Let’s Talk About Sex After My Wife’s Affair
This is part twenty-three of my story of recovering from my wife’s affair and rebuilding our marriage. If you haven’t already, please start at the beginning with part one.
Obviously, a big part of many affairs is the sex.
And just as obviously, sex is a big part of the recovery process for couples who decide to stick it out together. For my wife and myself, sex is now much different from what it was before.
This is an area where I would guess there’s an expansive range of problems that couples recovering from infidelity might have to deal with. Our experience is no doubt in many ways rare or unique. Prior to the affair, my wife and I had what I think was a fairly regular, moderately healthy sex life. From my perspective, there were some issues we were dealing with (or not really dealing with), which I’ll get into below, but our sex life wasn’t bad, distant or infrequent in any way that might have led her to stray.
I don’t think my wife’s reasons for the affair had anything to do with sex. Her unmet needs were emotion-based: she craved acknowledgement, validation, admiration, not sexual gratification. But that being said, she did have sex with her affair partner, a few times over a single night in a hotel room. She claims she did it essentially for the same reason mountain climber George Mallory said he scaled Mount Everest: “Because it’s there.”
Back in January, when she admitted to me that she had wanted, and tried, to have sex with him (though at the time she was still lying by telling me he hadn’t been able to get an erection), I asked her why she had wanted to. I remember her telling me, simply, “Because that’s what an affair is.” I think that sums it up. She did it because she could. Because she was having an affair and that was part of it. Having sex with someone other than me was fun, forbidden and exciting, a side benefit of the things she really wanted out of the affair.
In the recovery from her affair, our sex life has enjoyed improvements and encountered challenges. I’ll start with the negatives:
The images in my head. As I’ve said many times, she could have made this part so much easier on me. If she had just admitted, on that Thursday morning in December when I first confronted her, that they had fucked, I could have gotten past it all at once. The first time she told me they hadn’t, just a few minutes after she confirmed the affair itself to me, I called bullshit on it. At the time, she was telling me she had stopped him after just making out, because she didn’t want to go any further. I remember telling her right then, “Come on, you’re not a blushing high school girl, unsure whether you’re ready to go all the way. You’re a grown woman, in a hotel room with a grown man. Of course you did it all.”
But, I didn’t hold firm to that initial instinct that turned out to be correct, and instead, I tried to buy her chaste version of the story. She then gave me “trickle truth” on the topic of their physical interactions. Starting from “we only made out,” she occasionally admitted that the physical intimacy had gone further than she had previously indicated, until finally, six months later, she was forced to admit that they had gone all the way multiple times during their night in a hotel room downtown.
I spent months feeling like there were things she hadn’t told me. And during that time, I kept wondering, “Did they do this? Did they do that?” Honestly, the things I was unsure about crossed my mind and got stuck there much more frequently than the things I knew about. Once I knew it had happened, I could process it, accept it, and get past it fairly quickly. But those things I wondered about would cross my mind in the middle of sex with my wife, and often take me out of the experience entirely. For a time, sex became a near-constant battle to keep those thoughts at bay.
Comparisons. On the other hand, knowing what happened isn’t painless either. A few weeks ago, my wife and I made love relatively early in the evening, and it was really good. Afterwards, as we lay there, I felt like, “You know what? I think I could go again!” I made a move and was quickly rebuffed. She wasn’t into doing it another time and gently but firmly made that clear, which is totally understandable and fine … except for the fact that just a couple of weeks earlier, I had found out that she had sex with him at least three times in the span of about ten hours.
So getting turned down now felt like a gut punch. For a moment, it really hurt. I got angry, then upset. She was understanding and very apologetic. She held me, she listened to me, and she offered me a blow job, which I turned down because it wasn’t really about that.
I mean, I get it. I can’t demand that my wife approach every single session of sex with me with the same intensity that I’m sure they had together that night. It hurts to acknowledge the truth in the previous sentence, but I have to live in reality. I know that night between them must have been free and passionate and familiar and fun. It made them feel young again like when they had last been together almost three decades ago. It’s another thing I have to accept and move past:
Affair sex is different from married sex.
But I also have to remember that doesn’t mean it’s better.
And our sex life — all things considered — is actually better than it’s been in many years. Here are some of the ways in which it has improved:
Frequency. My wife and I have had a lot more sex in the past eight months since I found out about her affair. We’ve probably averaged a little under three times a week, which is a significant increase over what had been our usual routine of two or three times a month. I just feel more drawn to her physically. I want to be as close to her as possible, and she seems to also want that more now than she has in a long time.
Better sex for both of us. Honestly, from my perspective, there was a significant problem with sex with my wife, before her affair. This is probably the reverse of how it usually happens, but she was actually getting all the sexual attention and gratification before, not me. Sex between us had become all about getting her off. She has always been very orgasmic and usually comes multiple times, but I felt pressure to do everything just right, so she could have all the pleasure possible. There was little to no attention given to my pleasure, and then only when I specifically asked her to do something. She wasn’t interested in my needs, and it was obvious.
Now, we’re both being open and honest about our sexual needs and desires, and we’re both trying to fulfill those things for one another. We’re trying to make sure sex is a positive force in our relationship, something that solidifies our bond. We want one another, and only one another, from here on out.
Stronger connection. This is the biggest difference, and it doesn’t come from trying to change anything we do in the bedroom. It comes naturally, from the things we now do in our daily lives. We tell each other “I love you,” many times a day, and not just in that reflexive walking-out-the-door-for-a-dentist-appointment way. When we say it, we feel it. We mean it.
We leave notes on one another’s mirrors. We talk all the time, about serious things as well as current events, podcasts or whatever. We walk together, we find things to do together, we truly enjoy one another’s company. When we get in bed, that connection is already there.
Before her affair, I feel like that connection was something I was searching for. I knew it was gone, and sometimes I tried to use sex to find it again, but I was approaching the problem from the wrong direction. I should have been doing my part to cultivate the connection in our daily lives. I should have asked my wife to do the same. We have a lot of “should haves” from our pre-affair relationship, but all we can do now is make sure we avoid those things going forward. Communication is the key to that.
I know this improvement in our sex life together will be difficult to maintain. Things feel fresh and new again now, in a way they haven’t felt between us in a long time. Eventually, it will become routine again, and we’ll need to make sure this part of our lives remains satisfying and fulfilling to both of us. It will be a challenge at times, but I know we’re up to the task, and we’ll figure it out together.
