SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

My affair was two decades ago, but recently disclosed. My wife and I have spent many hours discussing it and many of her questions are about my thinking during the affair. I continually wish I would have journaled so I had contemporary thoughts as I know see the thinking through the lens of what I know now.

For example, my AP and I met working in a job that routinely requires 80+ hours week. I left to work in a different field, but she stayed and was pretty miserable. In retrospect, I think we were trauma bonded somewhat by the work and high pressure environment we were both in. She was pretty isolated (hard to have friends when work dominates your life that much) and many of our interactions were spent with her visible depressed about work.

When the affair began, I started drinking heavily when we were together and eventually abusing substances. This was definitely a numbing mechanism, but also in retrospect seems like a way to improve the time we were together.

What really perplexes my wife is why I stayed involved as long as I did. I remember several times lying to the AP about having to work late so I did not have to tell her I just did not want to come over so why not just end the affair. If I had kept a journal, I think AP and I would have been together mostly when one of us was hitting a low point.

I think my wife has been influenced by media portrayals of infidelity that often portray an affair as non stop illicit steamy interactions. I often describe the time as a grind and the dissonance is hard to reconcile.

Am I applying revisionist history? Do other Waywards remember seeing the affair differently in the moment than they view it retrospectively? So hard this many years later to remember what I thought / felt at the timd and I am a very different person now.

Nine years out.

It could be a little of both. But I think my affair, like most was built on trying to prop each other up, but the affair has a way of having this undercurrent of making things worse.

To me, the part of the affair that keeps it going has nothing to do with who the AP is. It has a lot of elements of being someone you are not. It’s escapism. And for every small high there were way bigger lows. Sometimes I felt disgust for him, an emotion I do not ever think I had for my husband.

It was like you get high off of it, then you crash but you want to feel that high again. The highs are not as good and then the lows get worse.

I can see it that way in hindsight.

When it was actually happening I don’t think I looked at anything too hard. It would have messed up the escapism for me, I was at my most avoidant during that time. A lot of it for me was chasing his attention and trying to impress him. It was all self- adulating. It soon became if I couldn’t get him to do that it was almost like fetishized abandonment issue. I would analyze my performance and adjust. I showed this man nothing but the worst version of myself and that only added to the insecurity.

I agree the way it’s portrayed on movies and TV’s make it look exciting. I felt excited some bit most of the time I was the most insecure version of myself and was highly inauthentic with him and in life in general. It was very damaging so it’s hard for me to see any good in it. I think at the time I was ignoring all the bad but there was a lot of it.

It was not as enjoyable as I imagined any of it would be, and I thought that sometimes at the time but I didn’t want to break it off because that next high or need would be waiting around the corner. I was so mentally unbalanced at that time that it’s hard to put myself back in it in the same way.