Within a single love relationship there are many endings.
—Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., Women Who Run with the Wolves
Once the affair is out in the open, you need to decide whether to work on rebuilding your relationship or end it. Whichever route you choose, I encourage you to choose it deliberately and not to act on feelings alone. Feelings, no matter how intense, are based on assumptions that are often highly subjective and may prove to be unrealistic, unuseful, or untrue. What feels right to you now you may later regret as an impulsive and unprocessed response that can’t be easily reversed.
Two of your options are dead-end. The first is to stay together and never address why the affair happened or work to assure that it won’t happen again. This is a ticket to a life of quiet, or not-so-quiet, desperation. The second is for you to stay together, with at least one of you continuing to be unfaithful, while the other fights back depression or rage. This is no more promising.
Except in those cases in which both partners freely agree to an “open” relationship, or one partner is physically or mentally incapable of serving as an active sex partner and the other one chooses to stay to provide assistance and emotional support, I have never known an ongoing affair to benefit a couple. In fact, I have never known a prolonged affair to do anything but undermine a couple’s efforts to seriously address the intimacy deficits in their relationship.
There are really only two viable alternatives.
One is to throw your lot in with your partner and work to improve your relationship. The danger for the hurt partner is that you may be drawn blindly to your mate and insist on keeping your relationship intact, no matter what. This is an example of unrequited love. “I just want my partner back,” you say. But will you be happy?
The other alternative is to say goodbye and begin building separate lives. The danger for the unfaithful partner is that you may be drawn blindly to your lover and insist on being with this person no matter what. This is an example of romantic love. “If the love I feel is this strong, it must be true,” you say. But is it?
Let’s look closely at these two types of love before you make any irreversible decisions. This is not a time for quick fixes.
Unrequited love is an intense but unwarranted attachment to your partner that makes you want to stay together, no matter how dysfunctional the relationship. The blind spot behind this feeling—what you fail to see—is how unloving your partner has been toward you, how shoddily you continue to be treated, and how nothing you do will change this.
Some of you hold on to these relationships, though it’s obvious to any outside observer just how depriving or abusive they are. “But I love this person,” you say, blankly, as if this were enough to justify your attachment.
Doggedly, sometimes desperately, you try to get your partner to stay or come back, without looking to see whether this person is good for you. Your self-esteem is so low, your sense of entitlement so undeveloped, your concept of love so limited, that you don’t even think to ask: “What are my essential needs and which of them are being met, or grossly denied, in this relationship? Can my partner change in ways that matter to me? Does my partner want to change?”
Linda’s husband admitted that he was having an affair with his voice instructor, but he refused to discuss it, and continued to see his lover regularly, often coming home late for dinner or staying in the city overnight. He instructed Linda not to ask him questions or create unpleasant scenes, but also not to pretend that everything was normal and loving between them. (He hated it when she was nice to him; it made him feel manipulated.)
Linda went from therapist to therapist, searching for strategies to lure her husband back. She didn’t know it, but what she was really searching for was her lost self—the self that informed her that the intense pain and emptiness she was feeling came from loving someone who was brutally selfish and treated her with contempt.
When I first met Gail, her husband, Craig, had just confessed to seventeen affairs over the course of their fourteen-year marriage, and she was in a state of shock and denial. “We have a great marriage,” she swore. “Craig is perfect for me.” She could have been talking about how the sun comes up each day, so complete was her faith in him. As she began to sift more consciously through the wreckage of her marriage, however, her selective amnesia lifted, and her memories became more accurate and detailed. She remembered, for example, how Craig used to come to bed sticky or sweaty, and wanting sex. She would complain lightly, and he would make light of her complaints. Aghast, she now realized that he had probably had sex earlier that day with someone else and hadn’t bothered to wash. She also recalled the time that Craig drove her home from the doctor’s office after a mammogram for a suspicious lump in her breast. He spent the whole time chatting on his cell phone with his stockbroker and never once asked about the results—and she never once acknowledged her disillusionment and rage.
It took Gail many sessions with me before she could peel back that layer of self-denial and face how denigrated she had felt throughout her marriage, and how completely she had failed to process her suspicions. “If I didn’t love my husband so much, I wouldn’t be able to tolerate the way he treats me,” she said one day. Her ability to acknowledge that he was hurting her was a step in the right direction, though it didn’t make her love him any less.
Gail’s low expectations for herself and her marriage began to make sense to her when she looked back at her relationship with her parents. Her father was a violent and abusive womanizer who taunted his self-effacing, overaccommodating wife with accusations of infidelity. Her mother’s response was to stay home, work harder, and always make herself available to him sexually. “If you want to keep your husband faithful,” she told her daughter, “never say no when he wants sex.”
Gail grew up believing that being loved meant being owned. In her marriage, she went to work for her husband, and developed no interests outside the home. Only when she expanded her definition of love beyond what she had experienced with her parents and Craig did she began to burn inside. “I want and deserve much more,” she realized.
“I know. But I think I can change him.”
Like Gail, you, too, need to ask yourself, “Have I been deceiving myself about my partner’s capacity for love? Have I been excusing this person’s behavior too long? Is there something in me or in my past compelling me to love and ingratiate myself with people who betray or bully me?”
It’s not within the parameters of this book to convince you that you have a right to a life or that you’re capable of making it on your own, but if you doubt yourself, you may want to get professional help to correct your self-image before you automatically slip back into an emotional wasteland.
Of course, it also matters how you treat your partner; your negative behavior may provoke the negative treatment you get in return. If you’re cold or critical, you shouldn’t be surprised if your partner is cold or critical, too. You need to take responsibility for how your behavior has contributed to the distress in your relationship, and you have a right to expect as much from your partner.
Keep in mind that some people have personality disorders that make them unable or unwilling to change, both emotionally and psychologically. Gail’s husband, Craig, for example, would probably be diagnosed as narcissistic. Such individuals assume that they’re entitled to love, and are virtually incapable of forming authentic bonds. Feeling empty inside, they attach to others only to aggrandize themselves. They fail to grasp the concept of reciprocity—of two people giving to each other in mutually enhancing ways. Such persons often feel no guilt or remorse because they’re incapable of empathy. When you express your needs to them, they’re likely to take it for criticism and feel threatened, even abandoned by you.1
If you’re in a relationship with such a person, you’ll need more than good intentions or a self-help book to make your relationship work. Couples therapy is likely to be equally ineffective. Because of their difficulty confronting inner conflicts, their mistrust of others, and their inability to negotiate interpersonal issues, narcissists often cannot tolerate the intimacy of therapy and quit, or flit from doctor to doctor. If you stay in the relationship, you’ll have to provide constant adulation, and even then, your partner is likely to feel deprived and wronged, and eventually replace you.
Narcissists who are psychologically unraveled by the loss of their partners may sink into a depression so deep that they become accessible to change. But before they rebuild their relationships, they must rebuild themselves. If you want to wait out this process, it’s important to be realistic about how long it will take—months, years, even a lifetime may not be enough.
The narcissist is one type of damaged personality. Another is the sociopath, or antisocial individual, who compulsively lies, is irresponsible in meeting work and family obligations, and exhibits poor impulse control, often leading to physical violence and unlawful behavior.2 This person usually can’t sustain a long-term monogamous relationship for more than a year.
Other partners suffer from what is known as a borderline personality disorder. These people are often moody, anxious, insensitive, and hostile. A relationship with this sort of person is likely to make you feel chronically angry, insecure, or exhausted—assuming you’re honest about your feelings.
There are other types of individuals who resist change, and with whom it won’t be easy to maintain ties: those who are addicted to alcohol or drugs, who become physically or verbally abusive, who are sexually provocative in inappropriate ways, or who just refuse to take your issues seriously and work with you to strengthen your relationship. This isn’t to say that if you’re dissatisfied, your partner is irredeemably bad for you and you should leave. I encourage you, however, to open your eyes to the truth of your relationship, and learn to acknowledge when you’ve been violated. Your feelings of love should be earned; they shouldn’t spring from some overactive source within you that pumps out love irrespective of how you’re treated. Be wary of spinning “enabling fictions”—false narratives that make you think everything’s all right when it’s not, and lull you into choosing “perpetual forgiveness over the possibility of change.”3
To avoid jumping to false and damaging conclusions about your partner, you might want to read more about dysfunctional personalities in Beck, Freeman, and Davis’s Cognitive Therapy of Personality Disorders.4 In the end, you have to decide for yourself whether your partner is gripped by intractable forces that make change impossible, or simply unmotivated to give you the love you need at this tumultuous time. How much is irreversible, how much a matter of training, how much is due to a permanently damaged psyche, how much to the alterable circumstances of your relationship—these are fundamental questions that you’ll be better able to answer once you’ve dethroned your partner and opened your eyes to the deceptions and distortions of unrequited love.
Romantic love is an intense but unwarranted attachment that you, the unfaithful partner, may feel toward your lover. It’s likely to make you want to leave your partner, no matter how satisfying your life together has been.
“My love for the lover must be real,” you assume, “otherwise I wouldn’t feel such high chemistry and be willing to sacrifice so much for this person.” The blind spot behind this feeling—what you fail to see—is that your so-called grand passion may have more to do with your unmet childhood needs or present-day challenges than with who this other person really is. For the sake of an exhilarating high, which you’re bound to come down from if the relationship lasts, you risk discarding a potentially salvageable, rewarding, lifelong relationship with your partner.
How do you make sense of your sweeping, intoxicating feelings for your lover, and your bitterness or disappointment with your spouse? How do you distinguish between a torrid but temporary attachment and an enduring covenant of love? Why turn away from romance when it feels so wonderful, or stay with your partner when your gut instinct is to run?
If you’re emotionally entangled with your lover, you’re probably not interested in asking these questions; you may just want to enjoy the ride. But I invite you to read on, and explore what romantic love is and is not, so that your decision to stay or leave, which may be irreversible, is one you won’t later regret.
Let’s begin by looking at the emotional, cognitive, and chemical changes that may be taking place within you at the very thought or sight of your lover.
Romantic love is full of “rapture, transport, transcendence, and bliss,” writes Ethel Spector Person in Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion.5 This sublime connection, often referred to as high chemistry, is effortless and fills you with a sense that you’ve met your perfect match. “Perhaps all romance is like that,” Jeanette Winterson writes in The Passion, “not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour.”6
In romantic love, your lover often becomes the single focus of your life, filling you, body and soul. You have a strong desire to spend every free moment together, to merge, to become one. You think about your lover constantly; you want to do things for and with this person, constantly. And because people tend to assign meaning to the way they feel and behave, you interpret your reaction as true love. What else could explain your all-embracing obsession?
The more time and emotion you invest in your lover—buying presents, text messaging—the more love you’re likely to feel for that person. Similarly, the less time and emotion you invest in your partner, the less love you’re likely to experience for him or her.
When you fall in love, a perceptual distortion usually takes place, and you idealize the other person, assigning to him or her more positive attributes than any one person could actually possess. The object of your affection becomes beautiful, brilliant, stimulating, sensitive, and, above all, the perfect one for you. It has been postulated that these distortions serve the evolutionary purpose of bonding partners together for the essential task of child-rearing.7 Whatever the reason, by exaggerating and selectively focusing on the positive attributes, while screening out the more questionable ones, you attach to your lover in incontestable ways that no long-term partner can compete with.
At the same time, you’re likely to paint your partner in equally distorted but negative terms, as a foil for your lover. Boring, constricted, joyless, critical—these are words with which your vilify your partner, and justify abandoning that person and attaching yourself to someone else. “The spouse, if not loathed, comes to be seen as limited,” writes Ethel Spector Person. “The marriage, if not bad, is experienced as stultifying.”8 This vision may ease your way out of the relationship, but it’s a vision that’s likely to be warped or full of holes.
Love is “a natural high,” Anthony Walsh writes in The Science of Love: Understanding Love and Its Effects on Mind and Body.9 In other words, your experience of intense passion has a biological base in which your body is literally swamped with amphetamine-like chemicals such as dopamine, norepinephrine, and phenylethylamine (PEA). The smittening effect of these drugs, particularly PEA, doesn’t last forever, however. The body gradually builds a tolerance to them, and requires more of them than it can produce to achieve the same euphoric state. In the next stage of love, the brain releases a new set of chemicals called endorphins—natural painkillers that soothe you and create a sense of security and calm. These chemicals help you move from a heated infatuation to a more intimate, sustaining attachment.
The limitation of this biological model is that it makes the transition from romantic to mature love seem smooth and effortless, as though your brain and body chemicals carry you automatically from one emotional stage to another. In any long-term relationship, however, you and your partner are likely to pass through a sustained period of disenchantment, followed by intervals of aridity. We don’t know what happens to you chemically during these difficult times, but we do know that for your relationship to survive them, you need to be prepared for, and accept, the vicissitudes of love.
If your relationship doesn’t live up to your ideas about love, the problem may be not with your relationship but with your ideas. Unrealistic expectations, not your partner, may be responsible for your dissatisfaction. These expectations include:
• “My partner and I should feel a deep, unspoken bond at all times.”
• “My partner should be able to anticipate my needs.”
• “I shouldn’t have to work for love.”
• “I shouldn’t have to work to be trusted.”
• “I deserve to be loved.”
• “The chemistry is either right or wrong.”
• “My partner should love me unconditionally.”
• “My partner should be emotionally available to me whenever I need him or her.”
• “Love is a feeling that can’t be forced or manufactured. It either exists or it doesn’t.”
• “A good marriage is free of conflict.”
• “If I’m not happy in my relationship, it’s my partner’s fault.”
• “We shouldn’t have to work at feeling sexual desire for each other; it should come naturally or not at all.”
• “When passion dies, so does the relationship.”
Think through these ideas about love, by yourself and with others, and ask yourself which ones you believe in, and how realistic and useful they are for you. You may brush them off as the half-baked assumptions of people less sophisticated or perceptive than you, but don’t be fooled. Some of them are likely to lie behind your discontent.
It’s not easy to gauge exactly how much of your unhappiness is due to unrealistic expectations (in which case you need to change), and how much to your partner’s inability to satisfy your basic needs (in which case your partner needs to change). This is a complex and highly subjective call that you can make only by searching deep within yourself. But your own starry-eyed preconceptions of love may be setting you up for failure when:
• you want your partner to be your friend, companion, protector, playmate, mentor, and lover—and, of course, to assume the proper role automatically and graciously, according to your needs of the moment;
• you expect your partner to do exactly what you want to do, at the moment you want to do it, and to be happily occupied when you’re busy;
• you expect your partner to enhance you in ways that take you beyond who you are—making you feel wiser, more loving, more competent, but never inferior;
• you want your partner to merge with you, be you, but not to suffocate you with enthusiasm or dependence and, certainly, never to bore you;
• you expect your partner to know your needs and communicate them with complete clarity, even when you’re being unreasonable;
• you expect your partner to forgive your human limitations, even as you reject his or her imperfections.
If you discover that you’re asking too much of love but want your love to last, you’re free to modify your expectations or adopt new ones more suitable to the current stage of your relationship. More modest, workable assumptions can make you more tolerant and forgiving, and cushion you against the natural disillusionments in any mature relationship.
Here is one vision of an intimate bond taken from Grown-ups by Cheryl Mercer. Some of you will find it somber and simplistic; others, profound and mature:
When I think about marriage, what I long for most, strangely enough, is not an elevated spiritual union with a man; that’s a fantasy not readily envisioned. What seems wondrous to me instead are the small, shared rituals that bind a man and woman in familiar intimacy, the borders inside which they make love, choose furniture, plan vacations, quarrel over closet space, share the toothpaste, celebrate Christmas the same way they did last year. I’ve been in love myself, so I know something of what it’s like to build a life together—the private jokes, the friends you share, knowing in advance which of you makes the coffee and which goes for the paper, even the comfortable tedium of hearing his or her favorite story yet again. To promise to share forever the small—not only the grand—moments of life seems to me profoundly human, more intimate even than making love with someone for the first time.10
Love is not static. We grow dissatisfied and move apart; affection returns and we pull together again. Some people, ignorant of the process, pull away when the good times end and assume the bad times will last forever. These people flee, mope, or drift into affairs. Others see the ups and downs as part of a dynamic process, which, when anticipated and understood, can enrich and revitalize their relationship, even give it an added punch.
If you accept that feelings of love are neither steady nor constant, but travel in natural cycles, you’ll be more prepared to bear up under the turmoil that follows periods of contentment, and see beyond it. Some researchers have documented that periods of discontent come at four-year intervals.11 Others trace the stages of love in a more linear progression, from romance to disillusion to maturity.
As psychologists Barry Dyn and Michael Glenn put it,12 the first stage is one of expansion and promise. The second is a time of contraction and betrayal, when both of you become less compromising, less available for change, and begin to retreat into rigid patterns and routines, many of which predate your relationship. At this point you’re likely to feel immensely let down with each other and caught up in a handful of well-defined, interpersonal struggles, all variations on the same few themes that repeat themselves in different forms throughout the life of your relationship. If these domestic scenes don’t tear the two of you apart, or wear you down, and if you can come to terms with each other’s limitations, you’re likely to enter the third stage of love—one of compromise, accommodation, integration, and resolution.
Thus, somewhere after the romantic prelude, and as a prerequisite to entering a more solid, secure, intimate relationship, what must inevitably take place is a period of disenchantment. The person you deified turns out to have clay feet. The fairy tale you were living is now, it seems, a true-life story with no happily-ever-after. Your criticisms are likely to escalate and become more shrill, and your level of sexual excitement to decline. If you’re going to bridge these choppy waters, you’ll have to come to terms with the diminution of everything that once seemed so thrilling or easy when you were courting.
As the unfaithful one, you’re likely to have a liturgy of complaints about your partner. But what about your feelings toward your lover? A conversation I had with an attorney who left her husband for her summer intern is typical:
“What don’t you like about your lover?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“What do the two of you fight about?”
“We don’t.”
“When you look into the future, what conflicts do you expect to arise between the two of you?”
“I can’t think of any.”
If you haven’t passed beyond this glorious though specious stage of romantic love, it’s doubtful you’ll have much in your lover to object to. That’s because, as couples therapists Stuart and Jacobson put it, “Courtship is a time of maximum human deception.”13 While your body chemicals pump you up with enchantment and idealized perceptions, you remain oblivious to your lover’s faults. The days of grappling with love’s inevitable disillusionment still lie ahead.
Every sustained relationship has these moments of annoyance and disappointment, its gall and wormwood, if only because two people rarely have the same needs at any given moment. Qualities that you like in your partner on one day you’re likely to hate on another, not necessarily because of anything your partner says or does differently, but because of conflicts within yourself. The attention you were so grateful for last Tuesday, you may resent today as a threat to your independence. The charm and gallantry you so admired on Wednesday, you may dismiss on Thursday as an excessive need for attention. Unless you’re blinded by love, there is no way to ignore, or to deny, one side without the other, no way to separate out what you love from what you hate, for they are two sides of the same person (more on this in Chapter 5).
When people get divorced and remarried, they expect to be happier, but the statistics tell a different story. According to leading marital researcher John Gottman, second marriages fail at an even higher rate than first marriages: 50 percent of first marriages and 60 percent of second marriages end in divorce.14 Add stepchildren, and the number of second marriages that fail jumps to 70 percent. It helps to keep in mind that the happiest couples in America don’t resolve some 69 percent of their problems.15
When you’re deciding whether to leave or to stay and rebuild trust, I encourage you to look beyond the moment and try to see your partner more objectively. For those of you who are swept up by high chemistry, this means seeing past the blind spots of romantic love and opening yourself up to the possibility of a less fiery, but warmer, more lasting love with your partner.
The cooling of romantic love inevitably carries with it a sense of loss, like the first days of fall, but it also opens the door to a more mature, committed relationship in which you accept what you love and hate in each other, tolerate feelings of ambivalence within the context of a loving relationship, and stay meaningfully attached even when you’re hurt or upset.
Don’t give up on your partner too easily. Ask yourself: “Does the problem lie within our relationship or within me? Have I fallen out of love because my partner can never give me what I need, or because I’m suffering temporarily from the loss of the illusion of love: the illusion that seduced me into believing that love is constant, that I would always feel positively about my partner; that I would never have to struggle with conflicts that made me question our basic compatibility as a couple.” As so eloquently expressed by Clarissa Pinkola Estés in Women Who Run with the Wolves:
A part of every woman and every man resists knowing that in all love relationships Death must have her share. We pretend we can love without our illusions about love dying, pretend we can go on without our superficial expectations dying, pretend we can progress and that our favorite flushes and rushes will never die. But in love, psychically, everything becomes picked apart, everything.... What dies? Illusion dies, expectations die, greed for having it all, for wanting to have all be beautiful only, all this dies. Because love always causes a descent into the Death nature, we can see why it takes abundant self-power and soulfulness to make that commitment.16
Love is a concept as much as a feeling. How you define it, and what you expect from it, will have a significant bearing on the partners you seek and on your level of satisfaction with them.
Since your concept of love usually mirrors the way your parents or caretakers treated you, or treated each other, it’s revealing to look back on these relationships and explore how they affected you when you were growing up.
According to John Money, a former sexologist from Johns Hopkins University, all of us carry in our minds a unique subliminal guide to our ideal partner. This “love map” is imprinted in our brain’s circuitry by the time we reach adolescence. If we experience a sufficient number of matchups or similarities between our lover and our map, says Money, we’ll experience love.17 The greater the similarities, the higher your chemistry is likely to be.
If your caretakers offered you a model of mature love, the odds are increased that you’ll experience mature love as well. If the model was dysfunctional and you weren’t made to feel safe, secure, and special, it’s likely that you’ll be attracted to a partner who may seem different from your caretakers, but who ends up treating you in the same stunted but familiar way, reopening the wounds of the past.18
John grew up with an asthmatic mother and an alcoholic father who drifted from job to job. Required to be excessively responsible, he assumed many of the day-to-day chores of running the house—shopping, cooking, cleaning up after his parents’ fights. As a college freshman, he found himself attracted to a girl named Debby who was clinically depressed. He felt very comfortable, very much himself, taking care of her, and proposed on their fifth date. His bliss lasted for about six months, at which time he found himself overfunctioning, just as he had done in his youth. His selfless dedication to Debby, which had once made him feel good—needed, important, effective—now weighed him down and made him feel imprisoned and resentful.
Another patient named Mary grew up with a father who constantly criticized and demeaned her, so she found herself drawn to Peter, who made her work hard to gain approval and then refused to grant it. You would have expected her to long for the opposite—for someone who supported and believed in her unconditionally—but only a person like Peter, who made her feel like her old, familiar self—who made her experience herself as she had grown accustomed to knowing herself as a child—could stir up feelings of love. Her attachment to Peter was dysfunctional, but on some unconscious level it made her feel at home.
Your own childhood models may help explain why you, the hurt one, continue to love an unrepentant partner, and why you, the unfaithful one, are drawn to your lover.
As the hurt partner, you might choose to stay in an unfulfilling relationship because it’s all you knew as a child, it’s all you know today, and it feels like love to you. Trapped in the past, you fail to distinguish what’s best for you from what you learned from your parents. Since you’re incapable of acknowledging the neglect or harm you’re experiencing, you stay with someone who offers little or nothing in return, never questioning or evaluating your other options.
As the unfaithful partner, you might resent your partner for failing to give you what you never got as a child, and go elsewhere to get these needs met, trusting your future to a lover you hardly know. Rather than work through your disillusionment with your partner and the conflicts within yourself, you seek out, or make yourself available to, someone else, someone new.
This time it feels different, you say. And blinded by intense, transcendent feelings, you believe for a while that it is. You attribute to this marvelous passion the power of healing, and experience yourself as never before. Surely this person, who seems so totally different from those who hurt or damaged you in prior relationships, will give you the sense of self, the love you’ve craved all your life, but which has always eluded you. So you believe.
But what’s drawing you so inexorably to your lover and creating such high chemistry between you may not be perfect love, but the unfinished business of your childhood, and the promise of being freed from the abuses and deprivations of the past. High chemistry, as I’ve said, may be triggered by an unhealthy model of love. Low chemistry may mean that you’ve chosen a partner who allows you to experience yourself in a more positive, more fulfilling way than you did as a child. You may roll your eyes at hearing this, but relationships that start off with lower chemistry may be stirring up less trouble from the past, and turn out to be more satisfying and enduring in the long run.
In the end, you may decide you’re better off making a life with your lover than with your spouse. Love can be transformative, one of life’s preeminent crucibles of change, allowing you to evolve, expand, become your best self. An affair can reawaken you to those positive qualities in yourself that were stamped out in a depriving or abusive relationship, and give you new confidence to leave a dead relationship and claim a more responsive mate.
But before you turn your back on your partner, I encourage you to listen carefully to your fights and disappointments; they may tell the story of where you left off in your childhood development, and what you need to accomplish in your present relationship in order to heal. Before you flee, ask yourself, “Does exiting my relationship represent a legitimate path to self-realization, or is it merely an excuse to bypass my unresolved childhood conflicts?”
Regardless of your choice of partners, you’re going to experience disillusionment, and you’re going to have to work hard to keep your relationship alive and well. If you think otherwise, you’re still deluding yourself.
In this chapter I’ve encouraged the two of you, both the hurt and unfaithful partner, to evaluate your assumptions about love. You may be left, however, with many reservations about recommitting. The next chapter helps you face them, and make the pivotal choice whether to stay or leave.