Eddie417 said:
A 3 year fling in the context of a 20 year marriage is not a pattern. And 3 years of wild sex handed to me on a platter by a very hot more than a decade younger than myself isn't something I'm going to try and justify to a group of healthy heterosexual men. The fact that she was my best friend (albeit a friendship predicated on an unrealistic situation) just colored things.
I'm going to miss it like hell but trust me, it's done.
Ahhhh,..NOW we're getting somewhere. DJ Math time again gentlemen. 39 years old minus 20 years of marriage breaks down to,...wait for it,..a wedding at the tender age of 19. And we're all frenetically typing away at our keyboards self-righteously wondering how a guy who loves his wife could be tempted into a 3 year affair with a hot, sexually available 29 y.o.?
azanon said:
You need a reason? How about you like having sex with many different women. You don't just suddenly not like that because you got married! You resist that desire each and every day because you think she's worth it!
I couldn't have stated it better myself.
Do you think maybe if someone had dissueded EDDIE from marrying his GF a year out of high school he'd have had more opportunity to realistically experience sex with a variety of women through his 20s? Here's the reason for his infidelity - he limited himself to one woman for 17 years (all through his 20s and the better part of his 30s) until 3 years ago (at 36) he's confronted with a real opportunity to experience sex with a younger, hotter, more sexually available woman. Do you think if someone had told him not to even consider monogamy until 30, he listened, and had experienced spinning plates for a good portion of his 20s he'd have been less inclined to 'cheat'?
Now, I have no doubt that EDDIE will respond by extolling the virtues of his wife and how much her loves her, but love isn't the issue here. For all the love, respect, and worth his wife has meritted over 20 years, it was still not enough conviction to trump his sense of missing out on (up to then)17 years of maturing as an adult man independent of a woman. And even 3 years after this (or within this time) he's still considering reestablishing sexual contact with his mistress.
I'm more than likely missing a lot of detail in EDDIEs personal conditions. We have a tendency to pass over less than flattering truths about ourselves in these situations, however his story follows a VERY common pattern in society today. Guys who've never been married for as long or in an LTR will only naturally cry foul and leap to their soap boxes to call ED a scoundrel and self-righteously social-proof themselves as being incorruptable in such a way, but they miss the point. I have no doubt that ED, at 19, felt exactly the same way, and perhaps at many other stages of life too after hearing about a man in a similar situation.
I'm not excusing the behavior. When you make a promise, you ought to keep it in spite of circumstance - it just makes you a liar when you renege on it - yet here we are. What I'm focusing on is the reasons leading up to the behavior, the unmet desire that prompts it and the considerations for it after the fact. I made the mistake of assuming EDs marriage was sexless, but that wasn't it. According to the OP she's too "reserved", but this may not always have been the case over 20 years. What we do know is that after 17 of those 20 years of, I'll assume again, faithful fidelity and banging the only woman he's ever been with, ED was presented with the opportunity to bang a hot, younger woman. Comparitively speaking she could be mediocre in bed and still sexually out-perform his wife based on no other criteria than
she's somenone different.
