Always want to be in love

Read the book, Emotional Infidelity: How to Affair-Proof Your Marriage and 10 Other Secrets to a Great Relationship by Gary Neuman.

He tells how to not have emotional affairs, how to deal with people that try to draw you away from your spouse, on purpose or unwittingly.

It sounds like you have boundary issues, and have a difficult time making it clear to men that you aren't interested for the sake of sparing their feelings, and also of course you like their attention.

You may want to get with a relationship coach? to set up scenarios of being in these situations and practicing how you will extract yourself by being polite, but firm. The more you visualize, and also practice it, the more you will be able to actually do it when the time comes.

sweety04 wrote:Hi,

I am a lady who is 26 yrs old married for 6 yrs now...i have had a troubled childhood, where my father alwys tried to abuse my sexually and my mother had illicit relationships with a lot of men, so i married soon and got settled in life....i love my husband a lot but still i fall in love with so many other men. ...at work i am attracted to men and i manage to get their attention and we have an affair ..though it doesnt lead to bed and i have not slept with any other man...but still i want to text, call and always be missed and always be loved by someone or the other...my husband also loves me a lot,,,,but i am always craving for new love.....my husband doesnt know anything about my relationships...i dont know whether it is normal or i have a disorder....but i want to come out of it and live my life normally as a happily married wife..please advise...

I'm curious as to how you manage to prevent these "affairs" going further? Don't the men expect something more than just the calling and texting? How do these "affairs" end?

It is really interesting and fantastic that you have, yourself, identified this behaviour as abnormal. Many people don't, they don't have the awareness that what they are doing is wrong, and they simply say "I am just playing or having fun". You know that this behaviour is wrong. It seems like a great starting point.

Do you for instance always make sure you look your sexy best? make-up? Short skirts? To get that extra bit of male attention, high heels as well? If you do ask yourself why you do this?

Your father was horrible to you. That link of fatherly love and support is broken; there will seem for a long time something that is broken in you. That can only be fixed with external, male attention, at the moment.

If you do this on your own, it can take years, read every book you can get your hands on pop-psychology, Freud, Jung, Deepak chopra, Buddhism, emotional intelligence....but do you really have that time to potentially mess up a great marriage?

A trained counsellor has studied, understands your issues and can take you to self-awareness quicker than anyone. If you are committed it will be a fantastic roller coaster until the day you really can smile from your heart, with no demons lurking in your psyche and behaviour

sweety04 wrote:Santa fe, I feel u have really understood me and my problem.....ur not exagerating on my issue and give good adivse...please tell me what to do now...cant i stop this by not getting into any type of counselling...i dont want to make it big am scared it would affect my family life with i dont want to loose at any cost.....please help me

Sweetie, there is no magic pill and and this is not a problem that you can just decide to think about differently and make go away. you are talking about primary drives and motivations being in direct conflict with what you know is right and what you want for your life and your family and it's causing you to be in a state of high anxiety and inner turmoil. you're trying to fill a big hole in your core self, caused by childhood trauma and lack of proper parenting and role models, with the attention, adoration, acceptance, validation you get from these other men. It's amazing to me that you have been able to limit it to emotional involvements.

from the psychodynamic perspective (freud), you are being driven by the id (the pleasure principle) but you seem to have a well developed superego (conscience, social conformity, ego ideal) that keeps you from stepping across the line so to speak. but your ego is not moderating between the id and superego as it should. the ego is supposed to figure out how to reduce the drives in a way that is acceptable to the superego but also congruent and satisfying to your real self (whole integrated personality). in most HPDs the id just runs the show and if the superego is present at all it only surfaces momentarily before being pushed back to the unconscious by defensive mechanisms (repression, denial, projection). but since you seem to be functioning in that sense a good therapist can probably help with ego development by working through the issues that kept it from developing properly early in life.

you must have had some influential person in your life that provided social learning and acted as a role model- am i right about that? anyway, you must heed what EVERYONE is telling you here. this is not something that's going to get worked out with a self-help book. get yourself an appointment with an excellent therapist immediately, and don't settle for one of the feel-good counselor types. you need to roll up your sleeves and get to the hard work ahead. it's the only way. do it now.

Santa fe,

Are u a therapist???