SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

A few thoughts:

I think that "love" can be defined in many different ways. I love chocolate, I love my parents, I love my kids, I love my pets. They are qualitatively different. I think that it is possible for a cheater to "love" their spouse when having an affair. I think that the meaning of the term becomes as fucked up and dishonest as the cheater him or her self. Do I think my WH "loved" me when he was dick deep in his cheap side piece? Yes, in a delusional, dishonest way that would reflect his thinking at the time. He loved himself more, THAT is the bottom line. I also think that convincing themselves that they 'love" their BS allows the cheater a way to continue avoid seeing themselves as completely despicable (which they are).

I agree that it is impossible to truly love someone and treat them the way that cheaters treat BS, but I think that cheaters see love in a completely different way than normal humans. This infantile viewpoint of love is part of what they have to change if they are to become safe and worthy partners. Love is transactional for cheaters. It is not compassionate and honest and supportive and full of integrity like it is for non-cheaters.

This thread is right up my username alley. My WH claims he loved me the same before during and after his LTA. Makes my head want to explode. Then wtf does it even mean to love a person? His response is I always loved you and I never loved her, you and she were completely different things, unconnected, unrelated. One of us is a grand master compartmentalizer who can make all this make sense and it isn't me.

Many here have said that love isn't what you feel, it's what you do. It's caring equally or sometimes more for another as you do yourself. There's no room for selfishness, lying, manipulation, deception or control of facts in my definition of love. In his definition, he is still here because he loves me, he stayed because he loves me, he swears he will always love me. His love has depreciated and devalued so much I can't understand it right now. I'm trying.

I get all hung up on how much of his love is really about safety, path of least resistance, saving face, guilt or any number of negative lenses I see through now. Of course he loves me, because he needs to stay with me so our lives don't unravel in so many other ways than they currently are. That's how I see things on my cynical days. My rational brain keeps doing the math, that if he loved me he would have made different choices. If you love someone, you do not harm them, you help keep them safe. So... If he loved me he would have spared me this pain and he would have protected me and spared further cracks to my broken heart. I think he chose to love himself more, in unhealthy and immature ways, and he maybe liked or tolerated me or appreciated me a lot for our history and for all I brought to the table in our relationship. But loved me through all that he did? Not buying it.

I want to know what love is, or what it means or how it can possibly even be real in the face of what I know about it now. True Love feels like Santa Clause - an idea I believed in because I was naïve. I think the best work my WH can do now is reflect on what love means to him and how he could give himself permission to do what he did and convince himself that that is still any kind of love worth having. I want no part of bullshit half assed love, or any part of a person whose emotional IQ can't comprehend what real love is. At least now I know I am worth more, and I deserve more. Thanks to a Gottman Minute email on love, we have the concept of love buckets and talk about what we do to give and feel love to each other. When I'm feeling down, I ask for help filling my love bucket. It gets empty a lot because he shot so many holes in it.

Sorry for the rant. Sorry for your pain, and for knowing you'll probably find as many answers to your question as I have.

I can see all the different perspectives on this, and really I agree with all of them.

I know that makes no sense.

When starting my affair the AP asked me why. Looking back that should have clicked something, but it did not. My only answer was "this is about me, not him. We've had a good marriage, he is a good husband". That's a very confusing thing to relay but I am being very honest here.

However, I think in answering that, I answered in the big picture sort of way. In the more detailed answer sort of way, I had become so unhappy (my fault) that I had been numbing myself and stuffing my feelings until I really didn't have a connection with anyone or anything, even myself. The affair happened because it lit up my happy chemicals in my brain and this guided my behavior rather than really looking at what I was unhappy about and fixing it.

All that to say, I don't think I really loved anyone prior, during, and in the aftermath of my affair. I was a huge void with very little ability to feel emotion. I could feel the dopamine hits though, and that confused the whole picture.

Now that my husband has had one, I tend so see the compartmentalizing he was doing that he believed that it was possible. We did a tremendous amount of work on our marriage during his affair. He was attentive and probably the best version of my husband in decades. To find out that he was fucking some other person during all of that is more than my brain can really process at this point. I was the opposite - anyone paying attention could have noticed I was completely checked out of our marriage. Do I believe he believed he loved me? Yes. Do I believe I loved him during my A? Also yes, but more the feeling that's more typical of "I love you but I am not in love with you". He claims to have felt "in love" with me.

So, again, it comes down to a flawed sense of what love is, and basing it on feelings rather than actions. Absolutely you can have feelings for more than one person.

However, the true litmus test moving forward has to be that you are putting that other person's interests at least equal to your own if not above. And, under that litmus test every single cheating person fails.

[This message edited by hikingout at 1:05 PM, November 9th (Monday)]

WH disagree on this, he says he loved and never stopped

You WH husband loved what you brought to the marriage. He loved what you gave him. But that’s the extent of it.

His definition of love is (was?) one sided.

He didn’t care about you.

That’s why you are having this argument. Because your definition of love and his definition of love is not the same.

It’s as if you are asking a color blind person whether your dress matches your shoes. The color blind person will answer based on the dress and shoe style.

I believe my WH didn’t love anything about himself, and therefore was unable to pour from the proverbial empty cup. The state he was in, how he felt about himself, he was incapable of truly loving me during that time in his life. He was on a path of self-destruction, and when someone doesn’t even care about their own well-being, it’s hard to imagine they have the capacity to genuinely care about anyone else.

So to answer the question, no I don’t believe you can love your spouse while simultaneously having an A.

Cheaters are liars. They will claim to have not stopped loving their spouses if they think it will lessen consequences.

So. It has been said that cheating is abuse and cheaters are abusers. Therefore, they can't love the spouse while cheating. Cheating is certainly not an act of love. Abuse is not an act of love.

My mom physically and emotionally abused me. Does my mother not love me? For many years, I believed there was no way she could love me and treat me the way she did.

One day after my daughter was born, I had an epiphany. I saw with out a doubt that my mom loves me and she loved me from the moment she knew she was pregnant with me. There is still no doubt in my mind of that reality.

Now, my mom is still a very broken and mentally ill person. That is what caused the abuse. It had nothing to do with love. My mom is also a cheater. She is getting pretty old and she struggles with all her past behaviors. She can't sleep for hating herself for all she's done. It is heart breaking for me to watch.

My fwh is now in recovery from his addiction. He was broken and mentally ill. Was his cheating abuse? Absolutely. Did he love me? I believe he did. Perhaps I'm delusional and I "need" to think that to R with him. But I don't think so.

I think love is a very separate thing. Broken, mentally ill people are still capable of love. Their behavior is certainly not loving, but I dont believe that erases all love.

I know when I was struggling with mental illness, it didn't stop me from loving others. I'm not saying that every one who cheats is mentally ill. I am saying that broken people do broken things. And love is separate from that.

Nope.

Love is an action. WS's actions during an A are the opposite of love.

GoldenR I agree.. Love is a verb.. It is based upon your actions to someone else..

The WS might say they never stopped loving you during the A, but their actions tell a totally different story. They lied.. Betrayed.. Withheld vital information.. They focused their attention on another man/woman.. Put their effort elsewhere than the marriage.

Did they think they still loved you? Probably.. Were their actions those of a loving, loyal partner? Not in a million years and actions speak louder than a million words ever could.

No. A WS can attempt to rationalize and say anything they want but their actions will always trump their words.

Love does not behave indecently.

Love is an action. WS's actions during an A are the opposite of love.

I tend to agree with this, as in, "not my definition of love". That said, in their own ways, I do think a lot of the men I know who cheat love their wives. Just not in "my way" (or as defined above). I have little doubt that most of the men I know, even the absolute worst of them, would jump in front of a bullet for his wife. The often gush about what a great mother she is, how good she is with the kids, how great a life they've made together, etc. Of course, I do know others who aren't like this, but the most common in my experience is the "my wife is amazing" guy.

The only analogy that I can draw that even makes sense in my head is my wife's cooking vs going out for a fancy meal. Do I love my wife's cooking? Yes, I do. Do I love this one particular place nearby' s cooking? Yes, I do. Does my love of the lasagna at my restaurant change my love for my wife's food? IMHO, no, it does not.

But it's an entirely different "love". If my wife died, I'd be beyond conciliation, it would turn my world upside down and I doubt I'd ever recover from it. No need to suppose, the restaurant that I'm thinking of in my example with the great Italian food; well, it "died" recently because of COVID. I was sad for a few seconds and then moved on; haven't thought about it since until typing this message.

I think it's something like this that's going on in the cheater's heads that I know. The AP is "good takeout food", serves a purpose, fulfills a desire/need and might cook up a great "dish" that the WS longs for. But, and this I'm sure of, if the AP disappears, it's like my Italian place going under, "Oh man, that sucks; what's the dividend on MMM looking like?". In other words, "oh well, back to business". I know we use the word "love" to describe how we feel about our spouses AND also how we feel about our favorite pair of shoes, we've overloaded that word to the point where it's lost much of it's meaning. But I do think that the majority of men I know who cheat, they "love" their wives and they would make incredible sacrifices for them to show/prove it. AP's get to hear the word "love" a lot, but, come on, we all know what's actually going on there and it's not often that it actually has any relation to what we call/consider "love" in a relationship and a lot more to do with "love" of lasagna.

So, it really depends on what you think of "love" as. IMHO, no, you can't, by my definition, love your spouse while having an A. But by another definition, it's easy to do so. So I don't think that this question can be answered without a personal definition of what "love" is to you.

The short answer to the question, "Can you love your wife while having an affair with another?" is NO.

Love does not do that. Infidelity is not a loving act. It is selfish instead of selfless. It in no way imitates love.

I firmly believed that my XWW loved me when she was with me I mean physically, when we were together, but the moment she was with another man I was in the background.

Also she is a chameleon, she adopt the behavior form the people she interacts. So if she said she loved me is more like she love herself when she was with me she loved the image of herself with me. But when she was with the OM she adopted another different behaviour, that's why when I read the texting she was having with the other guy is like she was someone else I couldn't recognized her. Maybe there's a name for that I don't know.

Sorry if it doesn't make sense, as I have said before english is not my main language,

[This message edited by RichT at 10:47 AM, November 10th (Tuesday)]

That’s was a good post RIO.

I love these answers. It’s nice to hear from some WS.

My understanding of love and what I have been raised to believe is.

Love is a feeling you feel for a person and the way we show it is by our actions. We can’t see a feeling and sometimes it’s so intense you can’t verbally explain. So our actions show a person how much we do.

This love is different to loving things like our clothes or house. I have always believed there are two types.

Maybe this is why I don’t understand my WH actions when he says he loves me. They just don’t a-line.

My STBX says he loved me before during and after his A's. It didn't feel like love though. Maybe that was the best that he could do after behaving so shamelessly. He has voiced that he loves with the capacity that he has. I do not believe my STBX was shown healthy love from his parents so I do believe him when he says he loves with the skills he was given. It is very sad. I know my STBX wants nothing more than to love and be loved, but he has hurt me and abused me and lot of other people too. For me the saying "sometimes love isn't enough" comes to mind.

Most of the answers here to whether you can love your wife while having an affair, distill down to "No, because you can't while having an affair." Which is circular reasoning.

I can love lots of things at the same time. That's the argument I had with my kids, that each time a new one came along, I didn't love the current ones any less.

But they sure got a lot less attention.

Has there ever been a woman who had to choose between two beaus? Does a polygamist love his wives? Probably.

What makes it wrong is the cheating, the breaking of promises, the violation of commitment. The giving of space in the WS's head and heart that was promised to the BS. But otherwise...I think they can love the BS.

Yes, I do believe that a cheater can still love their partner while engaging in destructive behaviours. Humans have an amazing capacity for cognitive dissonance. To them, I'm sure it just feels like compartmentalization.

That doesn't mean it's okay, nor does it mean you have to accept it.

HouseofPlane- it's not the loving two people that's the issue when things are honest and ethical. I love my husband and my boyfriend, and there's no dissonance there.

It's claiming to love someone while actively lying to and deceiving them, and breaking your marriage vows. That's where the confusion lies.

My husband maintained for about 2 years that he loved me during his A.

After the truth vomit last year, he has been able to admit to himself and me that he might have told himself he still loved me, in spite of what he did, but he was in no way treating me with love and actively disrespecting me. I truly think that if they admit that they didn't love us, it not only adds to the fear that we will leave (why stay with a person who doesn't love you?) but is also extremely hard for them to admit to themselves because it is proof that they broke promises, acted without integrity and have a part of them that is calculating and manipulative.

I have maintained throughout that if he loved me while he was sleeping with someone else and lying to my face about it, I'm not interested in that kind of love and deserve better.

At this point, the affair is 3.5 years behind us, and the last trickle of truth came over a year ago. It really doesn't matter what he thought of me during the affair anymore. If I am going to try and reconcile, I want to know and SEE what love means to him today and every day forward. If it is anything less than what I KNOW I deserve, I will make my decisions about what I put into the relationship (and if I will stay) based on that. Being angry that he loved me or didn't, doesn't serve me today.

(And for what it's worth, I was PISSED that he kept saying he loved me. And if I sit in that thought, I can easily get angry again. So I get how you feel and think this is a very normal feeling and reaction.)

ETA: I was reading through these responses and HO hit the nail on the head with the inability to love prior to the A. I think the part that is the MOST painful for me, is that my WH did not love me prior to DDay 2. I really don't think he did. And this is a man I have been with for 23 years now. I was his first almost everything. Unfortunately he wasn't capable of real love. Everything up to that point of his life was performative or for his enjoyment. Everything. There was no depth to his feeling because he did not ever engage in anything other than "fun". I still cry when I watch things on TV, like the family episode of Survivor, where the spouses just truly have this love and connection and vulnerability. I cry because I know that had my WH gone on one of those shows pre A, he would have been happy to see me, but only because he'd be trying to get some behind a palm tree or because he was lonely. Not because I was special or worthwhile in my own right. I do believe however, that post DDay 2, he knows me, he respects me, he supports me and that he has actual feelings of depth for me (and our kids and more importantly himself).

[This message edited by TX1995 at 2:43 PM, November 10th (Tuesday)]