155: Nurturing a Long-Term Affair (Part 1)

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 judgements.  I help my clients with all kinds of different aspects, or layers of infidelity situations.  For instance, I help people deal with the guilt, shame, and confusion that sometimes comes with cheating.  I help people decide which relationship, or relationships they want to pursue.  I help people juggle multiple relationships, if they choose to do that.  I help people make decisions they feel great about, and help them deal with their fears of making decisions they will later regret.  I help people decide whether or not to tell someone they’ve cheated on them.  I help people break up with their spouses.  I help people break up with their affair partners.  I help people grieve the end of relationships – whether it was an affair, or a marriage, or something else entirely.  I help people evaluate their relationship to monogamy.  I help people recommit to their established relationship after ending an affair.  I help people deal with the aftermath of getting caught cheating.  I help people navigate the ups and downs of long-term affair relationships.

And that’s just a short list!  I help my clients navigate all the things related to infidelity.  So if you’re in the midst of a challenging infidelity situation, and you’re ready to start feeling better and start getting a sense of what you want to do with your situation, I can help you.  When you’re ready to talk, you can schedule an introductory coaching session with me through my website, mariemurphyphd.com.  You can also learn about the current coaching packages I offer new clients, along with my current pricing, on 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.

In this episode, I’m going to start to talk about how you can nurture and sustain a long-term affair relationship.  Back in episode 82 I talked about how to cheat and keep your sanity intact, and if you’re in a long-term affair, you may want to listen to that episode if you haven’t already.  That episode pertains to managing your thinking about engaging in long-term infidelity, but not so much to how you can nurture the long-term affair relationship itself.  So today I’m going to start talking about how you can do that.

Right out of the gate, I want to make two important, general points about nurturing and sustaining long-term affairs.  Point number one is this: although in some ways, affair relationships are not like non-affair relationships, in many respects, affair relationships are like other romantic relationships.  And keeping this in mind can help us de-fuse some of the drama we may associate with our affair. 

The second general point is this.  In any relationship, affair or otherwise, there are some things within the relationship that you and your partner can deal with together, at least to some extent.  And there are some things that only your partner can deal with.  And then, there are some things that you and only you can deal with.  And of course, there may be some circumstances in the context of your relationship that are beyond your control, and beyond your partner’s control.  All of this may look a little different within the context of affair relationships vs. non-affair relationships, but these principles apply to all relationships.

Now I know some of you are thinking, “Okay, it’s all fine and good for me to take responsibility for my part in the relationship, but doesn’t my affair partner have to do their part too?  And what about things that we have to AGREE on, or figure out together?”  We will get to all of that in subsequent episodes, I promise.  But for today, I want you to consider that the best thing you can do for your relationship is to take responsibility for what’s happening on your side of the street.  

As I’ve said more than a few times on this podcast, there are three kinds of business in this world.  Your business, their business, and god’s business.  Or the universe’s business.  That’s Byron Katie’s line.  The point of it is that in life, there are some things that we and only we can do.  There are some things that only other people can attend to.  And there are some things that may be beyond the reach of any one of us humans.

In our romantic relationships, we often spend a lot of time and energy trying to do business that isn’t ours, and that we can’t even successfully attend to.  We try to get other people to do what we want them to do, instead of making peace with their behavior, or choosing to leave the relationship because we don’t like their behavior.  And when we spend our time and energy focusing on business that isn’t ours, we fail to attend to the business that is ours and only ours to do!  Like intentionally enjoying our relationship, or deciding to leave it, if we have reasons that we like for doing so.  

I don’t think this is terribly surprising because in our society we have so many crazy ideas about how romantic relationships work.  We don’t collectively understand what we have the power to take responsibility for within our relationships, and what we have absolutely no power to control.  So we can all be forgiven for trying to solve for the wrong things in our relationships, or trying to do things to make our relationships better that actually don’t do much besides drive us slightly crazy, or make us completely miserable.  

But even if our tragic misunderstandings about how relationships work are totally understandable, we’ve got to remember what our friend Ram Dass said: “All I can do for you is work on myself.  All you can do for me is work on yourself.”

I’ll say that again: “All I can do for you is work on myself.  All you can do for me is work on yourself.”  

So today we’re going to talk about some specific things you can take responsibility for doing if you want to nurture and sustain a long-term affair.  Everything I’m going to tell you will apply to other relationships, too, of course.  We will also, in future episodes, talk about the things that you do NOT have the power to control in relationships, and what you can do with that, but for now, I will tell you that if you start to focus on taking responsibility for your business within your relationship, you may be AMAZED by what happens.  

When we recognize what we have the power to control and we actually start taking responsibility for those things, we tend to feel better pretty quickly, because it’s so empowering to engage in our lives this way – AND we can create some different experiences for ourselves pretty quickly, too.  And that alone can be magical, but beyond that, when we are dedicated to dealing with our own business and we let other people deal with theirs, that can have a profound impact on how other people experience interacting with us.  And that can lead to some pretty magical developments in our relationships.  When we take responsibility for what we contribute to a relationship, other people often follow suit.  And when both people are committed to taking responsibility for their contributions, that elevates the whole experience for everyone.  And that can seem fucking miraculous.  And in a sense it is miraculous, but it’s the kind of miraculous that you have the power to create.

Now, just to be clear, it is also true that sometimes when we start taking responsibility for what we contribute to a relationship, and we contribute to our relationship in ways that we feel great about, our partner DOESN’T follow suit.  That can and does happen.  But if we get to the point where this is what’s going on, we’re usually in a much better position to be able to say okay, I feel really good about what I’m bringing to the party, and this just isn’t the kind of relationship I want to be in, so I can choose to walk away, knowing I did my best.

So with all of that said, I will offer some recommendations for what you can start taking responsibility for doing in order to nurture and sustain a long-term affair.

Here's the first thing that you and only you have the power to do if you want to nurture and sustain a long-term affair: get clear on whether or not you are willing to be involved in an affair on an ongoing basis.  Or whatever it is your infidelity situation looks like.  A bunch of people wrote to me and said, “I’m in a committed relationship and my affair partner is too, and we want to keep our affair going long-term, so what’s your advice for how to do that?”  I’m speaking to you people today, but I’m also speaking to other folks who are in slightly different long-term infidelity situations.  Get clear on whether or not you are up for doing whatever it is you’re doing on an ongoing basis.

Getting clear on whether or not you’re okay with doing whatever you’re doing in the infidelity department is important for a lot of reasons.  For one thing, if you’re continuously unsure of whether you’re okay with participating in an affair relationship or not, YOU are probably not going to feel amazing.  You’re probably not going to feel all that amazing about your relationship.  Or you might feel amazing about your relationship sometimes, but you might also spend a lot of time freaking out about your relationship.  And do you really want to do that?  Perhaps not!  And in addition to being a less-than-awesome experience for you, if you’re fretting about your participation in an illicit relationship all the time, you’re probably not going to engage in the affair relationship in ways that make it awesome.  And this will impact your experience of the relationship, and by extension, will probably your affair partner’s experience of the relationship, too.  Have you ever been involved with someone who is constantly freaking out about whether the relationship should keep going, or ever have started up in the first place?  If you have, I’m willing to bet you didn’t find the experience all that enjoyable.

Now, this brings me to the second thing you can do to nurture your long-term affair.  It’s closely related to my first point.  You can take responsibility for dealing with the stress you may associate with participating in an affair.  Taking responsibility for your decision to cheat doesn’t mean that you’ll never experience stress or guilt or fear of getting caught or any number of other challenging, uncomfortable emotions.  You absolutely might.  Even if you’ve chosen to engage in long-term infidelity for reasons that you feel really good about, you may still not like what you’re doing to some extent.  But you have the opportunity to take responsibility for dealing with whatever uncomfortable emotions you feel in a way that serves your ultimate interests.

Sometimes we want our affair partner, or our relationship with our affair partner, to relieve us of the stress and discomfort we associate with cheating, or to make the stress and discomfort worth it.  And often, when this is happening, when we’re operating from these kinds of hopes or expectations, we’re not really aware of it.  We may not be consciously expecting that our affair partner will make us feel so good that the stresses of cheating don’t really bother us, but effectively, that may be what we’re doing.  And when we’re doing this, especially if we aren’t aware that we’re doing this, it can have an impact on our experience of our affair relationship, in a not-very-good way.  We may – however unintentionally – lean on our affair partner to provide excitement and fun and connection and intimacy at a level that makes it seem so obvious to us that the stresses of the affair are worth it because the highs of the relationship are so good.  

But it’s not our affair partner’s job to relieve us of our stresses.  It's not their job to be so amazing and great all the time that we feel automatically convinced that the relationship is worth its challenges.  It’s our job to enjoy our relationship, and to deal with whatever stresses we may associate with participating in it.  Also, to echo what I said a little while back, if we’re leaning heavily on our affair partner to make us feel good all the time, that doesn’t just affect us.  If we’re doing this sort of thing in some form or another, our affair partner is going to have some experience of this behavior, and it might not be an experience that they love.  Right?  When somebody is DEPENDING on us to be their source of good feelings and their reliever of bad feelings, we’re probably going to notice this – and we may not like it.

The third thing you can do to nurture your long-term affair is get clear on what you want the relationship to be like, and take responsibility for contributing to the relationship being great in all of the ways you want it to be.  So often we focus on what we want to get from our partner, or we focus on all of the things that get in the way of us having the kind of relationship we want to have.  And this line of thinking can be especially easy to get hooked into if your relationship is an affair.  It can seem so obvious that there are limits on your relationship, and really significant challenges built into the whole thing.  And we can get sucked into thinking that we really can’t have the relationship we want to have with our partner because of these things.  

Here's a really common example of what this can look like.  Often, being in an affair relationship means there’s a certain amount of constraint on the time you get to spend with your affair partner.  You may not like that, and that’s fair enough.  You may wish you had more time with them, and that is fair enough.  But you get to choose what you do with all of this.  If you want to enjoy your affair partner like crazy, you can dedicate yourself to doing that, no matter how much time you get to spend with them.  You can focus on making the best of the time you get with them, and being as fully present with them during that time as you’re able to be.

OR you can spend your time with them thinking that the time you have together is not enough.  You can spend your time with them thinking how unfair it is that the two of you don’t get more time together.  Instead of focusing on enjoying them when you’re with them, you could focus on blaming them for not being more available.  Right?  And if you choose these kinds of thoughts when you’re with them, you probably aren’t going to create an experience of your time with them, and of the relationship as a whole, that you like very much.  

Now of course, there are other options, too.  If you want to spend more time with your affair partner, you might want to talk to them about finding ways to spend more time together.  Or maybe you get to a point where you decide you don’t want to be with someone if they’re only available for however many hours or days out of a month, or whatever.  But if you are theoretically okay with the limits on the time you get to share, you get to take responsibility for what you make of that time.  You can contribute to making it great, or you can contribute to making it less than great.

The fourth thing you can do to nurture and sustain a long-term affair is keep an eye on your own desires and expectations.  Sometimes we get into an affair relationship and we are as sure as we can be that we’re okay with the constraints on our relationship, or the terms and conditions we agree on with our affair partner.  Let’s say you and your affair partner are both married to other people, and when the two of you started your affair, you were both sure you wanted to stay married to your respective spouses, and you wanted to keep the affair a secret, and a limited thing.  And for a while, this might work great for you.  But then you might start noticing yourself yearning for more.  You might start wishing you could spend more time with your affair partner.  You might start wanting to have a full life with them.  You might not be satisfied with the things you were once satisfied with.

This doesn’t have to be a problem.  It’s pretty normal for desires and expectations to change over time, in relationships.  Our opportunity lies in taking responsibility for examining our desires, and thinking deliberately about what we want to do with them, or how we want to act on them.

Sometimes when people find themselves wanting more than an affair relationship with their affair partner, they decide that it is incumbent upon their affair partner to want this, too – and to want it immediately.  Not everyone does this, but some people do.  And in way, it can seem like such a reasonable thing to want!  It may seem totally obvious to you that you and your affair partner have this great relationship, and life would be so much better if the two of you could just be together for real, and so therefore it makes complete sense for you to tell them that you need to see them immediately because you have something very urgent to talk to them about – and then proceed to try to convince them to leave their spouse and run away with you immediately.

Here's the thing.  It’s fair for you to want to leave your spouse and have your affair partner do the same so that the two of you can ride off into the sunset together.  And it’s fair for you to tell your affair partner that you have this desire, and to ask them if they might be interested in considering a change of plans.  That’s all fine and good.  But what might not be so good is making the change in your desires your affair partner’s emergency to respond to.  Your desires are NOT their emergency to respond to.  You have the opportunity – and, I would suggest – the responsibility to consciously decide what you want to do with your desires, rather than acting on them impulsively, and expecting a particular sort of response from your affair partner.

So my recommendation is that you take your desires seriously, but take some time to think deliberately about how you want to act on those desires.  It might be that you really want to ask your affair partner to consider an above-board relationship with you.  It’s legitimate to want that, and to ask them to consider that.  But it also might be the case that you want to allow this desire to run through you, without acting on it.  Upon careful consideration, you might not really want to pursue a full life with your affair partner.  You might have just been experiencing a burst of enthusiasm for the fantasy of having a life with them.  Keep an eye on your desires, and use discretion when deciding how you want to act on them.  Or NOT act on them.

Point number five: you can make requests of your affair partner.  But get really clear on what you’re hoping to get out of making those requests.  So, to return to the previous example, if you’ve been thinking that you might want to pursue a full relationship with your affair partner, you have every right to tell them this, and to ask them if they’re willing to consider doing that with you.  But there’s a difference between asking them to consider this because you’re as sure as you can be that this is what you want, and that you want to give this possibility a shot, even if putting it out there means risking hearing your affair partner say, “No way, I don’t want to do that” – and asking your affair partner if they’d consider an above-board relationship with you because you want them to say yes, because you them to choose you because that would make you feel good.  

Similarly, let’s say you want to ask your affair partner if they’ll do something they don’t usually do with you – like go away for a night together, or maybe take a vacation together.  It’s one thing to ask them if they’ll do this because you really want to spend this kind of time with them, and you want to do everything you can to create that possibility, even if it means risking hearing them say, “Nope, that’s not going to happen.”  It’s another thing to ask them to go on vacation with you because you want the satisfaction of wrangling them away from their spouse, or their family, and “winning” more time with them so that you can feel more important.

It's fair for us to want things in our relationships, and to ask for what we want.  But it serves us well to get clear on why we want to ask for whatever it is we want to ask for – and to make sure we like our reasons for asking.  And it’s also important to remember that no matter what we ask for, our partner always has the right to say no.

And that brings me to sixth thing you can do to nurture and sustain a long-term affair.  You can take responsibility for exercising discretion.  You have a right to like things, and dislike things, and you have the power to decide what you want to do about your likes and dislikes.  So, let’s say that regular communication is something you really like.  Let’s say you really want to be in touch with your affair partner on a daily basis, even if that just takes the form of a few short text messages.  And maybe you’re willing to let go of your preference for daily text messages, as long as your affair partner texts you three times a week.  You’d be satisfied with a consistent three texts a week.

You have every right to want three texts a week.  And you have every right to ask your affair partner to text you three times a week.  But what if they don’t?  What if they tell you they just aren’t going to do that, or even better, what if they tell you they CAN’T text you three times a week?  As in they literally do not have the power to text you three times a week, even if they wanted to.

If someone tells you this, you might be inclined to argue with them.  Given what you know about your affair partner’s life, it might seem ABSURD for them to say that they can’t text you three times a week.  That might seem like complete and utter bullshit to you.  And you might be inclined to argue with your affair partner, and attempt to convince them that they are quite wrong, and tell them that in fact, it is obviously possible for them to text you three times a week.

And you might be right about that!  It is entirely possible that someone who says they can’t text you three times a week actually could text you three times a week.  But you may not be able to convince them of that.  And ATTEMPTING to convince them of that might not be very fun, for you or for your affair partner.  So it’s possible that instead of trying to convince your affair partner to do something they say they can’t do, you might get to feel better sooner by exercising your power to choose.  

Do you want to be in this relationship, with this person who will not text you three times a week?  Are you interested in choosing to be with them, even though they won’t do this thing that’s important to you?  You might want to continue your relationship, and figure out how you can deal with these communication patterns of theirs that you don’t love.  Or you could choose to not be in a relationship with someone who won’t text you as often as you’d like.  

The problem is that so often we don’t focus on the power we have to make these kinds of choices.  So often we get super worked up about whatever it is our partner is doing that we don’t like – or not doing, but wish they would.  We may beg and plead with them, or we may curse the injustice of having found ourselves in love with someone who just won’t do this thing that we really want them to do, even though they KNOW it’s so important to us.  And that often doesn’t get them to change their behavior, and it doesn’t get us anything great either, and we may spend a LOT of time believing that they’re the problem, and if only they would just text us three times a week, we could be happy and everything would be fine.

But we don’t have to do that.  We can make a simple choice about how we want to use our discretion.  We could say, you know what, it’s really important to be with somebody who communicates with me in this particular way, so if this person isn’t going to be with me three times a week, I don’t want to be involved with them anymore.  We could say, well, I really like everything else about our relationship, so I’m going to work on being less bothered about their lack of texting.  I’m going to figure out a way to think about this differently so I’m less upset about it.  OR we can say, “Well, I’m not really willing to let go of my wish that they’d text me at least three times a week, but I’m going to take responsibility for dealing with my hurt, or disappointment, or frustration that I feel when they don’t do the thing I want them to do.”  

We can dislike something, or wish something were different, without letting the feelings that come from disliking something become a really big problem for us.  

Here’s an example of what this can look like that has nothing to do with infidelity.  My spouse and I remodeled our living space earlier this year.  And although it’s not really fair to say that objectively the place looks better than it did, because whether something looks better or not is subjective, I will go ahead and say that the place looks objectively better than it did.  And I appreciate that, BUT I also happen to HATE certain features of our remodeled living space.  For instance, the new master bedroom sink thing, which I believe is called a “vanity” is fucking horrible in my opinion.  I am not joking about this, people.  I wish I were.  I hate everything about it.  For one thing, the dimensions are such that when I wash my face, there isn’t much sink for the water to go into, or much counter space for the water to land on, and so water gets all over the floor.  I might as well just intentionally dump water on the floor every time I wash my face.  And I could tell you a lot more of the details about this, I could defend my face-washing technique, and make the case that this is not just the product of a user error of some sort, but never mind all that.  The point, for today’s purposes, is that I hate hate hate hate hate hate the new and supposedly improved sink vanity whatever in the master bedroom.

But I have no plans to replace it anytime soon.  I am not even remotely interested in getting a different vanity installed.  That is NOT HAPPENING anytime in the foreseeable future, for so many reasons.  So, given that I dislike the current vanity but have chosen not to replace it, I could change my thinking about the vanity or sink or whatever it is.  Theoretically, I could.  I could try to find things I like about it, and think about those.  But right now, I’m not going to do that, because I don’t want to.  I have my reasons for disliking the damn thing, and I’m not interested in convincing myself otherwise.  So what do I do?  I allow myself to have those thoughts, and I allow the hatred that I feel when I think them to just happen.  AND I allow my hatred of the sink to be a relatively minor feature of my existence.  I feel the hatred sometimes, and I just let it be there.  And when I allow myself to hate it, without making that into a bigger deal than it needs to be, it’s not a big problem.  Oh, I hate the master bathroom sink?  Okay, cool.  I can hate it, and also get on with my life.  

So often when we don’t like something, we think that our dislike is a really big problem.  But it doesn’t have to be.  If you’re not interested in changing your circumstances – like, in my case, right now I’m not interested in ripping out the old vanity and getting a new one put in – and you’re not interested in changing your thinking – like, in my case, considering that the vanity might be kind of great in some ways – then you can simply tolerate your feelings that come with disliking something without excessive fuss or fanfare.  That might sound kind of wild.  But in practice, it can be one of the greatest things ever.  Not being worked up about hating my sink is so much better than being really worked up about hating my sink.  Not getting too worked up about how bummed you are that your affair partner doesn’t text you more can be the greatest thing ever, if you’re sure you want to sustain your affair with them and enjoy the experience of doing so.

Now, let me be really clear that we have EVERY RIGHT to make changes if we dislike our circumstances!  We absolutely do!  The point of my sink story is not that it’s better to put up with something we hate than to make a change.  No way.  But the thing about getting intimately involved with other humans is that the chances of them doing things we don’t really like is pretty high.  And if we want to maintain long-term, loving relationships, there are probably going to be times when we want to learn how to live with features of our partner that we aren’t crazy about.  But you get to use your discretion about what you want to learn how to live with, and what you don’t.

Okay.  Those are the major pieces of guidance I’m going to give you today.  What I really want to emphasize is that there is a big difference between thinking about doing these kinds of things, and actually doing them, and doing them consistently.  Sometimes when I talk to folks about the challenges they’re experiencing in their long-term affairs, they say things like, “I know I could be doing the things you suggest I do, but I just don’t do them.”  And that’s fine!  At least, in a sense that’s fine.  That’s the main challenge for many of us, in many aspects of our lives.  We know what we COULD be doing, but we don’t necessarily DO it.  And so what I want to encourage you to remember is that there’s a big difference between having certain knowledge and utilizing that knowledge.  There’s a big difference between knowing something, and putting something into practice in our own lives.  And sometimes we need HELP making use of what we know in our own lives, or applying what we know to the specifics of our own life, and that’s okay.  That’s what coaches are for.  I can help you put what I’ve talked about today into practice, in the context of your unique infidelity situation.

Now, speaking of me helping you, I can help both you and your affair partner work through the challenges and joys of sustaining a long-term affair.  A lot of folks write to me and ask me if I work with affair couples, and the answer is yes.  But when I work with you and your affair partner, I work with each of you individually.  And the reason for this is that I believe that our relationship dynamics can be addressed most effectively when we take radical responsibility for our own business.  And we need to LEARN how to do that, and then do that consistently, day in and day out.  And as I said earlier, when we do this, our experience of our relationship can change dramatically and miraculously.  Even if your partner doesn’t do anything differently, when one person changes, the entire relationship dynamic can change.  And of course, when both participants in a relationship, or all of the participants in a relationship, if there are more than two are in on the project of taking responsibility for their business, that only elevates the possibilities.  I don’t want to be too critical of the standard couple’s counseling approach where both parties are in the same room are in the same Zoom calls, but my perspective is that this approach often isn’t as helpful as we might like it to be.  Remember what Ram Dass says: “All I can do for you is work on myself.  All you can do for me is work on yourself.”  

So, if you and your affair partner want to talk to me, I would love that – but I will see you separately.  You can each book an introductory coaching session with me through my website, mariemurphyphd.com.  When I work with you and your affair partner, I don’t share anything that you and I talk about with your affair partner.  And I don’t share anything I talk about with them with you.  So each of you have this super safe, air-tight container in which you can say all the things, including all the things that you might not want to say to them or might not yet know how to say to them – and this can be immensely valuable and bring you tremendous relief.  And then, of course, you and your affair partner can share whatever you want to with each other.  You can talk together about the conversations I have with each of you to whatever extent that you want to.  And what affair couples that I’ve worked with find is that this way of doing things helps them grow as individuals and navigate their relationship in ways they really like.  When you and your partner both work with me, you get to start working from the same set of tools and concepts, and having that shared foundation for how you approach your relationship, COMBINED with individual opportunities to get your specific needs met in the coaching context is really powerful.

And with that, thank you all so much for listening!  Have a great week.  Bye for now.