212: Choosing Between Two Good Things

Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Marie Murphy, and I’m a non-judgmental infidelity coach.  If you are having an affair, or cheating on your partner, or 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.  When you are ready to start dealing with your infidelity situation in a way that’s truly right for you, there are two ways you can have me as your coach.  You can enroll in my online course, You’re Not the Only One, which contains teachings and assignments that go beyond what I cover on the podcast.  Once you enroll in the course, you have all of the access to the materials online, 24/7 for as long as the course exists, which should be for a very long time, barring all of the usual unforeseeable disasters.  Or we can work together one-on-one via Zoom.  If you’d like to do that, schedule yourself an introductory coaching session with me.  You can do that, and you can enroll in my course on my website, mariemurphyphd.com.  Let’s get busy with the business of dealing with your infidelity situation in a way that you feel great about.  The rest of your life, beyond the drama and difficulty of your infidelity situation, is waiting for you.

Okay, today’s episode is a re-release of Episode 67, which was called Choosing to Leave a Good-Enough Marriage for your Affair Partner.  As you will soon learn, the episode is about a lot more than that.  It’s about choosing between two very good things – which might be your spouse and your affair partner, but also might not be.  And in this episode I also talk about some of my experiences serving in the Peace Corps in Zambia, and in sharing these experiences, I illustrate how even when we choose to pursue something that we really want, we don’t necessarily get an easy ride.  And I talk about how very okay that might be.

There are two reasons why I’m re-releasing this episode, and the first is that since this episode was released back in 2021 or 2022, a fair number of clients have told me that parts of this episode really spoke to them.  So if you’re newer to this podcast, I wanted to bring it to your attention, rather than letting it possibly stay buried in the archives.  The other reason why I’m repeating this episode is because I talk about the stuff that I cover in this episode with clients ALL THE TIME.  So I’m pretty sure that the themes I speak to in this episode will speak to you in some way too, no matter what your infidelity situation currently looks like.  

I hope you enjoy the episode, but before we get to it, I have one last thing to say, and that is this: I have a new YouTube channel!  It should have gone live by the time this podcast episode is live, but if you look for it and cannot find it, rest assured, it will go live soon.  My handle or username or whatever it’s called on YouTube is MarieMurphyPhD, so go find me there!  All right, without further ado, here’s Episode 67.  

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First of all, I want to say that the title of this episode should really be something more along the lines of, “Choosing to leave a marriage that is very good in some respects so that you can open yourself up to experiences that are not available to you within the context of your marriage.”  And I’m clarifying this for a few reasons, and the first one is of course that sometimes people have a hard time leaving a marriage even if they aren’t having an affair, and if that is your situation, this episode will definitely apply to you too.  This episode is not just for people who are grappling with the question of whether or not to leave their marriage within the context of having an affair.

And I also want to make it clear that this episode is really about choosing to leave a marriage so that you can be open to options that are not available to you WITHIN marriage because there’s this piece of conventional wisdom out there that holds that you shouldn’t leave your marriage FOR your affair partner.  The idea is that you should leave your marriage because you want to leave your marriage, and then whatever happens with you and your affair partner is icing on the cake.

And I understand why people say this.  I understand why this is often the advice that’s given, and I think it speaks to something important.  Choosing to leave your marriage solely because you have met someone who you like better than your spouse has the potential to be - to use the most highly technical terms possible - kind of a mess.  For a lot of different reasons.

But if you are in a situation where you’re married and you’ve met someone new and wonderful, and you’re trying to figure out what you want to do about this, it can be very hard, in practice, to perfectly delineate between all the things.  The advice to not leave your marriage FOR your affair partner kind of implies that it’s possible for decisions to be made a in a vacuum – that you can somehow remove yourself, mentally or otherwise, from your affair in order to make a decision about your marriage that doesn’t have anything to do with your affair.

Again, I think this advice is well-intentioned, but impractical.  Many decisions in life cannot be made in a vacuum!  If you love your spouse and you love your affair partner albeit perhaps in different ways, you may find it pretty hard to simply put the genie back in the bottle and stop loving one or both of them and make your decision from there.  If you’ve met someone who you’re really excited about, it may be pretty much impossible for you to evaluate your marriage without taking anything related to your affair or your affair partner or who you’ve become as a result of being engaged in that relationship into account.

And I don’t think that has to be a problem.  Often, folks I work with who are married or partnered and are also having a relationship with someone else get really focused on figuring out how to completely disassociate themselves from their affair partner or get some space from their spouse OR BOTH so that they can make a clear decision about what they want to do.

Sometimes a little physical distance can be helpful.  But more often than not, people THINK it will be helpful, and then it isn’t.  And the reason is that when you’re trying to make a decision about anything, it’s your THINKING that matters.  And your thinking is not determined by your physical proximity to your affair partner, or how often you see them, or any of those circumstantial things.  Not completely, anyway!  We can sort out our thinking no matter what is going on in our lives.  So often we think we have to change our life circumstances in order to change our thinking, but that doesn’t have to be the case.  In fact, it usually works far better the other way around: when we’re able to change our thinking, we’re better able to change our circumstances.

I want to suggest that the central question you need to answer for yourself if you’re trying to decide whether you want to leave your marriage or not is, WHAT IS IT MOST IMPORTANT TO ME TO EXPERIENCE IN MY LIFE AT THIS TIME?

And that question applies whether you have an affair partner in the picture or not.  And a follow-up question to ask yourself is, are there things that are essential to me right now that are not options for me within the context of my marriage?

Notice that I’m not asking you how good or bad your marriage is.  Notice that I’m not asking you what you love about your marriage and what you don’t love about your marriage.  Notice that I’m not asking you about what you think you’re going to want in ten years. I’m asking you to get clear on what is MOST important for you to experience in your life at this point in time.

Here’s the thing: deciding whether or not you want to leave your marriage may require you to choose between multiple good things.  It may be that there are a lot of things you really appreciate about your marriage!  And it may also be true that are things about your marriage that you don’t want to continue to experience, or things that you really want that are not possible for you if you stay married.  So for example, you may think your spouse is a great person and a wonderful co-parent and you may really like sharing a home with them, but having a full-fledged romantic relationship with your affair partner may not be an option within the context of your marriage, and you really want to have that relationship.

So in order to move forward, you may have to choose between two things you like a lot.  You may have to relinquish something that you really appreciate and value in order to get something that you appreciate and value even more.

And for some people, this seems like a PROBLEM.  We sometimes think that having to choose between two good things is somehow bad.  And I think the problem a lot of people have is giving themselves permission to say no to something that’s okay or perhaps even pretty good – or VERY good.  

But what if it’s okay to say no to something good, because doing so will open us up to something that we want even more?  What if sometimes in order to experience things we REALLY want, we have to relinquish options and experiences that might be pretty good in some ways, or even pretty great – but are not as fundamentally aligned with our deepest desires and highest priorities?

This is where I see a lot of people getting stuck.  A lot of people think that it’s somehow bad to leave a marriage that isn’t completely terrible.  A lot of people think that if they’re going to end a marriage, the marriage needs to be really, really awful in some objective, verifiable way in order for the decision to leave to be okay.

And of course, this sort of thinking is supported by so many of the common messages that are out there about marriage and divorce.  Marriage is supposed to be forever!  That’s the whole point!  Till death do us part!  All of that.  These ideas are prevalent, and for some of us, they’re very powerful.  And this can be true even when we know, intellectually, that we can get divorced, and that other people get divorced and it’s okay.  Even if you know intellectually that you COULD leave your marriage, you may not believe that it’s okay for you to choose to leave your marriage.  

And what I want to emphasize today is that in order to make decision like that, you will, number one, need to get really clear about what you want in your life, and why you want it.

And, number two, you will also need to recognize that in order to get what you want, you may have to give up other things that you appreciate and value.

And finally, number three, you will need to be prepared for the possibility that even if getting what you want is totally possible, that doesn’t mean it will be entirely comfortable or easy, or always comfortable or easy.  It may be TOTALLY worth it on the whole, but that doesn’t mean it will be like magic and sunshine and rainbows and amazingness all the time.

In order to illustrate these points, and to show you how they can play out, I’m going to tell you a story from my own life.  It doesn’t have to do with infidelity, but it’s still extremely relevant to the points I’m making today.

When I was in my early twenties, I served in the Peace Corps in Zambia.  I made the decision to apply to the Peace Corps for very specific personal and professional reasons that I felt great about.  I could tell you many things about what those reasons were, but I’m not going to do that because the main point that I really want to make is that at that moment in my life, I was as certain as I could be that serving in the Peace Corps was an experience I definitely wanted to have.

And I was sure I wanted to do it then, at that particular moment in time.  I had several definite reasons for this, and one of them was that I was very aware of the fact that I really liked my life at home at the time, and that it would have been very easy for me to say, you know what, I’m really happy right now, and I don’t want to give up what I’ve got.  I was living in San Francisco and I was probably more in love with the city than I’ve ever been, before or since.  I had a job that I really, really liked.  I was in a romantic relationship that I really liked.  I had good friends!  I had hobbies!  I did volunteer work that I cared about!  I lived in a great apartment.  And it was very clear to me that I could so easily stay exactly where I was, and continue to enjoy my extremely satisfying life.

This could have happened, but it didn’t, because I was so clear on why I wanted to serve in the Peace Corps that I did not waver from my decision.  

But that doesn’t mean that it was easy to go.  As my departure date grew near, I was excited about embarking on my adventure, but I was also FIERCELY sad.  And I mean, like, crying for hours out of every day sad.  I was really sad to be relinquishing the aspects of my life that I was leaving behind, and all of the great things that I was effectively opting out of.

And all of the emotions I was experiencing then were INTENSE.  As I’ve been preparing this podcast episode and revisiting all of those memories, I’ve been hit by the force of all those feelings all over again, and reliving all of that has been quite something, let me tell you.  Leaving for Zambia was quite a moment in time for me.  Even though I was choosing to let go of aspects of my life for reasons I was totally sure of, that didn’t make the letting go easy or painless.  Far from it.

And then, once the Peace Corps experience itself began, it wasn’t like everything was perfect and magical and great all of a sudden.  It was a stark new beginning, and there was SO much new stuff to get used to, in addition to also missing everything I’d left behind.  So it wasn’t like I was instantly rewarded by my bravery and fortitude and commitment to my decision by getting to instantly transition into a whole bunch of warm fuzzy new awesomeness.  

The way it used to be with the Peace Corps was that you would go to Washington DC for a day or two for some bureaucratic stuff and you would meet the cohort of volunteers you’d be serving with, and then you’d fly off to your host country a few days later and you would move in with a local family for your pre-service training.  

So it’s a lot to take in all at once.  And then, just as soon as you’ve developed a deep love for your host family and for your fellow volunteers, your pre-service training ends, and you’re taken off to a village you’ve never been to before which will be your home for your two years of service.  At least that was how it worked when I was in Zambia.  I’m sure it’s different in other countries, and I’m sure it’s changed over time, but the way things were set up during my service made this moment of getting dropped off at your site, so to speak, was a big deal.  

And my experience of getting dropped off in my village was different from the experience a lot of other volunteers in Zambia had at the time.  Most volunteers got to go to a regional Peace Corps house, where they’d hang out with other volunteers for a few days, and buy some of the stuff they’d need for life in the village, and put their Peace Corps issued bikes together with other people around to help out.  And then maybe a whole crew of volunteers would take them to their site and help them get settled in a little before they left you to it.  In other words, it was sort of a gradual transition from training to the village for some volunteers, with lots of support from friends along the way.

For various reasons, it did not work out that way for me.  At all.  I won’t get into the details, but the process by which I was dropped off at my village was unique, and abrupt.  

And that was hard, but what made things even harder was that the family that I lived closest to in the village, the family that in theory would have been my host family, didn’t exactly give me a warm reception.  And so even though I had all of these people right next door to me who were very curious about me and what I was up to at every single moment, our relationship was strange from the start.  Ironically, from moment one in my new home, I had both zero privacy, and zero real company.

So there I was, dropped off at my new mud hut, with various supplies I’d bought like pots and pans and all of that, the belongings I’d brought from home, AND a box full of bike parts.  Since we were all stationed in rural villages, the Peace Corps gave us bikes to get around.  Except that upon arrival to my village, mine was not assembled yet.

Now, in case it doesn’t go without saying, I had no cell phone, no computer, no land line anywhere near me, and not even an established post office box.  At the time when I lived in Zambia, there was not an internet café in the town nearest to me, but that didn’t even matter yet, because I needed my bike to get to town, and my bike was still in a bunch of pieces.  Nor were there any other volunteers in biking distance of my village, who could have come to visit me on their bike.  So in other words, when I first arrived in the village I did not have any way to make contact with anyone outside of the village.  It was just me and my new environment and my new people.

As you might imagine based on what I’ve said so far, that first week by myself in my village was HARD.  There were so many difficult aspects of the experience.  For one thing, the house I was placed in was old, and kind of falling apart.  It was made from wood and mud, as many village houses in Zambia are, but it hadn’t been cleaned prior to my arrival, for one thing, and it was infested with all kinds of critters.  That was tough.  Then, there was all of the logistical stuff related to living without running water or electricity.  There was a well very close to me, by local standards, but when you’re hauling water and washing your own dishes and washing your own clothes and heating your own bath water and purifying your own drinking water from well water for the first time, it helps to have somebody help you out, or at least show you a few helpful tricks.  My nearest neighbors, my non-host family, didn’t do any of that.  They just stared at me as fumbled around.

Just a side note here, my comments about this particular family are not a reflection of my experiences with the people of Zambia in general.  I’d been in country for more than two months prior to getting my village, and just about everyone I’d met so far was wonderful.  So initially, I didn’t know what to make of the strange reception I got from my village neighbors.  I was really perplexed by a lot of things they did and said, but for a million reasons, I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt.  Nevertheless, the quality of my interactions with them were definitely a part of what made my early days in the village as hard as they were.

Then there was the matter of assembling my bicycle.  I had never assembled a bike all by myself prior to coming to Zambia, so putting a mountain bike together was a bit of a challenge.  That in and of itself didn’t bother me much, but what did get to me was the fact that only this tiny little instruction manual had come with the bike.  In many places, this little manual instructed me to “consult the assembly guide” in order to find answers to the many questions I had about how to assemble my new bicycle.  I did not have the assembly guide that my little manual referred to, and there was nothing I could do about this.  This situation drove me repeatedly to tears.

Many things during my first week in my new village drove me to tears.  

Before you leave for the Peace Corps, you hear all kinds of stories about people leaving as soon as they get there, and a couple of the people in my cohort did exactly that.  I think one left during pre-service training, and one left pretty much as soon as she got to her village.  In addition to that, Peace Corps staff were pretty good about acknowledging the challenges of service, and letting us know that we should anticipate difficult experiences in addition to wonderful experiences.  

So I understood very well that things could get really hard, and that some people decide they just want to get out of dodge, and knowing that that could happen was helpful preparation.  And I’d had a few tough days during pre-service training when my mood was pretty low, so I’d certainly had a taste of what the Peace Corps blues could feel like. 

But NOTHING could have prepared me for that first week alone in my village.  During that week, pretty much every moment was excruciatingly hard.  Pretty much every other second, I thought to myself, “Okay!  I totally get it!  I understand why people leave!  I totally understand why people get on their bike, ride to the nearest town without saying goodbye to anyone in their new village, and find a phone, and call the Peace Corps staff, and tell someone to come pick them up right away because they want to quit.”

But of course, I didn’t have that option, because I couldn’t put my fucking bike together.  

That isn’t the point, though.  And I did eventually get my bike put together.  The point that I want to stress is that even though I knew I was not going to go home, I knew I was going to hang in there, and even though I believed that if I hung in there, it would be worth it, there were moments during that first week when I was like, this totally sucks and I completely understand the appeal of quitting right now.  In terms of challenging emotional experiences, I’ve never experienced anything quite like that week before or since.  That’s not to say that it was the worst experience of my life or anything like that – but it was uniquely difficult.

And here’s what else I did during that uniquely difficult week.  I said to myself, very deliberately, and very frequently, This is fucking hard right now.  This is so hard for me right now.  I knew this was possibly going to be hard, and it is way more difficult than I imagined it could even possibly be, and this is so crazy and I am totally struggling.  AND I know that this is part of what people experience in the Peace Corps and now I understand exactly why some people choose to leave.  I get it.  Now I have that piece of understanding.  And I’m not going to leave, but I am going to let myself cry in my mud hut for another ten minutes because there is literally nothing else that I can do right now.  And then I’m going to pull myself together, I’m going to go back out into the world, and I’m going to face the next part of the day as best as I can.

And that’s what I did over and over again, for many days in a row.

That first week in the village was by far the hardest, but even after the intensity of the difficulty faded a little, things didn’t get amazingly better right away.  Things with my neighbors, or my would-have-been host family got worse, actually, and figuring out what to do about that was quite a challenge.  Since I wasn’t yet well acquainted with anyone else in the area, I didn’t want to speak badly about my new neighbors, because I didn’t want to offend anyone.  I was supposed to be making a good impression on my new community, after all.  Eventually, I learned that my neighbors weren’t all that well regarded by many people in the area, and I ended up moving to a totally different part of the village, and my new neighbors were wonderful, and getting out of my original village house and my original village neighbors was really great.  But getting that situation sorted out took weeks, and advocating for myself in getting this change made took a LOT of courage and tenacity.

And all throughout this time, I didn’t have any contact with other Peace Corps Volunteers.  I had finally been able to set up a post office box in town, but I had to mail people at home letters in order for them to get my address, and if they wrote back to me it took time for me to get their responses, and I wasn’t in town to pick up my mail everyday anyway.  I didn’t have access to the internet to check my email.  I think I found a phone in town that I was able to use to call my parents once during this time period, but that was it.  

So during this really challenging period, I didn’t have anyone I could lean on for support.  I eventually made good friends in the village, but at first, the whole dynamic with my strange neighbors had a limiting impact on my ability to form relationships with other people in the village.  So for this very challenging period of time I was about as alone as I have ever been.

If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while you’ve probably heard me talk about tolerating discomfort, and let me tell you, in these early days and weeks in my village in Zambia, I was tolerating a LOT of discomfort.  And let me remind you that I had left behind a life that I loved in order to have the privilege of being so uncomfortable.

So why didn’t I just pack it up and go back home to my nice life?  Here’s why.  I knew why I wanted to be in Zambia, I knew what I wanted to get out of the experience of serving in the Peace Corps and living in Southern Africa, and I reminded myself of those things every day.  I am not kidding about that.  In those early, difficult weeks, I had to sit myself down every night and write about why I was there, and what I WANTED to experience.

I also had to consciously and deliberately remind myself that the discomfort I was experiencing wasn’t going to last forever.  I had to choose to trust that things could and would change.  And I had to choose to believe that I could handle what I was experiencing even when it was really difficult.  And I had to make these choices over and over and over again.  I really want to stress how deliberate I had to be about doing this.  It wasn’t like I told myself once that I could handle my discomfort and it would be worth it to hang in there, and then everything was fine.  Not at all.  I had to renew my commitments to my beliefs many times a day.

And as I said a little while back, eventually things did change – or, more accurately, I made things change, and I moved to a different part of my village and that was a completely different experience.  And of course, my Peace Corps service included so much more than living in the village.  It included hitchhiking to Mozambique, and swimming in lake Malawi, and sliding down sand dunes in Namibia, and moving out of my village to live in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia.  And although there were certainly other difficult points in the overall experience, those initial weeks in my village were uniquely challenging, and if I hadn’t been willing to stick it out through those supremely difficult moments, I wouldn’t have gotten to experience all of the things I wanted to experience.  I wouldn’t have gotten to enjoy all of the things I wanted to enjoy in Africa.

So there are several generalizable points I want to make about my experience in Zambia.  The first is that we sometimes think about options we have in life in terms of wrong decisions and right decisions.  But what if there’s no such thing as a wrong decision, or a right decision?

What if the real question is, what do we most want to experience in life, and what are we willing to do in order to have those experiences? 

What are we willing to give up in order to have the experiences we most want to have?  And how much discomfort are we willing to tolerate in order to ultimately experience more of what we want?

Sometimes in order to get what we REALLY want, we have to give up some things we really appreciate.  And sometimes getting what we want more of requires us to weather some discomfort and hang in there through some tough going in order to get there.  And sometimes we have to do things we never imagined we’d have to do in order to realize our dreams.  

So to make this a little more concrete, even if you are sure you want to have options open to you that will only be available if you leave your marriage, you may still be extremely discombobulated after your separation, or your divorce.  Even if you’re SURE you don’t want to live with your spouse anymore, you may still be profoundly lonely when it’s just you in your new apartment.  Even if you’re SURE you want to pursue a life with your affair partner, you may still have moments of feeling very sad about the end of your marriage.  Even if you’re sure you want to build a life for yourself outside of the context of your marriage, the early stages of creating that life may challenge you in ways you never imagined possible.

But what if none of that is bad?

And what if we could anticipate that all of these sorts of things might happen, and believe that it’s possible for us to experience this stuff with good humor – or at least, with willingness rather than resistance?

What if we didn’t anticipate challenges or discomfort as reasons to avoid particular choices, but as a necessary part of living life to the fullest?

What if we trusted that if we can get clear on what we want, we can have it – as long as we are willing to experience some discomfort in the process?

What if I’m not really clear on what I want, you ask?  Great question.  But that’s a whole ‘nother podcast episode.  So we’ll talk about that another time.

All right everyone, thank you all so much for listening!  Please go check out my new YouTube channel and subscribe or like it or whatever it is you do with those things.  And of course, if you want my help dealing with your infidelity situation, let’s work together!  You can enroll in my online course, You’re Not the Only One, or we can work together one-on-one via Zoom.  You can get started with either of those options through my website, mariemurphyphd.com.

All right, that’s it for today.  Have an amazing day.  Bye for now.