227: Love, Sex, and Romance: What Do You Really Want?

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.  A lot of the so-called advice out there for people who are cheating 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 deal with your infidelity situation in a way that’s truly right for you, I can help you do it.  We can work together one-on-one via Zoom, or you can enroll in my online course, You’re Not the Only One.  Either way, we’ll find you some relief and a clear path forward.  To get started working with me, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com.

Okay, today we are going to talk about taking a step back from your infidelity situation, so that you can get a better sense of what you really want to do with your infidelity situation.  Sometimes we get so caught up in the drama of our infidelity situation that we totally lose sight of what’s important to us.  And by that I mean, we lose sight of what’s important to us within our love life/sex life/relationship life/romantic life, AND we may also lose sight of what’s important to us in our lives overall. 

And if this has happened with you, I get it.  Your infidelity situation may be a very dramatic thing that has started to seem like not only the most important thing in your life right now, but the most important thing that has ever happened to you, and, perhaps, the most important thing that has ever happened on planet earth.  It may, for quite some time now, have been nearly impossible for you to focus on anything other than your infidelity situation. 

And again, I get it.  There are so many very human reasons why this happens.  If you have been totally consumed by your infidelity situation, you don’t have to scold yourself for that.  After all, sometimes it is lovely to allow ourselves to get sucked into a particular bit of life drama.  Sometimes there are really good things to be had within that kind of experience.  But, you may not want to stay fixated on your infidelity situation forever.

For one thing, you may want to be able to take a step back from the drama of your infidelity situation so that you can think differently about your infidelity situation, and what you may want to do about it.  When we are gripping so tightly to all of the immediate things we’re concerned about - or excited about – within our infidelity situation, it can be nearly impossible to see the bigger picture.  And you may really WANT to see the bigger picture in order to make decisions about your infidelity situation. 

Sometimes we get so fixated on the details of our infidelity situation that we lose sight of what we actually want in our love life/sex life/romantic life/relationship life – and we lose sight of whether or not what we’re pursuing within our infidelity situation actually matches up with what we truly want.  Let’s say you’ve been waiting for your affair partner to leave their marriage for what you consider to be a long time.  During the time you’ve been waiting, you may have become so desperately attached to the idea of being with your affair partner that you’ve lost sight of whether or not they are actually a person you want to have a relationship with. 

Also, your focus on your infidelity situation may be detracting from your capacity to live a full and rich life.  And a reasonably productive life!  As some of you know very well, it can be really hard to get much work done when you are totally tied up in the drama of an infidelity situation.  And that’s fine for a while.  Nobody’s going to die if you aren’t a star employee or the world’s best boss or the most outstanding small business owner, for a while.  Your kids – or anyone else you’re caring for – will survive if you are not the most present and attentive caregiver, for a while.  If you ditch all of your hobbies and stop talking to all of your friends for a moment, there’s a good chance you won’t permanently ruin your friendships, or never be able to return to your hobbies again.

So if you’ve been neglecting the rest of your life in the service of fixating on your infidelity situation for a while, it probably isn’t going to be the end of the world.  But if you’ve been super focused on your infidelity situation for months upon months or years upon years, your overall quality of life may be taking a hit.  And you might stand to gain a LOT by stepping back from your infidelity situation and considering what you want your life as a whole to look like, at this particular point in time, and how you want your love life/sex life/relationship life/romantic life to fit into your life as a whole.

I recommend doing both of those things, but today I’m going to talk about clarifying what you want in what I think of as your love life/sex life/relationship life/romantic life.  That’s a lot of words, I know.  But the reason why I spell all of these things out separately is because we so often lump them together as if they SHOULD all be lumped together.  We often assume that love and sex and romance should go together, and more specifically, we often think that you should experience all of those things with one person.  Yes, don’t worry, I know non-monogamy is more visible these days, and more of a socially sanctioned option these days.  And that’s great.  But there’s still a dominant idea out there that love and sex and romance should go together, and should go into a particular sort of relationship with one person.  And it’s fine if you want to experience these things with one person, or within one relationship.  If that’s great for you, terrific. 

But the problem is that so many of us grew up thinking that love and sex and romance and relationships had to go together, or were supposed to go together.  And so many of us never had the opportunity to think about what we wanted each of these aspects of our lives to look like, and never had the opportunity to think about whether or not we wanted to experience all of these things with the same person.  Right?  Theoretically we could have romance with one person, love with another, sex with yet another, and be in a relationship with someone else.  Or we could be in a loving relationship with someone, and have sex and romance with another.  Or whatever!  You get the idea.

Not only that, although many of us are very much aware that there’s this thing called love that a lot of people talk about, we may never have defined what love means to us, or what we want the experience of love to be like in our lives.  A lot of us have never fine-tuned our ideas about what we want a relationship to look like.  To be clear, right now I’m talking about the kind of relationships that are usually associated with love and sex and romance, but a lot of us don’t define what we want our other relationships to look like, either.  We may have some vaguely formed assumptions about love and relationships, but do we have a good working sense of what we actually want, in these aspects of our lives?    

And then there’s romance.  What exactly IS romance, anyway? 

Back in my academic days, I read a research paper that was in many respects fascinating, but it employed the concept of romance without ever defining what romance was.  If I had been a reviewer for that journal article, you better believe that I would have taken the author to task on that omission.  But frankly, the fact that journal published the article without asking the author to define what they meant by romance reflects something that I think is very prevalent in our society: although we talk OF romance, nobody ever defines what it is, or what it means.

Also, sex has the possibility to mean a lot of different things to different people, both in terms of the things we might do with our bodies that could count as sex, or other aspects of a potentially sexual experience.  So what counts as sex to you?  Have you ever asked yourself that?  What counts as good sex to you, or as enjoyable sex to you?  Do you care about enjoying sex at all?  Do you want anything to do with anything that could be considered “sex”? 

These are the kinds of questions that a lot of people never ask themselves.  Many of us make major life decisions – like getting married, for instance – upon which these questions could have significant bearing, without having ever considered them.  And that’s not your fault.  When you were little did anyone come up to you and say, “Hey, kid.  As you get older, you may want to experience love, and there are many ways to experience love, and you get to explore what love means to you.  Also, as you get older, you may want to have sex – but guess what, sex can mean or include a lot of different things, and you get to decide how you want to experience this set of possibilities that we abbreviate under the heading of ‘sex’.”  Nobody ever said anything like that to me when I was young.  And I bet nobody ever said anything like that to you, either.

But here’s the great news.  You, at this point in your life, today, can start to think about what love means to you.  You get to start to consider how you currently want to experience love in your life.  You get to consider what sex is for you, or what you want your experience of sex to be.  You get to decide what romance means to you, or is for you, and how you want to experience romance.  You get to decide if you want to experience love and sex and romance within the context of a particular kind of relationship, or relationships, plural.

Now here’s the thing: you can take this assignment seriously and do it thoroughly without making it overly complicated.  If you think you know what love is, but you don’t think you have precise language to articulate your knowing, just do your best to name what you know.  There can be great power in simply making the implicit a little more explicit.  Or a putting a few words to the wordless.  Same thing with romance.  A lot of the definitions of romance that I’ve encountered are tautological, and therefore useless, so if you can’t come up with a precise definition of romance, don’t worry, you’re in good company.  But if you can come up with SOME certainty about what it means to you, that may be very helpful.

For example, for some people, romance is the experience of delighting in someone in a particular way, or enjoying the affection of someone in a particular way.  It’s somewhat ineffable, but it’s also distinct from other qualities of relationships, or interactions with people.  And for some people, that’s specific enough.  But for other people, romance means certain very specific things.  For some people, romance means that little blue box from Tiffany’s.  Is it Tiffany, or Tiffany’s?  I don’t know.  I am a lover of jewelry, but I don’t know if you’re supposed to say Tiffany or Tiffany’s.  And to other people, giving or receiving Tiffany’s jewelry might be the antithesis of romance.  To some, Tiffany is the height of tackiness.  In the hierarchy of fine jewelry, Tiffany might be way too low for you. 

Part of the reason I think we’re confused about what romance is is because romance has been so commodified and commercialized.  And maybe you love that!  Maybe you just want that damn little blue box with the shiny thing in it.  I get it!  I like me a good present!  So if your understanding of what romance is has been informed by diamond ads or perfume ads or truck ads or whatever, I love for you.  And yes, don’t worry, I know that the diamond industry is evil and I know most perfumes are made of poison.  The world we live in is as terrible as it is wonderful.  And I can see that, and I also know that my shit stinks just like everybody else’s does.  So if you love romance, and you think that D-I-A-M-O-N-D spells romance, that’s fine.  Know that and own that.

But just to emphasize what I said a moment ago, romance doesn’t have to have anything to do with the giving and receiving of items.  It could be something else entirely for you.

I said what I just said about romance with the intention of helping you think expansively.  I didn’t say it with the intention to overwhelm you.  Just because romance COULD be anything, that doesn’t mean you have to abandon your current ideas of what romance is to you. 

Same thing with sex and love and relationships.  Maybe your ideas about what those things are, or what you want those things to be like for you are clear enough.  And if they are, great.  But if you find that, upon thinking about it, you realize you actually don’t really know what you want your sex life right now, it might be time to put some thought into that.  If you actually don’t know what you want your experience of love to be like right now, it might be a good idea to think about that, too.

Here's why I am urging you to think about all of this stuff.

As I said earlier, sometimes people get so wrapped up in their infidelity situation that they lose sight of what they actually want in their love life/sex life/romantic life/relationship life.  And then, instead of making decisions about how to deal with their infidelity situation that are based on what they truly want in these areas of their lives, they make decisions that are informed by the drama of their infidelity situation.

So for example, sometimes people get totally fixated on a particular person, and the idea that they HAVE to have a certain relationship with that person.  Let’s say you were married, and while you were married, you got involved with someone who was also married.  Your affair with this person became intense, and the two of you professed your undying love for each other, and you both expressed a desire to have a non-affair relationship.  So you left your spouse.  You made yourself available to have a non-affair relationship with your affair partner.  But your affair partner still hasn’t left their spouse.  And you’re starting to worry that they might NEVER leave their spouse.  And this is driving you crazy, and with each passing week you’re growing more and more frantic that you might end up ALONE.  That possibility terrifies you.

Amidst all of this fear and longing, you may not have any sense of what you want your love life/sex life/romantic life/relationship life to look like right now – whether your current person is a part of that equation for you or not.  You may have developed the idea that you HAVE to be with your affair partner, and clung to that idea as if your life depends upon it. 

And you may have developed tunnel vision.  You may have started to think that your affair partner is the ONLY thing you want, or the only way to get what you want.

You’re allowed to yearn for your affair partner, of course.

But if you zoom out a little and think about what you want in broader terms, you may see things differently.

One benefit of doing this is giving yourself a clearer sense of what you want your future relationship with your affair partner to look like, assuming it continues.  Simply “getting them” is not enough to forge the relationship you want to have.  Creating the relationship with them that you want to have is a conscious act of creation, and it starts with having a reasonably clear sense of you want that relationship to look like!  And a reasonably clear sense of what you want the possible components of that relationship, such as love and sex and romance, to be like.  In other words, you want to know what you actually want to do with your affair partner when you get them!  Or if you get them.

Another benefit of zooming out is you give yourself the opportunity to see if your affair partner stacks up to your standards.  You may have fallen for them hard.  You may have a connection with them that is unlike anything you’ve ever experienced before.  But do they actually line up with what you want in your love life/sex life/romantic life/relationship life right now?  They might!  But they might not.

Sometimes when people develop a fixation on a particular person, and the quest to be with that person is long and arduous, the fixated person becomes overly certain that getting to be with the person they want to be with is the answer to everything.  Once they have the person they want, then they will be perfectly happy.

But then they get the person that they’ve wanted for so long, and it turns out that they and their person have pretty asynchronous desires, sexual or otherwise.  During the affair, this might not have been apparent, or might not have mattered if it did, but now that the drama of the affair is over, and the two people can be together as “normal” partners, the differences in what each person wants may seem a lot more significant. 

And that might not have to be a deal-breaker.  That might not have to herald the end of the relationship.  But it might.  And in order to figure out what’s going to work and what isn’t, it sure helps to figure out what’s important to you sexually, and how important it is. This way, if your former affair partner who is now just your partner isn’t interested in what you’re interested in, you can reckon with this – instead of sweeping it under the rug and telling yourself that your specific sexual desires don’t matter, because the most important thing in the world is that you got your affair partner.

Here’s another example of why it’s so useful to think about what you want out of your love life/sex life/relationship life/romantic life at this point in time.  Sometimes a person gets out of a long-term committed relationship, and there was some infidelity component in play, and they’ve ended up without any relationship.  And, newly single for the first time in a long time, they think they don’t want anything to do with getting too involved with anybody for a while.  They want to have sex with different people, but they JUST want sex.  Nothing more.

And of course it’s totally fine to want that!  It’s fine to want to just have sex, with whoever you want to, without there being any relationship beyond the sexual encounters, and without intentionally looking for love or romance, however you may define those things. 

But here’s the problem I see people running into.  Sometimes people think they just want sex, but then, something funny starts to happen.  They start having really good sex with someone, and they keep having good sex with that someone.  And then they start to think that because this is happening, because the good sex is becoming an ongoing thing, then obviously there is something more going on than “just sex.”  They start to assume that because they keep on having really good sex with the same person, there must be feelings there, or that there must be some kind of relationship being formed, and they start to assume that obviously, the person they’re having really good sex with is thinking this way, too.

And I think that one of the reasons why this happens is that so many of us really haven’t thought through what love and sex and romance and relationships mean to us, or what we want these parts of our lives to look like.  And we also haven’t examined our assumptions about how we think these things are supposed to go together.  And what this means is, even if we consciously believe that we just want sex, we may also unconsciously believe that if we have good sex with someone enough times, then, by definition, our relationship with that person should evolve into something more than just sex.

And that’s when people start saying things to me like, “Why hasn’t he or she or they asked me out on a date yet?”  And I say, “Well, because the two of you agreed your relationship was going to just be sex, and maybe that’s still okay with them.  Just because your expectations have changed doesn’t mean theirs have.”  And that’s when people essentially try to convince me that no, if you have life-changing sex with someone enough times, you obviously are falling in love, and are probably destined to get married.  And, perhaps obviously, that’s when I say, nope, that’s not quite how it works.

So!  If you are not currently clear on what you want your experiences of love and sex and romance and relationships to look like at this particular moment in your life, start thinking about those things!  Start thinking about what you want each of those aspects of your life to look like!  Start thinking about how you want them to go along with each other, or not!  Doing this can help you get very useful perspective on your infidelity situation, and can help you inform your decisions about what you want to do about it.  And, by the way, your answers to these questions do not have to be the same as they were yesterday, or ten years ago, or thirty years ago.  And your answers to these questions are not set in stone forever.  It’s okay to go from wanting one thing now to wanting something completely different later.  But I do want you to spend time getting clear on what you want NOW.

If you have been trying to figure out what you want to do about your infidelity situation but you aren’t getting the clarity you seek, let me help you approach your situation differently.  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.  Either way, you will get guidance and perspectives from me that you will not get from any other professional who works in the infidelity space.  When you’re ready for some relief and a clear path forward, head on over to my website, mariemurphyphd.com, and let’s work together.

All right everybody.  That’s it for today.  Thanks so much for listening.