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, I prayed for the pain to go away, but 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 mikes a week. It was the only thing that made me feel halfway normal.

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

I guess the arc in the way I told it, is that 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. 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, and I never really felt cherished by him for the same reason I didn’t feel cherished by my husband—because you can’t feel that someone else will if you can’t.

[This message edited by hikingout at 2:35 PM, Saturday, September 19th]