218: Creating the Future vs. Predicting the Future

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 are 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. A lot of the so-called advice that’s out there for people who are engaging in infidelity is little more than thinly veiled judgement. And a lot of it is just total fucking horseshit. If you’re new to this podcast, yes, I do swear sometimes. Welcome! But I also don’t curse like a sailor anymore. Anyway, the guidance I provide is totally different from what you are going to get from just about any other professional who works in the infidelity space. I respect the fullness of your humanity, and the complexity of your situation, no matter what you’re doing. So when you’re ready to resolve your infidelity situation in a way that’s truly right for you, let’s get to work. When you’re ready to have me as your coach, you can enroll in my online course, You’re Not the Only One, or we can work together one-on-one. I’ll say more about both of those options at the end of the episode, or you can to my website, mariemurphyphd.com and learn more about how to work with me right this minute.
Okay people, today I want to talk to you about something that you are already doing, but could probably do a lot more often, or a lot more intentionally. And, as the title of the episode suggests, that thing that you’re already doing is creating the future rather than trying to predict the future. In just a little while I’ll tell you why I know you’re already doing this, and I’ll tell you why it’s so useful to do this more consciously and purposefully, but first, I want to tell you what it sounds like to NOT do this.
Here are some things I hear a lot from people I talk to about their infidelity situations:
“I need to know what it would feel like to not be married before I can decide whether I want to get divorced or not.”
“I need to know how infidelity situations like mine typically turn out before I can make a decision about any or all aspects of my situation.”
“I need to know how things will turn out with my affair partner before I can decide if I want to pursue a non-affair relationship with them.”
“I need to be at least 90% certain that my decision will work out well, or else I can’t make any choice at all.”
I could give more examples, but you get the idea. The point is that sometimes we think we need to know what the future holds in order to take any action in the present. I’m going to say that again because it’s really important: sometimes we think we need to know what the future holds in order to take any action in the present.
And on the one hand, I’m sympathetic to this. If you’re considering making what you consider big life decisions, it’s pretty human to want to JUST KNOW, ahead of time, that things are going to turn out okay.
Or better than okay. But there’s a balance we have to strike. It’s important to legitimize the desire to have some advance guarantee that everything is going to turn out okay, but we also want to recognize that we never get that kind of a guarantee. Life doesn’t give us those kinds of promises.
And it’s worth noticing that that is always true, AND that we don’t always operate as if that is a problem. We often deal with the uncertainty that’s inherent to being alive without making too big of a deal out of it. Sometimes we don’t think about it at all! Moreover, we often take full advantage of our power to deliberately create our lives, despite the uncertainty that’s always present. Even though we don’t know for sure how things are going to turn out, we make decisions big and small, and take actions, both remarkable and unremarkable, anyway.
I’ll give you a very mundane example of what this looks like in practice. I have the rest of my day planned out. I have a pretty clear plan for what I’m going to do, and when I’m going to do it. I am not a time management fanatic, but I’m fairly intentional about how I make use of my time. I stick to the appointments I make and I tackle my to-do lists reasonably efficiently and I deal with all of the stuff that goes into getting through life more or less okay.
And, because I have a plan for the rest of my day, I’m pretty sure I know how the rest of my day is going to go. But that’s not because I can see into the future. It’s because I’m planning to create the future in a certain way. It’s not because I know for sure what’s going to happen. I DON’T know what’s going to happen. But I’m not choosing to use that as a reason to not make plans, or to doubt the plans I’ve made. I don’t say to myself, “Well, I don’t know what’s going to happen, so I can’t plan for anything. I’ve just got to sit around to see what happens before I can do anything else.” You can easily see where that would take me.
Now, it’s entirely possible that something could happen that would totally throw my day off, and I’d have to adapt. The internet could go down and stay down for a while. That happens far more often than I would like it to. It’s possible that the power could go off and stay off. That happens less frequently than the internet going down, but it does happen every now and then, and when it does, I definitely have to adapt. One of my dogs could have some weird medical emergency. That happened to me twice last week, actually, and fortunately, both of my dogs are fine – I think – but each of the incidents threw my day off. Or I could have some weird medical emergency! I have a doctor’s appointment later today which I’m expecting will be a total nothingburger, but who knows, maybe it won’t be. Or there could be a big earthquake that changes EVERYBODY’S day around here. I’m in San Francisco, so this is not outside the realm of possibility.
Any of these things – or all of these things – could happen on any given day. But although I’m aware of all of these possibilities, I don’t let the possibility that my dogs might spontaneously combust while I’m at the doctor stop me from going to the doctor. I don’t let the possibility that my doctor’s appointment might reveal that I have terminal something or another stop me from recording this podcast episode. I don’t let excessive consideration of all of the things that MIGHT happen stop me from a) coming up with a plan for my day in the first place, and b) executing on my plan for my day, or at least, trying to.
And I’m willing to bet that that’s more or less how you operate, too. I’m willing to bet that you make plans, and you trust that to an extent, you have the power to execute on the plans you’ve made. If you didn’t operate this way, you might not get anything done. Ever!
Similarly, I’m willing to bet that you plan vacations, knowing that there’s the possibility that something will prevent you from going. Or that something weird will happen while you’re on vacation, and screw up all of your plans. Maybe you get travel insurance to help deal with the potential consequences of your plans going awry. But if you are someone who likes to take vacations, I bet you don’t let the fundamental uncertainty of life stop you from planning vacations and going on vacations.
And even more significantly, many of you have children, even though there was no way for you to guarantee your child’s every outcome at the moment of their birth. Or at the moment of their conception, for that matter! You had no way to guarantee that your baby-in-the-making would become a living, breathing child one day. If you have a kid, you either signed up for a whole lot of uncertainty on purpose, or you found yourself thrust into a whole lot of uncertainty, and yet you probably don’t let that uncertainty stop you from doing what you can to influence your child’s future. And of course, for some people, it’s even more pronounced than that! Some people attempt to micromanage EVERY ASPECT of their child’s future!
They don’t let the fact that life is uncertain interfere with them making extensive plans for their kid, or kids, and assuming that everything they hope will happen will happen in exactly the way they want it to! Right? These folks don’t say, “Well, I need to be able to predict exactly how my kid’s life will unfold in order to make any plans for their upbringing.” They say, “I’m going to make plans, and damnit, the world will conform to my wishes!” And maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t, but their assumption is that it will! Some parents are not waiting to see what happens with their children. They’re doing everything they can to ensure that things happen in a certain way for their children.
I’m not describing this approach to parenting to pass judgment. I’m saying it to illustrate that sometimes we ASSUME we have the power to create the future, and we then exercise the power we have to create the future without really thinking about what we’re doing, or without doubting our capacity to do it. We just do it. We may recognize that life is uncertain and take steps to deal with that uncertainty. We may get travel insurance if we’re planning a vacation. We make sure our kid applies to colleges we’re very confident they’ll be admitted to, rather than just applying to schools that might be a reach. But we don’t let the fundamental uncertainty of life stop us from planning anything. We don’t allow the uncertainty of life to reason to doubt our ability to create our futures.
But then, of course, sometimes we DO doubt our power to create our futures. Sometimes we DO regard the fundamental uncertainty of life as a reason why we might not be able to do certain things, or create certain things. And this can happen in any area of your life, but perhaps obviously, when I’m talking to people about their doubts about their ability to create their desired future, we’re talking about their infidelity situations.
Some people – including people who have created seemingly impossible things in other areas of their lives – are pretty good and convinced that they truly cannot resolve their infidelity situation in the way they want to. OR they are very stuck to the idea that they absolutely must know in advance how things are going to turn out in order for them to make any choices – despite having leapt boldly into uncertainty in other areas of their lives. Some people who do things they consider very risky in some parts of their lives are totally freaked out by the idea of doing something they consider risky in the realm of their relationships.
And I’ll suggest a few reasons why I think this may be the case in a moment, but first, I just want to normalize the phenomenon I’m describing. You may be bold and innovative in some areas of your life. You may be fearless in the face of uncertainty, in some contexts. You may consider yourself a risk-taker in some regards. You may have confidently charted your own course in many respects, up to this point in your life. And yet, you may be totally freaked out about making decisions related to your infidelity situation. You may not think that you have the power to make decisions about your infidelity situation! You may think that somebody has to give you permission to resolve your infidelity situation in the way that you want to! You may think that somebody has to give you permission to want the things you want before you can want them in the first place! All of these things may be true at once. That is a Thing, and it’s a very human thing, and it’s okay.
So why do people who confidently create the future in some areas of their lives get totally freaked out about doing that within the context of their infidelity situation? For starters, it's helpful to recognize that in some areas of human life, risk-taking is valorized, and the rewards of taking risks are recognized and sought-after. For instance, we love the story of the visionary entrepreneur who went all-in on a prescient idea, and ended up changing the world with their innovations. And we love the idea of what we might gain by taking such risks – like, for instance, fame and fortune, in large quantities.
But in other areas of life, we don’t collectively applaud risk-taking in the same ways. For example, we often – not always, but often – regard the decision to get divorced as risky, and not in a good way! The conventional wisdom about getting divorced is not, “If you’re sure you want to do it, just go for it, it’s totally worth it.” The conventional wisdom is more like, “You really shouldn’t do it. Unless your spouse beats you and starves you and threatens your life. And even then, you’d better think twice, because it’s really hard being single!” Right?
And then on top of that, there are many messages out there that drive home the point that infidelity is bad and people who engage in infidelity are bad. I’m sure you’ve noticed. And that’s enough to freak a lot of people out. But even more importantly for today’s purposes, there are ideas out there that infidelity situations CANNOT end in certain ways, and can ONLY end in other ways that are pretty pervasive. For example, there is an idea that relationships that start as affairs ALWAYS fail. This idea is shockingly common. And the reasons why I find it so shocking that people promulgate this idea are, one, there is no way you could ever prove this to be unequivocally true. You just couldn’t. And two, there is ample empirical evidence to the contrary! Couples whose relationship began as an affair sometimes stay together until death do them part. Happily! And three, who gets to define what it means for a relationship to fail? The idea that all relationships that begin as affairs fail is predicated on the assumption that we can all agree on what it means for a relationship to “fail.” And I don’t think we can!
Why people think it is even remotely okay to brazenly claim that all relationships that begin as affairs are doomed to fail is something I do not understand. To be generous, there isn’t a lot of great research out there on infidelity, and the diversity of human experiences that we might label infidelity, so it’s possibly that people who say these sorts of things simply do not know what they do not know. Even if that’s the case, however, I can’t view the making of this sort of claim in a generous light. To state that a certain sort of relationship ALWAYS turns out a certain way is both ignorant and irresponsible. But alas, humans are capable of being many things, and they’re definitely capable of being ignorant and irresponsible from time to time.
Anyway, the point is that there is some really strong messaging about the fate of infidelity situations circulating out there, and my observation is that this messaging hits a lot of people REALLY hard. And I think there are many reasons for this, and one of those reasons is, there isn’t a strong counterargument to the standard take on infidelity. There isn’t really a dominant counternarrative about infidelity out there that’s loud enough to challenge the whole “cheaters burn in hell, no matter what” narrative. Believe me, I’m trying to change that, but a lot of people only hear ONE type of message about infidelity, and that is, it’s really bad, and nothing good can come of it. The end.
And when that’s pretty much the only thing we hear – or literally the only thing we hear - we may not be able to imagine that this might be anything other than THE TRUTH.
And then it seems kind of impossible to go forth and boldly create our future! Right? If you thought it was impossible to get in a car and pick up your kids from school, you probably would never get in a car and pick your kids up from school. If you thought it was impossible to go to medical school and become a doctor, you would probably never bother studying for the MCAT. If you thought it was impossible to become a published author, you would probably never sit down to write.
Now you may be thinking, well, I have ample proof that it’s possible for people to get in the car and pick their kids up from school. How could anybody NOT think that it’s possible to get in a car and pick up their kids from school? I have ample proof that it’s possible to become a doctor! Everyone I know is a doctor, so obviously it’s possible to become a doctor! And I have, like, eight hundred books in my house, so obviously it’s possible for people to write books. But I don’t know anybody who has successfully resolved their infidelity situation. I’ve never seen an example of that, so there’s no way I can know that that’s possible for me. So therefore, I need some proof that it’s possible for me to resolve my infidelity situation in the way that I want to, or else I can’t even try, because what’s the point of trying to do something that’s impossible?
Can you see where this kind of thinking leads? I bet you can. It leads to you not doing what you have the power to do to resolve your infidelity situation in a way that you feel great about. And that’s the most important thing here. As an aside, if you want proof that you could resolve your infidelity situation in the way that you want to, you can probably find it. When people say they don’t have proof that they can do something, that’s often because they haven’t looked for it. And there’s a lot more I could say about that, but I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole now. Because the point I want to drive home is that when you believe that you can’t take action unless you know for sure that something is possible for you, you will almost certainly prove yourself right through your own actions and inactions. And you might not want to do that to yourself!
So what’s the solution? The solution is to consciously decide that you can and will intentionally create your future without needing to know how it’s going to turn out. Yes, there are other specific actions you will also have to take, but this is where you start.
Some people see this as a really tall order. And if you see it as a tall order, here’s what I want you to consider: you are already doing this. All day, every day. You don’t know how the future is going to turn out, and yet you are choosing to act – or choosing to decline to act – in particular ways ALL THE TIME.
You are already taking charge of creating your future, despite the uncertainty of human existence.
So why not start doing this in a more intentional, deliberate way?
Instead of wondering what is going to happen in your life, you can decide what you want to create in your life, and then get busy creating that. You can embrace the fact that life is uncertain, and also recognize that you do have a fair amount of power to make things happen in your life, despite the various uncertainties and uncontrollables.
Now sometimes people say, okay, I get this, but believing that I can actually resolve my infidelity situation in a way that I like is fundamentally different than believing that I can drop my kids off at school, go to work, go to the dentist, and get home safely.
And to that I say, sure it’s different, but it’s also NOT different.
When we head off into the world to go about our routine business, there are certain things we can control, and certain things we can’t. We may THINK that because doing something is familiar to us, it’s safe, but that isn’t necessarily the case. We can get into a car accident while driving the same route to work we’ve taken for the last fifteen years. We can go to the dentist we’ve been seeing for just as long who we trust to take excellent care of our teeth, and the dentist could have a seizure while they’re poking around in our mouth and fatally stab us with their dental instrument. Familiarity may register to our brain as safety, but it isn’t inherently safe.
And doing things that are different may register to our brains as daunting, or scary, or un-safe, but that doesn’t mean that it’s actually dangerous – or impossible – to do these things.
It’s also important to remember that you probably do things all the time that you once considered daunting or dangerous or impossible. Were you born knowing how to drive a car? Probably not! Were you born knowing how to use power tools, or how to safely handle sharp knives? Did you start high school knowing how to navigate the hell that is high school? Or whatever hells you have experienced in your life? I highly doubt it.
Even if resolving your infidelity situation seems like the biggest challenge that you’ve encountered in your life so far – and it’s fair enough if it seems like it is – I can assure you that you are already doing one of the key things you need to be able to do in order to resolve your infidelity situation in a way that you feel great about. And that is, deliberately creating your future rather than attempting to predict your future, or believing that you need to wait and see what happens before you can make any decisions or take any action.
I want to make sure to make it clear that I’m not suggesting that creating your future is something that just happens without any effort on your part. Deliberately creating your future does take deliberate effort! And maybe a lot of it! And expending effort is indeed different from not expending effort, and sometimes people get really freaked out about expending effort they aren’t used to expending. And that applies to me, too! There are a lot of things I don’t really want to make the effort to do! And sometimes, I do the things anyway. I expend the effort even though I don’t feel like it, because I know I prefer the results of expending the effort to the results of NOT expending the effort. And sometimes I choose not to expend the effort to do certain things, and sometimes that’s fine and sometimes that ends up creating results that I don’t like.
So, if you are wrestling with your infidelity situation and you aren’t sure whether or not it’s possible for you to resolve your situation in a way that you like, or you believe you need to wait and see how things go before you can make any decisions, or you believe you need to be able to predict how things are going to turn out before you make choices and changes, here is what I have to say to you: start to notice all of the ways that you are currently using your power to create your life circumstances, even though you don’t know how things are going to turn out.
You’re already doing the thing that I’m urging you to do. Now you have the opportunity to start doing it more consciously and deliberately.
And if you want my help using your power to deliberately create your future, if you want my help resolving your infidelity situation in a way that you feel great about, let’s work together.
There are two ways you can have me as your coach.
The first way is to enroll in my online course which is called You’re Not the Only One. The course contains videos of me teaching you things that go beyond what I teach on the podcast – and on my YouTube channel – and it contains assignments that will help you put my teachings into use. And that’s the most important part. Passively listening to what I have to say is one thing. Actively making use of tools that I present to you and teach you how to make use of is another thing entirely. And this course is designed to help you do exactly that. All of the materials are housed in an online portal which you can access 24/7 as soon as you enroll, and you have access to the materials forever, which means for as long as the program exists… barring all of the usual unforeseeable disasters. If you enjoy this podcast and you want to engage with my approach and my teachings on a deeper level, get yourself enrolled in You’re Not the Only One! Listening to the podcast is kind of like us going on a date. Enrolling in the course is like us having a relationship. Kind of. Maybe that’s a weird analogy, but the point is, engaging with the course is exactly that – engagement. Engagement with my guidance, and engagement with the steps you need to take to actually deal with your infidelity situation differently.
And of course, if you want to have a very different kind of coaching relationship with me, we can work together one-on-one via Zoom. When we work together one-on-one, our collaboration is rigorous, intimate, and consistent. You get all of my radical compassion, and all of my no-nonsense tough love. When I am your coach, I am both your kindest, gentlest guide, and I am also your dominatrix/drill sergeant. My job is to meet you where you are and help you meet yourself where you are – and to help you figure out where you want to go, and help you get there.
If you want to enroll in my course, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com and you can sign up within minutes. If you want to work with me one-on-one, go to my website and schedule an introductory coaching session with me.
When it comes to dealing with your infidelity situation in a way that you feel great about, two things can be true at once. It’s probably the case that you don’t HAVE to do anything differently right now. It’s probably the case that you don’t HAVE to start creating the future in a more intentional way right this minute, or even this week, or this month, or this year. Theoretically you could wait and see what happens for a while longer. Maybe a long while longer.
But it’s also true that you have so much to gain by being willing to deal with your infidelity situation in a more conscious, deliberate way. How much time and energy do you spend dealing with the unpleasant aspects of your infidelity situation? Probably more than you’d like. And that’s time and energy that you could be dedicating to living a life that you’re in love with. Your time alive in this incarnation is precious. And I encourage you to make use of it in ways that delight you.
Okay everyone. That’s it for today. Thank you so much for listening! Bye for now.