151: Your Questions Answered (Part 4)

You are listening to Your Secret Is Safe With Me, non-judgmental talk about infidelity with Dr. Marie Murphy. If you’re looking for new perspectives on complicated relationship issues, you’ve come to the right place. 

Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Marie Murphy.  I’m a relationship coach and I help people who are engaging in anything they think counts as infidelity to deal with their feelings, clarify what they want, and make decisions about what they’re going to do.  No shame, no blame, no judgments.  If you are ready to begin the process of resolving your infidelity situation in a way that’s truly right for you, I can help you do it.  When you’re ready to talk, you can schedule an introductory coaching session with me through my website, mariemuphyphd.com.  I offer confidential, compassionate coaching via Zoom, which means we can work together no matter where you’re located.  If you’ve been stuck in confusion or inaction in regards to your infidelity situation for longer than you’d like, why wait any longer to get some help making change?  The rest of your life is waiting for you, so let’s get to work and deal with your infidelity situation in a way that you feel great about.

Okay, as I’m sure the title of today’s episode makes clear, today I’m going to answer some more of the questions from listeners that I’ve received.

A number of folks asked about sustaining a long-term affair, and how best to approach that.  One person said, “I would rather see a whole podcast episode about this topic, but can being married and secretly keeping a mistress work long-term?  What has to be true for that to work?  Do cheaters always get found out?”

Before I started doing these ask-me-anything episodes, I was actually working on some material for an episode or maybe multiple episodes about sustaining a long-term affair.  And so to those of you who have asked about how to do that, I want you to know that I’ll be devoting some time to talking about that at length soon.  But for today’s purposes, the short answers are as follows.  Yes, long-term affairs can and do happen, and if you want to make that work in your life, there’s a good chance you can.  Cheaters do get found out, sometimes, but they don’t always!  And while there may always be some risk of getting caught, that’s a risk you may choose to assume, and it is a risk you can manage, and just because there’s a RISK of getting caught doesn’t mean you WILL get caught.  I hear some professionals say that if you are cheat, you are bound to get caught, as if this is an irrefutable law of physics or something.  And all I can say is that the empirical reality does not support the statement that if you cheat you are sure to be caught eventually.  That’s just not how the facts bear out.  

And that’s all I will say about long-term affairs today, but I promise I will speak to this topic in greater depth and detail soon.  In the meantime, if you want to talk about the specifics of your long-term affair, schedule yourself an introductory coaching session with me.  Together we can attend to the specifics of your situation, and address your unique questions.

Now let’s move on to the next terrific question:

What to do if you've decided in your mind that you don't want to cheat anymore, yet your body and emotions are not lining up to the decision of your mind, and you still haven't stopped?

Great question.  The first thing I want you to encourage you to do if you’re in this situation is get really clear on why exactly you don’t want to cheat anymore.  Get as specific as you can about your reasons for not wanting to cheat.  As this person notes, even when decide that we don’t want to cheat anymore, we may also still want to cheat – or at least, we may want to keep on experiencing some of the aspects of cheating.  For example, you may have decided that you really don’t want to be in a relationship with a particular person anymore, but you may still REALLY want to have sex with them.

And, to stick with my example, if you want to end a relationship with a person you still really want to have sex with, you have to be willing to tolerate or allow your desire to have sex with someone without acting on that desire by calling them, or reaching out to them, or having sex with them.  If you want to stay away from them, you have to be willing to let your desires to engage with them, sexually or otherwise, to be present within you – without acting on these desires in the way that you may have in the past, and in the ways you may still want to.

And if you are INSANELY attracted to someone, you may not really WANT to just allow yourself to feel your desire to have sex with them WITHOUT acting on that desire.  That may not seem like an appealing idea to you at all.  And that is fair enough!  Experiencing immense sexual desire for someone and being able to act on that desire by actually having sex with the person you desire can be a really wonderful experience, and a really great part of being alive in a human body.

So if you’ve decided that you don’t want to have sex with someone anymore, even though you still feel desire for them, or you don’t want to be involved with someone anymore, even though you still want to connect with them in various ways, you need to have really good reasons why you want to disengage.  You need to have reasons why it’s worth it for you to not act on your desires in the ways you might want to.  

Your reasons for wanting to do something or not do something are your rocket fuel.  It can take a lot of motivation to do certain things in life.  And our reasons for wanting to do or not do certain things create our motivation.  If your reasons are strong and compelling to you, your motivation will be powerful.  If your reasons aren’t that strong or compelling, you may not have the motivation that you need to do the thing, or not do the thing.

When you have a really good reason, or set of reasons, why you are going to choose not to do the thing that you partially want to do, it’s easier to ride out the desire to do the thing without acting on it.  So for instance, if we want to lose weight, we may have to adjust our eating habits.  We may have to adjust our physical activity.  We may have to not do some things that we really want to do, and we may have to do things that we don’t particularly want to do.  We may really WANT to eat pizza every day, and not go to the gym.  But if our desire to lose weight is strong enough, we can be willing to feel our desire to eat pizza without acting on it.  We can tolerate wanting the thing but not having it.  Similarly, we might not really want to get out of the house and exercise, but if we really want to feel healthy and strong and lose some weight, it might be worth it to us to do the thing we don’t really feel like doing.  And to not do the thing we really wanna do.

Knowing what our reasons are for wanting to do something or not do something doesn’t necessarily lessen the intensity of the desire, however.  Not right away, at least.  If you REALLY want to have sex with someone, you may feel a LOT of desire to do that, even if you are as sure as you can be that you want to end your relationship with this person you feel all of this desire for. 

But you can allow all of that desire to flow through you without acting on it.  Try it and see.  It’s possible to want something and not go after it.  It’s possible to feel huge, powerful surges of desire flow through us – whether that’s sexual desire, or desire for anything else – and to just feel the desire happen.  Many of us kind of believe that we have to act on our urges to do whatever we have the urge to do, but we don’t have to.  And learning how to allow our urges without acting on them, or allow ourselves to feel desire without acting on it is a great skill to cultivate.  Not because acting on desire is fundamentally bad – not at all.  But because sometimes we like the results we get from not acting on our desire better than the results we get from acting on our desires.  

And if we want to stop cheating, if that’s our highest priority, then there’s a lot to be gained by allowing ourselves to feel desire without acting on it by engaging with our affair partner, or engaging in whatever our cheating behaviors may be or have been.

The next question I’m going to read is on the long and detailed side, but I’ve chosen to read it and respond to it because it speaks to challenges that are really common.  

I have been in a monogamous 20 year marriage to a man who loves and respects me and acts in a way that reflects his values and feelings for me.  Our son, his stepson, was in an accident ten years ago and is now a quadriplegic.  My husband has done everything possible for our family and has never waivered in his commitment to us.  We used to have a wonderful sex life and that took a backseat to caring for our son, and he is no longer as sexual as I would like.  We’ve worked hard in the last few years to make time for each other and get the passion back despite caregiving. 
About 6 months ago a man that I knew 25 years ago contacted me.  I was always attracted to him.  He’s funny, great looking and smart.  We started chatting, and soon our texts became sexual.  I felt so sexy and alive.  We met for a weekend getaway recently and our chemistry was off the charts.  We had sex nearly the entire weekend and it was spectacular.  I’m 60 and he’s 65 and it’s the best sex either of us have ever had. 
I don’t want my marriage to end because I value the relationship I have but I also want this new relationship, as a sexual friendship.  I’d like to see him every few months for a weekend.  I don’t think my husband would be open to that possibility.  He left his first wife because she cheated.  Is there a way to have an open conversation about this desire?

My short answer to this question is yes, it is possible to have an open conversation with your husband about what you want.  

The slightly longer answer, and the critical point here, is that may take some courage to talk to him.  

And to that end, it may be helpful to remember that although you may think you know what your husband would or would not be open to, you don’t know for SURE.  You don’t know for sure what he will say to your idea until you ask him about it.

Moreover, even if your husband wasn’t initially inclined to be open to you having a sexual friend who you spent some time with every now and then, he might be willing to consider this idea, and might arrive at a different position.  As life goes on, people may evolve.  If you haven’t checked in with your husband lately about your sex life, it’s entirely possible that he’s been missing your once-wonderful sex life, too.  And he may have some ideas about how he’d like that to change.  And who knows, maybe he too would like to have a sexual friend who he gets to see every now and then.  I’m not suggesting that he’s thinking that for sure, but who knows, he might be!  Any number of interesting things might be going on within the private realm of his mind!

What I encourage you to consider is what you want, and what you’re prepared to do about it.  If you want to stay married and have a sexual friendship with your new person with your husband’s knowledge, you can prepare to talk to your husband about this.

Your husband might decide that he’s totally cool with this idea.  On the other hand, though, you might present this idea to your husband in a way that you feel great about, and your husband might say no, I’m not okay with this, and if you want us to stay married, I expect you to end your thing with this other person.  That could be the outcome of having an open conversation with him about what you desire.  And if that happens, then what will you want to do?  End your marriage, for the sake of having other options open?  Stay married, but continue to see this other person in secret, even though your husband has made it clear that this isn’t okay with him?  I’m not suggesting that you try to predict all future developments and game the whole thing out, but I do encourage you to think about your priorities and get clear on what you’re willing to compromise.

And then you can prepare to have an open conversation with your husband about what you want, and see what he says.  If you want to, that is.  You might want to give him the benefit of the doubt and imagine that the two of you can have an open discussion that takes both of your desires and preferences seriously, instead of assuming in advance what he will or will not be open to.

The next question is one that I have edited down a bit.  Here’s the streamlined version:

I have gotten a divorce and chosen to be in a committed relationship with my affair partner.  Now that the rose-colored glasses have come off, we can see each other's warts and flaws.  As adults in our 50's, there are many more variables to contend with that did not seem as difficult when the rose-colored glasses were worn with every brief interaction.  Now that we can spend 2-3 days together a week, we see that we are very different people, from very different cultures (professional vs. blue collar). 

My new partner meets the needs for intimacy that I have longed for, but comes w/some baggage that is challenging (blue collar job, rough around edges, a bit of old debt, limited relationships w/children).  I have no debt, am quite mild-mannered and close w/my adult children. 

This matters because I don't feel 100% safe in the relationship and start nit-picking at his perceived flaws.  He treats me really well and our connection 18 months in is very strong.  So my question is: How can I reframe this relationship to be one that I am proud of?  HOW DO I GET THE FUCK OVER THIS SHIT so I can live happily ever after?

There is so much I could say in response to even this simplified version of this person’s query, but I’m going to focus on the following.

This person writes that their partner comes with some baggage that is challenging, namely having a blue-collar job, being rough around the edges, having a bit of old debt, and limited relationships with children.  Here’s the question we all get to ask ourselves: why does the stuff we think counts as “baggage” count as baggage?  Why does having a blue-collar job count as baggage?  Why do we think this way?

The point isn’t necessarily that we shouldn’t be thinking that having a blue collar job counts as having baggage, or as being some kind of problem, or issue, or drawback.  The point is to get really curious about WHY we think this way, and what specifically we are thinking about any feature of our partner’s existence – such as the type of job they have.

Now, I am fully aware that in our society, we tend to make having a particular type of job mean a LOT of things.  We assign prestige to certain jobs – and we don’t assign prestige to others.  We think that having a particular type of job can either make us a more valuable human who is more worthy of esteem, or a less valuable human, who is less worthy of esteem.  This kind of thinking is woven into the fabric of our collective understanding of how life is, so I’m not criticizing anyone for thinking this way.  These are beliefs that we’re all eligible to have come into contact with, and to have potentially taken on as our own.

That said, I do encourage you to take responsibility for examining what you think it means for your partner to have a particular type of job.  What does it mean about your partner if they have a blue-collar job?  And perhaps even more importantly, what do you think it means about you if you have a partner who has a blue-collar job?

It’s also worth remembering that the very idea that there are blue-collar jobs and white-collar jobs is a social construction.  Our understandings of what counts as a blue-collar job and what counts as a white-collar job are social constructions.  And that’s not to say that these constructions don’t matter – they do matter.  When we think things are real, they are real in their consequences.

But even if society in general thinks about blue collar jobs vs. white collar jobs in a particular way, even if there are ideas about different types of jobs and the people who do them floating around out there in the cultural fog, you get to decide on purpose whether you want to agree with these ideas or not.  You may have come to your current ways of thinking very unintentionally, but you have the power to consciously decide if you want to keep thinking in the way you have been, or not.

Your partner’s job – or any other feature of who your partner is – is a neutral circumstance.  Having a blue-collar job, or having a certain amount of debt, or any other feature of a person, isn’t inherently meaningful.  It’s up to you to decide what you’re going to make any of these things mean.  It’s fair enough to not like certain features of a person – it’s always your prerogative to have likes and dislikes, and to make decisions based on your likes and dislikes.  But you might find that adhering to some of your dislikes doesn’t get you more of what you want, overall.

So if you really don’t like it that your partner has a blue-collar job, you could always choose to leave the relationship.  That’s totally fair.  But if you want to be with them, it might serve you better to investigate your thinking about what it means to have a blue-collar job, and to potentially adjust your thinking, because doing that will enable you to have a different experience of your relationship with your partner.  Being willing to examine and adjust our thinking is how we get the fuck over our own self-imposed baggage and live happily ever after. 

Moving on… here is the condensed version of a question about how to deal with friends’ responses to infidelity:

Unfortunately there has been some friendship fallout, people not supportive of our relationship. I get it, but I guess I was hoping for more understanding because we are such a close group of friends and I know they can see the amount of pure love we share. There’s two people in particular that have expressed that they can’t be around us and one even yelled at him that he needs to go back to his wife. I guess I’m just wanting to know how we should handle these people, that we once viewed as friends? I know that once we go full legit, there will probably be more backlash too. I know I can control it, but it still hurts to feel judged.

I’m going to begin to answer this question with a question.  Have you seen the movie “Chef”, which came out in 2014 and was directed by Jon Favreau?  It’s an enjoyable movie, you might want to watch it if you haven’t seen it, and the point for today’s purposes is this.  In the movie, Jon Favreau plays a chef.  And at one point, a critic reviews his restaurant very unfavorably.  And in a sense, this is a fair thing for the critic to do.  The critic, after all, is allowed to find fault in restaurants he reviews, and allowed to write about them.  And by deciding to be a chef, and to put your work out there into the world for public consumption, you basically sign up for the opportunity to be reviewed by critics.  Moreover, you have to be a chef at a restaurant that’s notable enough to be reviewed for a critic to bother reviewing you.  So being eligible to be publicly criticized is in a sense an indicator of success.

BUT.  That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt when your hard work that you’ve poured your heart and soul into is publicly critiqued.  And if you’ve seen “Chef,” you know that there is a scene in which Jon Favreau’s chef character responds to the restaurant critic and tells him, “IT FUCKING HURTS!”  It fucking hurts when you critic people write this stuff about me.

Even if being a chef that’s successful enough to be reviewed in a major news outlet is a win, having your hard work criticized may not feel good at all.  Even if the possibility of that happening is only avoidable if you don’t put yourself out there in the first place.  Even if it’s just part of the game, or an inevitable part of your job.  Even if you know all this, it can still really fucking hurt to have your work criticized.  And the scene in the movie “Chef” illustrates this quite well.

And so it is with friends.  It’s such an immense pleasure and privilege to have good friends.  It’s such an incredibly wonderful thing to have a close group of friends.  And it’s lovely when our friends support us and approve of us and wish us well and all of that good stuff. 

But when we sign up for friendship, we’re not just signing up for the good stuff.  We’re signing up for human connections that may not always be sunshine and rainbows and unicorns and cupcakes and happy stuff.  

For better or worse, humans can be pretty great to be around sometimes, and also pretty not-great to be around sometimes.  Sometimes people do things we really like, and sometimes they don’t.

If we’re willing to get close enough to people to receive their support and approval and good wishes, by definition, we’re also close enough to them to receive judgment and criticism and disapproval and the like from them.  

We may not like being on the receiving end of that stuff at all, and that is fair enough!  It's totally human to like it when other people support and approve of us, and totally human to NOT like it when other people disapprove of us, and do not support us.  That’s fair.  

Now, the last line of this listener’s question was, “I know I can control it, but it still hurts to be judged.”

I’m imagining that what this person might have meant is that they can control the hurt they feel.  And if I’m right about that, I want to suggest an alternative.  Instead of trying to control the hurt you feel, why not ALLOW yourself to feel hurt?  

We gain so much from allowing ourselves to FEEL our emotions when they arise instead of trying to control our feelings, or prevent them from happening.  If you’re feeling hurt, you’re feeling hurt.  Trying to control that may not be possible.  Yes, you may be able to manage the extent to which you CONTINUE to feel hurt.  You don’t have to keep on feeling hurt forever.  But that’s another story, and more importantly for the present purposes, if the feelings are there, I encourage you to allow yourself to feel them instead of trying to control them or deny them.

When you give yourself the opportunity to feel your feelings, instead of trying to control them, they will eventually run their course.  There are caveats to that, but in brief, what I want you to consider is that you’re willing to really feel a feeling instead of trying to control it or get rid of it or avoid it, you will be able to make your way through it.  Or it will be able to make its way through you.  And THEN, once you’re on the other side of the feeling, or feelings – or you’re feeling less intensely hurt – then you can decide how you want to deal with your friends.  There are any number of courses of action that it might make sense for you to take with your friends.  But it’s hard to make those decisions when we’re in the thick of feeling hurt.  As they say, when emotion is high, intelligence is low.  So let yourself feel your hurt, and then once you’ve made it through the intensity of your hurt feelings, you can think a little more clearly and calmly about how you want to proceed with the friendships.

We tend to want to take action to relieve ourselves of our uncomfortable feelings, but that doesn’t work too well, on the whole.  Instead, though, we can digest our uncomfortable feelings, and then decide what action we want to take in relation to the situation at hand.

Here's the last question I’ll answer today:

I have listened a lot about how our feelings are our own, and that other people don't cause these, but may be the occasion for our feelings, which I understand. I sometimes find it hard then, to discern behaviour that is unacceptable to me in the moment (because often I am reacting with emotion) versus behaviour that is unacceptable full stop. I think you would say it's for us to decide, but I have trouble with overturning and second guessing myself about how I feel after reflection.

Okay.  If were speaking with this person, I would have a few clarifying questions to ask before I attempted to respond to their question, but I can’t do that, and so I’m going to respond to this question as best as I can, because I think I understand what they’re getting at, and I think what I have to say will be helpful to someone even if I’m misinterpreting their question to some extent.  So here goes.

When something happens, when anything happens, we have the capacity to think thoughts about that occurrence very quickly.  And we usually do that!  Our meaning-making machines, also known as our brains, or our minds, are likely assign meaning to occurrences before we even know what has happened.  And occurrences that we experience can of course include other people’s behavior.  And then, whatever thoughts we have about occurrences that we experience, whatever meanings we make out of our experiences, will very quickly create emotions for us.  This can happen in seconds, or even fractions of a second.  Something happens, I have a thought about it almost instantly, and that thought almost instantly generates a feeling, and before I know it, I am AWASH in a really intense emotion.

This happens all the time, and that’s not a problem, per se.  Our capacity to assess and react to situations quickly helps us in some circumstances, and has definitely served an evolutionary function for human existence.  But, sometimes our first assessments of a situation aren’t ones that we want to stick with forever.  Somebody else’s behavior might seem really problematic to us, upon our first thought – or might seem totally okay to us – and then upon further consideration, we decide that actually, what we initially thought was really bad isn’t that big of a deal.  Or what we initially thought we were okay with isn’t actually something that we want to be okay with.

So how do we use our capacity to examine our responses to things after the moment has passed to our advantage, rather than using this capacity as a way to second-guess ourselves, or second-guess our initial dislike of someone else’s behavior?  Here are a few suggestions: 

First of all, recognize that you have the right to dislike other people’s behavior, or not want to tolerate certain behaviors from others.  Sometimes we question whether or not someone’s behavior is unacceptable to us because we don’t fundamentally believe that we are allowed to decide that someone else’s behavior is unacceptable to us.  Sometimes our initial response to something happening is, “Wow, I really didn’t like that,” and then later we question ourselves because we don’t think it’s fully okay for us to say, yeah, that’s not okay with me.  That’s not something I’m cool with.

So consider that you have full permission to dislike anything that you want to dislike.

AND, consider that you don’t have to stick with your initial assessment of someone else’s behavior forever.  You are allowed to think about it and change your mind.

Now that said, sometimes it can be hard to figure out what we want to keep on disliking, and what we might be willing to adjust our thinking about.  Or might WANT to adjust our thinking about.  There CAN be good reasons to question our dislike of things.  Sometimes easing up on our dislike of things enables us to experience more of what we want to in life, overall.

So here’s the second thing I want you to do.  Get clear on what it was that happened that you thought was unacceptable.  Assuming we’re talking about someone else’s behavior, what did the person do that you didn’t like?  Get as specific as you can about what they actually did.  What are the facts of their behavior?  Not your assessment of their behavior, but the facts of what they did.

Once you’re clear about the facts of what they did, then ask yourself what you THINK about what they did.  Or more specifically, ask yourself WHY you do not like this other person’s behavior.  Why do you think it is or was unacceptable?

Now you get to decide if your assessment of their behavior serves you well or not.  What’s the outcome, for you, of thinking their behavior is unacceptable?  Sometimes thinking that certain behaviors are unacceptable helps us set clear boundaries, and that can help us create relationships that we feel great about!  But sometimes thinking – and continuing to think – that certain behavior is unacceptable feels terrible AND gets in the way of us having the experiences in life that we really want to have.  You get to decide if you think that assessing someone else’s behavior as unacceptable helps you get more of what you want to experience in life or not.

Having a robust sense of what is okay with us and not okay with us can help us steer clear of behaviors we know we don’t want anything to do with, and that can make for a more enjoyable existence for so many reasons.  But having TOO many ideas about what behaviors are unacceptable may cut us off from people and situations and connections with people and other kinds of experiences in a way that we don’t ultimately like very much.  

So yes, the answer to this question does boil down to, you get to decide, but hopefully my response here helps give you a framework with which to decide.  Does assessing this behavior as unacceptable serve my greater interests and priorities and desires, or not?  Does thinking of this behavior as unacceptable help me live more of the life I want to live, or not?  To answer those questions, you’ve got to trust that it’s okay for you to have likes and dislikes, and if you aren’t there yet, building your belief that you are indeed allowed to have likes and dislikes is your work for now.

All right everyone, that’s it for today.  If you would like to delve into the questions you have about your infidelity situation and how to handle it, let’s work together.  Having me as your coach is totally different from listening to me talk on the podcast.  When we work together, I teach you tools and concepts that I cannot teach you through the podcast alone, and I help you apply these tools and concepts to the specifics of your own life.  And with these tools and my guidance, you gain the ability to handle your situation in an entirely different way.  And then you can get clear on what you want and go after it and deal with all of the challenges that may come up as you so… instead of ruminating and staying stuck.  So when you are ready to get to work and begin the process of resolving your infidelity situation in a way that’s truly right for you, you can schedule an introductory coaching session with me through my website, mariemurphyphd.com.  You can also learn more about the packages I currently offer clients after the initial session, as well as my current pricing, through the services page of my website.  I offer confidential, compassionate coaching via Zoom, which means we can work together no matter where you’re located.  I can’t wait to meet you.

Have a great week everyone.  Bye for now.