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I came across a very well written piece from the Dear Cupid org website.  I think it is inteeresting enough to post here in its entireity.  It does deal very elegantly with the syndrome from a woman’s point of view.

The Married Man / Single Woman Syndrome- Dating a Married Man and Losing Yourself in the Process

copyright by Ask Oldersister, 2008, www.oldersister.sampasite.com    So you are young, single, attractive and no doubt have many eligible men pursuing you. Be ready to cut my head off but I truly believe the problem with most these men is that if they aren’t already married, there is probably something wrong with them. Experts claim that there are so many perfectly eligible single guys out there buthave they dated any of these men they are piling into the eligible pool? Here are some problems my "total package" friends and I have come across:No manners (blatant stuff you just can’t ignore….taking calls during your date, etc…)Insensitive (my ex is crazy, you don’t mind if I drink 5 beers at lunch, right?)Baggage (I’m going through a custody battle right now, I have to live with my parents for the time being, it’s only temporary)Chauvinism ( You’re not voting for Hillary, right? You’re not one of those kinda women that…, etc….)Egotism (Calling you all the time like YOU have nothing better to do than jump every time they call and GOD FORBID you may be smart and dating others!)Unavailable ( I’m just waiting for the right person, I don’t believe in marriage or won’t do it again, I like to keep my options open, I’m a workaholic, etc…)Casanova (I’m never attracted to anyone else when I’m in a relationship, you’re so gorgeous it hurts, …I never cheat, do you? My last girlfriend did drugs, cheated, and used me…)Desperate (they barely know you but know they want to be with you…I mean, you’re great and you know it but the feeling you could probably have a ring on your finger in a month doesn’t make you feel too special, does it?)Selfish (talk most of the time, not really too concerned with your beliefs, your goals, your job, etc….these types assume whatever you think now will be converted later)Sound familiar? After exhausting your time and energy treading water in that eligibility pool you begin to wonder if your standards are too high or if you’ve watched too many romance movies. You talk to your other friends and laugh about how you could write a book about all your common dating experiences and may even come to the conclusion that all these guys are just "immature" and maybe older men are the answer. You find yourself at that point where you have no real motivation to continue treading water in the same pool and need some different results because you still have that glimmer of hope that what those experts say is true. Are you now cynical, bored, suspicious, and somewhat defeated? Your married friends might think so but more importantly, what you really are is ripe pickings for a married man. Don’t believe me? Here is how the scenario plays out: A married man who has become routine in his duties as a father, husband, and provider at some point decides he wants a little sexual excitement and his ego fed. It is impossible for his wife to provide him the same type of attention she once did and not even realistic (the demands of kids, etc…).If you are getting angry with me, good, keep reading!However the two of you come across one another, it is almost going to be an instant attraction and that surreal feeling like you really "understand each other". Is this feeling real? Yes, and it’s intense! Would you feel this way if he weren’t married and appropriate for you? NO! (I’ll explain later)The script unfolds predictably where you become a special friend and the two of you have harmless lunches, coffee, etc… At this point you may be asking your friends what they think because nothing physical has happened. It’s really simple. This is stage one of the seduction process. How are you seducing one another?He listens to every word you say, is a gentleman, pays for everything, considers your feelings, believes in you and your goals, compliments you, loves that your smart and feisty, seems in awe that you are spending time with him, and respects your time and what you have to say. In other words, here is a man that seems to RECOGNIZE YOUR WORTH. You are in awe of him for his dedication to his career accomplishments, his kids, and maybe even his wife. You respect him for the sacrifices he has made and you really listen to him and express your admiration. You are probably even more open and flirtatious with this man because it has a great affect on him and he doesn’t react with desperation/eagerness. For him, here is a woman that FEEDS HIS EGO and is SEXUALLY STIMULATING.This is when the stage is set for an affair. You can’t deny that the physical tension is building and your desire to become closer to this person is very strong. You feel very empowered by the effect you have on him like you have a life raft with his name on it and you could throw it out to him or pull it back at will. And this man isn’t going to just spend his time or be attracted to anyone. He is discriminating.I’m going to interrupt this chemistry-induced soul-mate experience and explain what is really going on here:We have already established how each of you were vulnerable to each other in the first place. You were treading water in a pool of emotionally crippled men and to keep from stagnating, you stuck to your standards and refused to settle. You are a strong woman and are determined to face reality and have come to the realization that reality ain’t so pretty. And, no, there is nothing wrong/unrealistic/cynical with you or your view on things but this will change.He was treading water in his daily routine and probably came to acknowledge or even resolved himself to the fact that this was probably the best it was going to get. I’m giving this guy (because he is an exception, right?) the benefit of the doubt. However, it is far more likely his routine includes dipping into the pool of attractive, smart, single women like you who are more emotionally mature and won’t settle for those cripples. This is important because in that specific pool he is dipping into are women that will RECOGNIZE HIS WORTH. Unlike a weaker, more needy woman, an emotionally sophisticated, independent woman like you will appreciate the gentleman that he is.The other remaining pools of women are either too old, married(limited time/energy) ……or emotionally immature (single, very young, possibly more attractive, fickle, unreliable) and cannot give him the required emotional, intellectual, and physical energy that you will soon be providing.His beliefs, views, feelings (unlike yours) on life will not be changing but you are not aware of this yet because you’re too busy feeling empowered right now. What’s the worse that can happen? You feel great with that life raft in your hand and you can always date other people! You deserve consistent sex by someone who cares/loves you and who knows, maybe the right person will pop up during this whole experience and you can kind of exit the whole scene with your predetermined script that goes something like this: "I just can’t do this anymore, you’re married and this was bound to happen…we both knew I would have so many options and it’s time now for me to explore those….you know I love you but it’s time for me to go". You dramatically make your exit and he is devastated. You prance off with your new love and either trash that symbolic life raft or tuck it away for safe-keeping. You probably envision the latter since giving up power is very unappealing. You have nothing to lose and he is risking everything. This may or may not even be about love for you.Am I trying to make you sound capricious and evil? No, and you’re not. If you can admit that you have fantasized these things, you are ready to see that this is a crucial step in the seduction process and it is called Losing Your Sense of Reality. For those women who cannot admit this and want to firmly stand by their innocence (it just happened! Our love is profound and and an exception) in the seduction process, are going to be the ones that fall the hardest. They may never get out. If this is you, stop reading now because this writer is not at all interested in contributing to your defense of an exceptional love experience. If this man was your true love growing up and you really know him better than his wife and just happened to be separated by tragic circumstances, this article is not for you and you probably wouldn’t feel compelled to read it in the first place. He would be divorced, remarried to you and you would be way too busy planning your new life.We will now continue and as you can see, some of us will be weeded out along the way. If you’ve read this far and opt out later, take heart, you will have already instilled in yourself an important reality benchmark that you will come back to later and I hope you save this article for when you are ready to absorb it. Remember remaining readers, your strength so far has kept you from marrying an idiot or gave you the courage to divorce one, has kept you on the pursuit of reality (up until now), and has built the foundation for a magnetic, sensual, capable, intellectual woman who radiates these qualities with confidence. You may not trust your competence in relationships (we all question that, even your married friends) and may feel some guilt about your relationship or the secrets you are now carrying and worry if the weight of those things are going to impact your self esteem or ruin your reputation because of this situation. Not really. If you felt too guilty and had a problem hiding things, you wouldn’t be in this situation and that is why it is so easy to move forward in it because these aren’t the battles you will be fighting. Are you a bad person because of this? No, this is just another step in losing your reality and it is an important one because once you feel you can conquer what you perceive to be the true obstacles, you are confident to move forward. For women, this disillusioned thought process usually marks the beginning of the physical affair although it can happen after but regardless, it does happen. For the married man, your emotional process (discussed with or without him) is very important because this is what will anchor you to him and provide that consistent source of emotional and physical feeding he needs. For woman who are CURRENTLY, not intending or planning, dating two or more married men, this does not apply to you and you should stop reading. You may not believe or understand how this works but it does and has repeatedly with success; usually at a subconscious level so he is probably not evil. And no, he is not out to get you or maliciously planning all this. Earlier we discussed how he was not desperate or overly-eager (if he was, you would have been disgusted like you were with the single guys) and that is part of the reason why; if he was not interested in securing your emotional involvement, he would have dipped in another pool. This is not a pretty dynamic, is it?Once you are emotionally and physically involved in this relationship, you will feel a subtle shift on your empowerment scale even though you may not recognize it as that. You will attribute this shift to a struggle within yourself about the false battles you are having with guilt and secrecy or maybe even ask yourself if you are limiting your options by seeing this man. This still may or may not be about love for you and you may smirk at the idea that you are emotionally involved. If you are in denial about being emotionally involved at this point, you need to keep reading and face reality: If you met this married man on a cruise or in a bar and had a brief physical relationship and now it’s over, you wouldn’t still be reading this or compelled to read it in the first place. What is really happening is you are losing your grip on that life raft. He is not taking it from you and he may even be spending more time with you and will probably remain just as attentive as ever because married men will work harder than single men at trying to make you fall for them. His behavior is actually not changing at all but you are now fighting an internal battle of power and it has nothing to do with him although you will eventually project it on to him. Here are the signs when you have reached this stage:You may want to make him feel a little jealous You may wonder about his sex life with his wifeYou may notice you are no longer interested in other guys (if you haven’t dated anyone recently this applies to you)You may want him to fall in love with you You may get upset if he doesn’t call you when you need supportYou would love to be a fly on the wall at times when you are not with himYou don’t think he will ever lie to you (you completely trust him) or you wonder if he has or will ever lie to youIs this just normal curiosity? NO, not at this stage. This is the danger zone for you and you may or may not want to acknowledge that and chances are, you will dismiss it as curiosity. Getting caught up in whether you are just harmlessly curious or not isn’t really important because what’s not up for debate is one simple fact: If you admit you are wondering these things, you are spending more and more energy on this relationship. You see, guilt and secrecy is not the true enemy but the energy you expend is. This still has nothing to do with him because the rules haven’t changed and he hasn’t changed but you are changing although you may or may not be in love (the love thing actually isn’t that important and you will see why later). What you are experiencing is loss of that surge of power you felt at the beginning and you want that feeling back and you will project this outside yourself onto him in the form of a power struggle within the actual relationship. The green light for this to occur is when you start to feel he has the upper-hand; this is the transition where you give up the life raft. Remember, he has not taken it from you but at this point, he will start to lie to you to continue to make you happy and you will once again be treading water but at a faster pace. Why? Because this is where you begin to subtly apply pressure. It is time to weed out some people who will not get any benefit from reading any further.If you truly believe you want this man to leave his wife and family and start over with you and think it will work, STOP reading and please see a therapist with or without him before you do a lot of damage. If you just have those thoughts/fantasies sometimes and have not acted on them or if that thought horrifies you, please continue to read this because I think it may help you.We will assume the best case scenario from here on out and assume this married man continues to treat you well, pay attention to you, tell you or not tell you he loves you, confide in you about his wife or not, etc….These things seem very important so you are probably hyper alert to any fluctuating behavior on his part, but right now you are most disturbed with the whole idea of him lying. Just as experts claim how many eligible single men are out there, they also claim that any man that lies to his wife will eventually lie to you. In fact, they adamantly assert the whole foundation of this type of relationship is based on a lie. Frankly, I am amazed at the ability to lump everyone into these categories as if we all follow some predictable pattern. Women get really caught up in this and I believe it actually contributes to women staying in these relationships longer even though that’s not the intent of these professionals. Why? We identified energy expended as enemy number one and the amount of energy you are expending in this relationship is proportionate to how invested you are in it; therefore, it becomes an excellent indicator of how long you will stay. Let’s put this whole lying thing into the right context so you’re not subjecting yourself to this nonsense and entertaining suspicions of being the latest victim of a most sophisticated manipulator:You knew going in that he was willing to lie to his wife and you were okay with that(you moving forward was your consent- you can’t back out of that one now!)You trusted him enough to know he was not going to purposely sabotage you or your reputation (you are strong and you don’t put up with evil, emotional cripples)You also knew that you trusted him to be sensitive enough to your feelings that you felt confident starting this relationshipYou admired the fact he was stable and responsible in his life and trusted he wouldn’t do anything crazy and impulsive to harm anyone; in other words, a pretty decent guyYou trusted him enough to give yourself physically and emotionally to him without a commitment because he fulfilled a genuine need of yours and vice versaYou trusted that he sincerely wanted to make you happy given his serious restraints of time and energyYour gut feelings were right! You could and you still can trust him with these things because you are strong and smart enough to rely on those seasoned instincts of yours. He hasn’t changed these qualities about himself and probably won’t so don’t worry and question yourself to death about it. The truth is, your gut feelings and intuition are still working at this point so please don’t waste your energy chipping away at the great qualities you possess and will need later. So then why did I bring up the whole lying thing just like the experts continually do? Why does this strike a cord in so many women in these situations? The answer to that has to do with our perception that there exists an enemy outside of ourselves, beyond our control, and that feels very threatening. With our life raft given away and the power within the relationship being more balanced (if it weren’t and you still had all that power via the symbolic life raft, you’d be bored and have moved on already), the reality that the relationship is capped in it’s potential starts to sink in. A successful relationship is one that continually grows so any perceived outside threat is diminished in its capacity to destroy because this relationship’s uncapped growth can offset it. However, there is no outside enemy in your case because right now, the real enemy is just another battle emerging within yourself. Relax, he hasn’t lied to you yet(best case scenario), even though he will, so get that out of your head so you can really identify and fight this internal battle effectively.If you are not bothered by this whole lying thing or even disturbed by the possibility of him seeing someone else (no, not his wife) in addition to you, you probably don’t need to read any more.What this internal battle is all about is your reasonable and rightful expectation to grow and explore life to its fullest. If there is any doubt in your mind that this may not be the case, remember that you have made tremendous strides by not settling in that stagnant pool of immature and selfish men that most women will end up marrying. If women didn’t continue to have sex and marry these men, there wouldn’t be so many of them. But let’s get back to business. Thus far, in your relationship with this married man, you have invested a healthy amount of energy(whether you love him or not) and I’m glad we can finally agree on that. Unlike what is happening now, the prior energy required to date those losers left you feeling defeated but it didn’t really demand an "emotional investment"; you were able to throw that out and pull it back at will and even on your own time. Why am I reminding you of this? Because……What you are still failing to really internalize, which was what got you into this married man thing in the first place, is the pure fact that reality isn’t so pretty. That’s a hard one to swallow because it’s true, so keep reading because once you get past that, it won’t appear as imminent and threatening as it does now. I promise. You just don’t understand what it really means yet and it does sound like the worst kind of enemy to face. Why explore life to it’s fullest when most likely things can only get worse? When you fail to admit that you have a right to expect growth in yourself and that reality is difficult, you will begin to believe your married man isn’t doing enough. You will believe he is lying or manipulating you, that you can’t get out, that he is keeping you from a good life, that you are angry with him because you spend holidays alone, etc…..This is your signal that you are investing even more energy (negative or positive doesn’t matter) into this relationship instead of acknowledging what we mentioned before. He hasn’t changed and he hasn’t changed the rules of the relationship on you. What is actually happening is you are subconsciously projecting expectations onto him so you don’t have to face what you need to in order to keep on that path of growing because it is too scary. Can you guess what those expectations have to do with? You got it! Safety and Security. Once again, this has nothing to do with him but this has everything to do with your fear of not being able to provide these things for yourself. You are not weak and passive, it is natural to resist what it takes to grow sometimes. He stopped growing a long time ago. At some point, he realized the same thing you did and decided not to face reality at all, in his own self and in his marriage. He is comfortable with this and does not want to change it or else he would have already. The pain of this relationship and the longing/need you have for each other is actually coming from very different places: You are a strong, vibrant woman with passion and strong feelings who is just afraid right now having growing pains and he feels pain about not being able to make you happy. He’s not dumb and he does care about you and your feelings so don’t spend a lot of energy thinking he’s selfish and a taker. He wants to meet your needs like he did with so much ease in the beginning but he is incapable so he will lie in order to get back those good feelings and to keep you just like he lies to his wife in order to maintain the marriage and keep her. Is this reality pretty? To you, it is prettier than the "unknown" reality you were previously facing or else you would have already left the relationship. Back to your married man:He almost sounds pathetic in that context and how could someone you admired so much be that pathetic? He’s not, he is still all those things you admired but has made different choices for his life that won’t be changing because he is comfortable with them. You are the one that is no longer comfortable. Best case scenario is that when you get out of this he will just let you go but most of the time the married man will start promising things in order to keep you and maintain his level of comfort. What this should tell you is that the lies/promises he makes are in direct proportion to how resistant he really is to change. This is the stage most of the experts focus on because this is where extramarital affairs usually progress and stay stuck the longest. By the way, there is no progression from this stage because it’s the last one. It’s not going anywhere and this is the best it’s going to get if you want to call this good. This is where the energy you expend on your expectations of him is proportionate to the damage you are going to do to yourself; meaning, you have stopped treading water and you are beginning to go under. If this doesn’t quite make sense it is because what has been drilled into your subconscious by the experts doesn’t make sense:Being with a married man is a waste of your timeFalling in love with a married man will break your heartHe will never leave his wifeHe will lie to you and you will be waiting foreverNotice how the above statements have absolutely nothing to do with what you have been reading? If you took serious issue with the above statements, you would have never entered this arrangement in the first place, despite how tempting it is to claim those statements now (just like when you wanted so bad to belief your true battles were going to be secrecy and guilt). This is where society further contributes to your loss of reality.Those statements imply you are in a passive state just waiting to be given the time, energy, and love you deserve when actually it’s the opposite. You are the one actively expending a vast amount of emotionally energy while the married man is in a passive state. Simply put, he is not wasting your time but rather, you are actively pursuing your own stagnation and with a passion. Falling in love with him isn’t the real danger here because falling in love is a temporary, passive state which requires very little energy on your part. Remember how easy it was for him to make you feel good in the beginning by just being there? It was almost as if it didn’t require any effort on his part. Amazing! That statement is not only misleading but it contributes to your loss of reality by insinuating your love will destroy you when love isn’t the issue here (whether you love him or not). Love is an act, a choice to contribute to the growth of another human being despite whatever mood or expectation one has at any given moment. If you have gotten this far, you probably have done those things for him but that is not what you are in pain about. You are in pain because this situation did not change the reality you tried to escape and you are mourning the disillusioned self; attempting to hold on to your innocent self (the self that thought reality was pretty) but it brought you right back to the same issue. Predictably, you have projected this onto a married man because it feels safer. If facing reality felt safer you wouldn’t be in this situation.He will never leave his wife doesn’t address why you don’t leave either because that would require energy from him and then you would be required to stop your active pursuit of treading water and you are not ready to do that. As long as you are expending energy treading that water, you can avoid what you didn’t want to face initially.This has nothing to do with him because he hasn’t changed. If you fail to grasp what is going on in this last stage of the relationship, you will either remain here for years until he ends it with you or you will become so tired you will not be able to feed him what he needs to stay comfortable. He may love you or not love you, which will have nothing to do with the reason it ends, but it will feel that way. You may feel like a fool and kick yourself for not listening to what has been said about dating married men but if you truly understand the dynamic, you will avoid all this nonsense and go through the suffering in a way that is honest and constructive. Back to the part where you start to drown: The energy you don’t realize your spending is starting to feel bad and therefore you believe the relationship is unbalanced in his favor. To compensate for this imbalance, you start getting angry and making requests of him you never pictured doing. His failure at giving you what you perceive you need makes you feel even more unhappy, which he senses and doesn’t like, so he in turn compensates by telling you or promising you things to alleviate your pain. He is not an evil liar and he may even be making those promises or saying those things because he loves you and can’t stand to see you in pain. Have you ever heard the phrase "love is not enough"? It’s true in any relationship or marriage so it does apply to your special situation. His lies and promises may make you feel better temporarily because it seems like you are receiving something you need. You have been furiously treading water for a while now so it is normal for you to be on the lookout for a life raft. You are on survival mode and what will drown you is your failure to correctly identify enemy and rescuer. Where you once questioned your competency in relationships. you will now betray your instincts.When people speak of the "other woman" settling for the crumbs of a married man and how desperate she must in fact be, are the supposed experts who perpetuate a false reality; because if this were true, she would have married a man from that first pool of emotional cripples. It is overactive attempts to avoid the pain of facing reality that is causing her pain, exhaustion, and heartache. Not this married man, this relationship, or this waiting. These crumbs he is supposedly tossing her are not symbolic of his leftover love or his leftover emotional involvement or his leftover extra energy he is tossing her in this crisis. They are the opposite. He hasn’t changed and he doesn’t want to change because he is comfortable. For him to expend any more energy in any particular direction at all doesn’t make sense because it would cause him discomfort and discomfort prompts people to change. Therefore, whatever crumbs he is throwing her are not an attempt to increase his emotional investment but an attempt to now avoid it. The lies and promises are designed to replace the energy he was initially giving and she accepts it even though what she is receiving is less. Both of them falsely believe they are actually contributing more to the relationship while getting less out of it. Society is backing this woman’s belief that his crumbs represent love and emotional investment (energy) which will lead her to conclude that the potential emptiness of his promises are the enemy and he is her rescuer. He is holding the life raft with her name on it and why he refuses to give it to her will paint him as a worthless liar and her as a pathetic, passive person waiting for the love she will never get.The situation itself then becomes her higher power even though he’s not holding any life raft now just as she wasn’t holding one in the beginning. There was never any life raft. Ok, even if the life raft existed symbolically in this scenario, it was still incorrectly representing "need". A more accurate representation would be "projection" so it would be impossible for someone else to hold your life raft. Life raft is a pretty dramatic description of the whole dynamic and another blatant misrepresentation of what was really going on; safety raft fits better. You may have not noticed that the discussion stopped focusing on you in a direct manner and shifted to discussing you like a statistic or a category you were lumped into like you were on some sort of backburner. You may feel taken for granted, lied to, and treated like a dumping ground for false promises; provided you are still under the belief that your married man actually would expend that much time and energy to get those kind of results. Does that make you angry? Why? You are the one that changed the rules and destroyed a perfectly comfortable relationship with your misplaced expectations. You are the one that thought you could bypass all the hard work it takes to earn and build a real relationship and simply have that love miraculously projected onto you. You created this whole life raft concept to fill yourself with power and confidence only to use it against yourself and him later. Not only did he never participate in the whole life raft scenario, he never knew it existed.Do you remember in the beginning when you felt great and had those fantasies about how you would end things and how devastated he would be? You wouldn’t have believed me if I told you earlier but maybe you are ready to hear it now. He is not so pathetic that his lies and comfort zone will cause him doom in the end although it’s comforting for you to believe that. He was actually spending the same amount of energy you were but it was on his family. By working, doing yard work, having dinners at home, spending weekends with his wife and kids, he was consistently showing you through his actions where his love was being exercised. Remember, love is an action. You may discount this and believe anyone who lies and cheats can’t possibly be happy but would good would it do to side with the experts? If they (your married man and his wife) were uncomfortable, they would change it. He never tried to determine what would make you happy or try to change you. He accepted you the way you were either because he thought you were amazing, or because it would have required more of his energy not to. He was not capable of feeling the intensity of emotion towards you or share in your pain throughout this experience because 90% of his energy was going towards maintaining and probably even improving what he already had. How can this person feel devastated? I guess he could feel 10% devastated. Before you start feeling like the most low-impact person alive, you need to realize this isn’t personal and I can almost guarantee the last thing he wanted to do was hurt you. Was he acting in your best interests or really respecting your feelings? No, but he doesn’t even give that to his wife and she was the one he married and had kids with. Comparing yourself in any way to his family is absolutely ridiculous because if love from a guy like that was what you wanted, you would already be married to a guy like him. Was it a lie that he was super into you and felt a rush of adrenaline being aroung you? No, but that wasn’t personal either. That was his projection but his projections didn’t go any farther than that. Remember, all he was looking for was some stimulation. You were looking for your worth to be defined by something or someone other than yourself.That dating pool you got out of before you met him consisted of guys like him. He was probably a combination of what you wouldn’t expect: The egotist mixed with a little emotional unavailability and maybe some over eagerness in the beginning to secure the attachment of his wife. You have already graduated from that pool of emotional cripples and the only reason you didn’t spot him was because his primary feeding was already being taken care of enough at home to allow the appearance of a more balanced man. Are you that needy even though you’ve been statistically placed in the needy and desperate group? Lets see, you spent 10% of your time in a relationship that offered no commitment and you didn’t date other people. Even though 90% of your time was spent on a furious race towards stagnation and is considered self-destructive, you do keep yourself pretty well entertained! I mean, that 90% relationship you had with yourself and your inner demons was pretty intense!You’re just pissed at him because he didn’t turn on himself like you did but you realize you’re only projecting again so you don’t act out on that now. You know that you are just angry because growing up requires you to look after your own best interests and you don’t want to have to do that! But you will because you are strong and you want to grow. Unlike a child, you realize you are not deserving of an endless supply of unconditional love from another human. Just like your married man’s wife, providing someone that endless feeding supply is impossible. This is what scared you when you got yourself out of that pool of losers. You correctly disqualied them for that very same thing, but it was much harder to see in yourself. So difficult in fact, you projected it outside of yourself onto an unpretty reality. The kind of love that is endless in its supply comes from the relationship you build with a higher power (this cannot be a human because it is impossible for them to do). It is very important that you work on this relationship because it will determine what you will be able to give to your children later. If you fail to grasp this or believe it is cruel, you will repeat this process over and over again until you grasp it and no longer think it is cruel. Everything else in between (your adult relationships) will have to be earned by you on a daily basis through your actions for the rest of your life. Your married man earned this but where he fell short was that part about not deserving an endless supply of unconditional love. He doesn’t realize he can’t get that from another human so he thinks the problem lies outside of himself(onto his wife) and this feels like a threat so he never had any guilt. Either that, or maybe feeling guilt would have required energy from him. Because his wife couldn’t continually provide him with an endless feed supply, he was comforted by the idea of you securing an attachment to him. You engaged in that "seduction process", which felt very exciting at the time, but now it kind of feels like some foreign parasite your body just killed. This is a cycle he will continue because he never allowed himself to go through the suffering you went through to learn and to grow. You were pretty stupid about it though. Have you ever heard the phrase "the wheel is spinning but the hamster’s dead"? That was you and I’m glad you can laugh about it now.Experts say that having an affair with a married man is actually perpetuating his marriage. This assertion is completely ludicrous because it’s his wife that he’s getting 90% of his fulfillment from, so she is keeping him in the marriage. Me saying this would have felt very threatening to you once that physical relationship was underway but now it feels like a relief. Your role is actually much less important than that because you get less than 10% and you are replaceable. This is not personal. For you to accept that you have a role in keeping this man married would imply that if you left him, he would be unhappy and uncomfortable and wouldn’t be able to get what he needs from his wife. Had you been weak, you probably would have pulled the ultimatum card several times in response to that statement before you realized it wasn’t based on reality. Please, he was slightly uncomfortable maybe when he met you, but nowhere near the kind of unhappiness that would actually propel him to leave. This is a man that is so fearful of change and society wants you to believe that if you left him, he would have the courage to face his demons? So not only are you needy, desperate and pathetic but you are now responsible for his well-being which means that society now designates you his higher power. The false perception our culture continues to enforce damages more than it educates. Lack of this education is why the weaker women weeded themselves out earlier on in this story. This writer’s message became their identified enemy, and I simply could not contribute further to the ferocious guarding of their married man’s life raft. I can’t help them and I actually can’t help you either because I think it’s finally starting to sink in that you are your own rescuer. By the way, there was no outside enemy or any inner enemy emerging within you. We just brought that fear from a less scary place to a safer one and threw out that life raft so you could be weaned slowly, calmly, and constructively. You just need to be boring for awhile although experts want you to think you have some major issues that have to be addressed before you are allowed to come back out and play.Research shows that fear of the unknown is much more terrifying to a person than any real fear that person will accurately identify. This is carried out predictably as a false perception we cling to because we believe that no matter how bad our situation is, the unknown is always going to be worse. It’s actually the opposite. If you don’t believe this occurs on a much larger societal scale, look up how much money movies like Jaws and the Exorcist grossed off of this concept. That is why they were so effective and horrifying. The outside enemy in your case was also the unknown and it was so scary you had to project it outside of yourself onto this other person. This fear was so real and you had brainwashed yourself so well, you almost drown yourself trying to avoid it. This unknown is already here because you ended your relationship and it isn’t so bad; it’s actually a lot better. That married man feels pretty good most of the time too except he won’t ever have the kind of full life and options you have if you continue to earn your place in this world every day like you learned earlier; you don’t automatically become better than him because your out of it now. See, you weren’t too far off in the beginning when you had that whole idea of him being lucky to be with someone with all these options, etc…you just got arrogant about it and expected an unconditional supply of it from him.

Great piece of writing - very elegantly put!