180: When Your Affair Partner Has an Agenda for You

Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Marie Murphy.  I’m a relationship coach and I help people who are engaging in anything they think counts as infidelity to deal with their feelings, clarify what they want, and make decisions about what they’re going to do.  No shame, no blame, no judgments.  If you’re in the midst of a challenging infidelity situation and you’re ready to figure out what you want to do about it, let’s work together.  I’m not going to give you any prescriptive advice, or tell you what you should do or have to do.  My role is to help you resolve your infidelity situation in a way that you feel great about.  There are three ways we can work together.  You can purchase the DIY version of my program, You’re Not the Only One, which contains powerful teachings and assignments that you can access online as soon as you sign up.  You can join the group coaching version of You’re Not the Only One which contains all of the online teachings, as well as access to group coaching calls that are held in a way that protects your privacy.  Or we can work together one-on-one.  When we do that, we meet using Zoom, which means we can work together no matter where you are located.  To learn more about all of these ways you can have me as you coach, go to mariemurphyphd.com/services.

In the last couple of episodes I’ve talked about how people sometimes develop an agenda for their affair partner, or to put it differently, sometimes people develop a set of ideas about what their affair partner should do, and how they should do it – and then they try to “help” their affair partner do those things.  This happens a lot, and it’s a totally human thing to do.  So if you’re doing it, that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you, and it’s not an indication that you need to start beating yourself up.  But, as I’ve also talked about in the last two episodes, if you notice you have something resembling an agenda for your affair partner, you may want to set it down.  You may want to shift your focus to the elements within your infidelity situation that you actually have the power to control, and you may want to start taking responsibility for those things.  Because taking care of your own business is ultimately going to get you more of what you want than attempting to do other people’s business will.

Today I’m going to talk to those of you who have an affair partner who has an agenda for you.  And by that I mean, your affair partner has a sense of what you need to do about your portion of the infidelity situation the two of you are in, and they’re letting you know what it is they think you should do, and they’re trying to “help” you do it.  Now I realize that having an agenda for someone, or someone having an agenda for you can sound kind of loaded.  And so we may want to say, “Well, I don’t really have an agenda for my affair partner,” or “My affair partner doesn’t REALLY have an agenda for me.”  If the word “agenda” sounds loaded to you, I get it, and I want to encourage you to consider that you can make use of the idea that you might have an agenda for someone, or someone having an agenda for you without making it into too big of a deal.  You can use this idea lightly, or employ this concept loosely.  Having an agenda can come in many different forms and flavors.  We’re not trying to nail down a precise set of inclusion and exclusion criteria for what having an agenda means, or what officially counts as having an agenda.  That would be impossible, and it’s kind of pointless anyway.  If you think that your affair partner has an agenda for you, or has something resembling an agenda for you, then for today’s purposes we’re going to say they have an agenda for you.  

I’m going to stick with the example I used in the last two episodes, but today I’m going to explore the other side of the coin.  For today’s purposes, our example situation is that you are in a committed relationship.  Maybe it’s a marriage, maybe it isn’t.  And you are having an affair.  And you’ve indicated to your affair partner that you not only really want to leave your committed relationship, but you are GOING to leave your committed relationship, so that the two of you can be together in a non-affair capacity.  And your affair partner has gotten very invested in trying to “help” you do that.  

Here's the first thing I want you to be aware of.  When I talk to folks who are in this kind of a situation – and by that I mean, they’re in a committed relationship, and they’re having an affair, and they’ve told their affair partner that they want to or plan to leave their committed relationship, and their affair partner is working hard to try to “help” them do that.  When I’m talking to clients who are this kind of a situation, they sometimes tell me more about what their affair partner wants than about what they want.

And this is something I really want you to be on the lookout for.  If you think about your infidelity situation, and the first thing that comes to mind is what your affair partner wants or doesn’t want, that’s a pretty good indication that they have what we might reasonably regard as an agenda for you, and you may have gotten pretty focused on how to respond to them and their agenda, or how to keep them happy.  Now, it is also possible that they really don’t have any kind of an agenda for you at all, and you have gotten hyper-focused on them and what you think they want for other reasons.  That’s definitely a Thing.  But for today’s purposes, we are going to assume that your affair partner does have what could be considered an agenda for you, and they’ve been letting you know about it, and you’ve started to feel kind of beholden to their agenda, and to doing the things they want you to do.

Before I go any further, let me be really clear that wanting to do what your affair partner wants you to do isn’t necessarily a bad thing in any categorical way.  But it is really important to have a sense of the extent to which you are focusing on what your affair partner wants at the expense of focusing on what YOU want.  Focusing on what your affair partner wants and kind of ignoring what you want is definitely a Thing that happens, and if this is a mode you have slipped into, you want to become aware of that.

Here's what being really focused on what your affair partner wants sometimes looks like.  I’ll be talking to a client who is telling me about what their affair partner wants, and what their affair partner has been telling them about what they need to do to leave their marriage, and I’ll ask the client, “What do YOU want?  What do you want to do about your infidelity situation right now, and what are the ultimate outcomes that you would like?” and they’ll say something like, “I don’t really know.  I’ve just been so busy trying to maintain the status quo in my marriage, and trying to keep my affair partner placated that I haven’t been able to figure out what I really want.”

And people who have told their affair partner in no uncertain terms that they plan to leave their marriage will tell me this!  That’s not to say that they’re lying to their affair partner when they tell them they plan to leave their marriage – at least, not necessarily.  But this discrepancy between what they’re telling their affair partner and what they’re telling me reflects is that when we prioritize doing what someone else wants us to do over figuring out what we ourselves want to do, things can get a little funny.  Or, to put it differently, things can get pretty darn fucked up.  When we start focusing more on what other people want than on what we want, we can get lost in the forest, and it can easily start to seem like there’s no way out.

But the problem of course is that it can be tricky to deal with having an affair partner who has some kind of an agenda for you.  If you have an affair partner who has ideas about what you should be doing, and is making an active effort to “help” you do the things they thing you should be doing, you may really want to get on board with their plan.  Getting involved in their agenda for you in any way may feel like a really great way to connect with them.  A lot of affair couples get a lot of enjoyment about talking how they’re going to leave their committed relationships.  If you complain about your committed relationship, and your affair partner wants to help you solve that problem by helping you get out of that relationship, that can end being a really intoxicating topic of conversation for both of you.    

And if they have expressed a strong desire for you to do something – like get on with the business of leaving your marriage, already – you may really want to do what they want you to do for the sake of making them happy.  You may want them to be happy!  And you may want to be the source of their happiness!  And you may believe that their ideas about what you should do are pretty good!  You may think that they know you pretty well, and you may think they have some pretty sophisticated perspectives on what’s going on with you.  And of course, you probably really want to keep your relationship with them going for the sake of your OWN happiness!  And you may be somewhat concerned that if you don’t do the things they want you to do, they won’t stick around.  So it may seem like you just HAVE to keep on doing what they want you to do, or keep on doing some version of that, or else you’ll face the prospect of losing your relationship with them, which you may REALLY value!

For all of these reasons, and plenty of others, it can be really easy to get very invested in your affair partner’s agenda for you.  What might this mean in practice?  It can mean a lot of things in practice.  Let’s say your affair partner really wants you to leave your marriage, and thinks that you’ve been dragging your feet, and quizzes you on a daily basis about all of your interactions with your spouse.

For starters, you may believe that it is incumbent upon you to answer their questions.  If they quiz you on your interactions with your spouse, you may believe that you have to give them a full report.  You actually don’t have to do this, but you may BELIEVE that you have to do this.  And, you may become very sensitive to their reactions to your responses to their questions.  For instance, if you tell your affair partner that you and your spouse had a nice conversation, and your affair partner doesn’t like this, you may start to get the idea that you have to carefully manage what you say to your affair partner about your interactions with your spouse, OR manage your interactions with your spouse so that you don’t interact with them in ways that your affair partner won’t like, or you may do both of these things.

That’s just one example of what getting invested in your affair partner’s agenda for you may look like.  The key thing I want you to look out for is this: prioritizing taking care of your affair partner’s needs or desires or preferences over taking care of your own.  Sometimes we do this in really obvious, non-subtle ways.  And sometimes the ways in which we do this seem insignificant or innocuous, but are actually pretty powerful in their impact on us, and our ability to deal with our infidelity situation in a way that WE actually like.

Here's the thing.  It’s entirely possible that you and your affair partner may want the same things.  Maybe you both really want to be together in a non-affair relationship.  And if you do, that’s great.

But.  Even if you do want the same things, you each have to take your own path to getting there.  More about that in a moment.

ALSO, sometimes we’re a little premature in deciding that we want the same things that our affair partner does.  Sometimes we get into an affair relationship, and our affair partner becomes convinced that we need to be together without any constraints, and they decide that that means that you need to leave the relationship you’re committed to.  As soon as possible.  Because you’ve expressed dissatisfaction with your committed relationship.  And you’ve acknowledged that what you and your affair partner share is magical and special.  And so therefore, the decision is made: it’s time for you to leave your marriage.  

If you have an affair partner who is CONVINCED that this is the way things need to go, it can be pretty easy to get swept up in their certainty.  Their enthusiasm may be infectious.  It can be very alluring to have someone who wants you really badly, and wants to insist that you run off into the sunset together, as soon as possible.

But here’s the thing.  In order to get the thing that you want – which may be the thing your affair partner wants, too – you have to want it for yourself, and you have to decide what you’re going to do about it.  And that might sound rather obvious, but this is a step that a lot of people skip without knowing that they’re skipping it.  

There’s actually a big difference between telling your affair partner that you’re going to leave your marriage and DECIDING that you are going to leave your marriage.  Sometimes we tell our affair partner that we’re going to leave our marriage because we know they want that, and we really want to want that, too.  But wanting to want something is a little different from DECIDING that we want something, and deciding what we are going to do in the service of wanting that something.  For better or worse, we humans are capable of making grand romantic proclamations and really meaning them when we say them… but then later coming to realize that we aren’t all that certain of the promises we’ve made.  Put differently, we can totally tell our affair partner that we’re going to leave our marriage, without actually having decided for ourselves that we are going to do that.

And if you’re going to leave your marriage, you’re probably going to have to actually decide to leave your marriage, and commit to taking action in the service of that decision.  And a lot of people need some time and space on their own to make that decision, and commit to acting on that decision.  In other words, even if the IDEA of leaving your marriage sounds great when you’re in the midst of a passionate exchange with your affair partner, you may need to consider that idea by yourself and for yourself, without any input from them.  

And quite simply, if you’re focusing all of your time and energy on trying to do what your affair partner wants, you may not have enough bandwidth available to think through what you really want, and you may not have the capacity to make actual decisions about what you’re going to do in the service of what you want.

So here’s what I encourage you to do if you’ve been listening to this and thinking, “Hmm, yeah, I think my affair partner might have an agenda for me, and I think I have been more focused on their agenda for me than on my agenda for myself.  Come to think of it, maybe I don’t even have an agenda for myself.”

First and foremost, if your affair partner has an agenda for you, that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with them.  You don’t have to think less of them for attempting to get you to do what they want you to do.  You can love them like crazy, AND you can also decide that you’re going to opt-out of trying to do what they want you to do.  You can have a conversation about this with them if you want to, or you can just silently decide that your focus has shifted, and you’re going to start doing things differently now.

The second thing I encourage you to do is embrace the possibility that disengaging from your affair partner’s agenda, or opting out of your affair partner’s agenda may feel weird for you.  If you’re in the habit of trying to keep them happy, de-prioritizing that is probably going to feel pretty uncomfortable for you.  If that’s your experience, here’s what you need to remember: if your shared goal is to be with your affair partner in a non-affair relationship, you have to want that for yourself.  You can’t just ride the coattails of their desires – even if it is really flattering to be wanted as badly as they may profess to want you.  And in order to know if this is what you want or not, you have to carve out the time and space and focus to examine what you want.  And that may mean devoting less of your attention to what your affair partner wants.  If doing that feels like you’re doing something wrong, consider that this disengagement is part of a means to an end.  Put a little differently, if you want the relationship to ultimately work out, you may need some distance from it in order to get yourself to the place where it really can work out.  So if it feels odd or bad to create a little distance, consider that doing so may be essential to creating the certainty you need to go after the relationship.

The third thing I encourage you to do is give yourself permission to discover that what you want might be different from what your affair partner wants.  Maybe it won’t be!  Maybe you’ll come to the conclusion that you do want the same things they want, or things that are similar enough to what they want that it makes sense for the two of you to be together for a long time.  Or if not a long time, then for a good time.  But what sometimes happens when one member of an affair couple feels beholden to their affair partner’s agenda is they don’t allow themselves to consider that they might not actually want what their affair partner wants.  Because it just seems too inconvenient, or too IMPOSSIBLE for that to be the outcome.  Affair relationships can seem really high stakes, and if yours does, it can seem like you don’t have room to step back and reconsider things, and possibly change your mind about things.  But you can.  And you may want to consider that any decision to pursue your relationship with them is only a good decision if you make it for reasons that you really like.  Which is different from making a decision because you think it’s what they want you to do.

The fourth thing I recommend that you do is remember – or recognize – that if you’re going to leave your committed relationship, only you can leave your committed relationship.  That might sound incredibly obvious, and of course it kind of is, in a sense.  But if your affair partner is regularly trying to “help” you leave your marriage, or is trying to coach you through leaving your marriage, it may seem like this is a project that you share with them.  But it really isn’t.  You leaving your committed relationship is YOUR project.  It’s business that you and only you can attend to.  It might be the case that talking to your affair partner about the ins and outs of leaving your committed relationship is something you enjoy and find value in doing, and if that’s the case, that’s fine – but even it is, there are aspects of that journey that you simply have to experience on your own.  And, put in sterner terms, even if you find that your affair partner is really helpful, there are elements of the process of leaving your committed relationship that you have to take exclusive responsibility for.

Sometimes, when our affair partner has an agenda for us, we kind of look to them for leadership.  We kind of get used to taking direction from them, or we kind of get used to subscribing to their view of what we should do about our infidelity situation.  Put a little differently, we might kind of LIKE IT that our affair partner has an agenda for us.  And it’s okay if you do.  But even if you like their input, even if you like their leadership, even if you like the guidance they give you, there are some things that they simply cannot do for you.  They cannot decide for you that you want to leave your marriage.  They cannot extricate you from your marriage.  Only you can do that.  

And if you want to do these things, it may be very helpful to recognize that this stuff is YOUR business, and it isn’t really your affair partner’s business.  Remember, as Byron Katie says, there are three types of business in this world.  Your business, their business, and god’s business.  Or the universe’s business.  Or the cosmic business.  Or whatever – there’s business that is beyond the reach of any of us as individuals.  You deciding to leave your marriage and taking action in the service of that decision is your business.  The way you go about doing this is your business.

Your affair partner’s ideas about how you should do this are THEIR BUSINESS.  They may think that their ideas about what you should do are things that you need to take seriously.  But you actually don’t have to do this.  You may have been believing you are beholden to their agenda for you for a while, and you may have been acting as if you are beholden to their agenda for a while, but you can stop at any time.  You can love them a lot, and you can want to be with them, but you can also stop getting mixed up in their business, and you can decline to let them get mixed up in yours.  Their agenda for you is their business.  You don’t have to take it on as your business.

What this means in more practical terms is that it’s not your job to assuage your affair partner’s concerns if you aren’t doing what they think you should be doing.  It’s not your job to do what they want you to do – in terms of leaving your committed relationship, or anything else.  And it’s not your job to attempt to negotiate the terms and conditions of whatever agenda they may have for you!  Let them have their agenda, and let that be their problem, not yours.

Now if that sounds cold, rest assured – it isn’t the whole story.  You can love someone tremendously without abandoning the business that is yours to do.  You can actively love someone a LOT without taking it upon yourself to do what they want you to do.  You can love someone immensely without believing that it is incumbent upon you to make them feel good all the time.

If you start to gently but firmly indicate to your affair partner that you aren’t interested in some of the “help” they’re trying to give you, they may not like that.  Your affair partner may love having an agenda for you, and they may LOVE trying to get all involved in your business.  And by them “helping” you figure out what you’re going to do about your marriage, or them “helping” you figure out how you’re going to leave, the two of you may have had some conversations that both of you have found very enjoyable.  So you if you say something to the effect of, “Hey, I need to focus on what I’m going to do about my marriage by myself, and I’m not going to talk with you about that to the extent that I have been,” to your affair partner, and you actually enforce that boundary, they may be pretty disappointed – or angry – and you might not like it either!  It may feel like you’re detoxing from your favorite drug – and your affair partner may think you’re taking their favorite drug away from them!  And it all may seem very dramatic and unfair.

Here's the deal, people.  You don’t HAVE to carve out more space for yourself to figure out what you’re going to do about your marriage without your affair partner’s influence or involvement.  You don’t have to do anything!  Keep trying to satisfy their agenda for you if you want to.  It’s not that there’s anything WRONG with doing that, and you may get a lot of entertaining drama out of doing so.

But.  IF what you want is to figure out what YOU WANT to do about your marriage, and begin the process of TAKING ACTION in the service what you want to do about your marriage, you may need to create a little distance between yourself and your affair partner in regards to this matter.  Their ideas about what you should do about leaving your marriage are their business, and you may need to hand that bit of business back to them.  And you may need to consciously and deliberately take more responsibility for your own business. 

If doing this sounds sort of unromantic and unfun and unintimate and cold, I want you to consider that connecting with someone when you are clear about what business is yours and what business is theirs allows for deep and rich connection and intimacy.  Yeah, it can be exciting to get all wound up in your partner’s business, or to have your partner super fixated on “helping” you do your business.  There are certain thrills within that kind of dynamic, to be SURE.  But I can also assure you that the pleasures of connecting with someone without letting any agendas get in the way are also quite something.  And, perhaps most simply for today’s purposes, no matter how much your affair partner wants to help you leave your marriage, that’s something you have to do for yourself.  And in order to do that, you need to know that, even if your affair partner doesn’t.

If you want my help dealing with your own agenda for your affair relationship, or dealing with your affair partner’s agenda for you, let’s work together.  There are three ways you can have me as your coach.  You can purchase the self-guided, DIY version of my program, You’re Not the Only One.  You’re Not the Only One contains the teachings that I have developed from helping hundreds of clients resolve their infidelity situations, and these teachings are available to you in an online portal, 24/7.  You can also join the secret society/group coaching version of You’re Not the Only One.  You get all of the valuable online teachings, and you get access to anonymous group coaching calls.  Coaching calls are held approximately once a week, and you join as many calls as you want to, and request coaching as many times as you want to.  Last but not least, we can work together one-on-one.  If you want my exclusive focus on the specifics of your unique infidelity situation, you can start working with me individually by scheduling an introductory coaching session with me today.  When we work together one-on-one, we meet via Zoom, which means we can work together no matter where you’re located.  To learn more about all of the ways you can have me as your coach, go to the services page of my website, mariemurphyphd.com/services.

Thank you all so much for listening!  Have a great week!  Bye for now.