Are you Having an Affair? Is your Partner
having an Affair?
We help motivated adults manage
unpleasant emotions and improve relationships.
We also mentor helping professionals to work with challenging clients.
Signs of Affairs
. Confronting Your Partner
. Recovering from Affairs
Infidelity is a dark shadow of partnership. Affairs can
provide excitement for the bored, adventure for the restless and pride
for the egotistic. Affairs also provide heartache, guilt, disappointment,
depression, shattered dreams and damaged lives - especially
for children whose parents have affairs.
Although this may be a difficult time for
you, you can save your sanity.
Don't waste time - we help many people
rebuild healthy marriages.
Or do you want to end an unhappy partnership
peacefully?
Or do you just want to make a decision and move on?
Who has Affairs? ... People like You!
Many people have sexual fantasies now and again. It
might be fun to imagine what he would be like in bed or what she would look
like naked ... and so on. Fantasies are relatively safe but can become
obsessions. Can you resist sexual impulses? Can you say "No"
to yourself ... and to others?
The most common justifications for affairs that I
hear are: 1) it's cheaper than a divorce; 2) their partner reminds them of a
parent; and 3) because they can. So, who has affairs?
- People like you!
- People in mid-life crisis
- People with immature parts
- People with opportunity and time
- People who want to fulfill a transference
- People who want to punish a partner or past partner
- People with unmet physical desires or emotional needs
- People who want to diminish the intensity or intimacy
of a partnership
Are you trying to get over an affair? We help people resolve relationship enmeshments
and find lasting solutions. We help
many people resolve partnership issues and
marriage problems.
Perhaps you feel hurt by a partner's romantic,
intimate or sexual affair. Or perhaps you suffer guilt or depression about
your own acts of betrayal. Yet the real casualties of adultery
are often the betrayed children who may be later found in the depressed corners
of society.
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Before our ancestors developed
agriculture, humanity walked on the edge of extinction.
We humans survived partly because we could mate and produce
children at almost any time,
without a mating season. But prehistoric survival is no excuse
for so much suffering. |
What Price is a Free Lunch?
Some people flirt because they don't know
how else to relate. Some people use internet chat to build an emotional
intimacy that they avoid with their partners. Some people take training in
seduction, with the hope of more casual sex. But few lunches are really free, and the
true cost can be high.
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Toxic Advice: From a book about dating
for misogynists, predators and psychopaths
They say movies is a terrible first date because you
can't talk much, but I think that's perfect, you don’t want to know her -
you just want feel her up and get some action later.
She'll never know you faked the date....or maybe she
will, but who cares - you'll never see the bitch again. |
There ain't no such things as secret affairs!
Many children respond to their parent's romantic
or sexual affairs, even if they are never told. Someone you love
will pay for your 'free' lunch.
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My father had affairs while he lived with us
... he wasn't only betraying my mother - he was betraying me, my brother and my
sister ... now he is very upset that we have all divorced him. None of us
want anything to do with him now ... it's like he is polluted ... |
Types of Affairs
Probably you or your partner could have affairs.
Happy partnerships do not eliminate infidelity - and affairs allow some people
(who are enmeshed with a parent or fixated on a past-partner) to reduce
the emotional intensity of their intimacy. But few affairs mature into
long-term committed relationships.
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I had an affair with my husband for three
years before he left his wife and children to be with me. And now, only
two years since our wedding, he is having an affair with another woman.
I am paying
the price for his inability to honor or respect himself. |
If you are having an affair, you are probably
focused on your own needs. You may forget or ignore the needs of your life
partner, affair partner and any children. You may avoid considering the
consequences of your affair on everybody else. After all, no-one else
knows ... right? See Signs of Affairs
- Pressure-relief affairs may relieve boredom,
frustration and loneliness.
- In-love affairs can bring
overwhelming emotions - and often end in suffering and stress
- Brief sexual affairs and one-night-stands
rarely become love affairs or long-term friendships and often indicate
emotional immaturity or
passive-aggression
- Love affairs can become long friendships, although
feelings of guilt may cause you to eventually separate from or
distance yourself from your partner or your affair partner
- Business sex (trading sex for money
or favors; including prostitution) may have the least emotional
consequences but the highest risk of venereal disease
Men & Affairs
Men often say that they want affairs only for sex.
Men may admit or boast that they pretend to be in love to have sex with women.
(Many women have told us that men pretended to love them just as a preliminary
ritual for sex.)
Some sexual predators target single women with children.
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My wife helps me realize how very wonderful
is my girlfriend.
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Many men don’t like their female partners having close male
friends. But men may not confront their partners about extramarital affairs
... but if they hide their feelings they may explode emotionally later.
Younger men usually seek sexual rather than love
affairs. Their primary motivations are physical pleasure, to hunt, to impress
friends and to gain sexual experience. Older men are more likely to have affairs
with women who understand, accept and appreciate them. They may also want to
gratify sexual desires that they would not ask of decent women ...
like their wives. (See
Emotional Blackmail)
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The ONLY woman I ever loved was another
man's wife
... my MOTHER! Bumper sticker seen in Hawaii, USA
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Men who are emotionally bonded to their mothers (see
emotional incest) are likely to have
affairs to avoid or to sabotage any committed partnership. They are also
likely to boast to their male friends about the number and variety of
their sexual adventures. (See Little Prince).
Women & Affairs
It seems that the longer a woman is married, the more likely
she will have an affair. Women may choose sexual affairs for pleasure and for
experience. An affair may provide a woman with missing
emotional pleasure. A woman may consider affairs to be a reserve source of
intimacy, especially if she feels bored, disappointed or uncertain about
her partnership or marriage.
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Seducing an idiot is never worth the
effort!
(Don't sleep with someone crazier than you are!) |
Women who are fixated on their fathers
seem more likely to have affairs with much older men
(see Little Princess). Many women satisfy missing
emotional needs by
- mentally reliving past romantic affairs
- cheating on their partners to get revenge
- prove that they also can be unfeeling and insensitive
- cheat their partners for a feeling of being wanted as
a woman
- obsessing about lives of other people (gossip, soap operas etc)
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How can I divorce my husband without
telling him? He will be very angry. |
Both men and women may indicate, "I want to feel good regardless of the consequences of my choices on
my partner or family - or on my affair-partner's partner or family".
They may justify the pain and suffering associated with affairs, saying, "I
only wanted ...
- excitement and adventure
- to rescue or help someone
- to seduce or to be seduced
- to avoid the reality of my aging
- to fulfill an impulse or compulsion
- to feel desirable or sexually potent
Attacking, criticizing or blaming their justifications
will not improve relationships. We coach partners to restore
peace, to balance pain ... and to rebuild healthy partnership on a foundation of reality.
See Signs of Affairs
and Recovering from Affairs
Healthy partnership requires partners who know
and respect each other's values and needs; and cooperate to fulfill them. We
help people build healthy relationships.
Online Coaching for Better Relationships
Plagiarism is theft. Copyright ©
Martyn Carruthers 2002-2012 All rights reserved
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