SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

This is intended to be a continuity to the conversation about how real an affair relationship is. But I think it warrants its own thread, so I’m breaking it off.

So we keep talking about whether the feelings and the relationship in an A can even be compared in the same universe as a real, genuine, out in the open love relationship. I like to take things to their logical extremes and see what happens. Let’s imagine that the AP doesn’t actually exist. Tanner talks about one of his wife’s AP’s was a catfish made up Internet personality. If it hasn’t happened yet, the day will almost certainly come when a JFO thread is going to be "my husband ran off with a chat bot" or something like that, I mean people in Japan are marrying anime characters, the world is so weird. So imagine that you find out your spouse is having a hot and heavy online affair, and the other side just so happens to be ChatGPT trained on OnlyFans. But your partner doesn’t know that. This is where the title comes in. The Turing test refers to a test for how to tell if artificial intelligence is actually sentient, that a human should interact with it and be unable to tell that it is a machine. So if my spouse falls in love with a computer thinking it’s a person, I say the betrayal is just as real. The feelings are there. The pictures have been exchanged. The plane ticket for half way around the world is in hand. What’s the difference? So it seems to me then that the AP is not special, but the feelings in the WS are real and they matter immensely.

This one should be interesting.

[This message edited by InkHulk at 9:13 PM, Monday, September 11th]

Good questions.

I can tell you my H thought the whole thing was real b/c he was planning to D me during his affair.

After I told him on dday2 that he didn’t have to worry b/c I was D him, he admitted that he had made a mistake and he didn’t love the OW any longer and he didn’t want a D.

He told the OW he loved her for months. I believe he did. He certainly didn’t love me based on the things he said and the way he treated me.

It may not have been sustainable but the feelings were certainly real.

The transference of love is real regardless of whether the object is real or not and that is where the betrayal comes from. You mention catfish or AI, but how is that any different from when AP is just a person that managed to get the WS to believe that they were their soul mate or dream partner. When in reality they are nowhere near that. The biggest betrayal is the first step. When they first consider someone else over their spouse and don't nope the hell out. That doesn't require the AP to be anything other than a figment of their imagination.

I think it elegantly proves the problem lies with the WS, not with the AP.

Don't get mad at the knife, get mad at the person that stabbed you in the back. "Why a knife, and not an axe?" is a useless question. The question is why they stabbed you in the back.

So, haven’t seen any one leaving for a ChatBot, but definitely read an article where a woman thought she was talking to an actor from Stranger Things online (obviously a catfisher) and she divorced her husband to be with him. Feel like that’s pretty similar. She thought it was real enough to end her marriage over it.

Feelings are tricky, really no one makes you feel any way, they are caused by your own mind. Yeah actions can cause us to feel a certain way, but the emotions themselves only come from our own thoughts. It’s kind of like what the point of grey rock is, to control our emotions, to cut the association between good feelings and shity people. The feelings, whatever that means, are real enough, where the WP attributes them to the actual person, and starts to believe this feeling is from them.

So what then? AP isn’t special, AP is just willing and able. Affairs are "real" relationships in the sense that it’s people feeling love, affection, respect, trust for each other (at least in affairs such as your WW).

What does it mean past that? Probably nothing.

whether the feelings and the relationship in an A can even be compared in the same universe as a real, genuine, out in the open love relationship

In comparison, I don't believe they're equal.

However, there are many different forms of love. I do believe a cheater can love their AP. Its not a healthy love. But,then, the love a WS may have for their BS while they're betraying them,isn't a healthy love either.

I also agree with you. If my husband felt he was in love with someone who turned out to be a bot, WHO she is doesn't matter. His feelings do.

So if my spouse falls in love with a computer thinking it’s a person, I say the betrayal is just as real. The feelings are there. The pictures have been exchanged. The plane ticket for half way around the world is in hand. What’s the difference? So it seems to me then that the AP is not special, but the feelings in the WS are real and they matter immensely.

I agree that the damage is done by the WS's betrayal of the WS.

I'll also agree that the WS's feelings are important - if the BS and/or WS think they're important. I'll also admit that my W's feelings would have become of prime importance if she had tried to excuse them by, for example, telling me she was in a fog, so the feelings didn't count. My W never blame-hifted or otherwise attempted to dodge responsibility on or after d-day (d-moment?).

For a number of reasons, my W's 'feelings' toward ow didn't move me much at all. It seems obvious to me that the feelings expressed by aps are simply too fucked up to matter. W may have thought she loved ow, but I saw her, and I concluded she didn't know what she was feeling. Love? She didn't show ow love any more than she showed it to me. What she told ow (rather, what she convinced me she told ow) makes her expressions of feelings irrelevant to me. I expect that I'm not alone in that.

IOW, there are multiple ways of evaluating what one's WS did. The tricks include finding ways that develop naturally and not projecting one's own experience on others.

*****

A normal reaction to finding out a WS expressed love to an ap is to think that means the BS is unlovable. That can trigger all sorts of attack-self messages about the BS's lovable-ness. IMO, it's a big mistake to decide, 'They told ap they love them! I'll show them! I'm out of here!'

Loving oneself is the only defense I can think of to combat those messages. After d-day is a great time to learn that pretty much every one of us is lovable enough.

Once you feel the self-love, part of which is knowing you are lovable enough, then you can evaluate your WS's professions of love to the ap effectively. Once you know what your issue(s) are with what your WS said or did, you can make mindful decisions in your own best interests.

The betrayal derives from the transference of feelings and the loss of exclusivity, along with the disappearance of empathy for the faithful spouse. Add in the poison of secrecy to this toxic brew and you have a terrible outcome, regardless of whether the AP is a fabrication of AI ora coworker or neighbor, or whoever. The pain is the same IMHO.

The intent to betray is still the same so the feelings would just be the same.

My WW did not get a pass because it was a scammer. She was crazy about who she thought he was. This is the same for a real live AP, they are crazy about who they think they are, the role they play in the fantasy they have created. These relationships would fail a real stress test.

Isn't it often said around here that the AP could have been 'anybody'? If it wasn't this person, it could have been someone else?

So what is the difference, besides an actual person, that wouldn't make their wayward actions a betrayal?

People get duped online all the time. Just because it turns out that this AP wasn't who they thought they were(in this case, at all) doesn't mean that the full intention, and actions, to betray were not there. I'll assume that I might feel a little better in retrospect that there was no physical aspect of the affair. Maybe I would also feel some 'relief' that there wasn't an actual person that I was 'losing' to in my own relationship. But every other element of cheating is there.

Maybe I would only be 'totally' devastated as opposed to 'absolutely totally' devastated. Any little bit less may help......

The intent to betray is still the same so the feelings would just be the same.

Short, succinct and all that really matters IMO when it comes to Infidelity.

I find myself not really focusing on the APs at all. I agree with "it could have been anybody". Their biggest "attribute" is they were "willing". Willing to enter an adulterous relationship with a married woman and most were married themselves. It just feels to me like we are "searching for the Rubicon". Was it "only" online? Was it "only" an EA? Was it "only" oral, etc. Was it love or limerence? Did they say "I love you"? If so, did they really mean it?

Are we just endlessly searching for "what is MY deal-breaker"? For me, my wife was a habitual cheater and liar. THAT is a deal-breaker. Is it 1st level shit or 10th level shit doesn’t really matter to me. What does matter is if she is still showing the attributes (selfishness, lack of morals, lack of empathy, lying, etc.) that led her to Infidelity OR is she doing the work and showing changes in behavior?

I think it elegantly proves the problem lies with the WS, not with the AP.

Agree. The WS is just as culpable for directing their attention outside of the marriage, regardless of what the object of their attention may be.

Don't get mad at the knife, get mad at the person that stabbed you in the back.

If the knife is a living, breathing, sentient human, I feel perfectly alright about being mad at them too. If the knife is a bot, I think I’d enjoy a heaping helping of schadenfreude alongside the main course of betrayal anger.

I think it elegantly proves the problem lies with the WS, not with the AP.

There is something about the phrase "elegantly proves" that is just about the highest praise to me. Must come from my college days, learning to love seeing elegance and simplicity in nature. So thanks, that hit home. I agree with your assessment as well. This mental exercise has moved me forward, I think. It’s almost comical to imagine my wife interacting with a bot, it just helps me really focus on her culpability. She did this. She fucking did this. OM was just a masterbatory tool. If she really wanted to leave me and intentionally start a new life, I do not believe she would have chose a married man. I do think she slid down the slope, but at some point on it the thought crossed her mind of "this is better than InkHulk" and embraced that thought and fully and consciously betrayed me.
You guys are probably thinking I am fully fucked if after like 15 months that is a break thru to me, but the point is my mind and my heart just aligned on that point, and that feels good, a little cognitive dissonance relieved. Thanks for helping me along the path.

Are we just endlessly searching for "what is MY deal-breaker"?

And in this highly cerebral topic, this question just pierced straight to my heart. Thanks, IAC. Though I do wish you’d change your screen name. Just something to consider.

Feelings are tricky, really no one makes you feel any way, they are caused by your own mind. Yeah actions can cause us to feel a certain way, but the emotions themselves only come from our own thoughts. It’s kind of like what the point of grey rock is, to control our emotions, to cut the association between good feelings and shity people. The feelings, whatever that means, are real enough, where the WP attributes them to the actual person, and starts to believe this feeling is from them.

In one of the self help books I’ve consumed I came across a "thoughts-feeling-actions" triad and I found that helpful. If she were to come and say "I just fell in love, I couldn’t control it", I’d reject that fully. She nurtured it and allowed that poison to seep into her heart.

"this is better than InkHulk"

Or this is something unique I never felt before with inkhulk. Or she might have felt "like a virgin" (song of madonna) with her AP.

To me, just like the 1stwife's comment (and experience), it's pretty simple:

He told the OW he loved her for months. I believe he did. He certainly didn’t love me based on the things he said and the way he treated me.

It may not have been sustainable but the feelings were certainly real.

When I say the A isn't "real" I mean it from a more logical perspective - that the relationship - the FEELINGS - an AP-WS are really having isn't based in reality. Kind of like this:

Many years ago when I was single I met this "fantastic" guy while I was on vacation for 2 weeks on a remote island in Fiji. Super remote - only like 30 people there, very laid back, a lot of scuba, beach lounging, no electricity, no cell phone service, no hard line phones, and no internet - just generator and solar power at certain times of day, and many days spent playing cards and laughing and drinking under a palm-frond thatched roof open hut while a multi-day tropical storm poured rain - that warm balmy rain with a light breeze - just having a freaking great time in a setting that in this day and age is about as close to detached from reality as it gets - and romantic as heck too. It was immediate attraction, but I lived in Australia and he lived somewhere in England, so we spent the two weeks like they were our last. He was the ultimate "dream" guy - handsome, smart, blah blah blah - I thought he was perfect and imagined making it something permanent, and we even talked about that a bit without having any sound plan to do anything to make it so. At the end of the 2 weeks we parted ways and I actually cried at our parting and thought of him often for a while and then went back to my normal - graduate school, tiny (but awesome) flat, bills...life. We would exchange emails from time to time about nothing but "missing yous" and other unimportant mostly non-boring-real-life things - at first quite a few, but as time passed less and less.

Fast forward a year, dream guy sends me an email - I'm still single and he's coming to Australia and will be in my town for at least a month, maybe two, for work. I prepare, plan, look forward to it and he arrives. It's just like before, for the first week, but then we spend more post-work/school hours together as he ends up being there for about 10 weeks. He comes to my place, and it's clear he is less than impressed with my studies (at the time I was not studying law but literature, and an obscure genre at that which he thought was fanciful but not realistic as "how are you going to make decent money with that degree?"), and he doesn't like cats or pets in general, which my roommate had and I love, and a whole host of other things. He dresses a bit to ostentatiously for me (unlike the flip-flop and shorts clad guy I "knew" from the trip), and seems to be super impressed by things like status and fancy cars - things that even though I make a good living I would never buy as I find all that trying to impress others as tedious and unimportant. He is a bit of a neat-freak, and I, while fairly tidy, am not him. He is constantly interrupting our conversations to check in on work, which while I know is sometimes necessary, it seems too frequent to the point I'm wondering if he is trying to impress me with how important he is or trying to make himself seem more important for his own self-interest, and ultimately it just seems disruptive and a bit rude. He calls me "sweetie" in front of his workmates in an endearing not demeaning way, but I HATE this word like, barf-hate, so I bristle every time he says it... In other words, it became clear pretty quickly that we were not long-term compatible in any meaningful sense. I'm sure there were things about me that he wasn't a huge fan of but because he was leaving we never needed to discuss. He left, and we discussed my coming to England but I never really pursued it and he never really pushed, and we still exchanged emails for time, less passionately and less frequently, and then he just faded away. I have no idea where he is now.

Our time in Fiji was like an affair - nothing real getting the way - pursuit of pure enjoyment. And he seemed PERFECT. While I'm sure he mentioned some of the things I found to not be my thing while there, they were glazed over quickly. Only in the harsh light of even semi-reality was it clear that perfect for me he was not. But that reality did not make my feelings for him when we met - those two weeks and the year after - any less real. They were. I was really really really into him - the Fiji-fantasy version of him.

To me, my Fiji-affair was similar to an infidelity affair, minus the "excitement" of the forbidden, and his time with me at my home was much more real, allowing me to see him outside of the lens of fun and adventure. So, were my feelings back in Fiji real? Yep, they were. They just were based on an unreal version of him, and therefore were not reality-based. If that makes any sense?

So this is another long winded answer of mine - to the extent you were wondering if your WS's feelings in her A weren't real to her during the A, even if her A wasn't "reality" - I would say they were. While that hurts, I know, as I too came to the same realization about my WH now (something he freely admits today), she also was a willing participant in her own mental deception.

[This message edited by ThisIsSoLonely at 7:59 PM, Tuesday, September 12th]

Super helpful, TISL. Thank you for sharing

Super helpful, TISL. Thank you for sharing

Gladly - who doesn't want to relive, if even for a moment, one of those magical-unreal-fantasy-type moments 100% innocent NOT involving infidelity, where life felt like a freshly dipped warm-caramel apple, ready to be bit into and made just for you?