When you discover an affair, you will initially try to ‘make sense’ of what’s going on. You will assess the lover in terms of looks, money, sex appeal, age and accessibility. As you start to connect the dots, there are times the affair will not make sense.
What to do when the affair is not logical <<– listen to the audio here
Hi, this is Jeff Murrah with Affair Recovery Radio. I’m glad that you’re with me today. In today’s podcast what we’re going to be dealing with is the question of what to do when the affair is not logical.
At this point you’ve discovered an affair. And when you discover the affair, initially you start trying to make sense out of what’s going on. There’s a lot of information out there, a lot of things going on, and your head’s probably swimming, trying to say what is going on, what’s happening here.
As part of that making sense out of things, you’re going to find yourself assessing the lover in terms of their looks, how much money they have, what kind of sex appeal they have, what their age is, what their accessibility is. This is part of the assessment process, and in assessing you’re sizing up to find out what the nature of the threat is. Is this a sexual thing, is this an attractiveness thing, is this just an availability thing. It could be a number of things going on there.
But after assessing the lover in terms of the threat, you may start making comparisons of the lover to yourself. As you start connecting the dots you may find, at times, things don’t make sense. It may start to occur to you, this affair is illogical. It does not make sense for the cheater to have an affair with this person. That’s the kind of situation we’re going to be talking about today, when it doesn’t make sense. When there is no logic behind it.
The solution in those cases is going to be learn how to make sense out of what you do know. Because there are a few pieces that you are aware of and you’re going to need to try to start making sense out of those.
The first thing to do, number one, look for patterns. When I say look for patterns, instead of trying to force the situation into the kind of sense that’s in your head or your understanding, you have to see what the pattern is right in front of you. Even though it doesn’t make sense to you there may be a logic to it, and that’s what you want to look for. What are the patterns there.
Was it just that this was somebody who was available at the same time every day, or things such as that. There will be patterns, and you want to look for the patterns. Maybe patterns in when your spouse and them get together. It may be patterns in terms of they grew up in the same neighborhood, they may have gone to the same school, may have worked at the same place. There’s going to be a pattern.
Number two, when it’s not logical it’s emotional. What I mean by that, your head and your heart are on two separate wavelengths. Many times with affairs, there’s affairs that get started in a person’s head with a lot of fantasies, and there’s a logic to it. And then in other cases there’s an emotional component. And the emotions are not always logical.
Because when you look at the lover and say I wouldn’t have an affair with that person, that doesn’t make any sense, they’re overweight, unattractive, they stink. Whatever it is, if it is not something that’s logical then you can just about rest assured there’s emotions in play. And probably very strong emotions.
When it’s not logical, it’s emotional. Because those are your two choices. If it doesn’t fit the one box it must be the other one.
Number three, you need to avoid using the why question. I know in the days after you find out about the affair, one of the favorite questions, why this, why that, why why why? The why is going to do nothing more than keep you stuck.
And if you hit the cheater with a bunch of the why questions, first of all, the cheater may not know the answer. Because the cheater, a lot of times, is just reacting. They’re not thinking through their choices. Yet they are making choices. They may not be fully aware of the choices, fully thinking through what they’re doing, and so by pressing them for an answer you’re going to frustrate them, you’re going to frustrate yourself. Because they may not know the why at this point.
Another thing about the why, why questions tend to come across like you are accusing and turning in a courtroom situation. “Why did you do this”, “why did you do that”. This creates an adversarial situation.
The attorneys, use why questions because they are purposely out to create that adversarial position. When you’re trying to get answers from your spouse you’re not wanting to play the adversarial card.
You want them to cooperate with you, not to conflict with you, not to compete with you. The adversarial position creates a competition type of scenario where it’s adversarial.
So you want to avoid using why questions with your spouse.
In terms of understanding all the reasons behind the affair, you may have to wait until the affair is over before you fully understand the why. And the cheater may have to also. I have seen many cases where the cheater was not real clear on answers to the why questions at the time, and it took them some soul-searching, several months after the affair was over, before the light went off and they realized oh, that’s why I did what I did.
Because they didn’t know it. Or, in some cases, it didn’t feel safe. If you’ve got some ragey person sitting there going why why why, what’s the likelihood you’re going to open up and answer questions of that person? Because you know that if you answer the first question it’s not going to be good enough for them, they’re going to want more.
Let’s say that you answer two or three of those questions, and they still come at you. Like a machine gun, why why why why why. It’s never enough. It’s a very intimidating question, it’s a very intimidating situation.
I’ve gone ahead and gone over some things that you can do when the affair situation does not make sense or it’s not logical. The general response was learn how to make sense out of what you know. And the specifics were to look for patterns. And then I gave you the guideline in number two when it’s not logical it’s emotional. And number three, to avoid using the why questions.
Because I know the why question also tries to force them into a logical format, and sometimes it’s not going to fit right away.
These are things that you can start doing when the affair does not make sense. When it is not logical. I encourage you to go ahead and put these things into place. The sooner you put them in place and make those changes, the sooner you can start turning things around.
I appreciate you tuning in. I hope that you enjoyed it. Feel free to leave some positive feedback, either at the iTunes site or on my blog at Survive Your Partner’s Affair. If you have any requests or questions feel free to leave them there. I’ll be glad to get back to you. If it’s appropriate I may even go ahead and do a future podcast on it. Because there’s many many topics, and many many issues related to affairs that you are interested in, and I encourage you to go ahead and find the answers out to those things.
Until next time, this is Jeff Murrah with Affair Recovery Radio. Thank you for tuning in.
