I had an affair – what’s next?

i-had-an-affair-whats-next

A woman has an affair. But what she did not expect: That after the stranger suddenly her own man could be so strange.

I am a sleeper, a stress sleeper. When I am unhappy, unhappy, or even unhappy in love, I lie down, close my eyes, and kill myself. I have overslept the worst crises of my life.

Not that I had not suffered in the wakefulness. Not that I did not cry in my sleep. But technically that works for me. 

Seen from the outside, for the sleepless, an enviable ability. Instinctively, I probably had believed even in this delicate situation, it could work so: eyes to and through.

I had never had such great sex before

I had an affair. After nine years of marriage for the first time. It was not a one-night stand. But after three days our ways parted, we left for the opposite ends of the earth.

There had been an explosion, and I had been amazed by that: Never, I felt, had I had such passionate, uninhibited, intimate, unbelievably wonderful sex. It was terrific. And it was over.

Because, to put it in a picture: I wanted to get the train back on track. It was as if he had jumped on another track, a track that leads into another landscape. It was wild and tempting. But the driver felt compelled to switch the course to the usual route.

Because there are other people on the train, a good man and children and a sensible future. So sleep once, and then business as usual again.

I imagined it like that. Without confession, as if nothing had happened. I’m cool, I thought, because I used to be, earlier in a brisk time before marriage. It was just sex. I thought and had no idea what to do with a single body for nine years. And what extraordinary sex.

Two friends – two different ways

I had two role models: one friend had made it back. For the other, the affair had blown up the marriage.

Of course I wanted to keep it like the first. She had returned from a three-week stay abroad, her eyes had shone, she had been catapulted out of her family life, now he had to start again. Her aura was buzzing, somewhere. But not on the path we jogged along. Then she said abruptly, but after a considerable respite, “And Gerd is so fat!” I shouted loudly, “What makes you think, he’s not fat, you’ve never felt that way in all these years !?”

I knew immediately: There was another. My friend lowered her eyes and mumbled: “I just do not want to touch him.” That’s how it happened. It took a year and a half before she reported execution again. One day she came running and shouted, “We had sex, and he was wild.” I would like to know more exactly how she got that done. But she kept herself covered.

My husband had an affair too

In half an hour I will stand in front of my husband. Many say he is very attractive. I think so too.

I sit in the car and say several times in succession: Yes! But I am afraid: the man is a seismograph of feelings, he does not hide the slightest human emotion. Maybe you do not even need special antennas in the case of an amorous adventure.

I too had felt immediately when he had something with another. At first there was just his aura, that flicker. The repeated mention of a woman whose name had never fallen before. 

But most of all, he was different in sex. Stormy. And yet absent. He kissed differently, wilder, deeper. He held my hand as he had not done before. That’s when I knew: He does not mean me.

I can not think about the others anymore

I suppose I will talk soberly, if at all, about this strange man. Furthermore, I will keep it during sex as always, we are routinely. Insanely routinely. Bored routinely. If we fall back into our rhythm every two or three weeks.

If I do not get back on track, it will be dangerous. Striking. I can not think about the others any more and how much better that was. I should remember that someday it would be routine with him, the stranger. Could. I can not be too careful now. Or too nervous. From a tight distance, avoid the contact permanently.

Sex becomes a matter of the head

Until no sex takes place anymore and this nothing pushes like a big vacuum between us. So we both keep thinking of it, but we can not overcome it anymore. Because it has become a matter of the mind.

As at the time, when the children were very small. And generally, with me, because I’m a head person. This also means: I can discipline myself. I have a mega-strong, almost autosuggestive will. And at the beginning of our relationship, I deliberately put on pink glasses. Without good will and without nice words probably no lasting relationship would exist. So I talk to all this while I’m in the car and go home. Without noticing that I have misplaced the pink glasses. In the crowd of sheets.

Can I still have sex with my husband?

My husband is in front of me, and is it his sensibility? Instinct, feelings of rivalry? Spontaneous despair? – He wants right away, the door has just fallen into the lock. I think: eyes closed and in. My husband comes up to me, he kisses me, he urges me to the bed. I think … I think! 

In the days before, I had not thought. I had turned off my brain. An incredibly beautiful, uninhibited flow of desire and touch. But now I think: Take it off. He pulls me out. He kisses me. And then my lips are on his. And my hands in the air. They hang in the air. Yes, I feel the air between my fingertips and his skin. The distance gets thinner and thinner. And the air thicker. There is a resistance.

I get in touch. This skin looks so firm. Not soft. Not shimmy. Not fluent, not velvety. Not. Like silk. To fall. Not like the stranger. To the Dranschmiegen. To include. To kiss. My lips do not want to go there. Not my skin, not my body. My desire: not. I think: you want to feel the other. As if you could not feel anything with your eyes closed.

And then I give up.

I suppose I pressed my eyelids together. And the lips. The muscles are tense. Myself dead inside. Let it happen to me. Without being there, without coming. I feel the body, which I felt for years as belonging to me. And suddenly he is alien to me. So strange!

This feeling, this realization hits me like lightning. Because always I had thought of it the other way round. I imagined what it would be like to have an affair. How it would feel to take a strange hand, kiss foreign lips, touch foreign skin, foreign joints and limbs. Another smell and other sounds. And that, sure, it would be so unfamiliar that it would scare me away and leave me. That my head would turn on. But it is exactly the other way around: the stranger is close to me. And the stranger to me.

I do not tell my girlfriend that my husband is suddenly so heavy. I avoid the other as if her lane change were contagious. I close my eyes. For weeks.

It’s as if I’m falling into hibernation. I sleep in front of the TV in the evening, and in the morning my husband has to wake me up. It is not a healthy sleep. After six, eight weeks we start to bicker, my husband and I, constantly, because of trifles.

Aggression is in the air like a traffic jam. It comes to a fight. And for pronunciation. I do not reveal anything. From the affair. I talk about my feelings towards him, about my suffering in our routine. My husband says something that I have never heard of him: he lacked caresses, and he also wanted to be hugged. I feel like a macho. And has to grin.

I open my eyes and look at him.

And that must be the reason why some people say an affair can fuel a relationship: He had become so foreign to us that we were far apart. From a distance, I look at him again. And somehow, yes, somehow: is he really an attractive man? I would like to touch it. Carefully. Groping. And again.