Affair Type 1: Accidental Affair

Many of these happen simply because circumstances put two people together and in part due to the fact that so few people understand enough about affairs to prevent them from happening. No one came on to the other, there was not any flirtation at the beginning of the relationship and maybe even not a great deal of attraction between the affair partners. Neither was really looking for anything at all.

While many of these are the result of alcohol, circumstances or other mitigating factors like long periods away from home with a coworker of the opposite sex, they are really the result of missing or poor boundary types of things. As an example, it is sometimes necessary for a man and woman travel for business together. Often times these trips will require meetings with clients AND without the clients in order to discuss specifics of the business at hand.

The problem starts when these “off line” meetings begin to take place in a quiet restaurant or even worse, a private motel room. If the meeting starts over dinner, moves to the motel bar, involves a bit of consumption of drinks that lower selective reasoning and then moves on to the motel room it is really a recipe for disaster.

What many don’t realize is that simply working together on a project, communicating about things that the two people share a common passion about and without it even being personal information that is being shared, they are allowing a relationship to form that at some level deep inside that part of the brain that does not deal with logic but purely with emotion. As the situation continues, unless prevented by one or both from going beyond the strictly business phase, the two people start to GET something from each other that triggers a pleasure response in the brain that feeds them a reward on a level they can’t even put a name to.

Once this point is reached it becomes almost entirely a matter of the will to turn and walk away from the friendship that is beginning to develop. Neither one might be particularly vulnerable, both might have good marriages by their own descriptions and the thought of even considering cheating might never have crossed their minds. However, the feelings the pleasure centers of their brains are feeding them are something they begin to want more of. Two people can actually fall in love with each other and begin to desire being together more and more with absolutely no sexual attraction being present.

At this point, the bond becomes an addiction as chemicals in the brain start taking control of actions and unless something has been done to prevent the whole chain of events from continuing, falling in love or simply giving in to unmet needs that result from being away from the spouse at the time can be almost overwhelming.

The affair isn’t a destination anyone was headed when the whole trip began. It is rather the road that the potential affair partners are on that causes this type of affair. It might be a ONS based entirely on lusts and unmet needs of the moment or it could be falling in love with that cute guy or girl at the office that is the net result of accidental infidelity. It is an accident because neither one was looking for anything at all when it began and neither had any intention of even getting involved personally with each other.