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I think we are past the hysterical bonding stage and have actually settled into a more authentic love making experience. I feel my WS back home more, both mentally and psychologically, and directs me to be with her in bed on a more spiritual level, where we both connect more and have more eye contact.

In the beginning, within a few days after DD, we got really into the more hysterical bonding type sex, which was truly wild, involving more positions and intensity, but there was a desperation about it, as if to push the OM out of our space and allow me to reclaim her. Made it hot, but empty in the end, and I could definitely feel the presence of the OM in our bed and in my head, most of all.

Now, after discussing more openly what we truly want out of love making, we both agree we want to feel less of a porn vibe and more of tantric vibe. After DD, I gave up my porn habit, as that had been cited by her as something that drove her away and turned her off, even though at the time she said she never had a problem with it and even shared erotic movies with me as part of our foreplay. I guess she was settling for less than she wanted and it had secretly bugged her all along, but she wanted to please me. She told me her AP was not into porn and that was part of his appeal, so as we unpack the affair and its meaning for us, we are focused on getting more into a tantric, all chakra, more spiritually connected vibe, something that is working nicely so far for both of us.

We are also sharing erotic thoughts and fantasies via alternate email addresses so we can incorporate more of that into our lives, so as to use what Esther Perel talks about as the third, eroticism outside the dyad, or couple, so neither of us feels that side of us is left out.

Would love to hear other's thoughts about this.

I think she's using the porn as a straw man to distract you from what she's done. And you're letting her.

I agree wholeheartedly that its a straw man in the sense that it was hardly the justification for the affair. There are NO justifications for the affair. The porn has more to do with my work on myself and wanting to make my marriage better than it was pre-affair. The affair was secret and completely a selfish, entitled, toxic decision. She was lost in the Fog.

I do not let her conflate the porn thing, nor our pre-existing marital issues with justification for the affair. Thanks for keeping me honest about that.

My husbands porn addiction was a big factor in his A. He had since quit and will only watch if I want to. I don't really care for it either but I will on occasion because he likes it. Point is I didn't have an affair. I busted his chops about the porn but I remained faithful. I suspect your WW has found a way to blame you for her actions and that is unfair. Are the two of you in any counseling?

I think that at 9 months out from my DDay if I was looking at the type of sex and discussing what I want, it would be because I was glossing over my pain in hopes that it would go away. Distracting myself with a false dream of an ideal goal and ignoring the "danger will robinson" going off in the background.

I think you've slid back into a form of denial my friend. And she's all for it because then she doesn't have to deal with you anger and sadness or her guilt and shame and regret.

Maybe your focus is on this because you're afraid to lose her still. Maybe it's on this because you're wanting to use her. Maybe your focus is on this because thinking about fucking in different ways is much more fun than considering the reality of the situation.

I think you should spend a day or two with your eyes open and your mouth shut. Platitudes are fine.

Hysterical bonding? Me? Pfft! No way...

Yeah, I was an hysterical bonder, had to reclaim my wife. Two nights after D-day I had sex with her just to prove to myself that I could still drive her to China and back. That was just primal stuff, the immediate need to get rid of any doubt that about this old man's ability to satisfy her sexually. Argh! That went on for a while; not long though.

(TMI Alert)

Love making, however, seems impossible to me right now. It's not making love; it's just sex to help heal and reconnect on the most basic of levels. Since our marriage has drastically changed, I figured the sex has to change right along with it. So I bought some toys, she dusted off her old catholic school girl uniform. It's hot, but it's not hot enough and it's not making love. We've done the whole sensual massage thing, with or without the happy endings. We're making more eye contact. We even masturbate together or just one watching the other, again, making more eye contact, trying to find some loftier connection between to people who want each other.

The thing is, no matter which approach we've taken, the sex might be better than it was in years past (and we pretty much stopped having sex years ago), but it's still just that primal bonding that's fun and feels good, but isn't even close to the love making we once enjoyed.

There might come a day, who knows, when instead of having sex--merely experiencing the physical--I can experience that intense spiritual melding of two people deeply in love, when you feel yourself becoming a part of something more, something wonderful, amazing and completely fulfilling. Those moments of pure spiritual ecstasy.

So far, I've realized that it just can't be faked. All cognitive distortions aside, the wounds still remain and violation of that spiritual connection has not bee completely healed or redressed.

But what the hell, as Woody Allen once said, good sex is always great and bad sex is usually pretty good.

I agree that I'm focused more on the sex than on the pain, because the pain of the betrayal is too much to handle. And she would rather focus on the positive than directly deal with her issues.

That being said, I have been in IC for a while, and we've been in MC for several months. We used to talk on a nightly basis, sometimes to the point of anger and tears, and I've been writing in my journal nearly every other day. I do the 180 so most of the time my mouth is shut and my eyes are open.

I wanted you all to see that there is more than just a focus on love making and lots of dealing with my anger and sadness, as well as her guilt and shame and regret. She expresses deep regret and is digging deep to figure out what motivated her to think it would be healthy for her to have an affair and how she let her group of girlfriends talk her into it, a couple of which were in open relationships/affairs. She now sees the profound damage she did, is willing to keep working at looking at her childhood, her sense of entitlement and do whatever it takes to help heal me. I only believe it because I can see her doing the work. I'm likewise using the affair as a wake up call to become a better person. I was definitely not showing up in my marriage.

I don't think making it so black and white applies to everyone. We can all own our own stuff and take responsibility completely for our own actions, without blame shifting.

Just wanted to chime in that I didn't take it that you were putting your head in the sand so to speak on the justification for the affair, just that you seemed to be focusing on a single part of your relationship.

Having a mutually satisfying sexual relationship is something that is important to both my WH and I and after reading the 5 love languages, physical touch is both of our primary languages.

I think as long as you are working on the other parts of the infidelity, "reclaiming" a good sex life is healthy and good for healing. Just my opinion though.

I don't think making it so black and white applies to everyone

I'm curious about this comment, and what exactly did you mean by "it?"

I mean that in most marriages where an affair happens, there are problems and that some of those problems led to a distance between the spouses where the affair crept in, usually as a toxic coping mechanism for the spouse who chose to avoid tackling the issue head on, and instead escaping into the affair as a way to sooth themselves from the pain the dysfunction in the marriage was causing them. Although someone can cheat in a happy marriage and there are betrayed spouses who never did anything wrong, that is not always the case.

In my case, I know that I was being distant, critical, dismissive and disrespectful of my WS. I know that I was often feeling unloving toward her and that she often felt controlled and alone by the way I treated her. NONE OF THIS JUSTIFIES HER AFFAIR. But it humanizes her and makes empathy and therefore forgiveness more feasible. This is straight out of After the Affair by Janis Spring. Not all may agree and prefer to define the wayward spouse as purely evil and needing to crawl on their knees to get back to their betrayed spouse.

I think in my particular marriage, betrayal took many forms. I think if we are to establish trust, we BOTH need to own how we betrayed the other. She had ZERO justification for her affair. She regrets it completely. I have ZERO justification for treating her unkindly and dismissively and for fooling around online and visiting strip clubs without telling her.

Of course a 3 year emotional with a 2 year physical affair dwarfs any of the forms of betrayal I engaged in, but it takes it out of the black and white territory and demonstrates that if we BOTH work on our own issues and really give each other ALL of ourselves, we have a shot at a 2nd marriage, IF we both stick to truly honoring each other.

Thoughts?

[This message edited by Aumanny99 at 11:08 PM, July 28th (Tuesday)]

Aumanny - I just wanted to express support for a lot of your ideas. I find it totally plausible that you guys are connecting sexually in a non-HB way. My fWW and I are doing the same. I also don't think you are being unrealistic about her comments on your porn use. She is using it as an excuse and you know it. My concern is as I read through some of your other posts, I think I read that your WW continues to blame shift and is not doing the work of reconciliation. This makes me think that her comments about porn use are not a "one-off" but part of a broader pattern of not being committed to R.

No IC for either of you and crappy MC? Wow, man, are things really likely to change?

So I guess my point is keep keeping on with your new found intimacy! But don't let it distract you from the real work that I think you know lies ahead.

I wish you strength and peace.

Of course a 3 year emotional with a 2 year physical affair dwarfs any of the forms of betrayal I engaged in

Does it really? You sought the same ego kibbles as she did. You stepped outside your marriage, lusted after other women, actively engaged other women in sex, however anonymously, it was still you! I agree and understand your point about "black and white" in the marriage; but betrayal is still betrayal; cheating is still cheating; there is no scale upon which to qualify, other than the one you seem to deluded yourself into accepting. Sorry, but you minimize your own infidelity.

I'm not minimizing it. In fact, I'm owning up to it. But if she had done the exact same things I engaged in, I would not be heartbroken, and would more likely have explored those things with her. We would often watch adult videos together, I was open about my porn collection and we even went to strip clubs together.

I don't have to justify my view of this to you. I'm fully responsible for everything I did, and to the extent it hurt my wife, I apologized to her and accept that that will never acceptable in the future.

I just want her to do the exact same thing for me: accept full responsibility for her LTA, apologize, dig deep into why she did it, fix herself and never do it again. I'm more than willing to do the exact same things with respect to my behaviors.

Emotional/physical affairs that go on for years are MUCH more damaging to a marriage than someone enjoying porn/strip show/cyber room. I told her almost all about those things, and she never said she considered it cheating and never seemed to care as long as it wasn't a true affair. It's only now that she has stepped so far outside the bounds of the marriage, that I'm taking a hard look at anything and everything I did that resembled her affair so that there's a basis for both of us to see that we are not that different, each of us were weak in our own ways and each need to do much better and truly commit to each other. This the path to empathy and forgiveness. Not claiming anything beyond that.

[This message edited by Aumanny99 at 11:09 PM, July 28th (Tuesday)]

Emotional/physical affairs that go on for years are MUCH more damaging to a marriage than someone enjoying porn/strip show/cyber room

On the surface this seems a true statement, but when I think about it - I'm not so sure. Stepping outside of the marriage is detrimental to it - even talking about your relationship in a negative way to someone else.

I have different views on porn use now. WBF and I used to enjoy porn together but we also used it separately. I did so much research after WBF's A that I now believe porn can be very dangerous to a relationship. It impacts our physical sexual responses as well as risking progression to real world encounters.

It sounds like you have created a pecking order of who did the most damage which only serves to minimise your own issues. And now she has turned this back onto you as a justification for her actions. Complicated.

Complicated yes but equivalent no.

If you tell me that using porn and masturbating to it is the same as sleeping with another person and telling them I love you while in a long term affair, then you're losing credibility with me, particularly when my porn use was not secret and was out in the open, but the sleeping with the other person was kept secret because she knew full well that it was a dealbreaker.

Plus, I fully take responsibility for the porn use, acknowledge it was damaging to our intimacy and have quit using it as a way of showing up to deal with our underlying marital issues. I never had sex or even kissed anyone else during our whole relationship and certainly never told anyone else I loved them.

In the end, we all make our own judgments about what constitutes infidelity/cheating. I appreciate the feedback, but respect that I may disagree with some of you on this score for aforementioned reasons. Bottom line: what I did could never justify what she did. I am not minimizing what I did at all. I fully acknowledge my contribution to our marital issues and am addressing them. To reconcile, I expect no less from her. Comparing what each of us did and trying to measure who did the worse amount of damage is counterproductive. What matters is that we both own what did and fix it.

[This message edited by Aumanny99 at 12:59 PM, July 29th (Wednesday)]

Not sure if this is a t/j, but I did feel compelled to support one of Aumanny's points. There is a difference in types and levels of betrayals.

I remember talking with a friend about my WW's affair and he said something like, "Oh, yeah, my wife and I talked about that. We said that we would understand that you could get carried away in the moment and that sex could just happen against one's better judgment." He seemed pretty pleased with himself that he had figured all this infidelity stuff out ahead of time. So I asked him, "OK, let's assume that is true for a ONS. Now imagine if your wife texts him the next day and says "Last night was amazing, can't wait to see you again." and then proceeds to text him the next day with "I'm thinking about your constantly. You mean so much to me." And then proceeds to text him 100's (or 1000's!!) of times over the next month and sleeps with him a dozen times, all without your knowledge? A pall came over my friends face, and he slowly said, "Oh, I guess that is different."

It is true that a full blown affair, a ONS, porn, sexting, and anonymous cyber sex, all involve betrayal and lying. But to create a complete equivalence across all of them is just fantasy.

Is there a point to establishing a pecking order of which forms of infidelity are worse or most damaging? I'm not sure. But I do know that there is a difference.

Thank you for supporting me on this.

I feel the same way, and so long as no hypocrisy or double standard is involved, then we can as either individuals or couples decide what is considered cheating and what degree of cheating each one represents.

My wife, for example, voraciously read all three books in the 50 Shade series. No need to even ask for permission. We both knew erotic fiction of any kind could be enjoyed in private. She went to a bachelorette party once and the male stripper, down to nothing but a barely there gold brief, while covered in oil, picked up several of the female guests and spun them in the air turning them upside down. My wife said her skirt went up and she was partially exposed. Again, she told me all about it, I didn't get jealous in the least and we had a good laugh.

My wife knew I liked porn and I was open from the very beginning about it and always let her look at my collection. In the early days it was magazines, and then later a computer folder with photos and movies. Over time, she became more curious and in the last few years we began to share movies with both liked as part of our foreplay. That was fun for both of us and removed a wall that had between us.

My wife had contact with ex boyfriend on facebook, sometimes telling him his old pictures from his younger days made her blush. I caught her doing this when she left her facebook open and I was a bit mad, but she came clean and again, no big deal.

I knew about her male friend way before he became her AP. When she asked if she could ask him to the beach with our kids and our dog, so he could help her handle the dog, who was big and a handful, I said yes and even asked her, there's nothing for me to worry about between you two, and she lied point blank and said "of course not". Again, if he was a platonic friend, I would never have a problem.

Having sex with him and texting I love you and I miss you and having sex for about 2 years, BEHIND MY BACK, now that's an AFFAIR and ITS CLEARLY CHEATING, and I NEVER engaged in ANYTHING even remotely close to that with anyone in 25 years of being together.

So, although there are shades of grey and cybersex rooms fall into the grey area, particularly since I never let her know about the full extent of my involvement, primarily because she never seemed curious about it and also because it was embarrassing, but since I never said I love you, or used my real name, and never had a long term thing with any one other user, so ZERO intimacy of any kind and it never escalated to meeting in real life or any kind of touching, I always thought in good faith that it didn't hurt my marriage or violate our exclusivity. I do know better now, but again, it doesn't give her justification to carry on a 2 year affair with a married man that involved full contact sex, sometimes without a condom.

[This message edited by Aumanny99 at 4:45 PM, July 29th (Wednesday)]

I guess I mean its complicated because in working through who did what creeps into some kind of blame game. There is no blame on you for her A - she is wrong to use that as one of her reasons (I know you get that). And she can't blame it on her girlfriends either. She needs to dig into her why.

Maybe this thread hits a nerve with me because I was focused on the sex aspect for a while - maybe part of me still is. Its a slower road to R I think. In talking about his why initially, WBF did list a few things pre-A that I did/didn't do. I can work on those myself (as you are) but now he completely removes me from his bad choices, he owns his own shit. I think you are owning yours but is she?

We wrote erotic stories for each other, we emailed each other and explored sexual fantasies. All good, but it was a distraction (for us). I didn't want to become a player in a home porn movie I wanted true closeness and intimacy and I realised this wasn't the way. I felt as though I was becoming a new fantasy AP for him and maybe him for me (I was jealous of his sexual freedom). I also categorised this as post-HB but was it - really? That stuff can wait or work in parallel to the work of R.

That's all, it might delay things by going this route - might not - everyone has their own way.

I guess it depends what you want to get back to or towards. How would you feel now about her going to a bachelorette party with a stripper there or contacting an ex on FB? The world has changed now and things that were ok before maybe aren't now.

I think you hit the nail on the head. I'm owning my stuff, taking full responsibility for it and making changes to anything I feel I did to contribute to our marital issues. She has had a tendency to play the blame game and shirk responsibility, which plays into the core of how she could let herself have an affair. She sees it as human frailty, natural and monogamy for life as a patriarchal structure that does not fit women's sexuality. At least that was her starting point.

Now, she is at least beginning the process of unraveling her inner workings to see what was truly broken, which old scripts from childhood she had incorporated into her belief system (her whole family cheated), books she was reading (Sex at Dawn), and the group of friends and clients she was seeing (almost 100% were either unhappily married or cheating or both). She had friends who were and espoused polyamory as the more authentic way to be.

In hindsight, having seen the personal devastation she wrought on me, her supposed soulmate and one true love, she sees the error of her ways. However, I still worry, because when I showed her this site, she noticed how many people there are on here, nearly 50,000. I can tell her thinking goes something like this: "See. I'm not alone. Lots of people are cheating and that's because monogamy for life is too strict". She never verbalized that, but I could feel it.

Only time and therapy will tell if she finally ever gets it that she alone is the one who needs to take responsibility for the affair.

On my side, I have stopped using porn completely. No strip clubs or cyber rooms, of course, too. My goal is to show up 100% for her and our marriage in the hopes of either inspiring her to do the same (and largely its working, and her self insights lately have been all about her and not blame shifting), and between the two of us build a stronger marriage that is affair proof, to the extent that could ever be possible.

Waywards are not evil (most). They are lost. They got lost because marriage is tough and there's a great deal of internal and external pressure to be lazy, entitled and selfish. There are few marriages that truly seem happy after two decades of being together and plenty of divorced couples and/or cheating partners. If your marriage is not strong, and there are opportunities to cheat presented, many people do cheat. But actions have consequences and betrayed partners do not have to settle for staying with those that broke their vows. It's as simple as that.

Thanks for reaching out to share your experience, KatieG! Hugs.

I can relate to several of your points, Aumanny99. fWH and I went immediately into HB, and it lasted for 5-6 months. I didn't know there was a name for it before I discovered SI. Seemed odd at times, but for us, it was a healing place, a place where I felt connected to my husband and could put out of my mind the enormity of what he had done. Done to me. Done to us.

Since then, our lovemaking has morphed into something pretty good. No playing out porn themes (at least I don't believe so!), but we're connected emotionally in a way we haven't been in many years. Found out fWH had a porn problem dating back to 2010. I had no idea. That continued up until about 6 months ago, when I blocked the private browsing option on our computer. He has thanked me and asked me not to remove it. The porn was a player in his affairs. The women tools, objects for his fantasies. Yes, he had EA with them, but fantasizing during sex was key to him. He admitted those fantasies continued during our HB period to some degree.

But now, like you, we are reaching something much more spiritual and connected. Not just sex. At least most times we take time, have fun, leave the lights on. You get it. Sex hasn't taken a priority in our lives, at least in the sense that we share fantasies, sexy texts, etc. But lovemaking is important to our relationship now, and we make time for it 3-5 times each week now.

And like you, I scored low on the marriage partner scale for years before the Affairs. No excuse of course, but it puts things in perspective in our situation, and is what allowed me to give R a chance. The goal now is to be friends, lovers, partners. It feels good today, our interactions that is. BUT my burden to carry is the thoughts of him with the OW that haunt me daily. I'm currently at a point of comparing myself against her at most points, despite fWH's complete NC with her, lack of interest in seeing her or knowing how she's doing, statements that soon after starting the affair with her he wanted out (but he's weak and conflict avoidant-- but working on it ) All of which should give me confidence and help me heal. But 10 months out, and the thoughts are louder and more frequent than ever. Might be due to it being the exact time a year ago when he was with her.

Sorry, I get off track easily Just meant to offer support for your efforts toward a more spiritual, tantric type of sexual intimacy. The marriages most of us are trying to create out of this mess is one that is better in many ways, often including the sexual realm. Whatever works for both of you should be on the table. My views on porn being "not a big deal" have been changed as a result of my experience. Will always be skeptical about that. But other than that, if the path you're taking is helping you heal and rebuilding a better relationship, go for it! And best of luck to you