Family Forum / Marriage / Marriage / February 2008

The Married Man / Single Woman Syndrome- Dating a Married Man and
Losing Yourself in the Process

copyright by Ask Oldersister, 2008, www.oldersister.sampasite.com

So you are young, single, attractive and no doubt have many eligible
men pursuing you.  Be ready to cut my head off but I truly believe the
problem with most these men is that if they aren't already married,
there is probably something wrong with them.  Experts claim that there
are so many perfectly eligible single guys out there but have they
dated any of these men they are piling into the eligible pool?

Here are some problems my "total package" friends and I have come
across:

No manners (blatant stuff you just can't ignore....taking calls during
your date, etc...)

Insensitive (my ex is crazy, you don't mind if I drink 5 beers at
lunch, right?)

Baggage (I'm going through a custody battle right now, I have to live
with my parents for the time being, it's only temporary)

Chauvinism ( You're not voting for Hillary, right?  You're not one of
those kinda women that..., etc....)

Egotism (Calling you all the time like YOU have nothing better to do
than jump every time they call & GOD FORBID you may be smart and
dating others!)

Unavailable ( I'm just waiting for the right person, I don't believe
in marriage or won't do it again, I like to keep my options open, I'm
a workaholic, etc...)

Casanova (I'm never attracted to anyone else when I'm in a
relationship, you're so gorgeous it hurts, ...I never cheat, do you?  My
last girlfriend did drugs, cheated, and used me...)

Desperate (they barely know you but know they want to be with you...I
mean, you're great & you know it but the feeling you could probably
have a ring on your finger in a month doesn't make you feel too
special, does it?)

Selfish (talk most of the time, not really too concerned with your
beliefs, your goals, your job, etc....these types assume whatever you
think now will be converted later)

Sound familiar?   After exhausting your time and energy treading water
in that eligibility pool you begin to wonder if your standards are too
high or if you've watched too many romance movies.  You talk to your
other friends and laugh about how you could write a book about all
your common dating experiences and may even come to the conclusion
that all these guys are just "immature" and maybe older men are the
answer.

You find yourself at that point where you have no real motivation to
continue treading water in the same pool and need some different
results because you still have that glimmer of hope that what those
experts say is true.   Are you now cynical, bored, suspicious, and
somewhat defeated?  Your married friends might think so but more
importantly, what you really are is ripe pickings for a married man.

Don't believe me?   Here is how the scenario plays out:  A married man
who has become routine in his duties as a father, husband, and
provider at some point decides he wants a little sexual excitement and
his ego fed.   It is impossible for his wife to provide him the same
type of attention she once did and not even realistic (the demands of
kids, etc...).

If you are getting angry with me, good, keep reading!

However the two of you come across one another, it is almost going to
be an instant attraction and that surreal feeling like you really
"understand each other".

Is this feeling real?  Yes, and it's intense!

Would you feel this way if he weren't married and appropriate for
you?   NO!  (I'll explain later)

The script unfolds predictably where you become a special friend and
the two of you have harmless lunches, coffee, etc...  At this point you
may be asking your friends what they think because nothing physical
has happened.   It's really simple.   This is stage one of the
seduction process.   How are you seducing one another?

He listens to every word you say, is a gentleman, pays for everything,
considers your feelings, believes in you and your goals, compliments
you, loves that your smart and feisty, seems in awe that you are
spending time with him, and respects your time and what you have to
say.   In other words, here is a man that seems to RECOGNIZE YOUR
WORTH.

You are in awe of him for his dedication to his career
accomplishments, his kids, and maybe even his wife.  You respect him
for the sacrifices he has made and you really listen to him and
express your admiration.  You are probably even more open and
flirtatious with this man because it has a great affect on him and he
doesn't react with desperation/eagerness.  For him, here is a woman
that FEEDS HIS EGO and is SEXUALLY STIMULATING.

This is when the stage is set for an affair.  You can't deny that the
physical tension is building and your desire to become closer to this
person is very strong.  You feel very empowered by the effect you have
on him like you have a life raft with his name on it and you could
throw it out to him or pull it back at will.   And this man isn't
going to just spend his time or be attracted to anyone.   He is
discriminating.

I'm going to interrupt this chemistry-induced soul-mate experience and
explain what is really going on here:

We have already established how each of you were vulnerable to each
other in the first place.  You were treading water in a pool of
emotionally crippled men and to keep from stagnating, you stuck to
your standards and refused to settle.  You are a strong woman and are
determined to face reality and have come to the realization that
reality ain't so pretty.

And, no, there is nothing wrong/unrealistic/cynical with you or your
view on things but this will change.

He was treading water in his daily routine and probably came to
acknowledge or even resolved himself to the fact that this was
probably the best it was going to get.  I'm giving this guy (because
he is an exception, right?)  the benefit of the doubt.  However, it is
far more likely his routine includes dipping into the pool of
attractive, smart, single women like you who are more emotionally
mature and won't settle for those cripples.  This is important because
in that specific pool he is dipping into are women that will RECOGNIZE
HIS WORTH.

The other pool of women are either too old, married, ......or emotionally
immature (single, very young, attractive) and cannot give him the
required emotional, intellectual, and physical energy that you will
soon be providing.

His beliefs, views, feelings (unlike yours) on life will not be
changing but you are not aware of this yet because you're too busy
feeling empowered right now.

What's the worse that can happen?  You feel great with that life raft
in your hand and you can always date other people!  You deserve
consistent sex by someone who cares/loves you and who knows, maybe the
right person will pop up during this whole experience and you can kind
of exit the whole scene with your predetermined script that goes
something like this:  "I just can't do this anymore, you're married
and this was bound to happen...we both knew I would have so many options
and it's time now for me to explore those....you know I love you but
it's time for me to go".    You dramatically make your exit and he is
devastated.   You prance off with your new love and either trash that
symbolic life raft or tuck it away for safe-keeping.  You probably
envision the latter since giving up power is very unappealing.  You
have nothing to lose and he is risking everything.  This may or may
not even be about love for you.

Am I trying to make you sound capricious and evil?  No, and you're
not.   If you can admit that you have fantasized these things, you are
ready to see that this is a crucial step in the seduction process and
it is called Losing Your Sense of Reality.   For those women who
cannot admit this and want to firmly stand by their innocence (it just
happened!  Our love is profound & and an exception) in the seduction
process, are going to be the ones that fall the hardest.  They may
never get out.  If this is you, stop reading now because this writer
is not at all interested in contributing to your defense of an
exceptional love experience.  {If this man was your true love growing
up and you really know him better than his wife and just happened to
be separated by tragic circumstances, this article is not for you and
you probably wouldn't feel compelled to read it in the first place.
He would be divorced, remarried to you and you would be way too busy
planning your new life}.

We will now continue and as you can see, some of us will be weeded out
along the way.  If you've read this far and opt out later, take heart,
you will have already instilled in yourself an important reality
benchmark that you will come back to later and I hope you save this
article for when you are ready to absorb it.

Remember remaining readers, your strength so far has kept you from
marrying an idiot or gave you the courage to divorce one, has kept you
on the pursuit of reality (up until now), and has built the foundation
for a magnetic, sensual, capable, intellectual woman who radiates
these qualities with confidence.   You may not trust your competence
in relationships (we all question that, even your married friends) and
may feel some guilt about your relationship or the secrets you are now
carrying and worry if the weight of those things are going to impact
your self esteem or ruin your reputation in this situation.  Not
really.  If you felt too guilty and had a problem hiding things, you
wouldn't be in this situation and that is why it is so easy to move
forward in it because these aren't the battles you will be fighting.
Are you a bad person because of this?  No, this is just another step
of losing your reality and it is an important one because once you
feel you can conquer what you perceive to be the true obstacles, you
are confident to move forward.   For women, this disillusioned thought
process usually marks the beginning of the physical affair although it
can happen after but regardless, it does happen.  For the married man,
your emotional process (discussed with or without him) is very
important because this is what will anchor you to him and provide that
consistent source of emotional and physical feeding he needs.  For
woman who are CURRENTLY (not intending to date) dating 2 or more
married men, this does not apply to you and you should stop
reading.

You may not believe or understand how this works but it does and has
repeatedly with success; usually at a subconscious level so he is
probably not evil.   And no, he is not out to get you or maliciously
planning all this.  Earlier we discussed how he was not desperate or
overly eager (if he was, you would have been disgusted like you were
with the single guys) and that is part of the reason why..  If he were
not interested in securing your emotional involvement, he would have
dipped in another pool.  This is not a pretty dynamic, is it?

Once you are emotionally and physically involved in this relationship,
you will feel a subtle shift on your empowerment scale even though you
may not recognize it as that.  You will attribute this shift to a
struggle within yourself about the false battles you are having with
guilt and secrecy or maybe even ask yourself if you are limiting your
options by seeing this man.   This still may or may not be about love
for you and you may smirk at the idea that you are emotionally
involved.   If you are in denial about being emotionally involved at
this point, you need to stop reading and face reality.  If you met
this married man on a cruise or in a bar and had a brief physical
relationship and now it's over, you wouldn't still be reading this or
compelled to read it in the first place.

What is really happening is you are losing your grip on that life
raft.   He is not taking it from you and he may even be spending more
time with you and will probably remain just as attentive as ever:
Married men will work harder than single men at trying to make you
fall for them.   His behavior is actually not changing at all but you
are now fighting an internal battle of power and it has nothing to do
with him although you will eventually project it on to him.

Here are the signs when you have reached this stage:

You may want to make him feel a little jealous

You may wonder about his sex life with his wife

You may notice you are no longer interested in other guys (if you
haven't dated anyone recently this applies to you)

You may want him to fall in love with you

You may get upset if he doesn't call you when you need support

You would love to be a fly on the wall at times when you are not with
him

You don't think he will ever lie to you (you completely trust him) or
you wonder if he has or will ever lie to you

Is this just normal curiosity?  NO, not at this stage.  This is the
danger zone for you and you may or may not want to acknowledge that
and chances are, you will dismiss it as curiosity.  Getting caught up
in whether you are just harmlessly curious or not isn't really
important  because what's not up for debate is one simple fact:  If
you admit you are wondering these things, you are spending more and
more energy on this relationship.  You see, guilt and secrecy is not
the true enemy but the energy you expend is.  This still has nothing
to do with him because the rules haven't changed and he hasn't changed
but you are changing although you may or may not be in love (the love
thing actually isn't that important and you will see why later).  What
you are experiencing is loss of that surge of power you felt at the
beginning and you want that feeling back and you will project this
outside yourself onto him in the form of a power struggle within the
actual relationship.  The green light for this is when you start to
feel he has the upper-hand; this is the transition where you give up
the life raft.   Remember, he has not taken it from you but at this
point, he will start to lie to you to continue to make you happy and
you will once again be treading water.

It is time to weed out some people who will not get any benefit from
reading further.

If you truly believe you want this man to leave his wife and family
and start over with you and think it will work STOP reading and please
see a therapist with or without him before you do a lot of damage.  If
you just have those thoughts/fantasizing sometimes and have not acted
on them or if that thought horrifies you, please continue to read this
because I think it may help you.

We will assume the best case scenario from here on out and assume this
married man continues to treat you well, pay attention to you, and may
or may not tell you he loves you, confide in you about his wife or
not, etc....Although those things seem very important, and you probably
are alert to any fluctuating behavior on his part, but right now you
are probably most disturbed with the whole part about him lying.  Just
as experts claim how many eligible single men are out there, they also
claim that any man that lies to his wife will eventually lie to you.
In fact, they adamantly assert the whole foundation of this type of
relationship is based on a lie.  Frankly, I am amazed at the ability
to lump everyone into these categories as if we all follow some
predictable pattern.  Women get really caught up in this and I believe
it actually contributes to women staying in these relationships longer
even though that's not the intent.  Why?  We identified energy
expended as enemy 1 and the amount of energy you are expending in this
relationship is proportionate to how invested you are in it and
therefore, becomes a good indicator of how long you will stay in it.
Let's put this whole lying thing into the right context so you're not
subjecting yourself to this nonsense and entertaining suspicions of
being the latest victim of a most sophisticated manipulator:

You knew going in that he was willing to lie to his wife and you were
okay with it(you moving forward was your consent- you can't back out
of that one now!)

You trusted him enough to know he was not going to purposely sabotage
you or your reputation (you are strong and you don't put up with
emotional cripples)

You also knew that you trusted him to be sensitive enough to your
feelings that you felt confident about starting this relationship

You admired the fact he was stable and responsible in his life and
trusted he wouldn't do anything crazy and impulsive to harm anyone, in
other words, a pretty decent guy

You trusted him enough to enter a relationship with him without a
commitment because each of you fulfilled a genuine need the other
required

You trusted that he genuinely wanted to make you happy given his
restraints of time and energy

Your gut feelings were right, you could and you still can trust him
with these things because you were strong and smart enough getting in
to trust your gut feelings about him.  He hasn't changed these
qualities about himself and probably won't so don't worry and question
yourself to death about it.  The truth is, your gut feelings and
intuition are still laser sharp so please don't waste your energy
chipping away at the great qualities you possess either.  So then why
did I bring up the whole lying thing just like the experts continually
do?   Why does this strike a cord in so many women in these
situations? The answer to that has to do with a perceived enemy
outside of ourselves and it feels very threatening.  With our life
raft given away and the power within the relationship being more
balanced (if it weren't and you still had all that power via the
symbolic life raft, you'd be bored and have moved on already), the
reality that the relationship is capped in it's potential starts to
sink in.   A successful relationship is one that continually grows so
any perceived outside threat is diminished in its capacity to
destroy.  However, there is no outside enemy (lies) right now in your
case since the real enemy is just another battle emerging within
yourself.  Relax, he hasn't lied to you yet(best case scenario) even
though he will so get that out of your head for now so you can really
identify and fight this internal battle effectively.

If you are not bothered by this whole lying thing or even disturbed by
the possibility of him seeing someone else (not his wife) in addition
to you, you probably don't need to read any more.

What this internal battle is all about is your reasonable and rightful
expectation to grow and explore life to it's fullest.  If there is any
doubt in your mind that this may not be the case, remember that you
have made tremendous strides just by not settling in that stagnant
pool of immature and selfish men that most women will end up
marrying.  If women didn't continue to have sex and marry these men,
there wouldn't be so many of them.  You have so far in your
relationship with this married man, invested a lot of energy (whether
you love him or not) in it.  Unlike your current situation, the energy
you invested dating these losers didn't require much emotional
investment although it was a pretty defeating experience overall.
What you are failing to really internalize, which was what got you
into this married man thing in the first place, is the pure fact that
reality isn't so pretty.  That's a hard one to swallow because it's
true but keep reading because once you get past that, it won't feel as
awful as it does now.  You just don't understand what it really means
yet and it does sound like the worst kind of enemy to face.  Why
explore life to it's fullest when most likely things can only get
worse?

When you fail to admit that you have a right to expect growth in
yourself and that reality isn't going to be difficult, you will start
to feel that this married man isn't doing enough, is lying or
manipulating you, that you can't get out, that he is keeping you from
a good life, you are angry with him because you spend holidays alone,
etc.....

This is your signal that you are investing even more energy (negative
or positive doesn't matter) into this relationship instead of
acknowledging what we mentioned before.  He hasn't changed and he
hasn't changed the rules on you.   What is happening is you are
projecting your expectations onto him so you don't have to face what
you need to in order to keep on that path of growing because it is too
scary.

He stopped growing a long time ago.  At some point, he realized the
same thing you did and decided to not face reality at all, in his own
self and in his marriage.  He is comfortable with this and does not
want to change it or else he would have already.  The pain of this
relationship and the longing/need you have for each other is coming
from very different places:  You are a strong, vibrant woman with
passion and strong feelings who is just afraid right now having
growing pains and he feels pain about not being able to make you
happy.  He's not dumb and he does care about you and your feelings so
don't spend a lot of energy thinking he's selfish and a taker.  He
wants to meet your needs like he did in the beginning but he is
incapable so he will lie in order to get back those good feelings and
to keep you just like he lies to his wife in order to maintain the
marriage and keep her.  Is this reality pretty?

He almost sounds pathetic in that context and how could someone you
admired so much be that pathetic?  He's not, he is still all those
things you admired but has made different choices for his life and
won't change because he is comfortable with them.  You are the one
that is no longer comfortable.  Best case scenario is that when you
get out of this he will just let you go but most of the time the
married man will start promising things in order to keep you to
maintain his level of comfort.  What this should tell you is that the
lies/promises he makes are in proportion to how resistant he really is
to change.

This is the stage most of the experts focus on because this is where
these affairs usually progress and stay stuck the longest.  By the
way, there is no progression from this stage because it's the last
one.  It's not going anywhere and this is the best it's going to get
if you want to call this good.  This is where the energy you expend on
the expectations he promises is proportionate to the damage you are
doing to yourself meaning you have stopped treading water and starting
drown.  If this doesn't quite make sense it is because what has been
drilled into your subconscious by the experts doesn't make sense:

Being with a married man is a waste of your time

Falling in love with a married man will break your heart

He will never leave his wife

He will lie to you and you will be waiting forever

Notice how the above statements have absolutely nothing to do with the
real fear you have?  If you took serious issue with the above
statements, you would have never entered this arrangement in the first
place, despite how tempting it is to claim those statements now.
Those statements imply you are in a passive state just waiting to be
given the time, energy, and love you deserve when actually it's the
opposite.  You are the one actively expending a vast amount of
emotionally energy while the married man is in a passive state.
Simply put, he is not wasting your time but rather, you are actively
pursuing your own stagnation and with a passion.  Falling in love with
him isn't the real danger here because falling in love is a temporary
passive state which requires very little energy on your part.  That
statement is not only misleading but it contributes to your loss of
reality by insinuating that your love will destroy you when love isn't
the issue here, whether you love him or not.  Love is an act, a choice
to contribute to the growth of another human being despite whatever
mood or expectation you have at any given moment.  If you have gotten
this far, you probably have done those things for him but that is not
what you are in pain about.  You are in pain because this situation
did not change the reality you tried to escape and you are mourning
the disillusioned self; attempting to hold on to your innocent self
(the self that thought reality was pretty)  brought you right back to
the same issue except now you have projected this onto a married man
because it feels safer. If facing reality felt safer you wouldn't be
in this situation.

He will never leave his wife doesn't address why you don't leave
either because that would require energy from him and then you would
be required to stop your active pursuit of treading water and you are
not ready to do that.  As long as you are expending energy treading
that water, you can avoid what you didn't want to face initially.

This has nothing to do with him because he hasn't changed.  If you
fail to grasp what is going on in this last stage of the relationship,
you will either remain here for years and he will end it with you or
you will become so tired and will not be able to feed him what he
needs to stay comfortable.  He may love you or not love you but that
will have nothing to do with the reason it ends but it will feel that
way.  You may feel like a fool and kick yourself for not listening to
what has been said about dating married men but if you truly
understand the dynamic, you can avoid all this nonsense and go through
the pain in a way that is honest and constructive.

Back to the part where you start to drown:  the energy you don't
realize your spending is starting to feel bad and therefore you
believe the relationship is unbalanced in his favor.  To compensate
for this imbalance you start getting angry and making requests of him
you didn't ever picture doing.  His failure at giving you what you
perceive you need makes you feel even more unhappy, which he senses
and doesn't like, so he in turn compensates by telling you or
promising you things to alleviate your pain.  He is not an evil liar
and he may even be making those promises or saying those things
because he loves you and can't stand to see you in pain.  Have you
ever heard the phrase "love is not enough"?  It's true in any
relationship or marriage so it does apply to your special situation.
His lies and promises may make you feel better temporarily because it
seems like you are receiving something you need.  You have been
furiously treading water for a while now so it is normal for you to be
on the lookout for a life raft.  You are on survival mode and what
will drown you is your failure to correctly identify enemy and
rescuer.

When people talk about the "other woman" just settling for the crumbs
of this married man and how desperate she must be actually have the
whole thing wrong because if this were true, she would have married a
man from that first pool of emotional cripples.  It is overactive
attempts to avoid the pain of facing reality that is causing her pain,
exhaustion, and heartache.  Not this married man, this relationship,
or this waiting.  These crumbs he is supposedly tossing her are not
symbolic of his leftover love or his leftover emotional involvement or
his extra energy in her time of crisis.  They are the opposite.  He
hasn't changed and he doesn't want to change because he is
comfortable.  For him to expend any more energy in any particular
direction doesn't make sense because it would cause him discomfort and
discomfort prompts us to change.  Therefore, the crumbs he is throwing
her are not an attempt to increase his level of energy output but an
attempt to avoid it.  The lies and promises are designed to replace
the energy he was initially giving and she accepts it even though what
she is receiving is less.  Both of them falsely believe they are
actually contributing more to the relationship while getting less out
of it.  Society's and this woman's belief that these crumbs represent
love and emotional investment (energy) will lead her to conclude that
the potential of his promises not materializing are the enemy and he
is her rescuer.  He is holding the life raft with her name on it and
why he refuses to give it to her will paint him as a liar and her as a
pathetic, passive person waiting for the love she will never get.

The situation itself becomes her higher power even though he's not
holding any life raft now and neither was she then.  There was never
any life raft.  Ok, even if the life raft existed symbolically in this
scenario, it was still incorrectly representing "need".   A more
accurate representation would be "projection" so it would be
impossible for someone else to hold your life raft.  Life raft is a
pretty dramatic description of the whole dynamic and another blatant
misrepresentation of what was really going on; safety raft fits
better.

You may have not noticed that the discussion stopped focusing on you
in a direct manner and shifted to discussing you like a statistic or a
category you were lumped into as if you were on some sort of
backburner.  You may feel taken for granted, lied to and treated like
a dumping ground for false promises provided you are still under the
belief that your married man actually would expend that much time and
energy to get those kind of results.  Does that make you angry?  Why?
You are the one that changed the rules and destroyed a perfectly
comfortable relationship with your misplaced expectations.  You are
the one that thought you could bypass all the hard work it takes to
earn and build a real relationship and simply have that love
miraculously projected onto you.  You created this whole life raft
concept to fill yourself with power and confidence only to use it
against yourself and him later.  Not only did he never participate in
the whole life raft scenario, he never knew it existed.

Do you remember in the beginning when you felt great and had those
fantasies about how you would end things and how devastated he would
be?  You wouldn't have believed me if I told you earlier but maybe you
are ready to hear it now.  He is not so pathetic that his lies and
comfort zone will cause him doom in the end although it's comforting
for you to believe that.  He was actually spending the same amount of
energy you were but it was on his family.  By working, doing yard
work, having dinners at home, spending weekends with his wife and kids
he was consistently showing you through his actions where his love was
being exercised.  Remember, love is an action.  You may discount this
and believe anyone who lies and cheats can't possibly be happy but who
are you to determine how they live?  If they were uncomfortable, they
would change it.  He never tried to determine what would make you
happy or try to change you.  He accepted you the way you were either
because he thought you were amazing, or because it would have required
more of his energy not to.

He was not capable of feeling the intensity of emotion towards you or
share in your pain throughout this experience because 90% of his
energy was going towards maintaining and probably even making better
what he already had.  How can this person feel devastated?  I guess he
can feel 10% devastated which would be equivalent to a headache that
causes some discomfort.  Before you start feeling like the most low
impact person alive, you need to realize this isn't personal and I can
almost guarantee the last thing he wanted to do was hurt you.  Was he
acting in your best interests or really respecting your feelings?  No,
but he doesn't even give that to his wife and she was the one he
married and had kids with.  Comparing yourself in any way to his
family is absolutely ridiculous because if love from a guy like that
was what you wanted, you would already be married to a guy like him.
That dating pool you got out of before you met him consisted of guys
like him.  He was probably a combination of what you wouldn't expect:
The egotist mixed with a little emotional unavailability and maybe
some over eagerness in the beginning to secure the attachment of his
wife.  You have already graduated from that pool of emotional cripples
and the only reason you didn't spot him was because his primary
feeding was already being taken care of enough at home to allow the
appearance of a more balanced man.  Are you that needy even though
you've been statistically placed in the needy and desperate group?
Lets see, you spent 10% of your time in a relationship that offered no
commitment and you didn't date other people.   Even though 90% of your
time was spent on a furious race towards stagnation and is considered
self-destructive, you do keep yourself pretty well entertained
overall.  I mean, that relationship you had with yourself and your
inner demons was pretty intense!!  You're just pissed at him because
he didn't turn on himself like you did.  You are also pissed because
part of growing up is realizing only you can look after your best
interests and unlike a child, you are not deserving of an endless
supply of unconditional love from another human.  This kind of love is
what you will get from a higher power (also not a human) and what you
will give to your child.  If you fail to grasp this or believe it is
cruel, you will repeat this process over and over again until you
grasp it and no longer think it is cruel.

Everything else in between will have to be earned by you on a daily
basis through your actions for the rest of your life.  Your married
man earned this but where he fell short was that part about not
deserving an endless supply of unconditional love.  He doesn't realize
he can't get that from another human so he thinks the problem lies
outside of himself and this feels like a threat to this unconditional
love supply.  Because his wife couldn't continually provide him with
this because it's not humanly possible, he became uncomfortable enough
that he expended some energy to secure the attachment of someone who
could make up the difference. You engaged in this "seduction process"
which felt very exciting at the time but now it kind of feels like
some foreign parasite your body is trying to fight. This is a cycle he
will continue because he never allowed himself to go through the pain
you just did to learn and grow even though you were stupid about it.

Experts say that having an affair with a married man is actually
contributing to him staying in his marriage.  This assertion is
completely ludicrous because it's his wife that he's getting 90% of
his fulfillment from, she is keeping him in the marriage.  Me saying
this would have felt very threatening to you once that physical
relationship was underway but now it feels like a relief.  Your role
is actually much less important because you get less than 10% and you
are replaceable.  This is not personal.  For you to accept that you
have a role in keeping this man married would imply that if you left
him, he would be unhappy and uncomfortable and wouldn't be able to get
what he needs from his wife.  If you had fallen in love with him, you
probably would have pulled the ultimatum card several times before you
realized the false logic in that statement.  Please, he was slightly
uncomfortable until he met you, but nowhere near the kind of
unhappiness that would actually propel him to leave.  This is a man
that is so fearful of change and society wants you to believe that if
you left him, he would have the courage to face his demons?  So not
only are you needy, desperate and pathetic but you are now responsible
for his well-being which means that society now designates you his
higher power. The false perception our culture continues to enforce is
why weaker women weeded themselves out earlier on in this story and I,
being their identified enemy, could not contribute to the ferocious
guarding of their married man's life raft.  I can't help them and I
actually can't help you either because I think it's finally starting
to sink in that you are your own rescuer.  By the way, there was no
outside enemy either or any inner enemy emerging within you.  We just
brought that fear from a less scary place to a safer one and threw out
that life raft so you could be weaned slowly and calmly.  You just
need to be boring for awhile although experts want you to think you
have some major issues that need to be addressed before you are
allowed to come back out and play.

Research shows that fear of the unknown feels much more terrifying
than any real fear that you can identify.  This is another false
perception we cling to because we believe that no matter how bad the
situation is, the unknown is always going to be worse.  It's actually
the opposite.  If you don't believe me, reread why you got yourself
into this whole ordeal in the first place.  This truth is why movies
like Jaws and the Exorcist were so effective and horrifying.

The outside enemy in your case was also the unknown and it was so
scary you had to project it outside of yourself onto this other
person.  This fear was so real and you had brainwashed yourself so
well, you almost drowned yourself trying to avoid it.  This unknown is
already here because you ended your relationship and it isn't so bad,
it's actually a lot better. That married man feels pretty good most of
the time too except he won't ever have the kind of full life and
options you have if you continue to earn your place in this world
every day like you learned earlier.  You don't automatically become
better than him because your out of it now.  See, you weren't too far
off in the beginning when you had that whole idea of him being lucky
to be with someone with all these options, etc...you just arrogant about
it and expected an unconditional supply of it from him.

Ask Oldersister