Relationship routines, the monotony of marriage, a silver wedding anniversary approaching… Everything is heavy, listless, tedious, lifeless. We know our partner’s every move, know in advance how our conversations, fewer by the day, will go. We don’t even raise issues any more, because we have heard the unsatisfactory answers all too often. We sense, and hear, criticism of ourselves and how we behave. We feel restricted and unnoticed. We have tried to get closer to our partner again and again and come up against an invisible wall. We have wanted to connect and instead been rebuffed by withdrawal and silence. Or rejected by judgements and demands.
Of course, we also share some good times, as a matter of routine. A lot functions automatically, and on important issues we can take our consensus for granted. And sometimes we are overcome by the memories of our first weeks together or we smile at an unexpected erotic touch. But then we become aware of the dull Here and Now again, and dream of exciting and unpredictable encounters. We feel like the German ex-minister who yearned for life. But as soon as we become aware of our dreams, we pull ourselves up sharply. We need to keep things going, so we push our dreams back down to the bottom of the iceberg and instead flick through the TV listings for a gripping programme.
And then, apparently quite out of the blue, a stranger comes into our life and we feel like new. All our boundaries seem to dissolve and we are ready for adventure. At last we can live and love again.
With a lover we frequently experience an intensity of emotion and an uninhibited sexuality that we have rarely known, and hardly ever during our marriage. We feel electric – alive and vibrant. Our body pulses with passion and a huge river of excitement and arousal takes us out of our mundane world. It is as if a swathe of sunlight has broken through the heavy fog of our normal family life.
We can’t really make any decisions, can’t plan, and definitely can’t integrate anything of this into our everyday life. As if in a fever we wait for the next phone call, the next meeting, the next touch. The secret lover works like insulin for a diabetic. We need our regular dose, otherwise our vitality levels will drop. Without a regular supply, we are in danger of sinking back into the unbearable routine of everyday life. It would seem like a return to captivity, to that domestic prison in which we were always asking: ‘Is this it?’
By having an affair, we have hope and purpose once more. We now have something that is much more exciting than the old familiar routine. We are living on a high of uncertainty, of novelty, of the forbidden. The risk gives us an adrenaline rush; our heart races, its beat pounding through our whole body. Love is rationed, limited, forbidden and secret. Every word, every encounter, every touch is precious and rare, special, risky, illicit and dangerous. With every word, every meeting and every touch, we have to be as circumspect as a bank robber inching his way between sensors and alarm systems. We want to savour every precious moment of it and at the same time have to keep it secret. We can only experience limited relief with a good friend or a loyal confidante. Aside from that our happiness has to quietly implode. At all costs it must not be discharged into the outside world. Because out there are our partner, our children, our family – and most of all our guilt.
We have just been on cloud nine with our lover, and now, at the mere thought of our family, we are racked with guilt. Having just drunk deeply from the elixir of life, we find ourselves left with a poisoned chalice. We once had hopes for our marriage too, but what is left of them now? Home is a place of dutiful demands, safe habits, sad defeats and bitter resignation. We were fed up with a lot of it for quite a while, but now we can satisfy our hunger elsewhere, we feel like a traitor when we come home. We had promised to be responsible. Instead we have burdened ourselves with guilt and are now afraid of the consequences of our secret machinations. We had duties at home and had always meant to do the best for our partner. Instead, we have turned away from them and are living for our pleasure alone. Too often we were inhibited in our marriage or subjected to stale mechanical desires. Now we are enjoying ourselves elsewhere and feel free.
The following dynamics are normally unconscious, but happen nevertheless when we are cheating on our partner. In the outer world we give ourselves to our secret lover and experience our passion and vibrancy with them, while at the same time we feel guilty at home. Because our partner is there, embodying family, familiarity and closeness. Once a secret love enters our life, it automatically splits into two worlds that seem to be incompatible. We instinctively know that both have their place in our life, that somehow they belong together, but we don’t have the faintest idea how they can be harmoniously combined. In love triangles there seems to be only black and white, either closeness and familiarity or vibrancy and passion. And once we have travelled between those two poles for a while, both become heavily laden with guilt. We don’t do anybody justice – ourselves, our lover or our partner.
It is in love triangles that we experience our deepest inner division. Such relationships always bring pain and heartbreak to everyone involved. In them, love is like an undercover rebel. All three parties are only united in one thing: they are all afraid of closeness – even though in the case of the secret lover it looks the complete opposite.
Some singles are forever drawn to people living in a stable relationship. The married lover seems to be perfect, ideal, a combination of everything that they’ve ever dreamed of – apart from the fact that they are tied to another person and somehow always a little out of reach. Because of that, great hopes are just as inevitable as great disappointments and they take turns in ever-shorter intervals.
Love triangles are determined by vague boundaries. There is a continual whirl of guessing, hoping, fearing and yearning, and nobody knows exactly where they are. When delving deeper into those dynamics, we find a certain inability to connect and fear of intimacy in everybody concerned.
The person in the middle feels as though they are straddling an abyss. They are mostly incapable of making decisions because each of their partners seems to embody half of what they desire. They move to and fro, checking out the advantages and disadvantages of being with one or the other and secretly dreaming of having both of them. If they do come to a decision, there is always the feeling of having lost something. But if they get stuck in the hide-and-seek between their partners, they feel trapped and slowly run dry.
The secret lover always partly desires the cosy and safe position held by the one being cheated on. Most of all, they are struggling with their distrust of that partner that is so desirable but so otherwise engaged. Can they really trust someone who is cheating on someone else? They are also struggling with the guilt of ruining a relationship. Even if the piggy in the middle were to choose them, how could they build a happy relationship out of the ruins of the one they had destroyed?
The role of the person being cheated on in this triangular dilemma is the most difficult one. Whatever is happening behind their back is mirroring something of their own emotional dynamics, however vehemently they might reject the idea. However inconceivable it may seem to them, they too feel like pulling out of the relationship. Often, by the time one partner leaves, it’s been quite a while since the other was available. They weren’t firmly anchored in the relationship and had never been able to commit from the heart.
I have often taken the cheated partner all the way back to the beginning of the relationship – and how often have we arrived at issues like ‘I had never been with anybody else when I met my partner,’ ‘I wasn’t sure whether I really wanted them,’ ‘I allowed myself to be swept off my feet,’ ‘I have sometimes asked myself whether they were really right for me,’ ‘I had had my doubts about the relationship for a while…’ Even though it might look as though the deceived party has suffered the most heartbreak, the inner truth of the relationship is a different picture. How often have I asked someone who has just been left for someone else: ‘And had you already begun to leave emotionally? Had you already started to doubt your partner, to withdraw your trust and your heart?’ And in reply I’ve received a shamefaced nod.
When one partner leaves, it’s because the other one has left a long time ago. This is a fact we often don’t want to accept. We’d prefer a straightforward ruling: the one who cheats is bad and the one who was cheated on is good. But in my view the person who has been betrayed has often betrayed themselves. They may be someone who doesn’t really stand up for themselves and their beliefs. Someone who has high expectations of the relationship. Someone who prefers not to get involved with the real, shop-soiled, less-than-perfect partner. Someone who has often been feeling dependent on their partner in one way or another but not dared to challenge that dependency, to appear vulnerable, to courageously follow their own truth and to trust their own strength.
And the one who does the cheating? Frequently people who take lovers say ‘At last I felt accepted. At last I could simply let go. I didn’t have to constantly match up to someone else’s standards.’ One man was surprised to admit, after a few of our sessions, ‘In the beginning I thought I simply needed some good sex again. But then I realized that my heart was searching too. The relationship between my wife and me was never really warm. In the beginning maybe it was hot … but it was never really nice and warm.’
We often end up in someone else’s bed when our emotions have been dammed up for too long and we can’t express an important aspect of ourselves. Then our life-force looks for an escape route. It drains away from our relationship and flows directly to where it can enter into a vibrant liaison – and so we hurtle into an affair.
Love triangles almost always develop when we emotionally withdraw from our partner and their explicit or implicit pressure, our own inhibitions, our feeling of inferiority and inner emotions; when we are not really ready and willing to commit ourselves and not prepared to do some work on our own healing. It is in such illicit relationships that we express our fear of real closeness. It is rare that the third party turns up randomly – usually it is at a time we are either frozen and silent with our partner or engaged in a constant power struggle.
While in our affair we experience ourselves as wild, lively, inspired and passionate, we are downhearted and disappointed at the same time. ‘My partner really didn’t have much going for them. I’ve missed out on so much for such a long time…’The last sentence is true. But the first isn’t. The excitement wasn’t lacking in our partner, but in our relationship – all that wildness, passion and inspiration. Yes, we have missed it! But because we have not allowed ourselves to feel it for a long time. We have played it safe, swallowed our words, numbed our feelings, repressed our emotions, given up, lost heart and let our relationship drift into a routine. Now here comes a stranger and we believe that they have brought all those wonderful things with them and that they are responsible for them. In reality we have simply become involved again, become spontaneous again, been able to take a risk. And that is why we experience something with a stranger that we have not dared to give to our marriage.
When the third party turns up, it is high time … not to make a decision between them but to face up to the truth. Go to your partner, sit down with them and explain yourself. Imagine a text template with some empty brackets:
Whenever you are thinking of [your lover], be grateful for all that you have discovered in yourself with them. Analyze all those feelings as closely as you can. And then replace your lover’s name with [your yearning] or [your unlived parts]. Tell your partner honestly and openly about your desires and your unlived parts, your feelings and dreams.
This is likely to take about as much courage as jumping off a cliff – but if you stick to your guns and disclose all your desires, dreams and fantasies, you will be amazed how much intimacy, vitality and freedom suddenly open up after this leap into fear and pain.
The dilemma of a love triangle is always crying out for a courageous and honest declaration. It always involves three people who are avoiding taking their next major step towards healing and growth. All three (!!!) people involved are really being asked to confront, on their own, their fear of commitment and closeness.
A healthy relationship needs both partners to form a greater whole through constant openness and growth. If one of them represses old pain, doesn’t express the fundamental and important parts of the relationship and doesn’t allow new and risky developments to take place, the relationship is missing something. This ‘empty’ part works like a vacuum and creates a sucking pressure until it is filled – maybe by another person. Then the system is complete again, but still not intact. In love triangles it takes three people to add up to 100 per cent; two of them only add up to 50 or 60 per cent.
The third party embodies everything that the betrayed one isn’t expressing. That person, of course, really doesn’t want to know that the ‘bad’ third party might have something to do with them. They don’t want to talk to them, don’t want to argue with or be confronted by them – they just want them to go away. But this person has something that they are lacking – whether they want to know it or not. That is why I always encourage the cheated party to enter into an honest emotional discussion with the third party – who in turn is lacking everything that the cheated one embodies. Both are often completely out of balance, only in opposite directions.
The person in the middle should have entered into truthful communication and confrontation within the original relationship long ago. They should have led the way to new horizons, thrown all their old baggage overboard, inspired their partner and maybe the whole family with their patience and untiring involvement, day after day. Instead they ran away from responsibility, dreamed of ideal relationships, special partners and a different life, and were always chasing new rainbows.
Once a lover enters their life they say, ‘This person is so special, so inspiring, so liberating and unique that they make me feel alive.’ They don’t recognize that it is the special circumstances that make them feel so alive. The really special, unique and inspiring thing is that – at least at the beginning – with this person they are living in the moment, without the baggage of old memories, bad experiences and entrenched demands. When talking about the highest state of being, every serious spiritual path ends in the Here and Now, in enlightenment in the present moment.
In our normal life, our familiar surroundings, our familiar relationship, we are hardly ever aware of the present moment. We avoid all sorts of things that we may once have experienced as bad or painful. We dream of all sorts of things that we hope to achieve, because that is where happiness lies. We have all sorts of ideas about how things should be. The result is that we plan our relationship to death and control away every bit of spontaneity. We paralyze each other with our fears and demands to the point where we feel safe, but then we are also cut off from all natural flow. We are no longer living with the person by our side but with our image of that person. The problem is, that doesn’t do them justice.
Sometimes we can experience this game that our mind is playing with us, this quite amazing phenomenon, in fast forward with a lover. A woman came to me after she had had an affair and had returned to her husband. She had accidentally bumped into her former lover and had nearly burst out laughing. She had felt really embarrassed but at the same time enormously liberated. ‘I must have been blind,’ she said. ‘I used to be absolutely convinced of how fantastically attractive he was. When I saw him again, it was as if the drugs had worn off. I saw a spindly, badly dressed Mister Average speaking with a strong accent that I have never liked. At one point I couldn’t help myself – I just started laughing about all my old dreams.’
Re-establishing a truthful relationship with our partner works in exactly the same way as falling into a dream and then waking from it.
Chuck Spezzano has developed an almost magic recipe for love triangles and for notorious womanizers/man-hunters. Before Chuck started working with couples, he had been about a bit. He had changed partners more and more frequently until he had had to concede that this was getting him nowhere. None of the new partners seemed to be the right one and the novelty was wearing off more quickly each time. Often new and old relationships were overlapping. Eventually Chuck discovered that every new woman embodied the qualities that the last one didn’t have. As soon as he started to long for those missing qualities, they seemed to turn up in his life – but in the shape of another woman.
Back then Chuck had not only been womanizing but had also been doing research into human consciousness and the power of the mind. He tried out a new strategy, with baffling results. He still focused his attention on what was missing in his relationship, but this time he believed with all his heart that it could be found within his current relationship. Instead of escaping, he got closer to the woman by his side and focused on the fact that everything he was missing was, in reality, right there. He was rewarded with a kind of miracle and turned this experience into an important strategy for healing relationships. It is simple: Give all your love, all your attention and curiosity back to your partner. Engage with them with all your heart and for a fortnight concentrate on the qualities that you are longing for. Believe that you will find them in your partner and your true partner will develop them. For the last two decades Chuck has been happily married to the same woman. Together they work on healing relationships all over the world.
Everybody can take this path. Everybody can connect once more with the lost and isolated parts of their personality and believe in the power of their own love and their unlimited potential – and their partner’s too. The magic word for this is ‘commitment’. Commit yourself to reconnecting your heart and your sexuality. Work out what strategies you use to prove or maintain your independence. In reality you are simply distracting yourself from old heartbreak. Not being able to commit as adults is always about childhood traumas that never healed. And the longer we have shut off that old pain, the more courage it takes to finally show ourselves as the vulnerable beings that we are.
In love triangles, each of the people involved can set this urgently needed healing process in motion. Each of them can begin to recommit to their own truth and to stand up for it openly and courageously. Even someone who is being deceived and is not in the know will have an inkling that something is wrong in their relationship. But the one in the middle has the trump card with which they can take everybody else forward in one great leap. If they can disclose to their real partner that there is a third person in the relationship, this very pragmatic step will lead to much more clarity all round.
Often the one in the middle hesitates for a long time before confessing they have a lover. If this is you, I advise you to do it quickly. Only then can the journey begin towards the further growth that is so important for everybody involved.
In most cases the confession initiates conversations that should have taken place years ago. Often a lot of repressed and painful feelings break loose that nobody would have admitted to before. A person will often refuse to declare the identity of their lover. But in this case, too, I advocate telling the complete truth. Only when all the cards are on the table can everybody concerned move forward. As long as the lover is somehow kept secret, they will hold on to their place in the relationship in a powerful way. For that reason there is no greater challenge in healing a love triangle than to let go, to admit, to confess and to declare. For that reason, the question ‘Which of the two is better for me?’ keeps us away from the real task, which is ‘Now I’m finally learning to make decisions and to commit myself totally and wholly to this one person!’
This path demands great commitment, openness and the courage to admit that you are vulnerable. It also demands something very old-fashioned: faithfulness and discipline. When you indulge yourself sexually, when you are forever looking for a new thrill and change your sexual partners frequently, you cannot take this path towards healing. Unfortunately, in this scientifically and technically orientated world we haven’t a clue about deeper emotional and energetic contexts. We don’t even suspect that a profound exchange of power occurs when two people who don’t know each other very well just go to bed together, without the connection of love and trust. In this case, women use men rather like energetic vacuum cleaners to ‘have a good clear-out’, while men not only discharge their bodies but also their hearts.
Stop being independent. Do you want to know what is worse than being dependent? Being independent, because it is a constant attempt not to be dependent. Commit yourself wholly to your partner.
By ‘commitment’ I don’t mean sterile, dutiful faithfulness. Maybe you have been together for what feels like an eternity, but you daren’t say how you really feel inside. The dreadful thing is that every unexpressed word, every muted feeling will build a wall between you and your partner and prevent deeper intimacy. That is why you play power games without admitting to it, why you fight for acceptance and attention. And, probably unconsciously, why you compete with each other. You want to be better than your partner so that they cannot hurt you. Be courageous and show your dependency and your fear. Your relationship can only be healed and transformed as a result.
The true healing of a person begins with an honest commitment to another person. The true healing of a love triangle lies in a deep desire for truthfulness and the courage to reveal that you are vulnerable. What follows is like a long walk through a desert full of hurt and new betrayal. The hard phase of openness and communication seems endless and tough. Time and again the thought of giving up will enter your head. Just as often you’ll have the tempting idea that your ideal partner, your dream man or woman, is out there somewhere. But if you unwaveringly believe that your current partner can offer you everything that is needed for a fulfilling relationship, this will bring forward exactly those qualities in them. In this way the hole through which a third person can slip into the relationship will be filled in with truthfulness and life.
A while ago I had a wonderful experience. I had to go away on my own for a few days on business. I had an appointment with a man whom I had met twice before but didn’t really know. We went out for dinner to discuss a few issues. I hadn’t been in a situation like that in ages. After only a few moments there was something in the air. We were laughing as if we had known each other for a long time. We talked unusually openly and confidentially about work-related issues and challenged each other verbally. Fireworks were going off between us. I was in a wonderfully elated state which I really, really enjoyed. I felt at ease and feminine and apparently adored by this clever and attractive man.
That was all very wonderful and life-enhancing. But the really special thing was something different: I felt completely free to enjoy the attentions of this stranger. I was also able to talk openly to him about it. Was he aware of what was happening between us? He smiled and nodded. Without any warning I told him how much I liked his attentions. My openness took him by surprise. As if as a reward, he made me a few really flattering compliments. I also liked that very much and asked him whether he wanted to know why I was able to be so open with him. Yes, he wanted to know. I told him I could only feel so elated and free, so openly receptive to his attentions, because I felt so deeply connected to my husband.
The most wonderful feeling of all was that I did not have to feel shame or guilt about the fact that I could be open and feminine. And the man turned out to be exactly the right person for such an exciting encounter, because he understood immediately what I meant.