SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Would love to hear from both BS and especially from WS
How is break up with AP different than from other relationships? I am curious because affairs tend to have a limerant aspect to them.
Some WS on SI have said their feelings toward AP during affair were "infatuation, addiction, dopamine hit, self adulation, fantasy"
If so, is getting over AP more difficult? Is there more pining? Wanting to get high again?

My W showed signs of depression after Dday, I was angry, accusing her of missing AP. After some time passed and her being in IC, she said she never was missing AP she was missing the feeling and brain chemicals. There is a crash they experience.

Yep. Dopamine hit/addiction is the best way to describe it. I used my AP to get through what I thought would be the last few years of my M before my kids were out of the house. Survival mechanism- although it was poison. After DDay and I broke it off, it was a huge crash to my system. I had a shitty M AND the added shame of my A.

My H had ended his A about three weeks before I found out. During those three weeks his mood seemed elevated and light. He seemed like himself again.

My guess is during the A he was drawn to the attention and excitement but had conflicting feelings of guilt and shame. Once he ended it he appeared to be happy again. He never showed or communicated that he missed her.

I believe every relations start out as affairs. Initial days of dating are filed with dopamine hits, NRE etc. Once these things wear off and if this relation still survives and also flourishes then it is a serious, committed, compatibility based real relation. When you break up during your dating period it might cause you little sadness and disappointment because you will be missing NRE and dopamine hits you were getting but these feelings are only temporary. But when you break up during your serious committed real relation that pain in immense and lasts longer than one would anticipate. It can do more damage than one can handle. This pain and trauma doesn't come from loss of NRE or dopamine hits. It comes from loss of a big part of your life, loss of marriage, loss of comfort, security and romance, and loss of family and home. Loss of a part of your identity. It brings so much uncertainty and chaos in life that one just cannot imagine and predict the extent of them. This loss is vastly bigger and more complicated than loss of affair. Purpose of affair is very narrow. It is to satisy our lust and cover up our insecurities. So, loss brought by loss of affair is too very minimum and can be easily dealt with.

[This message edited by Lurkingsoul12 at 5:24 PM, Monday, April 24th]

My H's big feelings regarding the end of his A didn't seem to be so much about the AP herself, but about the guilt he felt having led her on. We had a bit of a struggle the first few months with him wanting to go back to being a cordial coworker with her, wishing her a happy birthday and saying "hi" in the hallway. He felt so mean going total NC with her, which really had nothing to do with her and was all about him wanting to be a nice guy. Thank god for a good MC who snapped him back into reality by backing me up when I said that he couldn't be nice to her without betraying me.

When he first confessed, the words he used were "I'm in love with someone else." He fully planned to divorce me, and though he says he wasn't yet ready to commit to her, he also refused to end things with her, so I asked him to move out. He moved to his mother's and got a good taste of reality. Once he fully realized that his uncomfortable reality was tied to the AP, the bloom was off the rose, so to speak. He started coming out of the "fog."

He did miss her sometimes in the early days. I asked and he was honest with me. I heard, "You would have liked each other if this hadn't happened." After a couple of months he could recognize the manipulative things that she had done during the A, and was still doing to try to regain his attention, and held a rather neutral opinion of her, which drove me crazy. He didn't feel negatively about her until he found out a year after DDay that she had been carrying on an EA with his friend/coworker at the same time that she was having an A with him.

[This message edited by SacredSoul33 at 6:36 PM, Monday, April 24th]