INFIDELITY, RELATIONSHIPS

If Our Affair Partners Could Talk To Our Spouses, What Would They Say?

All I wanted was a conversation.

A friend called me the other day completely livid. Someone stole her daughter’s bike. The bike had been in the basement of her apartment locked up with two separate locks.

“Why do people do this?” She exclaimed. “Why can’t they just buy their own bike?”

But as far as I know, people who enter a basement, remove two locks and steal a bike probably don’t have the money to buy a bike. People who take a risk like that are probably desperate.

Desperate like I was when I had my affair.

At that point in my life, I was so desperate for love and affection that I took a similar risk, and for a brief time, I stole someone’s husband.

One of my first posts on Medium was about a conversation I wished I could’ve had with my affair partner’s wife. It’s by far my most-read piece.

It’s also the most criticized. I’ve received the most comments — mostly negative — on that one story than any other I’ve written.

And I understand why. What I wrote hits a nerve. What I wrote would be a difficult conversation to have.

One thing about writing is that it’s not always easy to decipher tone. The type of comment I see over and over is that I’m blaming his wife for the affair. That I’m wagging my finger at her.

When I read comments like these, my shoulders sag. I sigh. Somehow, my message didn’t land quite right. I missed the mark.

Because blaming his wife was never my intention at all. All I wanted was to have a conversation with her. All I wanted was for her to see what I saw; that like me, he was desperate to feel loved.

Maybe if I would’ve been able to have a conversation with her I’d have heard a completely different story, as many of the comments suggest. Maybe I’d have gained some new information on the situation. Either way, a conversation would have led to more understanding on both sides, which is exactly what I wanted.

I’ll never know for sure, but I suspect what I wrote about would have held.

Because if my affair partner could’ve sat down with my former husband and had a conversation, my ex would’ve heard very similar things.

Your wife feels unappreciated.

She wants to be having sex with you, or at the very least, some amount of affection.

She feels taken for granted.

She wants to be forgiven for the affair and for this to be the beginning of a never-ending conversation on how both of you can do better.

But most of all, she’s having this affair because she’s desperate to feel loved.

And why on earth do we do this? Why do we put our partners — the one we’re supposed to love most in this world; the one whose heart is in our hands — in a state of desperation?

Why don’t we tell them how much we appreciate them and the things they do? Why don’t we show them with words and actions that their needs matter to us and are worth our time and effort? Why do we deny them physical expressions of love?

Why do we dismiss them, roll our eyes, and tell them to stop nagging us?

And for those of us who are desperate to feel loved, why is it so hard to have open and honest conversations? Why is it so hard to tell our partners how much we’re hurting? That we’re lonely? That we want them? Not this other person, this affair partner.

Them.

How do we remove the barriers that keep us from connecting? Barriers that keep us from having these conversations? Barriers that keep us from saying what’s in our hearts? Barriers that keep us from hearing each other?

I don’t have the answers to these questions, because I couldn’t manage to do this in my own marriage. I tried to have these conversations, but my words never seemed to make it into his heart. We tried seeing a therapist together, but that didn’t help either.

There was always something getting in the way of us connecting. It seems to me that to remove this barrier, something big has to happen. Hearing from an affair partner may be a big enough thing to do just that.

And like it or not, the affair partner is often in a unique albeit awkward position to offer insights that a therapist simply can’t. My affair partner and I bonded over a shared frustration with our situation. We understood because we were both living it.

What I want most for myself and all couples is to be able to talk openly with each other and get the love we need within our committed relationships. And what I know for sure is that there are a lot of couples out there who aren’t able to make this happen.

From my experience and the experiences of a few of my close friends, the pain of an affair seems to do one of two things to a relationship. It either puts partners into a vicious game of blaming and shaming or cracks them open to a place where new understanding and compassion occurs.

And I wonder if having these conversations with our partner’s ‘other’ would be the thing to help that crack form. To help us see what at the present moment we somehow can’t see. To help us get that conversation started. To help us gain a new level of understanding.

And I wonder if hearing from the ‘other’ would help our partners see our affairs for what they often are — a desperate cry for love.

kasey sparks, © 2021

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