"Your Lover's Past"

A dear friend recently asked whether it was appropriate to ask about his partner's past romantic involvements.  I asked him to give me a bit of time to ponder that question, as it's somewhat tricky.   I've seen couples come to grief with each other because they refused to share information, or because they did, and it turned out the partner couldn't handle what they learned.

It's perfectly natural to be curious about other people our partners have been involved with.  We wonder about the nature of those relationships.  Were they sexual?  If so, how did they compare to what we do with our partner now?  How emotionally committed were they?  What was the nature of the attraction, and what brought about the end of the relationship?  Our curiosity knows no bounds when it comes to wanting to understand our partners.

Some couples are quite open in this area, and readily share information about past relationships.  On the other hand, I have had couples come into marital therapy and reveal previous marriages that a current spouse had no clue about.  Needless to say, the future of that marriage rests on shaky ground.  After all, the foundation of a secure and satisfying marriage/relationship is trust.  To learn that your spouse or partner has had one or more committed relationships that were never revealed to you undermines that trust.

Think carefully about what you want or need to know.  Clearly, if your partner has been married before, you probably need to know the circumstances surrounding those relationships and the divorces that ended the marriages.  Was there physical or extreme emotional abuse involved?  You also need to be aware of arrangements made regarding minor children, visitation, and asset division.  These issues can affect you directly, and so you should have no hesitation having honest and detailed conversations with your partner about them.

But how much do you need to know regarding your partner's sex life, for example, with a previous spouse?  Do you need to know how often they had sex and what activities they engaged in?  What do you need to know about their shared interests and how much time they spent pursuing them?  There is no single formula regarding these questions.  You and your partner need to jointly decide what you want to share, and how the shared information might enhance or damage your relationship.

For instance, how much do you need to know about the threesome your husband had during a frat party?  How do the images of that night benefit you and your marriage now?  After all, you didn't even know him at that time.  And how does it enhance your marriage for your husband to have details about boys you attended your proms and other events with during high school?

Unless we are currently in relationships that began during or shortly after high school, the likelihood is that we've had some sort of relationship with one or more other people during our adult lives.   This is especially true if either of us has been married before.  The challenge becomes accepting that our partner was an adult who had a life before they met and committed to us, and that their history isn't a threat to us, but rather part of their life narrative.

Loss Compounded

At some point, we all experience it--the loss of a family member or a dear friend.  While the relationships were different and the sense of loss is never the same, what is constant is the hole that the loss creates in our lives and our hearts.  A relative, a beloved friend, a long-time valued coworker is gone.  Unless someone has held a similar relationship status to the departed (e.g., a sibling, another coworker), it may be difficult for others to deeply empathize with your intense pain and bewilderment about your loss.

At such times, typically family and friends rally around us and support us with words of comfort and tangible expressions of caring.  How many times do we hear "I'm so sorry for your loss" and how many casseroles are dropped off at our homes?  This may continue for two to three weeks, sometimes a bit longer.  Then, gradually, the phone calls and the visits taper off.  While it may not explicitly be said, we're expected to "get back to normal".  This is to a large extent for the benefit of those around us.  We may, for some indeterminate period of time, continue to have days where we feel we can't possibly function.  But others don't want to get so mired in our pain and misery that they can't function, either.

This can feel like people have stopped caring.  To some extent, this is true.  Your loss is not their loss, and their primary connection to the deceased may be you.  They may not have been close to the person who passed away, but they're close to you.  You will continue to struggle with the range of feelings the death engendered in you--shock, deep sorrow, abandonment, even anger at the deceased for leaving us.  When working with bereaved clients, I often get questions about the "normal" course of grief.  "Am I crazy for feeling this way?"  "How long will I feel this way?"  "Is this normal?"  The answer to this last question, to be addressed in a future post, is that, when it comes to grief, there really is no "normal".

These feelings, coupled with the gradual withdrawal of support from those in our social network, can result in what I call a "compound loss".  You've not only lost someone who played an important emotional role in your life, but, over time, the support and expressions of concern from others begin to dwindle.  At this point, it may be useful to locate a psychologist or other mental health professional who can offer an objective, value-neutral setting in which to air your feelings about your loss and the level of support which you've received from those closest to you.  This kind of relationship can provide the opportunity to process your loss and its impact on you, without the pressure of needing to "get over it" within a certain time frame.

The Infidelity Script

"The Infidelity Script"

Sadly, all too many of us find ourselves actors in this drama.  Something alerts us to the fact that a spouse has been unfaithful.  It can be almost anything, from a whiff of perfume that you don't recognize;  credit card receipts for dinners or hotel stays you never enjoyed;  jewelry or clothing that you never received; or changes in customary patterns of behavior that suggest that something's not quite right.

At first, you're likely to feel extremely confused, perhaps you even doubt your own sanity and assume you're just imagining things.  After all, your spouse would never do that to you and your family.  The sad reality is that many of our spouses do just that.  Reliable statistics are very hard to come by, as people are reluctant to admit to betraying their marital vows.  But, some of the best numbers suggest that between 40% and 60% of men and at least 40% of women in first marriages will engage in affairs.

Disclosure of an affair can happen in any number of ways.  Occasionally, a spouse will simply come forward--whether out of guilt or fear of being caught--and admit to an extramarital affair.  More likely, however, a guilty spouse is confronted about an affair and denies it initially.  Eventually, after being presented with sufficient evidence about his or her behavior, the spouse who had the affair will admit to something.  The admission, however, may only be partial and may be a distortion of what really transpired.

This is the point at which spouses may end up repeatedly contending with each other over versions of the truth.  The spouse who had the affair may still be engaged in protecting himself/herself or an affair partner, while the betrayed spouse may feel in his or her "gut" that there is much more to be uncovered.  The parallel processes of denial or "damage containment", and attempting to discover ever more of the truth, can go on for months.

Eventually, a couple reaches a place where they need to make a decision.  They'll either part ways over the affair, they'll work to build a stronger marriage, or they'll live in emotional limbo, where nothing is ever resolved.  Arriving at a decision can, in and of itself, take time.  The betrayed spouse may feel such raw, searing pain that she isn't sure she can put any effort into the marriage.  And the spouse who had the affair may become impatient and want to "just get on with it".

When a couple decides to work on the marriage, there's no denying that they're in for a bumpy road.  There will be glimmers of hope, followed by setbacks that lead the betrayed spouse to think that any "progress" the couple made was merely an illusion.  But that's the typical course of affair recovery--two steps forward and one step back,  for a while.  But the promising news is that they're still one foot ahead of where they were before.

Strange as it may sound,  in my clinical practice, I've seen couples, while scarred by an affair, come through it stronger, closer, and much better friends than before.  So, for those of you who are stinging from a spouse's infidelity, there is hope.

Fantasy: Your Safety Net

In my clinical practice, I do a great deal of work with individuals who struggle with sexual issues.  They may have had an affair, or they may have imagined having one, perhaps with someone at work, a neighbor, or even an in-law.  As you can imagine, there is often a great deal of guilt associated with these thoughts.

Of course, such thoughts are what we usually refer to as "fantasy".  Just the mention of "fantasy", however, is enough to fill make many people with feelings of anxiety and guilt.  It's as if they had already acted upon the promptings of their imagination.  For instance, a patient may come into therapy and confess that he's obsessed with a female coworker.  When he and his wife make love, he's actually imagining having sex with the other woman.  And, consequently, he's consumed with guilt, as if he has betrayed his wife with a real-life physical and emotional relationship.

Now this is a tricky topic.  And people will disagree on whether or not this kind of behavior constitutes betrayal.  One of my rules of thumb for which types of fantasies are "safe" and which can be potentially damaging to a marriage or committed relationship is how much access you have to the object of your fantasy in real life.  If you're imagining being with Angelina Jolie or Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt or Kim Kardashian, then you're on relatively safe ground.  For virtually all of us, the likelihood that we'll even meet these people, let alone become romantically involved with them, is close to zero.  These fantasies, however, can actually help couples through rather stale periods in their marriage.  The fantasy of being attractive to and desired by a celebrity can maintain a sense of vitality and interest.

On the other hand, if you're fantasizing repeatedly about someone with whom you're in close contact--a coworker, a neighbor, someone you play on an office sports team with, someone with whom you volunteer for a charitable cause--you could be in dangerous territory.  After all, you have real and repeated opportunities for deepening relationships with these people.  You can begin taking lunches with coworkers more frequently; you can sign on for extra projects with someone who's part of a charitable organization; you can look for opportunities to interact more frequently with a neighbor, and so on.

And, then, of course, there are our day-time non-sexual fantasies.  These fantasies tend to revolve around issues of achievement, self-esteem, and self-worth.  They may have to do with professional accomplishments and how we're valued by our peers.  For instance, do we see ourselves as perhaps doing our bosses' job better than he or she does?  Such fantasies can inspire us to improve our performance in our own spheres of employment.

And so, fantasy is a vast emotional terrain that allows us to explore possibilities in different aspects of our lives.  We can play out different roles and with different people.  It's important to consider the extent to which sharing fantasies (with anyone but your therapist!) is appropriate, as that can be either threatening or enhancing to a relationship.  The risk of sharing fantasies, however, is a subject for another time.

“Home”

Most of us have a physical address, for example, 333 Main Street, Anytown, USA.  But where does our heart reside?  Is it where we grew up as young children, with memories of riding tricycles and our young neighbors?  Is it where we spent our adolescence, feeling those pangs of attraction for that cute boy or girl down the street?

By the time we’ve completed high school, our sense of home is fairly well defined.  Later in life, as we contemplate “home” , that will function as a reference point.  “Home” was a place where, regardless of how we had failed our parents’ expectations, we could still return.

But, as adults, we also create our own sense of home.  This may have to do with the part of the country we choose to live in, a spouse’s personal history and sense of place, the career path we follow, and decisions we make for our children, regarding schooling, etc.

The idea of “home”  has recently been very much on my mind.  My elder daughter married a few weeks ago, and the ceremony and associated festivities were all held in areas of a city where I used to spend a great deal of time.  And, this weekend, my husband and I are traveling in our motor home through parts of the state that were home to me for many years.

A strange sense of disconnect during these last two trips led me to ponder how we establish that sense of home.  A number of years ago, as I was going through a major life upheaval, I was elated to travel to the city that would become my new home.  The sense of exhilaration as I departed was unparalleled.  The return trip was agony, except for the awareness that I’d soon see my college-age daughters. 

This process went on for several months, until I had my new residence established and resolution of legal matters under way.  And so the transition from home in one city, where I had resided for many years and where my children had been born and raised, began.

I immersed myself in the professional community in my new city and experienced a great deal of satisfaction in that.  I made rewarding connections and found that exciting professional opportunities emerged from those.  And, so, my new city has become home in a very vibrant and promising way.  And yet, a trip through my former home is enough to powerfully tug at my heartstrings.  The moral of the story is, I guess, that we invest ourselves emotionally wherever we go, and that that’s just fine.