Other than receiving news your spouse is dead (either because he or she was murdered, involved in a fatal car accident, or killed during some other tragedy) I can’t think of much worse news you could receive than to find out your spouse was unfaithful.
But there are two kinds of affairs: physical ones and affairs of the heart.
As I wrote in True Love Doesn’t Equal Perfect Love, if Wayne ever confessed to an affair I wouldn’t automatically start seeking legal services. I’d wait to figure out what kind of tryst he’d had. (Unless, of course, he told me he was leaving me for the other woman. That’d be a different story.)
However, if the affair was over and he’d come clean to try and make things right between us, then I’d want to know what kind of affair it’d been.
Was it just a physical fling all about the sex? Had there even been sex? (Don’t laugh. Some affairs aren’t about that.) It could have been he was attracted to her for her mind and the intellectual stimulation she provided. (No, I’m not being gullible in believing a man could fall in love with a woman’s brains over her body. It has happened.)
For me, an affair of the heart would haunt me much longer than one that was just sexual in nature. I cherish the physical relationship Wayne and I share, but I also cherish our great talks and debates. To find out he’d gone outside our relationship for that kind of intimacy would take me a long time to recover from.
And if sex had been involved too? That’s when the sex part of the affair would bother me.
Some of my friends don’t get this.
“Either way he was having sex. Aren’t they equally as bad?”
No. I stand resolute on my view about that.
Sex without love truly is meaningless. That’s just giving in to the savage beast and satiating its desires.
But sex when there’s an intellectual connection too? Ouch. That’s a bona fide relationship. One like we enjoy. That’s harder to swallow.
At least for me.
What’s your opinion?
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