Case study: Affair fills the space in a marriage

Christina met her first lover who affirmed her autonomy, her attractiveness, her life apart from her husband.  The affair also showed how the period of one’s life as well as real or imagined inadequacies in a marriage can combine, again with opportunity, to set the scene for an affair for a woman as well as for a man. Sex became more infrequent after the first child and she thought it might well be over for her but her first affair confirmed that it was her relationship with her husband that was conspiring to make her feel sexually inadequate, not her sexuality. For her, affairs became a way of filling the gap between her husband and herself.  Each affair filled an ever-yawning marital gap, not only a gap about sex but about support, intimacy and friendship.