Reactions of Unmarried Affair Partners

The 3rd Party or Lover – If you’re the affair partner, you probably can’t believe the affair is over. You may interpret your married lovers concern for you as a sign that he or she still cares about you. This may give you hope that the affair will continue, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

Some affair partners welcome the crisis of discovery initially, believing that the truth will force their lover to make a choice in their favor. They may have been assured that their lover was planning to leave his or her spouse as soon as the kids were through school or the business was on solid ground. They have dreamed of a life together and had visions of the secure home and family they would make together.

Letting go of a dream is hard. You may have believed that the marriage was unhappy, but you need to realize that someone who could deceive a spouse could also have been deceiving you. You might have been told that the marriage was worse than it really was in order to keep you on the string. Because of society’s tainted image of the affair partner, you may feel you are suffering all alone. Instead of sympathy from your friends, you might be hearing a lot of “I told you this was going to end badly.”

How affair partners react to the revelation of the affair depends on many factors: what they hoped for, their level of commitment, and how their lover handled the crisis. Reactions typically range from devastated to partly sorry and relieved. When the affair is revealed, it can feel like a painful but necessary step toward resolution.

Most often, however, affair partners suffer great unhappiness. They face tremendous uncertainty and have less control over the outcome than anyone else. In addition, they face the probability that the affair and their intimate partner will be lost to them forever. A single woman involved with a married man may have ignored other romantic opportunities in the hope that the affair would turn into marriage. She may not accept the rejection easily because she is left with false hopes and broken promises.

 

[box type=”info”] Studies have found a very low probability that an affair will result in marriage to the affair partner. Annette Lawson found that only 10 percent of involved partners who left the marriage because of infidelity ended up marrying the affair partner. [/box]

Affairs are inherently dangerous, and affair partners who are dropped have the disadvantage of having to heal alone, whereas the betrayed partner and the involved partner can heal together. Individual or group counseling can provide support and insight regarding a tendency to willingly expose oneself to a potentially self-destructive triangle.