Comparison and love chemicals can make us dumb.
I had an emotional affair on my first husband. I’d already filed for divorce, but we were in limbo, playing with whether we’d try to make it work or not. When I developed an intense crush on someone else, it was a mere eight days before our separation became official.
I then dated my affair partner for only a few months and that ended too.
Affairs seem fated to always end, and there’s a lot of science to potentially back why.
The stats aren’t promising for affair relationships.
They’re very unlikely to last and if they do result in marriage, they’re highly likely to end in divorce. Dr. Jan Halper found that only 3% of the men she studied went on to marry their affair partner, and the rate of divorce among these marriages was 75%.
I knew these stats shortly after I left my first husband and embarked on dating my affair partner. I’d looked them up, in some attempt of mine to find comfort in numbers and data and research.
But that’s not what I got. I got the equivalent of a cold drink splashed on my face.
But why is that? I thought at the time. Why do they so rarely last?
I would come to my own conclusion about that much later.
After my relationship with my affair partner ended, I realized I chose him for all of the reasons he was not like my then husband. I was attracted to the ways in which he was my then husband’s antithesis: an intellectual instead of a jock, an extrovert instead of an introvert.
I thought these differences mattered in some way that felt important, that these differences might equal a successful relationship when clearly my marriage hadn’t been.
Comparison, Theodore Roosevelt said, is a “thief of joy,” but it’s also a thief of reality.
While I was focusing on these comparisons, I was ignoring or denying certain aspects of my affair partner. If I hadn’t been so intent on the ways in which he was different, I may have realized much sooner that we just weren’t…compatible.
I was also a victim to my own chemicals.
Dr. Helen Fisher breaks down romantic love into desire, attraction, and attachment.
Desire and attraction, of course, were at play. The physical aspect of my marriage had been disappointing for quite some time, and my affair partner seemed an easy fix for that, which heightened both my estrogen and testosterone levels. Dopamine, or our brain’s reward system, which arises out of attraction, made me feel exhilarated and giddy.
Couple that with the often secretive nature of affairs and you’ve got a dizzying cocktail of excitement.
I also had the built-in comparison. My marriage was painful, full of tension and blow-out fights, yet the affair partner aroused in me the complete opposite.
These chemicals, as you can probably guess, are also at fault for shutting off the prefrontal cortex of our brains. This is where our rational behavior is housed. In short, our ability to self-reflect, be aware, and make choices based on logic is turned off.
This means too that it’s very likely once we become “rational” again, as in once the initial desire and attraction have waned, we realize the sometimes not-too-pretty reality of the affair and our affair partner.
It wasn’t rational for me to be in even just an emotional relationship with this person, especially while I was still married. Everyone knows that cheating is bad and messy. It’s always better to leave the relationship first. It wasn’t even rational for me to be with this person when I became officially separated from my then husband, as I learned later.
Those “love” chemicals I mentioned earlier can make us overly forgiving or even blind. It can mean we’ll overlook any manner of defects, physically or personally, to our own detriment.
But once those love chemicals fade, our critical thinking and self-awareness skills return.
My affair partner, for all intents and purposes, wasn’t a good match for me. We had different long-term goals and plans. He was significantly older than me and didn’t want more children while I did. Yes, he was an intellectual, but what I had seen as confidence was actually arrogance. His cutesy fudgings of the truth were actually traits of a compulsive liar, and his “strong love” for me was actually just jealousy and possessiveness.
I’d left my ex-husband by then, so comparison wasn’t something I could rely on much anymore, and the relationship ended.
While this wasn’t the case for me, for some of us once we leave our partner for the affair partner, the relationship is no longer a delicious “secret.” We’re left with the mundane realities of a real relationship, which we may have been trying to avoid to begin with.
So what to do with this?
Well, don’t have an affair first. They’re messy. We all know that. If you’re unhappy in your relationship, try to fix it. If you can’t, leave it, and then consider dating, ideally after you’ve done some work to figure out why that relationship failed to begin with.
But if you do have one, be aware. Be aware that you may not be functioning at your most logical or rational, that the relationship may be doomed from the beginning, and that you may eventually have to deal with more than you could ever have expected or bargained for. If your situation is anything like mine, it’ll be okay. Eventually.