204: The Challenges of Infidelity During the Holidays

Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Marie Murphy.  I’m a non-judgmental infidelity coach.  If you are engaging in anything you think counts as infidelity, I can help you deal with your feelings, clarify what you want, and make decisions about what you’re going to do.  No shame, no blame, no judgments.  

Infidelity situations can be exciting and exhilarating and amazing in so many ways, but they can also be stressful, and confusing, and overwhelming.  When 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 you can have me as your coach: we can work together one-on-one via Zoom, or you can enroll in my online course, You’re Not the Only One, which contains powerful teachings and assignments that go beyond what I offer on the podcast.  If you want to work with me one-on-one before the end of the year or in the early part of the new year, now is a great time to schedule an introductory coaching session with me, which you can do through my website, mariemurphyphd.com.  And, if you want instant access to my guidance and support, you can enroll in You’re Not the Only One right now and start binge-watching all the videos of me offering my unique blend of radical compassion and no-nonsense tough love.  That online course is available through my website too.

Okay, today we are going to talk about some of the ways that infidelity can be especially challenging during the holidays.  This is a topic that I’ve addressed in previous years, so if you are dealing with stuff that is related to infidelity during the holidays, I encourage you to take a deep dive into past episodes because there are at least several I’ve done in the past on topics that fall under this umbrella.  AND, I also want you to know that this episode may be very relevant to you even if you aren’t celebrating any holidays at the moment, or even if you aren’t experiencing any challenges in your infidelity situation that are related to the holidays.  

Because the point of today’s episode is that when we’re in a situation we don’t like, our power lies in identifying what our options are, and then making choices, even when we don’t like our options.  This may sound like a really obvious course of action.  But although this could be obvious, there are times when people don’t find this obvious at all, and in fact, what they end up doing is resisting this idea, or this approach.  Instead of making choices when they’re in a situation they don’t like, people often waste a lot of time and energy getting all worked up about not liking the situation they’re in, and not liking the choices they have.  And the time and energy you spend doing this is time and energy you’re NOT spending making the best of your situation, or making your bad situation better.

Let’s talk about how this can look for people who are engaging in infidelity during the holidays.

Here’s the first scenario we’re going to consider.  You are involved with someone who is married and has kids and has parents and has other family members who are going to be around for the holidays.  Or let’s specifically say Christmas.  Your affair partner is going to have a lot of family around for Christmas.  Let’s say they’ll have a house full of family, some of which are coming in from out of town, from a few days before Christmas until January 2.

And you do not have a spouse.  You are not involved with anyone other than your affair partner.  And you don’t have much family to speak of, and you don’t have any family nearby.  And although you have people who you consider friends, you don’t currently have friends who you consider close friends, and since you’ve been involved in your affair, you’ve a) been investing most of your spare time into your affair partner, and b) have kind of distanced yourself from the people in your life who you are friendly with, because you have this secret thing going on and you don’t really know how to navigate that with your friends.  So you don’t have any holiday plans to speak of.  You have a work party to go to, and you wish you could take your affair partner to that event as your date, but that’s not happening, and you don’t have any festive holiday plans going on other than that one thing.

And you are NOT HAPPY about this.  Because you really love Christmas.  And you really want to be able to spend Christmas with your affair partner.  You want to wake up in the same house with them Christmas morning, you want to exchange gifts with them, you want to share your home with them and decorate your shared home together, you want to host holiday gatherings with them.  You want all of that so, so badly.  SO badly.

But that’s not what’s happening, at least not this year.  What is happening this year is your affair partner has basically told you that the two of you will not be able to see each other AT ALL from December 20 until January 3.

And you are totally unhappy about this.  You really don’t like the idea of being ALONE for the holidays.  And you are very displeased that your affair partner hasn’t promised you to find a way to spend time with you, even though they’re going to have a house full of family members.  You think that if they love you as much as they say they do, they should find a way to make you more of a priority during the holidays.  But so far, they’ve continued to tell you that they will not be able to find a way to see you during the the aforementioned time frame.

And so far, what you’ve basically been doing is wallowing in unhappiness and attempting to show your affair partner how unhappy you are, and dropping hints about how much you’d like it if they could find a way to sneak out and spend part of Christmas or at least Christmas Eve with you.  But this “strategy,” if that’s what we want to call it, doesn’t seem to be working yet.  Your affair partner hasn’t changed their plans, and you’re still unhappy about that.

But you just don’t know what else to do about the situation!  You know you don’t like it, but you have no idea what to do about it!

When we know we don’t like something, but we don’t know what to do about that, it’s time for us to step up to the plate and consider our options.  

One option is that you could keep on doing what you’ve been doing, which, essentially, is not liking the way things are, wishing things could be different, and hoping that things might change with very little – if any – effort on your part.  WE OFTEN CHOOSE THIS OPTION WITHOUT EVEN REALIZING THAT THIS IS WHAT WE’RE DOING.  IF YOU TAKE NOTHING ELSE AWAY FROM TODAY’S EPISODE, I WANT YOU TO RECOGNIZE THAT IF YOU’RE DOING THIS, OR SOME CLOSE APPROXIMATION OF THIS, YOU REALLY DO HAVE OTHER CHOICES.

So what might those other choices be?  

Well, you could tell your affair partner how important it is to you that they find a way to spend some time with you on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.  If this is really important to you, but you haven’t ever explicitly communicated this to your affair partner, you might want to make a very direct request.  It is not their responsibility to just know exactly what you want without you telling them.  

If you have told your affair partner that you want to see them on Christmas and they’ve said no, you could tell them that if they don’t plan to figure out a way to spend time with you on Christmas, you will end your relationship with them.  I don’t necessarily recommend that you do this.  It might feel good to throw a tantrum, but making this kind of declaration or issuing this kind of ultimatum might not get you all that much of what you want, overall.  But just for the sake of thinking broadly about what your options are, it’s worth pointing out that this IS something you could choose to do.  And who knows?  Maybe your affair partner will be so scared of you leaving them that they do find a way to see you on Christmas, and maybe you’ll be happy with that.  

Now let’s say that you aren’t successful in getting your affair partner to change their plans.  You want to see them on Christmas or Christmas Eve, but they say, there’s just no way that’s going to happen.  

Even if you really don’t like that, let’s assume that you aren’t interested in dramatically ending your relationship before Christmas because of this.  You’re choosing to stick with the relationship, at least for the time being, but you REALLY don’t like it that you won’t get to see your affair partner over Christmas.  If this is your situation, what options do you have?

One option is to consciously decide to mope around and feel sorry for yourself and feel resentful towards your affair partner.  If you wanted to, you could fill your days by thinking about how alone you are and how surrounded by love and joy your affair partner is, and you could spend a lot of time and energy telling yourself how unfair life is.  You could WALLOW in feeling really bad.  If you’re going to do this, I encourage you to consciously recognize that you’re choosing to do this.  Consciously making the choice to wallow in our misery is SO different from unconsciously believing that our circumstances have doomed us to suffer.  

So that’s one option.  Another option is to acknowledge that you do in fact really dislike it like that your affair partner is not spending any Christmas time with you, and then decide whether you want to let that DEFINE your experience of the holidays or not.  Here’s the important thing, people: if we really don’t like something, we may not feel amazing within the context of the circumstances we dislike.  If it’s Christmas and you love Christmas and you just want to be with one particular human but they aren’t with you and moreover they’re with their spouse and their family, it’s okay to really not like that.

But you can really not like that and let that be a reason to be miserable all day, OR you can really not like that and ALSO decide that you have room in your heart and your head and your day for other experiences, too.

How can you spend Christmas in a way that you like, even if you don’t get your first-choice option?  Even if what you really want is to spend some time with your affair partner, how can you enjoy your time without them?  You have the option to create a Christmas experience for yourself that is pretty awesome, even if it’s your second choice version of awesome.

This is an important point for all relationships, not just affair relationships during the holidays: it’s one thing to ENJOY your person very much.  It’s one thing to want to spend time with your person, and to want to share occasions that are important to you with your person.  But it’s another thing to make your happiness DEPENDENT on spending time with your person.

When we’re deeply in love with someone, or deeply intoxicated by our relationship with someone, we may appreciate spending time with that person MORE THAN WE APPRECIATE ANYTHING ELSE IN OUR LIVES.  And, this can be a great experience, in some respects.  It can be pretty amazing to put all of our eggs into one basket, and get totally swept away by the experience of connecting with someone.

But even if having this kind of experience can be GLORIOUS at times, placing all of our energies with our partner is unlikely to be a winning strategy for cultivating the kind of long-term happiness we probably want to have – both with our partner, and with our life as a whole.  Even when we are madly in love with someone, making our happiness dependent on being with them all the time, or at particular times, is not a great way to ensure our own happiness.  Because no one can ever MAKE us happy all the time.  That’s just not how it works.

So you just might want to consider that not being able to spend Christmas with your affair partner presents you with a very interesting opportunity to take more responsibility for creating your own happiness.  If you love Christmas, but you can’t share Christmas with this one person you love, go find other ways of sharing your love for Christmas!  Maybe you have acquaintances who would LOVE to include you in their Christmas gatherings, if they knew you were available.  Maybe you just need to let some folks know that you’re looking for an invitation.  Or maybe the time you won’t be spending with your affair partner over the holidays is time you want to spend getting back into a hobby you’ve been neglecting for a while.  Maybe you actually like the idea of a little time to yourself, to re-discover doing things on your own that you really enjoy doing.  Or maybe you want to interact with other people and you truly don’t know anyone in your area.  What could you do if that were the case?  Well, you might be interested in volunteering around the holidays.  There are probably some people and organizations that could use your help.  Or maybe there are interesting ways of meeting up with people who are also going solo during the holidays.  I haven’t actually looked into that, but I’m willing to bet that if you Googled it you could find all sorts of interesting opportunities.  I could go on and on with examples, but the key point is that there are plenty of ways you could do cool stuff on holidays you aren’t spending with your affair partner, either by yourself, or with other folks.

If you are willing to take responsibility for creating your own happiness, you may be amazed by what happens.  For one thing, you may simply get to enjoy being happy.  That’s pretty great in and of itself, but in addition, you may find a lot of satisfaction in showing yourself that you aren’t dependent on anyone but yourself to create the feelings you want to feel.

I want to stress that taking responsibility for your own happiness does not mean that you don’t feel sadness or anger or hurt or any number of other feelings if you want to spend Christmas with your affair partner and that isn’t happening.  But you don’t have to let the sadness and hurt be the end of the story.  You can if you want to, but if you do that, recognize that you are making a choice, and you have other options.

I’ll say two last things about this example.  If you really want to spend the holidays with your affair partner and they’re spending them with their spouse and this has been happening for multiple holiday seasons, it may be time to start asking yourself some tough questions about whether you want to stay in this affair relationship.  If this is a pattern that you don’t like, and it’s been going on for years, this could be the time to get ruthlessly honest with yourself about what you want the holidays NEXT year to be like for you.

But if this is the first holiday season in which you’re dealing with this issue with your affair partner, you might not want to make it the thing that makes or breaks your relationship.  No matter how much you love the holidays, and no matter how much you hate your affair partner’s unavailability during the holidays, you might not want to make the fate of your relationship hinge upon that.  That’s not to say that you can’t break up with your affair partner because they can’t see you on Christmas.  Of course you can.  But if you want to see where things go with your relationship, and this is the only thing or the main thing that’s bothering you, you might want to focus on your opportunity to take responsibility for your own happiness during the holidays.  I know it may seem particularly hard to develop this capacity during the holidays, but hey, pressure makes diamonds.  Sometimes we get to learn things the easy way, and sometimes we don’t.

Okay, now let’s look at the other side of this coin.  This is example number two.  Let’s talk about what you might be dealing with during the holidays if you are having an affair, and you have a family and a spouse and lots of holiday plans, and you have an affair partner who does NOT have a partner or much family or many holiday plans to speak of.  And your affair partner LOVES Christmas, and really wants to be able to spend Christmas with you.  And guess what, your spouse also loves Christmas, and your family loves Christmas, and everybody expects you to be very present and engaged for all of the holiday festivities that are planned.

So where does that leave you?  Well, possibly caught between a rock and a pretty hard place.  If your family expects you to play house in all the ways that people sometimes play house during the holidays, and your affair partner really wants you to be available to them for Christmas, the holidays might be your idea of hell.

Now, as you may already be very well aware, dealing with these kinds of situations is one of the many reasons that a lot of people decide that engaging in infidelity kind of sucks.  And if you don’t like juggling family obligations with an affair during the holidays, one of the first things I suggest is to seriously consider the possibility that it’s time to make some decisions, and resolve your infidelity situation in a decisive manner.  In a way that you LIKE, of course.  If you don’t want to do that DURING the holidays, that’s fair enough.  But if you’re dealing with all of the gnarliness that can come with trying to keep your affair partner happy and keep up appearances with your family during the holidays and you don’t like that, you may want to prioritize making some choices and some changes as soon as the new year rolls around.

But what do you do in the meantime?  How do you just get through it all while it’s happening?

What I often hear people who are in this position complaining about is that they aren’t going to be able to make everybody happy.  If they do everything their spouse wants them to do during the holidays, their affair partner won’t be happy with them.  But if they do what their affair partner wants them to do, their spouse won’t be happy with them – and might possibly become very suspicious about their behavior.  And to the person who is in this position – the person who has the spouse and the affair partner - this often seems like a really bad deal.  It seems pretty likely that no matter what they do, somebody’s going to be mad at them, and that seems really unfair and really diffcult to deal with.

If you’re in this kind of situation, the first thing I want you to consider is that you might be absolutely right about not being able to make everybody happy.  There are plenty of times in life when we just can’t make all the people happy.  And you may not be able to make it through the holidays without somebody who is important to you being upset with you.  Sometimes this is just the way it is, or at least, quite likely that this is the way things will turn out, but instead of accepting this and working with this reality, we spend a lot of time wishing that this didn’t have to be our fate.  

So the second thing I want you to consider is, if this is your non-negotiable reality, you get to decide what you’re going to do about it.  Like I just said, what a lot of people do is remain paralyzed by their dislike of this situation.  And that’s an option, but a lot of people don’t consciously choose to avail themselves of this option.  They just unconsciously stay stuck because they think that not being able to make everybody happy is a terrible problem, and since they can’t solve it they’re screwed, and they just wring their hands and wish things were otherwise.

I’m actually not sure that there’s anything to be gained from thinking that not being able to make everybody happy is a problem.  If you think that not being able to make everybody happy is a problem, I encourage you to question that belief.  But whether you choose to think of this as a problem or not, the question is, what are you options?

One option is to feel sorry for yourself because poor you, you can’t make everybody happy and that’s bad and your life is hard and that’s just the end of it.  And if you choose that option consciously, you will suffer less than if you choose that option unconsciously.

But what do your other options look like?  

Well, it might be within your power to come up with a plausible excuse to escape the family holiday stuff and spend some time with your affair partner – perhaps even on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, even if those are days when your family expects you to be around and doing traditional holiday stuff with them.  And perhaps more importantly, if you are serious about pursuing a non-affair relationship with your affair partner and your affair partner REALLY wants you to spend some time with them on Christmas, you might want to do this for your affair partner, if you reasonably can.  Even if your spouse isn’t thrilled with you for ditching out on some family time on Christmas.  If you’re seriously considering divorcing your spouse, you’re probably going to have to deal with them not being thrilled with you at many points in the future.  You could bite the bullet and just start dealing with that now.

On the other hand, if you simply cannot imagine a way to extricate yourself from your family’s holiday madness, you might want to sit your affair partner down and say, something like, “Listen, I just do not want to rock the boat with my family during the holidays.  I know you really want me to find a way to see you on Christmas, but I am not willing to deal with the stress that would come with doing that.”  You can own your decision, and you can empathize with your affair partner’s feelings, AND you can deal with them being upset with you.  If you really don’t think that you can deal with the stress of finding a way to see your affair partner on Christmas, the implication may be that you’d rather deal with disappointing your affair partner by not being able to see them on Christmas.

When I’m talking to a client and I suggest options like these, the client will often say, “But no matter what I choose to do in this situation, there are going to be significant drawbacks.”  And that might be true for you!  But there simply may not be an option on the table that does NOT come with drawbacks.  That’s just the way it is sometimes.

It’s really important to remember that not liking our options, or thinking that any choice we make will be uncomfortable does not mean that we do not have a choice at all.  Sometimes the only choice we have is between discomfort version A or discomfort version B, and instead of saying, “Well, I don’t like this” or “That’s not fair!” and stopping there, we can dislike our choices and make a choice anyway.  And when we do that, we can more efficiently and effectively take responsibility for governing our own lives.

So in terms of actually seeing your affair partner or not during the holidays if you have a spouse and a family and everybody wants you to be with them as much as possible, you get to choose!  Might it be awkward to leave your family on Christmas day, even if you can come up with a pretty good reason to do so?  Sure it might.  Might it feel really shitty to not see your affair partner on Christmas when you know they miss you and really want to see you?  Yes, probably.  Whatever you decide to do probably will not be comfortable.  So if there isn’t a comfortable option, what are you going to do?

What some people do is say, well, I’m going to choose the least-uncomfortable option!  If whatever I choose is going to be uncomfortable, I’m at least going to minimize the discomfort I have to deal with.  And I think that’s a totally fair choice to make, IF you make this choice consciously.  A lot of us make these kinds of choices totally unconsciously, and that may not work out very well.  Because when our goal is to avoid or minimize discomfort, we usually run into trouble sooner or later.  If we want to live a life that we’re excited about or even moderately satisfied with, we are going to have to contend with discomfort.  So there’s a lot to be said for being willing to take it on.  But, it is also totally human to choose the less-uncomfortable option simply because it is the less-uncomfortable action.

The question I want you to consider is, what are the medium and longer-term consequences of your decisions?  For example, if you’re effectively trying to decide between the discomfort associated with letting your affair partner down on Christmas or displeasing your spouse on Christmas, the question may be, which relationship do you want to be in six months from now?  Which relationship do you want to invest in?  What is the future you are trying to create?  Generally speaking, it’s more worth it to tolerate discomfort when we’re moving towards our goals, or working towards creating our desired outcomes.

If you don’t know what you want in terms of your relationships, that’s fair enough.  If that’s the case, the best you may be able to do is muddle through the holidays, one moment at a time.  But if you really don’t know what you want with your marriage and your affair, it might be time to start figuring that out.  Survive the holidays first, by all means.  But sorting out your love life might be a high priority for the new year.

Okay people.  As I start to wrap up for today, I want to emphasize a few things.

Sometimes we think that because we don’t like a situation we are in, we don’t have any choices, but we do.  If nothing else, we always get to choose what think about any situation we find ourselves in.  But often, we also get to choose the actions we take in response to whatever circumstances we’re dealing with.

Even when we know we have a choice, sometimes we may not like our options.  And that is fair enough!  But the question is, what are you going to do about that?  Are you going to let not liking your options be your stopping point?  Or can you allow yourself to not like your options, AND also make decisions that will enable you to make your situation incrementally better?

It might not sound sexy or fun, but when we start to take responsibility for what we actually have the power to control, life starts to get so much simpler and so much better.  And you have the power to examine your options when you’re in a situation you don’t like, and to make choices for reasons that you feel good about.  And the crazy but also not-so-crazy this is, when you start doing this, you start to FEEL BETTER really quickly.  So what are you waiting for?

If you want my help identifying the options you have within your infidelity situation and making choices that will enable you to make your situation better, I am here for you.  If you want to meet with me one-on-one, go to my website and schedule an introductory coaching session with me.  If you want to meet with me before the year is over, or in the beginning of the new year, I encourage you to get that appointment scheduled today.  And if you want my IMMEDIATE assistance, in the form of videos of me teaching you stuff that goes beyond what I offer on the podcast, enroll in You’re Not the Only One.  With just a few mouse clicks or screen taps, you’ll have access to teachings and assignments that will help you deal with infidelity-related holiday angst in a totally different way.  To get started, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com.

All right everybody.  I’m sending my love and support from afar.  Bye for now.