236: Taking the Agony Out of Major Life Decisions

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 you’re the “other person,” or you’re 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.  As you may well know, engaging in infidelity can be exciting, and life-affirming, and wonderful in many ways.  And as you may also know, engaging in infidelity can be exhausting, and stressful, and can take up a LOT of your precious time and energy.  So my recommendation is that you start dealing with your infidelity situation in a conscious, deliberate way sooner rather than later.  And if you’re listening to this podcast, that’s a great start!  This podcast exists to help you take ownership of your infidelity situation in a way that’s truly right for you.  And if you want to go beyond what I offer on the podcast, if you want more concentrated help with navigating your infidelity situation, there are two ways you can 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 via Zoom.  To get started with either of these options, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com.  If you have found this podcast helpful and you want to uplevel your work with me, let’s get started.  The rest of your life, beyond the challenges of your infidelity situation, is waiting for you.

All right, everyone.  Greetings from Tucson, Arizona.  If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you know that last year I moved to Costa Rica, with the intention of staying there for a very long time.  My spouse and I had wanted to move abroad for years, and when we finally decided we wanted to move to Costa Rica, it took us about a year and a half – mas o menos - to turn that dream into a reality.  And then of course the actual move itself was a pretty big production.  And then, just a few months after having moved to Costa Rica, we decided to leave.

I’ve talked about the move to Costa Rica and the decision to leave Costa Rica in two previous episodes, namely Episode 224, “Going All-In on Your Desires,” and Episode 226, “Recovering from a ‘Bad Decision.’”  In this episode, I’m going to tell you a little bit about how we decided to move to Tucson, and how we made that decision making process a whole less torturous than it could have been.

So, as I talked about in episode 226, “Recovering from a ‘Bad Decision’,” my spouse and I decided to leave Costa Rica because daily life there was untenable for us.    

But I want to clear a little something up.  Upon listening to that podcast episode, more than a few people have said to me, “Oh my god, I’m never going to Costa Rica!  It sounds awful!” and in response to that I want to emphasize that I loved visiting Costa Rica so much that I decided to move there.  I would not say that Costa Rica is awful.  Far from it.  On the other hand, some people have said to me, “Oh my god, how could you have left Costa Rica?  That place is paradise.”  It usually turns out that people who say this either spent a month there with a host family when they were in high school, or visited as an adult, but never left the resort they stayed at, and I know very well that those kinds of experiences can be lovely, but they’re very different from what I was doing.  So let me be crystal clear on where I stand on Costa Rica: it isn’t paradise.  But most places aren’t!  It’s a place that’s great in some ways, and also is not great in some ways. 

For my spouse and me, the issue was that navigating daily life in the jungle was way more of a challenge than we’d anticipated, and more of a challenge than we wanted to take on at this moment in our lives.  And upon recognizing this, we decided we didn’t want to make decisions in the service of sunk costs.  We wanted to make decisions in the service of what made the most sense overall for our lives right now.  And that lead us to the conclusion that the best decision for us was to leave Costa Rica.  And that decision was, in my mind, both 1000% appropriate given our current needs and priorities, and also heartbreaking and discombobulating.  I’d been nurturing the dream of living in Costa Rica for a LONG TIME.  To pivot so quickly felt – and still feels – pretty weird. 

I’ll say more about the strangeness of all the changes I’ve experienced lately another time, but for now, what I want to stress is this: even though making the decision to leave Costa Rica came with mixed emotions, I made the very deliberate choice to not add any unnecessary layers of drama or suffering to that decision.  For example, I could have chosen to look at the decision to move to Costa Rica in the first place as a mistake.  I could have chosen to regard our decision to leave Costa Rica so soon after getting there as a failure.  I could have chosen to view the situation in any number of ways that would have created a lot of additional and unnecessary suffering for myself.  I could have.  But I intentionally chose not to.

This is really important, people.  We can make big decisions that feel really weird to make, and we can for allow for it to feel really weird to make those decisions, WITHOUT making our weird feelings more of a problem than they need to be.  Pain may be inevitable, but suffering is optional, as the Buddhists say.  Major life decisions often come with mixed emotions, but we don’t have to make that into a bigger deal than it already is.  Feeling weird is weird enough.  Making feeling weird into a big problem only makes us feel worse.  And we don’t need to do that to ourselves.    

So after having decided to leave Costa Rica, my spouse and I were then in the position of deciding where we were going to go next.  When we moved to Costa Rica, it had truly not occurred to me that we might leave after just a few months.  That possibility had literally not entered my mind.  So we did not have any kind of a plan B cooked up.

We could have used this lack of a backup plan as a reason to make the decision of where we were going to go next into a monumental production.  We could have thrown up our hands and said, “Oh my god, Costa Rica didn’t work out for us, woe is us, what are we going to do now?  How can we possibly just decide where to go next?  There are so many options, and we just made a choice that didn’t work out!  How can we ever trust ourselves to choose wisely again?”  But we didn’t do any of that.  We decided very quickly that we wanted to make a decision about where to go next efficiently, with minimal fuss and fanfare. 

And in the service of that, we then decided, very quickly, that we wanted to constrain our decision-making process in specific ways.  For starters, we didn’t want the goal of choosing our next destination to be to find our forever home.  We did not want to put that kind of pressure on ourselves.  Rather, we decided that our goal was to select a place that would meet our non-negotiable requirements, and be a place that we felt good about committing to for a year.  If it turned out that we liked it and wanted to stay longer, great.  But we didn’t want to choose our next destination from the position of hoping – or needing – that place to turn out to be our happily ever after.  We purposefully kept the stakes of our decision at a reasonable level.

From there, we very quickly decided that we didn’t want to go back to San Francisco, or anywhere in California.  When we moved to Costa Rica, we thought we’d set off on a big adventure, and even though the adventure we’d thought we were going to have ended sooner than we’d thought it would, we wanted to continue to have some kind of adventure.  We wanted to experience a place that was new to us and provided some interesting contrasts to places we’ve lived in the past.  But although we didn’t want to go anywhere in California, we did decide that the most practical thing for us to do was to go somewhere in the US – and we had already decided that this was a time in our lives when practicality was a very high priority for us. 

It’s important to point out that I could have pitched a fit about returning to the US.  I had just left, after all, for clear reasons that I liked.  I didn’t entirely LIKE the idea of returning to the US.  But I decided that I wasn’t going to make a big deal out of that.  I decided that I was going to embrace the decision to return, for all the practical reasons that it made sense to do so.  I also decided that I was going to deal with my dislike of the idea of returning to the US without making too big of a fuss about it.

I want to stress how valuable it can be to do this at times.  There may be times in your life when, in order to move forward in any way, you have to take a next step that you aren’t entirely thrilled with.  And what I want you to know is, you can continue to dislike whatever you dislike about your next move without making too big of a deal out of whatever it is you dislike.  You can dislike something without fixating on your dislike of that something, and you can instead focus on the benefits you get from being willing to put up with that something.

So after deciding we were going to return to the US but not to California, that left us with 49 other states within the US to choose from.  But we didn’t have any interest in considering all 49 of them, because we wanted to be efficient!  We wanted to make decisions quickly, and act quickly.

This is important to underscore, too.  There are times when it makes sense to cast a wide net, and it makes sense to consider as many options as possible before making a decision.  There are times when it makes sense to take a luxurious amount of time to make a decision.  There are times when it’s nice and useful to sleep on a decision not just for a night or two, but for a week or two, or a month or two, or perhaps even longer.  And there are also times when it does NOT make sense to do these things!  There are times when it behooves us to make a choice sooner rather than later, and with as little drama as possible.  And in these instances, it really helps to intentionally constrain our focus.

And constrain your focus you can!  You can deliberately say, “Okay, these are the options I’m going to consider, and these are the options I’m going to exclude from consideration.”  Sometimes people tell me that they “can’t” do that, they have to consider all of the options that are theoretically available to them, and sometimes people come up with very elaborate – albeit, not particularly convincing – reasons why they “have to” do this.

But I assure you that you really can constrain your focus if you want to, and I assure you that there may be times in life when it is extremely beneficial for you to do this, even if your brain is telling you that it doesn’t want to do this.  We constrained our focus by saying, okay, we’re returning to the US, but not California.  Then we said, okay, let’s come up with a list of non-negotiable features we want our next destination to have, a list of features that that we’d like our next destination to have, and a list of features we consider deal-breakers.  A list of things that would cause us to rule a potential destination out.  We did that part together.  We talked and came up with three lists of must-haves, nice-to-haves, and automatic disqualifiers.  This could have been an incredibly long, drawn-out process, but again, we wanted to be efficient.  So I think we did this in under an hour.

To be fair, both my spouse and I already had a pretty good sense of what we would and would not want in a place we chose to live.  It’s not like we were thinking about these things for the first time in our entire lives.  If we were considering matters that we had never given a single thought to before, we might have taken more time to do this.  But given what we already knew, we did not need to spend a lot of time on this.

So after we clarified our criteria, we said, okay, with these criteria in mind, let’s separately come up with a list of 3-5 cities or towns which we individually would be willing to commit to living for at least a year.  So we did that, and then we discussed our lists, and two of our picks overlapped.  One of those picks was Tucson.  Neither of us had ever been to Tucson, or to the other city that was a finalist within our selection process, but based on what we knew about these two places, we both were amenable to the idea of moving to either of them and staying for a year.

Our next step was to do more research on Tucson and the other place.  As I just said, we knew a little about Tucson, and we knew a little about the other city we were considering, but we didn’t want to make our choice based on what little we knew.  We didn’t want to make our research project an open-ended one, but we did want to know more.  So we checked some things out.  Did our possible next destinations meet our non-negotiable criteria?  Did they contain any of our nice-to-haves?  And did either place have features that we considered deal-breakers?  I think we allowed this part of the decision-making process to take about a day.  It might have been half a day, it might have been a day and a half, but we didn’t drag it out.

Because we didn’t need to!  When we looked at the two cities in this manner, we quickly ruled the one that wasn’t Tucson out because although it had some features that we liked, it also had one feature that we considered a total deal-breaker, and it had a few other features that we considered undesirable.  So we said, okay, it’s looking like Tucson.  We decided that I would go there to check it out and hopefully find us a place to live, or at the very least, get a sense of which neighborhoods we would consider living in.  But the purpose of my mission was to seal the deal, NOT to extend the process of consideration.  We agreed that unless something in Tucson struck me as completely unworkable when I visited, that was where we were going to go next. 

So I went to Tucson, for like, four days.  And my impression was, okay, I think we can make this work for a year.  I wasn’t like, “OH MY GOD, THIS PLACE IS SO AMAZING, I LOVE IT SO MUCH, WE’RE GOING TO BE SO HAPPY HERE!!!”  When I visited I said, okay, I don’t hate it, there are things here I’m intrigued by, there are things here I kinda like, there are things here that I find a little off-putting at first glance, but I’m willing to give it a go.  I think I can be okay here for a year, I think my spouse can be okay here for a year, I think our dogs can be okay for a year.  Fortunately I found a house for us to rent while I was visiting, so I went back to Costa Rica with our next destination secured. 

I want to emphasize that we could have made this whole decision-making process ten million times more complicated than we did.  We could have entertained a whole host of doubts at every stage of the process.  We could have indulged in believing that we didn’t have enough information to make such a major life decision.  Moving to a place that one of us had never been to, and the other had visited for just a few days?  We could have told ourselves that that was unthinkable.  Or we could have made our decision, and then started to worry about everything that could go wrong in Tucson, or started to think about everything we might not like about living in Tucson.

And believe me, if we had done that, we could have easily come up with a list of things to worry about or pre-emptively dislike.  Just for example, they don’t have espresso in the airport here, people.  You can get brewed coffee in the airport, but you cannot get espresso.  That, in my opinion, is not okay.  I’m not even joking about this.  I am truly displeased by the absence of espresso at the airport.  Does that say something about me?  Of course it does, and I am fine with that.  And yes, I understand that Tucson is not a major city, by some standards, so maybe my expectations are too high.  But I don’t care.  It’s fucking 2026.  The Tucson airport is technically an international airport.  Can’t these people get some fucking espresso in their airport?  I can deal with this, of course – kind of – but it is representative of something important.  There are some things about Tucson that I was unimpressed by during my initial visit, and if I had let myself get all worked up about that stuff, I certainly could have. 

But prior to the move, I very consciously decided that I wasn’t going to think too much about the things about Tucson that I could dislike.  It’s one thing to say, “I see deal-breakers here, and I don’t want to do this.”  That’s fair, and that’s useful!  But it’s another thing entirely to say, “I’m going to commit to something – in my case, moving to Tucson - but I’m also going to nit-pick it to death.  I’m going to look for things to dislike about it, and then I’m going to fixate on those things.”

If I had done that, I probably would have dreaded moving to Tucson.  Right?!  I probably would have been like, “Oh god, this could be awful.  I know we’ve decided to move somewhere, and I know I wanted to make a decision quickly, but still, I’m probably not going to like it there, and that’s going to be so bad.”  If I had done that, I would have felt horrible, before and after the actual move.  We can do this, of course – we can preemptively dread something and allow ourselves to feel unnecessarily miserable.  But we can also NOT do this, and spare ourselves the experience of feeling unnecessarily miserable!

So as we prepared for the move to Tucson, my thinking was moderately positive.  I was intentionally thinking things like, “This could be interesting.  This could be pretty cool.  I’m going to look for things to like about Tucson.”  And that set me up to feel moderately positive about the move.  And that seemed about right to me.  I certainly didn’t want to feel pessimistic about the move.  I didn’t want to feel horrible about it.  But it wouldn’t have seemed appropriate to me to feel wildly enthusiastic, either.  I was making a move for pragmatic reasons.  By moving, I wanted to ensure certain changes in my daily existence.  I hoped I would find things about Tucson to enjoy, and I intended to look for things about Tucson to enjoy, but I didn’t set the bar any higher than that.

An interesting thing that I’ve noticed is that sometimes we think that we ought to feel wildly enthusiastic if we’re making a big change in our lives, or conversely, that if we don’t feel wildly enthusiastic about making a big change, then we shouldn’t make that change.  But should that be the bar?  Is feeling wild enthusiasm the bar we want to set for making major life changes? 

I’ll tell you why we sometimes think we NEED to feel wildly enthusiastic about making a major life decision in order to actually make it.  When we make big changes in our lives, we often encounter a fair amount of uncertainty and unfamiliarity.  And many of us find it uncomfortable to contend with unfamiliarity and uncertainty, and we often think that we shouldn’t have to feel uncomfortable in these ways.  Or any other ways, for that matter.  Some coaches I’ve collaborated with call this “comfort entitlement.”  We think we’re entitled to feel comfortable, and that we just shouldn’t have to feel uncomfortable.  And so when we’re considering making a big change, we want some sort of assurance that that there’s either already a big payoff, or there’s going to be a big payoff.  We want to know that if we’re going to tolerate feeling uncomfortable, we’re going to get the reward - or already have the reward - of feeling incredibly enthusiastic about the change we’re making.

But that might not be the bar you want to set.  Sometimes the best bar to set is to get to the next best thing.  Sometimes the bar you want to set is to make an incremental improvement.  Sometimes the bar you want to set is to improve your life by meeting basic needs that aren’t currently being met, or to improve your life by addressing problems in your life that are causing you a lot of trouble.

Let’s talk about an example of this that doesn’t have anything to do with moving or with infidelity.  Let’s say you have a habit that has drawbacks that have started to outweigh the benefits.  Let’s say you like to drink alcohol, but have gotten into the habit of drinking so much of it that you feel horrible all the time.  Physically, emotionally, mentally, or otherwise.  And you don’t like feeling horrible!  Or you like to gamble, but you’ve gambled away all your assets and now you’re in a considerable amount of debt.  And you don’t want to be in debt!  Or you love eating candy, but you’ve eaten so much candy for so long that your teeth are a mess and you’re experiencing some other health issues that you really don’t want to continue experiencing. 

In any of these examples, you may know that your current habits have consequences that you do not like.  You may know that you want a life that is free of the consequences of your habit, but you ALSO may not want to go through the process of giving up the habit itself.  Because you like some of what you get out of your habit, after all!  Even if drinking alcohol makes you feel shitty, you still like the ritual.  You still like how the first couple of drinks feel.  You still like going to the bar.  You don’t WANT to give those parts up.  But you also know that if your life is going to get better overall, you kind of have to give up the things you like about your habit.  Just so you know, I’m not saying that if you have a habit that’s causing you some suffering the only way to deal with it is to quit it entirely. But sometimes that is the only solution that’s actually a solution.  Some things are all-or-nothing.

And so we may know that we truly want a life without the drawbacks associated with booze or gambling or candy.  We may want that very badly.  But that doesn’t mean that we’re going to be wildly enthusiastic about the process of getting to that life.  We may be wildly enthusiastic later, when we’ve gotten through the more uncomfortable stages of unwinding our habit, and we’ve made it to the other side, and we feel good.  But when we’re first learning how to function without our favorite habit, we may feel pretty terrible.  Even though we know that learning how to function without alcohol or gambling or sugar and going through the unpleasantness of the initial stages of this process is the essential next step we need to take if we want our lives to get better, we may not be wildly enthusiastic about taking it.

But we may take it anyway, because we trust that it’s the only way to get to where we ultimately want to go.  We take that next step not because it’s going to instantly make our lives perfect, but because we want to begin the process of making our lives better instead of staying in our current state of affairs.

And this is another place within the process of making major life decisions where I see a lot of folks who feel stuck in their infidelity situations struggling a LOT.  They want to be magically catapulted into the next chapter of their lives.  They don’t want to get from where they are to where they want to go one step at a time.  That sounds way too hard, or too uncomfortable, or too scary, or too whatever.

And I get it!  But usually, when we want change, we don’t have access to a magic catapult.  Sometimes we are one choice or one change away from a dramatically different experience of life – and what we consider to be a dramatically better experience of life.  But sometimes we’re more than one step away, and the only way to move towards living a better life is to take one step at a time.  Even if we aren’t wildly enthusiastic about the next step. 

We can intentionally embrace the idea that if our next step moves us forward incrementally, or improves our lives by just a bit, it’s worth it.  We don’t have to instantly get to a state in which everything is fantastic for our next step forward to count as a win.  Our next step forward does not have to get us everything we’ve ever wanted in order for it to be a success.

And that’s very much the state I’m living in, these days.  Moving to Tucson did instantly improve my life in some ways.  By moving here, my spouse and I successfully stabilized our day-to-day existence, which was and is great.  If I were still in Costa Rica right now, I’d be dealing with the full force of the challenges that come with the rainy season, and that would be pretty much all I would be doing.  Or at least, it would be the main consumer of my time and energy – and I’m so glad to not be dealing with that! 

And, on top of stabilizing our day-to-day lives, I have also been enjoying the experience of living in the desert for the first time.  I’ve been enjoying the novelty of discovering a new place.  I’ve been intentionally seeking out things to appreciate and enjoy about Tucson, and by seeking those things I have found them.  Overall, the move was an incremental win.     

And it is also true that this major life change of mine has come with mixed emotions!  As they do!  And I’ll say more about that in my next episode.  But for today’s purposes, the point is that you can make big decisions in life without making them unnecessarily complicated.  And by being willing to make big decisions without allowing the process of making them to become agonizing, you can move towards what you prefer in life more efficiently and with less unnecessary suffering.  And that’s a good thing!     

If you are in the process of making major life decisions related to your infidelity situation, or you’re considering making major life decisions related to your infidelity situation, I want you to know that you can do your own version of what I did.  You too can make your major life decision free of agony – or at least, a lot less agonizing than it could be.

And I can help you do this!  My online course, You’re Not the Only One, will walk you through the process of making big decisions and dealing with the emotions you may feel as you do so.  And of course, if we work together one-on-one, you will get all of my personalized attention and assistance, and all of my no-nonsense tough love.  Making decisions is one of the primary means by which we exercise our power to shape our lives to our liking!  So in my opinion, investing in learning how to become better decision makers is one of the best investments we can make in our overall quality of life.

To enroll in my course, or to schedule an introductory coaching session with me, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com.

Thank you all so much for listening!  Bye for now.