The appeal of a married man...

I was speaking to a real estate agent I work with today - a single mum in her fifties who was married for twenty years, successful in her own right, physically active, and her secret passion is to have sex with married men.

For her, the appeal is that she can have unbelievable sex without all the baggage. She now realises what she 'settled' for with her husband, and now can enjoy the fun, the sensuality, the lust and the passion without it ever waning, because the thrill of 'his' unavailability is electrifying. There's the chance of getting caught with no repercussions to her own status. He's the one who will lose out - lose the respect of his family, his wife, his peers and possibly his financial status, where as she's the one who can walk away and move onto the next. There's no love, just lust, and once that lust turns to something more, she just moves on.

It seems a little heartless for those who feel sex should be with someone you at least respect, admire and care for deeply, but I guess that's the difference between having 'sex' and 'making love.' There is no romance in just sex, no sweeping off your feet, no sentimentality or intimate conversation. Sex is just two bodies 'bumping uglies' to get to the big bang.

Then there's those who innocently fall for a married man because he is everything they want in a man - the intimacy, the mutuality, the love making, the reciprocity, the excitement and the romance only to be torn by the morality of knowing that he can't completely be yours because he has another life with his wife and children. In Australia, the statistics are around 60% of all marriage break-ups are because the woman initiated it, 35% are a mutual decision and only 5% of all marriage break-ups are men initiated it.  Men can't cope with changing their dynamic. They would rather live with the mundaneness of their marriage, find some excitement on the side and stay for the ride. But when their wives find out about their indiscretions, they lose all trust in their relationship and there is no turning back. Their marriage will never be the same.

Wives are funny people though. There are two types - those who accept their husband's indiscretions as just sex that they haven't been offering their husbands anyway, and happy to live with the lie for the sake of maintaining the family harmony, and those who don't accept any indiscretions and blatantly tell their husbands to leave. But when the first type of wife discovers that her husband is having an intimate relationship that involves more than just sex, but in reality a second life that involves everything from knowing their financial details and concerns, friendship, companionship, their every movement, their family bonding times, their work schedule, their doctor's appointments and even being introduced to mutual friends, then wouldn't it be fair to say that the wife would consider herself superseded and any trust, love, intimacy and mutuality is completely gone and that there is no point continuing the marriage, not even for the family?

You can't help who you fall in love with, but you can help who you have sex with. I'm not for or against either case, but I am 'for' mutual happiness, and if a marriage or any relationship for that matter, isn't happy consistently, then, for me, there is no point in continuing it. Life is too short to live in sadness...