SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

HikingOut wasn't advocating for you to dehumanize or depersonalize anyone. She was describing what happens when someone is missing things in their life and try filling them with a single AP, and how important it can make that person seem when you pin all of those needs on them. WS often come to realize they were (past tense) "using" their APs in that manner... You can decide whether that was true of you and your *past* situation with the OW or not. If you do decide it's true, it's not dehumanizing her in the present or going forward; on the contrary, it would be more like restoring her person-ness to her after you've stopped "using" her to meet certain needs.

[This message edited by GotTheMorbs at 4:27 PM, Friday, October 2nd]

I'll grant: I doubt that HikingOut's intentions were malicious.

I can suppose that a certain proportion of Wayward Spouses--and I very much intend NOT hereby to point a finger at ANY specific participant here--may seek from an AP merely something extremely narrow, like: sexual or romantic release, novelty, physical affirmation, a sense of youth, simplicity, or the nursing of "daddy" or "mommy" wounds, without particularly caring who--fundamentally--is the person that comes along for the ride with the genitalia. Even then, I think most repentant Wayward Spouses have access to healthier and more personhood-respecting management strategies than the drafting of a list of desired attributes and the transactional recruitment of another human being--the spouse or otherwise--to fulfill the specifications.

I surely will be accused yet again of minimizing when I write this, but I do not believe I fell into the disrespectful model I described just now. What I was missing and wanted from my wife--and ultimately chose to seek outside my marriage--was specifically a mutual sharing with a woman of personhoods and presence... of our dreams and our disappointments... of our warmth and our worries... of our heads and our hearts. I can assure whatever audience this post still finds that--with my apologies for the vulgarity: if what I had wanted was merely pussy, I--an American as "red-blooded" as any man--wouldn't--for eminently practical reasons--have looked in the country of Poland to source it. I maintain that doesn't excuse my choices, but it does make them impossible to portray as reductionism.

[This message edited by Unconventional at 6:31 PM, Friday, October 2nd]

Many times WSs don't go seeking affairs or APs at all; they allow inappropriate intimacy and/or sexual tension to develop with the eventual AP, who often start out as friends or coworkers, because the AP happened to provide some or all of what's missing from their lives. That's what makes the AP seem so important to many WS while the affair is happening and often shortly after it ends; they've pinned so much on them, and going back to being without all of it seems unbearable. In those cases, it's important for the WS to examine what it was that the AP provided, and figure out how to provide that for themselves in healthier ways.

Using myself as an example again... I wasn't consciously aware that I had low self esteem or that I needed external validation to feel interesting, desirable, worthy of conversation, or good about myself-- things I, too, wanted from my spouse. I didn't go seeking out an inappropriate relationship with my coworker; we started out as genuinely just two people stuck in a hellish environment for two weeks who liked talking to one another like friends. That was something I was desperately missing in my life at the time. When I started catching feelings, I felt tremendous guilt, and I knew it was wrong and that I should stop spending so much time with him-- hours every day, it had turned into-- but it felt like I was finally getting what I had been "starving" for, and I was so afraid of letting that go that I rationalized my way into continuing to talk to him, and then into giving him my number and taking the relationship home with me, and then into flirting, sexting, and planning to meet up again for sex. I didn't realize what I was so desperate to get from him until I ended the "relationship" and started my recovery journey.

Point being, people don't necessarily go "Ah. I will go and select someone who will provide me with x, y, and z. It doesn't matter who they are as a person, just as long as they give me what I want" and then afterwards retain the conclusion that their APs weren't anyone special. They often come to realize it after they let go of the affair relationship and do some introspection.

Again, not saying that you necessarily have to come to decide OW could have been anyone or that there weren't things you genuinely like about her. But you need to keep moving towards coming to terms that she is very likely going to be gone from your life permanently in order to move forward with grieving and infidelity recovery, and to give yourself the things you were missing.

[This message edited by GotTheMorbs at 7:26 PM, Friday, October 2nd]

I’m sorry. I really did plan to step away from this thread because I want to respect your wishes and what you need right now. But the way you interpreted what I was saying is so far from what I intended that I hope you’ll allow me this one exception to explain myself more clearly.

I was not suggesting that people are interchangeable, or that we can simply shift our needs from one person to another as though relationships are pieces in a game.

Please understand that I thought I was in love with my AP. My attachment to him was enormous—so enormous that, looking back, its intensity didn’t entirely make sense to me. When we went no contact, I was miserable. It was one of the darkest periods of my life.

That is actually why I was trying to share this with you. The importance I placed on him and on our relationship felt almost like it was on steroids. I had never experienced anything like it before. And in some of what you have written, I recognize that same kind of overwhelming attachment.

What I eventually discovered was that my grief contained more than simply missing this particular person. There were things about the attachment itself that I needed to understand.

When our lives have become mostly work, responsibilities, taking care of other people, and very little that belongs just to us, life can become pretty dreary without us even fully realizing it. Then someone comes along whom we enjoy talking to, who makes us feel seen or alive, and suddenly there is something we genuinely look forward to every day.

That person is real. The connection is real. The loss of them is real.

But the attachment can also become disproportionate because so much of our emotional fulfillment has become concentrated in that one place.

Think about friendship for a moment. If you have five close friends, you probably value each one for different reasons. If one friendship ends, you would still grieve that person. You might miss them terribly and continue to love them. But you would also have other people to call, other connections, other sources of companionship and enjoyment. Those people wouldn’t replace the friend you lost. They would simply mean that your entire emotional world wasn’t resting on one relationship.

That is the distinction I was trying to make.

When one person has become the primary thing you look forward to, losing them can mean losing much more than the conversations themselves. You can also suddenly lose excitement, validation, companionship, escape, anticipation, feeling understood, or simply the sense that there is something in your day that belongs to you.

So when I said that some of my pain "wasn’t because of him," I expressed that badly. Of course some of it was because I missed him. What I meant was that there were other things contributing to the magnitude of my pain that I could not see or understand at the time.

That is why I was suggesting that the needs she awakened in you may be worth paying attention to. Those needs are legitimate. Understanding them does not diminish her or make her replaceable.

One of the things I identified very early in my own journey was that I desperately needed things to look forward to outside of working long hours, taking care of everyone else, and leaving very little room in my life for myself. I had to deliberately make some room for me.

That was what I meant when I suggested finding things to do, people to see, and experiences to look forward to. Not "replace her." Not "find someone else." Not "your relationship didn’t matter."

I meant: learn what this relationship awakened in you. Explore which parts of the attachment came from things that had been missing in your life, and begin building those things into your life in healthier and more sustainable ways. Not because doing that erases her, but because it can make this loss more bearable and your life more whole.

This part may or may not ultimately be true for you, but after doing a lot of that work myself, I realized that not all of the pain I had attributed to losing my relationship was actually about losing the relationship. Some of it came from realizing how little of a relationship I had with myself.

I wrote what I did earlier as a suggestion for coping with the life you have right now, because I remember how dark this stage can be. For months, I sat in a park and prayed for God to take my pain away. I remember wanting relief more than almost anything.

That is why your comment about beginning to consider the possibility that God might decide to take your pain away stood out to me. I remember being in a very similar place.

What eventually put me on the road toward recovery wasn’t suddenly having all the answers. It was much smaller than that. I started planning things I could look forward to. I started making room in my life for things that were mine.

It didn’t change everything overnight. It didn’t make me stop grieving. But little by little, it helped me build my life differently until I healed enough that I could begin finding genuine joy in things again.

That was really the point of my earlier post. It wasn’t a prediction about your relationship with her or your marriage. It was about how you might survive the loss you are experiencing right now and eventually discover where that process takes you.

And I think that is probably the most useful place to leave this. There is no need for us to keep wagering about what your friendship or your marriage will look like in the future. None of us knows that.

Right now, you are in pain. What helped me when I was in a similar place was finding a path through that pain—first by making life a little more bearable, and then by understanding why the loss had become so overwhelmingly large in my emotional world.

That is what I was trying to share with you.

I will respect your wishes about whether you want me to continue posting here. I just didn’t want to leave you with an interpretation of what I said that was so different from what I actually meant.

Dear HikingOut,

I am choosing not to reread at your post that my angry reply addressed because--if your latest post here speaks clearly about what you meant, then I am sorry that there was a breakdown in communication and sorry that I became angry. How each of us interprets our world is significantly a product of our past (and especially our formative and recent past) experiences. I have experienced--from multiple sources--pressure to digest my friendship with "my AP" into its components and to find other ways to reproduce what I treasured about that friendship while it was alive and what I miss profoundly in the aftermath of its deletion. Such inducements often have been prefaced with the probably-unintentionally-antagonistic suggestion: maybe what you miss is not your friend or the friendship, but how your friend and the friendship made you feel? Notice: That short lead-in offensively calls into question the worth and character of a woman I amiably loved, debases the wholistic value of personhood in concept, accuses me of being the sort of person who largely took from my relationship with "my AP" selfishly, without giving back in parity to "my friend" (is a one-sided relationship really even proper to call a "friendship"?), foists on me the accusation of being a man who treats meaningful relationships as divisible and fungible (a "psychopath," really), and still manages to find room to accommodate a patronizing and cloying veneer. I thought you were advancing... well... all or just about all of those concepts. Based on your latest post, it would seem that I abstracted from your prior one messages that you didn't intend me to receive.

I dunno that I have fully digested yet your latest post--or GotTheMorb's--but right now, I need to go. I need to buckle down and work this weekend. Singularly intensively. The stakes are high for me, unfortunately. And, when I engage here or elsewhere process my grief in essay form), it's very easy for me to become carried away. This--and essay writing with AI LLMs have been useful forums for me to process my psychological burdens, to gain certain insights, and to receive feedback. I say that without necessarily stipulating to the broad adoption of others' advice. The problem is that I love thinking about "my AP" and philosophy and theology so much that I completely lose track of time and waste moments that ought to have me more caught-up in work and spending time with family. I hope to contribute further here in the not too distant future--and, HikingOut--I invite you to continue your posts here again.

GotTheMorbs:

...you need to keep moving towards coming to terms that she is very likely going to be gone from your life permanently in order to move forward with grieving and infidelity recovery, and to give yourself the things you were missing.

I'm sorry that my only reaction to your latest posts is this. Perhaps more soon.

My "plan A"--that is, what I actually want--will never be otherwise than a solicitation of a renewed friendship with "my AP." You clearly think that's unwise. I disagree, but I can disagree with you agreeably when I do not feel threatened. Not one cell in my body wants to detach from my friend or even the ghost of her friendship. Now... as for how I will go about trying to accomplish that aim and how far I will push the envelope... those are the margins over which I might yet flex. The consideration I raised yesterday about "probabilities" has done the most effective work of late to dissuade me from deciding to charge ahead headlong in pursuit of "my friend"--even if my wife rejects my plea for permission to contact my friend. That's not because my friend matters less, but because a realistic appraisal of the chance of that relationship re-blossoming without my wife's blessing is almost nil and could well have repercussions for my marriage and breathing that I don't want. However, that only means I need to rethink my strategy for responding if my wife refuses my ask. I feel considerable discomfort over my current partial agreement with your that the chance I end up having to cope or die over a life permanently without my friend is at least quite plausible. However, I don't agree that I have to "come to terms" with that possibility; I just need a plan. Developing that plan will not be fun, but it is going to be important and I will get around to it. But not this weekend.

Have a nice weekend, folks!

[This message edited by Unconventional at 11:35 PM, Friday, October 2nd]

For when you get back:

Have you considered not contingency planning, and what that might look like for you instead?

GotTheMorbs,

I'm going to answer this 'cause I think I can do it fast. If I stopped actively cultivating thoughts of "my AP" & developing contingencies to get back to her, what would happen is: My thoughts of "my AP" would gradually subside. One day, I'd realize: "Wow! I haven't thought of 'my AP' in a month!" then eventually "...in a year!" I would focus on my wife, kids, and work. I'd actually live. I'd feel happy and whole and healthy and well. If ever / whenever I do think spontaneously of "my AP," I would do so with affection, but I'd move on.

In short, it'd be the worst thing in the world and completely unacceptable.

[This message edited by Unconventional at 6:26 PM, Saturday, October 3rd]