When You’re Pretty Fed Up with Your Marriage

Reading Time: 25 minutes

Tempted to Have An Affair

Sometimes, people get pretty fed up with their marriages. It happens often. It happens so often that it is possible that it happens in every marriage, sooner or later, for shorter or longer, for richer and poorer, in sickness and in health, and so on.

Sometimes people work through it, live through it, or just live with it. Sometimes people call it quits. And sometimes people get tempted (verrry verrry tempted) to deal with being pretty fed up with their marriage by having an affair.

So – what should you do when you are pretty fed up, getting pretty fed up, or not even that fed up and tempted to have an affair?

The answer, of course, varies based on circumstances. But that doesn’t mean we can’t help you out with a handy dandy decision tree, logical analysis, thorough reasoning, and persuasive (perhaps) argumentation.

No socially approved bullshit here, just cold hard reasoning. And a handy dandy decision tree. That will hopefully sort of solve your problems and make your life better.

I’ll start with an example tempted person. You don’t have to be in the same circumstances as the example tempted person. It just helps to have an example to ground things and use as we go through the decision tree.

Our example tempted person is male. Married to a female. Married for 7 years with 1 child. His personal pretty fed up issue is that the sex is gone. This is a very painful issue for him, although interestingly and conventionally enough, he hasn’t mentioned it to anyone, including his wife. He has come to the conclusion that he is no longer sexually attracted to his wife. So, unsurprisingly, his feelings of sexual attraction have velcroed themselves to other people.

In our tempted person’s case, they have decided to velcro themselves to someone highly inappropriate. His wife’s mortal enemy, her rival, her nemesis, her foe – and her coworker. Whose kid goes to the same school as their child and whose child is always, so it seems, just a little bit better than theirs at everything. This woman gets under his wife’s skin in every little way, and she is always comparing herself to this other woman, favorably and unfavorably. So when our tempted person starts feeling that this nemesis is as hot as boiling lava – it’s about as bad as it could get for his wife.

We’ll call this woman Nemesis to highlight her role in this sordid business of his temptation to stray. We’ll call him Married Man. To thicken the plot, we’ll say that Married Man has already kissed Nemesis. They both got very very drunk at an office party at his wife’s job, snuck off somewhere and flirted, hugged goodbye, held hands for just a second too long and then leaned in for the fatal kiss. Now Married Man cannot stop thinking about that kiss.

There’s just one catch. He loves his wife! And his child! And his lifestyle. And the two families get along. Everything in his life would be going great except for the fact that he is not having sex with his wife and has decided that he doesn’t want to anymore.

This scenario, fictional as it is, is actually quite common – or at least some variation of it is. Sexual problems happen in marriage all the time. Take a look at 100 marriages, and 93 of them will have had a sexual problem at some point. The question is – what is he going to do about it?

All he’s thinking about right now is whether or not Nemesis will bonk him, and if she will, should he do it, and if he does it, how soon and where can he get started. All of these questions are very exciting to him except the ‘should he actually do it’ one. That one’s a dilemma. But we are going to introduce him (and you) to our decision tree.

So the first level of analysis with these ‘tempted to have an affair with someone highly inappropriate’ situations is the structural analysis. Because these situations have an underlying structure.

The first and most important element of the structure is being married or at least similarly committed. Being married means that you are likely to spend at least a certain amount of your marriage attracted to other people.

The reason you are going to spend at least a certain amount of time attracted to other people is that you are a human being with a physical body. The hormones that run around your physical body causing trouble and bossing you around periodically like to make sure that they are all still working properly and capable of engendering pregnancy-causing activities with suitable specimens just in case anything happens with your current partner.

That may sound kind of stupid but the truth is, for most of human existence on this planet, things frequently did happen with your current partner. Mainly, they died. People have spent hundreds of thousands of years of human history dying before they’ve been married all that long. And if they weren’t dying, they were being kidnapped or sold into slavery or separated by war or forced to move on by famine or natural disaster or otherwise having their lives disrupted.

Humans have to deal with the impulse to breed for at least thirty years. A lot can happen in 30 years. And often it does. People who live in developed countries with relatively stable situations may think it’s the norm to be able to get through 30 years of partnership without some crazy-ass thing happening, but really it isn’t. Your body wants to be prepared for a missing mate or even an opportunity to score a prime pregnancy opportunity with some superb gene-carrying specimen.

The fact that this may not be convenient for you has never stopped a hormone before, and it’s not going to stop it now. Your hormones will periodically be on the prowl and it will be up to you to decide what to do about that. So now we come to the first branch in our decision tree.

DECISION TREE QUESTION A:

What are you going to do about your natural hormone-induced attractions? Choose one:

1. My hormones are the boss. They give orders, I follow them. If my hormones want to jump someone’s bones, I’m jumping!
2. I’m the boss. I recognize that hormones can be extremely persuasive, but I also recognize that they are just hormones. I can decide for myself how to respond to their urges and prompting.

If you chose answer 1) congratulations! You do not have a dilemma. You just follow the orders of your hormones wherever they may take you in life and that’s that. And since hormones are daredevil risk-takers where they lead often causes enough trouble that you don’t have time to worry about reading blogs on the internet. And even if you do have time, the decision’s already made, you’re gonna do what you’re gonna do.

Married Man really wanted to choose answer 1) but his pride and conscience wouldn’t let him, so he decided reluctantly to choose answer 2).

If you chose answer 2) as well – congratulations, you are a normal human being. Normal human beings experience mind-bending dilemmas all the time. You are neck deep in one yourself. So let’s move further down the decision tree to help you out.

So the next question is –

DECISION TREE QUESTION B:

Do you want to ditch your marriage? Are you looking to get out of it? Choose one:

1. Yes, I sure am. I am so fed up with my marriage that I am looking to leave it, destroy it, divorce or otherwise blow the whole thing up. I need to get out.
2. No, I love my partner and my life. I’m just really really tempted right now.
3. I’m not exactly sure. I don’t think I want to ditch my marriage but things aren’t going so well right now.

If you chose answer 1) congratulations! Having an affair with a highly inappropriate person is a pretty good way to destroy a marriage. All you really have to do is make the most foolish decisions you can think of and you’re well on your way to not being married. Now I’m not saying some partners won’t cling. I’m not saying the divorce won’t be extreeeeeemly expensive. I’m not saying things will go smoothly in the destroying your marriage department. I’m not saying it won’t be painful. I’m just saying having an affair with a highly inappropriate person is a pretty good start. Let the carnage begin!

Married Man chose answer 2). If you chose answer 2) as well congratulations, you have plenty of company in the world of married or otherwise committed people. You have so much company throughout human history that a list of names of people in your situation would have way more pages than Wikipedia. We’re going to need to move on to the next level of the decision tree.

If you chose answer 3) I feel ya. This is tough and it happens often. You really don’t know if you should stay or you should go. We’re going to move gingerly through the decision tree in this case.

Now that we’ve eliminated some folks from the decision tree, let’s move on for the folks in the answers 2) and 3) category.

Ask yourself, what do you want? This is a tough question because there are a lot of things you could want and foremost on your mind is that you want to get it on with the highly inappropriate person you are currently attracted to. But we’re going to have to dig a little deeper. So I’m going to ask a sensitive and possibly embarrassing question.

Is it love that you want?

It can be a little difficult to deal with the feeling that you’re not loved in your partnership. Especially if you thought that you were before. It’s a painful feeling to feel unloved and not everybody wants to deal with experiencing it. Sometimes people just want to jump into a liaison just to make the feeling go away. Sometimes people just don’t want to admit that they’re feeling it at all.

Sometimes not feeling loved is accompanied by an even worse sensation, that of being lonely. Feeling lonely in a marriage is not uncommon and it can be quite excruciating. You’re busy raising kids and living life but you’re not in any way connecting as human beings who can ease each other’s loneliness. Each of you are facing the various problems and sensations (good and bad) of life without each other, in your own heads. Life inside your own head can get pretty gnarly. It’s not good. You need people to share it with. If you can’t share with your partner, you’re probably not going to feel great unless you have someone else to share it with. Hence – the desire for an affair.

Sometimes people don’t feel loved or feel lonely in a marriage specifically because they are not having sex. For a fair number of people, sex is a prime way they experience love, the feeling of being loved. It’s one of their main modes of emotional communication or connection. For this type of person, the idea can naturally arise that having sex with someone else, anyone else, can make them feel loved and less lonely.

So now we come to the next question on the decision tree.

DECISION TREE QUESTION C:

Do any of the above descriptions remind you of you? Choose one:

1. Nope. I feel loved enough and I’m not really lonely.
2. Yes, at least a little bit (sad face)

Okey doke. Our Married Man chose answer 1). If you too chose answer 1), then we’re going to move on to the next question in the decision tree.

If you chose answer 2) then skip down to here, unless you feel like reading through just in case.

DECISION TREE QUESTION D:

If it’s not love, you’re after – is it just sex? Choose one:

1. Bingo! Ding, ding, ding. Yes, that’s what I want! Just sex. Sex, please. Yes.
2. Well not exactly just sex. I mean I am attracted to my favorite highly inappropriate person on multiple levels.

Married Man chose answer 1). If you also chose answer 1) then woo boy!, no wonder you’ve got a dilemma, so let’s dig into it. If you chose answer 2) then you can skip down to here if you want.

Okay, you just want some good old-fashioned hot penetrative passionate rolling in the hay. So now the question is –

DECISION TREE QUESTION E:

Are you willing to lose your marriage over some good old-fashioned hot penetrative rolling in the hay? Choose one.

1. Wait, what?! No, I don’t really want to lose my marriage. I just want to have an affair.
2. Maybe. It’s not necessarily my first preference but…
3. I guess so. If it comes to that.

Married Man chose answer 1). We’ll deal with that answer in a bit. But first we’ll deal with answer 3). If you chose answer 1) or 2), you can skip down to here if you’d like.

If you chose answer 3), then ultimately you are probably going to take the risk. You probably ought to make yourself a nice logical list of all the things you would lose if you lost your marriage – such as potential access to your children or acceptance by them, a boatload of money, peace of mind for at least awhile, lots of time spent dealing with dissolving your marriage and so on.

Here’s what I’m going to ask you do to answer 3) folks: Write out a worst case scenario for having this affair you’re tempted to have and write out a best case scenario. Don’t just think, write it out. Although you know destroy the evidence if you decide against the affair.

In your worst case scenario include things like reputation damage to yourself and the person you would be having an affair with, damage to your kids if you have any, damage to your current partner and so on. Imagine an ugly breakup to the affair and how you would deal with that. Let your imagination run wild with all the things that could go wrong.

In your best case scenario, include things like the person you would be having the affair with turns out to be the true love of your life and you stay together for ever and every in blissful marital harmony. This does happen. I have no idea if it will happen to you, but people do leave marriages for other people and it turns out the person they left for was the person they wanted to be with for the rest of their lives.

Okay, now that you have your best case and worst case scenarios laid out, ask yourself what you think is the most likely. Just use your gut intuition on this.

Then ask yourself if the worst case scenario you think is likely is worth the best case scenario you think is likely. Remember that best case and worst case elements can happen at the same time.

Got it? Do this work and make your decision.

It’s often actually much simpler to make these kinds of decisions than it seems. Deep down, often you just know. You just don’t realize what you know because hormones and complications are busy running around through your body and mind making it hard to get clearheaded. But sometimes your heart is telling you that you just have to go for it. And other times, your brain is telling you that no matter how attractive the temptation seems, it would just be a foolish (stupid) decision to give in to it.

So now I’m going to ask you –

DECISION TREE QUESTION F:

Did you decide to go for it? Choose one:

1. I did. It’s worth the risks.
2. Not at this time. There are problems in my marriage but this would not be the way to solve them.
3. I’m still conflicted.

If you chose answer 1), then I’m going to ask you do to some planning. Going for it will most likely entail some pain for multiple people. Plan now for how you are going to mitigate that pain. You’re also going to need to talk to the person that you’re not yet having an affair with and get straight with them how you are going to handle things once the rolling in the hay gets going.

For all we know, the person you are attracted to is not going to be on board, which will probably not make you feel very good at all, but at least you are making the decision to pursue with a full willingness to accept the consequences, rather than just jumping in the pool and hoping you don’t drown.

If you chose answer 2), then the decision is made. You’re not going to have the affair. Kind of a disappointment considering how all worked up you got yourself over the attraction, but also you can go back to a kind of peace of mind. Congratulations on making a decision. I hope you feel better, if not now, then soon.

Okay, we’ve actually eliminated a fair number of people thanks to our handy dandy decision tree. They’ve decided to go for it, or they’ve decided to stop torturing themselves with thinking about something they’re just not going to do. A bunch of people feel better already.

But some of you don’t. If you chose answer 3), well then we’ve still got work to do.

So I have another question for you. Are you under a lot of stress or uncertainty in your life right now? Is something intense going on with you or anyone you’re close to? Illness, work stress, unemployment, legal problems, money problems, mental health problems, other life problems?

Do you sometimes feel like you just want to escape your current life and/or its stresses?

It doesn’t exactly seem fair or right but people are often most tempted to have an affair when there’s a lot of other shit going on. Their kid has cancer, their partner has cancer, they have cancer. They are burning the midnight oil at work. They are questioning their life choices. There is a lot of financial strain.

It’s an odd but true-life physiological response that when people feel threatened, they also want to have sex. Intensity and threat activate hormones, sex and love hormones, and they’ll glom on to any likely suspect in the vicinity. This is especially true if the intensity is accompanied by a desire to escape.

Attraction can feel a lot like love or a lot like overwhelming desire when your physiology is in a disarray by a stressful life situation. This business of intensity provoking love and sexual attraction hormones is exactly why TV shows like The Bachelor force people into situations that are kind of scary for them. Then they get the contestants tired and drunk and basically disoriented and the producers can pretty much guarantee emotional meltdowns, flaming hot passion, declarations of love, and total heartbreak.

You may notice that people who get engaged on shows like The Bachelor almost never make it past the airing of the show before they break up. That’s because the attraction hormones induced by all that stress are not in the least reliable.

And that’s why I’m going to tell you – you don’t want to have an affair. You do want to have an affair. You want to a lot. But an affair is not actually what you want. What you want is for the intensity and stress to dissipate. Ride it out. Don’t try to solve other life problems by having an affair.

People do this. They dump their spouses when their spouses have breast cancer. They take up with a hot young thing when their kids have cancer. They run away with the receptionist when their business takes a downturn.

These are natural reactions. But they also make you a jerk. Don’t do it. It doesn’t turn out well. It doesn’t solve the problem. And it will make you more likely to do similar things in the future because you never got to experience solving the problem.

Life problems ever so frequently cause marriage problems. And it’s no joke. It’s difficult. It can be reallllly difficult. But affairs don’t solve those problems.

Now I say that on the basis of the experience of observing people go through this and knowing what it’s like to be attracted and want to run when things get tough. It’s my opinion that having an affair in these circumstances makes you a jerk, having seen such jerks in action.

But of course I don’t know that every every single time someone does this that it all works out terribly and causes horrible unnecessary pain. You could be the exception. But still, at least try to ride it out. The feelings may go away and you will realize, holy shit, I could have made a terrible mistake. I’m glad I didn’t.

If you can somehow manage to get through the tough times with your spouse, things often get better. Way better. Way way better. There is often a payoff for figuring out how to deal with stuff that is far greater than you could imagine when things were bad. Tough times often lead to golden times, strange as it may sound.

Not always. Sometimes a marriage does not survive the tough times; people take different routes and they can’t make it work together any more. So it’s not a guarantee. If you can’t make it work, you can’t make it work. And you can move on once you decide that. But don’t move on until you do.

All right, a number of you have made a decision now. Not necessarily the decision you were anticipating or hoping for, but a decision. You’ve answered the important questions. Congratulations.

Now, for those of you who are still conflicted, another question.

DECISION TREE QUESTION G:

Are you getting drunk a lot, or did this attraction flare up suddenly while you were drunk? Choose one:

1. No. No drunkenness involved. At least not yet.
2. Uh, yeah.
3. Maybe a little bit.

Married Man chose answer 2). If you chose answer 2) or 3) then what you are dealing with is alcohol. Alcohol lowers your inhibitions. It may be that underneath the facade of your sober self what you want is to unleash massive horniness on anyone who will let you. But guess what, that desire lurks under the surface of almost everyone’s sober self.

The answer to your drunken dilemma is simple – don’t get drunk.

If you only rarely get drunk anyway, then just be especially careful not to get drunk around the person you’re attracted to or you’re likely to do something stupid. People do very stupid things when they’re drunk. I can tell you that from personal experience.

If your only real evidence of attraction appears under the influence of alcohol then you don’t really have an attraction.

I’ll put it another way. Married Man should not have an affair with Nemesis. There’s no good evidence that Nemesis is really into him. Yeah, sure Nemesis may truly be a nemesis and have spotted a malicious opportunity to do something horrible to Married Man’s wife. But that doesn’t mean she’s willing to give up her superior position in life just to solve his problem of feeling like he’s not attracted to his wife.

I mean, she might. She might be that malicious. She might be willing to bonk Married Man just to make his wife feel bad. But that’s a whole pile of shit to step into just because a couple of people got drunk. Drunken attractions (which used to be referred to as ‘beer goggles’) are not reliable attractions. It’s not that the attraction isn’t there. It is. It’s that when people are non-drunk, non-attraction factors take over. Non-attraction factors such as ‘holy shit! I don’t really want this person in my life.’

Don’t get yourself wound around the axle over something that happened (or almost happened) when you were drunk. Don’t start asking yourself if it’s real. Just don’t take it any further. Pretend it never happened and forget about it. (That might be less possible if your spouse finds out about it later, but that’s when begging for forgiveness comes into play.)

If you cannot stop yourself from getting drunk, then you have a different problem, which is that you cannot stop yourself from getting drunk. Either you solve that problem (which is not necessarily an easy problem to solve) or you don’t. If you don’t solve that problem or you don’t want to solve that problem (maybe you don’t even consider it a problem), then it is possible that what you really want is to hook up with someone you can be drunk with all the time.

Is the person you’re attracted to a person you can remain drunk with all the time? If so, then your marriage may be on the rocks and you may be able to start a whole new (possibly short) life of unceasing, untrammeled drunkenness. If that’s the road you’re on, then there is no need to get wrapped around the axle over the affair itself. If you’re going to get wrapped around the axle, get wrapped around it over whether or not you want to live drunk (or stoned or under the influence of opiates and benzos or whatever) for the rest of your foreseeable life.

Okay, so we’ve eliminated people with substance abuse problems that impair their sexual judgment. We’ve also accidentally eliminated Married Man from the pool of people with an affair dilemma. Much to his chagrin, Married Man is not going to have an affair with Nemesis. He’s still hot to trot with someone though so he’s going to keep reading the next section. Which is:

You want an affair because you want the passion, the sex, the body stuff. But you’re conflicted. The stakes are high. So now we move on to some logistical questions.

What do you think this proposed affair is going to be like? How are you going to conduct it? Where? When? How often? For how long? Are you going to pretend to this other person that you love them or are you going to present it as just sex because you’re not currently getting any, or enough? What are you going to do when or if it ends? What are you going to do if it goes wrong and the person you were fucking decides to fuck you (in a metaphorical way) by trying to ruin your life? Will you be able to break it off if you want? What will you do if your feelings change? Can you handle two relationships at a time?

Are you going to try to deceive your current partner? How do you plan to pull that off? If you’re not planning to deceive your current partner, how do you think that will go over? Is it something your current partner might be open to because they truly don’t want to have sex with you anymore?

What will happen if you get caught? How will you handle that? Will there be damage to your career? Your reputation in the community?

Where do you think the other person is coming from? Sex only? Love? Drunkenness? Unknown? Are they going to pressure you for marriage? Money? How trustworthy are they?

Now, you are asking yourself, perhaps, wait, I’ve got to think about all that before I do the deed? I was hoping to just kind of start and see where it led.

Of course you were. That’s typically how affairs start. It seems like a really really good idea at a certain moment or set of moments, and it seems like such a good idea that the thought of, you know, thinking it through seems absurd.

But if the affair was truly such a good idea, there’d be no dilemma. So yeah, think about that stuff before you start. That may take awhile. Give yourself some time.

Did you do some thinking? Are you ready for the next question? Ok then.

DECISION TREE QUESTION H:

Have you decided whether or not to have an affair? Choose one:

1. Yup. I’m going for it. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. I know what I want and I have a plan to get it.
2. Yup. I’ve decided I’m not going to pursue it. When I think about it, it’s not really what I want and/or it’s not really worth the risks and problems. Sigh.
3. No. Are you kidding? This is a hard decision. Of course I haven’t made up my mind.

If you chose answer 1) or 2) congratulations. At least you’ve made a decision. You know what you’ve decided and why. There are undoubtedly some downsides to whatever decision you made, but all decisions have downsides. I hope your decision works out as best it can for everyone.

If you chose answer 3), well, you’ve still got company. So let’s explore what’s holding you up from deciding one way or another.

You might be at the ‘last call for pregnancy‘ age. A lot of what are referred to as ‘midlife crises’ are really ‘last call for pregnancy’ reactions. Both men and women hit an age (typically in their 40s, although it can skew a bit later for men) when their bodies realize that the number of eggs or quality of sperm is declining rapidly and it’s last call for healthy pregnancy.

Offspring-desiring hormones send out a command to all the bodily systems to be on the lookout for potential healthy-offspring-producing humans in the vicinity. It is possible to be wildly attracted to incredibly inappropriate people during the last-call-for-pregnancy phase of one’s life. Most people ride this out – experiencing all kinds of attractions and longings that they decline to act on because acting on them will mess up their lives too badly and be too much trouble.

But it’s not called midlife crisis because the only thing people do during it is go gallivanting off with someone they shouldn’t be gallivanting with. Last call for pregnancy is also often a time for reassessing the entirety of your life. It’s like your body has determined that you are at a decision point – either you need to have another kid or you need to move into another phase of your life.

Sometimes people do have another kid. Or kids. They don’t necessarily decide this consciously but they decide it. They’re going to start over with a new batch or a later in life child. Sometimes people who have not had kids before decide this is the time to do it.

If you’re at last call for pregnancy and you want another child, this is something to address with your partner. Well, first address it with yourself. Do you really want another child, or your first child? If so, decide how do deal with that desire.

If you’re at last-call-for-pregnancy and you don’t want another child, then you may need to decide what you do want from your life. This can be an exhilarating process if you do it on purpose. It can also be bewildering, fatiguing, and kind of harrowing.

If the problems in your marriage stem from the fact that you’re at a crossroads, then decide whether you are willing to face that crossroads with your current partner. You’ve got to find out if your partner is willing to participate with you in the decisions you need to make.

If your partner is not willing, then you may indeed end up having an affair as part of the entire readjustment you are going through.

On the other hand, if your current child or children is/are young, then it may be more important to figure out how to make small adjustments in your life so that you can be still be present for them.

Bottom line – and you do know this already – if you have children, you have to consider them. I mean you don’t really, lots of people don’t and I’ve seen the consequences of that, but if you’ve made it this far, then you are absolutely positively going to have to consider your children.

If you don’t think last-call-for-pregnancy plays a role in your temptation to have an affair, let’s move on to loneliness. Welcome back, lonely married people. There are certainly a lot of you!

You have an extremely common problem. A problem so common that various pundits are calling it some sort of vast social crisis. Everyone’s lonely these days.

Married or not, you need love in your life and having a partner does not guarantee that, as you have learned. Loneliness and the human need for love are actually more common reasons for affairs than just having the hots for the wrong people. People can, and do, deal with having the hots for someone they can’t have all the frickin time. Loneliness, however, is almost unbearable.

So we’ve got to do something about your loneliness.

And this is hard. In fact, I’m going to ask you to do something super hard, something that may not pay off, but that you need to do for clarity: find out what your current partner wants.

You’re going to have to try to make friends with your partner. This may be very painful if you feel like you’ve already been rejected by your partner or if you feel like you’ve just lost any good feelings about your partner.

But here’s the thing. You’re tempted to have an affair. You’re not tempted to just get a divorce. For whatever reason, children, circumstances, finances, just leaving is not your first option.

For those of you who are facing a sex drought, I’m going to ask you to make another attempt. Not at sex at first. Nope, at flirting. And by flirting I don’t mean a strip tease.

It may seem that since you are already married, the thing to do is cut to the chase. It may seem like you don’t need to go back to wooing and courtship and all those things you did before you had kids or got married or combined families or whatever.

But if the connection has been broken, you kinda need to start over to see if there’s any hope.

Try holding hands. Hug. Make a joke. Try little interactions. Little interactions that are not about practical shit. Or what the other person did wrong. Or your schedules. Or the kids.

See what the response is. If your wife or husband won’t hold hands with you (and this is possible), it’s going to hurt. But it’s not going to hurt quite as much as full-fledged play for sex. If you can’t even exchange a friendly or reassuring hug with your partner, well then at this point you don’t really have a partner.

If you can’t banter and flirt and interact on things that don’t have to deal with the grim business of being an adult, then it’s no wonder you’re feeling lonely and tempted to have an affair.

If you get no response to your tiny little overtures, then you are going to have to do something worse. You’re going to have to talk to your partner about it. You probably don’t want to do this or you would be doing it already and not fantasizing about someone you’re not with. But you gotta do it.

If you’re a reasonable person, you’re probably afraid (terrified maybe) of what turning over the rocks in you marriage will lead to. Cuz it might lead to some ugly stuff.

On the other hand, it might very well make you less lonely. Because here’s the thing: loneliness is terrible. It might seem less terrible than finding out your partner doesn’t find you attractive anymore or that the resentments have built up so much between you that there’s a whole tangle of hissing snakes right below the surface. But in many ways it isn’t less terrible.

I know you might very well rather ease your loneliness with someone else rather than dig into why the person you married has sexually or emotionally abandoned you. And you might well end up doing that anyway. The two of you might agree to go your separate ways, either officially and legally, or informally and on the down low.

But if you don’t do something about it with the person you are with, it (the loneliness between you) might go on forever.

Granted, it might not. It may be that your partner is dealing with something they don’t want to share and that something is temporary. It may simply be that the stresses and strains of being a grown-up have overwhelmed one or both of you and caused you to shut down for awhile.

But you can address that sort of temporary situation with your partner too. You may not like hearing that your partner is seething with resentments because they think you don’t do enough around the house or with the kids, but these things are fixable. You might not like hearing that your partner thinks you have let yourself go. But that is fixable too.

It might be fixable with a time out. There is an old saying that ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’. One meaning of this phrase is that when you are all up in each other’s business all the time, you start needing some space.

Sometimes you want an affair because your physical chemistry is just so sick of being overwhelmed with the constant presence of the people in your life that it starts longing for some new chemicals with some new people just for refreshment.

There is nothing wrong with taking a break in marriage. In fact, taking a break can be a marriage-saver. An actual physical separation. A pretend separation where you each agree to give each other a frickin break from the daily routines of your lives. Separate hobbies. Separate friend groups. Something, almost anything, new to give yourself a break from the sometimes sheer drudgery of being married to the same person for quite awhile.

You deserve to ease your loneliness. You deserve friends, confidantes, the occasional bout of excitement. And, if it comes to that, you deserve new tricks in the bedroom, a new routine, a bit of mystery, spice.

Maybe you need to step back from all the things you feel like you have to do and need to do, and just start deciding you can do less of those things and more things that are fun and refreshing. Maybe you just need to literally rest more.

Same old, same old doesn’t always work in relationships. There comes a time for many people when they start unconsciously longing for all the things they can’t do in their current relationship. The things their partner doesn’t want to do or doesn’t do easily.

You might be bored. Boredom happens in life. It frequently happens in adult life when you get a sudden sinking feeling that you know exactly how things are going to play out for the next 30 years. You can feel like you’ve got a career, a marriage, a house, and kids – and none of that is going to change for a long long time unless you do something drastic. Like fall in love with someone else entirely. But you can address boredom within your marriage as well as outside of it.

I realize you may be willing to do all this hard work on your marriage for an uncertain payoff – or you might not be.

Which brings us to the final question.

DECISION TREE QUESTION I:

Is it time to fire your current marriage partner and just move on to someone or something else? Choose one:

1. Yeah. I cannot bear the thought of trying to deal with the problems in my marriage and my life with my current partner. I am realizing now that we’re going to split up sooner or later. I’m not happy.
2. No, not yet. It might be soon, but not yet. There are things that we can try and we’ve just put off trying them.
3. No, god no. I do love my partner and my kids and my life. We are just going through a rough patch. I’m committed. I will either gut it out for awhile or look for solutions.

Look, by and large it’s no fun to be tempted by an affair when you’re really tempted. It can actually be kind of fun when you’re not really tempted. A bit of flirting, a spark of desirability when you know you’re not going to act on it. But being really tempted is not fun.

You literally married the person you’re married to (or otherwise committed to them). It’s tough to either break up and move on or face the fact that things are wrong enough right now, painful enough right now that you’d rather be with someone else.

Marriage is not for wusses. Being an adult is not for wusses.

But honey – you can do it. You can make the necessary decisions, you can know why you’re making them, you can carry them through. You don’t have to flounder around in a fog of uncertainty. You can reinvigorate your marriage or you can call it quits. Hard as it may be – you got this.

Tags: relationships, sex