How Do I Begin To Understand My Husband’s Affair?
By: Katie Lersch: I get a lot of correspondence from wives who are struggling to understand more about their husband’s affair. Mostly, they are struggling to figure out why he would do such a thing and where they go from here. I recently heard from a wife who said “I really need help understanding my husband’s affair. I’ve tried several times to talk to him about this but the answers that he gives me don’t really help and they leave me with more questions than answers. I just cannot understand why he would do this to us. He’s never given me any indication that he wasn’t happy with our marriage or unsatisfied with our sex life. And then out of the blue, I find out that he’s been sleeping with a woman from our church of all places. I just cannot understand it at all. We were happy. I did everything I could to be a good wife and meet his needs but apparently this wasn’t enough. Sometimes I get so angry with him and I demand that he help me understand this, but then he gets just as frustrated and says that he doesn’t have any answers for me because he doesn’t understand it either. What now?”
This is such a common issue. So many of us wives feel like if we could just begin to understand the “whys” of her husband’s affair, then we just might be able to begin to heal. But the answers still allude us. On my surviving the affair blog, I hear from and get insights from a lot of men who have cheated and had affairs but who are now trying to save their marriages. I believe this gives me some insight as to why infidelity happens and what a man’s thought process is from the beginning to the end. I’ll share some of these insights with you in the hopes that it at least helps to give you some new understanding and insights about the affair.
First, Understand That It Might Be Difficult For You To Grasp A Series Of Events That You Yourself Would Never Follow: Before I tell you why I believe men cheat and what their motivations are, I want you to know that afterward, it still might all feel or sound very foreign to you. It’s very hard to feel any understanding at all for actions that you yourself would never take. I would never cheat on my husband no matter how unhappy I was or how unfulfilled I felt. That possibility would never enter my mind. Instead, I would sit my husband down and share my concerns with him in the hopes that we could fix things before any one felt the need to cheat or to go outside of our marriage. And, if we could not reach a resolution, I would divorce my husband before I ever allowed myself to be intimate with anyone else.
Many of the wives who I dialog with agree with me completely on this. And that’s why it’s very hard for us to understand it when our husbands try to help us make sense of their affair. This reasoning still falls flat with us because we could never understand that motivation when we’d never feel the same way. We might concede that there were vulnerabilities in our marriage or that our husband was struggling in some way. But none of these could ever justify cheating in our minds, which is why the answers allude us.
I bring this to your attention because I want you to consider that you may have to vow to step outside of yourself and your own way of thinking if you truly want to begin to understand your husband’s affair. And, even then, you may still have some questions.
The Real Reason That I Believe Husbands Have Affairs And What This Means To You: I’m sure that if you’ve been researching this topic, you’ve read numerous accounts of why men cheat or have affairs. You’ve likely heard various theories like men have affairs:
to get more sex;
to get a different kind of sex;
because their wives don’t appreciate them;
because they wanted to get caught;
because of unresolved resentment toward their wife or their marriage;
or because they wanted to feel young again.
The list really is endless. And some of these things are true. But, a man’s reasoning for cheating can be very personal and varied. Still, for me, it really does come down to one thing. Men cheat or have affairs to feel better about themselves or about their situation. For some, this will mean the excitement of more sex. For others, this will mean getting attention from (or the validation of) someone with various attributes or availability. For others, it might mean still feeling very desirable, even when they have self doubt of self esteem issues.
Whatever it is that they are grappling with at the time, the affair is a way to quiet whatever is causing them pain and to obtain relief or reprieve. And I know full well that you’re probably either not buying this or thinking that it’s not a good enough explanation. As a wife who has been cheated on, I wholeheartedly agree with you. I can never embrace this thought process because my individual struggles would never inspire me to betray my spouse.
With that said, I have to tell you that men who cheat don’t really go through a thought process in the same way that a woman would. I firmly believe that if I ever was tempted to cheat, I would think long and hard about it before I took any action. I would feel a lot of conflict before I even made one move. But men can be different in this way. Often, an affair is very impulsive decision that they just do not think a lot about. In fact, their inability to think and to be reflective is often one reason they find themselves cheating in the first place.
They often keep pushing the conflict down to spare themselves pain, only to find themselves in a situation where they are reacting to that same pain. Of course, they end up making a bigger problem for themselves that they often regret deeply, but they unfortunately aren’t thinking about any of this at the time (which is why they are sometimes telling you the truth when they say that they don’t understand the affair either.)
As I said, I’ll never truly understand my husband’s affair. But eventually, I came to realize that I didn’t necessarily need to fully understand it to move past it. It dawned on me that I could either continue to be confused and reeling, or to commit to moving on despite not having everything tied up in a neat bow. And this was the beginning of my healing. Eventually our marriage recovered and is now better than ever. It it helps, you can read about the things that helped me move on after the affair on my blog at http://surviving-the-affair.com
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