Dear DSO: Have You Ever Heard About An Affair SAVING A Marriage?

Okay, if you're a frequent listener of the Dad Starting Over podcast and you find yourself saying, "Yeah, that sounds like me," well, you don't need another podcast episode. What you need is support. The Help for Men Brotherhood is where men go when they're done pretending that they got it all handled. You know, your dead bedrooms, your divorce, your loneliness, your rebuilding life. We have private forums, frequent live Zoom meetings, one-on-one coaching, courses, all my books at no additional charge. And yes, we get together in person. Real men and real conversations. So stop doing this alone and join the Help for Men Brotherhood today at help4men.com/join. I look forward to seeing you in the next member meeting. All right, we got another Dear DSO that came in. You can submit your own question at dadstartingover.com/dear-dso. DSO. And today's submission comes from John. The subject line is, "An affair can save a marriage?" Interesting. And his message is, "Hi DSO." Well, hi John. "I love your stuff. Have you ever heard from a guy that an affair can actually save a marriage? My story is that my wife and I had a dead bedroom for about 2 years." After our son was born, he says, she checked out completely and didn't want anything to do with me unless it had to do with the kid. I had many talks with her, suggested counseling, books, but nothing could get through to her. I started seeing a woman that I work with. Uh-oh. We had lunch, started texting every day, and then ended up having sex. We've been seeing each other off and on for about 5 months. We both are married and have no desire to leave our marriages. We've both been good about keeping things just physical between us. I've spent way less time chasing my wife, and I have given her the space that she says she needs. It seems that now she is more pleasant. She likes the distance and actually initiated sex with me several times in the past month. She hasn't done anything like that in years. I can't remember the last time that she initiated, actually. I would say that my behavior towards her has been far more aloof, distant, and non-caring. I worried that this may set off alarms and cause my wife to start asking questions and snoop on me, but instead she seems happier than ever. And for now, it seems like this is a completely sustainable relationship we have. I have my girlfriend on the side and she has the distance that she wants. She doesn't question anything and I no longer feel like I have to win her over. Instead, she comes to me. Is this completely weird? Have you heard anything like this before? Man, this is a good one. This just has like all kinds of cool, interesting stuff in one message. So thank you for sending it, John. Um, have I heard something similar to this before? Yes. Not often from the guys that I speak to, but from the relationship sphere talk in general, this is not an unheard of thing. There is an author by the name of Esther Perel who wrote a book that was very, very popular, has sold bazillions of copies, and it's called Mating in Captivity. And it talks in part about this scenario. To encapsulate this much as possible, this is tough. This is a real multifaceted thing we're talking about here. This is kind of complicated. Relationships are complicated stuff. But in this particular scenario, what we're seeing here is, um, an illustration of the fact that it's really, really difficult to put all your eggs in one basket, in one human, as far as the relationship is concerned. Modern-day marriage, the template for modern-day marriage, is one of they got to be my best friend in the whole world, they got to be my lover, my provider, that doesn't necessarily mean monetary, it could be providing, you know, comfort, security. I need to know that my wife's gonna be there, she needs to know that I'm going to be there. What if one of us gets sick? We need to help, you know, care for each other, so the caregiver. It's a lot of jobs all into one human being. And we expect that one human being to do anything and everything. And they need to be wired up here in a way that they're able to juggle all of that successfully and continue on doing all of those things from now until the day we die. And when somebody fails at that, we're not happy campers. Well, it could be argued that your wife has kind of failed in one regard, and that is in the lover category. Not unheard of. As you may or may not know from listening to my stuff or watching videos or reading my material, when I ask men who are in bad relationship situations, when did the wheels fall off the relationship, the number one answer I get, by a long shot is when the kids came into the picture. As I often say, kids are kind of a crapshoot. You don't know what's gonna happen after the fact. It could change that dynamic between you and your spouse completely. All the way, you know, from just the bedroom activity goes from 5 days a week to once a month kind of thing. To a lot of men, that's a pretty glaringly bad thing. All the way to the super extreme of, you know, the woman suffers from extreme postpartum depression, has to be hospitalized. All kinds of fun stuff. In your case, it sounds like her libido just completely dried up post childbirth, and you went without physical intimacy, if I'm reading this correctly, for 2 years after your boy was born. She just checked out completely. Now, why she checked out is the question. Her anxieties, resentment towards you, who knows? I mean, it could be a myriad of different reasons, but Regardless, um, you two disconnected that way, and you, uh, to your credit, tried a lot of different things to bring you guys together, to bridge the gap— counseling, uh, books, sit-down talks with her. And it sounds like she was very resistant to all of that. Um, you are exhibiting— this is— I'm just getting this from several paragraphs of a message, so I don't know for a fact, and I'm no psychologist, uh, but it sounds like you are being Mr. Anxious attachment guy, or at least exhibiting some characteristics of it, you know, chasing after her, um, you know, let's talk about this, let's read this book, let's go to this counselor. And she's exhibiting very kind of avoidant tendencies, which is get away from me, which is further fleshed out by the fact that when you went off and said, well, the job of my lover, I see why if you don't want that job, well, I'm going to give that job to this person over here. And your wife's reaction was, not surprisingly, oh shoot, because I really didn't want that job anyway. Um, takes the pressure off, and it— that allows you, mister, to crank the anxiety down, or the anxious attachment traits down, to the point where I'm much more comfortable being around you now. You're not always talking about this stuff. You're not asking me to read books or podcasts, and you're not asking me to go to counseling. You're just existing. And that's kind of what I've been wanting for years and years now, is just for you just to calm the eff down and exist. Seems kind of cold, but that's what she wanted, and now she's got it. And you're watching her kind of open up. She's more comfortable, and she's coming to you. Interesting. So have you tapped into a relationship dynamic, is the question, which is sustainable long term? There are people out there in the world that live this out and they live this out openly. In other words, wife knows about girlfriend or girlfriends, plural. Husband knows about lovers on the side. That's what they call open relationships. And some people such as swingers and that world, they do it openly with each other. There's just a whole bunch of different ways and flavors and iterations of this relationship love game out there. It's not just— strict monogamy ain't just it, as I've learned over the years of talking to a lot of different people. There's a lot of different ways to skin a cat, so to speak. And your version of that is lover on the side, I presume a secret. The wife doesn't know about it. And that seems to improve things all around. Is this long-term sustainable? You're playing with fire and I think you know it. And the whole, hey, we can keep this physical, me and other fellow married woman, we can keep this a secret, number one, that's tough. And number two, keep it just physical, good luck, dude. Somebody's gonna quote unquote catch feelings. And then all hell's gonna break loose because she is going to say, I've dumped my husband and I want to be your woman from now on, just you and me. You dump that wife over there too. And you're like, oh shit, this isn't what I wanted. My advice is always to be open and honest. Put it out there on the table. Wife, you and I both know we've had issues for a while. You know I've been pestering you, and you know that you've been resistant to all of my pestering over the year. I've been chasing after you and counseling and books and all this other stuff, and I think you may have noticed that I've backed off. And it's helped out quite a bit. Well, I'm going to be honest with you, wife. I'll tell you why I backed off. Lay it all out there. What's the worst that could happen? Well, I understand it could get pretty bad. I've heard those stories. Guy loses his 401k, pays a lot of money every month because of divorce. Uh, wife says, I don't want anything to do with you anymore, get the hell away from me. His reputation is lost amongst his social group because now he's the cheater. In today's modern society, especially in the West, people don't really stop and think and say, why is it he or she stepped out? A lot of them just say, you stepped out and you're a dirtbag and you deserve everything bad that ever comes to you. They don't stop and ask the guy or gal, were you in a dead bedroom relationship? Were you abused? Were you, you know, all kinds of things. They just, yeah, modern day society says cheating is no bueno. And if you do it, go to hell. Well, as you can see, these things aren't so simple. And again, this is nothing new, this concept. I've talked about in my writings, there was a famous, his title I think was president of France years ago. I think his name was Macron, M-A-C-R-O-N. He famously had a big funeral when he died. People in the US and other countries were just flabbergasted and clutching their pearls when they saw that in the procession where in the crowd of people at his funeral was his wife, and sitting down next to wife was his lover, his girlfriend. And a lot of French people at the time said, well, yeah, that's pretty common. And people in the US and other places were like, holy shit. This is nothing new. If you can make it work, all right, I guess, as long as it's above board and everyone's cool with it. And no boundaries are violated and nobody's going to get hurt. But from what I've seen in these scenarios, good freaking luck. Somebody's probably going to get hurt in some way. So, John, thank you so much for a very interesting Dear DSO submission. Appreciate it a great deal and best of luck to you and stay in touch. I want to hear how this goes.