SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

It took me a long, long time to try and understand a mindset I’ve never experienced.

My wife’s standards with me and for herself were off the charts - until the A.

It seemed to be part of the escape, this fantasy validation world was so many horrible situations and bad trades, and zero standards.

She had blocked a lot of it out, part of the compartmentalization, and because the A was a secret she planned to take to the grave before confessing 18-years after it was over, she was barely audible describing some of it as she remembered.

Heck — one event, based simply on her description was full on assault, but she said she must of been ‘willing’ to let that moment be okay, be a part of the escape from the grind of parenthood and work life.

So, yes, I understand the premise of this thread, I’ve wrestled with it all.

Where I ended up took a while.

Are we, are any of us our very worst moments and behavior or the sum of all the things we’ve done in life?

For me, I definitely had some moments with alcohol that betrayed my own standards when I was younger. It took me a few years to conquer my poor coping mechanism. For some of my friends, they only remember my drunk days (that ended when I was 22), and assume that’s who I still am.

I am still that guy, even though I haven’t been drunk in decades, but I’m much more about the healthier, happier version of me now.

I see my wife as someone who betrayed her own best interests — and me, and her family too.

I also see all of the really cool and wonderful things she has accomplished along the way.

She evolved too, beyond the horrible choices she made.

I always understand when people focus on the bad (and where many move on) but somewhere in there, I started to focus on the good.

That’s where the rebuild started, about year THREE of recovery.

I want to broaden this perspective out into a larger theory. While I cannot know the exact, intricate reality of your specific marriage or your wifes internal state, the argument she used that it wasnt about the sex, it was about validation is an incredibly common script in the world of infidelity. It is used so widely across counselling rooms and support forums that I find it highly unlikely to be true as often as people claim. In fact, I believe this specific defense mechanism has become a pervasive cultural myth designed to sanitize the reality of betrayal.

My theory is that the validation only argument is a form of collective revisionist history. When wayward partners are caught and forced to face the wreckage of their actions, they are hit with a wave of intense shame. To look a betrayed spouse in the eye and say, "I did this because I wanted a new sexual experience, I wanted to feel a different body, and I wanted the raw pleasure of different orgasms," feels too cruel, too base, and too monstrous. It forces them to own a level of hedonistic selfishness that destroys their own self image. So, consciously or unconsciously, the narrative gets rewritten. It becomes a psychological tragedy where they say they were broken, they had low self esteem, they just needed to feel seen, and sex was merely the unfortunate tax they had to pay to get that emotional fulfilment. It reframes an act of active indulgence as an act of desperate compliance.

But when we look at human behaviour objectively, this rigid separation between physical pleasure and emotional validation rarely holds up. In an affair, the two are completely intertwined. Experiencing someone elses intense physical desire for you, climaxing with a new person, and engaging in forbidden acts is the ultimate validation. The sex isnt a chore they are gritting their teeth through to receive a compliment afterward; the physical pleasure and the dopamine rush are the very vehicles delivering that validation. To claim it wasnt about the sex ignores the entire biological and psychological reality of how affairs operate. It wasnt a calculated marketplace transaction where currency was traded for goods; it was a deeply immersive, self indulgent fantasy where the physical and the psychological fed into each other.

This is why the transactional, marketplace analogy, while entirely understandable as a way for a betrayed spouse to process the filthiness of the act, ultimately gives the wayward partner too much credit. It treats them as a passive participant who lowered their price, rather than an active agent who pursued a high. By recognizing how widely this validation script is used, we can see it for what it truly is, a shield against the full weight of accountability. While it may play a role in some cases, the sheer frequency with which it is deployed suggests it is far less about historical accuracy and far more about softening the blow of a brutal truth.