I came across this article by Linda Macdonald and thought it would be good to share here for those who may not have seen it. I think it’s good reading for both BS and WS alike (endnotes removed).
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When a husband or wife becomes infatuated with someone else, the betrayed spouse often feels as though he or she has been entered into a competition without knowing the contest was taking place. Worse, the contest was rigged from the beginning. You were living in the real world. They were living inside what I call the affair bubble.
As the Proverb says,
"Stolen water is sweet; food eaten in secret is delicious."
—Proverbs 9:17
A Relationship Untested by Reality
Affair partners may believe they have discovered an extraordinary connection. They talk for hours, share secrets, anticipate their next meeting, and feel unusually understood, admired, desired, and alive. But something important is missing from this seemingly amazing relationship: ordinary life.
The affair partner usually isn’t standing beside your spouse at 6:30 in the morning while someone searches for lost car keys. They aren’t discussing the Visa bill, cleaning the kitchen, taking the dog to the veterinarian, sitting through parent-teacher conferences, caring for an aging parent, arguing about the thermostat, mowing the lawn, dealing with a teenager’s attitude, or lying awake together worrying about retirement.
Instead, affair partners tend to connect in carefully selected slices of life. They meet for lunch. They exchange flattering texts. They dress for the occasion. They sneak away to a hotel. They share their dreams and frustrations. Gradually, they may become one another’s escape from ordinary life.
In my booklet, Who Will You Become? I describe an affair as something like an emotional and sensual vacation. Vacations are wonderful partly because we don’t live there. Nobody compares a week at a resort with a Tuesday afternoon spent cleaning out the garage. Yet that is essentially what happens inside the affair bubble. The excitement of the secret relationship is compared with the familiarity of marriage—and marriage inevitably comes up short.
Secrecy Adds Fuel to the Fire
There is another reason affairs can feel unusually intense: they are forbidden.
Secrecy, intrigue, obstacles, uncertainty, stolen moments, and the danger of being discovered can intensify romantic preoccupation. Dorothy Tennov coined the term limerence to describe an intense state of romantic longing and preoccupation, and subsequent literature has noted the important role uncertainty can play in maintaining that obsessive focus.
This helps explain why an affair may feel even more intoxicating than the early courtship the unfaithful spouse once experienced with his or her husband or wife. The affair partners may conclude, I’ve never felt this way before. Perhaps they haven’t. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they have discovered the greatest love of their lives. It may mean they have never before experienced romance under these artificial conditions.
Fresh romantic attraction is also associated with powerful reward and attachment systems in the brain. Researchers have identified roles for dopamine, norepinephrine, oxytocin, and other neurochemical systems in romantic attraction, bonding, motivation, and reward. Add secrecy, anticipation, sexual attraction, uncertainty, obstacles, idealization, and stolen time, and you have created an unusually potent emotional environment.
That intensity can easily be mistaken for intimacy.
But they are not the same thing.
The Bubble Allows Idealization
Healthy relationships eventually undergo reality testing. You see the other person tired, irritable, selfish, sick, bored, and disappointed. You learn how they handle money, conflict, chores, relatives, responsibility, stress, temptation, and inconvenience.
Marriage eventually introduces us to the whole person.
Secret relationships can postpone that reckoning. Because affair partners often spend limited time together, they have more opportunity to present their best selves—and to fill in whatever they don’t know about one another with idealistic projections. As infidelity researcher Shirley Glass observed, secrecy is one of the important features that separates an affair from an ordinary friendship; emotional intimacy that belongs within the committed relationship can gradually be transferred to the outside person.
The affair partner becomes not merely a human being, but an answer: She understands me. He appreciates me. She makes me feel alive. He thinks I’m beautiful. We are so much alike. This must be what true love feels like.
Meanwhile, the faithful spouse is being evaluated under completely different conditions. The spouse is known; the lover is still being discovered. The spouse has flaws; the lover still has possibilities. The spouse carries years of history; the lover offers novelty. The spouse represents responsibility; the lover represents escape.
How can a real person compete with a projection?
You can’t. And you were never supposed to.
When the Bubble Changes the Marriage
There is an especially cruel feature of emotional distortion that betrayed spouses need to understand. The affair doesn’t merely provide an attractive alternative to the marriage. It can begin changing the way the unfaithful person experiences the marriage itself.
As the straying spouse becomes increasingly attached to the outside person, emotional energy is siphoned away from home. The faithful spouse senses the distance and naturally moves closer: What’s wrong? Why don’t we spend time together anymore? Why are you always on your phone? Why are you working so late? Why do you seem irritated with me?
The betrayed spouse may try harder to connect precisely because the other person is pulling away. But to someone absorbed in an affair, those perfectly understandable attempts at connection may suddenly feel intrusive. Now the unfaithful spouse thinks, She’s so needy. He’s controlling. Why can’t she give me some space? We don’t have anything in common anymore.
This creates a terrible circular dynamic. The affair contributes to the distance. The betrayed spouse reacts to the distance. The unfaithful spouse resents the reaction. Then that resentment becomes further "evidence" that something is terribly wrong with the marriage.
The affair has helped create the very marital unhappiness now being offered as justification for the affair.The Spotlight Shifts
Something else frequently happens. As the affair partner becomes increasingly idealized, the spouse becomes increasingly devalued. Characteristics once overlooked—or even considered endearing—suddenly become intolerable.
The wife who was once dependable is now "boring." The husband who was once devoted is now "needy." The spouse who asks reasonable questions becomes "controlling." The partner who senses something is terribly wrong becomes "paranoid."
Meanwhile, the affair partner seems remarkably understanding. Of course they do. They aren’t asking where you’ve been. They aren’t wondering why money is missing. They aren’t confronting the inconsistencies in your stories or asking you to repair the marriage you’re neglecting. In fact, the affair partner may reinforce your complaints about the marriage.
And so the contrast becomes increasingly distorted. One person represents pleasure while the other represents accountability. One applauds while the other asks questions. One offers escape while the other represents reality.
Gradually, the unfaithful spouse may become convinced that this contrast proves, "I married the wrong person." Or, "I’ve finally found my soulmate."
The contrast proves neither.
It reveals far more about the conditions surrounding the two relationships.A Word to the Person Inside the Bubble
If you are currently involved with someone outside your marriage, I don’t doubt that your feelings are powerful. I am not telling you that you don’t feel what you feel. I am asking you to question what those feelings mean.
What if the intensity you experience isn’t proof that you have finally found your perfect match? What if secrecy and uncertainty have amplified the attraction? What if you are comparing someone you encounter primarily in selected moments with someone who has shared the unedited version of life with you?
And what if your dissatisfaction at home has increased partly because you have withdrawn emotional energy from your marriage and invested it somewhere else?
Shirley Glass spent decades studying and treating infidelity and challenged the assumption that affairs occur only because marriages were already bad. She documented how friendships and workplace relationships can gradually cross boundaries through increasing intimacy, secrecy, and sexual chemistry—even among people who did not initially intend to be unfaithful.
So before concluding that your feelings have finally revealed "the truth" about your marriage, consider another possibility: your feelings may be altering your perception of it.
Feelings are real.
But feelings are not always reliable interpreters of reality.
Before sacrificing a marriage, family, integrity, faith, friendships, finances, and perhaps even your relationship with your children, you owe it to yourself to step outside the bubble long enough to ask:
Am I seeing clearly?And to the Betrayed Spouse: Please Stop Competing
This is the part I especially want you to hear.
You may have tortured yourself with comparisons. Perhaps you’ve studied photographs of the other person. Maybe you’ve scrutinized her face, body, clothing, career, personality, or social media posts. Perhaps you’ve wondered what he provided that you couldn’t. Maybe you have replayed your spouse’s criticisms until you began accepting them as an objective assessment of your deficiencies.
Please stop.
You were being compared with a fantasy environment, not merely another person.
Your spouse saw you against the backdrop of bills, responsibilities, disappointments, history, fatigue, aging, familiarity, and the normal friction of two imperfect people sharing a life. The affair partner was illuminated by novelty, secrecy, anticipation, idealization, and escape.
Those are not equal conditions.
Imagine photographing one person beneath the fluorescent lights of a grocery store after a twelve-hour workday and another at sunset on a tropical beach—and then asking which person is more attractive.
The comparison tells you very little about the people.
It tells you the lighting was different.
So was the lighting inside the affair bubble.
Their Rejection Does Not Establish Your Inferiority
This distinction matters because betrayal easily becomes shame. The mind makes a devastating leap: My spouse chose that person instead of me. Therefore, that person must be better than me. And therefore, there must be something wrong with me.
But none of those conclusions necessarily follows from the first.
Your spouse’s affair tells you something important about choices your spouse made. It does not establish your ranking in some universal hierarchy of attractiveness, desirability, femininity, masculinity, intelligence, sexuality, or worth.
And if your spouse rewrote your marital history while caught in the affair—claiming the marriage was always miserable, that you were never compatible, or perhaps even that he or she "never really loved you"—remember that people sometimes revise the story of their marriage in ways that make their present behavior easier to justify. Glass specifically described this rewriting of marital history among involved partners.
Psychology offers another useful lens here. Cognitive dissonance theory describes the discomfort we experience when our actions conflict with our existing beliefs or self-image. People commonly reduce that discomfort through self-justification—changing the story they tell themselves rather than changing the behavior that created the conflict.
For the unfaithful spouse, that can sound something like this:
I’m a good person.Good people don’t betray faithful spouses.
I’m betraying my spouse.
Something has to give.
The person can change the behavior—or change the story.
Maybe my marriage was terrible.Maybe my spouse never understood me.
Maybe I never really loved her.
Maybe God wants me to be happy.
Maybe this new person is the one I was supposed to be with all along.
Tragically, the betrayed spouse can become the villain in a newly revised marital history.
Do not automatically adopt your spouse’s distorted narrative as your identity.Eventually, Real Life Enters the Bubble
Affair bubbles cannot remain sealed forever. Exposure punctures them. Divorce alters them. Living together changes them. Children complicate them. Money intrudes. Former spouses remain part of the landscape. Holidays arrive. Stepfamilies form. Resentments surface.
And two people who once met primarily in stolen moments eventually encounter one another on ordinary Tuesdays.
The dazzling lover becomes a human being. So does the person who was having the affair.
Research on romantic love itself reminds us that attraction and long-term attachment are complex but distinguishable processes involving overlapping biological systems. The powerful sensations accompanying early romantic attraction therefore shouldn’t automatically be treated as proof of enduring compatibility or mature love.
But here is what may be even more important for you if you were betrayed:
The bubble doesn’t have to burst for you to heal.
You do not need to wait for your former spouse to "wake up." You don’t need the affair relationship to fail. You don’t need the other person to turn out to be awful. And you certainly don’t need your former spouse to return someday and admit, You were better.
That would still leave you measuring your worth according to someone else’s distorted scale.
There is a freer place to stand.
You can recognize that you were living in reality while they were participating in a relationship partially insulated from it. You were an imperfect spouse, as every spouse is. But another person’s infatuation did not prove your inadequacy. Their idealization of someone else did not diminish your value. Their rejection did not make you inferior.
And their distorted vision does not have to become yours.
If your spouse disappeared into the affair fog, you don’t have to follow them there. You can return to solid ground, reclaim what is true, and refuse to judge yourself through the eyes of someone whose perceptions may have been profoundly distorted.
Perhaps one of the first truths worth reclaiming is this:
You didn’t lose a fair contest to someone better. There was never a fair contest in the first place.
