188: When Your Affair Partner Leaves You for the Wrong Reasons

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 resolve your infidelity situation in a way that you feel great about, I can help you do it.  There are two ways we can work together.  You can purchase my self-guided course, You’re Not the Only One, which contains videos of me teaching you concepts and tools that will help you deal with your infidelity situation in a way that’s truly right for you – and assignments that help you apply what I teach to the specifics of your own life.  These teachings and assignments go beyond what I offer on the podcast, so if you’re ready for the next step in your Jedi training, go to my website, and sign up for You’re Not the Only One.  Or we can work together one-on-one via Zoom.  When we work together one-on-one, our collaboration is consistent, rigorous, and intimate.  We get into the details of your infidelity situation and we get really serious about finding you relief and a clear path forward.  If you want to work with me one-on-one, you can schedule an introductory coaching session through my website, mariemurphyphd.com.

The title of today’s episode is a little clunky, so let me attempt to explain what today’s episode is all about.  We’re going to talk about a situation in which two people are involved in an affair relationship, and one of the members of the affair couple is ostensibly committed to someone else, and the other is not.  And for a while, the member of the affair couple who is ostensibly committed to someone else is pretty sure they want to leave their committed relationship, and pursue a non-affair relationship with the person who is currently their affair partner.  And they’ve been telling their affair partner this, and maybe telling them this for months on end.  Or maybe even longer than that.  And maybe they’re taking some action that indicates they’re serious about leaving their committed relationship.  And the member of the affair couple who is not ostensibly committed to anyone else really likes the idea of their affair partner leaving their committed relationship, and really wants this to happen.  They want to have an above-board relationship with the person who is currently their affair partner, and so, by extension, they really want them to leave their committed relationship like they’ve been saying they’re going to.

But then, perhaps seemingly out of nowhere, the member of the affair couple who is committed to someone else gets to a point where they say, “You know what, I can’t leave my committed relationship after all.  I thought I was going to be able to do it, and I really wish I could do it, but I just can’t.”

And the other member of the affair couple, the one who is not committed to someone else goes, “What?  You’ve been telling me for weeks or months or years that you really wanted to be with me.  What happened?”

And sometimes their affair partner gives them an answer that they just do not understand, or doesn’t seem like a good-enough reason for them to have changed their plans, and ended the affair relationship instead of leaving their committed partner.  And this is when I usually get the call, so to speak.  The member of the affair couple who has been left reaches out to me and says something to the effect of, what the hell is going on?  I thought my affair partner was planning to be with me, I thought they loved me and wanted to have a life with me, and now they’ve totally changed their mind.  I don’t understand.

So today I want to offer some insight into what very well could be going on, when your affair partner rather abruptly changes course, and decides they can’t leave their committed relationship – even though they’ve been telling you for quite some time exactly how badly they want to do just that. 

I’ve worked with quite a few clients who are married, or are in a very committed relationship, and they’ve really wanted to leave their marriage for their affair partner, but ultimately got to a point where they decided that they just couldn’t do it.  So for those of you who are wondering what on earth is going on when your affair partner decides to stay in the committed relationship that they’ve been telling you how badly they want to leave, I have some sense of what may be going on with them.  And I’ll share some of these insights with you today, but the first and most important point, for better or worse, is that your affair partner’s decision to stay in their committed relationship probably isn’t about you and how much they love you. 

That may not sound very reassuring at all, and for better or worse, reassurance isn’t exactly the point of today’s episode.  If someone leaves you, or someone decides they don’t want to continue a relationship with you, and you aren’t happy about that, there may not be any way to reassure you.  If you really wanted your relationship to continue, and your affair partner has ended it, and you’re hurting, there may not be any way to instantly make you feel better.  If someone has made a decision you don’t like, there may not be any way to stop disliking this turn of events – at least, not immediately.  You can, however, mourn that loss and move forward – and that’s something I talk about in episode 125, Privately Grieving the End of an Affair.

So if today’s episode isn’t about reassurance, what is it about?  It’s about insight.  It’s about new perspectives.  I can, at least quite probably, offer you insights into what may have prompted your affair partner’s decision that you don’t have – because I see these kinds of situations from all of the different angles.  I may not know YOUR affair partner, but it’s quite possible that I’ve worked with someone who’s experiences are similar to your affair partner’s experiences. 

Having different insights into what may be going on with your affair partner, or have been going on with your affair partner, may not make the loss of that relationship instantly hurt less.  But it may help you think about their actions differently.  And thinking about their actions differently is likely to help you feel better.  Maybe not immediately, but sooner rather than later.  So for those of you whose affair partners have left you for reasons that seem bewildering to you – or just seem like bad reasons, plain and simple – I hope today’s episode can provide new perspectives that bring you some peace. 

With all that said, I’m going to talk about a few examples of what is sometimes happening when someone decides they can’t leave their committed relationship for their affair partner – after having ardently declared to their affair partner that they really wanted to leave their committed relationship.

One of the more common things that I see happening when someone decides they can’t leave their marriage even though they really love their affair partner is they just can’t deal with the idea of making changes in their family.  Some people are SURE that if they leave their spouse, all manner of bad things will happen.  For instance, a lot of people are SURE that if they leave their marriage, their relationship with their kids will be irreparably damaged, and their family life will go down the toilet, and that all of this will be really terrible for everyone involved, and that it will be ALL THEIR FAULT that the lives of their family members have been ruined.  Some people aren’t quite that dramatic about it.  Some people believe that they’ll negatively impact the lives of their family members if they leave their marriage.  But other people are SURE that if they leave their marriage, the lives of people they care about are going to literally be destroyed.

Now, let me tell you, when I work with folks who have these kinds of concerns, I help people critically examine their fears about what might happen to their relationships with their kids, and what might happen with their family life, if they were to leave their marriage.  I help people critically examine the idea that they will “destroy” the lives of people they care about if they choose to leave their marriage.  I help people consider how they might deal with the impact that leaving their marriage might have on people they care about, if their concerns were to be realized.

And sometimes people come to the conclusion that they will not in fact destroy their families if they choose to leave their marriage.  Some people, upon closely examining their thinking, and starting to think intentionally about what they have the power to create, decide that they can and will do everything in their power to ensure that their family relationships survive a change in their marital status.  It is totally possible for a family to thrive even if a couple does not remain a couple, and some people really get on board with believing that this can be true for them.  And when people believe that this is true for them, they tend to do everything they can to make it so.  And then they prove themselves right, and it ends up being fantastic for everyone involved, and I will tell you that it’s so satisfying for me as a coach to see this happen.  It’s amazing.  But it’s even more amazing for the clients who are showing themselves that they don’t have to believe their worst fears are doomed to come true.  When you show yourself that you have the power to create the outcomes you desire, instead of being beholden to what you’re afraid might go wrong, it’s life-changing. 

However.  It’s really important to understand that there are a LOT of messages out there that proclaim in no uncertain terms that divorce is REALLY BAD, and that families can never recover from divorce, and of course, there are lots of messages out there that divorce is really bad for the children of the divorcing couple, no matter how old they are.  And this is of course just a very, very short summary of the common ideas about how awful divorce can be for individuals and families.  And here’s the thing.  A lot of people have absorbed these ideas as absolute, non-negotiable truths.  They are NOT absolute, non-negotiable truths, but a lot of people think they are.  And it can be really hard to divest ourselves of our deeply held beliefs, EVEN WHEN holding onto those beliefs holds us back from going after what we really want in life.  I’ll say that again because it’s so, so important: it can be really hard to divest ourselves of our deeply held beliefs, even when holding onto those beliefs holds us back from going after what we really want in life.  This may be tragic, but it is also a common occurrence.

So, if your affair partner has decided that they “just can’t leave their family” and you don’t understand what the hell they’re talking about because they’ve been complaining about their marriage for months upon months to you, here’s the deal: some people are CONVINCED that the world will end if they leave their family, and they just can’t imagine being the person who causes the world to end.  Is the logic here faulty?  Yes it is.  I can say with great confidence that the world would not actually end if your affair partner were to leave their family.  But humans are 100% capable of believing things that aren’t true, or at least, aren’t necessarily true, or don’t have to be true.

I’ll say that again, too, because it’s so important.  Humans are 100% capable of believing things that aren’t true.  For better or worse.

And so we’ve got to be somewhat sympathetic to the fact that if we’ve been exposed to a message that has been presented to us as absolute over and over and over again, we just might start to believe it.  And what that may mean for your affair partner is that even if they know, intellectually, that people get divorced all the time, and that the world doesn’t end, they just may not be able to fathom being a person who initiates a divorce.  Or they can’t fathom being a person who initiates changes in their family member’s lives.  It literally does not matter that all of the things they are imagining might happen if they were to leave their committed relationship might not happen.  If they’re terribly afraid of being the person who initiates a divorce, or a person who leaves their family, that fear may get the final say.  That fear may keep them in a self-created prison, so to speak.

And our self-created prisons are as real as we make them.  Right?  And sometimes we make them pretty real indeed.  Now of course, there are other layers to this example.  When folks are really afraid of leaving their families, they’re often afraid of a lot of additional things that I haven’t mentioned today.  They may be afraid of “destroying” their family, but they’re often also afraid of being judged by other people.  And they may be afraid of not having the security of their known family structure.  And they may be afraid of financial changes.  And they may be afraid of a whole bunch of other things too. 

But here’s the important thing for you to be aware of: the specifics of what they’re afraid of aren’t really the point for you, the person they have left.  Sometimes people say to me, “I don’t understand how my affair partner could justifying staying in their marriage for their kids, when their kids are full grown adults!”  Here’s the deal: when people believe their own fears, or their justifications, they will act accordingly.  The point isn’t that your affair partner – or former affair partner – is right or wrong for choosing to stay in their committed relationship for the reasons they did.  The point isn’t whether or not they’re thinking clearly.  The point isn’t whether or not their reasons for their choices make sense to you.  The point is that they chose to act on what they believe to be true.  And is that a total fucking bummer for you?  Quite possibly.  But you can relieve yourself of a lot suffering by recognizing that the external validity of your affair partner’s reasons for making the decision they did is NOT THE POINT. 

I want you to take the next thing I say lightly, because it really isn’t our business to decide what’s true for another person.  BUT, if you do this lightly, you may find it helpful.  If you believe that your affair partner really loved you and wanted to be with you, but was just too afraid to leave their family, it might help you to think about their decision in terms of their inability to get out of their own self-made prison.  I do NOT encourage you to lay that thinking down too heavily.  Use it lightly, if you use it at all.  But I think it is fair and appropriate to recognize that humans trap themselves in jail cells of their own creation all the time, and you might find it helpful to think of your affair partner’s decision in this manner.  As opposed to thinking that you can’t understand their decision, or as opposed to thinking that they made a decision for reasons that aren’t good, or don’t make sense.  That kind of thinking will drive you crazy pretty quickly.  Finding some way of choosing to understand your partner’s decision – even if you don’t agree with their reasons, or don’t like their decision or their reasons for making it – may help you find peace more quickly.

I’m not a big fan of Jack Johnson – sorry Jack – but I think has a song with lines that go something like, “Even if I don’t understand it, it’s all understood.”  And that’s what I’m getting at here.  You may not be able to understand your affair partner’s decisions in the sense that they may not make sense to you.  But you might be able to understand that there are some things that make sense to other people that just don’t make sense to you.

What I see with a certain amount of regularity is that some people, no matter how much they love their affair partner, ultimately cannot imagine dealing with the changes that would come if they were to choose to leave their marriage.

And one of the reasons for that, or one of the elements within that is that sometimes, no matter how much we want something, or how much we enjoy something and want to continue enjoying that something, we cannot imagine the identity shift that would come with fully embracing or pursuing our desires.  Some people can’t quite imagine allowing themselves to undergo the identity shifts they’re imagining for themselves, and some people can’t quite imagine how they would deal with other people’s responses to the identity shifts they’re imagining for themselves.  This definitely applies, at least at times, to folks who are concerned about leaving their families.  Some people just can’t imagine themselves as being a person who initiated a divorce.  Some people just can’t imagine how they would deal with being know by others as a person who initiated a divorce.

Here's another example of how a seemingly huge identity shift can factor into your affair partner’s decision to stay in their committed relationship.  Sometimes people who are in a committed relationship that they consider heterosexual, and have always considered themselves fundamentally heterosexual, find themselves in a relationship that they do NOT consider heterosexual.  They fall in love with someone of their own gender.  Or perhaps they get involved with someone who is not the so-called “opposite” gender.  Opposite genders are not a thing, by the way, but that’s totally another story for another time.  Anyway, sometimes when this happens, people are like, “Oh, this is great, it feels like everything makes sense to me now!  I guess I’m queer, or I guess I’m gay, or I guess I’m whatever.  I guess I’m not as straight as I thought I was!  So I’m going to leave my marriage, and I’m going to live in this new way, with this new understanding of myself, and I’m super excited about that.”

That happens!  AND, sometimes when people who have always considered themselves heterosexual find themselves having a very un-heterosexual affair relationship, they freak the fuck out.  Not because they don’t love their partner and the experiences they’re having with them – at least, not necessarily – but because they can’t quite get their head around what this new experience means for their sense of who they are.

Sometimes people who have thought of themselves as straight for their whole lives can’t imagine declaring themselves gay, or leaving a heterosexual relationship and becoming a member of a queer relationship, or a non-heterosexual relationship. 

Your affair partner may love YOU, and they may know that they’re really into YOU, but they may not be able to wrap their head around the idea of shedding their old sexual identity and stepping into a new one.  They might have a hard time affirming to themselves or others, yeah, I’m gay – or at least, I’m in a gay relationship.  Or even if they don’t want to take on the identity of gay or queer or anything else in any sort of declarative way, they might feel totally destabilized by the idea of stepping away from what they thought they knew about themselves and their sexual identity.

Also, heterosexual privilege is real, and the idea of relinquishing the privilege associated with heterosexuality really freaks some people out.  Heterosexual privilege is a big topic in and of itself, and I’ve actually been meaning to do a whole podcast episode on it for months or maybe even a couple of years at this point.  But for today’s purposes, let’s just acknowledge that society bestows many privileges upon people who identify as heterosexual, and do heteronormative things, such as get married, and have children, and live a “idealized” family life.  When you live this way, you tend to receive a certain amount of esteem, or approval – or at the very least, it’s pretty likely that you won’t have to contend with much disapproval related to your sexual identity and how you configure your relationships. 

And of course, beyond matters of privilege, society dishes out plenty of antipathy towards people who do not fit into what is considered sexually normative – and this antipathy ranges in severity from being annoying or depressing to its recipients, to being literally fatal.  Right?  I’m compressing topics that are worthy of a lot more discussion into a few sentences here, but the point that I’m getting at right now is that some people who have been living the life of a straight person have a really hard time stepping into the social world as anything other than a straight person.  Again, this isn’t true for EVERYONE who lives as a heterosexual person for a while and then realizes it’s time for a change.  For some people, it feels GREAT to say, hey, I have figured out that my sexual identity isn’t what I thought it was, and I want everyone to know that.  For some people, that’s the most liberating thing in the world.  But the idea of doing that scares the living shit out of other people.

If you have been living the life of a queer person, or a gay person, or a something-other-than-heterosexual person, you may have some understanding of the fears they’re contending with – and you may think they should be able to deal with those challenges, even if they are challenging.  And of course, they could deal with those challenges – at least theoretically.  That’s certainly AN option that’s on the table.  But not everyone finds it within them to exercise this option, even if they really want to.

So if you are your affair partner’s gay lover, literally speaking or loosely speaking, and you just can’t understand why your person wants to stay in their heterosexual marriage when the two of you have such a great thing going on, let me suggest this.  Your person may be experiencing fears and hesitations and doubts that they have no idea how to contend with.  And what a lot of people do when they’re experiencing fears and hesitations and doubts that they have no idea how to contend with is they opt for what seems like the path of least resistance.  When fears of the unknown seem overwhelming, we tend to opt for the devil we know rather than the devil we don’t.  Sometimes it seems a whole lot safer and easier and therefore BETTER to stick with something that is uncomfortable in a familiar way than to deal with the uncertainty that comes along with pursuing something new and different – EVEN WHEN it’s something we know we really want.

If I had to boil today’s episode down to one point, I’d say that people who choose to stay in their committed relationships after professing a deep desire to leave that relationship and pursue a relationship with their affair partner are almost always contending with a lot of fear of the unknown.  Or fear of the uncertainty that will come with making big changes in their life.  That’s a generalization, of course, but I think it’s a fair and useful generalization.  Now, a lot of the people I talk to who have been left by their affair partner are like, “But I just don’t understand.  We loved each other SO much.  I KNOW they loved me, and I KNOW they really wanted to have a life with me.  Why wasn’t that enough for them to get over their fears?”

Welp, I think Morcheeba said it best.  Morcheeba, if you are not aware, is a band from London that has been making music for a while now and apparently still is.  I am not at all familiar with their recent work, but on Big Calm, one of their older albums, there’s a song with lines that go something like, “Fear can stop your love.  Love can stop your fear.  But it’s not always that clear.”  I might not have the lyrics exactly right, but I’m sure I’m pretty close, and I think this is a very important point.  Sometimes love really does enable us deal with and surmount our fears.  But sometimes our fears really get in the way of our love.  Coaching can help us deal with our fears.  For sure.  And, we also have to really WANT to deal with our fears if we’re going to effectively deal with our fears, and sometimes dealing with our fears is just too damn scary.

Now some people whose affair partners choose to stay in their committed relationships after declaring their undying love and allegiance to them come to me and say, “Well, this proves it.  They never really loved me.  I was just a fun side project.”  Or sometimes folks will say something like, “I guess they never really intended to leave their committed relationship after all – they just liked having me in addition to their committed relationship.” 

Now, I’m as sure as I can reasonably be that SOME people tell their affair partners that they love them and they want to have a life with them and they’re going to leave their marriage and they don’t really mean it and they say it even though they KNOW they don’t mean it.  But what I see, among my clients, is that the issue isn’t that they never meant what they said to their affair partner when they said it.  Rather, what I see among my clients is that, to go back to what I’ve been saying this whole episode, the issue is often that people really WANT to do what they said they were going to do in terms of leaving their marriage, but they’re dealing with a level of confusion or fear or internal conflict that they just find the wherewithal to move through.  The other thing that I do see happening is that sometimes people really mean what they say when they say it, but later they realize that what they want has changed.  Or what they are actually willing to do about what they want has changed.  Sometimes people feel HARD for their affair partner and make a lot of big, bold claims about what they want and what they’re going to do without really thinking through what they want or what they’re saying.  I do see that happening. 

Now, it’s really important for me to point out that my clients are a self-selecting group.  So just because the people who choose to work with me are not intentionally misleading their affair partners just because they can, that doesn’t mean that other people out there don’t do that.  And to echo what I said a moment ago, I’m pretty sure some people DO do that.  It’s a big world, after all, and people do all kinds of stuff.

So is it possible that your affair partner just viewed their relationship with you as a distracting fantasy?  Yes, it’s possible.  But it’s also possible that they genuinely cared about you and just didn’t have their shit together.  Or more specifically, it’s possible that they made promises to you before they really thought through what they were saying.  It’s possible that they really WANTED to follow through on everything they promised you, but when push came to shove, they discovered that they effectively couldn’t.

And those, I think, are the points we all want to be more attuned to.  Sometimes relationships don’t work out because one member of the relationship just doesn’t have their ducks lined up in a way that is conducive to participating in the relationship.  And when this happens, it can be a really sad thing for us, the person they left behind, if we really wanted to be in a relationship with them.  And by the way, this happens ALL THE TIME in non-affair relationships, too.  The reality is that relationships don’t work out all the time, and not always because of a lack of love or a lack of desire to make it work.  Sometimes one or both parties just aren’t fully available to make a relationship work.

So, if your affair partner has chosen to stay in their committed relationship instead of leaving their committed relationship to be with you, and you think their reasons for their choice are terrible or bewildering or both, here’s what I encourage you to do.  Mourn the loss.  Grieve what you shared with the specific special someone you were involved with.  And then, use your experience with that person to refine your sense of what you want in a relationship.  Use your experience with your affair partner – or former affair partner – to refine your sense of what sort of availability you want from a future partner, or from future potential partners.

I see a lot of “other persons” out there who think that the fact that their affair partner didn’t choose them was an indication of their worthiness – or unworthiness, I should say.  Folks think that if their affair partner had left their committed relationship to be with them, this would have been proof of their fundamental worth and loveability – and then when their affair partner does not do this, they take it as an indication that they aren’t worthy of the love they desire.  This of course happens when non-affair relationships end, too.  What I suggest you consider is that a) someone ending a relationship with you is NEVER a verdict on your fundamental worth or loveability, whether the relationship was an affair or not, and b) if your affair partner ends their relationship with you, there are almost certainly things going on with them that have very little to do with you specifically.

Is that reassuring?  Maybe, maybe not.  But remember, I told you that this episode was about giving you insight and new perspectives, and not necessarily reassurance.

If you’re still really stuck on the idea that your affair partner’s reasons for ending their relationship with you don’t make sense, I encourage you to consider that we’re all operating on the basis of what makes sense to US, and what makes sense to us does not necessarily make sense to other people.  And conversely, what makes sense to other people does not necessarily make sense to us.  I think a lot of us really get our underwear in a tangle over this one.  We sort of have this idea that if we’re in a relationship, we and our partner are supposed to see things the same way, or at least, see certain things the same way.  But what if it isn’t possible for us to always see things the way our partner does – and what if we don’t even need to see things the same way as our partner does?  Here’s a crazy idea for you to consider: what you and your partner NEVER see things the same way?  And what if we could never even know if this were the case or not?  Crazy, right?  

We tend to operate as if relationships are built on mutual understandings, or agreements – and from a certain vantage point anyway, I would say that they are.  For sure.  BUT, I think it’s also really important to consider that we never fully know what another person is thinking.  And we tend to make a lot of assumptions about what our partner is thinking.  It might be more appropriate to say that relationships are built more upon assumptions than on shared understandings.  You can take that idea with as many grains of salt as you want to.  But even if you want to ignore that idea entirely, I do encourage you to consider that no matter how well you think you know someone, they are always going to be un-knowable to you, to a certain extent.  No matter how well you think you understand someone, there are probably going to be things about them, or things they do, that you don’t understand.  And I encourage you to consider that allowing this to be true rather than wishing it weren’t might bring you peace.

So again.  If your affair partner ended your relationship for reasons you think are crazy, grieve your loss.  Digest your grief.  And then use your experience as fertilizer for creating the future you want to have, or perhaps more specifically, the kind of romantic relationship you want to have with someone in the future.

Okay people.  If you’re having trouble making sense of the end of your affair relationship, let me help you put the pieces together, honor your feelings and grieve your loss, and then move forward in your life in a way that you feel great about.  It is totally worth taking your hurt and confusion and sadness seriously, AND the end of this relationship does not have to define you, or determine your future.  And of course, I can help you deal with allllll of the other aspects of your infidelity situation, too.  I offer confidential, compassionate coaching via Zoom, and you can schedule an introductory coaching session with me through my website, mariemurphyphd.com.  I also offer a self-guided course, called You’re Not the Only One, which gives you all of my most powerful teachings in video form, and assignments to help you apply what I teach to the specifics of your unique infidelity situation.  That’s available through my website too.

All right everyone, thank you all so much for listening.  Have a wonderful day.  Bye for now.