Waywards are experiencing "positive" emotions. How could it be otherwise? If there were no positive feedback, no one would continue an A.
She’s not saying that the feelings aren’t positive, or genuinely felt. Instead she’s pointing out that they’re based on delusion, a distorted and incomplete assessment of what is actually going on. She is saying affair:marriage :: vacation:workaday life.
Indeed they are. Same goes for rapists. Pedophiles. Narcissists and all kind of abusers who inflict similar trauma wounds on their victims.
They all get positive emotions, they all get off on it, it becomes addictive and they are looking forward to the next time.
You would cringe at describing those as a "vacation " vs the boring workday life, because our culture still mostly abhors those behaviors, while infidelity was romanticized and normalized.
There are many reasons for this, and are all stupid because in the end they are in the same family of trauma each one with their peculiar disgusting flavor.
Their apologists do try to romanticize the "positive aspects " of those as well, like here.
After all positive emotions, hence can’t be all bad right?
No it doesn’t move me a millimeter, I understand the goal of the article and maybe there is no malice behind, but it is a poor choice to romanticize abuse in any way shape or form.