You can't drop the word "affair" without cueing an entire fully-staffed circus of assumptions and images and ideas about what that means. You've already got images of Britney Spears with a python around her neck trying to seduce Bill Nye the Science Guy, and I'm here to say while that's mildly amusing, it perpetuates some damaging stereotypes. Let's roll a grainy, 1950s film strip of a dude in a lab coat who's going to clue us in on things you need to know before you read any further.
1) Not all affairs are about sex.
--It's true, though we're not all raised to believe this. The very first time I ever heard about anyone having an affair, it was the choir director of the church where I grew up* having an affair with a member of the choir. It was shocking! It was sordid! It happened while his wife was dying of cancer, and was too medically fragile to move from her bed, and the choir director was mad with grief and desperate for human connection! Nobody said that last thing, obviously-- they were too busy shunning him and running him out of the church for extra-marital relations. I bet the choir director felt like absolute shit about himself for this affair. He was not free-floating in a haze of lust and post-orgasmic self righteousness. His affair was not about sex, but about relief from grief. Affairs can be about a lot of things.
2) An affair with an authority figure might not be an affair at all.
--It might be abuse. It's clear that it's abuse when the authority figure is an adult, and the object of attention is a minor. But what if the authority figure is an adult-- a doctor, say-- and the object of attention is a patient? What if it's an adult therapist and an adult client? What if it's an adult priest and an adult parishioner? This is where it gets muddier, and more details are necessary, but I'm starting to read more and more about this and while I will never excuse myself from fault in this situation because I don't believe that's honest, GODDAMN wouldn't it have been wonderful to have had a priest who was properly boundaried and educated on the ethics of when to end pastoral care for the safety of all involved? My own affair was not something I sought out and not something I wanted, but it's a doorway I walked through because of issues in my past. There's lot for me to untangle there, even with the years of therapy I've been in, and for me, untangling that means writing about it, in this space.
3) Talking about affairs isn't always an attention thing or a revenge thing.
-- Obviously, it can be, and quite honestly who am I to judge the motives behind either? I'd be inclined to say that talking for any reason about anything upsetting or life-altering is a way of circling the drain on trying to get to healing, if healing is down in the pipes and we're not sure how to get there but know we need to process and integrate and go with the flow of what processing looks like in the moment, so that we can eventually dump out into the ocean and realize that every single one of us humans makes mistakes-- sometimes terrible, awful mistakes-- but we still deserve love and acceptance.
4) Affairs can be traumatic.
--I mean this in the clinical sense of what it means to undergo trauma. Affairs can literally cause a trauma response in the brain, and they can be a source of PTSD. More about this later on, but this is certainly how my own affair presents itself in my life, and the direction my work with my therapists has taken.
*Note that this affair also took place in a church. Watch this space, in other words. This is a thing that happens ALL THE TIME.
Image description: A worn-out bumper sticker on a dented car says "Please don't hit me-- I'm not 100% sure about my coverage."
Image credit:"Sunsetting in Rearview Mirror, South Dakota" by Arthur Chapman is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/?ref=openverse.
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