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During the entire time of the A my AP was sleeping with other women and I knew it, didn’t bother me. I’m not saying that to be callous, just to show that there’s was no respect for him or myself at the time. He also had a longtime gf. My BH and I go back and forth about how he says that I had a “relationship” with AP. I say that I used AP for sex and companionship/comfort but there were no I love you’s or ideas that we would one day be together. AP never asked or wanted me to leave my H and I didn’t want or expect him to leave his GF. I know that in some cases it makes it worse that I didn’t love him, but it’s the truth. We both knew exactly what it was, more of a sick long term friends with benefits. To me it’s not a relationship in the idea that I cared for him or wanted a future. He was a close friend and most of the time frame was texting. Maybe because of the length of time? (3yrs had sex 6 times). I’m not trying to argue with my BH over wording or trying to be difficult I’m just not understanding and I don’t want to hurt him more by just agreeing without meaning it. The traditional idea of what makes a relationship is thrown out the window with infidelity so what would your definition be or does it even mater? I’m not expecting this to sit well with every BS who reads it but I am going to leave the stop sign off anyway in hopes of getting differing perspectives. If this hurts for anyone to read I really am truly sorry but I’m not going to figure the shitty stuff out if I only post kittens and rainbows.

There are all sorts of relationships. When single we often try out FWB and similar things. All these are relationships IMO.

In your case you may not have said ‘I love you’ to each other, but what you had was a relationship that was more important than what you had with your husband and he had with his GF. I believe this because you and OM were with each other even though you knew it was hurtful to BH and BGF. Your affair had a higher priority.

This next bit is related, but it may seem to be a stretch.

My WW said she loved me even while sleeping with her OM (it was a 2+ year affair). My response was that her version of love wasn’t something I wanted. A man who beats his wife does not love her, no matter what he professes.

Later she said that she loved OM more than me during her affair, but that all changed after Dday. This may be closer to the truth, but her love still remains as something I’m not much interested in.

He was a close friend that you’d had for a number of years, you slept with him, so he can be a fwb, , F buddy, close friend turned sex partner, but whatever way you look at it I agree with your BS. It was a relationship within yours, even if it wasn’t romantic or loving.

My ws thought of his relationship much the same as you do (except she wanted him to leave).

Even though, like you, it was not a high volume of sex and with no love, it’s still a relationship.

By not acknowledging it as such I think it’s a bit insulting to bs.

I agree it doesn’t come under the banner that we all associate with the word relationship, but i believe it is one.

If it was a paid/once off exchange with a complete stranger then as a bs I wouldn’t call it a relationship.

I have a relationship with my babysitter. She babysits my kids and I pay her.

I have a relationship with the checkout lady at the grocery store. I always stand in her line because she’s fastest.

I have a relationship with our UPS guy. He rings my doorbell and drops off my Amazon loot and I pick up the package.

You had a relationship.

Saying orherwize is minimizing and not actually correct. Why is it so important to you to not call this a relationship? (Ie, why are you still minimizing what it was?)

It was a superficial and immature relationship, sure. It was a symbiotic and manipulative relationship, cruel to your BS. But it was definitely a relationship.

Perhaps relationship to you means you exchanged certain emotional intimacies? But remember, that’s not what is implied by the word relationship. I found that my WS used nit picky things like that to try to minimize what it really was, to rugsweep. I called the woman he met to have casual sex six times his “girlfriend”, and he argued that she wasn’t his girlfriend. I explained, “She’s a girl you had sex with over several months. What you were thinking while you had sex with her is not relevant to me. In my mind, she was your girlfriend.”

Part of growing from this is seeing this from your BS’s view, so that you won’t hurt them again. And I suspect you’re nit picking on a word to try to avoid seeing your BS’s pain. You need to see it to learn, and your BS needs to kind of rub your nose in it to heal.

If you want this to get better, your BS to heal, your brain to learn some mature boundaries, then you need to see and acknowledge- it was a relationship. Or continue saying it wasn’t, and face the consequences.

You prolly should be thinking about why it’s so important that you don’t want it to be called that...... that’s where the healing and learning is. And I’m willing to bet it’s to minimize what happened.

[This message edited by 3yrsout at 4:53 AM, August 4th (Saturday)]

Btw, reiterating that your AP was sleeping with someone else the whole time kind of leaves me with a weird taste in my mouth......

It tastes like you’re trying to minimize also. Like, “See, he used me too, so that means this shouldn’t hurt my BS as much...... it’s not like I loved him.” There also seems to be a small bit of hurt when you say that. Did it hurt you that your AP slept with other people outside of your relationship? Because I’m guessing that it did based on your phrasing of it. If you’re using this phrasing with your BS, I could guarantee they’re thinking that, too.

For example- WS -“But Jimmy had other women he was having sex, and it’s not like we had a relationship or anything.”

BS- “Oh, ok, so if I go have sex with Jane and as long as I don’t say I love you and as long as she gives BJ to the landscaper, too, then it’s cool?” And internally, I guarantee your BS is thinking, “she’s talking about how her AP cheated on her. Did she view it that way???? Not a relationship my ass, casual sex is casual sex. If you’re only having casual sex then you can’t view the other person doing it too as sleeping around.”

If it was purely casual sex, then you wouldn’t have even asked about other women he was with. If I go to the grocery store to buy eggs, I don’t ask the check out lady if they have other eggs at their house. I just want my eggs, and I don’t care what her eggs are like. If you didn’t care that he was having sex with other women as well, then why did you find this out?

You had sex outside of your marriage. Period. You had a relationship out of your marriage that was inappropriate. These things you are saying are pretty hurtful to your BS.

How did you find out the AP was sleeping with someone else?

[This message edited by 3yrsout at 9:28 AM, August 5th (Sunday)]

Also confused because you used the statement, “not a relationship......he was a close friend.”

A close friend is a way to describe a relationship. If a close friend betrayed me, I’d be hurt. If a close friend used me for sex and I found out there were others, I’d be hurt.

Also- it started out as an EA (your words). I thought the whole definition of an EA is a relationship without the sex.

I think you should meet with an IC to discuss your pain from your AP hurting your feelings. Seriously, your post smells like you’re hurting because your AP used you and betrayed you. And if your BS smells that, too, it’s no bueno.

[This message edited by 3yrsout at 5:22 AM, August 4th (Saturday)]

Your describe him as a close friend. I describe him as an enemy of your relationship.

BS here. When I was single and dating, I had many periods in which I was involved in multiple overlapping non-exclusive relationships with various women, many of whom themselves were also in similar places of life. That is a common dating structure amongst single people who are lovers.

You took a lover. You did this while you were married, with a man who was not your husband. You deceived your husband and kept this secret from him. All of these things are anathema to marriage. They are wicked, deceitful, hurtful acts. You created a secret parallel narrative of your marriage, one that your lover knew about but your BH did not. In fact you were more honest with your lover than your BH. In this way, you were more intimate with and connected to your lover than your BH. You're lucky to have a BH who appears to be trying to give you a second chance.

The fact that your lover was involved with more than one woman is almost completely irrelevant. As noted, this is common amongst single unmarried lovers. I say "almost" because this is relevant to one issue: it multiplied the number of vectors of exposure to STD's that your BH was then unwittingly exposed to. So, in that way, fucking a fucker who fucked lots of others was really fucking wicked, a callous gamble with your BH's physical health.

There is another element to this post that is somewhat more abstract. I think what you are trying to do here is minimize the emotional element of your A in some way, which in your logic makes it somehow "less wayward" or some such. There are many threads on SI, however, in which betrayed men say, over and over, that for many men, the emotional element of a betrayal is less hurtful than the physical element. Every man has his own triggers, and it is possible your BH feels differently, but there are men on SI for whom an EA is barely a blip in terms of feeling hurt, but a drunken ONS with a stranger with no emotional connection can result in years of emasculation and droopy unresponsive johnson. In other words, for many men, the pain is worse if the WW has sex just for sex, as opposed to a WW who believes she is in love and has sex as part of that (sometimes imaginary) love affair. We feel especially emasculated if our WW cheats on us for some dick that she doesn't even love. That must be some good dick. Better than our own dick.

Speaking personally, if I were your BH, your statement about your AP in this thread would make my pain worse, not better. What I would hear as your BH would be the following: "BH, the dick you give isn't all that great (yes, I realize that in your case he wasn't giving any, but in fairness to him I gather you also weren't addressing that issue with him effectively), but I found a man who can give some really good dick, he gets a lot of pussy, for good reason, this man knows how to work the kitty. So I snuck around behind your back, lied to you, betrayed our vows, and exposed you to STD's, even though this guy really didn't give a rat's ass about me, because the dick was that damn good."

For me, I don't think I could R after those facts. The emasculation would be too strong. I'd have to D in order to have a chance to find peace.

[This message edited by Butforthegrace at 7:41 AM, August 4th (Saturday)]

LOL, I saw the title of this post and thought to myself "ugh, yeah, of course, duh?". Almost every married AP is by definition "sleeping with other people". Now, of course, a lot lie about it. But, my W, for example, was sleeping with "other" people (me) during her A. Her AP claimed "dead bedroom" to her, that was not, I'm sure you'll all be shocked, the case at all.

I think maybe the way I would word this is described in polite terms as "casual". The more common term that I hear is "f**k buddy". It's someone who you f**k who you're not serious or exclusive with. But, as other posters have said "f**k buddy" is still a relationship, it just happens to be a one sided relationship (unless both people are out for that).

It's good that you didn't get so sucked in as to believe the "we'll be together" crap that's so common in an A, but honestly, I'm really not sure that any of this will matter to your H. The sex part of my W's relationship has been the "sticking point" for me, and I think it is for a lot of BS's (especially men). I could honestly care less about the "I love you's" from the A, that was all lies/based on lies. If you loved someone, you wouldn't be in an A with them, you'd file for D. The actions that occur in a typical A aren't at all "love" when you examine them from the outside, so, I dismiss those words as irrelevant, neither my W nor her AP had a clue what "love" was/is when they were saying that to one another. They did, however, have a pretty good idea of what sex is, and that's really what their A was, it was sex with some pretty words thrown in occasionally to keep things moving in that direction.

Don't take this the wrong way and it's only my point of view, but...

I might be reading into this what I want to, but how in the blue hell does having him just as a "f*ck buddy" make it any better?

That's always hard for me to hear. An entire marriage was ruined and you didn't even really care much for the guy.

I would personally rather hear that you were in love and had a relationship rather than casual sex.

At least we, as a bs, could say that she thought she had something worth keeping.

BS here: I appreciate that you say you don’t want to agree without meaning it. That’s honesty and that’s good.

Unfortunately for you, your views on this topic show that you don’t get it yet. Your inability to accept this was a relationship shows an innate need to continue minimizing, which isn’t a good place to be.

So, you shouldn’t agree if you don’t agree with him. That’s lying. What you should do is get curious and figure out why your instinct is to minimize rather than explore the topic. (But you’re here talking, so that shows a positive - willingness).

My advice is when your husband is expressing hurt and saying something you don’t agree with - don’t argue, and don’t agree without meaning it. Say honestly - “I clearly need to take some more time to reflect on this”, and maybe ask him to discuss it more when you’ve both calmed down. But you need to mean it. You need to mean you’re going to reflect and think and work through it. And I don’t know your DDay as I type but I think it takes time for a cheating spouse to really get there. But you need to start with a seed of humility and work from that position.

Coming here in earnest with an open mind is a good step, if that is in fact what you’ve done. But you need to get out of your own way. By that I mean, don’t ever assume you’re right or you’ve got it. Be receptive and unerstanding of your spouses point of view, and honestly, be thankful he’s around to share it.

I go back and forth about how he says that I had a “relationship” with AP. I say that I used AP for sex and companionship/comfort but there were no I love you’s or ideas that we would one day be together.

I found the best thing is to not argue against your spouse by their definition of things. If they say you didn't love them. Then according to them, you didn't and that is all that matters. If your husband sees it as a relationship by his definition, then you did. Why argue their POV? Just say by my definition of a relationship, it wasn't but by yours I can see that it was. Who knows, maybe yours was wrong to begin with. Which IMO it was. That was a relationship. Not a good one, but still was. Your POV is dysfunctional at best enabling you to cheat. I wouldn't trust your POV of what a relationship is. Certainly your marriage by your definition, wouldn't be considered a relationship either. Friends with benefits is a relationship. At the time you weren't even a friend to your husband. Good news, this type of defensiveness goes away if you keep working on you and listen to your husband. Then, you gain remorse and not just regret.

I think you just have to let him use the word he chooses to use. How does it benefit either of you to insist you’re “right”?

So how did you find out he was with other people?

I think you just have to let him use the word he chooses to use. How does it benefit either of you to insist you’re “right”?

Seriously, this is being very hardheaded for zero gain. Also, you are demonstrably wrong. The term "relationship" applies to any human interactions and most definitely ALL ongoing sexual interactions. You say it wasn't emotional? Well if I were a betting man I'd wager that you shared all kinds of intimacies with your "friend" that would make your BH sick, but let's assume you are 100% correct about that. You still had a relationship with this "friend" (using the term friend is really minimizing it too).

The point in arguing with BH about this isn’t really to argue but to understand his side of it. It’s not about who’s right or wrong but recognizing and changing thought processes. I am usually the one who says we have different point of views but they can both be valid. I hear his pain when we talk about this topic and I wanted to understand it not disprove it. Just agreeing to avoid the pain doesn’t help me fix the thought process behind it, I’m trying to change and I needed the information to understand. Your perspectives and answers have helped me with that. I don’t know if other Waywards feel this way but when you know your BS is on here too and going to read your posts it’s hard to do the ones that I know are going to hurt him. My apology was directed mostly for him but my main goal here is to be a better person for my family and for myself. It will not always be pretty and Im not expecting to win any popularity contests here. It’s ugly and twisted but my story is genuine, I’m trying to learn from it and rise stronger than ever.

There are multiple definitions and viewpoints on what a relationship is but at the very least I can agree that it was a relationship. I was thinking more about comparing it to what I had with my H when we started to date. The butterflies, kindness, caring and genuine love. Considering what I had with AP as a relationship cheapens what I experienced with my H. The two couldn’t be more different. I know that it’s harder for my BH to know that I didn’t love AP, that doesn’t minimize the hurt I know I’ve caused him actually I feel like it makes it worse. The relationship with AP was seriously sick. I knew about the other women because we talked about it openly. He would even show me some of the nude pics that they would send him and ask my opinion on who he should go for. He also got tested every 6 months for STDs supposedly, I never saw any proof of it. I got tested anyway and was lucky to not have caught anything. I knew when I met him he was a serial cheater. I could see how reading through the original posts that some picked up on hurt related to this. I think it’s the hurt I feel for sinking this low. That I was okay with this twisted situation. I knew exactly what he was and knew that he was a bad person. AP would ask me about relationship advice and he gave me what I thought was honest feedback on how my H was feeling about things from a “mans” perspective. It’s disgusting.

Technically, a relationship exists between two people who interact to accomplish some joint purpose. You ring up items at the store. The clerk tells you the price is $17.35. You hand the clerk a $20, she hands you your change. Asks if you want a bag. “Yes, paper please.” Etc. You have a relationship with that clerk.

I gather that in your worldview “relationship” implies some personal, subjective threshold of emotional entanglement and you feel you did not reach that threshold with your AP. However, what good can you possibly expect to achieve bickering with your BH about this? Even assuming you are being completely honest on this point, all you’re going to do is piss him off and push him farther away. It’s a bullshit issue.

By the way, from reading your threads, I think you are lying about this issue, and I reckon your BH does too. Clearly this was more than anonymous physical sex. You get that by going to a gloryhole or a porn shop and fucking strangers. There was something about the AP specifically that scratched your itch, which explains why you continued to create opportunities to get back with him. The level to which you felt “love” or “like” or anything along that continuum for your AP (if that can even be measured objectively) is meaningless in light of the vectors that led you to decide letting him stick his dick inside you repeatedly was an appropriate way of addressing your dissatisfaction with your marriage.

Consider a hypothetical situation where your BH feels is he making some progress addressing his ED so he decides that the next step is to get some practice, and a good way to practice would be to have sex with prostitutes, in secret, behind your back, without telling you. You discover this one day and confront him about it. He admits that he was rawdogging them, but it was meaningless because he wasn’t in a relationship with them. It was purely an economic transaction done only for sex. Does that make you feel any better?

[This message edited by Butforthegrace at 12:09 PM, August 4th (Saturday)]

BFTG what would the best alternative be in your opinion? How do I learn if I don’t understand? How do I fix this shit without acknowledging it’s there. That’s the gain. I don’t want to hurt my H more by dragging this into the light over and over but hiding my confusion and messed up reasoning changes nothing. The idea that there was zero emotion attached to it is not true. I don’t think there is such a thing as completely emotionless sex, but the emotion wasn’t love or even mutual respect. Those are emotions that I equate to relationships but now I know not everyone does. I don’t see the point of your hypothetical but I’ll adress it anyway. I would be devistated, but the fact that he didn’t love or care about them would make me feel worse. If he needs to figure that out though I’m not going to try to convince him that he did love them so I can feel better.

BFTG what would the best alternative be in your opinion?

Stop bickering over meaningless issues. It only rubs salt in the wound.

I have a friend who is a grammar nerd. Somebody says "I have less than three appointments left." My friend says: "Fewer." Which is technically correct, but everybody hates being around my friend. Including me sometimes.

Why be annoying at that level when you have giant substantive issues that are still open and bleeding?

If it causes him pain it is not a meaningless issue. I would rather be annoying than divorced.