Why do men participate in EAs?

[sidney2718]

Correct. Except sex is not an endgame. It's a continuation of the same game

 

I see it this way: the spectrum is not Intimacy vs. Sex.

its always forms of inimacy. Intimacy in its many forms. One is EA (OR the romance /dating stage without the physical. Huge turn on for some. Less so for others) on the other end is Intimacy through physical connection. It's not just sex. It's intamacy achieved through it. No either or. It's always the same thing. Some arrive at a heightened form of intimacy through sexual connection, others prefer, or feel greater intimacy in emotional connections. Both are meaningful. Men are raised to believe that the sexual is more important.

 

For me the biggest Bull Sht is when a woman says that a man "is only in it for the sex" BY which they mean a kind of wam bam thank you ma'am neanderthal.

 

I don't know how all men are, but i derive most of my pleasure during sex pleasuring my partner. I'm not in it just for me. When I feel enormous intimacy I wish to express that making love. Not just having sex.

 

So true, especially that last paragraph.

 

Men can be different with different women under different conditions. A wham-bam thank you ma'am is sometimes what the woman wants too.

 

But the most satisfying relationships, it seems to me, comes from pleasuring the other person. When both are doing it, it can be volcanic.

[shermanator]

As someone who was in a long-ish term EA before anything close to a PA, I was drawn to the OW because she made me feel good about myself. Without really realizing it, I think I had started to resent my W and the OW was friendly, quick to laugh, etc, etc... provided me a lot of those emotions and laughs that I wasn't getting at home.

 

I didn't even realize that it was an EA until things were kind of far down the road. When the EA started, I might have fantasized about a PA or had visions of intimacy with the OW, but that wasn't why the EA began.

[whichwayisup]

As someone who was in a long-ish term EA before anything close to a PA, I was drawn to the OW because she made me feel good about myself. Without really realizing it, I think I had started to resent my W and the OW was friendly, quick to laugh, etc, etc... provided me a lot of those emotions and laughs that I wasn't getting at home.

 

I didn't even realize that it was an EA until things were kind of far down the road. When the EA started, I might have fantasized about a PA or had visions of intimacy with the OW, but that wasn't why the EA began.

 

Where do things stand in your life now? You should update your thread you started last summer. Hope all is well.

 

Bolded, I think many do this to their spouses, and in the process also re write marital history the more attached they become to the AP.

[fellini]

well I going to say what very few men are willing to admit, and or some have probably never even thought about it.

 

Men get emotionally involved with women all the time, and without embarking on anything. Men are enormously attracted and drawn to woman but will never do more than fantasize sex with them. Men can be emotionally involved with other mens wives without ever crossing a single line. You cannot see this, it all goes on in the head. But it happens all the time.

 

Some men use low level EA's to keep their marriages alive (Esther Perel concept of the "Shadow of the third)

 

Of course everyone here knows men who are virtually in love with unavailable woman, and these woman KNOW IT and feed it without crossing the line. They are not being cruel or CTeasers: they are engaged in mutual -mostly safe- intimacy.

 

How many Hollywood pics have been made about the guy or gal who helps the best friend to hook up with the fantasy only to realize in the end they were meant for each other. The large majority of these real life EAs do not end in a Hollywood romance but rather remain as they are for as long as the two can play the game.These are not full blown affairs in the making. They are intimate connections that do not have to go farther. I imagine some even might do so. And of those that do, sometimes they might both laugh at it and say something to the order of " Well I'm glad I got that off my chest, let's go back to being good friends before we f-ck that up too."

 

Not all EA'S are sordid. Some just are what they are and remain below the radar forever or until they pass through.

 

 

Some men, alternatively - to continue to disagree with your absolute position - if they are given the message a PA is off the table will take that merely as a challenge.

 

I think you confuse, in the latter part of you post, hitting on (schmoozing if you will) with an EA.

 

I can fully hit on another mans wife, and if I did i would agree it is probably with the endgame, although maybe not.

But an EA is not usually about schmoozing another mans wife except to me, until you actually realize, late in the game, you are in an EA and want more.

 

 

 

I'm going to go ahead and be sexist and use absolute terms and say that no man will embark on an EA if a PA is off the table and that a physical encounter(s) is always the endgoal.

 

 

I know people hate that kind of generalizations and that kind of absolutism but it is for a purpose. That purpose is everyone should always assume that if a man is schmoozing up to a married women without his wife or her husband involved, it is never for platonic friendship, never for an EA, but always with having sex as the endgame.

 

 

If you take that assumption and act accordingly in shutting it down, the worst that will happen is that in 0.0000000001% of time, you will be mistaken.

Edited April 1, 2015 by fellini

[Lion Heart]

I'm going to go ahead and be sexist and use absolute terms and say that no man will embark on an EA if a PA is off the table and that a physical encounter(s) is always the endgoal.

 

 

I know people hate that kind of generalizations and that kind of absolutism but it is for a purpose. That purpose is everyone should always assume that if a man is schmoozing up to a married women without his wife or her husband involved, it is never for platonic friendship, never for an EA, but always with having sex as the endgame.

 

 

If you take that assumption and act accordingly in shutting it down, the worst that will happen is that in 0.0000000001% of time, you will be mistaken.

 

oldshirt, thankyou and a curtsey. I completely agree. My experience says so too but in the decades of my life b4 LS, I never knew the term EA. I could be merely polite (my DD says only smile) at another man and they're hitting on you, sometimes saying they only want to be friends but often a full on hit.

I think the % is a little greater than you quote LOL if you count ALL men, as some are 100% homosexual.

 

I'm NOT a man and certainly MOST men I've known would never be as honest as oldshirt but BOY have I listened to his message (and others) who are not afraid to tell it like it is, in earnest, to a thread poster seeking answers.

 

Though I'm educated nonetheless with most concepts presented, it's very hard to believe that a man would even bother starting an EA with a woman he would never in a million years sleep with because the thought of it would make him puke. You wouldn't call neighborly courtesy for your neighbor, who's 95yo, even if you tell her something personal. You would never call that an EA because the "affair" component is just not there.

 

There's attractions moving between people in EAs. It's often physical then emotional then sexual. Not all EAs end in PAs but it's definitely where it all started - IMHO. And the man given an even "perceived" opportunity would jump at it in my experience.

 

Thankyou oldshirt I was hoping one of you would pop in! :-)

 

Lion Heart.

[fellini]

You don't "start" an EA. Your emotions are not engines that begin when you turn a key. Emotional intimacy with another human being is a continuum, not a manoeuvre.

 

You know some people climb mountains to derive value from the climb, not just to get to the top.

 

Getting to the top sets the limit of how far one needs to travel through ones pleasure. It is a marker, not the endgame.

 

 

oldshirt, thankyou and a curtsey. I completely agree. My experience says so too but in the decades of my life b4 LS, I never knew the term EA. I could be merely polite (my DD says only smile) at another man and they're hitting on you, sometimes saying they only want to be friends but often a full on hit.

I think the % is a little greater than you quote LOL if you count ALL men, as some are 100% homosexual.

 

I'm NOT a man and certainly MOST men I've known would never be as honest as oldshirt but BOY have I listened to his message (and others) who are not afraid to tell it like it is, in earnest, to a thread poster seeking answers.

 

Though I'm educated nonetheless with most concepts presented, it's very hard to believe that a man would even bother starting an EA with a woman he would never in a million years sleep with because the thought of it would make him puke. You wouldn't call neighborly courtesy for your neighbor, who's 95yo, even if you tell her something personal. You would never call that an EA because the "affair" component is just not there.

 

There's attractions moving between people in EAs. It's often physical then emotional then sexual. Not all EAs end in PAs but it's definitely where it all started - IMHO. And the man given an even "perceived" opportunity would jump at it in my experience.

 

Thankyou oldshirt I was hoping one of you would pop in! :-)

 

Lion Heart.

Edited April 1, 2015 by fellini

[Owl6118]

LionHeart and others, men are as diverse a group as you would expect of any set comprised of 49% of humanity. Yes, there is a bell curve or distribution, and you are probably right that most--as in, maybe more than half of men--fall under the center of the curve, where interaction with non-family women is somewhat or highly sexualized. But it's a distribution, and in every distribution there will be outliers.

 

The problem here is that axiom that ALL men have no real interest in women UNLESS the promise of sex is on the table, AND that they lose interest if it is not.

 

This simply isn't true for ALL men. I know because I am a straight man and it has never been true for me. All my life I have enjoyed the company of women. On average, I find them easier and more rewarding to befriend than men. There are days when my social media feed looks like one big old mess of platonic friend women.

 

Most of my close female friends I have felt some greater or lesser degree of physical attraction to. But in most cases it has been a mild thing, easy to dismiss by not feeding it. Far more often, I simply like a person while recognizing soon after I met them that we would be a bad fit as a couple, or a HORRIBLE TRAIN WRECK as a couple, or I would not be that physically interesting to her, or she not that physically interesting to me, or she unavailable, or me unavailable (and since I have been married for 15 years and loyal that has been the case 100% of the time for a decade and a half).

 

Sometimes this was frustrating as hell when I was young--surrounded by female friends and a lot of female emotional intimacy but no sex! And it actually was a real sorrow to me when I belatedly learned that it was a lot easier on average to get causal sex, if that's what I wanted, by closing up the emotional availability. I learned that a slight degree of genteel cruelty, just a touch of caddishness, went a very long when in getting you into bed. And you know what? I still dislike and resent this. It sucked that being your real, best, kindest, most avialable self was on average a reliable road to friendship and a lousy road to sex. But it is what it is.

 

But I digress. The point is, you just can't generalize, not without invalidating (unintentionally perhaps but there it is) someone else's real, lived experience.

 

But back to the OP. The problem here is not EAs or PAs, or men. The problem is a human one. The problem is the affair--the choice to get needs met at the expense of betraying another to whom you are committed. The thing to focus on is not why men want an EA or a PA, its why you want to live in a shadow life, in a relationship predicated on betrayal and dishonesty, with a man immature or broken enough to sacrifice his integrity and use others--in this case you--to meet his needs.

 

The problem is brokenness and deceit, in you and your AP man, not men in general's ability or inability to befriend women.

[dichotomy]

An old scene....

 

[OwlSong]

Thanks for all your intelligent, thought-provoking replies!

 

The problem is brokenness and deceit, in you and your AP man, not men in general's ability or inability to befriend women.

 

Yes, Owl6118, these are true and painful words. There is brokeness and deceit in both of our marriages. His M has been on the brink the full duration of our EA and my M had been for the last half. We recently started to talk about our respective (and escalating) M problems but neither of us admit to each other or WSs the role our EA plays in the M mix.

 

We're turning to our EA more intensely now, but it is a ticking M time bomb for us both. Time to end this.

 

The last week I've been preparing to say goodbye, sorry, and good luck.

[oldshirt]

The point of my post was not to make a convincing argument that virtually no man will settle for a friendship or EA.

 

 

The point if my post is that if you hear hoof beats, think horses not zebras.

 

If some guy is showing attention to your wife, your default assumption should be he's hoping to have sex with her and not hoping to make friends or top out in an EA.

[fellini]

Doesn't seem a fair assessment to me. In fact it reduces human beings to binary systems. Our brains are wired for more complexity than that.

 

 

 

 

The point of my post was not to make a convincing argument that virtually no man will settle for a friendship or EA.

 

 

The point if my post is that if you hear hoof beats, think horses not zebras.

 

If some guy is showing attention to your wife, your default assumption should be he's hoping to have sex with her and not hoping to make friends or top out in an EA.

[Cinnimon]

I would LOVE to know the answer to this question!

[I4givehim]

Someone wrote on another thread that sending naked pic to people is Cheating. If that is true then my husband was cheating on me with a lot of women. What does everybody think?????

[SoulStorm]

Someone wrote on another thread that sending naked pic to people is Cheating. If that is true then my husband was cheating on me with a lot of women. What does everybody think?????

 

Yep..I would say it's more disrespect to you and your marriage, yet still cheating. He vowed himself to you. His body is yours and vice versa. Sharing naked pics with women other than you breaks that vow.

[oldshirt]

Doesn't seem a fair assessment to me. In fact it reduces human beings to binary systems. Our brains are wired for more complexity than that.

 

Complexity has caused more affairs than the beach has grains of sand. It's because of complexity that people are trying to go through 20 different possibilities of why this guy is coming over to your house to have tea and crumpets with your wife every week while you are at work.

 

 

It's because of people trying to guess if some guy is just trying to be "friends" with his wife when this other dude takes her out for drinks after work a couple times a week.

 

 

It's because of the complexity of the wiring of our brains that make people shrug off their gut feelings when their wife is txting some dude dozens of times a day and taking the phone into the bathroom with her and she is sending him pictures of her.

 

 

9 times out of 10 in life when you break things down to their simplest common denominator, that is the correct answer.

 

 

If some dude is sniffing around your wife all the time, it's not because he wants to learn her secret to picking basketball brackets, it's because he wants to fck her.

 

 

Don't let complexity turn you in to a simpleton.

[fellini]

In my mind you continue to talk about players, womanizers and predators.

 

This is a fair topic. But that topic is not the same as the original question about emotional affairs.

 

If a scale existed for emotional affairs whereby 0 means 0 emotional and 10 means extreme, I would put predators at about a 1. A man sniffing around my wife in front of me maybe a -10.

 

These men are having an EA with their own self concept. They are feeding themselves, they are not IN an EA they are tracking a rabbit like a bloodhound.

 

No one accuses the bloodhound of getting a hard on for its prey.

 

 

 

Complexity has caused more affairs than the beach has grains of sand. It's because of complexity that people are trying to go through 20 different possibilities of why this guy is coming over to your house to have tea and crumpets with your wife every week while you are at work.

 

 

It's because of people trying to guess if some guy is just trying to be "friends" with his wife when this other dude takes her out for drinks after work a couple times a week.

 

 

It's because of the complexity of the wiring of our brains that make people shrug off their gut feelings when their wife is txting some dude dozens of times a day and taking the phone into the bathroom with her and she is sending him pictures of her.

 

 

9 times out of 10 in life when you break things down to their simplest common denominator, that is the correct answer.

 

 

If some dude is sniffing around your wife all the time, it's not because he wants to learn her secret to picking basketball brackets, it's because he wants to fck her.

 

 

Don't let complexity turn you in to a simpleton.

[Hope Shimmers]

I'm going to go ahead and be sexist and use absolute terms and say that no man will embark on an EA if a PA is off the table and that a physical encounter(s) is always the endgoal.

 

 

I know people hate that kind of generalizations and that kind of absolutism but it is for a purpose. That purpose is everyone should always assume that if a man is schmoozing up to a married women without his wife or her husband involved, it is never for platonic friendship, never for an EA, but always with having sex as the endgame.

 

 

If you take that assumption and act accordingly in shutting it down, the worst that will happen is that in 0.0000000001% of time, you will be mistaken.

 

You are wrong.

[confusedwife1981]

Well My H still continues his contact with exOW...and they never had sex. So there is that...

[William]

Folks, since this appears to be a driveby and I discovered a duplicate account (common in our Infidelity areas!), I'll close this up. Thanks for your contributions!