Midlife extra marital affairs

The incidence of extra-marital affairs can be quite common during this phase of life.  Affairs are loaded with romanticism, morality, mythology and intense emotions.  They are not really about sex, but about pain, fear and the desire to feel alive.  They are also about betrayal.  The meaning of the midlife affair is to go back and pick up what was left behind in one's development.  What remains unconscious is projected on to the third party.  What is sought is wholeness.  But try explaining all this to a person in love.  Yes, the other in the affair may in fact prove to be a wonderful person, the true soul mate.  If he or she did not have some of "that quality" the projection would not have occurred in the first place.  If the new liaison survives, then one may have integrated something missing in the first stage of adulthood.  Or one has been very lucky.  Or one is in for a very large disappointment.
Many people say "I can talk to you but I can't talk to my spouse".  In reality one can probably talk more to one's spouse than a relative stranger can.  Perhaps, it is rather that the marital conversation has become so encrusted with inhibition, repetition and disappointment that one has given up hope of truly connecting with the ordinariness of one's spouse.  However, the affair embodies the projection of the under-developed parts of one's self.  It therefore requires a work of enormous will on the part of the participants to pull back from the affair and bring those missing parts, those unattempted conversations, back to the original partnership.
Even though you may not be the person who had the extra-marital relationship it is important that you take joint responsibility for the state of the marriage.  It is never one person's fault.  It is important to ask yourself what part did you play in the failure of your marriage?  Sometimes conflicts arise when a partner is too busy with his or her own work, with the children or the housework and the husband, or the wife is sidetracked and does not listen.  We all like to be listened to, to share our thoughts with our partner be it about work,  games, politics or our health.
If the two people in the marriage are willing to become separate people again and dialogue with each other about that separateness, then it is possible to reconstitute the marriage.  The paradox is that for marriage to be unified there must first be greater separateness.  Each person must become more of an individual before there can be a transformation of the relationship.  A marriage can only be as good as, or at the level of, the two persons in it. 
The transformation of marriage at midlife, then involves three necessary steps, on the basis that both agree that they want to save the relationship.
* The partners must assume responsibility for their own psychological well being.
* They must commit to sharing the world of their own experience without reproaching the other for past wounds or future expectations.  Similarly, they have to endeavour to hear, without feeling defensive, the experience of the person.
* They must commit to sustain such a dialogue over time.
These three steps ask a great deal.  But the alternative is that marriages limp along or dissolve.  Radical conversation is what a long-term commitment is about.  Only radical conversation, the full sharing of what it is like to be me while hearing what it is really like to be you, can fulfil the promise of an intimate relationship.  One can only engage in radical conversation if one has taken responsibility for oneself, has some self-awareness and has the inner strength to cope with a genuine encounter with your partner.