Exit Affairs: Gifts that keeps on hurting

When cheaters use affairs as a way of leaving your marriage, it carries with it an extra helping of rejection. Exit affairs are  a rejection of the marriage and of you.The cheater not only walks away, but does so with an added amount of force.

Using an affair in exiting your marriage adds a certain ‘coup de grace‘ or twisting of the knife to the whole situation. (Coupe de Grace’ is a French term for the ‘blow of mercy’ used in ending a life to end the victim’s suffering). Using an affair with intentional extreme acts for the sole purpose of exiting your marriage carries with it a rejection at a very deep level.

The exit affair is typically planned to be so heinous that there is no way that you would take them back. They are intentionally painful. They are often designed to hurt and be morally reprehensible. The exit affair amounts to a poison pill that hurts you if you take them back.

A reader recently wrote describing and incident where the cheater took selfies of them and the lover performing sexual acts in the marriage bed. The cheater then sent the pictures to his betrayed spouse. She was shattered by what he did.

Being sent selfies in such a manner is a ‘STRONG‘ message of rejection. In this case, the photos were a rejection of the spouse and their marriage. It is also a strong rejection of the sanctity of their marriage bed.

The twisted irony is that those using exit affairs in this manner often have issues with leaving people. They create situations where they are hated rather than facing up and owning up to them choosing to leave a relationship. For them, having to be honest about choosing to leave a relationship would leave them vulnerable.

Rather than face such vulnerability and honesty, which could open the door of their heart, they engage in an act so hurtful, you must consider the option of leaving them. They want to do something so outrageous you feel a compulsion to push them out of your life. To do that, they often do what is  hurtful or disgusting.

In their twisted thinking, it’s easier being booted out than walking out. By using the affair, they’re counting on your rejection of them as a way of ‘justifying’ the affair.

If you get mad at them, they use your anger as a way of indulging in the affair without the associated guilt. They use the hurt of the exit affair and your rejection of them as a way of propelling them into the arms of their lover.

They play ‘poor me’,  make claims about how you ‘hate them’ and don’t understand them. Since they did something so outrageous in forcing that kind of reaction from you, they’re partially right. Where they’re not honest is that what they did was orchestrate a self-serving crisis.

The cheater is using the emotional centrifugal force of the exit affair as a way of launching deeper into the affair. The lover, since they don’t want to see the cheater hurting, often ‘rescues’ the spurned cheater and takes them in.

By trying to escape the wrath of the spurned spouse, they are able to have a very emotionally intense time without large amounts of guilt. They use the rejection in countering the force of the guilt.

The whole process involves twisting emotions and emotional reactions in ways they were never intended.

I mention the exit affair now since over the holidays, some cheater are looking for a way out of their marriage. The weasel way of getting out is using an exit affair. They’re counting on and expecting a reaction from you to make their plan work.

Since exit affairs are intentionally filled with high drama, you’re likely to experience affair trauma reactions.

I talk about Affair Trauma a lot in my video “Dealing With Affair Trauma”. You’d be surprised how many solutions there are. Download it here. Link

Best Regards,

Jeff