SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Our MC tried the "it takes two people to create the environment wherein an affair can happen" BS. I jumped all over that, quickly. I don't buy into that "both people are guilty and that's why it happened" nonsense.

If someone else can make you happier than do the adult thing and end the relationship. But WS's want to be cake eaters. They want the Safety and Security the spouse provides and the fun and excitement the AP provides, the best of both worlds, the epitome of selfishness

DRS, yes I do.

Waywards are experiencing "positive" emotions. How could it be otherwise? If there were no positive feedback, no one would continue an A.

She’s not saying that the feelings aren’t positive, or genuinely felt. Instead she’s pointing out that they’re based on delusion, a distorted and incomplete assessment of what is actually going on. She is saying affair:marriage :: vacation:workaday life.

Indeed they are. Same goes for rapists. Pedophiles. Narcissists and all kind of abusers who inflict similar trauma wounds on their victims.

They all get positive emotions, they all get off on it, it becomes addictive and they are looking forward to the next time.

You would cringe at describing those as a "vacation " vs the boring workday life, because our culture still mostly abhors those behaviors, while infidelity was romanticized and normalized.

There are many reasons for this, and are all stupid because in the end they are in the same family of trauma each one with their peculiar disgusting flavor.

Their apologists do try to romanticize the "positive aspects " of those as well, like here.

After all positive emotions, hence can’t be all bad right?

No it doesn’t move me a millimeter, I understand the goal of the article and maybe there is no malice behind, but it is a poor choice to romanticize abuse in any way shape or form.

Adultery is neither rape nor pedophilia, come on, man.

You’re still just fundamentally misreading her essay. She is neither normalizing nor romanticizing adultery. She’s exposing the faulty thinking that enables it. I’m baffled that you can’t see that.

Is it so ridiculous to say that it is rape? In the UK, stealthing (secretly removing a condom during intercourse) is illegal, on the basis that someone is consenting to sex with a condom not without. I can't understand how it's different if someone is consenting to sex within a long-term monogamous relationship, when unbeknownst to them they are not in one and the fact is being actively hidden from them. Ditto for reproductive coercion if you have pregnancies/children with someone while secretly being unfaithful.

I find Esther Perel absolutely appalling when you parse what she says for its implications. ** No soliciting **

[This message edited by SI Staff at 3:41 PM, Saturday, October 31st]

I think it's important to clarify that not all infidelity involves physical contact, and not all WS "get off" on the part where it's covert and harmful to the BS... Some of us feel intensely guilty and have to compartmentalize in order to allow ourselves to cheat at all.

I feel uncomfortable when the generalizations becomes sweeping and progressively more villainizing. I don't think that's helpful for anyone.

I'm aware that not all infidelity involves having sex with people besides your primary partner, but much of it does, and comes with very real risks (and it seems to be alarmingly common that people in affairs choose not to practise safe sex). I don't think that most people do get off on harming other people either, but the guilt someone feels doesn't change those risks.

I've said before on this forum that it is helpful for me to accurately name my experience. It is a fact of my experience that I would never in a million years have chosen to have a baby with someone who had a secret girlfriend. If I had believed that my marriage was in trouble, I would never in a million years have decided to bring a baby into the situation. That doesn't mean I don't love my children more than life, but that is the truth of it. Other people will feel differently about issues to do with agency and consent I'm sure, but maybe some people reading will feel the same.

First of all, Esther Perel did not write the article I posted, Linda Macdonald did. I find Esther Perel appalling too.

StrugglingThrough, you’re asking a very different question than the one I was responding to. I understood BackFromTheStorm to be saying that because rapists enjoy raping, and WPs enjoy their affairs, they are equivalent. I don’t see that.

You’re suggesting something different, which is that a WP sleeping with their BP while in an A is a rape on the basis that the BP could not make informed consent.

That’s a harder question, but I think I come down on the side of no.

For a simple point of reference we can examine various and sundry legal codes. Both rape and adultery are recognized concepts under law, and they are treated very differently. One is classified as a violent crime. The other is a civil matter that is, in some places, grounds for favorable terms in divorce. Some jurisdictions also recognize a claim for "alienation of affection" but that’s a civil claim in tort, not a crime.

A WP sleeping with a BP while in an A is clearly not a forcible rape. It’d have to some kind of rape by deception. But if you examine what’s available on the web, those cases are pretty different to what you’re positing. They’re like a man in a dark room pretending to be a woman’s boyfriend. A man pretending to be a doctor telling her that she needed a particular vaccine to be administered by intercourse. The point of the deception was to gain access to sex, the essential element of rape. A WP is not concealing their A in order to get laid by the BP. I suspect that’s a key part of the distinction.

So I think adultery is all kinds of bad things, but not rape.

Of course you're right, it's not illegal. I just don't personally understand a rational reason for why it is different from other things that are illegal, like stealthing. I heard that in parts of Australia having sex with a prostitute then not paying is illegal because they consented on the basis that they would be paid; I don't see how that is different from someone who consented on the basis that they were being monogamous.

Letmebefrank, fwiw I like the Linda MacDonald article

To be clear I also absolutely don't think that everyone who has an affair is evil or malicious or bad or irredeemable. I do think that culturally affairs are normalized and that's extremely harmful, especially when people are motivated to find justifications for something they want to do. It's important to me to talk about my experience in clear terms because I feel the seriousness of it is minimized so often, by people like Esther Perel and many others.

I heard that in parts of Australia having sex with a prostitute then not paying is illegal because they consented on the basis that they would be paid; I don't see how that is different from someone who consented on the basis that they were being monogamous

Because the promising to pay a prostitute and then not paying is fraud, and fraud’s a crime (and not a new one at that). There’s no other part of that relationship.

You thought you were in a monogamous relationship, but it turns out you weren’t. True for so many of us! But that could be true for just about anything. Thought your partner wanted kids and they didn’t? Thought they were a particular religion, or believed in God, and they don’t? Not really vegetarian, or secretly harbor political views you abhor? Would any of that convert marital sex to rape in your mind? Very hard to see where one would draw the line, in my opinion.

Right, but it isn't prosecuted as fraud, it's prosecuted as rape. From a quick Google "refusing to pay a sex worker can be legally prosecuted as rape or sexual assault in Australia, depending on the jurisdiction".

Just to be clear, you think there is an equivalence between me saying I feel I was manipulated and controlled into having a baby in a situation in which I would not have chosen to have a baby if I had known the truth, and someone feeling disappointed by dietary preferences or political views that they didn't know about?

[This message edited by StrugglingThrough at 9:00 PM, Saturday, October 31st]

Just to be clear, you think there is an equivalence between me saying I feel I was manipulated and controlled into having a baby in a situation in which I would not have chosen to have a baby if I had known the truth, and someone feeling disappointed by dietary preferences or political views that they didn't know about?

I’m saying that neither situation would be a rape in my view.

I’m not suggesting what happened to you was remotely ok. I think what happened to you is awful and I’m so sorry for you. We’re debating the more narrow idea of whether it was rape or some other terrible thing with a different name.

Adultery is neither rape nor pedophilia, come on, man.

You’re still just fundamentally misreading her essay. She is neither normalizing nor romanticizing adultery. She’s exposing the faulty thinking that enables it. I’m baffled that you can’t see that.

You say that because the bias of our modern culture has established that as normalized and acceptable.
My understanding is that you assign a ranking of "acceptability" to the kind of sexual abuse, this is common practice for both me and you have been "programmed" to be desensitized to something and over sensitive to other things,

There are cultures in the world where rape is punished less than adultery, even some where is normalized or ritualized while adultery is punished by capital sentencing. Other cultures are just fine with pedophilia but punish harshly adultery and rape.

No matter the circumstances, there are absolute wrongs and Doesn’t change it is an heinous disgusting act that causes the same trauma on the victim just because one culture has come to tolerate it.

There is no scale of "better / worse" (except pedophilia has the added layer of infancy abuse which is worse in my view, but this is my personal view, trauma wise they are all similar).

Truth is, they are the same family of sexual and emotional abuse and they cause very similar trauma, they share a lot of common wounds on the psyche of those who suffered, male and female alike.

And even in our culture there have been (and likely will be more) attempts to normalize rape and pedophilia from time to time, which I abhor nonetheless.

The differences between these abuses (let’s add narcissistic manipulations and such to the pot) are broadly that some abuse come most commonly from external threats (rape and pedophilia) so the outside world is the scary place, while others come exclusively from your inner world (infidelity, dark triad abuses).

The outside threats often add physical violence, inner world threats are more "ambiguous" as physical violence is less apparent or absent.
External threats make you scare if the outside world, inner threats give you nowhere safe to run.

Apart from that the trauma are similar because they hit the nervous system in the same critical areas.

Case in point: when rape and pedophilia are happening within the family, they are often slipping under the radar because the violence part is either "missing" or "ambiguous" - is still there, just less evident and still as traumatic.

Why did we normalize and romanticized adultery in our culture?

That’s not something that was there historically and anthropologically for centuries in our culture, even in our religious roots the adultery is a capital sin, while rape and pedophilia don’t even register.

So it was always a big deal, our culture deemed that "worse" back then when, while the other sexual and emotional abuses where always loathed and disgusting they weren’t ensuring the capital punishment (death or exhale).

If you ask to your ancestor back then they would likely tell you a similar remark "rape and pedophilia are not adultery! Come on man" simply because that was their "current thing" at the time.

And again it doesn’t change the "horror score" of any of those, they are the same family of abuse (sexual - emotional), bearing the same wounds, it was just the perception.

So when did change in our culture and slowly became a "no big deal" ending even as encouraged and romanticized in our today culture?

At some point in time the "elites" of our culture were taking marriages for convenience or politics more than love, it was actually fairly rare for a real connection or relationship between these people to occur.

It was all transactional, a performance to get something out through the display.

So mistresses and lovers became the norm because the people most often than not felt trapped and disconnected in their marriage and while hushed and kept clandestine (performance and appearances was what mattered mind you, not reality, just the show) they were expected and tolerated.

People, often young, exploited as resource in transactions never had romantic relationships, were stuck i. Loveless weddings with a near stranger, so they looked for romance outside of it.

In time that became a staple of power and prestige. If you were wealthy you were expected to have lovers because the marriages among the privileged were often still transactional more often than not.

Love was for the poor, the rich had to search it only in infidelity or live without. A thing of that times thought is different from our current reality: those people. Most likely didn’t give a shit if their spouse was having affairs all around. Because the emotional connection between spouses was a rarity, they were often happy that they could skip any sexual interaction with the spouse once the duty of kids was fulfilled.

If you don’t care for the other person, you suffer no trauma. You actually welcome their absence and disconnection.

In time became associated with personal success, and since the successful are the one who lead the show and the media, and the mediatic scandals could destroy careers, they worked hard to normalize this shit in our culture so they can indulge in their flawed and broken behaviors without any consequences (the scarecrow of every weakling, consequences, along accountability).

So today you flinch at infidelity and you are still horrified at rape, pedophilia and the other abuses. While your gran gran gran pa or ma would feel the opposite, all abuses are heinous but infidelity was the horrifying thing worthy of the capital punishment.

The way I see it is more pragmatic: they are the same family of abuses because they are all sexual and emotional in nature, they cause into the victim very similar traumatic wounds and thus they are at the same level as in "bad". The ones I feel more appalled by are my own personal bias, but in absolute they are the same kind of cancer with the same damaging effects.

Do you understand why the issue I take with sugar coating any of those abuses?

I see the merit of the article, I also see the choice of words for being able to appeal to a "wider audience" and that’s not sitting right with me.
Which doesn’t invalidate the solidity of the rest of the content, because it is well written and accurate.

The lip service to the current thing however should not be paid because even though it’s slight it still reinforces something that is destroying lives on daily basis.

I feel the need to call it out, even if I agree with the rest.