Why Happily Married Women Cheat

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Why Happily Married Women Cheat.  I wrote a blog about why women cheat and thought I’d elaborate more on why some happily married women choose to have extra-marital affairs.  Again there are many reasons why people make the choice to step outside their primary relationship.  As a Marriage Counselor, I talk to many women who make that choice.  There are research materials that indicate various reasons for this choice.  I am sharing a couple of reasons that have proven successful in keeping marriages intact.

In the movie, “The Bridges of Madison County,” it depicts an excellent example of how an affair kept a wife from leaving her marriage and family as the Heroine states if she hadn’t had her affair and the experience she gained from it she couldn’t have stayed on that farm she lived on to continue to lovingly meet the needs of her family.

Most women are socialized to marry, have children, manage the household and work outside the home.  Developing their Primary Relationship is an investment in time, energy, and resources.  Often they love their husbands but perhaps feel in some fundamental way that their emotional, sexual, or psychological needs are not being met inside the marriage.  Albeit not typically exercised or accepted in our Society women are getting these needs met elsewhere. Women are unwilling to abandon the marriages and families they have developed as other aspects of the family are functional, satisfying and happy. They were also unwilling to bear the stigma (although slowly changing in the 21st Century) of a publicly open marriage or to go through the effort of negotiating such a complex arrangement.

These women are turning to infidelity not as a way to blow up a marriage, but as a way to remain in it.  As a Marriage Counselor and Affair Recovery Specialist, I work with women who describe infidelity, not as a transgression but a creative or even subversive act, a protest against an institution they have come to experience as suffocating or oppressive.  I have a client who told me she is much nicer to her husband because she has something special going on (her affair) that is just for her.  She states she is more patient with the family, less resentful, and “less bitchy.”
Some may judge these happily married women who cheat as they claim they like their husband enough, (love them, too), have a shared history with them, have children to raise, developed a life together that for the most part works, have acquired financial resources they don’t want to split up and are friends.  But until any of us have walked in their shoes and feel what they feel to make the choices they have made to manage the ramifications of those choices, I wouldn’t throw the first stone.  Albeit affairs are dishonest because they are hidden behaviors from the primary relationship, the rationale is the positive energy from the affair is keeping that primary relationship intact.  What works for some people don’t necessarily work for others.

In my professional and personal opinion, having a dialogue about possibly opening up your marriage is a much better place to start than to unilaterally make a decision to be open or polyamorous.  Betrayals are not good on the receiving end and I do not recommend anyone having an affair without thoughtful consideration about the consequences.

For more information on open marriages and affairs please contact me at (858) 735-1139.

 

 

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