Question:

How can my husband possibly love me while having an affair? I mean really, he made the conscious choice to have sex with someone else knowing full well the pain it would cause. How can he actually claim to love me and still be able to knowingly have an affair?

I felt exactly this way for many years and I hear this question a lot with those I work with. How can someone say they love you and STILL be able to betray you in such a devastating way? I kept asking my husband, “How can you say you love me when you did this?” He didn’t have an answer and I was in immense pain.

Here is an excerpt from Beyond Affairs:

How can he say his affairs had nothing to do with our relationship? He says it wasn’t personal; that is had nothing to do with me. Well, in my eyes it had everything to do with me. And how can he say it didn’t mean he was dissatisfied with me or our marriage? He says nothing I could have done would have made any difference. Later, when James reflected on his reaction to my efforts during that time, he recalled thinking, “Wow, this is great; I’ve got this terrific wife who’s doing all these wonderful things – and I’ve got my affairs too!” He felt like the luckiest man in the world. He had completely separated his affairs from his life with me.

So, how can people have affairs but still love their spouse? It has a lot to do with rationalization and denial. They TRULY feel that no one will ever know and since no one will ever know, no one is going to get hurt. My husband thought he would just have fun for the summer and then just break it off and I would never know so he wasn’t really hurting me.

They justify the affair to a point in which it’s something they deserve and why shouldn’t they have it anyway, no one will ever find out. To the one having an affair, this seems like a normal way of thinking but to us it’s anything but. We see it, as the betrayed spouse, as a choice they made but to the one having an affair, they don’t see it that way because to them, they aren’t using rational thinking but emotional thinking. So, we are left trying to make sense of something that will never make sense. It’s like “temporary insanity.”

There really isn’t an “exact time” when they decided to have an affair. Your spouse didn’t wake up one morning and say to themselves, “I think I will have an affair today and even though it’s going to hurt my spouse beyond belief and tear my family apart I still think it’s a great idea.”

The most important thing you can do is to figure out why the affair happened. What was missing in their life that they made such a destructive choice? Once you both know why the affair happened then you can better guard your marriage from any repeat affairs.

I now know that my husband did truly love me during his affair and we know why the affair happened and we work hard on making sure both of us aren’t letting ourselves be vulnerable to an affair in the future.

If you want to recover from your spouse’s affair then you need lots of information, understanding and perspective about affair issues, especially why they happen.