216: When Your Affair Partner Breaks Your Heart

Hi everyone. I'm Dr. Marie Murphy and I'm a non-judgmental infidelity coach. If you are cheating on your partner or having an affair or engaging in anything you think counts as infidelity, I can help you deal with your feelings, clarify what you want, and make decisions about what you're going to do. No shame, no blame, no judgments. So much of the so-called help that's out there for people who are engaging in infidelity is little more than thinly veiled judgment, but that is not what I provide.

I give you guidance and support that respects the fullness of your humanity and the complexity of your situation, no matter what you're doing. When you're ready to resolve your infidelity situation in a way that's truly right for you, I can help you do it. There are two ways you can have me as your coach. We can work together one-on-one via Zoom or you can enroll in my online course, You're Not the Only One. To get started with either of these options, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com. I can't wait to meet you.

Okay, today we are going to talk about various things related to having your heart broken by your affair partner. And on this subject, I'm going to start off by answering a couple of questions from listeners. Here's the first question.

“I've gotten through the early stages of infidelity and all of the doubt and confusion that comes with it. I'm in the process of getting divorced, so I'm in the trenches, but I am happier. However, my kids and my whole circle have shut me out. I've moved suburb and feel unwelcomed. How do I cope with that? Especially the kids judging me and not talking to me. Also, I'm still with my affair partner. He and I talk about growing old and living together, but he is still married and pretending to be married to his whole social circle. He has moved out, but only his wife and kids know this. It's been three years now and he says he is scared and avoiding, and I don't think he will ever divorce. So I'm dating a married man and that doesn't help my cause with my kids or my self-worth. How do I accept or cope with this? Does he not love me enough to fight for us?”

I'm going to start by responding to the last part of this person's question. It is entirely possible that your affair partner loves you very much, but does not quite have it in him to make certain major life changes. You say your affair partner is scared, and that may be exactly the point. Some people, no matter how much they love their affair partner, are absolutely terrified of leaving their marriages.

Some people, no matter how much they love their affair partner, are paralyzed by the fear of being known as a person who initiated a divorce or as a person who cheated on their spouse. They may really want to leave their marriage and have a non-affair relationship with you, their affair partner, but their fears of what would happen if they were to do that loom large and ultimately dictate their actions or lack of actions.

So in response to this person's question, does he not love me enough to fight for us? I would say that isn't the right question to ask yourself. A better question is, do you really want to be involved with someone who isn't fully available to be with you?

You have taken the step of getting divorced, or at least you've gotten that process started. Do you really want to continue to be involved with someone who isn't willing or able to do the same? If you are divorced or close to being divorced, you now have different options to explore. Technically, you're free to form a relationship or multiple relationships with whoever you want.

So the question that I want you to seriously consider is, do you want to continue to devote yourself to someone who isn't devoting themselves to you? You get to decide. It is also true that you could find ways of coping with your affair partner's partial availability. You could, but you might not want to do that. You might want to be with someone who is not married or is not acting like they're married or doing whatever it is your affair partner is doing.

Could it be sad to end your relationship with this person who you probably care very much about? Of course. But you're already sad. Waiting for him to do things differently is no fun. And in your message to me, you said that you don't think he will ever divorce. So it might be time for you to make some different choices instead of hoping that he might make different choices. Could that be sad and scary in the short term? Sure. But it has the potential to bring you a lot more of what you want in the longer term.

Now, as to the part of your question about feeling shut out and unwelcomed, it is true that people can be total jerks sometimes. To put it mildly, people can be total fucking assholes. And the extent to which people can be total assholes when it comes to infidelity is sometimes quite staggering. I am continuously amazed by the lack of nuance in many people's understandings of infidelity. So if people are being jerks to you or have shut you out entirely, I'm sorry. It is not fun to be on the receiving end of that.

And it is also true that you don't have to take other people's bad behavior sitting down. Let's talk about your kids. If they know about your infidelity-related behavior and they have opinions about it, you can let them have their opinions. You don't have to try and change their thinking. Let them think whatever they want.

But you can also let them know that you are not interested in hearing their opinions. If they start to make comments about your behavior, you can tell them, politely or otherwise, that you expect them to keep their opinions to themselves. You have every right to exercise this sort of leadership in your relationship with them.

Furthermore, you have every right to exercise leadership in your relationship with them in other ways, too. Let's say you want to see more of your kids. You don't have to mope around about that and spend your days wishing they would reach out to you. You can summon them to your home for Sunday suppers every week or every other week or whatever. You can tell them in no uncertain terms that you are requesting their presence at a family get together.

Or if you're not interested in summoning them to anything, you can invite them to spend time with you. “Hey, I'd love to see you. Let's have lunch next week or let's go have coffee or let's go for a walk together” or something else that's reasonably low stakes.

When I talk to clients about their power to do these kinds of things that I've just mentioned, they sometimes say things like, “But my kids have made it clear that they don't want much to do with me. Or, my kids have made it clear that I'm not their favorite person right now.”

Here's what I have to say to that. I don't care. You do not have to cower in fear. You do not have to let your kids be the boss of you or your situation. You do not have to be dissuaded by their current mood. You can rise above the difficult aspects of your current dynamic with them and actively work towards creating the dynamic you want to have with them. Sometimes relationships with other humans get a little rocky. That's just life, but you have the power to be a steady presence in the midst of a difficult patch in your relationship with your kids.

Now here's the critical thing. In order for you to do these kinds of things, you have to believe in your right to do them. If you're going to tell your kids to keep their judgments to themselves, you have to believe that you have every right to tell your kids to keep their judgments to themselves. You have to believe that you have every right to request that your kids spend time with you.

And in order to believe those things, you probably have to believe some other things, too. Like for instance, that you are not defined by your experiences with infidelity. You have to believe that engaging in infidelity is not the big, bad, terrible thing that some people might think it is. You have to believe in your own fundamental okayness. You have to believe in your inherent worth. And you have to believe these things even when other people don't seem to believe those things.

And that, for a lot of people, is really challenging. And it's fair for it to be challenging. Deciding on purpose what we are going to believe about ourselves is not something many of us learned how to do. Deciding that we want to hold ourselves in high regard even when others don't, or don't seem to, is also something that many of us never learned how to do. But I can teach you how to do that if you want to learn.

You can develop unconditional positive regard for yourself. Now, that doesn't mean that you never view any of your actions critically, but it does mean that you don't allow a critical perspective on any of your actions to compromise your belief in your own fundamental worth.

When you do that, when you cultivate strong belief in your own fundamental worth, your relationship with other people's asshole behavior will change dramatically. Sometimes people are going to be jerks. That is definitely part of life. But you don't have to be a jerk to yourself.

And when you stop being a jerk to yourself, you show other people in both subtle and overt ways that it's not okay for them to be a jerk to you either. Ever heard the saying that we teach other people how to treat us? There's a lot of truth in that. Now that isn't to say that we are responsible for other people's behavior and that if someone treats us badly, that's our fault. That is not my point.

But when we show people that we unconditionally love and respect ourselves, they tend to get the message. And when people treat us in ways that we consider unacceptable and we do not tolerate those behaviors, that also sends a very clear and powerful message.

Now, is it possible that you could deeply love and respect yourself and ask your kids very nicely to spend time with you and they say no? Yes, that is possible. But don't let that possibility stop you from doing everything that you can to create the outcomes you want to experience. Don't put yourself in a position where you create a failure before you've even tried to do anything. I think people sometimes call this failing ahead of time. Don't fail ahead of time.

Last but not least, if you find that people in your life are distancing themselves from you, whether because of your infidelity or for any other reasons, I want to acknowledge how painful this can be. When people you care about grow distant, it can hurt a lot, even if their distance isn't informed by malice.

And I also want you to consider that you always have the power to forge new connections. There are always possibilities to connect with our fellow humans in the ways that we want to. There are always opportunities to form new relationships. The world is full of all kinds of folks. And if a group of people have rejected you or just drifted away from you, that does not mean you have lost all access to human connection. You just have to be willing to get out there and actively meet the kinds of people you want to meet and cultivate the kinds of relationships that you want to create. And this may take effort, but most things that are worth doing take effort, and this can be a joyful endeavor.

Okay, here is the next listener question I'm going to respond to. “What should I do when my affair partner and I were making plans for the future and he breaks up with me suddenly, leaving me completely devastated and heartbroken? I'm married with three kids and I was making baby steps toward a future with him. I'd felt him pulling away, but he assured me it was stress from work and that he needed to find a new job. He found a new job, but a week after he started, he was still acting very distant. He told me that he was sorry he hadn't been responsive, but it was because he was adjusting to his new job and concentrating on that. 

He also told me he's been trying to work on himself and he doesn't know if he can be good enough for anyone if he doesn't work the kinks out of himself. I am left with soul-crushing pain and hurt that makes it almost unbearable to function when I'm a parent and still married. A future I thought we both wanted has been ripped away, and while he didn't have to make any immediate changes to the future we talked about, I started to make small changes in my life and my kids' lives to be with a man who ultimately wasn't sure about me. The doubt I have in myself is the worst. The only thing I don't doubt is how much I loved him, which makes me doubt myself even more. How do I get over this?"

Okay, first of all, it's so important for you to give yourself time to feel all of your feelings about this relationship not working out in the way that you wanted it to. It's reasonable to be sad and confused and hurt and all the other things. When we really want something or really want something to happen and it doesn't work out the way we hoped, we may feel extremely disappointed. And it's legitimate for you to experience what happened with your relationship in this way.

And it's also important to remember that whenever we get involved with someone, romantically or otherwise, there is the possibility that things are not going to work out the way we hope they will. Even when someone tells us they want a future with us, there's no guarantee that they won't change their mind. And this may be sad, but this is a normal part of life. This is true of all relationships.

I'm not saying that to minimize your pain. Your pain is legitimate, but I do want to help you put it into context. People change their minds about relationships all the time for all kinds of reasons. And this is so important to remember because when someone changes their mind about continuing a relationship with us, we often turn it into a reason to doubt ourselves. But we don't need to. We can recognize that relationships end and grieve the end of ours without taking it quite so personally that someone has decided to end their relationship with us.

I know how crazy that might sound because of course, when someone ends a relationship with us, it is about us in a way. But it also isn't. It's about them, the person you were involved with, and it's also simply about the fact that not all relationships last forever or last for as long as we might like them to. And as you indicated, it sounds like the person you were involved with had a lot going on. Sometimes people just aren't fully available to participate in a given relationship at a given point in time. It's possible that this had to do with misgivings he had about you. It's possible that he had misgivings about participating in infidelity, and it's also possible that he was dealing with exactly what he told you he was dealing with, and it was overwhelming for him.

I encourage you to let it be sad that the relationship didn't work out without spending too much energy speculating about why your person did what he did. You may never know the answer, but you can pretty easily drive yourself crazy by trying to figure out what it was or is or whatever.

Now, as for the question as to how you get over this, giving yourself time to privately grieve is important. It may not be very fun to privately grieve the end of a secret relationship, but it is doable. And I have a podcast on this very topic. It's episode number 125 and it's called Privately Grieving the End of an Affair. So go listen to that one if you haven't yet.

And then, as you start to feel less consumed by intense emotions, I encourage you to start to get serious about clarifying what you want out of your love life. Your experience with your affair partner probably sparked some thinking about this. Even if he isn't a part of your life right now, even if he isn't going to be a part of your life anymore, you can still use what you learned from your connection with him to guide the choices you make. Even if you can't have a relationship with him, you can have a relationship with someone else that is more to your liking.

And it might take some work to get to that. It might mean you have to leave your marriage and make yourself available to meeting someone new. It might mean you choose to work on your relationship with your spouse. You might prefer the idea of just having your affair partner back, but if that option isn't on the table, the question is, now what?

Once you have moved through enough of your sadness to think clearly, start thinking about what you want to do to live the life that you most want to be living.

Okay, now I'm going to - that’s the end of my response to that listener's question. Now I'm going to talk about a thing that affair partners do from time to time that I've been meaning to talk about on a podcast episode for a while now. It's not related to a listener question, but it is related to the theme of having your heartbroken by your affair partner.

Here's an interesting thing that affair partners sometimes do. They go away and then they come back. They disappear and break your heart only to reappear later on a random Tuesday afternoon. Now, I'm not saying this to promise that your affair partner in particular will come back if they've left you, they might not. But they also might, and it's important to think clearly and perhaps critically about how you want to handle it if they do.

What I see happening, not infrequently, is that two people will be having an affair, and then one member of the affair couple will basically ghost their affair partner. They won't break up with them, they'll just go silent without any prior warning or explanation. And the person who is left in the dust will be sad and hurt and miss their affair partner like crazy and wonder why their person went away and assume that it's because there must be something terribly wrong with them and feel terrible as a result of making that assumption and generally experience a lot of heartbreak.

And maybe the person who got ghosted will eventually start to move on with their lives and heal from their hurt, and maybe they kind of won't. Maybe they'll remain pretty stuck in a state of longing for their former affair partner, wondering what happened, wishing things had turned out differently, and so on.

What I see happening sometimes is the person in the affair relationship who is ghosted allows the ghosting to become a defining experience for them. They feel hurt and shocked and confused and rejected when their affair partner ghosts them and understandably so, but they don't move through their emotions. They keep nursing a narrative about what happened that keeps them stuck feeling the same feelings. 

And that narrative often goes something like, oh, I can't understand why this person left me, so the reason they left must be because there's something wrong with me, and I can't bear it that this person let me go like that because they were the person that I felt the most connected to in my entire life. And now that they are gone, I'm never going to experience love like that again.

When we keep believing a narrative like that, we keep feeling terrible for one thing, and we also remain attached to the idea that our affair partner or former affair partner holds the keys to our happiness forever. It's one thing to be devastated if someone you're involved with disappears without warning. Fair enough. But it's another thing to allow this to become an experience that defines you. It's one thing to miss someone terribly, and it's another thing to remain attached to the idea that the person who left you was or is the only person who you can connect with in a deep, rich, and satisfying way.

And if we are really fixated on a particular person, it can seem like their absence from our lives is a huge problem that can only be solved by having that person back. And if that person doesn't come back, that can create one set of challenges. But if that person does come back, that can create another set of challenges. And that's what I'm going to talk about right now.

What if your affair partner breaks your heart by disappearing abruptly and then comes back into your life? They might just call you one day out of the blue and apologize for their disappearance. They may say all of the things that you've wanted to believe were true but feared were not. They may tell you that they love you madly and they've been thinking about you constantly since you've been apart. They may tell you that you're the best thing that's ever happened to them. They may have reasons for ghosting you that you are willing to accept. Because you're just so glad that they're back in your life. You just want to be with them. You just want to love them and be loved by them. You just want your relationship with them to work out.

Now, here's where things get a little uncomfortable. The reality is that just because someone loves you does not mean they will automatically treat you the way you want to be treated. And similarly, you loving someone does not necessarily translate into you loving the way that person treats you.

So for example, let's say you and your affair partner were both married when you were having your affair relationship. And maybe you have begun the process of getting divorced since your affair partner ghosted you. Maybe by now you are fully divorced. Maybe you have moved on with your life, missing your affair partner as you've done so, but moving forward all the same. And maybe your affair partner has gotten divorced too since they ghosted you. Maybe they've returned to you in a state of being available to have a non-affair relationship with you. And if they have, fantastic.

But maybe they haven't. Maybe they're still married. They've reconnected with you and professed their undying love for you, but they are definitely still married. So what do you do? You are absolutely thrilled that they came back to you, but basically, what they're offering you is a chance to have an affair with them again. Except this time, you aren't married, so things are a little different. You have the freedom to do whatever you want, but your second time around affair partner still doesn't. They have all kinds of limits on their availability. Can they meet you to go on a romantic vacation for a week? No, they can't even text you outside of business hours. Do you want that? I'm going to ask you again. Do you want that?

What I've seen numerous times is that people don't even stop to ask themselves that question. If their married affair partner vanished from their life and they've been missing them terribly, and then the affair partner just comes back suddenly, they don't pause to ask too many questions. They just jump back into a relationship with them because they've missed the connection so much and it feels so good to be reconnected with their special person.

But then, after the headiness of the reconnection starts to dissipate a little, the questions begin to arise. Does my affair partner intend to leave their marriage? If so, then when? If not, then why the hell did they reconnect with me again in the first place? And if they aren't planning to leave their marriage, why are they stringing me along again?

Here's the thing it's really important for all of us to keep in mind. Humans do all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons. It is totally possible that your affair partner reached out to you because they missed you terribly and wanted to see you again as badly as you wanted to see them. But does that mean they necessarily had any kind of a plan beyond getting back in touch with you? No, it doesn't.

Sometimes the person who was ghosted assumes their affair partner would never reach out to them again unless they'd finally gotten their shit together and were ready to start up a non-affair relationship, but alas, this is not always the case.

Now, what I see folks doing when their affair partner reappears but is still married and doesn't have much of a plan for how they're going to get unmarried is this. They try to be very accommodating of their married affair partner. They try to be sympathetic to the challenges they're experiencing. They try to be sympathetic to the challenges associated with getting divorced. But they also expect that their patience and empathy will be rewarded by their affair partner actually getting a divorce and doing so pretty efficiently.

And sometimes this happens. Sometimes your married affair partner who ghosted you comes back to you, still married, and does end up getting divorced. I've seen it happen. But I've also seen the married person who ghosted their affair partner come back to the person they ghosted, still married to their spouse, and essentially take advantage of their affair partner's love for them.

I'm not saying they necessarily are consciously taking advantage of them. Humans are not always conscious of what they're doing or why they're doing it, and that, as far as I can see, is just a non-negotiable feature of human existence. However, this may effectively be what they're doing, even if it isn't their conscious intent.

So where does that leave you? The person whose affair partner has come back to them and is still married? It leaves you in the position of needing to exercise your discretion like your happiness and sanity depend on it because your happiness and sanity do depend on it.

Your long-lost person who has found their way back to you may love you, and you may love them, but you have to decide whether or not you're willing to be in a relationship with someone who is still married. You have to decide if you're willing to be in a relationship with someone who can only text you during business hours. You have to be willing to decide if you're willing to have another go round of the whole infidelity thing.

And you might not want to have to make those decisions. Instead, it may seem like the solution to the problem is to appeal to your affair partner and convince them that it's time for them to leave their marriage. But this simply may not work. You can certainly tell your affair partner that you'd really like it if they left their spouse, but you can't leave their spouse for them. And you cannot badger or cajole or beg your affair partner into leaving their spouse. Telling them that you deserve to be treated better than they're treating you may not change their behavior one bit.

The surefire way to create change is to decide what you are okay with and not okay with and take action accordingly. So for example, you might decide that you are not willing to be with someone who is married and you might end things with your affair partner who has come back to you immediately. It might mean you wait three months to see if your affair partner takes any steps towards divorce. It might mean you tell your affair partner that you're going to date other people as long as they remain married. The options are endless. These are just a few suggestions.

The really critical thing that I want to underscore is that you cannot assume that your affair partner who has returned to you is going to behave in the ways you want them to just because they came back into your life. I see people making logical leaps to the contrary all the time, along the lines of, oh, they came back to me, so they must be serious about having a certain kind of relationship with me this time. Not necessarily.

What I want to suggest to you is that even if your wonderful person has come back into your life and you're delighted to be reconnected with them again, they, your affair partner, are not necessarily the ultimate prize. The ultimate prize, probably, is you having a partner you love in a relationship with them that you love, right?

And the question is, is your former/current affair partner going to be that person? You may love them, but do you love their behavior? Do you love the relationship they are currently co-creating with you? If your answers to those questions are no and no, I want to suggest that you may want to seriously consider ending your participation in the relationship. Hoping that your affair partner will change is not a great strategy for creating the kind of relationship you want to have. But taking responsibility for your own destiny is.

All right people, there is so much more that could be said about all of this, but it is time to wrap up for today. If you are ready to start dealing with your infidelity situation in a way that you feel great about, let's get to work. 

There are two ways you can have me as your non-judgmental infidelity coach. You can enroll in my self-guided course, You're Not the Only One, or we can work together one-on-one via Zoom. To learn more about both of these options, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com. Why wait any longer for some relief and a clear path forward? The rest of your life beyond the drama and the difficulties of your infidelity situation is waiting for you.

All right everybody. Thank you all so much for listening. Bye for now.