On the “meaningless sex” topic, I put quote marks around it bc my WW used that exact phrase. Unfortunately for me, I just don’t have a grid for understanding it. Yes, I can conceptually “get” that people have meaningless sex, or tell themselves that’s what they are doing.
There have been a lot of threads around this concept. Yes, as BR has said, both men and women can have "meaningless" sex. There is a whole thread in the "I Can Relate" forum specifically about this (although most of the betrayeds there are BW's whose husbands cheated by using prostitutes). I would note that there are countless posts here discussing the fact that cheating women almost always say this to their betrayed husbands as a part of their effort to minimize, and the fact that, from a man's perspective, the "it was just sex" is often more hurtful than it would have been if she had actually been in love with the AP. There is a gulf of understanding between women and men on this point. To women, "it was just sex" is less hurtful; to men, it is often more hurtful. What hurts us is that our wife chooses to inject time and energy giving sexual pleasure to another man, and break her wedding vows, simply because she desires sex with him.
Yes, I've seen plenty of posts by betrayed wives also bemoaning the sex aspects of their WH's affairs. However, what I have seen over and over is that, for a betrayed wife, the source of the pain is the idea that her husband enjoyed sex with the AP more than with her. For a betrayed husband, the source of the pain is that the WW chose to give sexual pleasure to another man.
But that is somewhat of a digression. Back to BR's point, women enjoy recreational sex also. Historically, our society imposed a heavy stigma on women around this, so as a practical matter there was probably less of it than with men, but nowadays the stigma is diminished and women are free to be a bit more open about the sex.
But context matters, and, specifically as to this board, the context is that BR's WW had her extracurricular sex while married to BR. In most marriage vows, spouses make an express promise to not do this. And in BR's case, his WW had a particularly clear understanding of this precisely because she had a friend who was in a marriage based on an alternative set of promises, an expressly open marriage. If BR's WW really thought that what she was doing was not a big deal, then why did she intentionally conceal it from him and lie to him about it. "It was just sex" is really a lie. She knew it was more than that. "Just sex" is something single people do, and married people promise not to do. She knew specifically that she was breaking her express promise to BR and, as Thumos notes, she did it quite clinically and even chronicled it.
That last part is what makes this thread so odd to me. It does remind me of the threads by betrayed wives whose wayward husbands cheat with prostitutes. BR's wife simply decided, unilaterally, that she would break the promises she made to BR in their wedding vows, and she did it just because she wanted some variety in her sex life. Clear-eyed, sober decision-making that she would betray his trust, break her promises, solely because she wanted to.
It pretty much breaks it down to the fundamentals. Some threads here involve a ton of marital baggage that infuses all of the decisions involved in the A. Here we have: "You made a solemn promise to me that you would not have sex with anybody else during our marriage. You made a clear-eyed decision to break that promise and fuck other men. You did it for no reason other than you wanted to."
Which places BR in a conundrum. What is his response to this? "Don't do it again, or else."
And as to his WW: "I promise I won't fuck anybody else, now that I've been caught." Ahem, you made that promise once already, yet here we are.
i would be honored to have a drink with all three of them but from what I read so far don't see how Walloped's wife has become a genuine heroine here based on her behavior when getting caught.
I think there are several reasons for this. First is that her behavior on getting caught was 180 degrees opposite that of most WW's. She did not trickle truth nor minimize nor DARVO. Instead, she answered Walloped's questions with blunt honesty. In that way, she treated him with respect, as a man. In so many threads here, the disrespect caused by the ongoing TT, minimizing, DARVO and similar tactics (such as in the case of Thumos), is as bad or worse than the A itself. The ongoing lack of basic decency and respect, after DDay.
Second, Mrs. Walloped almost instantly and completely had empathy for Walloped, the pain he was in, how it broke him. Again, this made her unusual in comparison to almost all other WW's we see here on SI.
Third, she threw herself very quickly and wholly into the task of helping him heal. She did this naturally and instinctively, without needing to read any of the books commonly referenced here.
There is another bit to her thread, the "why" bit, that wasn't discussed much but certainly impacted my own personal view of Mrs. Walloped: the profound degree of her life's circumstances and how it impacted her self-image as a human woman. As I recall, she was a SAHM living in an upper middle class suburb who had five or six pregnancies. Assuming the pregnancies were spaced like many couples nowadays, this means that for something along the lines of 10-15 years of her life she was either pregnant, giving, birth, nursing, or changing diapers. That stage of child care is all-encompassing, keeping one essentially homebound. Even after the end of diapering of her youngest, her life would have been a daily grind of getting kids to/from school, play-dates, extracurricular activities, etc., and preparing and planning food, clothing, and other supplies for them (and for her husband). For like 20 or so years, this would have been her complete existence.
Our culture tends to "disappear" women who get married. Their individual existence is gradually erased. My own wife and I note this constantly, and she is an accomplished professional woman with a career. It is insidious and happens in so many small ways: the death of a thousand cuts. For example, when we buy a car together, even if we put my wife's name on the title form first, almost invariably, when we receive the official title from the state, it is in my name. The man's name.
Add to this the isolation of a surburban existence, where people tend to enter their homes via the garage, keep the doors closed and locked, and not interact with neighbors. Mrs. Walloped was highly isolated and alone, and the sole source of meaning available to her was her children, who were becoming grown, getting married, etc. She invested a giant amount of herself into her family, moreso than many mothers would.
As that process waned, she didn't sit around fretting. She had a big heart, and a generous one. She sought meaning by volunteering. But she was young and inexperienced with men when she was married, then lived a life in a cloister. So when the serpent at her volunteer -- a man with enough wealth and unstructured time to own a Manhattan pied-à-terre and volunteer during the daytime working hours -- started uttering saccharine words in her ear, we can understand that those words formed a sort of "perfect storm" within her. A woman who had been around the block a few times before marrying would have spotted him as a bullshit artist from a mile away, but Mrs. Walloped did not have that perspective and did not see his bullshit for what it was. She mistook it as sincere personal interest.
In other words, hers was a deeply human failure, one that many of us could understand at a personal level. Her decision to respond to that man's advances was a wicked decision. She broke her marital promises to Mr. Walloped. She broke them profoundly and continuously and often for a significant period of time, but this is an infidelity forum, every thread here involves somebody who did that. And this is a forum where, if the betrayed spouse wishes to reconcile, we offer advice about how that works and what it looks like. What is remarkable about her story is what she did after DDay. I've not seen another wayward respond like she did.
Let's not forget Mr. Walloped. First, he is a fantastic writer. His real-time posts were palpable, visceral, human. Second, he is a deeply spiritual man, a man who leads an examined life, a man with a large reservoir of love for his wife and family, a man whose heart can grasp what I described above and, in the face of her sincere empathy and remorse, find a way to reconcile with her.
I have a lot of respect for the way Lt. Cmdr. Lost and/or Space Ghost handled his circumstance. I have an equal amount of respect for the way Mr. Walloped handled his.
[This message edited by Butforthegrace at 3:22 PM, September 22nd (Sunday)]
