I read that most affairs are about validation and ego. that most affairs would not happen if we were all secure little entities, capable of finding validation through other means, perhaps healthier means, and when I say healthier I say this only because when I speak of affairs here, I am speaking not of those who are single and out having multiple relationships as single people do and have a right to, but to those who are married and have made vows, depending on religion and custom, to perhaps forsake all others as they say, to put all the eggs here, to promise yourself to one man, one woman and to really mean it. to say "until death do us part" and know that when you walk down that aisle, when you say the words I will or I do, that this is the last person you will ever bed down with. It's a scary business to some, but to others, it comes naturally. There are no questions asked, it is a simple equation. I forsake all others not because I believe monogamy is perhaps natural or not, depending on species, though maybe it is, but because I know that I have had enough experience to know that what I have found with you (whomever that may be, dear reader) and that I do not a. wish to hurt you, b. wish to jeopardize this good thing, and c. perhaps cheapen myself and wake up one day wondering who the hell I am and why did I sell out so cheap.

I speak and write from experience, and I speak now from what I have read and researched for years in an effort to understand why it is that people have affairs. There are many types of affairs, as we well know. There is the much debated "cyber affair" that some people believe does not qualify, since no actual physical contact is made and it's all words over a phone or DSL line, so it doesn't count. There's the one-night stand, which we will hear "meant nothing", which is likely true for the person who did the doing and certainly not true for the spouse on the receiving or discovering end of the one-night stand because I can pretty much guarantee you that to that person, it will mean everything. There is the several months long fling, the long-term, many years affair, there is the emotional affair which is never physically consummated yet is so emotionally intense that the bond with the so-called lover and the emotional relationship not only drains the marriage, but is betrayal of the highest order because intimacy is shared with someone other than to whom is was promised.

Someone once told me that it was possible to have an affair or an emotional affair or a crush or flirtation, whatever you want to call it, and still "love your wife/husband" equally. That this flirtation does not take anything away from the primary relationship because there is not, this person said, "a limited supply of love." Likewise, x. said that it was possible to love two women, it was possible to find two completely different women equally attractive and want them equally, not one more than the other. To X. it seemed absurd that in life, one is asked to choose. X. makes a valid point in some ways. After all, why should it be that we can like say freesia and roses but we can't like Laura and Annie equally. No one would ask us to choose between our love of freesia and roses, so why can't x. equally want or love Laura and Annie. And what if X. is also married. Why should X.'s affair with say Laura take anything away from his marriage to Y.? He still loves Y., nothing has changed on that front. He may even love Y. more than he loves Laura, so why should Y, or why should any spouse for that matter, be so hurt, so devastated (a therapist and an expert in marriage counseling told me that the word he hears most often from people on the receiving end of an affair is "devastation." Their whole world comes down around them and everything that they believed to be true is now in question. Why this is makes perfect sense to me. If I believe my husband loves me, if I believe my husband meant his vows with his whole heart as he said, if I believed my husband said "only you" over and over and more, if I offered my husband the opportunity to have affairs because I would rather he do that than do anything behind my back and then he goes and does it anyway, why should that make me question literally everything in my life?