SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

RIO, I agree with coco. These guys are lying to you.

These guys think that guys who have sex only with wives are putzes and cucks. That you need the side piece to be the real man, the stud. No amount of wife sex is going to make up for that. A man getting something on the side >>>> any sex with wife.

IRL I know as much about these guys as what I saw on Mad Men. But on that show the quality of wife had basically nothing to do with the guys cheating. I'm assuming that may be closer to reality for your playa and dawg buddies.

How many men do you know IRL who tell you they need cuddles and sweet nothings whispered in their ears? Just because they aren't telling you doesn't mean they don't want it.

None. And I agree, it doesn't mean they don't want it. I want it too. But it's like number 75,323 on the list of wants. It's a "nice to have" not a "must have". It's like the difference between a ribeye and a filet. Yes, I like filet more, but I really like ribeye too. As long as I'm getting steak, I'm happy. But shoe leather? Nope, that's not gonna hit the spot at all.

Most men do need affirmation of some sort. All of my married female friends laugh about how their Hs need major acknowledgment when they put a dish in the dishwasher (maybe exaggerating a little here, but you get the idea). They want acknowledgment for everything they do and act like babies when they don't get it. Is that inflammatory?

I can't speak to it because I have no idea how my friends act behind closed doors. I know that almost none of us EVER affirm the other that way. "Got a raise today" will be met with "Wow, your boss is really stupid", not "Good job RIO!". Affirmation with words is just not something I've ever sought from anyone, my wife does provide it, but it has near 0 value to me. You like my work? Give me a raise. Don't tell me you like it. You love me? Lay me like tile, don't tell me how much I mean to you.

They are going to lie and say that they don't care one bit if their APs don't care about them. They do care. That doesn't mean they care about the APs. It means they only care about themselves. So, yeah, they are getting other stuff that makes them feel good whether they tell you about it not.

It's possible, but let me say, if that's the way these men treat people they "like", God help you if they don't like you. Even my W's AP, same pattern, the way he treated her I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Maybe he did like her and just has a very twisted way of showing it, and maybe my friends do really like the AP's who's pictures used to wind up as group MMS's in my phone (nude pictures) years ago. I suppose it's possible, just not what I consider "liking someone" to entail.

Even the single guy who has wild sex with a different woman every night is getting more than sex. He's getting that ego boost of being a stud. "Look at me. All the women want me. I'm so much better or more of a man than you because I can get all these women." Otherwise, why would they tell anyone about any of it?

Speaking for myself, when I was sleeping around, I never told anyone. Well, that's not entirely true, I had a group of guys that were comparing notes, but, it wasn't about "how great I was" it was "this bar is great on Thursday nights because there's a hospital next door and all the nurses come over". That may not be typical, but I was very secretive about my sexual life. Now, male AP's I know, yes, they're the opposite, I agree with you. They boast about it commonly. Perhaps that's for the ego boost, I really don't know.

coming perilously close to saying it's the woman's fault if her husband has an affair because she's not giving him enough sex.

Let me reverse it. How many cheating women do you think would say "I have a great emotional connection with my husband at home". I'll hazard a guess and say "not very many". Is that the H's fault? The W's fault? Or just a statement of fact and both/neither person's fault? I'm really not sure I can answer that, but I can tell you, in my experience, "not getting sex at home" is a major CLAIMED reason for men having an A. And I'll say, I believe them when they say it because there's logic in that statement. No sex at home, OK, well, plenty of sex in an A, so.. As immoral as it might be, it's logical to pursue an A if you actually do feel that way or are starved for sex at home. So I didn't challenge it because well, it seemed reasonable to me. Is it true? No idea. Is it the "reason" for the A? I'm sure in some cases it's part of the reason, but I lived in a low sex marriage for a long time and didn't cheat, so it's obviously not THE reason. A doesn't lead directly to B. But A increases the likelihood of B.

RIO, you're falling into the same old trap of assuming everyone is like you. I know you've said before that you came to realize this was not true. So, try to let go of what you would do and think about what others are telling you.

Btw, I didn't say the CHs liked the APs. I said they cared that the APs liked them.

I agree with striver that these sound like men who think they aren't real men unless they have a side piece. There are subcultures of people who think that way. They don't see it as any reflection on how much they value their partners and M. It's just what you do. So, again, it's not just about sex. It's about living up to an image.

Whenever RIO describes the cheaters he knows IRL, it reminds me of this section from Beyond Betrayal: Life After Infidelity by Frank Pittman.

Philandering

Philandering is a predominantly male activity. Philanderers take up infidelity as a hobby. Philanderers are likely to have a rigid and concrete concept of gender; they worship masculinity, and while they may be greatly attracted to women, they are mostly interested in having the woman affirm their masculinity. They don't really like women, and they certainly don't want an equal, intimate relationship with a member of the gender they insist is inferior, but far too powerful. They see women as dangerous, since women have the ability to assess a man's worth, to measure him and find him wanting, to determine whether he is man enough.

These men may or may not like sex, but they use it compulsively to affirm their masculinity and overcome both their homophobia and their fear of women. They can be cruel, abusive, and even violent to women who try to get control of them and stop the philandering they consider crucial to their masculinity. Their life is centered around displays of masculinity, however they define it, trying to impress women with their physical strength, competitive victories, seductive skills, mastery of all situations, power, wealth, and, if necessary, violence. Some of them are quite charming and have no trouble finding women eager to be abused by them.

Gay men can philander too, and the dynamics are the same for gay philanderers as for straight ones: the obvious avoidance of female sexual control, but also preoccupation with masculinity and the use of rampant sexuality for both reassurance and the measurement of manhood. When men have paid such an enormous social and interpersonal price for their preferred sexuality, they are likely to wrap an enormous amount of their identity around their sexuality and express that sexuality extensively.

Philanderers may be the sons of philanderers, or they may have learned their ideas about marriage and gender from their ethnic group or inadvertently from their religion. Somewhere they have gotten the idea that their masculinity is their most valuable attribute and it requires them to protect themselves from coming under female control. These guys may consider themselves quite principled and honorable, and they may follow the rules to the letter in their dealings with other men. But in their world women have no rights.

To men they may seem normal, but women experience them as narcissistic or even sociopathic. They think they are normal, that they are doing what every other real man would do if he weren't such a wimp. The notions of marital fidelity, of gender equality, of honesty and intimacy between husbands and wives seem quite foreign from what they learned growing up. The gender equality of monogamy may not feel compatible to men steeped in patriarchal beliefs in men being gods and women being ribs. Monogamous sexuality is difficult for men who worship Madonnas for their sexlessness and berate Eves for their seductiveness.

Philanderers' sexuality is fueled by angerand fear, and while they may be considered "sex addicts" they are really "gender compulsives" desperately doing whatever they think will make them look and feel most masculine. They put notches on their belts in hopes it will make their penises grow bigger. If they can get a woman to die for them, like opera composer Giacomo Puccini did in real life and in most of his operas, they feel like a real man.

Not all men, or all cheaters, fit the philanderer description. My WS certainly didn't. He was one of the dopes that thought he found his soulmate.

[This message edited by ibonnie at 2:57 PM, May 1st (Wednesday)]

Hi FloridaMan,

As with so much to do with infidelity, there is not an answer that fits every person or every scenario.

I really think that the 'only sex' issue is a blind alley and a distraction that takes you and your wife away from the issues that have to be addressed and fixed if reconciliation is to happen.

The biggest of which is a person (1) having the capacity to be married and still initiate and take part in an affair, and (2) why they took that action rather than fixing themselves or talking to their spouse where the revealing insight exists.

As a rule, sex-only relationships have to be short-lived. A one-night stand is the classic example. Two people can have a night of sex without even knowing each other's names, and then go their separate ways. A totally sex-based relationship, played out in 24 hours.

Where an affair has been longer, and involved multiple meetings, people in the affair make up their own narratives, to justify what they are doing in their own mind, and again if they are caught or they confess.

So your wife may have told herself, "This affair is perfectly okay, because it is just sex and I will not leave my husband because of it".

They never ask their spouse's opinion though, do they?

However, no affair is emotion-free, because human beings are emotional creatures. We have feelings about any person that we spend time with, and there is no way people undress and have sex multiple times without developing emotional feelings for them.

It may not be love, it may not be respect. It may be similar to two criminals robbing a bank together; we are both as shitty as one another, but don't we make a great team? But no affair that lasts for more than a few meetings is without an emotional component.

Lust may be one of the seven deadly sins, but it is also an emotion, so a relationship based on lust is a relationship based on emotion. Just because it was not high-minded virtuous 'love', or even the desire to start a new life together, does not mean there was no emotion there at all.

And I think that is what makes it hard for you to believe that your wife's affair meant 'nothing' to her. It meant enough to her for her to lie about it to you for six months, and to ignore the pledge of fidelity she made to you when you married. So her decision to have her affair was also a part of her emotional relationship with you, and how she frames her relationship with you.

It is also artificially compartmentalizing to suggest that an affair happens in complete separation from a marriage. They never, ever do.

For the period of an affair, a cheat maintains parallel relationships with two people: their spouse, and their affair partner. And to do that without having a nervous breakdown, they have to create justifications, excuses, reasons, minimisations, and a way to live with what they are doing. They only people who do not need to do that are sociopaths or psychopaths.

So what many betrayed people are told after an affair is discovered or confessed is what the cheating spouse told themselves for months or even years to help them live with their own actions.

A series of one night stands might be purely sex-focused, but an established affair with one affair partner means the affair partner is more than just a body.

And to say that an affair is 'sex only' separates it from the act of betrayal on which it is based.

A cheat does not go off and have sex with an affair partner without first choosing to betray their spouse. So their betrayed spouse has been considered emotionally, and then mentally shoved to the back of the closet before every 'just sex' encounter occurs. Which means that no affair sex is ever 'just sex'.

An equal component of every affair encounter is the emotional process of betrayal that every cheating spouse goes through. Which means they make their unwitting spouse a part of their affair by knowingly casting them in the role of the betrayed.

The sex part cannot happen without a cheating spouse going through a process of emotional detachment from their betrayed partner to enable the extra-marital sex to occur. So even a one night stand with a random stranger (who might arguably 'mean nothing' in the grand scheme of things) requires the cheating spouse to make emotional decisions about their marriage and the spouse they are betraying.

So infidelity is never 'just' sex, because the betrayed spouse is always involved in the process in their cheating partner's mind, even if they do not know it at the time.

To minimise the significance of an affair partner to nothing more than a life support system for genitalia is a variation of the same minimising process a cheating partner puts their betrayed spouse through.

And maybe that capacity for conveniently minimising both you and her affair partner (depending on which of you she was with), is where your wife has a ton of work to do. She prioritised herself and her pleasure over everyone else involved, with no concern for you or her affair partner's wife and family, and even calculated that she could essentially get away with it if she confessed.

That is where the significant problems with her lie, not in how she is attempting to frame and minimise the affair.

[This message edited by M1965 at 3:04 PM, May 1st (Wednesday)]

I agree with striver that these sound like men who think they aren't real men unless they have a side piece.

I'm not sure their motivation, but I can tell you, if you enter into an A, your MUCH more likely to meet men like this because, well.. They're having A's. Again, all bets are off when you enter into an A, you've stepped out of the "what would a normal man do" into the "what would a man who cheats on his wife do". And those are 2 very different standards of behavior. I usually speak from the perspective of the men I know who cheat, I don't talk about those I know who don't cheat because, frankly, they don't add to the conversation. They act as you'd expect, yes, sometimes a lustful look, but mostly "above board" with the exception of the conversations about lack of sex at home. But the men who I know who do cheat operate by an entirely different standard, and this is EXACTLY the group you self-select into when you enter into an A. Are they doing it for ego or sex? Who knows. I can tell you, I didn't do it for ego, I did it for sex (not an A, but sleeping with women before I was married). I could care less about how awesome guys think I am for sleeping with a woman. In fact, I would often lie to them about it "we're just friends" and that was relatively common among my friends. It had nearly nothing to do with ego and a whole lot to do with the pleasure that sex brought me. I really don't know why this is such a topic of contention, orgasm and sex are designed to be the most intensely pleasurable experiences that humans can experience. Why is it the least bit surprising that people pursue them for that feeling? If sex didn't feel good, the human race would have died out long ago. It feels good to motivate us to do it, not to build our ego, but just a standalone good. Same reason fatty food tastes good, to motivate us to eat more calories so we can survive the lean times. Why do I eat cake after dinner? I'm sure you could dig into FOO issues, my relationship with food, and my psychology, but, at the base of it; it tastes good and I like cake. It really is that simple.

Btw, I didn't say the CHs liked the APs. I said they cared that the APs liked them.

I misread you. I agree with that statement. If someone doesn't like you, it's difficult/impossible to get them to have sex with you, so, yes, I'd say it was important to the cheaters I know that their AP liked them because without that, they can't get their end goal.

So, again, it's not just about sex. It's about living up to an image.

I can't argue this because I really don't know. But let's take other examples, why did Hugh Grant get a BJ from a prostitute in a car? Was that to live up to some image? Or was it just because he wanted to have sex with someone new? I'd argue (strongly) the 2nd, and I further argue that more accurately describes the A's that I know of personally than someone trying to get their ego stoked by taking a woman home. I know men who use professionals, their ego isn't stroked by that, if anything, it's injured. But they still do it (and I'm now thankful that they do, every man seeing pros is a man not trying to talk my W out of her panties).. What's the motivation there? And, like it or not, most A's are a very small step from prostitution; no, it's not money, but it's "tell me what I want to hear and I'll F you". It's a different payment for the same result. I just don't see a lot of difference between the two in many of the A stories that I read here.

To minimise the significance of an affair partner to nothing more than a life support system for genitalia is a variation of the same minimising process a cheating partner puts their betrayed spouse through.

I don't think that this is true for my W at all. It was far more than that for her. But for him? I think your description above is dead on accurate, she was a life support system for a vagina that could deliver said vagina to him for sex when he so desired. That's, like it or not, what a lot of people willingly sign up for when they enter into an A. And I think that we have quite a few WW's here who've realized it after the fact; wow, this is really the deal that I made and really what my role was; keeping my vagina/anus/mouth alive and willing to pleasure the AP. Yes, it was, in a lot of cases anyway (and certainly my WW's), your value was reduced to just that. Which is OK, I guess, but it's also counter to what nearly every women says they want from a man. If you want to be treated as a sex toy, by all means, there's a line of MM out there who will happily take you up on that. But don't do that and then be surprised when you've selected yourself into the group of men who.. Use women as sex toys!

[This message edited by Rideitout at 3:14 PM, May 1st (Wednesday)]

RIO, ibonnnie's post is a perfect explanation. I've already stated my opinion about attached men and prostitutes. I know you read it because you commented on it.

I am not having a hard time grasping the idea that men are motivated by sex. I'm an evolutionary biologist. I absolutely believe, and am pretty sure I've stated somewhere, that there is a evolutionary advantage to men being motivated by sex and wanting to have sex with as many women as possible. Yes, sex feels extremely good for a reason. That reason is to propagate the species.

What I have a hard time with is your insistence that all men only care about the sex. They get nothing out of an A. That's just not true. Sex may be the primary motivation, but it's certainly not the only motivation, and it's not the only reward. I don't understand why this is so difficult for you to grasp.

[This message edited by cocoplus5nuts at 4:19 PM, May 1st (Wednesday)]

My wife also had a sex focused/sex only affair.

In view of your immediate response to D, she's likely saying what she thinks will maximize her chances for R.

From your initial post, your wife confessed to a 4 month BDSM relationship/affair with a COW (including sex with the COW 4 times).

Do the texts/email records support her statement that it was just about sex (no emotional connection)?

Does the time frame support her statement that it was just about sex? How did she meet him and how long until it escalated to a PA?

At the very least she liked him, enjoyed his attention and trusted the OM enough to become intimate with him. Unless she's a robot that implies more than just sex.

My understanding of polygraph tests is that they are better at confirming fact based behavior vs

emotional states (especially from 6 months ago).

Is it extremely rare for women to have sex focused/sex only affairs ?

If a woman does have a sex focused/sex only affair what does it mean ?

For me man, my wife went on ashley Madison and had two affair partners. She described me to them as as "good provider but lacking passion". It might just be me, but I think it might have been me being in Afghanistan that stood in way of providing passion at the time, but I'm just lucky i know how to spell the word. Kwim?

So, while she listed a bunch of reasons related to her inner "brokenness", a part of me can't help but think she just wanted to get freaky and it was more along the lines of the mice playing while the cat was away.

And it hurt. Like hell. And i healed. The pain didn't last forever.

So, for me I can relate to this question because a part of me still thinks she just wanted some d.

Here's what I learned:

As far as whether she was in it for the sex or the attention or the emotions or excitement or attraction or any of the other multitude of whatever the hell she thought she got out of it... it's really like a fart. It might've been long or short or loud or silent... it's still stinks and by the time you smell it, there's no taking it back. Can't unfart.

Course who the hell am I? Just a stranger on the internet.

What I have a hard time with is your insistence that all men only care about the sex. They get nothing out of an A. That's just not true. Sex may be the primary motivation, but it's certainly not the only motivation, and it's not the only reward. I don't understand why this is so difficult for you to grasp.

I never said they get nothing out of an A. They get sex. As does the WW. My instance is that either party, in almost all cases, gets nothing ELSE of any real value out of the A. There's a reason there's a market for paid sex and not a market for "paid ego kibble delivery". Because there's no value in a "paid ego kibble". And make no mistake, those kibbles are bought and paid for with sex.

I don't mean to claim it's the ONLY reward. It's the reward that makes it worthwhile though, at least in my experience. Let me use an example. I get dental insurance from my job. It's good insurance and it's real cheap, so it's something I appreciate from the job. But if my job stopped paying me tomorrow, but kept my dental insurance, well.. I'd be looking for a new job the day after. The pay (sex) is what makes the job (affair) worthwhile. Yes, there are other fringe benefits, but they are that, nice to haves. And some of the fringe benefits have no value to me at all (the yoga room, not my thing). Yes, my job provides it, but I don't really care one way or another. That's more the analogy for affairs. Of course an affair provides kibbles. But those kibbles are about as valuable to me as my dental insurance is, if my company switched providers or even stopped offering it entirely, I wouldn't quit. In fact, I'd really hardly care, I can buy that on the open market for a very affordable price. But if they stop paying my salary, I'm gone tomorrow. That's the "primary motivator" for me, and without it, none of the secondary motivators matter.

Now, of course, this equation is going to be different for everyone. Need 15 root canals tomorrow? Well, the dental insurance will be more valuable to you than it is to me. Everyone will have a different weighting to the things provided from the A, but, for me personally, the "your so wonderful RIO" would be about as useful as the yoga room. I guess it's nice that we have one, but if they took it out tomorrow, I wouldn't really notice. And that analogy, I feel, is a lot more complete way to look at my cheating friends. Of course they are happy to have other women hanging on them like they are gods gift. And enjoy talking about their exploits, sharing the pictures and trying to one up each other with the level of depravity they've gotten the AP to stoop to (the ultimate, sex in the marital bed, in case you're wondering). But none of those motivations are anywhere near enough to get them to do it, IMHO, without sex. It's the "salary", bragging anal sex in the back of the car is the dental insurance.

RIO!!! You don't value egokibbles??!?!

Don't you know at the Ego-Kibble Exchange they trade at the rate 1 Ego-Kibble (EK) per .0000045% of a kidney bean.

Now I know some of you are thinking ‘hey, that beats the pants off the rate Walmart is offering. 1 EK to .000000013% of a jelly bean!’

If you don't believe me, see my evidence here:

https://www.survivinginfidelity.com/forums.asp?tid=609745&AP=1&HL=

Depends entirely on the amount of ego kibbles delivered per "RIO, your so dreamy". 1 trillion ego kibbles per, well, I might be able to have an A and corner the jellybean market.

If you decide to grow a jellybean hill like me, let me know so we can start a club!!

That would be awesome, we could get matching black leather jackets with jelly bean skulls!

Oh, I'm sorry going off the deep end here with my club dreams right now. We'd definitely need a lobbyist.

RIO:

"I know very few/no men who've cheated who would also say they have a "loving partner ready to please" at home"

And Striver and Coco both basically said these guys are lying to you.

For sure. I mean, in your after work/gym/beer/guy time polls, who in the world would tell you their "real reasons" for an affair? Or how they conducted themselves at home? Who would actually admit to the types of cheating behavior that makes them look like a huge douche?

To your point that few/no men who cheat have an active, willing, loving, faithful (or even a limber freak-a-deak kinky) partner at home is from my own very personal experience, a huge fallacy.

I mean, thanks to us having a continued busy (and unprotected) bedroom at home, I had increased exposure to some awesome "gifts" during all his affairing. (You know, that he was doing because he wasn't getting the amount/type/level of sex he wanted at home.) Lucky me - I had the joy of finding out from my doctor after Dday what that ongoing sex with my cheater got me. I sure wish in retrospect that we did have a dead bedroom.

I would just gently suggest you might consider the depth of what your poll responders tell you. I'm pretty sure mine wouldn't have told you anything close to the truth about his real behavior.

Sometimes the generalizations that come out of your buddies' mouths can be a bit salty for some of us when we are living proof of the opposite.

Oops. That was a typo, RIO. I meant nothing but sex.

I didn't say RIO values ego kibbles. He's not a cheater, afaik. I actually said (maybe it was one another thread) that not everyone thinks like he does. Yeah, I think that was on another thread.

Cheaters have damaged egos and low self esteem. They do value those ego kibbles, whether it's being told they are pretty and loved, or being able to get an OW to have sex with them.

RIO, maybe you can explain this to me. I engaged in various sexual activities with OM for four months and slept with him on one night towards the end of the A. He then moved back across the country to his home state. He continued to attempt to restart the A -- calls, letters, gifts, songs -- for six months, including one weekend where he flew 3000 miles to see me for a total of 8 hours, despite my assurances that nothing physical of any kind was going to happen (and it didn't). I went NC when my BBF proposed. OM's last attempt to contact me was 18 months later, the week before I got married.

OM was single, an Ivy League graduate, in law school, and reasonably attractive. I promise you, there were far easier opportunities for him to get laid on his home turf. Am I supposed to believe I was so stellar in the sack that it was worth two years of transcontinental effort to reel me back in? To hijack one of your common metaphors, that sounds like attempting to rob a bank when someone left the doors of the fully loaded armored truck unlocked on the street.

I'm not saying there was anything real about OM's feelings for me, but if he didn't think there was, where's the logic in his behavior?

I'm not saying there was anything real about OM's feelings for me, but if he didn't think there was, where's the logic in his behavior?

I don't know your particular story, but that sounds like classic harem building behavior to me. Think about it, if you want to have lots of sex, there are two ways to go about it. Find a lot of new sexual partners or, alternately, keep multiple existing sexual partners open/available to you. This sounds like the 2nd. It's far easier to sleep with someone you've already slept with than it is to find someone new to sleep with. And what you're describing is classic "low investment grooming" behavior. Keep it on a low boil and make sure opportunities for sex, if they present themselves, have a good chance at "conversion" into actual sex. It's why TXT messaging and things like Facebook have been such a boon for "harem building", 10 minutes each night, you can TXT/write something sweet to 5 different women and keep all of them "interested enough" that you might be able to sleep with them again if you're together. Where in the past, you'd have to pick up the phone and talk for an hour, or take them out on date (hours of effort), now all that can be reduced to a few sentences in instant message. Sentences that can be copy/pasted between women if you so desire.

Who knows if his feelings were real or not. Also, does it matter? We have a lot of these discussions, and often I wind up thinking to myself we're arguing about the color of air. You say it's blue, I say it's red; but, fundamentally, it doesn't matter what color it is so long as your breathing it. Do I really care if my W's feelings for the AP were real? Not a whole lot, those feelings were based on fiction and lies; who did she really have feelings for? Not the man he was, I can assure you that, because the man he was did awful things to other people, including his family, to get a new piece of a**. And I'm also 99.9% certain she doesn't feel that way today. The feelings are ephemeral, they are here today, gone today. The actions that she took during the A, those have repercussions, at least for me they do, because there's no need to guess "did he love her", the facts are "he did this with her".

BraveSirRobin,

There’s a strong possibility you are underestimating the power of your pixie dust.

Signed,

Your friendly internet Neanderthal

that sounds like classic harem building behavior to me. Think about it, if you want to have lots of sex, there are two ways to go about it. Find a lot of new sexual partners or, alternately, keep multiple existing sexual partners open/available to you.

Well, I see your point for someone who is local, but I still don't get how it applies to this situation. It's not like he could make a random booty call from that distance. The only time he was even on this coast was the time he came specifically to see me. Hell, it was 1989, no cell phones, no digital cameras, no sexting. I guess phone sex was viable, but calls still cost by the minute, and he never tried it. How am I a good candidate for harem building? He was going to buy a plane ticket when he wanted to get some?

And let me be clear, I'm not pushing this because I'm invested in proving it was twu wuv. It wasn't. The A is 30 years in the rearview mirror, and I think he projected on me for a combination of reasons (one that got away, martyr complex, various other cliches). I'm not arguing whether it was ultimately "real," I'm disputing motivation. Your response flips back to saying that you don't care if the feelings were real for your wife, because women are irrational like that, and all men are after the sex, which they get. You've said repeatedly that there may be exceptions, but you haven't seen one. I counter that we see circumstances where men are in the fog fairly routinely. Are more men in it solely to get laid than not? I think you're probably correct that they are. But the universal generalization has started to grate a bit, so again, how does love bombing me for months from thousands of miles away get him casual NSA sex?

Are more men in it solely to get laid than not? I think you're probably correct that they are.

Then I think we probably agree, just in different shades of "more". In my eyes, "more" is "almost all". And becomes "nearly all" when you take post-A behavior into account; if he drops her and moves on like she's a leper, well, I'd argue that tells you everything you need to know about "tru luvv". But, your right, there are some men who get into "love" affairs, I just think they are rarer than it's made out to be; I know quite a few cheaters and not 1 "love" affair. And usually, this conversation comes up when a BW comes here all torn up because her husband was "in love" with another woman, where I'll offer up "It was almost certainly not love, especially if he's still with you".

Speaking without generalizations for a moment, love is extraordinarily rare for me. If I fell out of love with my W and found another woman I truly was in love with, I'd leave so fast your head would spin. Lust/want to F you however, is wildly common for me. I see girls every day I'd like to sleep with/find sexy. Speaking for me, playing to odds, if I were sleeping with someone other than my W, chances are very, very good that it's the 2nd category (like to F) rather than the first (in love). Particularly when you add the "A element" and the fact that I'm rational enough to realize this isn't going beyond a lay; I'm going to close myself off to love with that person and concentrate more on the things that I'm likely to actually get (sex).

I would never hold out that a "true love" male affair is unheard of, nor would I hold that a "just sex" female affair is impossible either. But, absent really strong evidence to the contrary, the best guess for a male A is "just sex" and for a female is "love". And that doesn't apply to just A's, again, speaking for myself, if you had a snapshot of me with every sexual partner I've ever had and asked me to use yellow sticky notes for "just sex" and green for "love", I'd use two green stickies and a whole stack of yellows. One of those green stickies would be on my W, the other on a college GF. And none of this happened in the context of an A, something I'd argue would make "love" rarer and even less likely to be the case. Now, if you took the yellow sticky stack and then asked me to go through that stack and put a red sticky next to each woman I claimed to love? No, it wouldn't be all of them. But it would be most. "I love you" was a means to an end for me, it was a "social grace" rather than a statement that had meaning. So hearing those words without the context really meant nothing at all. And if the context is "keep having sex with someone who's not my wife" well.. I find it near impossible to believe that "I love you" wouldn't be part of my hypothetical A, even though it's almost certain that what we understand to be "love" would have zip to do with it.

I guess the message is this, I don't want to see BW's beat themselves up over something that's almost certainly, in my experience, not true. Just like so many WW's have helped me with the "had all kinds of kinky sex, but it probably wasn't because he was a god in bed" problem I have, I try to return the favor. No, it probably wasn't love, and no, he probably wasn't all that wonderful in bed. Both things COULD be true, it could be love, and he could have been the 2nd coming of John Holmes in bed. But it's not likely, and there's little/no reason to assume that those things are true without strong evidence to the contrary.