I am with Thisisfine, as a long time poster and reader here, the love topic always sorts of plays out in the same way and it is a lot of semantics. Actions weigh the most, so I also agree with Gemmy in how a bs could only sanely look at it.
However, I will give my personal view of it, for my own circumstances only. For me, cheating came from a long period of distorting reality to match the feelings I had about myself. I do not feel I was "in love" with my husband when I cheated.
If love is only fond thoughts or feelings, then I would say those feelings existed in me for him. I thought he was a good man, had a lot of great qualities but had come to a place in our marriage that I was starved for emotional connection and I was convinced he could not give that to me and also didn’t feel "in love" with me. I thought he wanted me around because of the services I provided.
Which, in a sense is what people pleasers do- they hustle to be worthy of love and eventually they get tired of the hustle not producing results. The condition of my mind became the conditions of our marriage. Thoughts lie to us. I was unhappy with the life I had created in my mind.
This of course turned out to have nothing to do with my husband, when you go around avoiding conflict and people pleasing, then you starve yourself in the marriage of emotional connection. Because there is no being vulnerable and letting them very deeply into your internal life.
My internal life was actually a mess and when I would say what was bothering me, even if it had nothing to do with him, he was often on a different page and as a result I felt stupid for telling him because I was extremely self protective. I feared rejection, or exposing the ways I wasn’t perfect.
We also had kind of enforced this culture of our love being so easy, how we never fought. He had told me before we got married (he had been married twice before) that he was going to be happy, and that it was important I understood that. He didn’t mean it as a threat, it was more he had stayed in his last marriage even though he had been miserable until she finally pulled the plug. I was more careful about his happiness than my own. Over a period of a couple decades this can become toxic.
Loving someone does come with commitment but commitment isn’t love. Lots of people stay married to people they shouldn’t out of their sense of commitment. The fact he has done this before made it more feasible to me he was staying with me now because it was easier. I cooked his meals and provided sex, took care of the house, laundry, kids, brought in considerable income too. He didn’t need to love me to make this a great arrangement in my mind.
I also was emotionally numb at the time of my affair. I was diagnosed with emotional exhaustion just prior to my affair. I felt dead inside.
The affair broke the numbness, but only because it was firing off the adrenaline and dopamine in my brain this are just caused by the conditions of an affair and usually do not have a ton to do with the quality of the Ap.
After the affair blew up, I went to counseling for couple of months to kind of get myself sorted out. I was a big mess of conflicting thoughts and feelings and was not functioning well at all. Gradually I came to terms with I needed to confess and let the chips fall where they may. I needed everything in v to come out and I had even started to look at where I was going to live because I couldn’t imagine he would want to even consider staying married And truth is I didn’t think I wanted to either.
All this to say- I do not think the worst thing one can say is that they didn’t love their spouse in whatever definition you want to put to it. The worst thing is the betrayal.
I think in a long term relationship you have to keep creating love by doing the actions of love, and of course cheating makes it hard for both the bs and the ws to get back to the business of creating love. Had I just said hey I am not feeling love, other things in the relationship would have stayed in tact, so I think it’s the trust/respect that you lose that causes the most damage. No words or feelings you express fixes that easily.
And I think you have to invest in yourself to have that energy to draw from the well to make that everything work.
So I believe basically, if you do not love yourself- you won’t be investing in the things that make a relationship healthy, for example, you may be like me thinking you have to jump through hoops to the point of exhaustion to get someone to stay with you. As a result you do not lead communication to have your needs met or to share your internal world. Instead you will always be looking at someone else’s weather and what they are doing to show you love and you will always be misidentifying it because it doesn’t look like you believe it should
Those who love themselves believe they are loveable and will be able to see someone else’s day to day weather isn’t always about you. They will be able to make proper bids for connection and be able to hold space for the other person when they are struggling without making it about they just don’t love me."
Those who do not love themselves also can get to a place of dehumaizing themselves by the neglect they hold over their boundaries, needs, and feelings. Someone in that state dehumanizes everyone around them.
So in my experience is that love doesn’t exist in the scope of an affair, not towards their spouse, their ap or themselves. But admitting that is scary. It feels like a verdict of the outcome of the marriage.
Reality is, love can be created at any time, and sustained through a healthier mindset. Saying I didn’t love my husband during that period doesn’t mean I didn’t love him before or that I can’t love him now. I simply went though a period of not being capable of loving him—- and that in itself would have been okay if I had talked to him about it, leaned into plausible solutions instead of disregarding him and leaning into escapism.
This is my personal view—-I believe other combinations are possible depending on the circumstances so I am not trying to debate anyone else’s experience.
What makes you think you get to debate with us on equal footing then, on what love is? I think you should instead demonstrate a lot more humility and self-awareness than you are doing here, OP.
Won’t be fooled- a lot of the things I learned here I did so because I was brave enough to show up and debate things even though I was a ws. And eventually, many of those debates changed my mind and shaped my experiences.
At least she is here posting her own feelings and experiences. I see no reason to shame her for wanting to continue a conversation that was already being had.
[This message edited by hikingout at 8:06 AM, Wednesday, May 13th]
