By Ogova Ondego
Published March 20, 2023

To prevent one from getting involved in an affair, the counsellors advise that one should beware of any major change event--death of a family member or friend, extensive travel,depression or elation, children all in school or or gone from the home--that alters one's psychological or spiritual balance and makes one long for deep emotional caring.If the opportunity presented itself, would you allow another wo/man to draw your emotions away from your spouse? Put bluntly, would you have an affair, an entanglement or an inappropriate relationship?

Come on.

“If you are spending energy, time, and money on a relationship with another [wo/man] instead of your [spouse]–no matter how innocent that relationship may appear–you are in an affair,” relationships counsellors Jim and Sally Conway write in Women in Midlife
Crisis.

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Though the entire engagingly written book running 470 pages is useful, I zero in on the Foreword, the Preface and chapters 1, 15,16,17,18 and 19 that look at definitions, keeping up with the life’s clock, answering life’s questions, preventing a crisis, helping a woman in crisis and blooming at midlife.An affair is a romantic or passionate attachment, usually of a limited duration, in which one’s emotions are continually shifting away from one’s partner to the person one fancies. Though it need not be sexual to qualify for an entanglement, it more often than not lead to that.

To prevent one from getting involved in an affair, the counsellors advise that one should beware of any major change event–death of a family member or friend, extensive travel,depression or elation, children all in school or or gone from the home–that alters one’s psychological or spiritual balance and makes one long for deep emotional caring.

They list and discount six misconceptions that people justify to get into an affair:

  • Everyone’s doing it
  • It is possible to separate sex and love
  • An affair will meet the need caused by loneliness
  • Affairs are fun
  • At least we have discovered the real thing
  • An affair will strengthen my marriage.

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But just why is an affair so appealing?

Thanks to the internet, the smartphone, social media chat rooms, shifting moral values and the sexual stimuli, visual turn-ons and sex without commitment messages that have saturated today's world, an affair is now within everyone's reach.Thanks to the internet, the smartphone, social media chat rooms, shifting moral values and the sexual stimuli, visual turn-ons and sex without commitment attitude that have saturated today’s world, an affair is now within everyone’s reach.

What is wrong with you getting involved in at least one affair?

“An affair is an illegitimate relationship that is unhealthy emotionally and spiritually for everybody involved, ” the Conways conclude in Women in Midlife Crisis.

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