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Marital relationships are tricky, as the human mind searches for happiness, sometimes outside the marriage. Here’s looking at why extramarital affairs end.
Extramarital affairs. If life were perfect you wouldn’t get into one, you would think. To be honest, even when life is almost perfect, people find themselves rowing the boat of an extramarital affair. So, why does it happen to the best of the people?
The reasons may vary. More than boredom, it is the excitement and thrill of feeling romantic love once again. If lucky, things could get passionate and you might have the best of both the worlds. Both worlds, where one is shaky and the other sheer.
A lot has been written about why such affairs happen but the same cannot be said about why extramarital affairs end. Here are 6 important reasons why extramarital affairs end.
Contrary to what people might sum up, extramarital affairs definitely have an agenda behind them. There are gaps in the current relationship that people seek to fill. The thought first originates in the mind and after it gathers momentum, it sees the light of the day.
For most people it is the thrill of a new person coupled with the attention they receive that gets under their skin. The agenda is simple. This is just a stop gap to meet certain immediate needs, be it emotional or physical. Those that profess undying love are just being polite. It is actually just a need that has to be met.
People that enter an extramarital relationship do so with the idea of escaping their boring reality. They assume that a new person would bring freshness to their mundane existence.
Well, the newness does arrive, albeit for a very short time. The two people in this set up end the newness pretty fast due to inability of waiting for things to take their own course. They hurry up things wanting to gauge what the end result would look like.
During this journey from freshness to the mundane, familiarity creeps in. Talk about problems creeps into the conversations, which makes it unromantic. When they find the path to be treading along lines similar to their real life, they choose to break away.
As time goes by and the mundane sets in, interest levels decrease. After all, everyone carries a baggage that they are looking to unpack. Calls become few, texts go unanswered, dates are never planned and excuses lead the way.
When the agenda is not being met, why would anyone with a family hang on? There is someone at home to fall back on, someone that is in the dark about this affair. Someone that has had your back since ages.
Now, no married man would leave his wife and kids for another married woman. He would not want to step out of his comfort zone. When demands on time increase, fights begin and seals the fate of the relationship. This was not on the agenda after all.
Fights are a part and parcel of every marriage. But they are never on the agenda of an extramarital affair. When demands on time and attention are not met, nagging begins and cools the diminishing flames of the once hot clandestine relationship.
When there are more fights and less intimate moments, the purpose of the relationship is lost and the the verdict becomes clear.
In every relationship, one person loves more than the other. Now, this love might just be an attachment or a kind of obsessive fixation. What happens is that when a partner bestows extra attention and too much care on the other partner, it stifles them to the extent that they begin to detest it.
Gradually, the newness fades away, revealing the reality which is obviously not rosy.
As the seasons change so do the feelings. An extramarital affair is one that is supposed to provide for all that lacks in your primary relationship. For a short while the best foot works well, but soon the real picture dawns, calling it curtains on such relationships.
The hunt for the next person is on. The hunt is always on and each stay short lived.
The missing spark or the lost zing are amongst some of the reasons why people embark on such journeys. More importantly, to satisfy the ego that others still find them desirable and attractive.
Whether one should indulge in extramarital affairs or not is for another time and topic. For now all that can be said is that such experiences tend to weigh heavily upon your mind, for sometime resulting in mental chaos.
Yes, there is always a reason why such relationships end and now you know it.
Published here earlier.
Header image is a composite of stills from the movie Rustom
Kavita Panyam is a Counseling Psychologist by profession and a Freelance writer by passion. She
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