Jeff's story is a case in point. It began when a business associate flirted with him. "Here's this attractive young lady," explains Jeff, "who finds me attractive. That's pretty heady stuff. It's hard not to be flattered and respond in kind. Of course I never expected it to go as far as it did."

I ask Jeff if he felt especially vulnerable to an affair. "My wife is not only my lover," he says, "but my best friend. Yet we were in a time in our lives that was rather traumatic. Because of a job change, she was less available. I had much more time alone, and much more access to this other person." Jeff also believes that midlife played a part. "I was feeling used-up, unattractive--like all the good times were behind me," he says.

Jeff says the affair developed slowly and imperceptibly but always with another compromise on his part. "I kept drawing lines and saying 'I won't cross this line, but I'll get right up to the edge.' But you just keep crossing the line, and pretty soon you're over your head."

Jeff says he feels lucky to have escaped in time to save his marriage and family, but the affair did cost him a job and important friendships.

Jeff has a warning for midlifers who use affairs to deal with their midlife blues. "Having an affair will lift you out of the doldrums very quickly," he says. "But when you fall again--and you will fall--you'll go down much further than before. It's simply not worth it."

"I can remember the day when it hit me," he says. "It was months after I had broken off any physical contact with this person. It struck me one day that I didn't know her--that I never knew her--that the person I thought I loved so intensely didn't exist. She lived only in my mind." Jeff says it was then that he finally became emotionally free from his affair. "Because then I realized when I had these feelings--despite all my efforts not to--of loving someone other than my wife, I realized that the person no longer had a name."

Jeff says that he now believes he had been in love with only the feeling of love, and that he read into the other person what he wanted to see there. And she had done the same. "What happens is that reality finally destroys the fantasy," he says.

"This illusion that this special person can fill all my empty places, can meet all my needs, would have worn away. Because in reality no one can do that."

Excerpts from columnist Mike Bellah, PhD
The Amarillo Daily News