Untitled - When Good People Have Affairs: Inside the Hearts & Minds of People in Two Relationships (Mira Kirshenbaum)

When Good People Have Affairs: Inside the Hearts & Minds of People in Two Relationships (Mira Kirshenbaum)

We tend to look for what’s “right” or what’s “best.” But when things are murky, the only solution is to take things one step at a time, and make sure that with each step you ask yourself what you can do that’s least likely to lead to regret. Then things are most likely to turn out okay.

So here’s the radar-fixing question for you:
Imagine the unimaginable. You’re married to your lover with all the daily BS that entails. You’re having an affair with your spouse, with all the romance and fun that entails. How do you see the two people now?
Does that change how you see things? If so, you’re already making progress at improving your radar.

We tend to blame the other person for what’s missing. This is perfectly normal, but it adds a note of anger
and disappointment to the relationship, and it breeds conflict. Your partner is pissed at you, at a minimum, for your being pissed at him.
This is the familiar anger/ distance cycle, in which anger creates distance, distance creates anger, and on and on.
So your partner, whom you’re so unhappy with, is to some degree a monster of your own creation. I don’t mean it’s your fault necessarily. I’m just saying that your radar is off because the reality you’re looking at is off. He might be a sweeter, more affectionate guy if you were sweeter and more affectionate to him.

here’s the question you need to ask yourself to tune up your radar:
If my lover just disappeared, and if I put time and energy into my primary relationship, including maybe our working with a good couples therapist, can I imagine a realistic scenario in which things would be better for us and I’d be content to stay in this relationship?
Most people who answer yes to this question feel it is very worthwhile to carefully rethink the whole question of whether they need to end their primary relationship so they can be with their lover.

ask yourself whether your partner holds on to grievances for a long time and uses them against you. If so, then based on most people’s experience, this is not a good sign that you’ll be able to reconcile. A hostile, aggrieved partner is more interested in defending himself than in healing the relationship.

Figuring out which person you want to spend the rest of your life with depends a lot on your attitude. People who do a good job with this, who end up liking the choices they’ve made, who end up with few regrets, if any-they may not have better judgment than you, but they have an attitude that says “I’d better not be so proud and confident about how I’m sizing up these people. I’m too caught up in the whole thing. This is a recipe for becoming blind. I need to make sure that I’m seeing both of these people with fresh, unbiased eyes.”

What is a great person made of? Life plus growth. A great person allows himself to live, to really have a rich, interesting, and varied life. And then he allows it to teach him something, to change him.

It’s the negatives in our relationships that are the first to rise up when things haven’t been going so great, but it’s the positives that tell the tale as to how good and strong your relationship really is. Be very careful about throwing away a relationship with a lot of positives.

There are, in fact, only four dimensions when it comes to comparing potential partners:
1. Who the people are in themselves.
2. What your relationship is with each one.
3. What your lifestyle would be with each.
4. Who you are with each.

people who make smart decisions about who to be with tend to choose the highest quality person: the most sane, intelligent, honest, kind, reliable, sensible, generous, warm, good-natured person they can find.
In other words, the person who is best for you is the person about whom you can say that he or she would probably be best for anybody. Someone who is solid and wears well.

“Tell me what I should look for in a guy.”
Fine, I said. Do you have a business card? Write these phrases down on the back of it:
Not stupid.
Not crazy.
Not creepy.
Not mean.
Not ugly.
Not smelly.
You know, a good, solid person.

Here’s how you know if you have good chemistry with someone: You check to see if you have all five ingredients.

EASY CONNECTIONS S. To see if you have this, ask yourself: When the two of you are together, do things feel easy between you, and are you able to connect?
When it’s just the two of you, and you’re able to leave the stress of day-to-day life behind, and you’re not mad at each other, does it feel easy, comfortable, relaxing to be together, and do you feel connected, not like polite strangers who happen to get along, but like lovers who are close? And is it like this more often than not?

F U N. You might be surprised to learn that fun is one of the five essential ingredients in relationship chemistry. Fun is the glue of intimacy.

Ask yourself this:
When it’s just the two of you, no other couples, no kids, no toys (like a boat), and no props (like a party or a club), do you feel that there’s always the real possibility that the two of you will find some way to have fun together, and does this, in fact, happen fairly often?

basically and in general, we need to feel safe in our relationships. We need to feel that we won’t be hurt deliberately. We won’t be lied to routinely. We won’t be belittled.

By and large, do you feel safe being with the other person? And do you feel that you’re particularly safe from being hurt, physically or emotionally? And do you feel that you’re safe when it’s most important to you, when you’re being vulnerable or personal or intimate?

Even though you’re aware of the other person’s flaws, do you basically, overall, respect him as he is right now? Not necessarily that he’s a fantastic genius, but that in most ways he’s solid, capable, responsible, smart, and kind, and generally makes good decisions. And does he treat you as if he genuinely believes that right now, just as you are, you’re solid, capable, responsible, smart, and kind, and generally make good decisions?

Does the other person feel right to you physically? Their smell, their touch, the way they look. Not perfect, not necessarily great, but right for you. And do you clearly get the sense that you’re right for your partner physically? And does the amount and nature of the physical affection between you feel right? And doesthe way you make love feel right?

I’ve learned something very interesting over the years in my research and clinical experience. I would never have guessed it-I’m probably too romantic. And it’s something people having affairs are too now focused to see. What I’ve learned is that in many ways our experience of being in a relationship is our experience of the lifestyle we have in that relationship. That’s right. We tend to experience the lifestyle more than the relationship itself, and more than the other person.

Do you have a very special and compelling reason for thinking that two years after you married your lover your lifestyle together would be dramatically better than your lifestyle with your current spouse?

There are always a lot of unknowns. The people in your situation who get clarity don’t do so because they eliminate the unknowns. They get clarity because they focus on what they do know that’s really important.

You need all five ingredients. If one is missing, the relationship is probably not going to make it. It can limp along for a while, but over time the missing ingredient will become more and more important, and soon the bad stuff in your relationship will swamp the good stuff.

choosing between two people is for many of us much more a matter of choosing between two selves: the two different selves you are with these two different people.

And the fact is that your choice will only work if you like the person you are when you’re with the person you’ve chosen.

Here’s a technique I think you’ll find very helpful. Do this the next several times you’re with the people you’re involved with. Right afterward, ask yourself how you felt while with each on a scale from -10 to +10, where -10 is the worst and +10 is the best you’ve felt in the past while with someone. Do this several times just to make sure that you get an accurate average reading.
Don’t worry about why you feel the way you do. That might be important for working

Here’s the rule of thumb, and I’ll make it simple: You can’t be with someone who doesn’t support you becoming who you want to be.

if you can identify what’s closest to your heart and pick out the path that gives it to you, then you’ve discovered an underground passage leading you straight to the happiness you’ve been longing for.

When you tell someone that you want to break up with them, their first response is almost always “Why?” That question contains a terrible trap. Trying to answer it is the first mistake to avoid. Don’t answer the question why, and especially don’t go into details.

I want you to hear this loud and clear. A breakup is not a discussion about how you can patch up your relationship.

you should have already made a serious effort to make your relationship as good as it can be. You should have already proved that trying to patch things up isn’t going to work.
Most of the misery in breakups come because people unwittingly turn the breakup into an attempted “patchup.” And they do this by getting sucked into answering the question “Why?”

Almost any possible answer to the question why can easily slide into a discussion about how to patch things up.

One way or another, you get sucked into a negotiation about your relationship. Before you know it you realize that you’re faced with two alternatives. You can say “I don’t want to be with you under any circumstances.” That ends the painful pulling back and forth. But in the meantime the discussing and negotiating have heartbreakingly gone on for hours, days, months, sometimes years. What a waste.
The other alternative is that you cave. At some point you seize on some little suggestion: “Yes! You’re right! We’ll get a dog! That will be so much fun, and we’ll go for walks and everything, and we’ll get close again.”
But why did you cave? Because you were worn-out.

So what do you say to break up with someone? All you say is “This relationship just doesn’t work for me anymore.” And if they ask “Why not?” the answer is “Because it just doesn’t work for me.” Repeat these words as often as necessary. Don’t add any details to this clear statement.
Keep trying to change the subject to when and how you’re going to separate.
I know this might sound harsh and cruel and cold. But look, there may very well be a time for the two of you to hold each other and cry and mourn the loss of your relationship. That would be a good thing to do later. But breaking up the way I’m suggesting is far less harsh than an endlessly dragged out and much more painful discussion that involves a lot of desperate begging that can never really lead anywhere good. And it’s far better than a time-wasting, heart-eroding period where you cave into the idea of working on a relationship you don’t want to stay in.
So the rule of thumb is this. Don’t say it’s over until you’re sure it’s over.

In case you’re thinking “You’re just nuts if you think that all I’m going to do is say ‘It just doesn’t work for me’ and that’s going to be the end of the discussion,” you’re right. I would be nuts if I thought that. You want to cause as little pain as possible, and yet there is a lot to talk about. So how do you go about it?
The principle is pretty simple: Tell the truth, but meet their need.

you tell the truth, but you think as carefully and deeply as you can about what the other person hearing your truth would need when she hears it. And then,
as part of the process of telling your truth, you find a way to address their need.

Quick example. “Do I look fat in these pants?”
“Well, they’re not the most flattering pants I’ve ever seen on you, but I love you, and I think you’re beautiful.”

What needs do you think your spouse or lover will have if you tell them that you’re ending your relationship with them? You have no right telling them that until you make an honest attempt to figure out their needs and try to hit on a way to address them.
To help you, here are the most common needs people have when someone breaks up with them:
• To know what your future relationship will be.
• To know that you can still be friends.
• To know how the money is going to work.
• To know where he/she is going to live.
• To know how much time he/she has before you separate.
• To know who’s going to have custody of the kids.
• To know who’s going to have custody of the dog.
• To know what you’re going to tell the kids.
• To know how you’re going to explain this to family and friends.
• To know what the next steps are and what the timeline is.
• To know that there’s nothing they could’ve done to change things.
These are all real and valid needs. The only need you refuse to meet is their need to know why.

I’ve found over the years that you minimize pain by honestly doing your best to guess what the other’s needs are. You might not guess exactly right, but that’s okay. And by trying, you’re doing the most you can to show that you have goodwill.

the best, in fact the only, way to minimize the yelling and crying that come with a breakup is to welcome it. That’s
right. Break up with someone when there’s plenty of time and privacy for all the emotions to come out. And you should positively elicit those emotions. Say, “I know you have a lot of feelings and a lot of things to tell me. I don’t want to stop you. Let me hear everything you have to say. Let’s get it all out.”
You can’t prevent a scene, but that’s the best way to minimize how bad a scene it is.
Here’s the rule of thumb. The more you welcome the other person’s feelings, the more that person feels that she doesn’t have to crank up her feelings to break through your resistance to them.

Apologies are good. Remorse is appropriate. But when you’ve hurt someone the way he had, being sorry makes the whole thing about your pain, not the other person’s. It’s actually the easy way out.
Here’s someone you’ve hurt. And you’ve hurt them in a special way-a humiliating way that makes them feel like nothing. Now they have all this emotional pain, layers of it, each layer different from the next.
And there’s nothing worse than having your pain made invisible. Healing begins when your pain is acknowledged and understood.

FEELING LOVED
You sit down with your chosen one and say something like “I want to know what makes you feel loved. I’m really sorry; I should know it, but I just don’t. I need you to tell me. Just tell me five things that I could do to make you feel loved, whether I’ve ever done them or not. I’d like to know your language of love. And I’d like to do the same thing for you. How does that sound? That way we’ll both know exactly what makes each other feel loved.”
The first key to making this successful is being specific. A bad answer is “I feel loved when you’re nice to me.” It’s bad because it doesn’t point to any concrete action. What the hell is “nice”?
The second key to making this successful is that what you ask for is something the other person can do. A bad answer is “I’d feel loved if you made up for all the ways you’ve neglected me in the past.” But how can anyone realistically ever do this?

To get started, here are the top ten most important things to do to maintain a good and healthy relationship:

1. Show how much you appreciate your partner. Do and say little things that make it clear that “I love you and I think you’re great.”
2. Touch. Every day there needs to be hugs, kisses, gentle stroking, holding hands, and, sure, throw sex into the mix. But it’s not about sex every day. It is about affectionate touching every day.
3. Say what you need. How does this maintain love? Saying what you need allows your partner to keep the love pipeline open by doing what you need, and prevents you from feeling resentful and deprived.
4. Listen to the other person. Yes, maybe they repeat themselves. Maybe you’re not overjoyed at what you’re hearing. But in many ways listening is the single most loving and of fectionate thing you can do. And not just listening, but being actively involved in what you’re hearing.
5. Be supportive. With few exceptions, everyone is having a hard time. Everyone’s life is tough. Everyone needs help and encouragement. That means your partner needs this. And it’s not just words. It means making food, rubbing shoulders, giving the kids a bath, taking out the garbage without being asked.
6. Spend time together. You should spend at least ten minutes every day where it’s just the two of you, and you’re focused on each other, and you’re not talking about problems and chores and responsibilities. You’re just there for each other and with each other.
7. Have fun with each other. Whatever fun is for you. Do something that’s just a little fun every day, and something that’s a lot of fun every week.
8. Be positive. We all go through our lives vulnerable to frustration and discouragement. So when you’re negative, your partner just wants to get away from you. If you say something positive, hopeful, forward-looking every day, your partner will want to be with you.
9. Put yourself in your partner’s shoes. Even if it’s just a minute, spend some time every day thinking about what it’s like to be your partner, living her life, being in a relationship with you. And if you think about this, it’s got to have an effect.
10. Be open. Intimacy means being close to each other. How can you do that unless you show what’s inside of you?

Show your partner this list of items of daily maintenance. Ask her which three items she feels you’ve been neglecting the most.

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