I’ve questioned monogamy for as long as I can remember.
Not in some rebellious “rules don’t apply to me” kind of way.
More in a quiet way.
A persistent way.
The idea that one person is supposed to be our everything for an entire lifetime has just never fully made sense to me.
Our best friend.
Our emotional support.
Our intellectual equal.
Our source of comfort, stability, novelty, excitement, desire.
And somehow we’re taught that if we seek any part of ourselves outside of that structure—emotionally or physically—then someone has failed.
But affairs are rarely just about sex.
Sometimes they’re about loneliness.
Sometimes longing.
Sometimes avoidance.
Sometimes curiosity.
Sometimes they come from parts of ourselves we stopped listening to a long time ago.
That doesn’t excuse betrayal.
But what does bother me is how quickly conversations around affairs collapse into victim and villain.
One person cheated.
One person got hurt.
End of story.
And while yes—betrayal absolutely causes pain—I also think it’s incredibly rare for relationships to completely implode overnight.
Most disconnection happens slowly.
Quietly.
Over years.
People stop talking honestly.
Stop examining the relationship itself.
Stop asking difficult questions because life becomes busy and routines take over and maintaining the relationship starts replacing actually participating in it.
And honestly, a lot of people are living inside profound emotional disconnection without fully allowing themselves to acknowledge it.
Not because they’re stupid.
Not because they deserve betrayal.
But because cognitive dissonance is powerful.
Because it’s easier to keep functioning than it is to stop and ask:
Are we actually connected anymore?
Are we still consciously choosing each other?
Or are we just continuing because we always have?
That’s the part that unsettles me most.
Not the affair itself.
The years of silence that often came before it.
The unspoken resentment.
The loneliness.
The avoidance.
The performance of “we’re good” while intimacy quietly erodes underneath the surface.
A lot of couples unconsciously outsource responsibility for the vitality of their relationship.
Commitment becomes treated like arrival.
Like once the marriage exists, the relationship will somehow sustain itself automatically.
But relationships are living things.
People evolve.
Desires evolve.
Needs evolve.
Yet so many people stop examining the relationship while simultaneously expecting it to continue fulfilling them indefinitely.
And when betrayal finally happens, it often becomes the first moment everyone is forced to confront what had already been unraveling for a very long time.
Painfully.
Messily.
Sometimes destructively.
But honestly.
And then there’s the question people always ask after an affair:
“If you were unhappy, why didn’t you just leave?”
As if leaving a marriage is some clean, logical decision people arrive at the moment discomfort appears.
As if people only stay because they’re fulfilled.
The reality is far messier than that.
People stay for all kinds of reasons.
Love.
Fear.
Comfort.
History.
Finances.
Children.
Identity.
Guilt.
Hope.
The life they built together.
The version of themselves attached to that life.
And sometimes people stay simply because they haven’t fully admitted the truth to themselves yet.
I know for me, the affairs came long before I had the language for what was actually happening internally.
I knew something felt off.
I knew parts of me felt disconnected, restless, unfulfilled.
But I couldn’t yet separate whether that discomfort was about my marriage, myself, society’s expectations, fear, intimacy, freedom, or some tangled combination of all of it.
People assume affairs happen after clarity.
In my experience, they often happen in the middle of confusion.
In the middle of avoidance.
In the middle of trying to maintain a life that no longer fully fits while simultaneously being terrified of what happens if you finally admit that out loud.
Part of why I feel so compelled to talk about this openly is because I’ve sat on both sides of it.
I’ve been the person who betrayed trust.
And I’ve also been the person left trying to make sense of betrayal inside a relationship.
And honestly?
The deeper truths underneath both experiences felt far more similar than different.
Disconnection.
Silence.
Avoidance.
Unspoken needs.
The slow erosion that happens when people stop being fully honest—with themselves and with each other.
Which is why these conversations feel important to me.
Not to justify affairs.
Not to minimize the pain they cause.
And certainly not to place blame neatly at the feet of one person while absolving the other.
But to open the door to a more honest conversation about relationships themselves.
About what happens when people stop examining them.
Stop nurturing them.
Stop questioning whether the connection still feels alive.
Because by the time betrayal becomes visible, something underneath it has often been asking for attention for a very long time.
-A
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