Your Avoidant Wife Had an Affair (Here’s Why)

Nothing is more confusing to the anxious dude than learning that your seemingly asexual, very avoidant wife had an affair. What the fuck? Such as the guy that wrote into me, we'll call him Bob. He did not leave a name. He says, hi Ralph, I'm familiar with avoidance because my wife is definitely one. I am way more anxious. Let me pause there. We will talk about the whole anxious and avoidant thing for those that are new to all this and you've just found this video. Thank you, by the way. If you could pause and give me a a like and give me a subscribe or a follow or share or however the hell it works wherever you're watching this. I would appreciate it. But he says, uh, we've had a dead bedroom marriage for about 10 years, married for 11 years total. That's not good. The last 2 years have been completely sexless, very little touching of any kind. She has always hated the idea of counseling or any kind of work on us. I finally hit the end of my rope and I filed for divorce. During the blowup of everything, I came to learn that she's been in an affair for at least the last 2 I guess she wanted to be touched and to have sex, just not with me, but with a loser from work. We'll talk about that one here in a bit. It helped me make sense of this because I'm losing my mind. Thankfully, we don't have any kids. Yeah, that's a big load off. She's always been anti-kids from the very beginning. I've heard that one a few times. Okay, Mr. Bob and whoever else may relate to this. First of all, let's start with the whole attachment thing. That's what we're talking about, avoidance and anxious people. The majority of men that come to my material and And you know what, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say the majority of men that take in any kind of self-help relationship-oriented material are what we call anxious guys that have an anxious form of attachment. And what we mean by all this attachment thing, just quick little history lesson. Some expert years ago by the name of John Bowlby, he came up with the idea that people in our youth, human beings when are in our youth and our childhood, and how we attach to our parents has a a great deal of influence on how we develop emotionally over the years until we become an adult. And it determines how we attach to our romantic partners. The more you learn about it, it makes a lot of sense. It's just a framework. It's just a template, if you will, to help kind of understand human behavior. And when you're trying to understand these sexless marriages and the anxious guy and he's with this woman who seems very cold and very distant, the whole anxious and avoidant framework really makes a lot of sense. So anxious person is very preoccupied with the relationship. He or she, usually it's a she, by the way, they are very concerned with, am I gonna lose this person? I need a lot of reassurance that you're not gonna leave me, that you still love me, that you still want me, that you still desire me. I need a lot of touching. I need a lot of talking things out. I don't like letting arguments go. We need to resolve them like now. I see my partner is making a funny face that looks like they're upset. I need to fix this now. It must be something that I'm doing wrong. Yes, it's a very codependent way of going through life and relationships. The opposite is the avoidant. That's the person who's basically like, I value my independence over everything else. I really don't want to sit and talk about the relationship all the time. I don't want to sit and cuddle and schmooze, and that's just too much. Most avoidants are men, but in my world, the men's self-help relationship-oriented world, the genders are flipped. That doesn't mean anxious guys are feminine in any way. It's just how they're wired thanks to mom and dad in the childhood. They're very preoccupied and very constantly anxious about the relationship. And what, you know, irony of all ironies, they tend to match up with the avoidant women. How wonderful. So that's what old Bob is seeing here. Now, what Bob and others like him, including women who have reached out to me, women who are very anxious and married to very avoidant men, what some discover is, holy shit, my spouse who wanted nothing to do with me all these years, wouldn't ever hold hands, doesn't like to cuddle, doesn't like to do the old SEX. They've been fooling around with somebody else all this time. It makes no sense. That's what Bob's going through here. He's like, I don't get it. I've been, you know, hungering for this woman for so long, and she's just been like, it's not me, that's not me, get away, get away, get away. And lo and behold, she's been with somebody else. Sounds like for a couple of years now. Bob and others that are going through this, your first inclination, especially as Mr. Anxious Guy, is to say that this dude must have something that I don't have. And what you jump to is saying he must have— I've, you know, it's ridiculous, bear with me here, but often guys will say, must have larger genitalia, he must be richer, he must be maybe a kinder, sweeter man. Maybe I need to do better at that. Maybe he's more of an alpha male type dude. He's tougher, he's more manly. I'm not as masculine as him. And what a lot of guys like Bob here discover after they find out who Mr. Loverboy is, is they say, okay, this makes no sense. What Bob is insinuating here is that his wife's lover was a loser. I mean, it's the— it's a Hollywood trope for a reason. The bored rich housewife has the affair with what? The young hunky pool boy. And you know what, in real life I've seen it again and again. He doesn't have to be that hunky. Do you know what the secret sauce is for Mr. Loverboy? He's not husband. He's not that familiar, calm, predictable, safe person. He's not that person that's always bugging for connection and wants to be intertwined with her life. In fact, Mr. Loverboy probably represents a split from all that. He's independence. He's the old single her. And he's new. As I've said in countless videos before, dude, you can't beat new. We as human beings are wired for new. You may not remember, a lot of you guys watching this, but when you met a girl and fell in love with her, man, all your hormones and good feeling chemicals in your brain were just pumping away. It's Mother Nature's way of saying you need to make babies with this person. And your wife, your adulterous wife, is experiencing that with her lover. Rest assured though, it ain't gonna last long. They may last a while as a couple, hell, maybe even years, but that passionate energy, that resurgence of femininity that you see in your ex-spouse, a lot of guys talk about how she's totally changed her appearance, she's much more sexy in nature, She looks younger, she's acting younger. Trust me, it ain't gonna last very long. Once the old honeymoon phase passes, they'll be left with what? A comfortable, safe, predictable partner. And you know what happens? They live out the rest of their years as a couple in a very boring, sedate relationship that he probably is not very happy with, but she's perfectly fine with it. Or she drops him and she gets another one, and she does it again and again. Those avoidant people, to be more specific, before people start filling up my comments on this video, the Dismissive avoidant. We can break these different attachment styles into little subcategories. People love to categorize, you know, these kind of things. The dismissive avoidant does not do well in traditional long-term monogamy where the understanding is it's you and I, we're going to be each other's best friends and lovers and partners in life and all this other stuff. The avoidant just is rolling their eyes saying, can I just get out of here? And they tend to get out of here over and over and over again unless they get help with it. This isn't like some kind of disease that they can't cure. This is something that the avoidants can get help with, but Here we go with the old irony again. The dismissive is the least likely to raise their hand and say, I need some help with this. And let's say with some luck you actually convince them to go to counseling with you. The chances of them actually listening and doing the homework that the counselor gives to them, not very good. In fact, we have data to show that who is likely to become more secure with themselves— so we have anxious, avoidant, and in the middle, as I put it, I know it's not scientifically accurate, but this is how I put it— is secure, which is what we all want. Who is more likely to swing their pendulum over to secure? The anxious person, simply because because they're very keyed up and ready to put in the work to fix the relationship, and in the process they fix themselves. And then they look over at avoidant person, and avoidant person says— is just yawning. They don't want to do any of this shit. That's what I hear more often than not, which is also why the counselor seems to be, you know, picking on you, Mr. Anxious, so much. It's not because you're a dude, it's because you're the only one that's going to put any work into it. And they realize if they want to get anything rocking and rolling in this relationship, it's probably going to be you that needs to kind of drive the ship. And maybe by virtue of the fact that you're changing and you're becoming more secure, that may allow your avoidant partner to become secure either. They feel like the weight is off their shoulders and they're able to be safer to come towards you. That is if they're one of those people that is not so avoidant. This avoidant and anxious stuff, it comes in degrees. It's, it's on a spectrum. You can be super duper avoidant, or you can just be a person who's relatively secure, but they need some time to themselves. They don't like to be overburdened. They come home, you know, leave dad alone for a while. We all know that kind of dad, right? I had one of those. But what those people don't do is just shut out their loved ones for days, weeks, months, and years. All in an effort to try and regain some semblance of independence. That's very unhealthy, specifically for a relationship and a family. So guys, this is not an unusual thing. I talked about it in another video where men discover that their avoidant woman is using a vibrator, for example, which shows that there's some kind of innate level of sexuality buried in there somewhere, which is very hurtful to Mr. Anxious. This, what Bob went through, is like a super duper version of that. He discovered that she was willing to bring other human beings into the fold, so to speak, and have relationships with them. Very intimate relationships, at least at a very physical level. But recognize this is more of a testimony or evidence of her brokenness and not so much of your fault as her spouse. Your anxiety and your clinginess and your neediness certainly didn't help. But you know what? It was probably just a matter of time before she did what she did, because no matter who she's with, you would become Mr. Secure and Mr. Safe and Mr. Familiar and Mr. Boring. And the avoidant gals, these really hyper-dismissive avoidant gals, they don't tolerate that boring much longer, especially if they have a libido still in there, which a lot of ladies still do, just not within the confines of a traditional monogamous long-term relationship. So guys, how many of you have dealt with this? Reach out to me. You can submit your own story at dearDSO.com, and if it's a good one, I'll create a video out of it and share it with the whole world here. Or you can speak to me one-on-one, once again, at help4men.com. And you know, we do have a support community for guys to talk about this kind of stuff. We talk about this kind of stuff all day in our private forums as well as our live Zoom meetings. We We have over like, by now it's like 1,400 hours of audio content for our members. All my books, including the audiobook format, the coaching. We get together in person for conferences, courses, all kinds of cool stuff. Check it out, help4men.com/join the brotherhood. We would love to have you. All right guys, thank you so very much for watching. I do appreciate it. We'll catch you on the next one.