Playing Around by Linda Wolfe

Author:Linda Wolfe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497680975
Publisher: Open Road Distribution

(6)

Breaking Up:

Deciding to Be Alone

Affairs catapult questions of divorce. This is true despite the fact that most women do not intend to abandon their marriages when they first turn to extramarital sex. Yet as I was to discover, even the briefest of affairs could cause immediate changes in life situations, abrupt separations, dramatic divorces. It was always difficult for me—or for the participants—to tell why this was so; to decide whether an affair pinpointed a marriage’s deficiencies and thereby caused divorce, or whether a deficient marriage already hurtling toward divorce paused inevitably at an affair.

I have arranged the reports I heard from once-adulterous now-divorced women into three chapters. The first two deal with women who themselves decided to end their marriages after some exposure to extramarital sexual experience, either to be on their own, or to realign with their lovers. The third deals with women who wanted to continue their marriages but whose husbands decided on divorce.

Among those who decided to end their marriages were a handful of women whose lovers had been catalysts but not goals. These women had used extramarital sex as an almost ritualistic precursor to divorce, a rite of passage that established that they were sexually or emotionally desirable. Even living for a short time in quarrelsome or neglectful marriages could cause women to doubt their desirability, and although they might contemplate breaking up such marriages, they hesitated, fearing that no man would ever again find them appealing. Winning the affection of lovers, or feeling affectionate once again toward new men when they had felt only anger or resignation toward their husbands, was a sign to such women of their sexual and psychological capacities. It gave them courage to undertake new life situations for themselves—to leave their marriages—but not necessarily to be with their lovers.

These women tended to consider their lovers way stations, but not the end of their emotional or sexual routes. They felt that because they had chosen men while they were still married, they had chosen under duress. When they divorced or separated, they did not long realign with their lovers. Typically, their affairs ended as soon as their marriages did. Dramatically reversing the fairy tale view, lovers lost their glamour overnight and princes turned into frogs. Extramarital sex proved, for such women, to have been a stepping stone, a pathway out of turbulent or difficult marriages.

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