If you want to support independent women's media, become a Mamamia subscriber . Get an all-access pass to everything we make, including exclusive podcasts, articles, videos and our exercise app, MOVE.

This article is an edited version of one that originally appeared on Avalon's Substack . Sign up here.

I exited my marriage through the gate of an affair.

I met a man I eventually came to love at a meditation retreat, which became the precipitating event that led to the end of my 24-year marriage.

From the outside, my life had followed the traditional arc. I met my husband in college, married in my mid-20s, and built a life organised around stability, dependability, and societal expectations. So when a feeling of distance and flatness took hold in my forties, it never occurred to me to disrupt our life.

Instead, I focused on managing what I was experiencing.

Watch: Why millennials aren't having affairs. Post continues below

0 0

Why millennials aren't having affairs | Mamamia Out Loud

My unease was natural and existential, I believed. I just needed to learn to breathe my way through.

A meditation retreat, oriented toward introspection and self-regulation, seemed an unlikely place for my own reckoning. And yet, through my meeting with this man, my body revealed how deliberately I had trained myself to ignore its signals beneath my determination to cultivate calm.

There was no talk of running off into some imagined happily-ever-after. What unfolded between us was real and mutual, revealing itself slowly over time. In allowing myself to remain in contact with him, I also remained in contact with what was happening in my body.

He drew me out of my measured composure, and long-dormant parts of me followed. For the first time, I allowed myself to surrender — not to fantasy, but to direct experience. Without him, I'm unsure that opening would have happened at all. What emerged were truths I had not reasoned my way into — truths my body had known long before my mind was willing to recognise them.

The choice was not about escape or fantasy. It was about beginning to tell the truth to myself — gradually, and for the first time — about what I had been suppressing to maintain continuity in my life. Being with him made visible the quiet cost of the role I had been playing: the ways I had learnt, over years, to override my body, my desire, and my knowing in service of stability and false virtue.

This experience initiated a slow reclamation of my Self — my body, my desire, my choices as my own.

Over time and through his touch, I came to recognise myself as a deeply sexual, sovereign woman. Claiming my pleasure and my desire was not indulgent; it was revealing. As the weeks and months unfolded, this reckoning exposed my good-girl conditioning and just how narrow the world was that I had been inhabiting — and how devastatingly little I had questioned the ways it had silently shaped me.

From the outside, my life had followed a traditional arc. Image: Supplied.

What followed was the recognition that I had been moving through my life without ever fully occupying it. I had been performing a role that was modelled for me, not consciously chosen. I mistook that performance for responsibility. Much of my energy had gone into managing myself — being thoughtful, self-aware, and regulated.

What I had never known was how to fully feel.

As this came into focus, I began to see that my life — so stable, so coherent — was also profoundly insulated. I had been living inside a narrow emotional bandwidth, buffered from rupture and, with it, from depth. I had no idea I was disappearing. I thought this was adulthood.

What I was actually encountering was something far more ordinary: the fact that we grow, and that the structures that once held us do not always do so indefinitely. Wanting a fuller experience of being alive was not a failure of commitment, but a sign of development. As that understanding settled, it became clear that this was not only personal, but universal. Living fully requires allowing people — and relationships — to change form as growth demands. The cost of resisting that natural evolution is not stability. It is vitality. Creativity. Life force.

Eventually, my body forced a reckoning with what my mind had been circling for years — attempting to manage myself through logic, self-criticism, and regulation, all of which had become increasingly sophisticated forms of anesthesia.

Affairs expose the fault lines running through lives we prefer to believe are secure. You should have just left! Why didn't you just get divorced first?

These judgments function as a convenient shield. They allow us to avoid examining the unstable ground the institution of marriage actually rests upon, and they reveal how little collective capacity we have developed to hold the complex, uncomfortable conversations that arise when bodily truth surfaces.

What I came to understand is how reliably structure overrides truth — not because anyone is cruel or uncaring, but because systems are designed to preserve themselves. Marriage, as a legal and social agreement, is built for continuity and legibility. It rewards staying, even when staying requires contraction. Over time, we learn to call this integrity. What I was actually practicing was allegiance to the structure. The work before me was different: learning how to trust myself, even when that trust asked me to step outside what could be easily justified or approved.

For many people — and certainly for me — telling the truth you are trying to live into is not the first step. Getting clear with yourself comes first: the slow, destabilising work of listening honestly to what you feel and know. Only then does the question of telling the truth to another arise. That clarity, and subsequent action, requires capacity — the ability to feel, to tolerate uncertainty, and to remain loyal to oneself when attachment is threatened.

When belonging, security, or love are made conditional, staying aligned with one's own truth is punished as disloyalty. Under those conditions, truth becomes secondary. It's reduced to something praised in theory and condemned in practice, then we call the inability to survive that punishment a personal failure rather than a systemic one.

When financial safety depends on staying, fear multiplies. And yet, I sense a gradual shift. As survival becomes less tightly bound to marriage — and for women, less tied to men at all — our relationship to structure begins to change. When survival is no longer the primary driver, choice becomes far cleaner.

The terrifying reality of my affair.

Leaving my marriage was not about choosing another man. It was about choosing to stop outsourcing my life to a structure that could not hold my full range.

Accepting this reality was terrifying. There was no external authority to bless and celebrate this passage — no white dress, no ceremony, no supportive crowd to raise a glass, then hit the dance floor as the photographer snaps photos.

It was lonely.

I had to learn how to trust myself by trusting myself.

No shortcuts.

No workarounds.

In moving through this, I developed an inner integrity that no longer depended on approval, performance, or outcome. It was not outwardly reassuring. It did not make me more likeable or more certain. It did make me accountable — to myself first, and to the truth I could no longer avoid.

Leaving my marriage was not about choosing another man. Image: Supplied/

I also learnt that presence, for all its praise, is not the same as embodiment. Presence can be powerful, calming, and soothing — yet still function as another finely honed performance. It allows us to witness ourselves and others, yet does not demand the responsibility of being changed by what we see.

Embodiment is different. It requires participation. It is far more exacting, as it necessitates submission to what we feel, learn, and know — truths that do not negotiate, and that can reorganise our lives in deeply uncomfortable and frightening ways. A person can be present for decades without ever fully inhabiting themselves.

Embodiment occurs when observation has exhausted itself — when insight is no longer enough, and something in us is ready to stop managing and start living.

The relief comes not from certainty, but from coherence. When inner and outer life are no longer at odds, the effort of self-contradiction finally falls away.

This is the paradox I did not understand until now: when choice arises from embodiment, commitment becomes easier, not harder — because it is aligned with who you are rather than enforced by who you think you are supposed to be. Feeling this brought deep relief. By choosing to trust what my body knew, alignment followed. The effort of holding myself together eased, and something that had long been divided settled.

My choices no longer pulled against what I felt. Self-authorship did not feel like assertion or defiance. It felt natural and stable. What fell away was coercion.

This is not an argument against marriage, nor an endorsement of affairs. It is an invitation to examine where we place our deepest loyalty. If we want people — married or not — to speak honestly about change, desire, and becoming, we have to loosen our attachment to structure and increase our capacity to honour the truths our bodies are communicating. The habits we practice in our most intimate relationships do not stay there; they shape what we normalise everywhere.

When we insist on fixed forms over living truth, we don't create stability — we train ourselves, collectively, to avoid reality and calcify.

Listen: How to have a "good fight" — one that's free from criticism, defensiveness, and all those traps we fall into when emotions run high. Post continues below.

As I continue to write, I plan to explore the contrast in the choices I am now making in relationships. I no longer identify with the archetype of the wife. This does not mean I no longer appreciate men — I do, and love having them in my life. I also think often about my two sons, now in their twenties.

There is much more I intend to share. I am also working on a memoir that holds the longer arc and the deeper, lived backstory behind this transition.

The more distance I get from binding structures, the more empathy I feel for this period of collective transition we are moving through. I find myself genuinely curious about who the nuclear family is truly meant to serve. Since stepping outside it, I notice how much less distracted I am by outward success and performance, and how clearly I can see the ways our relational forms have kept us busy, productive, and striving within an economic system that depends on constant output.

This raises a more unsettling question: whether the way we have organised love, partnership, and creation is truly serving human flourishing — or simply keeping us occupied and outsourced, measuring ourselves against external metrics of success.

As my loyalty shifts from preserving form to staying in honest contact with what is alive, my attention continues to widen. What once felt deeply personal now feels societal. When preservation and status-building are no longer treated as virtues, our relationships become litmus tests for what we are quietly consenting to. In this moment — particularly in America — many of the structures we have relied on are under visible strain. That strain is not happenstance. It reflects years of deferred truth, misplaced obedience, and power repeatedly outsourced in the name of order.

Our work does not begin abstractly and is not helped by hand-wringing. It begins at home, in our most intimate choices. What we stand for. What we tolerate. What we excuse. What we remain silent about in order to stay insulated and intact.

Our decisions do not remain private. They scale. They ripple outward into culture, into institutions, into the hands of people authorised to act without conscience. When we abandon our agency in small, daily ways, we help create a world where cruelty can be enacted without pause or remorse.

We are not separate from the whole.

We are participants in it.

This article is an edited version of one that originally appeared on Avalon's Substack. Sign up here.

Feature Image: Supplied.