Solutions for Couples in Crisis: Affairs & Infidelity (1)
After the Excitement - Depression © Martyn Carruthers

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Are you Having an Affair?  Is your Partner having an Affair?

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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?

1. People like you!
2. People in mid-life crisis
3. People with immature parts
4. People with opportunity and time
5. People who want to fulfill a transference
6. People who want to punish a partner or past partner
7. People with unmet physical desires or emotional needs
8. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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)

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 ...

1. excitement and adventure
2. to rescue or help someone
3. to seduce or to be seduced
4. to avoid the reality of my aging
5. to fulfill an impulse or compulsion
6. 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 relationships require partners who know and respect each other's values and needs; and cooperate to fulfill them. We help people build healthy partnership.

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Plagiarism is theft. Copyright © Martyn Carruthers 2002-2012 All rights reserved

Plagiarism is theft. Copyright © Martyn Carruthers 1996-2012 All rights reserved. Soulwork Systemic Coaching was primarily developed by Martyn Carruthers
to help people dissolve emotional blocks and improve relationships to achieve their goals. These concepts and strategies are for general knowledge only. Consult a physician about medical conditions and before changing medical treatment. Don't steal intellectual property ... get permission to post, publish or teach Martyn's work.