Ralph Brewer responds to a viewer whose wife had an affair eight years ago and he still can't move past it. After one therapy session, they never addressed it again. Brewer says affairs create a sexual allure that regular intimacy can't match, and advises real conversation, proper therapy, and deciding if the marriage is worth staying in.
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Okay, we got a new entry on the Dear DSO form online at dadstartingover.com/dear-dso. If you want to, you can submit a question and I will answer it here in video format. And this one today comes from Chunk James. The subject is cheating. Uh oh. My wife cheated 8 years ago, Chunk says. We just brushed it under the rug. Therapist said what you don't know can't hurt you. Now I've lost 100 pounds and I've been working on myself. Well, not so chunky anymore, are you? Um, she is going into menopause and sex is only weekly. It's not so bad, right? Well, here's the catch. Should I accept this knowing that she was with him the affair partner, 8 years ago, 3 to 4 days a week. So Chunk, formerly Chunk James, pretty deep topic here. A lot to go on, or a lot to dig into rather. Your wife cheated 8 years ago and you brushed it under the rug. So you didn't have the big adult sit-down conversation to say, well, What caused that to happen? Where did we fail as a couple? Where's the— what kind of baggage did you bring to the table to cause this, wife? Because that's important to know, because I want to make sure you don't do that again. And I, Mr. Chunk, do I want to continue on with a wife who may or may not be resolving these issues in her head? In other words, I need to know, wife, where you are mentally, where you see us going forward, what caused this in your mind, is this something you see happening again, and am I cool with all the information I'm getting here, what do I want to do? But you didn't do any of that. It was just, eh, forget it. And you went to a therapist and therapist said, eh, forget it. Now there is a school of thought out there that, you know, affairs happen. Human beings are, you know, Not without fault. People sneak off and do things. And some of us are wired to be able to say, "Yeah, it happens. Let's move on together and go through life together. We're partners, and sometimes partners eff up and do things to hurt the other person. But let's talk it through, and maybe we can march on together in life." That happens. But you guys didn't do the big talk. You didn't do anything. You just ignored it. And you can see what's happening now is 8 years later, still resentful. You're still unhappy with what happened there, and you're still holding on to anger, and you are allowing it to color your perspective. You have a wife who's going through menopause, as you know, very natural thing. We all go— or all women, not we men, but all women go through it. And for some, It has detrimental effects on their libido and their overall sense of well-being. Some of them have, you know, health concerns after menopause. Some women report everything's as it was, sometimes even better than what it was before. But for you, you're saying you're only getting physical intimacy once a week, which I think if you were to poll most people would say that's pretty average. For a lot of the guys I talk to, they would say, "Hallelujah, dude, that's awesome," because that's above average for a lot of men. But regardless, what is coloring your perspective right now is the fact that your wife had an affair, you never resolved it, and you found out some details about the affair, it sounds like, to the point where you know that they were intimate with each other 3 to 4 days a week. And you're thinking, if this dude got that, I should be able to get at least that much as her husband. And the old mating game doesn't work that way. There is nothing more titillating, nothing more of a turn-on than an extramarital affair. And more in more general terms, there's nothing more titillating, more of a turn-on than somebody new. You have somebody new and you layer on top of that Secrecy, sneaking around, knowing they shouldn't do it, the forbidden nature of it. And then it becomes like a super duper holy shit thing, and a lot of sex gets done. So to compare that powder keg of erotic energy to you're comfortable, you had an affair, swept it under the rug, blah blah blah, to, to compare the two is not fair. So dude, what you got to ask yourself is Am I cool with this? Because this is not going to just go away. History is not going to rewrite itself and suddenly she's not going to have the affair from 8 years ago and suddenly you're going to be cool with it. Sounds like you're not cool with it. You never addressed it and it's causing you to look at all these little details of every relationship and get pissed off. Maybe it's time you let this one go. I don't know. Or at the very least, sit down with somebody and say, you know how we kind of brushed shit under the rug 8 years ago? Not going to do that anymore. And she may, you know, protest and say, no, I don't want to go there again. There's no need to go there again. There's no need to rehash all that pain again. And it sounds like you need to. So put up the old, you know, boundaries, or put your foot down and say, no, that's what we're going to do. We're going to go talk to somebody about this, and we're not going to just brush it under the rug. We're not going to just leave after one session and say, "Hey, we did that, we're done." Nope. We're going to get to the bottom of this and we're going to figure this out. And I need to because I need to determine whether or not I'm going to stay in this relationship. From where I sit, that's the healthiest, frankly most masculine way of looking at this. Good luck, Junk.
