How frightening is the past that awaits us.
—Polish poet Antonin Slonimski
So often we blame our partner for what goes wrong and fail to see the link between our personal, lifelong conflicts and the conflicts in our relationship—between the damage we carry within ourselves and the damage we experience as a couple.
In attempting to assign responsibility for the infidelity, hurt partners tend to think, “You were screwing around with someone else. Don’t blame me.” Unfaithful partners tend to think, “You weren’t there for me; you drove me away.” Both of you are likely to insist on your own, perhaps self-serving, certainly contradictory, and often oversimplified versions of the same conflict. The following alternating viewpoints are typical:
She: “My husband is still flirting, even after his affair.”
He: “My wife is pathologically suspicious.”
He: “She’s always contradicting me in public. It’s embarrassing and insulting.”
She: “He never lets me say a word. He always has to be the expert.”
She: “He ignores me and makes me feel irrelevant.”
He: “She’s impossible to please. If I spend any time doing things for me, she takes it as rejection.”
This chapter asks you to stop pointing fingers at each other and accept an appropriate share of responsibility for the affair. It’s not that you’re equally culpable; you’re not, if only because no one can make another person stray. But instead of haggling over the percentages—how much was your fault, how much mine—you both need to look at how you contributed to your problems at home.
In searching for clues, it helps to explore:
• how you may have been damaged by early life experiences, and how that damage may be undermining your relationship today;
• how you may have been damaged by infidelities in your own family;
• how the qualities you dislike in your partner may be related to those you like or envy, and may be missing in yourself;
• how stressful life events at the time of the affair may have knocked you off balance and contributed to your problems at home.
Let’s look at your relationship through each of these prisms, and then bring your insights together in a very concrete exercise.
As you interacted with your parents, siblings, and other significant persons in your childhood, and as you watched them interact with one another, you developed certain dominant ways of feeling, thinking, and behaving that coalesced into the person you have come to know as you. This sense of yourself is likely to have hardened over the years and to affect how you relate to others today, although your early caretakers may be gone. Blindly, tenaciously, you may cling to this familiar self, dysfunctional as it might be. This is the person you know best, the person you’ve spent a lifetime being, the one with whom you feel most comfortable.
Here are a few of the emotions you may have experienced as a child; try to identify the ones that apply to you, and add your own:
Positive feelings: safe, contented, trusting, attended to, praised, respected, accepted, valued, encouraged to express.
Negative feelings: frightened, inadequate, mistrustful, lonely, jealous, bored, deprived, neglected, pressured, unloved, humiliated, criticized, constrained.
These and other feelings influence and define your comfort zone as an adult. The people who let you reexperience similar emotions, positive or negative, are those you’re likely to seek out and be romantically attracted to today.
Along with these feelings, you’re likely to have developed certain dominant schemas—ingrained perceptions and beliefs—about who you are and what you can, or should, expect from others. If you were abandoned by a parent, for example, you may have learned to expect that people you love will leave you; if you were emotionally or physically abused, you may have learned that the world is an unsafe place and that you need to guard against getting hurt again.
You also acquired specific ways of relating to others. You learned what to say or do to get what you wanted, or how to absorb or live with the pain of being turned down. You became comfortable with a certain level of intimacy (or lack of intimacy) and learned how to act in ways that preserved it. In the end you mastered, or were victimized by, your day-to-day interactions in that small, private world known as home.
You did your best to be safe and happy, given your inherited predispositions and your limited resources as a child, but if you missed out on any of the following critical growth experiences, you may never have fully developed into a healthy, secure, competent adult:1
1. Being safe and secure.
2. Functioning independently in the world.
3. Having solid emotional connections with others.
4. Being valued.
5. Being free to express yourself.
6. Being free to let go and have fun.
7. Living with realistic limitations.
Deprived of any of these essential experiences, you’re likely to grow up with emotional wounds that affect your choice of partners and the way you relate to them. Here’s how:
In the idealized stage of courtship, this person may seem to possess the magical power of healing you—of undoing the damage of your past and freeing you from your old, familiar self. But as time passes, you may find that you’ve chosen someone who evokes within you the same negative but deeply rooted emotions you experienced in your childhood.2
This is a variation on the to-the-person-holding-a-hammer-everything-looks-like-a-nail phenomenon, in which you see in others whatever you know or are looking for, based on your early experiences. If you were controlled as a child, for example, you may perceive your spouse as controlling, whether it’s true or not. As Anaïs Nin writes, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”3 “In that sense,” writes clinical psychologist Jay S. Efran, “all our perceptions are, literally, in-sights, including the illusion that is hardest of all to shake—that we are able to see an independent, external reality.”4
In other words, you unwittingly prod your partner into treating you badly so that you experience yourself, the world, and others in the same distorted ways to which you’re accustomed.5 Thus, if your parents resolved conflict by ignoring you, you provoke your partner into ignoring you.
Let’s look now at the seven formative growth experiences listed earlier, and see how growing up without them is likely to damage your relationships today.
There are two common ways in which your parents may have created an insecure home environment for you:
1. They abandoned you, either physically or emotionally, and you grew up feeling chronically anxious or needy. In your adult relationships, you perceive rejection too easily and too often. Your abandonment schema says, “People I love will leave me.”
2. They abused you, physically or emotionally, and you grew up feeling suspicious, intimidated, humiliated. In your adult relationships, you perceive control and subjugation too easily and too often. Your mistrust schema says, “People I love will hurt me.”
Let’s look at how these two damaging experiences—abandonment and abuse—may affect the way you relate to your partner.
Unable “to risk all and to love full out,”6 you seek out a lover to distance yourself from your partner or lower the emotional temperature between you. Your affair reduces your fear of being emotionally dependent on someone who, you assume, will inevitably leave or hurt you. It can also keep who you are a secret from your partner, and afford you at least a temporary sense of freedom and control.
An affair can also serve to punish your partner and even the score. Having been betrayed earlier in life, you now betray the one you love to seek reparation for past wrongs.7 If you experienced an abuse of power as a child, you now seek power yourself to make yourself invulnerable. To share power is to put yourself at risk; to wield it is to maintain control. And so your relationship becomes a domestic battlefield in which you struggle for dominance.
When Jane was ten, her mother packed her up and resettled a continent away from her alcoholic father. She never saw him again. “Jane’s a great kid,” she overheard her mother telling him on the phone one day. “She’s yours, too. Get to know her. She needs you.” Seventeen years and dozens of unanswered letters later, Jane married what she called an “emotional iceberg” who made her feel as unimportant and unloved as her father had. Throughout the marriage, she rarely confronted him with her loneliness, but retaliated through a series of one-night stands. Their marriage took on a competitive edge, the winner being the partner who needed the other less. “He thinks he’s so wise,” Jane confided in me, “but he has no inkling of my private life. If he can’t find time for me, I’ll make my own party.”
Having been abandoned in your youth, you’re unable to relate to others in an intimate or authentic way, and end up clinging to your partner or making excessive demands on your partner’s time. You also assault your partner with unfounded suspicions (ones that stem from your past experiences and predate your partner’s affair).
Having been exposed to an abuse of power, you become overly accommodating and passive as an adult and then feel trapped and secretly resentful of a partner who seems to micromanage your life, always insisting on getting his or her way. Alternatively, you mirror the abuse you once experienced by becoming overbearing and manipulative, constantly ignoring or dismissing your partner’s needs. Either way, your behavior is likely to strain your relationship and leave you feeling as alienated as you felt in the past. You may even precipitate what you fear most—being abandoned.
Sheila’s father had a history of promiscuity; she remembers hiding in her room late at night, listening to her parents fighting about his betrayals. Her father never owned up to them, and her parents never split up, but the feeling in the house was always tense and sad. After two years of community college she married Sam. Each morning when he left for his high-powered job in New York, she obsessed about his secret life. Her suspicions took on a force of their own, and she found herself accusing him of deliberately staying late at the office and sleeping with his assistant. Sam found her relentless interrogations and angry outbursts impossible to deal with. “She became inconsolable,” he told me. “There was nothing I could do to reassure her of my love, short of imprisoning myself in the house. After a while, she won; she wore me down. I really did dread coming home and started going out with a woman who works on my floor. I’ve been seeing her ever since.”
Your parents discouraged you from forming your own identity, developing an independent life, or trusting your own decisions. As a result, you grew up feeling dependent, vulnerable, incompetent. In your adult relationships, you feel controlled by the emotional needs of others, and guilty or fearful when you try to strike out on your own. Your lack-of-autonomy schema says, “I can’t make it by myself.”
An affair for you can be an act of rebellion, a way of declaring independence from relationships that feel too intimate or engulfing. Having been reared in a home in which your boundaries were ignored and privacy didn’t exist, you learned to assert your sense of self through secrecy and subterfuge. Unable to be yourself in the presence of your partner, you feel a need to step outside the relationship to breathe.
David grew up without a father. His mother, a Holocaust survivor, feared losing her only child (physically and emotionally), and refused to let him bring friends to the house. Each day she walked him home from school. He experienced his mother as suffocatingly invasive, and himself as dependent and weak. Loving, to him, meant merging with another person and losing oneself. “My relationship with my mother was like that of a moth to a flame,” he told me. “It was dangerous to get too close, but I couldn’t stay away.”
David was attracted to Muriel because, like his mother, she was frightened and insecure, and needed him so much. In their marriage, he struggled to find a way to be connected to her, yet be separate and true to himself. He needed her love to feel whole and to quell his fear of being on his own; but when he catered to her needs, he felt cramped and resentful. “I shouldered two damaged women, my mother and my wife, and sacrificed myself to both of them,” he told me. It was only with prostitutes that he believed he could negotiate his needs.
Afraid to create a life of your own, you envy your partner’s separateness and feel anxious whenever this person functions independently of you. You expect your partner to enrich your impoverished life, with no help from you. Or you swing the other way, become fiercely independent, and never permit your partner to support you.
Anna, an only child, was raised by a mother who lived to protect and provide for her. When Anna was three and playing in the backyard, her mother went into the house to fold laundry. When she returned, Anna was gone. The mother found her down the street, sitting on the curb, crying. She had been kidnapped by a man who had lifted her into his car and cajoled her into giving him a hand job.
From that day, Anna’s guilt-ridden mother became even more protective, crushing her daughter’s every effort to strike out on her own. She was forbidden from locking her bedroom door at home or living off campus in college. Her mother’s be-careful, don’t-do-that attitude made it impossible for Anna to develop a sense of effectiveness or mastery in her interactions with the world. As an adult, she became engaged to a man who overfunctioned as a partner, and continued to protect her from life. But her passivity, dependence, and lack of spontaneity gradually grated on him, and he had an affair with someone who seemed more vibrant and interactive, more “real.”
Your parents failed to interact with you in a warm, nurturing way, and you grew up in an emotional vacuum, feeling lonely, uncared for, empty. In your adult relationships, you experience others as disinterested or cold, and react by remaining aloof, drifting from relationship to relationship, or desperately seeking attention from people who let you down. Your emotional deprivation schema says, “Nobody is there for me.”
Raised without skills as a loving collaborator, you’re likely to be intimate with no one, including yourself. Commitment, intimacy, sharing of responsibility—these are only abstractions to you.
You sleep around with the hope of finding someone who, this time, will form a meaningful and durable bond with you. To escape your sense of inner barrenness, you become compulsively sexual and crave the excitement and novelty of short-term serial encounters. Enduring relationships seem intolerably predictable and disillusioning.
Chuck grew up in a divorced home with a narcissistic father who was too busy making deals to notice him. “I don’t think we ever had a heart-to-heart talk,” he told me. “The one time he bragged about me, he exaggerated the truth. I struck three batters out in one inning, and he told everyone I pitched a no-hitter. The man had no idea who I was.”
When Chuck turned nineteen, he got involved with Marilyn. After six months of dating, he discovered that she was sleeping with his best friend. Chuck and Marilyn patched things up and got married, but Chuck never believed he could satisfy her. Shortly after the birth of their first child, he began using escort services. Though Marilyn remained faithful, he wrote her off as cold and distant, and continued to remind her of her past infidelity as an excuse for his. Inside, he was terrified of an intimate commitment. He was sure that even if he let her get close, she’d continue to be unloving. By keeping her at arm’s length, he never tested whether she could be there for him, whether she would embrace him. Anonymous sex and self-righteous anger allowed him to remain safely detached.
Your family never taught you how to relate in a loving way, or how to reach out when you were feeling disconnected. You compensate today by withholding love or demanding more than anyone can give, and drive your partner away.
Sara grew up without parenting. Her mother was clinically depressed and rarely left her bedroom. Her father worked long hours as an attorney eighty miles from home, and once, when she was twelve, moved into a separate apartment for several months. Neither parent showed interest in her feelings, or explained what was going on. She grew up feeling unloved, lonely, lost—deprived of a sense of family oneness, a sense of “we.” The man she chose to marry was emotionally unavailable to her, self-absorbed. “Sometimes the only way to get his attention is to scream at him,” she told me. Recently, he suggested that they try a trial separation. She suspects he’s involved with someone else.
As a child, your parents frequently criticized you and made you feel you didn’t measure up. In the absence of praise or encouragement, you grew up feeling defective, unlovable, unsupported, ashamed. In your adult relationships, you perceive ridicule, rejection, or blame too easily. Your self-esteem schema says, “I’m not good enough.”
Having personal adequacy issues, you’re vulnerable to the ministrations of an adoring admirer. When your femininity or masculinity is threatened (for example, a miscarriage or bankruptcy), you seek a lover to mask your feelings of disgrace or inferiority. What draws you to your lover seems to be this person’s specialness, but may be only your need to restore your injured self—to feel more sexy, wanted, winning.
John, a celebrated lawyer, doted on his sons—all but his youngest, Chris. While the others followed their father to Harvard, Chris had to settle for a state university. While the others launched successful legal careers, Chris began manufacturing women’s sportswear. He laughed when the family called him the black sheep, but inside he was hurting.
Chris married Rita because she looked up to him and made him feel good about himself. But when his business took a dive, she could do nothing to undo his humiliation. When she offered advice, all he could hear was his father saying, “Typical. You can’t do anything right.” Chris paired up with Debbie, his sales manager, fourteen years his junior, who helped him recover his financial losses and his self-respect.
Your personal adequacy issues make it impossible for you to relate to anyone in a full-bodied, intimate way. Your negativity denigrates both of you, and pushes your partner out the door.
When Susan’s parents got divorced, she stayed with her mother. But when her mother was unable to manage both a willful daughter and a full-time job, Susan was shunted off to live with her father. His younger wife complained openly about this intrusion. Susan never felt she had a home of her own or a place where she was wanted. Eventually she married Rob, and looked to him to make her feel whole. But her neediness made her difficult to love. In the end, Rob found refuge with her best friend, which only reinforced her feelings of defectiveness.
Your parents never let you have a voice of your own. Today you try to please others, and silence yourself to avoid conflict. You’re used to feeling subjugated, misunderstood, manipulated, dismissed. In your relationships, you perceive others as being controlling and insensitive to your needs. Your subjugation schema says, “My needs don’t count.”
You keep your needs locked up inside and then silently resent how much more you give than you get back and go elsewhere to have your needs met. You succeed in keeping the peace but end up feeling victimized, unacknowledged, lonely.
Fritz grew up in a household dominated by his successful father. His mother smiled a lot. No one ever made waves. As an adult, Fritz went to work for his father and married a strong-willed woman named Roberta, whom he lavished with attention and gifts. At first the couple seemed to fit together seamlessly, but before long Roberta was attacking him for living in his father’s shadow. Fritz said nothing, but finally expressed his rage by having an affair with his young bookkeeper.
By silencing your needs, you’re able to maintain a candy-coated pleasantness in your relationship. But inside you’re seething with boredom or frustration. Periodically you erupt with hostility, deepening the rift between you. Your silence doesn’t cause your partner’s infidelity, but it puts you in the intolerable position of tolerating it.
Mindy’s mother tried to keep the house as stress-free as possible so as not to aggravate her asthmatic husband. Mindy grew up learning never to rock the boat. Eventually she married Sal, an anesthesiologist with a numbing sense of entitlement, and spent her time catering to him while he catered to himself. His neglect galled her as much as his self-adulation, but she said nothing. “I can’t legislate love,” she told me. “If I’m good to him, he’ll want to spend time with me.”
No one apparently was good enough for Sal but Sal, however, and the relationship continued to deteriorate. Mindy saw less and less of him until one day she caught him in bed with his nurse.
Your parents never let you follow your own natural inclinations and enjoy yourself, so you grew up feeling weighed down and stressed out. In your adult relationships, you shoulder too much responsibility and then feel taken advantage of. Your perfectionist strivings lead you to overdiscipline yourself or your partner. You easily perceive others as weak or lazy and unwilling to share the load. Your unrelenting standards schema says, “Everything falls on me, and I’d better do it right.”
Taught to be excessively responsible, even perfect, you seek out a lover who can give you back some of the childhood you were robbed of. You attribute this reawakening to the lover, when, in fact, it’s because you have finally granted yourself permission to be self-indulgent or impulsive, and have replaced rigid internalized rules with ones that gratify your momentary needs.
Keith went directly from high school into a Whirlpool training program to help support an unemployed father and a disabled brother who lived at home. He resented them both. The woman he chose to marry, Michelle, had a childlike spontaneity about her and was as joyful as he was sober, but before long he resented her ability to balance work and play—to find time to exercise at the gym, call friends, linger over meals—while he exhausted himself in the factory. “She’s sloughing off,” he complained. “She’s taking advantage of me.” When he finally managed to break free of his demanding work ethic and treat himself, it was on Skype with a go-go dancer from Romania.
Tethered to unrelenting standards, you developed compulsive habits that today drive much of the playfulness, romance, and creativity from your life. You’re running so hard and fast, you have no time to smell the roses or realize that your partner is bringing a dozen to someone else.
Dorothy’s puritanical father berated her for being only human. She married Ernie, who was too preoccupied with his poetry to balance the checkbook or carpool the kids to school. The more Dorothy tried to change him, the more polarized they became. Her inflexibility made him feel that he couldn’t be himself with her. Her requests, like her need for order, were reasonable but unremitting. One day she told him to take out the garbage. He took out the babysitter instead.
Your parents did too much for you, or taught you to view yourself as superior to others. As an adult, you lack self-discipline, expect special consideration, and take offense when people put restrictions on you or force you to play by the rules. You easily perceive others as violating your rights, even though you’re insensitive to theirs. This entitlement schema says, “I’m above the rest; I deserve as much as I can get.”
Your partner may be struggling to cope with your grandiosity, but, given how unaware you are of your effect on people, you’re unlikely to notice. Instead, you probably see your partner as someone who fails to satisfy your needs, and you feel wronged and deprived. Having grown up without a model of mature reciprocity—of mutual give-and-take—you can’t see that your demands for love are excessive, and that you fail to nurture your partner in ways that entitle you to the treatment you think you deserve. Your dissatisfaction at home, along with your affairs, seems perfectly legitimate to you, because you expect so much from your partner and so little from yourself. Avoiding the discomfort of self-examination, you’re unlikely to subject yourself to therapy, or to read this book.
Howard was raised by wealthy, power-seeking parents who emphasized the attainment of status and recognition. They rarely imposed limits on him, and more than once relied on their attorneys to cover his tracks when he was caught breaking the law. As an adult, he drifted from marriage to marriage, always madly in love until the birth of children, who made him feel peripheral.
Unaccustomed to setting internal limits or confronting your personal failings, you, too, are unlikely to be reading this book. Your energy is probably too invested in preserving an inflated sense of self, or searching for someone who will preserve it for you. You feel entitled to be taken care of, while doing little to earn it. Your partner’s affair, however, may force you to confront your imperfections and give you the perspective you need to become a more lovable partner.
Michelle’s mother raised her five sisters by herself and swore she’d give Michelle a more carefree childhood. Michelle was rarely disciplined and could shirk responsibility—emptying the dishwasher, getting summer jobs—with impunity. She was never encouraged to excel. “Life’s short,” her mother told her. “Enjoy it.”
Michelle married Keith, who soon tired of her sybaritic ways and insisted that she get a job. She resented his ultimatums—until Keith started seeing other women, and she discovered that she was replaceable.
It’s not possible to identify in one book all the ways in which you may have been injured as a child, or all the ways in which your injuries have affected the development of your personality, your choice of partners, or your role in the affair. The fact that your parents treated you in one particular way doesn’t bind you to any one set of behaviors or beliefs. However, we do tend to bring our damaged selves into our most intimate relationships, and to reenact with our partners the struggles of our childhoods. As bitter or unnourishing as they may be, they’re what we know and what we tend to feed on.
It’s difficult to sort out how much of your dissatisfaction is your partner’s fault (treating you in ways that make you experience yourself as you did as a child); and how much is your fault (manipulating your partner into treating you in these old, dysfunctional ways).8 To begin to make these distinctions, you need to learn more about your vulnerabilities, more about your own unbeautiful self. As a starting point, I suggest that you try to answer the following questions:
1. Which of the seven growth experiences described in this section was I deprived of?
2. What feelings (see list on p. 118) were most dominant or familiar to me as I was growing up?
3. What was going on in my relationship with my parents, significant caretakers, or siblings, or in their relationships with one another, that made me feel this way?
4. What was missing from the way my mother treated me? What was my greatest unmet need? How did this affect who I became, and the way I feel about myself today?
5. What was missing from the way my father treated me? What was my greatest unmet need? How did this affect who I became, and the way I feel about myself today?
6. What did I like most about the way my mother treated me? How did this affect who I became, and the way I feel and think about myself today?
7. What did I like most about the way my father treated me? How did this affect who I became, and the way I feel or think about myself today?
8. What did I learn about love from the way my mother and father treated me?
9. What did I learn about love from the way my parents treated each other?
10. Who were the other significant people in my life? What did they teach me about love, and how did they affect my concept of myself?
11. How do I blame you, my partner, for making me feel the way I’ve always felt?
12. How do you blame me for making you feel the way you’ve always felt?
13. How do I hurt you in ways in which you’re already vulnerable?
14. How do you hurt me in ways in which I’m already vulnerable?
15. How do I provoke you so that you react to me in ways that hurt me, as I’m used to being hurt?
16. How do you provoke me so that I react to you in ways that hurt you, as you’re used to being hurt?
17. What do I give you that you value most?
18. What do you most need from me to feel safe, secure, and valued?
Your experiences with infidelity as a child are likely to shape how you experience and think about infidelity today. If one of your parents was unfaithful, you’re likely to have grown up in an atmosphere clouded with secrecy and tension, your boundaries blurred, your right to a secure, stable environment denied. Perhaps the babysitter you counted on to take care of you at night suddenly began taking care of Daddy at night; perhaps your father’s best friend became your mother’s best friend—and your stepfather. Either parent may have replaced you with a new playmate, and there was no way for you to beat the competition. Or one parent confided in you that the other was an adulterer, and implored you never to reveal the secret. The unfaithful parent, swept up in the passion of the affair, may have had little time for you, and avoided you or turned away in shame to escape your condemning glance. The hurt parent may have been too depressed, too obsessed with the affair-person, to pay attention to your suffering. Both parents may have competed for your support or forgiveness, while overlooking or discounting your pain.
Today, long after the infidelity has been acknowledged or put to rest, you may still be scarred, may still be harboring negative feelings about yourself and carrying them with you into your most intimate relationships. Riddled with insecurity, you may have trouble perceiving yourself as a worthy, lovable, special human being. It’s not easy to love, or be loved, when feelings of abandonment, invalidation, or betrayal are core to your sense of self.
Let’s look now at how these early patterns of infidelity may have left their mark on you.
You’re more likely to have an affair if one of your parents did.9 This may seem strange at first. Why would you emulate those who blew your world apart? Wouldn’t you want to give your life the structure, the solidity you never knew? The answer is yes, of course you would, but you don’t expect it to happen, so you have an affair to create a safe distance between you and your partner and protect yourself from being violated again. You learned your lesson: To love is to open yourself to pain. Being faithful makes you feel dependent and vulnerable; being unfaithful makes you feel invincible.
Mike never forgot the day his father left home. It was on his thirteenth birthday, and he found his mother sobbing at the kitchen table. Three weeks passed before his father stopped by, unannounced, to pick up his golf clubs and his Gucci ties. His mother told him what his father refused to admit, that he had moved in with another woman. Mike had never felt that his father was proud of him; now he was sure. Looking back as an adult, he realized that on that day he made a pact with himself never to love anyone so totally again—and he kept his promise. Even after he married Barbara, he remained committed to a life of promiscuity.
An affair may lift you, like Mike, into a position of power and control—what better way to avoid feeling the way your straying parent made you feel than to become that parent yourself? By identifying with the aggressor, you toss off the role of victim. No longer are you the one who was abandoned; now you abandon. No longer are you the one who was emotionally deprived or abused; now you deprive and abuse. You’re out of harm’s way, and in command.
Andrea knew for years that her father was an adulterer and that her mother was chronically depressed. She couldn’t wait to leave home and wrap herself in the warmth of a loving, committed relationship. But one night, feeling irrelevant to her fiancé, she screamed at him, drove to a bar, and threw herself at a married man. In one swift, nihilistic blow, she tried to rise above the anguish of her past. “I don’t need John [her fiancé]; he’s replaceable,” she told me. “All dicks are the same in the dark.”
An affair may allow you to loathe yourself instead of your straying parent—to turn on yourself the rage you feel toward the parent who tore up your family. By making yourself the object of your contempt, you never have to grieve the loss of the parent who wasn’t there for you. Sometimes it’s easier and less confusing to hate yourself—to see yourself as weak, morally reprehensible, selfish, impulsive, “no good”—than to face the one who let you down, particularly if your self-contempt allows you to feel as defective as your parents made you feel. By directing your scorn and shame at yourself, you manage to stay attached to a parent who detached from you, and take control of your pain.
Janet never confronted the rage she felt toward her father for sleeping around while her mother was undergoing chemotherapy. Instead, she slept with her best friend’s husband, turned her fury into shame, and directed it inward at herself. “I’ve thrown all my values out the window,” she told me. The problem with hiding from her rage was that it prevented her from having an authentic relationship with anyone—her father, her husband, or herself.
It’s unlikely that your family’s attitude toward infidelity caused you to be unfaithful, but it may have laid the groundwork.10 If you grew up in an environment in which adultery was winked at, and heard messages such as “boys will be boys” or “what your partner doesn’t know won’t hurt,” you may be more likely as an adult to stray. Messages travel across generations.
It’s no coincidence that so many of my patients whose parents had affairs have partners who cheat as well. By latching on to someone who betrays you, or by provoking that person to betray you, you reexperience the same rejection you experienced as a child. It’s not that you take pleasure in being replaced; you don’t consciously seek out abandonment or deliberately go in search of pain. What you may do unknowingly is seek out someone who treats you in a way that replicates your earlier experience of yourself. Even if your partner is committed to you, you’re still likely to read into that person’s behavior what you’re programmed to see, and then react in ways that reinforce your preconceptions.
Eddie’s overbearing father, a remorseless philanderer, made a habit of trashing his oversensitive son at every opportunity. When the boy turned twenty, he was coerced into marriage by a promiscuous and imperious woman named Alison. His attachment to her replicated his earlier experience of love: a relationship between a bully and a victim. Two years into the marriage, after Alison’s third affair, he scraped together enough self-esteem to break the mold and leave her.
When Eddie fell in love with Linda, he vowed not to repeat past patterns. But he was so accustomed to being dominated that he didn’t know how to tolerate such a mutually supportive relationship. “This must be love,” he told me. But then he found himself orchestrating confrontations that undermined his happiness. If Linda so much as glanced at another man, he pummeled her with questions about her faithfulness. Alone in my office, he devalued her and their relationship. “I don’t really love her that much,” he insisted. “She’s not all that attractive or special.”
At the same time, Eddie berated himself for trying to destroy the best thing that had ever happened to him. Was it to restage the abandonment he had experienced first with his father and then with his ex-wife, Alison? To diminish Linda’s value and make himself feel less dependent, less assailable? To test her love? To reinforce his sense of himself as an unlovable human being?
Eddie found a certain sad truth in all these explanations and talked to himself about his behavior so that he would stop contaminating their relationship. It wasn’t easy. Trusting that your partner loves you and is committed to you is hard if you’ve been taught the opposite all your life. Having been left before, why, you wonder, won’t you be left again?
Sometimes there can be an uncanny resemblance between the circumstances of your betrayal as a child and the circumstances of your betrayal as an adult. I don’t believe people are doomed to repeat old patterns, or deliberately re-create them, but they do happen with unsettling regularity. Here are two typical experiences my patients have shared with me.
Just before Lauri was born, her father announced that he was leaving her mother for another woman. Lauri grew up ministering to a mother who was later diagnosed as schizophrenic. Thirty-four years later, when Lauri was nine months pregnant with her third child, her husband announced that he was in love with another woman and leaving home. In the hospital, Lauri gave birth to her daughter alone and, with a macabre sense of déjà-vu, brought her home to a fatherless house.
Stephanie grew up with an alcoholic mother and an unfaithful father. As a young adult, she parented them and lectured them frequently on the importance of changing their ways. To escape them, she became engaged to Hal, only to discover that he was an alcoholic who was engaged to someone else in another city. She took to lecturing him frequently about changing his ways.
Whatever the similarities between your partner’s and your parent’s affairs, your injury today is likely to cut more deeply—to reopen a channel of vulnerability inside you—if you experienced a betrayal earlier in your life. It’s not that your sense of violation today isn’t genuine or profound, but that it’s contaminated by the trauma of your early experiences. That trauma needs to be acknowledged and addressed separately. You can’t restore your relationship today until you strip away the damage of the past.
I strongly advise you to confide in each other about your childhood encounters with infidelity. Talk through how you felt at the time, and how your experiences may have reduced your ability to value yourself and feel safe and trusting in your relationship today. Disclosing your personal histories won’t make the affair less upsetting, but it may help you understand the depth and intensity of your reactions, and make you feel closer to each other—more like allies than enemies.
I also strongly urge you to discuss the affair with your children, at whatever level of detail they can digest. Encourage them to acknowledge their feelings—their grief, their anger, their confusion—and confront you with them. If you can acknowledge their pain—listening openly, without defending or explaining—you may help them avoid similar mistakes in their own adult lives. Apologize for the hurt you’ve caused, for your unavailability and insensitivity. Talk about yourself, knowing your partner is doing the same. Invite your children to bring up the topic again and again, as often as they need. Don’t be afraid to let them see your pain or your hope for the future of your family. Later on, you may want to share with them your understanding of how you personally contributed to your marital problems. You may also want to reveal your own experiences with infidelity while you were growing up, and how those experiences marked you.
To heal the injuries of prior infidelities and move your relationship forward, I recommend that you try to separate the past from the present, and address the grievances you still hold against the person who betrayed you in your childhood. One way to do this is to write that person a letter, revising it as many times as you need until you feel it expresses exactly what you want to say. If the person is alive, you may decide to send it. Your purpose isn’t to elicit a compassionate response—if this happens, great; but be prepared for no response or a defensive and hostile one. What matters most is that you acknowledge the full range of your feelings and make peace with your past.
Here’s a letter that one of my patients named Mike wrote to his unfaithful father, almost three decades after his father’s affair. It was Mike’s way of breaking the silent pact he had made with himself never to let anyone get close to him again.
Dear Dad,
I’ve waited close to thirty years to bring up the subject of your leaving Mom and me. I hope it’s not too late to discuss it with you. I’m not writing to blame you or to make you feel guilty; in fact, I hope that by talking about it, we can understand each other better and maybe close some of the gaps that still sit between us.
Dad, I’ve always wanted to ask you why you left without talking to me, why you stayed away for so long, how you couldn’t have known or cared (it seemed) how that would affect me. I felt totally unimportant to you. The truth is, I always felt I didn’t achieve enough to make you proud of me. Can you help me understand why you acted the way you did? Whatever the explanation, it probably isn’t as bad as what I’ve assumed to be true.
I don’t fault you for leaving, for being unhappy in your marriage, even for not knowing how to work things out with Mom. I’ve been married twenty-two years now; I know how hard it is to hold a marriage together. I’ve failed in many ways. I’ve even had my infidelities.
For years I couldn’t face how angry I was with you for leaving me, for rarely making me feel you loved me or were proud of me, for making me take care of Mom. But I’ve come to realize, at least for my own self-preservation, that what you did had nothing to do with me—that I was just a kid, that I didn’t do anything wrong, that I wasn’t deficient in any particular way. I’ve learned not to take what happened so personally anymore.
When I was thirteen and you left, I decided I’d never let anyone get close to me again, and I’d never love anyone again. I kept my promise. But recently, since [my wife] Barbara found out about my affairs, we’ve started to talk more honestly to each other, and I’m beginning to feel I don’t have to keep her at a distance anymore, and that I don’t want to live such a controlled and insulated life. I’m reaching out to her, as I’m reaching out to you today.
If you’d like to respond, I’d love to hear from you. If you can’t, I just want you to know—and I just want to say it out loud for myself—that I’m not going to invest my energy in hurting anymore, in feeling unsafe anymore, in keeping the world at arm’s length anymore. I forgive you for the unhappiness you must have felt to leave. I even forgive you for leaving the way you did. I wish you a better life now. I wish myself a better life now.
By the way, the kids are doing great. I welcome your involvement with them. I’m sure they’d like to know you better, too.
Love,
Mike
As disenchantment sets in, you’re likely to screen out your partner’s positive qualities and selectively focus in on the bad. You may even forget that the positive ever existed. If the two of you are going to make it, you need to learn that the qualities you like and dislike in your partner are often flip sides of the same attribute, that you can’t have one without the other, and that your dissatisfaction may say as much about your own unresolved inner conflicts as it says about your partner’s.
Becky was initially attracted to Steve’s stability, but over time grew to hate his lack of spontaneity. What she failed to see was that both qualities sprang from the same root. The problem was not that he had changed but that she had imposed different meanings on the same behavior; one day loving the security and structure he gave her life, the next day hating how constricted he made her feel. When she looked back at the chaos of her childhood—her father was addicted to drugs, her mother had manic episodes—she realized that the qualities she criticized her husband for (his inflexibility, his joylessness) were linked to the ones she counted on him for (his predictability, his dependability) and lacked within herself.
Vicki spent her childhood trying to please her hypercritical parents. In college she was drawn to a man who, unlike herself, seemed totally self-sufficient. After they married, she catered to his needs and encouraged him to ignore hers. It wasn’t long before she felt overwhelmed and unsupported, just as she had felt at home. She now viewed her partner’s attributes differently. What had passed for self-sufficiency she now saw as selfishness. What had passed for independence she now saw as aloofness.
I call this phenomenon—that a certain basic personality trait triggers both what you love and hate about your partner—the Flip-Flop Factor.11
The qualities that you consider negative are the “flop” side of the equation. The qualities that appealed to you when you were first attracted to each other, or that still appeal to you today, are the “flip” side. Put them down next to each other and you’ll discover that neither side exists in isolation; that what you consider the good inevitably keeps company with the bad; and that the attributes that repel you may also attract you, when looked at from another angle.
Here are some negative attributes that you may have experienced once as positive:
Negative Attributes (“Flop” side) |
Positive Attributes (“Flip” side) |
lacks spontaneity, passion, and a sense of adventure; boring |
stable, reliable, even-tempered, content |
constantly seeks approval; unassertive, ineffectual, weak |
considerate, attentive, accommodating |
spaced out, self-absorbed, irresponsible |
creative, flexible, spontaneous |
joyless, compulsive, materialistic, driven |
disciplined, productive, effective, responsible, successful |
depraved, needy, oversexed |
uninhibited, sexual, passionate |
uncommunicative, secretive, lifeless |
calm, peaceful, mysterious |
narcissistic, attention-seeking |
affable, socially skilled, gregarious |
depressing, burdensome |
deep, thoughtful |
silly, superficial |
fun-loving, capricious |
suffocatingly invasive, needy, controlling |
attentive, generous, giving, involved |
cold, removed, unloving, selfish |
independent, confident, stable, strong, self-reliant |
hysterical, unstable |
expressive |
arrogant, controlling |
masterful, competent |
It’s important for you to see how your unresolved personal conflicts make you dwell on the flop side, and block you from ever feeling content with anyone, including yourself. Maggie Scarf refers to “the unacknowledged, repudiated, and thoroughly unintegrated aspects of one’s own personality,” and explains, “What was once unacceptable within the self is now what is so intolerable and unacceptable in the partner. The war within each member of the couple has been transformed into a war between them. And each believes that peace and harmony could be achieved, if only the other would change.”12 In other words, the qualities you hate in your partner may be related to those you hate in yourself. They also may be related to qualities you lack, and envy your partner for having.
The story of Keith and Michelle illustrates some of these points. Keith’s father did everything he could to avoid a hard day’s work, and flitted from one disastrous get-rich-quick scheme to another. Keith resented his father for not carrying his weight and identified with his mother, who held the family together with her paycheck from Stop & Shop. Love, to Keith, was another word for self-sacrifice.
As an adult, Keith was hard-driving, goal-oriented, ambitious. But though he could move swiftly and efficiently from point A to point B, he often sensed that something was missing. “I’m driven and irritable too often,” he told me. “Life simply isn’t much fun.”
Keith was initially drawn to Michelle for her light-heartedness, her warmth, her ability to enjoy the moment and be satisfied with her lot—the qualities he most lacked in himself. Before long, however, he began to dwell on the flop side of these attributes. What had once seemed spontaneous in her now seemed irresponsible; what had once seemed fun-loving now seemed undisciplined. He resented having to support her and her photography habit. If she could play, why shouldn’t he? To make his point, he rented a studio apartment for his “late nights at the office” with a neighbor’s wife. There, for the first time, he escaped his overly conscientious, constricted self. He didn’t want to break up his marriage, but he didn’t know how to feel better in it. After Michelle found out what was going on—she saw that he was withdrawing large sums from ATMs and confronted him—Keith began looking into himself. What he discovered was that his dissatisfaction said as much about him as it did about Michelle.
“I realize she’s not the source of all my unhappiness or the only one who needs to change,” he acknowledged. “My father was a financial drain on us, and I don’t want my wife to be one, too. But I know I’m oversensitive about this, that Michelle isn’t my father, and that she’s good for me—the way she makes me laugh and helps me see there’s more to life than making money.”
Keith refused to let what he considered Michelle’s irritating attributes poison their relationship, and worked to recognize what it was about them that he found appealing.
“I’ll always get annoyed at how she ducks responsibility,” he told me—“how she comes home and, instead of putting the groceries away or folding the laundry, calls her friends or checks her e-mail. But I’ve come to accept that the good comes packaged with the bad, and though I hate how undisciplined she can be, I admire how much she enjoys life, unlike me.”
To reinforce his new understanding, Keith drew up a ledger, stating on one side what bothered him, and, on the other, what he admired or envied about the same characteristics. Here’s what he wrote:
Michelle’s Negative Attributes |
Michelle’s Positive Attributes |
procrastinates |
lives for the moment |
lacks discipline |
spontaneous |
uninterested in making money |
relationship-oriented |
slovenly |
easygoing |
irresponsible, spendthrift |
carefree |
naive |
optimistic |
expects to be taken care of; spoiled |
improves the quality of our lives in nonfinancial ways |
Now let’s turn to Michelle. She hadn’t been entirely happy with the marriage, either. Although it was Keith who strayed, she more than once had fantasized about sleeping with someone else herself.
Michelle’s mother, burdened with responsibilities as a child, had encouraged her daughter to live for the moment. Michelle was not grateful. “My mother expected nothing from me,” she complained. “It was like she thought I didn’t have a creative bone in my body, like I was good for nothing but good times.”
Michelle was drawn to Keith because he seemed to believe in her artistic talent. He was focused and entrepreneurial, unlike her, and helped her organize and direct her energies.
Turn the clock ahead three years, and these same qualities of his were driving her nuts. “I used to think he was so productive,” she told me. “Now I think he’s just a workaholic. He encouraged me to develop a career not because he loved my photos but because he didn’t want to support me.”
To help Michelle appreciate the flip side of Keith’s attributes—the side that drew her to him in the first place—I asked her to generate a list of his negative qualities and match them up with the ones she once loved in him. Here’s what she came up with:
Keith’s Negative Attributes |
Keith’s Positive Attributes |
controlling, can’t share power or collaborate in decision making |
resourceful, competent, achieving |
compulsive, driven, no fun |
organized, productive, focused |
insecure about money |
responsible, encourages my work |
materialistic |
supports a high standard of living |
The exercise reminded her that what she objected to was related to what she was still drawn to, and helped her to reattach to what she liked in him. It also taught her that what she resented him for (his materialism, his compulsive work ethic) was linked to qualities she had always lacked in herself (stick-to-it-iveness, ambition). If she was ever going to feel more satisfied with him, she would have to look more deeply into her own personal issues.
“My mother never made me work a day in my life,” Michelle told me. “She taught me it was my right to be dependent. Keith wants to change the rules, and I resent him for it. But I can see that he’s not mean or unreasonable to ask me to pull some of my own weight.”
The Flip-Flop Factor can teach you, as it taught Keith and Michelle, to think differently about your dissatisfaction. It can show you that a partner who annoys or frustrates you isn’t automatically wrong, or wrong for you; that though you’ll believe the two of you are a bad fit at times, the opposite may be true in the long run. You chose this person—someone who may be very unlike you—for a reason. That reason may be that you’re drawn to what is unaccessed or undeveloped in yourself, what you envy, what you’re incapable of expressing on your own. The very attributes that you criticize are likely to be intimately related to another set of attributes that enhance you and help you transcend your limited self.
To help you see this, I encourage you to ask yourself the following questions:
1. What attributes do I dislike in my partner?
2. What does it reveal about me that I object to, or resent, these attributes? Do they represent some disavowed aspect of myself?
3. In what way are these negative attributes related to attributes that I admire, and that first attracted me to my partner?
4. What does it reveal about me that I was attracted to these attributes in my partner? Do I lack them in myself? Do I envy them?
The Flip-Flop Factor challenges you to view your differences in a new way, one in which you reconcile, tolerate, and perhaps, at times, embrace the bright and dark sides of your partner’s personality, and your own.
Identifying the critical life events that contributed directly or indirectly to the affair may help you get a better handle on why the affair happened when it did, and give you some confidence that you can prevent it from happening again.
What I mean by critical life events are personal crises or other stressful circumstances that create an emotional disequilibrium within you and alter the nature of your relationship—events like the birth or death of a loved one, or a change in health or financial circumstances.
What may add to the impact of these life events is their congruence with stresses to which you’re particularly vulnerable. If you grew up sensitive to issues of abandonment or rejection, for example, you’re more likely to feel depressed when a nurturing parent dies than when your business falters. If you grew up sensitive to issues of competency or achievement, however, you’re more likely to get depressed when your business falters than when you’re faced with a personal rejection.13
These critical life events may make you, the hurt partner, difficult to live with, and push your partner further away. They may make you, the unfaithful partner, more needy and unstable, more vulnerable to temptation. Your affair may be an attempt to recover from an external crisis that undermines your sense of self, and therefore may have more to do with what’s happening inside you than with any specific problem in your relationship.
Here are some common stressors that may throw either one of you off balance and precipitate an affair.
You or someone you love has a serious illness or accident, or receives a life-threatening medical diagnosis. You feel vulnerable, mortal. You panic at the thought of how much you haven’t yet accomplished or experienced. Alternatively, you panic at the thought of being abandoned.
When Barry had a heart attack at age forty-two, he put his life under review and decided that time was running out. “There’s so much I want to do before I die,” he thought. He closed his office for the first time in twenty years and set off on a grand tour of Europe with his young secretary.
Tracey developed ovarian cancer. Her husband, Victor, suddenly felt terrified of losing her, of feeling so dependent on her. He took control of these feelings by having an affair, abandoning his wife before she could abandon him.
Someone you love (not your partner) dies. You feel profoundly the loss of support and solace this person gave you, which your partner can’t replace. Alternatively, you feel liberated from this person’s judgment, and free to act in new, unsanctioned ways.
“When my son took his life,” Kate told me, “I found it easier to focus my bitterness on my husband than to lose myself in grief. For consolation, I turned to someone else.”
“Divorce was anathema to my mother, and I couldn’t deal with her disapproval,” Doug explained. “Within a week of her death I had left my wife and moved in with the woman I loved.”
You move to a new community and suffer the loss of familiar surroundings, family, friends. You compensate by finding a lover. Or you become so depressed and withdrawn that your partner finds one.
Mark’s promotion took him from Peoria to Manhattan. His wife felt isolated and abandoned, and angrily withdrew from him. Mark, having no one to celebrate his success with, felt isolated and abandoned as well, and took up with his assistant.
You experience a change in power or resources. The partner who is used to feeling more dependent gains career recognition or becomes more financially or emotionally independent. The partner who is used to feeling dominant now feels overshadowed, fears abandonment (“You’re bound to leave me, now that you’re no longer dependent on me”), and has an affair to feel needed or to stay in control.
As long as Michael felt superior to his wife and could put her down, their marriage, such as it was, held together. But when she addressed his complaints—losing thirty-four pounds and returning to graduate school to complete her degree—he tuned in to his young voice instructor, who restored his threatened sense of power and importance.
You experience what you perceive as personal failure—the loss of a job, infertility, bankruptcy.
A week after Ron was laid off as an investment banker, he ran into his Wall Street buddies at a local bar and wound up in a motel with a bond trader. “I was on a power trip,” he admitted. “I was feeling competitive and not particularly successful.”
You undergo major life transitions that change the nature of your relationship, such as pregnancy, the birth of a child, or the departure of children for college (the empty-nest syndrome).
“When the baby was born,” Dick recalled, “nothing else mattered to my wife. I felt totally replaced. So I went off and replaced her.”
You or your partner becomes addicted to alcohol or drugs.
“I didn’t know that Adam was depressed about his business and medicating himself with merlot,” his wife, Holly, explained, “but I did know that he seemed totally self-absorbed and uninterested in me. I was feeling so rejected and alone that when my therapist came on to me, I took it as a compliment.”
It’s usually not one isolated event that leads to the affair, but several, happening concurrently. I encourage you and your partner to work together to identify these events and to discuss, in a nonaccusatory way, how they made room for a third person.
Dean and Mary began this discussion by drawing up a chronology of critical life events and exploring how each one helped destabilize their relationship.
Critical Life Events |
Responses |
July |
|
We moved from Chicago to New Haven. Dean started a high-pressured job with a hotel chain, working for a boss he couldn’t please. Mary was without family or friends. |
Dean: “I was afraid of being fired. I felt responsible for Mary’s happiness, a burden I resented. I spent too many years holding my mother together after my father left, and I couldn’t bear subjecting myself to that again.” |
|
Mary: “I felt alone and ignored. I relied on Dean to entertain me.” |
August–November |
|
Mary wanted a baby and tried to get pregnant. |
Dean: “I went along to make her happy, but I wasn’t sure I was ready. Our sex life became obligatory, temperature-controlled.” |
|
Mary: “This was a happy time for me. Dean never let on that he was so ambivalent.” |
December |
|
Mary got pregnant. Dean visited his best friend, whose first child had just been born. |
Dean: “I saw how exhausted my friend was, and how constricted his life had become. I felt the door closing on me.” |
January |
|
Mary’s brother had a serious car accident. Dean celebrated his thirtieth birthday. |
Dean: “I worried about all the things I’d never see or do.” Mary: “I spent a lot of time in the hospital visiting my brother. I really wasn’t there for Dean.” |
February |
|
Mary had a miscarriage. |
Dean: “I felt almost relieved. I didn’t think I could take care of myself, much less a family.” |
|
Mary: “I felt defective and demoralized, and withdrew from Dean.” |
April |
|
Dean had an affair. |
Dean: “I felt free, capable, in control—like my old shining self again.” |
Identifying these critical life events didn’t excuse Dean’s affair in Mary’s eyes, but it helped her take it less personally. Knowing that she was only part of the problem lifted a weight from her shoulders and gave her the confidence to risk loving Dean again. Dean, in turn, saw that his dissatisfaction had less to do with Mary than with the pressures of his new life and with his own unresolved responsibility issues from the past.
The exercise also taught them, as it can teach you, that life itself can be the enemy—that day-to-day stresses conspire against us all, and that we need to join forces against them, not against each other.
This exercise is a prescription for change. It helps you pull together all the abstract concepts we’ve been discussing in this chapter and apply them in a very concrete and graphic way whenever you find yourselves in conflict. It shows you the specific changes you need to make to manage your differences and reduce the chances that one of you will stray again.
It’s not enough to change the way you act; if you’re going to overcome old patterns, you also need to change the way you think and feel. I’ve therefore divided this exercise into three distinct and deliberately simplified categories:
1. The behavioral component—the way you treat your partner.
2. The cognitive component—the meanings and expectations you attach to your interactions.
3. The emotional component—the way you feel toward your partner.
Step by step, you’ll learn to:
• identify what you do that upsets or provokes your partner;
• identify the thoughts and perceptions that feed your behavior;
• identify the specific changes your partner wants you to make;
• develop an attitude or perspective that makes these changes acceptable to you;
• observe how your feelings change as your behaviors and attitudes change.
The exercise consists of writing out or thinking through your responses to the following questions. You can do this together or separately. To make what I’m asking clearer, I’ve included a case study for you to follow and adapt to your own circumstances.
What actually happened? Stick to the facts; don’t interpret what they mean to you.
By the third day of their ski vacation, Keith had not initiated sex. He insisted that they get up at seven each morning to hit the slopes the minute they opened. Michelle would have preferred to stay in bed and make love some mornings, but she went along with his plan. She wanted to stop for a nutritious breakfast, but, knowing how disgruntled he’d be, she said nothing and grabbed some muffins at a gas station on their way to the lifts. Finally, she screamed at him, “I don’t even know why you wanted me to come on this vacation. All I seem to do is inconvenience you. You just want to do exactly what you want. I feel like a stranger to you.” Keith just drove on.
Your Behavior: What did you do that hurt your partner?
Keith: I focused on getting the most out of the activity, ignoring or dismissing Michelle’s needs; I never made time for intimacy.
Michelle: I ignored my own needs, went along with Keith’s plan, then blew up at him.
Keith: Those lift tickets are expensive, so we should get in as much skiing as we can. Michelle’s so slow in the morning. She probably wants to stop for breakfast, but if I don’t mention it, maybe she’ll let it go. As for sex, later.
Michelle: Keith would rather be with Jane [his ex-lover]—he’s not sexually attracted to me and doesn’t love me. It doesn’t matter what I want. I don’t have a voice in this relationship.
Keith: Impatient 100%, annoyed 90%, inconvenienced 100%, anxious 80%.
Michelle: Disregarded 90%, unloved 100%, resentful 100%, controlled 90%.
Your Behavior: What specific behavioral changes would your partner like you to make? How would your partner like to be treated differently?
Keith: Michelle wants me to slow down. Ask her what she wants to do. Shape our plans to fit both of our interests. She wants me to do things for her without resenting her or feeling that I’m sacrificing myself. She wants me to learn to enjoy feeling close to her. Make room for intimacy.
Michelle: Keith wants me to tell him what I need instead of going along with his plans, feeling disregarded and controlled, and then lashing out at him. If I decide to do what he wants, he doesn’t want me to hold it against him. He also wants me to understand that his compulsiveness has nothing to do with his love for me—it’s who he is.
Keith: Stop substituting activity for intimacy, doing for relating. My parents taught me little about affection. I need to think about how I want my marriage with Michelle to be different. I know I’ll be too tired after skiing to make love, so I either should do it in the morning or cut the day shorter. I cheated on her, and now she needs me to show interest in her sexually and make her feel wanted. But I’m deceiving myself to think I’m doing this just for her. When I take the time to make love, I’m usually glad I did.
I gave up my childhood to take care of my parents, so I resent doing things for anyone, including Michelle. But I’m wrong to see every accommodation as a sacrifice. This isn’t just my vacation.
Michelle: I know Keith. He wants to get the most for his money. I’m hurting myself, taking his behavior personally. He loves me and enjoys sex with me. He just doesn’t know how to stop or slow down. He knows he’s driven and doesn’t particularly like this side of himself. There are times when I admire how organized and efficient he is, and appreciate his efforts to help me get my business started.
I’m not doing Keith a favor by giving in to his agenda and ignoring my own, and then hating him for bullying me. If breakfast means that much to me, I need to tell him he’ll just have to get to the slopes a half hour later.
When I feel disregarded, as I did as a child, I tend to repress it and then explode. But yelling at Keith puts him on the defensive and makes it easy for him to write me off. I need to speak calmly but firmly. Shout, and he’s not going to hear.
Keith: Impatient 60%, annoyed 30%, inconvenienced 70%, anxious 30%.
Michelle: Disregarded 40%, unloved 25%, resentful 35%, controlled 25%.
You, like Keith and Michelle, need to step back from the specific content of your altercation and see how it fits into a broader pattern of conflict. Most couples argue over only a handful of issues throughout their life together. The details change, but the conflict is almost always a variation on a few well-worn themes to which you were sensitized in your early years. Like so many of the couples I see in my practice, you’re likely to be amazed at how often these themes repeat themselves—at how you continue to misperceive and interact with your partner in the same maladaptive ways and experience the same painfully familiar emotions, regardless of the argument. Keith, for example, came to recognize his tendency to emphasize productivity over intimacy, to see every accommodation as a sacrifice, and to withdraw emotionally. Michelle came to see her tendency to dislike restrictions and schedules, to feel disregarded or unvalued, and to dismiss her feelings and then flare up.
By responsibility sharing—identifying the recurrent thoughts and behaviors that upset them, working out concrete alternatives, and writing new scripts—Keith and Michelle learned to manage and, at times, rise above their conflicts. This effort required hard work, commitment, self-awareness, openness, and maturity. It didn’t just happen. But as they began to make changes in service of their relationship and their more integrated selves, they elicited more positive responses from each other and bonded together more solidly.
I hope that you, too, will work to understand yourself and your partner better, to pool your accumulated wisdom, to develop compassion and forgiveness for each other’s limitations and damaging early experiences, and to design a better future together, based on a deeper awareness of who you are and who you’re struggling to become. In short, I hope you share responsibility for feeling more satisfied and loved at home.
Now let’s turn our attention from the lessons of the past to the present, from understanding why the affair happened to learning how you can recover from it. The next chapter addresses the very concrete task of restoring trust.