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.

After my Dday, I was so fearful I would never enjoy music again.
Music has always been a huge part of my life. My mom was a professional musician. Music was everywhere growing up. I went on to study music in college. Made my living doing music for a few years.
I have a wide variety of musical tastes. My XWS enjoyed listening to and learning about music from me.
I did not know if I could listen to or play music again.
It took my adult DD saying to me "Mom, you have loved music your entire life. Long before dad came into your life. Don't let him take that from you."
You will find your way back to music. You will enjoy it again.

Men (or most men) are completely capable of separating the physical act of sex from love, yes. Men tend to associate love with loyalty, economic support, and social/filial duty, with sexual exclusivity being seen as a contractual agreement rather than a mandate of instinct.

This appears to be a fundamental biological difference between the sexes, i.e. women conversely seem to require (or acquire) an emotional component to enjoy or be interested in sex. This is a broad, statistical generality and will certainly not be true in some individual cases.

Conversely, love isn't a compulsion for men, either. I told my WW in the aftermath of her adultery that I still loved her, and that I would go on loving her to the end of my life even if I left her and never spoke to her ever again.

Related science stuff: Bio-chemically, a man appears to sexually pair-bond with whichever woman he's having sex with, an effect which generally fades over the course of seven to fourteen days (though many years of constant sexual contact appears to show more permanent bonding and neuro-bio-chemical adjustment in men). A woman tends to permanently pair-bond with whichever man she first has sex with. This female pair-bonding capability will drastically diminish or "burn out" with every subsequent sexual contact (including eroding her first pair-bond) until, after several partners, she doesn't really sexually bond much, if at all. This might not seem fair, but I will point out that all the major world religions have been telling women to pick one and stick with him for thousands of years, now, so it's not as if we haven't had any warning.

-M

Mindjob, I think whoever studied pair bonding in females and came to the "first sex partner = strongest bond for women" may have worked with a limited population for their comparison, which may have produced a weakly powered statistical probability; I mean, what if they found approx. 60% of the female population conformed to their hypothesis but not the other 40%? I'd be interested in seeing that study.

The problem I see with that general conclusion is we know that too many women have negative first sexual encounters. I would hate to think we ladies pair bond with some boor who wouldn't take no for an answer...or with my XH for that matter, UGH!! 😖

The conclusion that I drew from the whole study is that we as a species should deal with sex a lot more seriously and carefully, as the effects of it are far more potentially harmful than the ways we are flippantly handling (and mishandling, to your point) the whole endeavor would appear to merit.

Of course, I didn't really need a study to reveal that, the trauma running through the threads of this forum are proof positive of that conclusion.