SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I’ve seen some version of that phrase in several different accounts of what an affair meant to the unfaithful partner, and the more I think about it, the more contradictory it seems.

How can a relationship with another person be "something just for me"?

By definition, it isn’t just yours. It is relational. It is dyadic. There is another person involved, another person whose attention matters, whose responses matter, whose availability matters, whose approval matters, and whose behavior can change how you feel.

Something truly "just for me" would seem more like developing an interest of your own, taking time alone, making independent choices, rediscovering preferences you had stopped expressing, building friendships, creating something, learning something, or developing a stronger sense of self that does not depend on another person.

An affair is almost the opposite of that.

Especially when the affair partner and the affair relationship are, in many obvious ways, worse than the primary relationship.

The AP may be less available. Less dependable. Less invested. Less caring. Less knowledgeable about the person. The relationship itself may have secrecy, uncertainty, inconsistency, very little shared reality, and very little evidence that it could survive ordinary life.

And yet sometimes that seems to make the attachment stronger rather than weaker.

There can be an intermittent-reward quality to it. The spouse may provide affection, admiration, security, attention, and validation consistently enough that it becomes expected and almost invisible. The AP provides much less, but because it is uncertain, every small reward becomes highly salient.

Will they text today?

Will they say something nice?

Do they still want me?

Will I get attention this time?

The scarcity itself starts making the reward feel more valuable.

And if that is what is happening, then I struggle with calling the affair "something just for me."

Because that is not really selfhood. That is still locating something essential in another person's response to you.

If anything, it seems deeply invalidating to the self.

You may tell yourself that you finally found something that belonged only to you, but then you become intensely dependent on maintaining the affair container. You need the messages. You need the attention. You need the validation. You need the fantasy. You may begin protecting the relationship, rearranging your life around it, pushing boundaries to preserve it, or experiencing withdrawal when access to it is threatened.

At that point, what exactly was "just for you"?

You have not become less relationally dependent. You may simply have moved the dependency somewhere else.

That becomes even more troubling to me when someone has spent years losing themselves in a primary relationship through masking, over-accommodation, poor differentiation, or an inability to openly express what they actually want.

If the problem was, "I lost myself in my spouse," then escaping into an affair and losing yourself in an AP does not look like reclaiming yourself.

It looks like repeating the same problem in a different relationship.

Real individuation would have been learning how to remain yourself while staying connected to another person. Saying what you actually want. Allowing disagreement. Establishing boundaries. Developing independent interests. Becoming capable of tolerating another person's disappointment without reshaping yourself around it.

That is "something for me."

An affair can feel private, secret, exciting, separate from ordinary life, and therefore personally owned. I understand why someone might experience that subjectively as "mine."

But I think there is an important difference between something being **secret from your spouse** and something actually being **for yourself**.

Those are not the same thing.

And if the affair becomes another place where your sense of worth, desirability, identity, or emotional stability depends on somebody else's intermittent attention, then describing it as self-discovery may obscure what actually happened.

Maybe you did not choose yourself.

Maybe you just chose a different person to disappear into.

I see it like a Freudian slip, the simp,e truth coming out through the curtain of lies.

Something just for me.

Look at it. Is transactional. Dehumanized. An object of self soothing, not a relationship. An empty fantasy that this someone is aware from the start and is just painting it as something more not to face the shame of their selfishness, character flaw and objectification.

And making it "only for you". Excuses somewhat the pain and suffering that this petty selfishness inflict in ruining another person’s life.

"Something just for me"

If you see it in its simplicity that’s sound exactly right.
It tell you everything you need to know about the cheater.

I agree with storm, the something just for me is exactly what an affair is.

The ap in most cases could be really anyone, as long as they are willing to fit in the little box you have them in. For me this wasn’t conscious behavior. It was the part of myself who knew the truth though that said "something just for me"

Also, the "something just for me" speaks to the entitlement I think most ws arrive at. I deserve this because——fill in the blank. But it goes to the belief I make more sacrifices or provide more to the relationship/household in some way and I don’t get what I want.

That’s where the justifications for the initial green light come from for a good majority of us. A lot of times all that is boils down to pent up resentments that we didn’t deal with effectively by doing normal things like communicating.

Maybe you did not choose yourself.

Maybe you just chose a different person to disappear into.

I don’t really feel I chose my ap. Not like the way you do when you date people. AP’s are frequently about proximity, opportunity, and timing. That’s true for dating, but in essence it’s a little it takes one to know one sort of thing. The ap would likely not ever be chosen in a situation where you could date literally anyone because you are single and are free to.

Back in the days before homosexuality was very in the closet, somehow there was an innate ability to understand if people around you were gay or interested. I did not live that experience, so I hope I am not saying something that provides it an injustice. But just like that, for me, I knew what the ap was. It takes one to know one.

So, the selection is limited. But what you want is for that person to believe you are a better version of who you actually are, and validate this person you are escaping to be.

So what I am saying, for me, for a lot of us, it’s not about the other person, it’s more about this role we want to play in our escapism. I wanted to be younger and sexier(so my ap was 20 years older than myself—-makes sense because it was easy for him to reflect back that I was younger). I wanted to be funnier, sexier, more interesting. The depression/crisis I was in I felt so old, so frumpy, so unhappy in my skin.

And just like we recognized each other it was easy to understand what the other person wanted——mega validation for this person they wanted to be in the whole paradigm.

Esther Perel has written that many people have affairs to meet a different version of themselves. And I think affairs are almost always about self and the things they need to be come out I the surface, often awkwardly and inauthentically.

So that’s where the decision begins, the audience to your show is reflecting back what you want to convey. But after the decision is made then there are psychological effects that are scientifically predictable that are not predictable or understood by the person entering the affair

And that gets to this piece:

The AP may be less available. Less dependable. Less invested. Less caring. Less knowledgeable about the person. The relationship itself may have secrecy, uncertainty, inconsistency, very little shared reality, and very little evidence that it could survive ordinary life.

And yet sometimes that seems to make the attachment stronger rather than weaker.

There can be an intermittent-reward quality to it. The spouse may provide affection, admiration, security, attention, and validation consistently enough that it becomes expected and almost invisible. The AP provides much less, but because it is uncertain, every small reward becomes highly salient.

Yes. The push pull dynamic creates lower lows and higher highs. For me, I was very low in going into the affair. The adrenaline can show up in either case. Just like a gambler who is down, there are still chemical rewards in it. But the true draw comes in the wins, no matter how meager, the cocktail of dopamine, endorphins bring an unnatural euphoria that for me made me thing there was something magical happening in this "relationship"

Truth is I didn’t give a shit about him. I didn’t think he was a better man, I didn’t think he was greatly attractive, that’s a veneer that I believed must be there because I was having a very common reaction to what affairs feel like. I only cared that he kept showing up, that the pull dynamic would return so I could chase those highs.

And there was an extraordinary amount of evidence he didn’t really give a shit about me either, I just didn’t focus on it for whatever reason.

Affairs are not a relationship with another person. Externally yes that’s what is happening, and of course to my husband that looked and felt very different. I am not minimizing the true facts of what I did, and what it caused , or how it all looks.

But escapism is a coping mechanism that I have had since I was a child. So my ability to consume it relies on my ability to fully leave reality and live in this other paradigm. One that gets hard to leave because of the psychological rewards that are inherent to the experience

Something for just me is akin to what it was - only focusing on getting what I wanted or needed from the situation. That layer of justification and the amplification of the high feelings twisted it into some crazy soul mate story. I needed to put it on a pedestal to keep getting high, without those highs my depression and mental state were rock bottom and it’s why I had such a hard time in withdrawal.

I honored Nc which is the most important thing so you can go all the way through withdrawal. But during those initial months, all I did was pray. for the pain to go away . It took some time to see the pain was not the absence of him, it was the pain of having my life be so much worse off in the aftermath and having my primary coping skills of avoidance and escapism also disabled. And not having any real dopamine or endorphins that were in quantities large enough to dull the ache of feeling soulless.

My reality dictated that I could not use those things and put things back on a path. Walking through the ruins of my life without any real framework for true coping, rendered me sitting in a park talking to God for hours on end, begging him to fix it. I didn’t know how to get back to normal, it took realizing I was in a physical withdrawal and figuring out ways to build up the happy chemicals again. I hadn’t run a day in my life but before long I was running upwards of 25 miles a week. It was the only thing that made me feel halfway normal.

In the aftermath of getting through the withdrawal, I learned to distill my experience to translate true needs and wants and simply needed to construct a life that authentically supported those things.

What I learned I wasn’t trying to have a relationship with someone else. What I craved was a relationship with myself. But I tried to solve it by living an alternate version of me because I didn’t like myself and I didn’t know how to become someone different who was still real. Had I liked myself I wouldn’t have hidden in that role where what I was trying to be was cherished—cherished by me, and by another person. It’s bastardized- it was actually self abuse trying to get that from someone who truly didn’t cherish me, and betraying the one who did. I didn’t feel cherished by my husband—because you can’t feel that someone else does if you can’t do that for yourself.

[This message edited by hikingout at 2:42 PM, Saturday, September 19th]

Hikingout wrote:

I honored Nc which is the most important thing so you can go all the way through withdrawal. But during those initial months, all I did was pray. for the pain to go away <-> I didn’t know how to get back to normal, it took realizing I was in a physical withdrawal and figuring out ways to build up the happy chemicals again.

I've seen WS' talk about this more than a few times. The months of withdrawal and pain. The difficulty letting the affair go.

I kind of get it, but to a BS it just looks like you're in love with someone else, and I'm sure you understand that.

My wife did not go through anything like this to that degree. She did drag her feet and fight with going no contact for about a month, but once she made up her mind to do it, he was yesterday's news. She was never once tempted to break no contact and stopped pining for him immediately. As soon as she realized he was a scumbag, that's exactly what she thought of him as. A scumbag. Her disdain and disgust was strong and complete. There was no prolonged mourning period or difficulty letting go of the relationship for her at all.

Once she made her decision she was completely recommitted to me and me only. It was really a pretty drastic almost overnight change. One day she's arguing that she doesn't have many friends who share her condition and the next he was lower than pond scum.

I don't know if I could have dealt with her moping around, pining and missing him for months like that. It would have been too much for me to deal with and I'd have probably filed for a divorce. It kills me reading some of the wayward threads attempting reconciliation that go on about not being able to get an AP out of their hearts and minds. There's one pinned at the top kind of blew my mind. I read it thinking "is this really what most WS' go through?" As a BS I don't think I could tolerate it.

I understand everything your just wrote from the bs perspective.

For us, it didn’t look like that, but I understand why and how it can.

My husband didn’t think I was in love with the guy, he thought I was very lost. And he was right in that. I had gone no contact for two months before confessing and had gone to therapy during that time and had really understood that a lot of what was happening was involuntary and unrelated to the AP. Understanding that framework actually made those discussions more productive.

The other element that probably helped him understand the batshit crazy that I felt was I was already under a doctors care for emotional exhaustion.

Neither of these things excused it, and I don’t think it’s softened the blow of the betrayal. But we weren’t talking about it like I was pining away from the ap. I was actually clear that I didn’t want the ap, even if we divorced. What was hard about the withdrawal is that I had dwindled my life to the very small space the affair actually existed in. (The affair was two month, long distance) And by that I mean I focused on it like I had ocd during that time to be able to ignore reality.

By the time I confessed, I was already looking into treatment for the OCD tendencies surrounding the affair.

In other words, I think we both thought I was sick. Yes it was hard for him to relate to but he didn’t watch me pine for the ap, neither of us would frame it that way. It was more of a fight for my sanity. I think this is the most I have said about it, but it was the darkest time in my life. I don’t think my husband really could believe I was having a good time with any of it.

Had it been presented to him right when the affair ended instead of two months later I think he would have maybe had a different picture? It was hard for me to understand that I knew I didn’t want the ap, yet I couldn’t live without them. It was because it was never about him. It was the getting high and then coming off it like a drug.

The best I can relate it to is other addictions that aren’t involving an external substance for the highs—-like gambling or shopping addictions. It’s very hard to understand how people get so deep into gambling that they lose their families, homes, etc. it’s because they have become physically dependent on the rush of body chemicals. When the thing that gets you high goes away and you wake up to nothing but destruction around you—-then you need a way to cope with that. But the loop is that your coping is built around the very thing you were addicted to—the next big win, the info could just buy one more thing—-whatever your escapism of choice currently is.

Coming back from that and building back happy chemicals, changing how you cope, changing the obsessive thought patterns, and then ultimately building back a life you can live in happily, it’s a hard battle.

The reason that I did all that work was driven by how dark and bleak I felt in withdrawal. I never want to put myself through such a death and rebirth like that again. It couldn’t have been because the relationship with someone 20 years older than me, who was married and not planning to change that,who didn’t really treat me that great, that I mostly texted over a period of two months (outside of person to person for a total of three days) was someone that I was so "madly in love with" that would make me almost suicidal? See it made no sense—-

So I had no choice but to see that the work was non-negotiable. I had made myself sick in the 18 months leading up to the affair, and after damaging myself further by actually having the affair, I was at below grown zero in my mental health-and I had done it all to myself. My husband didn’t see a romantic threat, he saw a woman in an existential crisis.

[This message edited by hikingout at 5:24 PM, Saturday, September 19th]

Okay, that clarifies things quite a bitnfor your situation. I think I understand where you were at with it, the withdrawal you're describing, and it makes more sense to me now.

However, I have read some threads like the survival guide pinned at the top of the wayward section and a few threads where waywards want to bargain with their spouses to keep contact, rationalize reasons for doing it, and seemingly genuinely pine for their AP for months, or even a year or more that I would find absolutely intolerable. That's pure torture for a BS. It would be like living in a special little circle of hell for someone like me, and I'm sure many others.

I'm incredibly hurt my wife had an affair to begin with, but watching her mope and be depressed for months over the thought of ending it to keep her marriage would be just awful.

I'm not unsympathetic to what you're describing tho. Would you consider yourself to be more of an edge case, or is that more common than I realized?

There were a lot of circumstances that led to my wife being depressed and unhappy. A major, major driver for her was losing her ability to drive safely. She grew up with a TBI and epilepsy her whole life. Her seizures stopped for 25 years, but she had to fight and struggle to be "normal." She has to work for things that come to many of us easily. Her getting her license was a major milestone for her. For someone like her, having her license represented autonomy, independence, and normalcy. When her seizures returned, that was stripped away from her through no fault of her own. She was devastated. And guess who is the one who pushed for it by having a heart to heart with her neurologist? Me. It was "all my fault."

She let so much resentment build and blamed me for ruining her life basically. Now she sees it. Now she understands that I was worried. I was scared to death that she might get into an accident and kill herself or someone else. That resentment is gone now. She sees I was always here for her, running her around, going to all of her appointments with her, and protecting her from herself. She didn't want her dr to know the frequency of her seizures and didn't want to "count" the petite mals as "real" seizures. She was having 3 or 4 a year, and they were completely unpredictable. It just wasn't safe anymore.

So when a fellow epileptic who didn't care about his own safety or the safety of others and drove anyway started buddying up to her, she tumbled head over heels into a relationship with him in a fairly short timeframe. Her entire affair lasted about 6 weeks. 4 of which included more and more intimacy which led to the last 2 weeks turning physical. She thought she was in love with the POS. That faded about as fast as it sparked. While there are some similarities I think my wife had very different reasons than you did.

Once she realized she was fucking up royally and that I wasn't her enemy all of the feelings she had for him went out the window and she was once again madly in love with me.

There were other factors and years of broken marriage leading up to that (tho things were improving quite well until the no driving thing entered the picture), but that was a major catalyst for this whole mess. She was absolutely destroyed when her dr told her "you're no longer safe to drive" and I was sitting right there, nodding along.

Of course neither she nor I see it as an excuse or justification for it. Not at all, but understanding some of the reasons isn't wrong. She no longer blames me and realizes what I did was out of love and concern, and that AP didn't give 2 shits about her or her safety. That prick used it to his advantage. "I have epilepsy and I drive. I don't see what the big deal is." That hit her like a sledge hammer.

He didn't have to get a phone call from a stranger explaining she'd been in an accident, then sit in the back of a cop car to get a ride to the scene, worried sick that she or someone else had been hurt, or that our vehicle was totaled. I was always there for her. We had history. I fucking cared. She finally realizes that now.

[This message edited by Pogre at 6:20 PM, Saturday, September 19th]