Now Ye're Talking - to someone who's had an affair

Tell me how wrote: »

Do you think if you were male, with the exact same experience of having had relationships with married mothers that the questions on this thread would have been of the same type?

Personally, I think the response would have been much more accusatory.

I've had an affair, AMA wrote: »

My parents are married more than half a century, my father would tell you it’s a happy marriage, my mother would say she has sacrificed a huge amount, been controlled and dominated by my father and trapped by the church and social convention.

I've had an affair, AMA wrote: »

1. Neither were very good-looking, it’s fair to say! The first guy- definitely not. He actually looked older than his age and had not aged particularly well. When things started with him, I had no actual attraction to him as such, I was responding to attention from someone I knew as a friend. I did develop an attraction to him as time went on, but looking back now I really struggle to see what it was about him that I fancied. Love is blind, as they say!!

The second guy was better looking than the first, certainly had a lovely smile and laugh, but if you were to walk past him in the street you wouldn’t give him a second thought.

2. It’s going great. I lost more than 10 stone, a whole person really. After a few years I regained about 2 stone but lost that again and am now back at the 10 stone weight loss mark. Yes, I became much happier as a result of it. Life became an awful lot easier. I gained confidence and lost the awful self-loathing. It’s hard describe how awful it is to be that size to someone who hasn’t experienced it. Like, there were practical difficulties, such as getting clothes to fit, or being able to run, getting out of breath walking upstairs, not being able to tie the seat belt on a plane, coming home with a big bruise on my thigh from where the armrest in the theatre dig into it.
But there’s the psychological side too. The lack of self-worth. The feeling that everyone is judging you and repulsed by you. I used have a thought that would come into my head unbidden whenever I caught sight of myself in a mirror and it was “how could anyone fancy that ?” ... I used literally dehumanize myself and refer to me as “that”. And when you feel that 5hit about yourself, it’s hard to motivate yourself to make any changes. So you get bigger. And you hate yourself more.

There’s also the aspect of how you get treated by others. I was ridiculed by complete strangers who took time out of their days to mock the fat woman. Literally. I would be walking down the street and people would shout out of a passing car, things like hippo, hulk, fatso, elephant. Or a gang of lads would jeer, saying stuff like who’d ride her, she’d eat you, she’d squash you. Someone once came up behind me, put his hands on my hips, and then stood back, with his hands held my hip-width apart, saying to his friends “what do ye think lads, guess how big she is”. Ever heard of the game ‘pull a pig’? It’s basically when a nice-looking lad chats up the fattest girl in a group, flattering her and making her think she has a chance with him, and then humiliates her in front of others.

It’s hard to even like yourself, not to mind love yourself, when that’s what your life is like.

So, losing the weight opened up a whole new world for me. Life was pleasant, strangers didn’t bother me, I didn’t have to plan my route to minimize stairs, walking etc, I could go into shops and buy normal clothes, I didn’t feel like everyone judged me on my size without giving me a chance.

3. Probably the only positive thing I can say about the first guy is that he managed to make me feel desired in bed. I didn’t exactly cast off my inhibitions and behave with wild abandon, but I did believe that he was attracted to me. I was still insisting on low lighting and refused to do certain positions that would have left my body very exposed, but I did feel a bit desireable to him. In general he was a good lover.
[A bit off topic, but this turned into quite a fcuked up dynamic over time, in that he encouraged me to gain weight. He was always buying me chocolate or ordering Chinese/pizza etc and would say to me that he “loved to see a girl enjoying her food”. With hindsight, I believe he was doing this so that I would become even fatter and even less attractive to other men, in keeping with his possessiveness and jealousy.]

The sex with the second guy was really good- quite disinhibited, no doubt due to the quantities of alcohol typically involved! We would have done stuff I’d never done before and have never done since.

4. I really don’t want to say, on the off-chance one of my friends is reading this and thinks “I wonder...”. Sorry!

I've had an affair, AMA wrote: »

Hmmm. I don’t know. I look at people sometimes and wonder about their relationship. A number of years ago my father was diagnosed with cancer. My mother told me that the next morning they were talking and he said to her that he was going to install an oil fired stove in the house so that she wouldn’t have to be trekking out to the garage for coal for the fire when he was gone. To this day, thinking of that makes me cry as I think of how selfless he was being- there he was, less than 24 hours after a life-changing cancer diagnosis, all the uncertainty and stress and worry that brings, and his concern was for my mother, not himself. And I think that’s true love. But then on another day he will treat her like crap, belittle and undermine her, stop talking to her for no reason and I wonder how the hell anyone would do that to someone they loved.

I think of the men I had the affairs with. They both felt they loved someone enough to marry them, make a public commitment... I wonder did they mean it at the time, did they genuinely intend to remain faithful or were they just going through the motions?

I’ve seen people marry because it’s the script, marriage, house, babies, and they don’t put too much thought into not following the script. But somehow things turn out fine for them and they can end up having truly wonderful relationships.

A friend of mine once said that she thought that if she started treating her husband really badly, she still didn’t think he’d ever leave her. (The context for this statement was that we were talking about someone we knew who treated her husband abysmally and I said that I couldn’t figure out why he was sticking around, the kids were grown up, so I wondered why he had t slung his hook) I was taken aback by her comment- was she basing it on her belief that he truly loves her and would never leave, would tolerate anything... she spoke with a certainly I could not get my head around. (For clarity, she treats her husband really well, it was just a comment about hypothetically if she treated him badly!)

I do think most people are inherently selfish and therefore I don’t know if they are capable of all-encompassing selfless love. Most people probably have done selfless things for loved ones at times, and may repeatedly do so, but... oh I don’t know. I don’t think ‘true love’ has to be entirely self-sacrificing either.... aaaggghhh I don’t know, I’m rambling...