I’m Andrea Giles, and you’re listening to the Heal from Infidelity podcast,
episode number 144, Types of Affairs.

Hello, and welcome to the Heal from Infidelity podcast where courageous
women learn not only to heal from their spouse’s betrayal, but to become
the boldest, truest, most decisive, and confident versions of themselves
ever. If you know there’s more for you than the life you’re currently
living but don’t quite know how to get there, you are in the right place.
Stick around to learn how to create a life that will knock your own socks
off. Is it possible? It is, and I’m here to show you how. I’m your host,
Andrea Giles. Are you ready? Let’s dive in.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode. This one is going to be
all about types of affairs. I’m going to go through several different types
of affairs, different ways that infidelity occurs, and the reason why I’m
going to be doing this is because, for everyone involved, it helps to know
what to do about it. Not all affairs are the same, not all infidelity is
the same, there are different kinds of infidelity that need different kinds
of response, different kinds of help, different kinds of bringing in
professional help, different kinds of treatments, etc.

The way that each individual processes infidelity, both the person who
engaged in the affair and the person who learned about it later, need to
know what it was about, need to know kind of a context of what led to the
affair, what led to the infidelity. It’s hurtful enough just that it
happened, it’s hurtful enough for every single person I’ve ever worked with.
It’s been quite a blow and it can be really, really helpful to give some
context to it. This is something that I do inside my program a lot, we get
some understanding of why it happened. It’s really, really important
because otherwise we’re looking at it through a lens that might not be
correct.

For example, if we just assume that our spouse is just a selfish jerk and
leave it there, it really is quite impossible to actually go and make the
kind of marriage that you want. If you’re holding onto that, the wall is
going to stay up, if you drop the wall, it’s going to be so easy to jump
back into it at the slightest little aggravation, you’re not really going
to get anywhere. And understanding what the affair was about and looking at
it from a broader view is going to help you know what to do, what needs to
happen. For the person who had the affair, it is not enough to just say,
“I’m sorry, it won’t happen again”, it is not enough. There needs to be
some deeper understanding of what was the impetus, what were the
vulnerabilities, what was going on, and that is what we’re going to talk
about today. That’s what we’re going to talk about.

Before I jump into it, I would like to ask a favor, my podcast has just
been growing and growing, and I hear from people all over the world how
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take the time to go rate and review my podcast, let other listeners know
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take the time to do so. Thank you so much.

Okay, here we go. Let’s look at why it happened and types of affairs. So
many of the things that I’m going to be sharing today are adapted from,
it’s an older book, but it’s an oldie but a goodie, it’s called Infidelity:
A Survival Guide. It’s kind of hard to even get your hands on, but it is an
excellent resource. Don-David Lusterman, PhD, this is his work. He did
extensive, extensive, long-term studies of people who had experienced
infidelity, people participating in it, and those that are the affected
partner, and he is a great body of work around infidelity. So I’m sharing
some things from him and some things that I have adapted through my own
practice to share with you today.

So, let’s just jump in. Right out the gate, he says that people want to
know and one of the first questions that people have is why did it happen.
And the short answer to this every time is that the answer is not simple,
the answer is not simple. Okay? Some people are unfaithful for reasons that
are tied up in their past that have absolutely nothing to do with the
person in front of them, such as a history of infidelity in their parents’
marriages, such as wounds from their childhood that have never been looked
at, that have never been dealt with, and it’s a kind of form of acting out
from this place of trauma. Others are unfaithful because of what they
believe about the opposite gender, that the opposite gender is to be used
and enjoyed, that kind of thing that they are entitled to it. We’re going
to get a little more into all of these things.

For others, it really is rooted in the marriage. There’s things that
they’re unhappy about, they don’t know to get what they want and act out,
get involved with other people to get more of what they want. We’re going
to be talking about all of these things. So, once you get a sense though of
what happened, why it happened, what kind of affair we’re dealing with here,
what kind of issue, how big is this issue, all of that, then you can
consider what to do about it. It’s very important for the person who is
unfaithful, it’s very important for the person who discovered the
infidelity, it can even be really important for the third-party, for
everyone involved to really heal and not continue on or do it again.

All right. So we are going to now jump into different types of extramarital
involvement. As you’re listening, I understand that it might make you
uncomfortable, and what I want to say about that is that knowledge is
power. The more you know, the more powerful your choices are going to be.
So please keep open as much as you can. You can always pause it if you need
to pause it and come back, and feel free to share this with your partner if
you are in a partnered relationship still.

Okay. Before I dive into the very specific kinds of affairs, I want to
share something that psychologist Fred Humphrey has said about infidelity
and extramarital sex. He suggests that we can best understand any
particular act by considering the many factors involved. For one thing, you
may want to know how long an extramarital affair has been going on. If your
partner has been involved with more than one person, how often has it
happened and with how many? It may also help to know whether there is a
strong emotional bond between your mate and the other person. Some people
want to know if it was very sexual, how far things went sexually, others
are more upset about a strong emotional attachment. This is an interesting
piece to look at, especially between men and women. Women often have a
harder time with the emotional connection, especially if they feel
emotionally cut off from their spouse and they find that they are
emotionally really tight with somebody else, that can be more painful than
if it were like a one-night stand.

For men, often, they have a hard time knowing that their spouse has been
physical with somebody else, that can be very, very challenging for men. A
lot of this goes to how we’re wired, how we think about men and women, how
we think about our own significance in the life of our partners. All right.
So, just like there are lots of different kinds of affairs, there are lots
of different ways that men and women differ in each type. There are
different things that they’re thinking, there are different things that
they’re doing, and we’re going to kind of look at some of that.

So, first, I’d like to start with some of the most frequent reasons given
for various types of infidelity. This is a more broad list and we’ll get
even more specific in the next portion of this. Not understanding what
relational love is. I want to pause on that one. What is relational love?
This word relational is something that has been in my vocabulary much more
in the past year than ever before. You maybe have heard me say that in my
podcast, partly because I am studying with Terry Real, and I’m in his
certification program to be a relational practitioner.

Part of the reason why this word relational has been more frequent in my
vocabulary is because I think it sums up a lot of what our problems are in
our society individually, there’s so much individualism out there, like
more power to the individual, and it’s problematic in that it overshoots
the goal. We don’t want to be completely dependent or co-dependent, but
overshooting actual relational health within a relationship is this, “I
don’t need anybody, I can do it on my own,” that kind of attitude. And so,
I’ve been talking more about this especially because I’m studying with
Terry Real, I am in his certification program. I actually spent seven hours
today, this very day, in a mandatory training. I’ve got several more of
these seven hour classes coming up. It’s a long day, but I love it. I just
eat this stuff up. This is the kind of thing that teaches me that I’m right
where I’m meant to be in the career that is meant for me because I love it,
I love it. I eat it up. It’s fun. It’s fun for me to study.

But he is the champion of relational health, Terry Real. And so, to read
about that in this book is really awesome to hear about not understanding
what relational love is. Relational, it’s learning how to be in a healthy
relationship, being relational with each other. Another thing, inability to
communicate feelings or needs. Not having the verbal skills to solve
problems together. Not being able to accommodate to one another’s needs or
interests. Not really knowing the person you married, for example, unaware
of some upsetting sexual problems. Not being able to cope with cultural or
ethnic differences. Unrealistic expectations about the nature of marriage.
Disappointment that your mate has not grown in the same ways you have.
Sexual curiosity, emotional need such as feeling lonely in the relationship
and looking elsewhere. Sexual addiction, boredom, losing the sense of fun,
and excitement you once had as a couple. And this is not an exhaustive
list, but this is one more, getting so caught up in life’s daily
obligations that you lose sight of one another.

As you’re listening, I want you to think about if any of those that land
with you, please don’t judge, please don’t feel shame, just notice, just
notice. What was true maybe in your marriage or about your partner, about
you, or looking at the whole, the goal here is to be able to have really
healthy relationships. And the more that we’re able to look at the whole,
whether it’s the person we’re with that we’re going to stay with or not,
that is all good stuff that’s going to help you.

All right. One of the reasons why people have extramarital affairs is
because of what’s called the life crisis theory. All of you have probably
heard of midlife crisis or identity crisis. For many people, they have a
time in their life when reality sinks in. There’s some different parts of
this that we’re going to look at. Sometimes it’s after all of the big
choices have been made, the mate has been chosen, the house has been
bought, the schooling has been done, the job has been acquired, and this
person can then start going, “Oh my gosh, have I chosen the right mate? I
thought it was supposed to be better than this. Can I really fulfill
people’s expectations? I had different expectations of what the marriage
was supposed to be.” It can be, “Now that our children are grown, what is
left? Can we salvage anything good from what’s left?”

Sometimes these life crises can happen when we experience loss. I cannot
tell you how many people have come to me to talk to me, telling me that
their spouse’s parent died, their mother or their father or somebody very
close to them, and that’s when their spouse moved away from them and into
another relationship. Here’s the thing that’s so fascinating is that it’s
not always negative things that push people out the door into infidelity,
sometimes it’s really positive things, sometimes it’s good things,
sometimes they have these things going on. Like for example, somebody
landing the dream job, they’ve got the job, and they want their spouse to
be so proud of them and they don’t know how to articulate that they are
terrified of failing, they’re terrified of not getting the job done
properly, and so they don’t share with their spouse, they want to be seen
as this strong, capable, “I can show up, I can provide”. They want to be
seen as that way because they have been programmed to think that that’s the
most valuable way to show up, that you can’t show weakness.

And then they go to work and they are learning the ropes of this new job,
and somebody there pays attention to this person, gives a bunch of
attention to this person, and it feels really nice to them at the workplace
to share some of their anxiety and concerns and to have a listening ear.
So, this is one example of a good thing. This is a good thing that happened
and still infidelity occurred. Another thing that is common that I myself
have coached around is around the birth of a child that oftentimes the
spouse, the father, this is often the father, will suddenly feel really
unimportant, like they have no purpose, they see that the way that the
mother and child are bonding and feel really worthless, and so they go out
and get attention elsewhere.

Sometimes the mother becomes so involved with that baby that they feel
neglected and ignored. Some men just feel just not good enough. And so, for
example, they’ll go out and drink and have too many drinks, and end up
being with somebody, and wreaking havoc in their life. For some women,
becoming a mother can be very instigating in feeling their sense of worth go
down, their sense of attraction, kind of feel like their whole identity is
wrapped up in this tiny person. And sometimes being shown affection and
attention by somebody new can feel very exciting, very validating, very
tempting. So it goes both ways, not just with men, but also with women.

So, in both of these situations, sometimes it can be just reaching a time
in life where it’s like, look, it can be nothing that’s particularly a big
change, like a job loss, job gain, a baby, things like that, sometimes it
can just be going, “Oh my gosh, just like that I middle-aged. What do I
have to show for it?” A midlife evaluation is what a famous psychologist
calls it, Dan Levinson. He calls it the midlife evaluation. Some people
call it a male menopause. Interesting, right?

Another form of this place, of this midlife crisis or this life crisis
theory is termed reaching the summit. This is extra particular in men more
than women. For men, some women, but more for men, they can hit this place
where they feel like there’s nowhere else to go, “I got it all, I’m at the
top of my game financially, career-wise, with my family, I have the house,
I have all the things.” And this, instead of feeling proud and enjoying it,
it can cause feelings of depression or panic in the growing realization
that this pace that it has required to get to the summit cannot be
maintained forever. These men have been so so programmed to think that they
have to succeed, and if they recognize, “I can’t keep this pace up, it’s
downhill from here”, which as a coach, I don’t necessarily agree with
because there’s so many different measures of success that are outside of
money or your status at work anyway. But for many men, this pace can create
some depression.

Another version of this is called the facts of life. And unlike the summit
or empty nest where all the kids are out, and it’s like, “Now what do we
do”, the sudden awareness of the facts of life can occur earlier or later
than midlife, but like these other crisis, the facts of life crisis is a
frequent trigger for extramarital activity. Why? Okay. According to
therapist Pitman, “At some point in the course of the marriage, people come
to grips with several painful realities, they are imperfect, their spouse
is imperfect, their children are imperfect, they’re not going to conquer
the world, and it will all get worse”. Pretty sad, right? He says, “These
thoughts have enormous power like the empty nest in summit crisis. This
realization can also cause great anxiety or overwhelming depression. When
people are anxious or depressed, they often set upon solutions that at least
for the moment, seem to relieve these feelings. One quick fix is defined a
new love to regain the feeling of a new future with new possibilities.”
It’s kind of the perfect little setup there, even though we all know it’s
short-lived, right?

Okay. Next, another thing that happens, another reason why people step out
of sight of their marriages is entitlement. So even though we have come a
long way in our society in not demoralizing women as much and not
objectifying women as much, I think everyone listening would agree that
we’ve got a long way to go. There are still plenty of people who think that
women are prices to be won. And unfortunately there are, still to this day,
TV shows, advertisements, magazines, movies that continue to hold the
belief that if a woman gets in trouble with a man that somehow she’s
brought it on herself. There’s still the messaging that women are
playthings to be one, that they do not have to attach any emotional meaning
to. Ironically, the study show the number is 56%.

It’s probably, I don’t know, right around there, but the study show that
men who had purely sexual extramarital involvements reported that their
marriages were happy, as do 33% of women. Isn’t that interesting? So more
men than women. There’s a group of people who believe that extramarital sex
as opposed to extramarital romance has nothing to do with their marriage,
nothing to do with it. They can compartmentalize it like no one’s business,
it’s super fascinating. Men and women who feel this way often never step
foot in a therapist’s office until one of two things happen. One, they’re
caught by their partner, or two, they begin to feel like they’re falling in
love with someone with whom they’ve been having an affair. And this means
that their long-term relationship, our marriage is over.

Another form of entitlement is the belief that marriage should meet all our
needs, all the attention that we need, all the great intimacy. Some of this
is the belief that women are responsible for the relationship and that men
are responsible for income and material advantage. So often what happens
here is each person is seeing the other’s role as kind of entitled, it’s
your job to keep the home looking good, to make good food, to keep the
laundry done, it’s your job to make sure the kids are all taken care of, to
make sure that the husband is content and satisfied. And for many women,
this becomes their full-time job. This is an example from a woman named
Barbara. She said, “I did everything I knew how-to to keep my husband
happy. I learned from my mother that my job was to create a beautiful and
serene home, to dress well, meaning the way he liked, to keep myself
well-groomed and to protect him from the children’s little squabbles”.

In return, she felt entitled to his continual shows of interest and to his
large income, which had given the family many material advantages. Her
husband, Bob, said that he had learned that his job was to be the provider.
He felt that he was supposed to handle life outside the home, and that it
was her responsibility to make the home a safe and welcome place for him.
This is how his parents’ marriage worked and it seemed good enough for
them. Through the years, both Barbara and Bob had played their roles so well
that once the children had grown, they felt they barely knew one another and
were left with little to share. They came to theory because each one of them
had discovered that the other was having an affair. Both were seeking in
their affairs, the feelings of closeness and sharing that they had lost
through the years. So that is just another example of how for men and women
this entitlement can come up, we can feel entitled to certain kinds of
treatment and then go seek it elsewhere when we’re not getting it in our
marriages.

Okay. The next one is sexual identity affairs. All right. So this one is
really interesting to think about, to talk about. There are many, many
people, based on how they were raised, that have pretty suppressed sexual
lives, pretty suppressed, where sometimes when they think about the kind of
intimacy they want, they instantly go to a place of shame, that they feel
like that would be wrong, that they would ruin their life. And sometimes
when people, it can come to a head for them and they feel like they’re just
going to blow it if they don’t have some experience and uncaged some of
that suppression that they have felt for such a long time.

But for many people, these are like going back to fantasies teenage, like
that strong drive that many teenagers have, and then actually following
through with some of the things that they imagined as teenagers. Now, for
some people, it’s like this internal pressure like, “I have to follow
through with this urge, I have to follow through, it’s really important”.
And for many people, this is where you see, for example, a heterosexual
marriage, heterosexual couple where the man has an affair with another man,
or vice versa, where the woman has an affair with a woman. It can be that
they have suppressed this attraction for a very long time, and it has kind
of come to the point where they can’t ignore it anymore and they feel like
they’re going to burst if they don’t do something about it, and so they go
act on it. This is an example from someone named Eunice.

She said, “The fact that Doug was having a gay relationship hit me like a
ton of bricks. He is a minister, and I always thought a good Christian. He
is a good father and a great person and preacher. Everyone loves him, and
the weirdest part is we always had a good love life, at least I thought we
did. He is considerate, gentle, and interested in my pleasure.” Doug
explained that, as a teenager, he had feelings toward other boys, but he
had done nothing about it because he thought it was sinful and wrong. He
had never dated much, but when he became a seminary student, he began to
feel that it was important to find the right woman to marry, and he had
never did feel that he did not love and respect her.

He said, “In a way, it was like being in a sleepwalker. I went through the
marriage always trying to be a good husband and a good man, but always
feeling that in some way, I was not sure that this was me, at least not the
real and true me.” At a convention, he met a man to whom he felt deeply
attracted. He had a drink or two, and found himself in the man’s hotel room
where for the first time in his life, he had gay sex. He was filled with
excitement, shame and guilt. He said nothing to Eunice, but she noticed
that he had come back from the meeting, not quite himself, neither of them
assured that this means the end of their marriage, but it’s left each with
many questions about Doug’s sexual identity.

So there are many examples of this. I’ve worked with many people who have
come to me with this scenario where their spouse had an affair with
somebody of the opposite gender, and sometimes it was the exploring of it
that they realized, “That’s not actually what I want at all, I want more
passion within our marriage”, and they come back and they want more of
that, and there’s a lot there for them to work through. And sometimes they
realize, “Actually, I feel most fulfilled in this other way.” So, that is
another type of affair.

We’re now going to talk about another, sexual addiction and Don Juanism.
The term sexual addiction refers to a compulsive need to engage in sexual
experiences. This is really important. Just like any type of kind of
addiction, there’s a compulsion to it, that’s really, really important to
know. A tendency of people who engage in these kinds of relationships or
this kind of action, a tendency to hold low opinions of themselves and to
constantly remind themselves of their deficiencies, distorted, or
unrealistic beliefs about themselves, their behavior, other people, and the
events that occur in the world around them. A desire to escape from or to
suppress unpleasant emotions, difficulty coping with stress, at least one
powerful memory or of an intense high experienced at a crucial time in
their lives and an ever present desire to recapture the euphoric feeling
and uncanny ability to deny that they have a problem.

So there’s a lot of deception, there’s a lot of deception that goes on
here. Romance does not interest them, this is mostly men, there are some
women that engage in this. People who are involved in Don Juanism or Dona
Juanaism, if it’s a woman, is that unlike other types of affairs where
there’s a third-party that somebody gets involved with that often is an
emotional part of their life, with this kind of affair, that is not the
case. And in this kind of affair, relationships within the marriage are
actually not really the problem, there might be some issues, there might be
some things that need to be worked through, need to be navigated, but the
quality of the marriage is not actually the real issue. The problem is with
the Don Juan, the problem lies deep within Don Juan, and its solution
depends upon whether he or she is ready to face it.

This kind of personality can appear over the top, successful, strong,
brilliant, charismatic often, but inside, they feel very, very empty. So
what they do is they get their highs by going out on a conquest and
winning, and having the person, and getting that initial hit that becomes
kind of like a chemical addiction. It’s like any other kind of addiction
that you get that first hit, that’s really, really powerful, and that
intensity can never quite be recaptured. Every subsequent experience is a
little weaker and its power to produce that original feeling, but they
become more and more drawn to the addiction because it filled the emptiness
that is so central to his life and how he feels. They feel compelled to go
through the experience of finding some person to conquer and spend as
little time as possible kind of scheming of how they’re going to succeed,
and then having accomplished that goal, they leave.

These sexual exploits, they are not viewing the other person as a person
really, they’re seeing them as an exploit, as a wanted object that they get
and then they cast aside. There’s really no meaning beyond this, and they
can really start the next day. On their next conquest, many Don Juans, when
they are in recovery, can really look at how this can go back to stem to
teenage years. This is generally when this starts out is when they are
teenagers and they don’t know what to do with different things, they can
have a very low self-esteem and gain a false sense of self by engaging and
they get attention for it engaging in these types of behaviors. So Don
Juans are very similar to sexually addicted people, but with one big
difference. Don Juans can be very high on themselves and think that they
are great, and sexually addicted people often feel a lot of shame and
guilt.

So there are two different ways that people feel here, and sometimes it can
go back and forth where they can feel really good and look how high and
mighty I am, and then can go to shame. But for the most part, Don Juan,
that kind of thinking is above like, “I’m very, very entitled, I deserve
this”, that kind of thing where people who are the sexually addicted type,
where it’s a little bit different, it’s less about conquesting and more
about getting the hit, it can come from a place of shame and guilt. And
also I will add that for some people, that hit can be like a pretend
healing from feeling insufficient. It can make them feel good, make them
feel more alive, and hence they do it again and again and again to have
that same feeling.

All right. Couple more here that I’ll get through. This is definitely going
to be a little bit of a longer episode, exploratory affairs. This is when
there is a marriage that the person that’s having the affair knows that
they’re in trouble, and that the marriage is in trouble, and they’re kind
of exploring to see what’s out there, to see if there might be something
better out there. And sometimes they get in over their head, get more
involved than they ever intended, and sometimes inadvertently end up
ruining the marriage so that there’s no chance of fixing it. And sometimes
what happens is these exploratory affairs show them that what they want is
actually with the partner that they’re with, and there’s a lot of work to
do to get back to that.

So some exploratory affairs end with the realization that the marriage can
improve, and others end in a decision to divorce. So, that one is pretty
self-explanatory. I’m going to move ahead into retaliatory affairs.
Sometimes when somebody is offended by their spouse, they respond by having
an affair as an act of retaliation. This is something I have coached on,
it’s something that I see. This happens more statistically with women than
men where women are so hurt, and if they’re feeling unheard, if they’re
feeling like, “I’m going to show him how bad this hurts. You brought this
pain to me, I’m going to show you how bad it hurts”, they might get
involved. And then as mentioned with the earlier example here, they may end
up going, “Actually, what I have is better than what’s out there, even with
this hurt and I’m willing to go all in”.

Sometimes a woman explores because she feels trapped, like that she doesn’t
have other options, she can’t do anything else. And so she explores as a
way to cope with her pain even if she knows that she’s not going to leave
because she doesn’t feel like she can. These kinds of affairs are typically
pretty joyless. Their purpose is more to hurt the partner than to get much
joy out of it. And the words by this therapist who says, “The best that can
be said of retaliatory affairs is that for some people, they seem to even
they score, but they do not help the couple resolve the problems that led
to either the original affair or the retaliatory affair.” So it doesn’t
really solve much and often adds more to it. There’s one more, and then I’m
going to wrap it up for today, exit affairs. Exit affairs are when you
already know that you’re on your way out and rather than really dealing
with it, you have an affair to kind of seal the deal.

Sometimes a man will bring his wife to therapy hoping that the therapist
can strengthen his wife as he prepares to leave. Sometimes this is a means
to kind of justify his own problematic or unethical behavior like, “Oh,
look how good I am. I know that I want this, so I’m going to support my
wife by doing this.” So, sometimes people will have an affair on their way
out the door really to seal the deal, to say, “I know that I’m out and I’m
going to do this to really give the other person all the leverage to leave
because I don’t have the guts to do it myself”, that happens. And what
happens in these involvements is sometimes it can be predictable and
sometimes it feels like it came right out of the blue. Many of you have
said to me, “I had no idea”, and sometimes it’s quite predictable.

Okay. That is all for today. I could go into more detail of all of those,
but I think I’ve taken long enough for today. I hope that you found it
useful, I hope that you found it helpful. If you have any follow-up
questions, you can always email me at andreagiles.com. Again, please leave a
review, I appreciate it so much. Take care, and I will see you next time.

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