Infidelity

[slim]

I don't really have any questions, I just want to make a comment and maybe some of you can agree/disagree. Some of you have read my other post about my wife cheating on me. Obviously, my life has been turned upside down and there has been nothing else on my mind since I found out about 2 and a half months ago.

Just wanted to give everyone a brief history of our marriage. We've been together about 14 years and married the last 8yrs. WE have twins who are 3 and a half. My wife has been having an affair for about 2 years with her boss who is about 10 yrs older than she is. There was no abuse in our marriage. We had the typical marriage....basically on autopilot and taking each other for granted. Not many fights just raising the kids and no romance. My wife has decided to divorce me and eventually move in with her boss who has 3 kids aged 10-15. Since revealing the affair to her family, my wife has been disowned by her father and kind of on the fence with pretty much everyone else in her family......most are not willing to shun her completely but do not really want to invite her over bc it is too awkward. So basically, my wife and I have gone from having a large nice house with no debt, 2 beautiful twins and a good family relationship to each of us living in smaller houses, our kids will be bounced between 2 families, and her being not welcome by her own family. As for me, obviously I now have a lot of psychological issues with trust and a host of other issues like anger, sadness etc.

In doing research on infidelity, I discovered that it is an addiction like any other addiction. People who have some kind of void in their lives become vulnerable to affairs. Anyone who shows interest or pays special attention to a vulnerable person becomes the source of addiction. There are bunch of chemicals there are released in the brain when these people "fall in love". These chemicals cause irrational behaviour and cause the person to do ANYTHING to preserve the feeling of being in love including distancing themselves from their spouse, magnifying small problems in their marriage, minimizing the faults of the affair partner and all kinds of justifications and rationalizations. It causes the person to live a double life of lying and deception even in a previously honest person. Once the affair is discovered, the culprit acts like a typical addict....tehy go on the offense and attack the people trying to help them. They blame everything but their own weaknesses for casuing their affair.

The thing about affairs that make them one of the hardest addicitons to overcome is that no one thinks of affairs as an addiction. So the persons involved feel they are in total contol of their lives and they feel that the have found their soul mate when in fact it is all an illusion. They are living a life with their "soul mate" which is all a fantasy....no bills to pay, no diapers to change, only romance. The persons involved only see the best side of each other, the side they want to portay. Everything changes if they live together. 80-90 % of the time, affair relationships end and even those that survive are no better than the original marriages...same but with a different partner. The other thing about affairs is that unlike, drugs,gambling etc, interventions tend not to work. A drug addict will choose to go into rehab when faced with the reality of losing their family. With affairs, there is someone waiting for them on the other side so it is easy to accept losing a family bc they will gain a new one.

So on to my comment. As far as I am concerned, infidelity should be a crime. At the very least, there should be a lot of money poured into research and rehab for infidelity. Instead, we have companies nowadays that promote affairs )i.e. ashleymadison.com). There are many organizations that help alcoholics and drug and gambling addicts because left untreated, they destroy families and lives. It is not uncommon for the perpetrators of affairs to go into depression when the high wears off and they realise what they have done. These people lives are usually shattered whether the affairs ends or not bc they live a life of shame and guilt and alienation by family. The victim or betrayed spouse can also go into depression, cimmit suicide and even murder. Anything that destroys families, especially when kids are involved, should be taken very seriously. From my research, over 50% of marriages end in divorce and over 80% of those divorce is a result of infidelity. I haven't done any research on alcoholism or drug addiction but i would guess that affairs affect more families than both of those combined.