Q & A: Women Who Are More Sexual in Affairs
There are many reasons someone might feel this way.
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Here’s a really interesting question about long term relationships and affairs.
Do you also have a really interesting question, not necessarily about long term relationships or affairs? Are you single and loving it? Do you have a question about Medieval sex manuals? Please send it to me here.
Q: Hi Emily, thank you for both books. What literature can you recommend to explore with clients who find their SE off with their husband (primary attachment) but on with select others (as long as they don't become a long term partner, then they are turned off again)? Thanks!
A: Excellent and important question! Before I refer to some resources for clients, I’d like to suggest a potential reframe: Is it that their accelerator is off with their primary partner? Or is that their brakes are ON? A common situation in a long term relationship is that people build up all the petty frustrations and disappointments of any close and extended partnership, and that stuff hits the brakes. Of course the accumulation of arguments about taking out the trash or picking up the kids will hit the brakes! Here’s the lovely person you chose to be with, but also here’s this irritating, uncooperative jerk who is apparently allergic to doing the laundry.
Compare that to a lovely new partner, who would, given enough time, generate the same accumulation of frustrations and disappointments, but right now? Right now, they are ideal, perfect, without complications. Early in a relationship, we do not yet have evidence that our partner is not in fact everything we hope and dream. At the start of what is now our primary and long-term relationship, we probably felt the same way. Then time passed and our lives became more interdependent and there were times when this person we chose failed to be there for us when we needed them, as therapist and researcher Sue Johnson might put it.
But again, this accumulation is normal, as is the periodic flushing of the accumulation. A professor of counseling from my MA program called it “cleaning out the pipes.” In the process of resolving all that gunk, partners might even find themselves feeling closer than ever, because they went through a hardship together, and there’s no better way to feel deeply connected to someone.
Could it be that a person’s accelerator is activated in the context of a non-committed relationship and not in the context of a committed relationship? Sure, that too! For all kinds of reasons—cultural background, childhood development, individual temperament, or even sexual orientation—a person might find that as soon as they develop a strong emotional connection with someone, their sexual attraction goes away.
Maybe a person grows up in an unstable family of origin and, when they find themselves in a relationship that looks like the home where they grew up—two adults, living together, sharing a bed and the jobs of householding—it activates all the insecure attachment of their childhood and their sexual interest evaporates, to protect them against reinforcing the bond with their partner.
Your client might be interested to read about fraysexuality, a microlabel under the umbrella of asexuality. It’s the opposite of demisexual, which refers to people who only feel sexual attraction once they have developed an emotional connection with the person. (The usual caveat applies: as with all labels, they are used to communicate boundaries and needs, not to police or categorize humans.)
What I’m saying is, it happens a lot, but for so many varied reasons that each person has to get to know their own life history, their personal story around the relationship between commitment and sexual interest.
With that out of the way: resources!
Of course the go-to mainstream author on all things affairs is Esther Perel, maybe especially The State of Affairs.
A great book particularly for consensual non-monogamy is Polysecure by Jessica Fern, which integrates the science of attachment into the real lived experience of consensual non-monogamy.
Let me also put in a word for adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism, particularly the chapters “On Nonmonogamy” and “Being Second.”
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