants to know more about you. It is strange that people never seem to stop and realize that when their spouses first came to “know” them they liked what they saw so much that they committed their very lives to them and still would. How many affair partners are willing to do that? Yet the affair partner soon becomes more valued based solely upon this superficial interest, even though the interest is, in a very real sense, bought and paid for by the favors given in the affair. A patient once told me in a very revealing statement that it was more exciting and attracting for him to be “in consideration” by his affair partner than it was to have already been chosen by his spouse! The way he shifted his energy from trying to make his spouse love him, something he basically took for granted, to making his affair partner love him reminded me of the difference in the way we behave in job interviews and after we have been hired. We go from putting our best foot forward to confidently relaxing, and soon we also notice that the people who hired us never seem to reach that level of intense interest and careful attention than they did when we were only “in consideration.” We like being chosen but we miss the chase because it energizes us.
Once this shift in energy to the affair partner occurs there is a contributing and reciprocal response from your spouse. When you are not putting all your effort into the intimacy of the marriage guess what your spouse starts to do? He or she gets the hint and stops contributing too. It is like taking food off the table and then complaining that you are hungry because there is not enough there for you both to eat. Throughout the course of an affair the involved spouse is sending out a very powerful but often subtle message to be left alone, to be allowed to have the affair without interference from the spouse, a message that says I can't be intimate with you now. Spouses having affairs want to do their own thing, closeness makes that difficult and also risks detection or the giving of a sense that something is wrong.
The unknowing spouses must be isolated and kept at a distance, causing the marriage to suffer. Sadly, during the course of the affair they are often their own worst enemies. They know something is wrong but can’t comprehend what it is. Unknowing spouses sense their diminished importance and frequently react with withdrawal, anger, resentment, anxiety, depression, hostility, even violence, and in some cases an affair of their own. Unfortunately, these behaviors only reinforce the decision to have the affair and ratify the sense of justification and entitlement that sustain the affair.
In many cases the spouse having the affair actually blames the unknowing spouse with an inverted reasoning that suggests that if he or she weren’t so neglectful or thoughtless the affair wouldn’t be happening, even though the affair itself in the epitome of thoughtless neglect. It is not uncommon for the spouse having the affair to actually be angry with the unknowing spouse throughout its duration and sometimes longer. This anger serves as both a badly needed justification for the moral implications as well as a distancing mechanism. The unknowing spouse gradually senses shortness, impatience, and anger, until he or she withdraws, which is the precise result consciously or unconsciously desired by the spouse having the affair.
Now both spouses are headed in different directions. Both are angry at each other, both feel distanced, and both have lost the marriage’s greatest asset, spousal intimacy. So, short answer to our test is that bad marriages don't really make affairs, affairs make marriages really bad.
A typical case is one of my recent patients, a thirty five year old woman married for 12 years before having an affair lasting 18 months. Her lowest opinion of her marriage occurred during her affair and her opinion of her marriage prior to her affair was that it was pretty good. In other words, she was like most people. So when do you think she had her highest opinion of her marriage? After her affair ended and when she was reconciling with her husband, even with alienating and hurtful effects of the affair now confronting them both. But the key fact is that this perception occurred in the absence of the affair relationship and during a period in which she had given her time and energy solely to the marriage. Intimacy grew from her confiding the details of her affair to her spouse rather than confiding the details of her marriage to her affair partner. To be sure this is no coincidence, only a reflection of a time honored truism, marriage is what you make it, or in the case of an affair what you are not making it, your primary focus.
What is the point of all this? It is to recognize that marriage counseling in the aftermath of an affair is a useful component to reconciliation and recovery, particularly in dealing with the damage and pain it caused. But we should remember, and couples in counseling need to understand, that the affair was more a product of bad conduct and bad choices than it was the product of a bad marriage, and the marriage itself is probably stronger and in better shape than we give it credit for being. Simply put, if the marriage did not have more love, more happiness and more vitality than the affair, it would have ended long ago, especially given the self-gratifying intensity present in most affairs. Counseling is helpful to improve the way couples handle the challenges of a successful long term marriage, but in a basic sense, most of what it requires to endure is just the undivided commitment of both partners.
Making a marriage better is always a worthy goal, but affairs are not really marital problems at all, they are personal problems rooted in some very deep-seated individual causes ranging from ordinary emotional problems, ego traits, substance abuse, and personality issues, to more serious neuroses and complex personality disorders. A marriage can't be affair proof until the people in them are affair proof and this requires curing the individuals not the marriage.</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">
<small>[ November 24, 2003, 09:12 AM: Message edited by: T00MuchCoffeeMan ]</small>
