Revenge can drive affairs. When you hear the term “Revenge Affair”, you may think of an affair done as payback for a previous affair. When this happens, it is akin to two children who shouldn’t play with fire tossing matches back and forth to each other while gasoline cans are nearby. The two children are so focused on trying to ‘burn’ the other one, they are oblivious to the threat of the matches burning each other, much less the gasoline.
They do not consider how fast gasoline burns of what to do if they or their spouse gets a serious burn from the episode. The two continue their strange dance of sending matches flying through the air toward each other. Their dance is partly driven by defiance and partly by risk taking.
There is another kind of ‘revenge affair’. There are some cheaters who engage in an affair for revenge for what their spouse did or did not do. It does not have to be in reaction to an affair. It may be that they had to work late, or had to go out of town without them or even invited their mother-in-law over without consulting the other. With this variation of revenge affair, any excuse will do.
The cheater in such cases wants to have an affair and is just looking for an excuse to ‘carry out their intentions’. Never mind all the talk about how they are an adult and deserve to be trusted, emotionally they are behaving like a spoiled brat who is not getting their way.
In this case, rather than speaking up or risking a confrontation, they choose to have an affair. Whether as a distraction or as punishment, the affair is being used as a tool. In their mind, they deserve something and have been denied it. Somehow the affair balances the relationship back to where ‘the score is even’.
Couples in the midst of such revenge affairs often operate as if a giant scoreboard is in operation within their marriage. Each action or reaction represents points on the board.The husband and wife are competing against each other rather than working with each other. The marriage becomes a competitive contest where those playing are determined to win. What they do not realize is that each point represents pain being inflicted in their spouse’s life. The dynamic is not one between equals, but a struggle for dominance and to see who has control.
The couple’s also do not realize that each spouse has their own way of exercising control in the marriage. One may control the money, but the other controls sex or the emotional thermostat of their home. Each of them has ways of seizing power. What I can tell you is that the relationship between control and love is inverse. The more the control the less love. When control games are being used to motivate, there is little or no love being shown to each other.
Breaking the control games involved in revenge affairs requires teamwork. This is why in my approach to affair recovery (as used in the Affair Recovery Workshop), teamwork comes before figuring out what kind of affair the two of you may be facing or the relationship dynamics. Undoing affair dynamics will take both of you. Attempting the undoing of an affair unilaterally takes a degree of clear thinking that many of you do not have in the early days of affair discovery.
Best Regards,
Jeff Murrah
