The Most Baffling Post-Betrayal Question: Why Do I Want Sex with My Unfaithful Husband?

Seriously, right? You've found out your husband cheated on you, maybe once, maybe an ongoing affair, maybe multiple affairs. And sure, you're angry. You could take a sledgehammer to his testicles. You could punch him in his stupid face. You're furious. You're devastated. You're...aroused?
It's called hysterical bonding. Hysterical not in the sense that you'll be clutching your belly, which aches from laughter, but hysterical as in a consequence of hysteria.
Hysterical bonding, otherwise known as "why the hell do I want sex with this idiot of a husband", is one of the weirder responses to infidelity. Not weird as in unusual. Weird as in...unexpected. Even unwanted.
I shocked myself when I responded to my husband returning home upon demand (I had confronted him over the phone and told him he either came home now to find me here or came home later to find me gone) by unzipping his pants.
That was not, let's say, my usual greeting even when I didn't want to drive over him with a cement truck.
But there it was.
Over the following weeks, of which I remember very little except that I ate about 1 1/2 pieces of toast and maybe a bowl of soup, cried despondently through the day, stared a lot at the ceiling at 3 a.m. and tried to present a somewhat sane face to the world lest my children be removed from my care, I also found my libido in overdrive.
My husband was, shall we say, pleasantly surprised. He was also as baffled by this as I was.
In hindsight, it was a valuable reconnection during a time when it was abundantly clear how disconnected we'd been. It felt like a rediscovery. I insisted he look in my eyes when we made love (it was the only way I could stop the mind movies). We talked like new lovers. What did you first notice about me? When did you know you were falling in love with me? What's my best feature? and so on.
And then, after months of daily (sometimes more) sex, hysterical bonding suddenly ended. I felt disoriented. Betrayed by my own body. Him? Seriously? What the hell??
Another woman on another betrayal web site (I wish I could remember which and link to it), wrote about her intention to make love to her husband every single day for a year (I think?). And she'd kept to it, their liaisons varying from quickies to slow and sensuous. For her, it was a way of reconnection but also prioritizing her own pleasure.
Women on this site have also written about how reconnecting sexually with their partner was as much as about valuing their own pleasure as rebooting the marriage.
And that's an important consideration. Betrayal can make us feel powerless. Reclaiming sex with our spouse can be a healthy response to that and a way of focusing on our own sexual pleasure.
But it can also be an unhealthy way of trying to lure a wayward husband back. Sex as manipulation.
What's more, it can be unsafe. If your husband has been having unprotected sex with others, you are potentially exposing yourself to sexually transmitted diseases. Even if he says he's used protected (he's a liar, remember?), get tested yourself and use protection.
Like so much of our response to betrayal, it seems the difference between whether hysterical bonding can be a positive way to reconnect with your husband or an experience of manipulation or humiliation, is to check your motives and your expectations.
If you think frequent sex will keep him faithful, you're fooling yourself.
If you think sex will heal your pain, you're wrong.
If he thinks sex means that you've forgiven him, correct him of that delusion.
But, if you each can look at sex as a teensy tentative step toward reconnection, as a way to give and receive pleasure, and as a healthy escape from almost constant pain in the early days, then have at it, you crazy kids.

Riding out the storms

It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one’s life, change the nature and direction of one’s work, and give final meaning and color to one’s loves and friendships
~Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind

When I wrote my book, Encyclopedia for the Betrayed, I had to consider why I was doing it. I'd been picking away at a "survival guide" for years. But none of it was working. Organizing it chronologically didn't work because betrayal doesn't happen in a straight line for a whole lot of us. Dividing it into categories didn't work because there's a whole lot of overlap so it became repetitive. I'd get frustrated and put it aside. And I kept asking myself what my book would contribute to the conversation that wasn't already out there. 
When I hit upon the idea of writing it like an encyclopedia, inspired by one of my favorite books Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by the incredible Amy Krouse Rosenthal, everything fell into place. I had my "how". But more importantly, by then I was also clear about the "why".
I wanted my book to assure readers of two crucial things:
•You are not alone in your pain. 
•You will get through this.
Sure I wanted my readers to have the information to help them with specific concerns – how to avoid pain shopping, how to manage mind movies, what the hell to do about hysterical bonding. But more than anything else, I wanted people to read between every single line these two things: You are not alone. You will get through this.
Because neither of those things feel true when you're going through betrayal hell. You feel so incredibly alone. Surely nobody in the history of the world has felt as gutted as you do, as hopeless. 
And you, by no means, believe you'll get through this.
You believe you'll feel like this forever, don't you? Maybe not completely devastated but sad. You'll carry on but you're convinced that this taint, this sense of defeat will remain with you. 
I told my husband he had "ruined" me. That I was "broken". Which wasn't untrue at that moment. What was untrue, and what I wish I'd known then, was that my broken-ruined stated was temporary. Yes, I was sad. I was deeply wounded. But that too was temporary.
And what I also didn't know then and I even hesitate to write it here because it reeks of self-sacrifice is that out of the rubble that was my life on D-Day, I recreated myself. I recreated my marriage. I recreated my family. My life.
I can hear you already. "But my life was just fine!" you say. "I liked who I was!" you tell me. "I will never feel carefree again!" you insist.
I hear you. I really do. 
And I'm not saying those things aren't true (well, except your life wasn't "fine". Your husband was cheating). I'm glad you like yourself because it will help you remain clear with your boundaries as you're healing from this. So much easier than those whose self-esteem has long been in tatters. And I know how painful it is to realize that you likely will never again just trust that your partner would never hurt you. That's an excruciating truth to accept. It really does change us.
But Kay Redfield Jamison, who has struggled her whole life with bipolar disorder, is right in that it's the storms we weather that shape us. An easy life is never to be confused with a good one. The struggles we have don't only shape us negatively. We get to decide what we do with the bleakness. Consider the mothers who created MADD, the veterans who are demanding appropriate mental health support, Malala who continues to fight to get girls into classrooms. My own daughter, who lives with bipolar disorder, is using her experience to prepare to counsel others with the illness. My mother, who lived 25 years as a recovering alcoholic, never hesitated to get someone struggling with alcoholism to a meeting, long after she'd stopped attending them herself.
Betrayal is excruciating, I know. But without it, I wouldn't have met the incredible women at our retreat 10 days ago – women who dazzled me with their kindness, their humor, their brilliance. I wouldn't have my book, of which I'm enormously proud and grateful to be able to put out in the world. I wouldn't have healed deeper wounds I had around abandonment and self-worth. I wouldn't have this blog. And all of you who, every single day, amaze me when you show up for each other, even when your own hearts are breaking. 
Do I wish I'd never gone through it? It doesn't really matter, does it. I did go through it. My husband went through it and is a more humble, considerate and compassionate man. 
So. Here's what you need to know:
You are not alone.
You will get through this.
I promise. 

The fraught world of post-betrayal sex or "Here's what I know...and it ain't much"

One any given day, my house is filled with my three kids, ages 12 through 17, and a collection of their friends, both male and female, gay and straight. One has to almost wade through hormones in our house. The air crackles with sexual energy. 
Dinner table conversation the other night ran from masturbation to teenage motherhood and the importance of protection ("Abstinence!" insisted my Catholic-schooled husband, who never practiced it much himself). My daughter's boyfriend shook his head in disbelief. "We never have conversations like this at my house," he said, and I wasn't sure whether to feel smug or sheepish.
But while there's plenty of talk about teen sex around our house, there's far less around post-betrayal sex. 
Sex is an arena that, almost nine years after D-Day, seems still dotted with landmines. It has become easier for my husband and I to simply avoid that topic. But, as I know all too well, "easier" can mean avoidant. And avoidant can fast-track us to disengagement and detachment, two signposts on the way to cheating.
That's not to say that I think either of us plans to cheat. It's just to say we should both know better than to ignore our own discomfort.
And sex makes both of us deeply uncomfortable.
It wasn't always this way, at least for me. In fact, I considered my sex life to be a model of agency and maturity and healthy sexuality. I loved sex, which, for me, was within the context of relationships with people I felt safe with and cherished by. I felt comfortable in my body. 
Not too long into my marriage, however, I began to notice that sex with my husband sometimes felt...off. Though it offered up the expected physical pleasure, on an emotional level he sometimes seemed tuned out. Somewhere else. 
I bought Mars and Venus in the Bedroom and tried to get him to read it with me. In very broad strokes, author John Gray outlined the differences between male and female sexual desires. My husband wanted rough-and-ready sex. I preferred soft and slow. I tried to talk with him about achieving some sort of compromise, along the lines of, sometimes we do it your way, sometimes mine. But not much changed.
During that time, I gave birth to one, two, three children. I was exhausted. I became resentful. He worked longer hours. I was lonely. I freelanced part-time and mothered full-time. Sex waned. I talked myself into believing this was what life with three kids and two tired parents was like. Maybe that's true.
I was happy. Mostly. I loved being a mom. My career was going great. I had deeply fulfilling volunteer activities. I had good friends. So I avoided looking too deeply at what didn't feel right. My relationship with my husband.
We all know where this is going, right?
Dec. 10, 1996, the light in my head finally went on. My husband was cheating. My world collapsed.
For six months, I continued to believe he had cheated with one person: his work assistant. I remained baffled by the affair. It didn't add up – she was so incredibly unpleasant and his relationship with her was constantly strained – but I believed him when he said that was the whole story. And then came the day when he told me the rest: He was a sex addict who was in treatment and who had been carrying on secret sexual relationships for the entirety of our relationship before D-Day. His acting out preceded me – though, without being in a committed relationship, it appeared more as just the sex life of a 20-something than the actions of an addict.
That remaining puzzle piece explained so much that had felt wrong in our relationship. It explained my sense of feeling objectified when we had sense (his sex addiction included a lot of porn). It explained his inappropriateness around sex, sometimes making frat-boy-type jokes that to him were funny but to those around us were beyond the pale. It explained my awareness that he was often elsewhere emotionally when we had sex – present in body but not in spirit. Turns out, he needed fantasy to fuel his desire. A real-life wife – and mother of his children – didn't do the job, so to speak. 
Like so many of you after learning about a spouse's affair, my sexual identity was in tatters. I was so confused about our entire relationship – what was real? what was fake? – but especially our sexual relationship. I had believed myself desirable. I had thought of sex as connection. How could I have been so wrong?
At first, I responded with hysterical bonding. For the first time since very early in our relationship, I felt that intense connection through sex. We looked each other in the eyes, we talked and talked and talked. We tried new things. Our passion was unquenchable. 
And then...it was over. For months and even years, we barely touched. 
In the meantime, my husband was in sexual addiction therapy and learning, for the first time, what healthy sexuality looked and felt like. 
I was just trying to hold myself together. It was enough to get through the day. My bed and my pyjamas signalled to my husband that I was closed for busines. I might as well have had a sign around my neck that read, "Leave me the hell alone." 
I began to wonder about leaving. Not the "to hell with you, you bastard" kind of leaving (which, I wholeheartedly support if that's what you want) but an "I want a healthy sexual relationship with someone who doesn't carry the same baggage" kind of leaving. I toyed with the idea of having a no-strings-attached sexual relationship outside of my marriage, feeling somewhat entitled given what my husband had put me through. But I knew I couldn't look myself in the mirror if I was violating my own value system.
Eventually, we found a therapist who specialized in sex. We saw him for about six months and though we might have inched forward incrementally, he ultimately wasn't moving the needle far enough. His most frequent recommendation was "wine time", which too often turned into "whine time" during which we complained about the kids. It sure as hell didn't lead to sex.
Back to a sexual wasteland for a couple of years.
All this time, however, we were rebuilding a marriage. Though I hold that sex is an important part of a marriage, I've come to recognize that it's not necessarily the glue that I'd always thought it was.
Marriages come in all shapes and forms and I felt no less married in a sex-less relationship than I had when we had frequent sex. In fact, I felt more married because we were so committed to making it work.
And then we found our current couples counsellor. 
We continued to try and avoid talking about sex, but she wouldn't let us off the hook. 
She'd gently remind us that we were starting over with sex. Like shy teens, we had to come together in a way that we hadn't before, or at least not for a very long time. She still reminds us that it will feel uncomfortable and embarrassing at times, and she's right. I've had to do a lot of work around my own body image, especially as my former marathoner's body has settled into middle age. Long-gone are the mind movies that tormented me in the weeks and months post D-Day but I realized that I replaced them with a squeamishness around ordinary people sex, as compared to the soft-light beautiful people sex we see on TV and in movies. Both involve somehow imagining that everybody else is having better sex than you. Both involve convincing ourselves that we're somehow deficient: we have rolls, we don't moan loud enough, we accidentally fart. And both take us out of the experience itself and into our heads, where dangerous thoughts roam and threaten our pleasure.
I've learned from one incredible BWC warrior that my own sexual pleasure isn't given to me by someone else but is mine to claim, a lesson I knew in my twenties but that got unlearned in the rubble of D-Day. I've learned that sex is many things – awkward, fun, amazing, uncomfortable – and that I don't need to feel threatened by any of that. The only person who expects me to constantly delight in bed is me. I've learned that, despite my conviction that I had no sexual hangups, I do. We all do.
I'm still learning. So is my husband.
Which is why I'm not sure if have much to offer you beyond my own story about where I am right now: A middle-aged woman who's realizing that another chapter of her sex life is still being written. 

Taking a Dive...Into Risk

Our marriage counsellor wants me to consider taking risks.
Sure, I said. I'll jump out of a plane. I'll summit Everest. I'll eat deep-fried maggots.
Unfortunately, those aren't the risks he's talking about.
He's talking about something far more frightening. Far more likely to end in tears.
He wants me to consider trusting my husband again.
Ack!
Specifically, he wants me to engage in intimacy with my husband.
Now...and this is likely way too much information for some of you. In which case, put your hands over your eyes and hum the tune Yankee Doodle Dandy until I get past the personal stuff.
But my husband's and my sex life has been somewhat...sporadic. As in almost never.
It wasn't always like this. In fact, it was rarely like this.
Even post-disclosure – particularly post-disclosure – we were like caffeinated rabbits. I learned later it's called hysterical bonding. But whatever it's called, it's a whole heap of fun if you can prevent the occasional sobbing or urge to plunge a knife into your cheating husband's back. 
But then I came to my senses.Or perhaps I lost my senses. I'm still not sure. All I know is that, as quickly as hysterical bonding arrived, it packed its bags and hasn't been seen since.
In its place? Reading in bed. Working in bed. But very, very little sex in bed. At least not with my husband. Or with anyone else whose name isn't the same as my own (if you get what I'm saying...).
But now my marriage counsellor (and, incidentally, my husband) wants to change all that.
Admittedly, I wouldn't mind changing it, too. At least in theory.
But when I consider what it would entail...
Actually trusting that my husband won't decimate my soul once again. That he'll cherish my heart and my loyalty. That he is, in actual fact, being faithful to me and I won't end up with genital warts.
Well, all that seems like an enormous leap of faith that looks an awful lot like vulnerability to me.
And vulnerability isn't my strong suit these days. (Ha!)
I'm pretty darn good at cynicism. I'm a master at worst-case scenarios. And I've become adept at keeping my heart (and private parts) under wraps.
But, as MC explains it, there's no change without risk.
We can keep on keeping on (and keeping our clothes on). Or I can take a risk.
MC offers up this metaphor:

If someone is afraid of the water, we don't simply suggest she never wade in. Instead, we offer to let her go slowly. To wade in on her own terms. To maybe splash around in the shallow part for a bit. And then, when she feels as though she can trust those around her to not let them drown, she takes a dive.

I get it. I know I'm the fearful swimmer. And, apparently, I'm being asked to take a dive.
Gulp.
I remind myself that my fear is based on what happened. It is the product of memory, which focuses on the past. As MC says, there are no guarantees. Except that, without trying, he can guarantee that nothing will change. Trying to impose the past on the present will never wipe out the threat of being hurt.
Only facing that fear with risk...and achieving trust.
Ack...

Hysterical bonding or Why do I want sex with my unfaithful husband?

It's called "hysterical bonding" though there's nothing particularly funny about it. It refers to the surprisingly common phenomenon following discovery of a spouse's adultery to suddenly crave sex with that person morning, noon and night. I confess (TMI coming...this is your warning), I gave my husband a blow-job within a half-hour of learning he'd cheated on me.
WTF?? At the time, it seemed I was like a dog staking out my territory. We then proceeded to put Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's honeymoon shenanigans to shame with the sheer quantity and variety of our love-making.
Then, as quickly as it appeared, it vanished, leaving a shaking, incoherent, grief-stricken me...wondering what the hell that was all about. And, by the way, ewwwww...
According to the experts, many couples dealing with infidelity engage in hysterical bonding, in part as a path toward intimacy and reconciliation. While there's still a LOT of work to be done, it does get the ball rolling – so to speak. :)
It can leave the betrayed spouse feeling bewildered and perhaps betrayed by her own body. "How can I want him?" we ask ourselves.
Part of it, of course, is about taking back what we feel is ours. It's a primal thing, kinda like clubbing him on the head and dragging him back to our cave (the clubbing on the head part is very tempting. Refrain.). At the same time, it can also be our way of soothing ourselves. Betrayal is traumatizing by anyone's estimation. And with trauma comes a primal way of seeking comfort. It can seem very disconcerting to be seeking comfort in the arms of the very person who betrayed us. But, if reconciliation is even on your radar, it makes sense to turn to that person.
Whatever the reason, it's a reality for many couples. There seems no harm in it with one caveat:
Use protection, i.e. a condom. This guy might swear he always used them during his affair(s). Or that they only kissed. Whatever, as my 11-year-old might say. Your husband isn't exactly the Dalai Lama at this point in time so I wouldn't trust a whole lot of what he says. The only way to be sure he's "clean" is testing. In the meantime, protect yourself.