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She had an ?emotional affair? that lasted many years. They were never lovers. They talked constantly and told each other their stories. They said they would leave their marriages. He left his. She didn?t leave hers. She went into the therapy instead.
That chances that an affair which ends a marriage can become a happy marriage are very, very slim. ?We?ll look at why that is, at what happens in an affair, and at how to make the best of the mess that?s left afterwards.???The woman who had the ?emotional ?affair,? ?had it with a man she?s met in a pottery class. There was a part of her that longed to be creative and artistic. ?She and her husband had joined together to work hard, build a family, build a family business. By her late thirties, children off in college, she felt utterly suffocated by the very success she?d worked so hard to build. Her husband wanted them to double the size of their business and all she could see was another fifteen years of being a slave to that business. Yet she felt she couldn?t refuse her husband because, she felt she?d committed to a certain kind of life with him. So she began her affair.
Now I?ll give you a male version of that story. The man was a doctor and an excellent one. He?d come from a family where the adults and older children were pretty selfish and self involved. ?He basically raised himself and cared for the older people. ?Since he had a good heart and was smart, he was good at it. He knew how to care for others. What he had suppressed was his ability to allow others to care for him. You can see where this story is going and why, at 45, he began an affair with a very sweet young woman who was a nurse in his practice. You can see what their time alone was like, and why he said to her so often, ?When I am with you and our clothes are off, one of greatest happy feelings for me ?is that, finally, I?m not being a doctor.?
What?s going on?
Most of us, except those of us who really are very superficial, have a suppressed, or hidden side. ?There is almost always a part of our potential that, for a number of good reasons, we refuse to develop. ?The mark of the young adult is his or her focus on becoming a certain kind of adult. ?Often the first marriage is an expression of that healthy intention.
But often, unless you were graced by exceptionally loving, generous and supportive parents, your vision of what you can be is too narrow. ?At midlife you discover in many ways that you are both a better and more complex person than you thought you were, and a worse one.
There is a suppressed part of you that wants its time on the stage of your life. ?And if you don?t trust your marriage partner to allow that part of you to appear, you will find someone who will nurture it. You will fall in love with that person. It?s a very old joke. The man says to his secret love, ?My wife doesn?t understand me.?
People in these relationships, when they get into them, are often pleased, surprised, relieved, or thrilled to find that, in this affair, they show up as a very different person than the person they seem to be ?in their marriage. They are funnier, sexier, smarter, more compassionate, wiser, kinder, something more wonderful, fulfilling and pleasing to themselves than they ever thought they were, or always wished they were.
But there is no integrity to the relationship ?when it?s a secret and there is another party being excluded. How can there be? The relationship which is an affair, ?is no more stable than the one that isn?t. ?In both relationships, the one who is having the affair is showing up with only part of her or his true self.
So the affair starts out as being a way to become more real, more whole, as a way of trying to live with more integrity, and ends because, in the context of the affair, it?s impossible to become more real and more whole while having an affair, impossible to love with integrity. And this is the lesson everyone learns over and over and over again.
Here is how things sometimes resolve. The woman who wanted to do pottery had to learn to say, in a generous way, ?no? to her husband. Instead of helping him open an additional store, she set up a studio in a loft building where there were several other artists. ?She replaced her ?emotional affair? with a community of friends.
The Doctor went into therapy and ended the affair. ?Of course he had to ask the nurse to find a new position because he couldn?t have her in the office anymore. They managed that with some grace and a heavy severance package. ?If the pottery woman had to learn to start saying ?no,? the doctor had to learn to stop saying ?no.? He had to learn to allow his wife to care for him and that wasn?t easy for either of them, but in the end, it was a transition they were both grateful for.
Sometimes the affair that ends the marriage survives the divorce, but usually it doesn?t. In one situation, as soon as the man left his wife, all the unpleasant ways he?d been as a husband started showing up in his new relationship. His new love stopped being the good woman in contrast to the ?bad? woman at home and became, to him, a woman of ordinary complexity. He couldn?t handle it and in some respects, neither could she. As their relationship got weird, she became convinced that he was cheating on her with another woman just as he had cheated on his wife with her. And she was right. At some level she intuited the dual personality aspect of men who have affairs.?The poet, Stanley Kunitz, said, ?We have to invent and reinvent who we are until we arrive at a self we can bear to live with and die with.? ?People who are drawn to affairs are often in a chaotic research project to discover what parts of their inner self they need to invite into their daily lives. ?There are ways to create this integrity without doing something that also violates integrity. ?But life is filled with such lessons.
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