Some harsh truths
He took what he wanted and she loved it.
her being obsessed with him
Basically he treated her like a whore, and she told me she wants me to treat her like that in the bedroom. Over the last few years she admits her attraction to me has diminished but says it's a personality sense and not a physical sense. She was much more involved emotionally than he was and has told me she feels ashamed and stupid for being a piece of meat to him.
She doesn't feel in love with me, but she realizes that no one is really in love after all these years together. She loves me and our family and she wants to remain my wife and will never do anything like this again.
I am trying to display more of a dominant, alpha type leadership role/personality. It's been working so far I think. She brought me lunch at work yesterday which she's been doing every time I work now. Pleasured me in the privacy of my office and got very into it. It was nice I guess. We are still not fixed and we will continue going to counseling. For the men does anyone else have a wife who wants to be treated like this?
I have read in these threads more than a few situations where the cheating wives were much more wild in the affairs. Right now in the divorce section there is a man whose cheating wife wore baseball catcher's gear to have sex with the other man. I have read of cheating wives with bdsm tendencies with the other men, I hate to use the word "degradation" if the women wanted to go there, but definitely things like foot fetishes and stuff more extreme I've read here that were never part of the marital sex life.
More often than not, in the threads I've read here, the cheating wives who behaved much differently in the affair, have not wanted that in their marriage, more often that they were much more reserved in their marriage after being so much more wild in the affair. The "hysterical bonding" effect seemed to be where the affair sex was more similar to the marital sex, just with a new partner. I've read cheating wives who did certain acts with their affair partners that they always had refused and still refuse to their husbands. I have heard a few here where the "new" activities were "offered" but not "desired" (for example, "I'll do it if you really want to, but otherwise, I'd prefer not to") although they were wanting it from the affair partner (or at least the messages between the affair partners show that).
I have seen in my own experiences that a woman who was "desperate" to be with me in a committed relationship would be willing (and seemed very happy and wanting to do so) to be much more extreme. I don't know where that came from, the reason why, but I thought it had to do with "competing" and "proving" to me. Guys do it to with women, I think, but maybe in other ways - competition.
I had a lot of experience before I got married. Human sexuality is complicated. At a basic level, it is a primal drive, instinctual, hard-wired to procreate and continue the species. Some of it is genetic, some of it is social engineering. Unlike maybe all other species, the mental aspect, emotions, play into it well. Part genetics, part evolution, part societal influences, part familial influences, etc.
The point I'm trying to get to is that I think most of our sexual likes and dislikes are largely unknown even to ourselves. We know what we like and dislike, but in many aspects we don't know why, or why not.
Both men and women, I think, usually change over their lives as far as sexual desires, in frequency very frequently and less so in what we like and dislike.
Based on my experiences and observations (and I always have been attracted to "traditional" male-female roles - which seems to be most situations described here in this forum), there definitely is an "afraid to be too wild, afraid to 'let go' and 'explore' " in a committed relationship. The beginning few sexual actions ramp up gradually, and acts are added a bit at a time, and very relatively early in the long-term marriage, it kind of stays in that relatively small "range" of sexual acts and behaviors - including "foreplay" and post-play.
When I was single, I was the same person, the same likes and dislikes, but new partners meant different "attitudes" toward each other, some more aggressive, some more passive on each end, and different routines, but over time, always kind of becoming in a relative small range of routines.
I think if you ask your wife about where did this "feeling" and "desire" for this "new to you" wishes came from, she probably will not know. I suspect that this is the result of the strong feelings she had with other man, and she enjoyed that aspect, and she may at some point not enjoy it as much.
Just about every woman I've been with, in retrospect, enjoyed feeling "desired" and "wanted" and "feminine," which based on my sisters and other close women I've known come to me to be kind of "protected" and "cared for" within the role of the romantic relationship. One of my first girlfriends told me all the time how "complicated" she was. I started to hear this from other women, just in passing, really. Later, in other relationships, I would tell the women how "complicated" they were, and I almost always could tell that was kind of a home run for me, they loved it. None ever told me they disliked that characterization.
I took it to mean that they wanted to feel they had many aspects to themselves - sexual woman, family woman, ambitious woman, etc., and they wanted me to pay homage to each of those aspects (even if they frequently didn't return the favor). Overall, though, I found women to be much more involved and attentive to the relationships, really scrutinized what was going on, even to the point of looking for "meaning" in what I considered meaningless actions.
I was reading something recently from a woman named Wendy Plump who wrote a book called Vow: A Memoir of a Marriage (and Other Affairs). She had multiple affairs in her marriage (and later her husband had affairs of his own):
Start by picturing yourself in the therapist’s office with your betrayed husband after you’ve been found out (and you will be found out). You will hear yourself saying you cheated because your needs weren’t being met. The spark was gone. You were bored in your marriage. Your lover understands you better. One or another version of this excuse will cross your lips like some dark, knee-jerk Hallmark-card sentiment.
I’m not saying these feelings aren’t legitimate, just that they don’t legitimize what you’re doing. If you believed they did, your stomach wouldn’t drop on your way out the door to your lover’s. You wouldn’t feel the need to shower before climbing into the marital bed after a liaison. You wouldn’t feel like a train had struck you in the back when your son asked why you forgot his lacrosse game the other day.
When you miss a family function because of work, you get over it. When you miss a family function because you were in a hotel room with your lover, you feel breathless with misery.
The great sex, by the way, is a given. When you have an affair you already know you will have passionate sex — the urgency, newness and illicit nature of the affair practically guarantee that.
What you don’t know, or perhaps what you don’t allow yourself to think about, is that your life will become an unbearable mix of yearning and regret because of it. It will be difficult if not impossible to be in any one place with contentment.
But the affairs also cause angst and guilt of fabricating alibis to explain whereabouts. Affairs are half miserable, half bliss, unbearable mix of yearning and regret."
Ultimately unsustainable. I may have strayed. I would never have left.
This is no way for an adult to live. When you’re with your lover, you’ll be working on your alibi and feeling loathsome. When you’re with your spouse, you’ll be dying to return to your love nest. When you are at home, everything in your life will look just a little bit out of register — the furniture, the food in your refrigerator, your children, your dog — because you’ve detached yourself from your normal point of reference, and it now belongs to a reality you’ve abandoned.
You will be pulled between two poles, one of obligation and responsibility, the other of pleasure and escape, and the stress of these opposing forces will threaten to split you in two.
I met the man I cheated with early in my marriage. He was beautiful. I was entranced. With my husband, I was anxious and ill at ease. I should have been focusing on our new house, our new jobs, but my inability to resist the pull of the affair ruined all of that. I could not concentrate on our coupled life and frankly did not care to.
The tidal pull of the other man proved addictive. It was about lust, yes, but also fantasy, the thrill of newness, passion, inspiration, even a ration of joy.
Affairs are intoxicating, a combination of appetite and impulse. What I wanted most was the drug and energy of passion, of new intimacy.
At least in the beginning, affairs are like blasts of pure oxygen, which is irresistible, given that I'm not that high on life that I can manufacture joy out of the quotidian details.
I met my husband in college.
My husband was an even flame to my reckless burn. He was not affectionate and he was not demonstrative. I am both, in spades. Right back to the beginning, there was never enough revelation in our relationship, never enough said.
Once the affair is out in the open, you will strive mightily to justify yourself. You will begin many sentences with the phrase, “I never meant to — ” But one look at the hollow-eyed, defeated form of your spouse will remind you that such a claim is beside the point. You can both get over this, yes. But the innocence will have gone out of your union and it will seem as if a bone has been broken and healed, but one that rain or cold weather can set to throbbing again.
So, now take the other side. You discover your cheating spouse, as I once did, and what you experience is not far removed from post-traumatic stress. It is a form of shock. As your mind struggles to accommodate this wrenching reality, you won’t be able to sleep or focus. Your fight-or-flight mechanism will go haywire. You will become consumed with where your spouse is at any moment, even if you see him in the pool with your children.
You will lose your appetite. Stress will blow out your metabolism. You will torture yourself with details known and imagined. You will fit together the mysteries of his daily patterns like a wicked puzzle. Every absence or unexplained late night or new habit or sudden urge to join a gym, for instance, will suddenly make horrible sense. You will wonder why you were so stupid.
It is very easy to plant a bomb in a peaceful, trusting place. That is what the cheating spouse has done. Then detonated it.
Sooner or later your illicit, once-beloved object of affection will become tawdry, wearying. You will come to long for simple, honest pleasures like making dinner with your sons or going out to the movies without having to look over your shoulder.
On the other side, your spouse’s philandering will cease to torment you and instead the whole episode will leave you disgusted and bored and desirous to get out. You will just want to be with someone who does what he says he is going to do, goes where he says he is going to go, and can be found any time you need him because he is not hiding.
I say all this by way of hope, believe it or not. Affairs are one of the adult world’s few disasters that can be gotten over, with a lot of time and kindness. It has to burn out of you over months and months, flaming up and then subsiding as you get used to the fact.
A great deal of comfort will come from your friends, many of whom will offer advice — hate him, leave him, move on — that you should listen to politely and then reject. After all, the consequences of your decisions will be visited upon you, not your friends. They will be only too happy to amplify your confusion, listen to you cry, and then get into the car and drive home to their own intact families.
In the end your marriage may not need to be trashed, though mine was. The affairs metastasized in our relationship from the inside out. By the time all was said and done, there was little left to save. Our marriage had become like a leaf eaten away by caterpillars, where the petiole and midrib remain with some ghostly connective tracery in between. Not enough to hold even a drop of rain.
I look at my parents and at how much simpler their lives are at the ages of 75, mostly because they haven’t marred the landscape with grand-scale deceit. They have this marriage of 50-some years behind them, and it is a monument to success. A few weeks or months of illicit passion could not hold a candle to it.
If you imagine yourself in such a situation, where would you fit an affair in neatly? If you were 75, which would you rather have: years of steady if occasionally strained devotion, or something that looks a little bit like the Iraqi city of Fallujah, cratered with spent artillery?
From where I stand now, it all just looks like a cheap hotel room, whether you’re in that room to have an affair or to escape from the discovery of one.
And despite the sex and the excitement, or the drama and the fix of everyone’s empathetic attention, there is no view from this room that is worth having.
My family is utterly broken apart. It really gets me when I see those happy families in the Disney World commercials.
I am now in a seven-year relationship with a man. He's an old high school friend, and together we're exploring what it means to be middle-aged but not boring and happily monogamous but not bored in a committed relationship that isn't marriage.
We ride bikes together. We hike and rock-climb and travel. We drink coffee and talk.
I really like him. I love his company. That passion is present in this relationship, though it is not the crazy passion that consumed me during my affair.
I first discovered my husband's first affair and forgave him readily. I later discovered he had a 10-year relationship and recent out-of-wedlock son. It was one of those affairs that shock the whole pond and change all the life forms in it. So that nothing could thrive there afterward.
I lost my husband, my house, and even my sons half-time to joint custody. Of all the things there are to do on the planet, my husband and I picked one hell of a pastime.
I realize now that being with a person is not just about lust and drama. It's loyalty. It's hanging out. I don't judge myself as bad for my past infidelity. Just stupid. It would be a great way to live if it weren't so ruinous.
