A Marriage Therapist's Blog
Thoughts on Marriage Counseling
Posts Tagged ‘affair’
Here are three secretive behaviors to think about. If you see your spouse engaging in them, you should be concerned about what he is keeping from you.
- Secretive about his e-mail. Maybe he only reads his e-mail when you aren’t around, and then carefully deletes it. Even worse: he has a secret e-mail account that he hasn’t told you about.
- Secretive about his cell phone. Is he careful to keep his phone away from you? Does he erase the numbers of incoming and outgoing calls. Does he erase the text messages? Even worse: he has a second phone that you don’t know about. Even worser: it’s a pay-as-you-go phone, which means that detailed bills don’t arrive at your home.
- Secretive about his credit cards. He doesn’t want you to see the monthly statements. Even worse: he has a secret credit card with a different address so that the bills don’t arrive at your home.
And yes, people really do all of these things.
In working with couples who have recovered from infidelity, I’ve pieced together the thought process that gets people into and out of affairs. I’ve written the following from the perspective of a man, but it wouldn’t be too much different for a woman. By the way, this thinking (except for the parts about sex) applies to emotional affairs as well as physical ones.
- Excitement. “Wow! An attractive woman likes me! Yes! Even though I’m [insert age here] I’m still in good shape and attractive. I’ve still ‘got it’! This is going to be great. I haven’t felt this much excitement in my life for a long time. We’re going to have a lot of fun and I’m going to be happier now. My girlfriend understands me, unlike my wife, who hasn’t understood me for years. I just have to be careful so that my wife will never find out about it. Actually the sneaking around part adds to the excitement!”
- Boredom. “This is starting to become monotonous. And it’s getting harder to sneak out of work and then to make excuses at home. My wife is asking why we aren’t intimate anymore, and at the same time the sex with my girlfriend is boring now. That excitement I felt a few months ago is gone. And my girlfriend is starting to annoy me; she wants to know where this ‘relationship’ is going.”
- Reality. “Maybe my wife isn’t really the problem, because things weren’t any better with my girlfriend. Maybe I have some issues of my own that I should look at. Maybe it’s true that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side of the fence. I’ve cut things off with my girlfriend, but my wife is very suspicious because of some e-mails that she found. I wonder if I should come clean with her or if it’s better to keep denying everything. I really hope my wife doesn’t leave me.”
I was recently interviewed for the “Workin’ It” website. I’m reposting the interview here:
1. What are the five most common problems that motivate couples to attend marriage counseling?
Here are the top five, but not in any particular order:
Blended family issues. This occurs most often when one of the spouses has been married before and has kids from that marriage. If the kids are at least 10 or so, there can be trouble between them and the stepparent which then becomes trouble in the marriage.
An Affair. One spouse has been caught or has admitted to cheating. This is devastating, of course, and sometimes ends the marriage. But some couples want to work through it, and so they come to counseling.
Porn addiction. This is becoming a bigger issue due to the easy availability of pornography on the Internet. Some men become addicted to porn. They sometimes can hide it for a while, but eventually the problem surfaces.
Stage-of-life crisis. I see this more often in women than in men, believe it or not. The most common case is that of a woman who was a stay-at-home mom but who has something of an identity crisis when the youngest child leaves home. She frequently makes some significant life changes at this point and may re-evaluate whether or not she wants to stay married.
Communication problems. Many couples don’t know how to express their feelings to each other in a healthy way. At one extreme, they may argue constantly. At the other extreme, both people keep their feelings to themselves. Neither option is good.
2. Is it sometimes obvious to you after a session or two that the couple you’re treating would be better off apart?
Yes. For example, if I find out that the husband is physically abusing his wife or is extremely controlling of her and that he is not willing to try to change, then I think it’s better for the wife to leave him. I spent a year working as an intern counselor at a domestic violence shelter, so I am quite familiar with this pattern of behavior on the man’s part. Sometimes the man will claim that he had ‘no choice’ but to hit his wife because she ‘provoked’ him. Or I might find out that the wife has to let her husband know where she is at all times and that she is not ‘allowed’ to go certain places or see her friends. These are all red flags to me.
3. What problems do you sometimes see that can’t be solved through the counseling process?
Occasionally I will get a couple where one spouse has announced that he/she wants out of the marriage. The other spouse doesn’t want the marriage to end and has convinced the unhappy partner to attend counseling in an attempt to patch things up before agreeing to separation or divorce. Unfortunately, by this time it is usually too late to fix things because the unhappy spouse has been unsatisfied for years and already has one foot out the door. This is a case in which the couple should have begun counseling several years earlier.
4. Do couples have to be married to engage your services?
No. I see unmarried couples as well as married ones. This includes young couples who are planning to be married as well as older couples who have no plans to marry. Although many relationship problems are common to both married and unmarried couples, I have noticed that unmarried couples are more likely to have “trust issues.” They suspect that their partner is cheating on them and so will be spying on them by reading their email, checking their phone, looking at their MySpace page, etc. A lot of times people with trust issues have been cheated on in previous relationships so it’s not hard to understand why they fear that it will happen again.
5. Do you occasionally get couples with very minor problems that can be worked out quickly, but simply need an intermediary?
Yes. A couple may be generally happy and satisfied with their relationship but be stuck on one particular issue. It might be something to do with job choice, a financial decision, or a major decision involving children. When this happens they may come to me for a few sessions just to have an impartial third party engender a healthy discussion and point out options that may not have been considered.
6. Do you find that people are often surprised by what is said by their partners during a counseling session?
Yes, this happens sometimes. For example, sometimes a person will ’save’ an issue for the next counseling session rather than bringing it up at home. This is because he/she feels safer discussing the issue with me in the room; I won’t let the discussion get nasty or out of control.
7. What general advice can you give to couples who want a long, successful partnership?
Try to see things from one another’s points of view. I’ve written about this recently on my blog. It sounds easy, but in fact it’s not easy at all and requires some concentration. If you can put yourself in your spouse’s shoes and feel things as if you were in his/her position, you go a long way toward being able to understand him/her. When both spouses understand each other at this level, conflict goes way down.
The sad fact is that many couples will argue just for the sake of trying to convince each other of who is right and who is wrong. They completely gloss over the hurt feelings that caused the argument to begin in the first place. They should really be talking about the hurt feelings and not who is right and who is wrong.
8. How many jobs have you held in your life?
Fast food worker, warehouse clerk, landscaper, radio station engineer, electrical engineer and therapist. I guess that’s six.
Rick,
I didn’t begin this letter with “Dear Rick” because you aren’t dear to me right now. Far from it. So for now “Rick” will have to do. It’s hard for me to even think about your name, let alone say it out loud.
There is no way that you will ever comprehend the magnitude of what you have done to me. The devastation is total. Everything that I married you for, hoped for in you, believed about you, KNEW about you is gone. All of it. There is nothing left. Where do I go from here, Rick? What do you expect me to do?
So even though I don’t believe that you will ever really get how I feel, I’m going to try to explain it anyway. My therapist says it will be cathartic for me to write this letter.
Remember the night you asked me to marry you? I do. I thought it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’ve always been a dreamer. When I was a little girl I dreamt about the day a man would propose to me. I imagined what it would be like. And then it actually happened. I was the happiest girl in the world. I started to dream about our perfect wedding.
Remember when we talked about what name I would use after we were married? You told me that I should keep my maiden name because it’s my dad’s name and I am so proud of him. You were right. I am so proud of him. But I was marrying YOU and I decided to take your name so that it could be one more thing that we would share. I wanted us to share everything. Rick, I didn’t want to have my world and you have your world. I just wanted us to have OUR world. You could say that I left my family behind and invested my whole life and future in you. EVERYTHING. In YOU, Rick.
Then we had the perfect wedding and started our life together. I was still a dreamer, only now my dreams turned to us having kids, buying our first house, even growing old together.
Those dreams are shattered now. My whole life and future have been ripped away from me over the last few days.
How could you do this, Rick? I put my WHOLE LIFE into this. Everything I did, every thought I had, was about US. I thought you were doing the same for me and that you felt the same way about us. And all the time you were deceiving me. I feel so stupid now for falling for your lies. I cannot believe that you had a secret life that I wasn’t a part of. It’s hard for me to see how I could ever get back to how I used to feel about you or to ever trust you again.
Here’s the part that I don’t understand: I still love you. And that really puts me in such an awful place. I love a man who has treated me like dirt. Where do we go from here, Rick?
This is the hardest letter I’ve ever had to write.
Becky
Note: this is not really a letter from a betrayed spouse. I would never violate a client’s confidentiality. This letter is merely the product of my imagination.
A Brief History of Plagiarism & Copyright Infrigement of this Website
©2007, 2008 Jay Slupesky, M.A., MFT. All rights reserved.
Referer: none
East Bay Couples
Counseling
Two Convenient Locations
- San Ramon: Off I-680 at Crow Canyon Road
- Livermore: Near Valley Memorial Hospital and LifeStyleRx