The Problem With Saying, “I Didn’t Want Them—I Wanted How They Made Me Feel”

After betrayal, people often search for an explanation that makes the relationship easier to understand.

One of the most common is some version of this:

“I didn’t really want that person. I wanted how they made me feel.”

Maybe they provided validation. Attention. Excitement. Admiration. Sexual affirmation. Escape. A feeling of being attractive, important, interesting, powerful, or desired.

Those things may be completely true. But there is a problem when the explanation takes one more step and concludes: therefore, it wasn’t really about the person. That does not necessarily follow. The feeling matters. The person matters too.

Feelings Do Not Exist in a Vacuum

Human relationships are relational by definition. We feel things in response to interactions with actual people. You might feel respected because someone listens carefully to you. Desired because someone pursues you. Safe because someone consistently protects your vulnerability. Excited because a particular person flirts with you. Understood because conversations with that person reach places your other relationships do not.

Your own psychology certainly affects how strongly those experiences matter. Two people can receive the same attention and respond very differently. But that does not make the other person interchangeable. The feeling emerged through an interaction between you and them. That distinction matters.

“They Made Me Feel Desired” Does Not Mean “I Didn’t Desire Them”

This becomes especially important when people try to understand affairs.

Suppose someone says:

“I wasn't interested in him. I just liked feeling sexually desired.”

That may describe an important motive. Perhaps being pursued met an unmet emotional need. But it does not automatically establish that there was no attraction to the person doing the pursuing.

Those are two different questions.

A person can enjoy feeling desired and enjoy who is desiring them.

They can want affirmation and develop attachment.

They can like the attention and anticipate seeing the person providing it.

They can be drawn to what someone represents and be drawn to that specific human being.

Psychological explanations become misleading when they turn these possibilities into an either/or choice.

Explanation Can Quietly Become Erasure

This is where certain therapeutic explanations can create trouble. Understanding the need beneath a behavior can be enormously useful. If someone desperately needed affirmation, belonging, excitement, sexual confidence, or emotional connection, that is worth understanding. But explaining the need should not erase the relationship that formed around it.

Imagine saying of a marriage:

“I don't really love my wife. I just love how safe she makes me feel.”

Or:

“I don't care about my husband. I simply like how understood I feel when we talk.”

Most people would immediately recognize that something important has been removed from the description. Safety, intimacy, admiration, affection, belonging, desire, and companionship are not somehow separate from relationships. They are part of what relationships are. Why would that suddenly become untrue because the relationship was inappropriate?

The Better Question Is “What Was Happening Here?”

After betrayal, there is tremendous pressure to find the explanation.

Validation.

Loneliness.

Low self-esteem.

A bad marriage.

Attention.

Escape.

Midlife crisis.

Compartmentalization.

But human behavior rarely fits neatly inside a single explanation.

The more useful question is not:

“Was this about the person or about how the person made them feel?”

It is:

What role did each of those things actually play?

Maybe validation was the dominant motive.

Maybe attraction grew because validation kept being provided.

Maybe emotional connection made the attention more powerful.

Maybe secrecy intensified excitement.

Maybe sexual pursuit created feelings that gradually became attached to the person doing the pursuing.

Reality may be messier than the clean explanation. That does not make reality less useful. It makes it more honest.

You Do Not Have to Choose the Most Comforting Explanation

Betrayal can shatter a person's understanding of their marriage, their spouse, and even their own ability to judge what was happening around them. White Passage describes this kind of shattering as the loss of a map that once helped life make sense. The work afterward is not to replace that shattered map with another explanation simply because the new one hurts less. It is to recover a picture that can survive contact with what actually happened.

That means an explanation like “it was only validation” should not automatically be accepted or rejected. It should simply be held up against reality.

Because the opposite of distortion is not cynicism. It is reality.  And sometimes reality is uncomfortable enough to contain more than one truth:

They may have wanted how the person made them feel. And they may have wanted something about the person too.



If you are stuck between the explanation you are being given and what the relationship itself seems to show, White Passage is designed for that territory. Before you can decide what comes next, you need a clearer understanding of where you actually are.

FAQs

Can an affair really be mostly about validation rather than the affair partner?
Yes. Validation, attention, desirability, or escape may be powerful motivations. But identifying one motivation does not prove that attraction, attachment, affection, or desire for the specific person were absent.

Does liking how someone makes you feel mean you have feelings for them?
Not necessarily. But repeated emotional experiences can become connected to the person providing them. The relationship has to be examined as a whole rather than assuming the feeling and the person are completely separate.

Why do betrayed spouses struggle with explanations like “it wasn't about them”?
Because the explanation may conflict with observable behavior such as pursuit, secrecy, anticipation, emotional intimacy, sexual interaction, or repeated contact. When words and behavior seem difficult to reconcile, the unanswered contradiction itself can keep the betrayed spouse feeling lost.