SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Hi everyone

I constantly think about my WS and I have a question..

Can a man be in total love with you yet go out and have an affair?

Are men capable of that? Can they complete their responsibility at home yet go out and have an affair?

They can internally feel their definition of love, but it probably doesn't meet a wide variety of definitions for love.

They cannot complete their responsibility at home. One of those responsibilities is sexual exclusivity.

They can have a perfectly happy primary relationship, and still choose to cheat.

My wife told me after being unfaithful to me for 15 years that she never stopped loving me. That statement made no sense to me yet it is not uncommon in affairs. One thing I learned from this is how differently my wife thought and acted inside the affair fog.Totally opposite of the woman I married.How can you love someone and then destroy them? Stay strong and take care of yourself because you can't control your spouse no matter how hard you try. As a side note my wife was normal and showed no signs of unhappiness for 13 of those years.

All during his LTA WH told me he loved me. I believe him.

It took me years to realize it was himself he didn't love.

Could you madly love somebody and cheat on them? For this answer alone cheating will always be a deal breaker because it isn't MY definition of love. I don't judge others if they feel it's not and give reconciliation a chance, but because my answer is, "no," i have to go by what my heart says for me.

I have posted this previously but I do believe love meant very different things for exwh and I respectively. For him it was more like the song "I love the way you love me". In other words you are useful to me and I will love you the way one loves a treasured object that makes one’s life better. "I just love that car/couch/ watch or Shehawk….

Then there was "love" the way I viewed it.

The latter was loyal, showed fidelity and was not self serving. It was where one honestly tries to support and connect with your spouse.

So I am curious what you were thinking "love" meant. Because I do not find infidelity congruent with love the way I defined it.

Well...

Actually I also want an all inclusive and exclusive love... Fidelity should be at the top...

No love without commitment, responsibility and fidelity...

Thank you all for clearing my mind yet again...

I am at the stage where I am 100% sure I am not returning to him.

Yet, my mind and my heart try to betray me into bringing in the positive thoughts of him... I am at that stage right now...

It's so breaking me apart .. I have to keep him away yet my heart yearns for the " fool's paradise" that I was living in.

I have gone into a quiet and melancholy phase now...

Getting a job will take a while due to registration process of my profession in the different state of India and having to learn the new local language of this state... But I am busy learning the new language...

I can't listen to music anymore as he was very much into music and every song, lyrics are a trigger... Can you give me any tips how to renew that please...

Music may need to wait for more heart healing. Or maybe try listening to a different genre of music, let's say - classical music? Or perhaps some music from another whole tradition?

You need to go through the natural mourning stages and they are not really predictable. Meaning the stages do not progress in a straight line.

I know what you mean about how music gets down deep: after the events of the morning of September 11, 2001 here, near to our nation's capital, I found I needed to stop playing music on the car radio. Because the news was so terrifying and traumatic every day, and the news reports broke in every half hour to my listening to familiar tunes, that it just proved too much for my heart and mind to take! Actually, I never did resume listening to music while driving, it left me that much of a trauma.

[This message edited by Superesse at 2:42 AM, Saturday, November 16th]

I pretty much stopped listening to music for a while. It was really triggering and I could find my self yelling swear words at the radio/streaming app. I started streaming cooking shows because there wasn't much infidelity-related things on there. Food Network was my friend.

Can a man be in total love with you yet go out and have an affair?

Depends on what you mean and what he means by "love".

I contend that affairs reveal a chasm in both character and definitions. Put another way, the betrayed and wayward mean far different things when using the same term, love.