'What sleeping with married men taught me about infidelity'

You ever bang a blonde soccer mom in an apple orchard? Golden delicious.
/thanks2freq

 

Worth it.

 

Having a live-in mother-in-law is the fucking worst.

You can basically take everything that annoys you about your wife and multiply it by two.

 

My MIL lives with us, and I have no problem with it.
Her presence bothers her daughter but does not bother me a bit.

 

Just wait until she kidnaps the kids.

 

Honeycrisp.

The End

 

Dat ass doe.

 

Honeycrisp FTW.

Had my first one about 8 years ago when I bought a bag from a fruit stand outside Kelowna.

We do a BC run every Fall for peaches/apples and a fun overnight getaway.

I pay whatever price they are asking when those apples show up in the middle of Winter.

 

At the recommendation of my therapist, I was watching "It's Complicated" with Alec Baldwin and Meryl Streep recently. They are a divorced couple who starts sleeping together and emotionally reconnecting again. At one point, she says something along the lines of "You're not the only reason our marriage failed." He's surprised and says she's never said that. She says, "I know, because once you cheated, I didn't have to."

Struck a chord here, as my partner's infidelity helped bring an end to our marriage. And it's very easy to point to that as THE reason. But when I'm introspective, I can see the things that helped create the conditions that led to the affair and my hand in them. One big one was how we stopped relating to each other after we had kids and one of us was home with them (a role we both filled at different times) and we no longer bonded over our work. It had been a huge connection we shared, and all of a sudden the biggest things in our lives were very different.

Interestingly, I have a married friend whose spouse is a jerk -- I know this because I used to work with both of them, and it was kind of baffling. Anyway, said friend has been a bit flirty toward me lately. After being scarred by infidelity in my own marriage, I'm adamant that it's not a path I'd go down. But I find myself being a little flirty back. I'm torn about the reason: I genuinely like this person? It's a safe way to get an emotional rush without actually having to worry about all the strings of a relationship? I'm starved for the emotional validation? Maybe all of the above.

I haven't dated since the divorce, incidentally. I've got young kids and I'm my mom's primary caretaker. Not complaining about either of those things, I'm extremely thankful for those roles and made a conscious decision to give them my all and not worry about dating right now. But it hits me every so often how damn long I've been single and how some of the aspects of a relationship would be really nice.

 

My god, that would be fantsatic!

 

First off, I'm glad you're in therapy. I hope it's helping and continues to help. But I want to disavow you a little of the notion that anyone is "driven" to cheat. I find that idea both prevalent and wrong. Almost every marriage breaks down because of the actions of both parties, at least to some respect. (I think it's rare that it's a 50-50 fault line, but sure, it's unlikely that a divorce involves a perfect spouse.) But nobody is ever forced to cheat.

I have a female friend who was madly in love with her husband. She's a good person and a great mum. She often talked about how happy she was, including how good her sex life was. He then cheated on her, and they divorced. It's about two years ago now. They were recently talking at one of the kid's basketball game or something, and he effectively blamed her for his cheating. She was too focussed on their kids (four of them) and too worried about money (both teachers), and he wouldn't have done what he did if she hadn't been those things.

She was upset and we talked it out, and I was like, that's fucking bullshit. He cheated. He did. He's miserable now—he's still with the other woman, and she's awful, not surprisingly, but now they have a kid together, his fifth(!), and he's totally fucked—and he can't put the blame on himself. He can't live with the guilt, so he's trying to transfer the load. I've seen that time and again, where the cheater turns him- or herself into the victim, and it's fucking wrong. I think it's far more likely that people given to cheat are the same kind of morally unmoored people given to blame others for their own sins.

Were you the perfect spouse? Probably not. Did you drive your partner to cheat on you? No. Full fucking stop. Your partner chose to do that.

Don't you ever for a minute think otherwise.