About a year and a half ago, my wife — whom I’ve been married to for forty years — had an affair. It took me about six months to actually figure out what was going on.
I’m in my early sixties. She’s about thirteen years older than me. And I will say this plainly: this was the last thing I saw coming from a seventy five year old woman. In fact, marrying an older woman was something I once believed would insulate me from this kind of behavior.
For the better part of fifteen years, we had what I would call a sexless marriage. Not for lack of trying on my part — there was just rejection. I had essentially placed her somewhere on the spectrum between Nurse Ratched and Mother Teresa when it came to sexuality. So the idea that she would suddenly have what she described as a kind of “twin-flame” romantic awakening was, to put it mildly, unexpected.
After reading Esther Perel and others, I realized this kind of thing is not nearly as uncommon as I thought.
What Affairs Actually Do
The biggest problem with affairs is that they rob a couple of a future.
The minute erotic energy gets directed elsewhere, something fundamental breaks. The attachment that holds two people together fractures. And in my case, it didn’t help that my wife was completely unable to honestly disclose what had happened.
She oscillated between gaslighting me — telling me I was overreacting — and minimizing the affair whenever that didn’t work. What it felt like, in practice, was that she was trying to negotiate a new deal: keep the marriage, but redefine its terms.
She wanted to continue our trips, our shared meals, our intellectual companionship — but have entirely separate sex lives. And those, she emphasized, would be none of each other’s business.
In theory, you could frame that as something out of 19th-century France — the mistress model. In practice, it doesn’t work. Not even close. The mistress model worked because women had no rights in the 19th century.
Applying a Business Lens to Marriage
I come from a startup background. I’ve had two successful exits and more than my share of disasters — including a business partner who were less than honest. So I’m not unfamiliar with betrayal, or with evaluating whether something is salvageable.
I applied that same thinking to my marriage.
A few days after I found out — after returning from France, where I keep a second home — I confronted her. First came the denial. Then I presented proof. Then came partial admissions, calibrated to what she thought I already knew.
Finding out your spouse is cheating on you feels a lot like discovering a business partner is being unethical. There’s disbelief, then anger, then a kind of cold clarity.
My terms were simple: end the affair, go to counseling, and try to rebuild intimacy. Which, in practical terms, meant re-dating each other from scratch.
The answer was no.
She had feelings for the other man. She didn’t want a therapist involved. And she suggested that we would “figure it out like adults,” potentially in the form of an open relationship.
I also got a crash course in the metaphysics of “twin flames,” complete with literary references — Balzac in particular.
Affairs and cheating are different
One thing I’ve come to understand is that not all affairs are equal. Lumping everything into the category of “cheating” isn’t very useful.
Watching porn is not the same as having an affair — ditto for going to a strip club. A one-night lapse at a high school reunion is not the same as a sustained emotional and physical relationship involving hotels, secrecy, and ongoing investment. And no that did not happen to me. It is meant to illustrate.
Broadly speaking, affairs, which have a repeat quality to them, fall into two categories.
The first is what I would call a replacement affair. This is when someone is looking to exit the marriage and find a new partner. There’s a strategy to it. It may not be moral, but it’s understandable. In some cases — especially in abusive situations — it’s even a path to survival. It is most often used by women in abusive relationships.
Replacement affairs typically begin when one spouse is deeply unhappy in the marriage. Their appeal lies in the hope that falling in love again might offer an escape — or even a substitute — for that unhappiness.
The second is what I would call an experiential affair. This is about stimulation. Novelty. Dopamine. The person has no intention of leaving their marriage — they just want something more, something different, on the side.
Experiential affairs are often born out of boredom. The thrill of falling in love again lets the cheating partner rediscover a version of themselves they thought time had taken away. More often than not, they are a rebellion against the monotony of marriage and the routine of daily life. Older women can be particularly vulnerable to this dynamic, as can younger men weighed down by too much family responsibility.
The first is a strategy. The second is a fantasy.
My wife’s situation falls squarely into the second category. There is no future there. It’s a closed loop designed for emotional and sexual stimulation.
And that creates an unsolvable problem: she wants a relationship without commitment from him, and commitment without a relationship from me.
When the Game Changes
Within a month of discovering my wife’s affair, something unexpected happened. As I was trying to cope with the shock and the pain, someone very special from my teenage years reappeared in my life. What began as a simple exchange — messages, memories, a kind of mutual consolation — gradually deepened.
That correspondence led to a meeting in Paris. And from there, it quickly turned into a love affair of my own.
She made me extremely happy. The relationship was passionate, intimate, and alive in a way I hadn’t experienced in decades. For the first time in a very long while, I found myself pulled back into the kind of romance I thought belonged only to youth — the intensity, the anticipation, the feeling of being completely present with someone again.
But there was a fundamental difference. My affair fell into the first category. I wasn’t looking for stimulation — I was looking for safety. A replacement. A way out of what increasingly felt like an abusive dynamic.
It’s a hard thing to accept, but being married to someone caught in an experiential affair can feel a lot like being married to a drug addict or an alcoholic. You may still love them on some level, but what they’re doing is so self-destructive — and so corrosive to the marriage — that staying begins to hurt more than leaving. At some point, out of self-preservation, you’re forced to make a choice: to let them go, even knowing it may lead them further down that path. And yes, it does hurt to let someone you love go, even when their behavior is abusive, and has been for decades.
Interestingly, my wife initially encouraged me to have an affair — but only the second kind —an experiential affair. Something casual. Something contained. Something that wouldn’t threaten the structure of our marriage. It was acceptable as long as it remained purely sexual — something she could understand. A parallel fantasy, contained and without consequence.
What she did not want was for me to find someone real. Because that would put the entire arrangement — our shared life, our future — at risk.
The Reality of “Open” at This Stage of Life
There’s a lot of talk about open relationships these days. And for some people, they may work — particularly when both parties genuinely want that structure. There’s even an entire polyamory subculture being promoted as a solution to the frustrations of monogamous life — though to me, it feels more like a kind of living hell than a remedy.
But that’s not what this was.
What my wife wanted was to keep the marriage for companionship and stability, while outsourcing sex and romance to third parties.
Fifteen years ago, she effectively negotiated a sexless marriage. Now she was proposing consensual non-monogamy.
Deep down, my wife still operated from a fundamentally monogamous mindset — but one where sexual exclusivity had been shifted to the affair partner rather than the spouse. In that framework, if I were to have a purely casual relationship outside the marriage, it would dilute any remaining claim I had to intimacy within it. In a sense, it would “balance things out” on her terms.
The sex market for older people
Here’s the reality, especially at our age: the sexual partner market doesn’t work symmetrically.
A married woman can relatively easily find a married man for an affair. Most men will not turn down the advances of a women, if they are unhappy at home.
Affairs between married people are inherently volatile, because once exposed, they tend to blow up. There’s a kind of “mutually assured destruction” built into them — but at the same time, betrayed spouses can react in unpredictable ways.
However, a married man, in his sixties, will quickly discover that most women are not interested in being a side experience. They are looking for commitment.
A man’s appeal, at that stage, is his ability to commit — not his availability for casual involvement. So the bias plays out differently between the sexes.
Which means that, practically speaking, the only viable path for a man in that position is the first kind of affair — the one that leads somewhere — out of his relationship and into a new one.
An Equation That Doesn’t Balance
What I’ve come to believe is this:
The second type of affair — the “have your cake and eat it too” model — creates a fundamentally unworkable equation. By unworkable, I mean that it does not work for the married couple.
It asks for commitment without intimacy, and intimacy without commitment.
It tries to preserve the structure of a marriage while hollowing out its core.
And in the long run, that simply doesn’t hold.
At some point, the question becomes unavoidable: are you still building a life together, or just maintaining the shell of one? Faced with this dilemma, the betrayed spouse is often left with little choice but to leave the marriage if they want to escape the ongoing harm. And the possibility of finding a suitable companion can be the catalyst that finally makes that decision possible.
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