226: Recovering From a “Bad Decision”

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 that’s 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 resolve your infidelity situation in a way that’s truly right for you, let’s work together.  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 self-guided course, You’re Not the Only One.  To get started with either of these options, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com.  Together we will find you some relief and a clear path forward.

All right.  The title of today’s episode reflects the fact that many clients I’ve worked with over the years have told me that they are terrified of making a “bad decision” about their infidelity situation, or making the “wrong decision” about their infidelity situation, and dooming themselves to eternal misery as a result.  They’re afraid that they’ll make a choice that they think is great, only to find out, after the choice has been made, and the action has been taken, and there’s no going back to the state they were previously in, that the choice isn’t working out as well for them as they had hoped it would.

And, for many people – not everyone, certainly, but a lot of folks – the specific fear is that they’ll leave a good-enough marriage that comes with a good-enough life to pursue a relationship with their affair partner, and then that relationship won’t work out.  And then – many people imagine – they’ll have NOTHING.  No family, no relationship, no stability, NOTHING.  And many people believe this in a very literal way, and it scares the crap out of them. 

When clients express these kinds of concerns, my responses depend to some extent to the specifics of their situation.  But one thing I always say to people is this: if you make a decision, and you make changes in your life, and it turns out that you do not like what you have created with your choices and changes, you can always choose again.  You can keep on making changes, until you create what you want.  You are never doomed by any single decision you make, or set of decisions you make.

And at the moment, I have some real-time, living proof of that.  I am currently in the midst of dealing with a very major life decision that I made, which has turned out a whole lot differently than I’d thought and hoped it would.  And for those of you who listened to the episode that came out recently called Going All-In on Your Desires, yes, I am talking about my move to Costa Rica. 

Basically what happened was this.  For years, my spouse and I cultivated a dream of living abroad.  We considered multiple options for where we might relocate to.  We investigated a few of those options pretty seriously, but ultimately decided against each of them.  And then Costa Rica became an option, and we visited multiple times, considered it carefully, and then we went all-in.  We bought a house, which was not an easy thing for us to pull off.  To put it mildly.  We applied for residency.  We rented out our condo in San Francisco.  We dealt with all of our belongings as if we were moving to Costa Rica and staying there for the long haul.  We did the actual move thing itself, which was not a small job.  We came to Costa Rica with the intention of making a life for ourselves here.  And I was SO, so, so excited about doing this.  This was something I had wanted to do for a long time.  My spouse had wanted to do it, too.  But I’m speaking mostly about my experience of the whole thing.

And then, after SO much buildup, and all of the work and hope and time and money that went into getting here, pretty much as soon as we got here, we realized that some things about being here were WAY harder than we’d anticipated they would be.  And as I talked about in that other episode, within mere days of getting here, both my spouse and I were like, “Oh my god, what have we done?”

When this initial wave of horror arose, I freaked out.  But then I started dealing with my thinking more intentionally, and I came to the conclusion that it was okay for things to be tough.  We’d just made a big humongous life change, and we were dealing with a lot of adjusting, and we were figuring out how to deal with a lot of things that were difficult in ways that we hadn’t anticipated and probably could not have anticipated.  And I decided that it was okay for this to be difficult.

My spouse took a slightly different tack.  He was like, “I think we might need to call this sooner rather than later, and I think we have to get out of here.”  And, as I described in the recent episode about the move, my initial reaction was to say, “NO DUDE, that is not how this works.  We have to stick it out for a while before we can even CONSIDER leaving.”  That was my very staunch stance for a moment there. 

But – fortunately for everyone – I pretty quickly started to realize that I didn’t want to be a fascist dictator in this situation.  It was abundantly clear to me that my spouse was not happy, and I did not want to tell him that he HAD to suck it up, ignore his dislikes, and just make it work.  For one thing, I respect his right to say, “This isn’t working for me,” whatever the “this” is, and whatever the circumstances are.  He is, after all, a grown ass man, who has the right to think for himself, and have his own preferences.  And, I respect his right to say, “This isn’t working for me” whenever wants to.  For a little while – meaning, maybe a few days, or maybe it was a week - I told him that he HAD to stick it out for 13 months, because I considered that an acceptable amount of time to give things a try here before throwing in the towel.  But when I thought hard about what I was doing by attempting to impose that timeline upon him, I realized, “Who am I to tell him how long he has to stick this out?” 

If I am going to be with my spouse, I want our shared life to be good for both of us.  If we are going to be together, doing life together, it is EXTREMELY important to me that we are both on board with the major components of our shared life.  I want us both to be enthusiastic about the way we’re living.  Obviously life has its challenges, and at times, things are just hard, and that’s fine.  But I don’t want a condition of our relationship to be that one of us has to do something that they really don’t want to be doing, when there is an option to do things differently.  I would NEVER want to say, “You have to do this even though you don’t like it if we are going to be together.”  That’s just not how I want to live.

And here in Costa Rica, I realized that this was true, even if the thing that my spouse didn’t like was a thing we had both really wanted to do, and had invested a LOT into doing.  I didn’t want to make the fact that we had both signed up for this adventure mean that we were both doomed to stick with this adventure.

And once I recognized all of this, I said to my spouse, “You know, it’s really okay if we don’t stay here.  It’s really okay with me if we pivot.”

And I meant that from the bottom of my heart, for all of the reasons I just mentioned.  I also meant it because once I started taking my spouse’s desire to leave seriously, instead of just telling him that HAD to stick it out for 13 months, I started to look at my own experience of living in Costa Rica a little more broadly.

When I let go of my attachment to the idea that OBVIOUSLY we were just going to stick it out and make it work, it was easy for me to recognize that some things about living where we live in Costa Rica were going to be continuously and significantly difficult.  Some aspects of life were never going to run as smoothly as we needed them to.  We had thought that moving to Costa Rica was going to make life simpler and easier.  That sounds hilarious, now – it blows my mind that I truly believed that at one point.  But I did!  That said, life in Costa Rica has been far less simple and easy than we thought it would be, and we just don’t have the bandwidth to take on all of that stuff.  If we were retired or independently wealthy it might be a different story, but for two people who need to work, it’s an untenable situation. 

Could we change that?  Yes and no.  There are some things about our situation that could get easier if we threw a lot more time and money at the problems.  But there are some things about our situation that just won’t change, and it’s simply a matter of deciding whether we want to deal with them or not.

And when I looked at the realities of living in Costa Rica alongside the current necessities of our life, without attachment to what I’d HOPED living in Costa Rica would be like, it was easy for me to see that it was time to pivot.  And it was easy for me to see why it would be a good idea to do so quickly.

This is what we have the opportunity to do when we make choices that create results that we don’t like.  We can choose again, and we can do so without a whole bunch of drama and handwringing.  We can deal with the stuff that didn’t work out, and get on with the business of making the next thing work out.

Some people are horrified or downright bewildered by this idea, for various reasons.  Sometimes we think that once we make a choice, we’re just stuck with it, for reasons beyond our control.  And sometimes we think that if we make a choice, we HAVE to stick it out, or OUGHT to stick it out, because it is fundamentally better to do so.  We tend to valorize stick-to-it-ness in our society.

And sometimes that’s great.  If we didn’t stick to anything, we’d never get anywhere. 

But we also need to hone our discretion, so that we can make good choices about what we stick with and what we don’t.  Sometimes sticking with something that isn’t going well is, at best, foolish, and at worst, fatal.  There’s a book about this.  It’s called Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, and its author is Annie Duke.

I highly, highly recommend you read this book – or listen to the audio version, which is great.  As the title suggests, the book talks about the value of quitting – and provides some fascinating examples of both the benefits of quitting early enough and often enough, and the perils of not quitting early enough.  The author talks a lot about how we, collectively and individually, tend to valorize grit over quit, and how detrimental this bias can be. 

One of Annie Duke’s big points is that we need to learn how to become better quitters.  Not because quitting is fundamentally better than sticking with something, but because we really do need to know when to hold them and when to fold them.  We really do need to know when to walk away and when to run.  There are times in life when it makes MUCH more sense to walk away from something than to keep at it – even if that challenges conventional wisdom about the value of stick-to-it-ness.

When it came to the matter of living in Costa Rica, I realized that this was a time for quit, rather than grit.

And so, we have decided to pack up and go somewhere else.  We’re not going back to San Francisco.  We’re not yet entirely sure of where we’re going, at the time of this recording.  We have to figure out what we’re going to do with our house in Costa Rica, which probably means renting it out for the time being, which of course, is a whole thing to undertake.  There’s a bunch of uncertainty in the air, there are a bunch of logistics to be dealt with, and of course, there’s more money to be spent.

And then, there’s a whole new life to reestablish – somewhere else – just as we’d begun the process of doing that here.

I cannot stress enough that this is not what I thought I was going to be doing right now AT ALL.  I thought that right about now, I was going to be getting into a terrific life routine that nicely balanced work with time in nature with exercise and new friendships and sloth sightings and art making and all of that kind of stuff.  The possibility that we might leave Costa Rica after just a few months of having gotten here literally had not occurred to me when we were planning this move.  But nonetheless, that is where I have found myself.

This is more or less exactly the kind of scenario that some of my clients are terrified of.  They’re terrified of making a very big life change, or a set of big life changes, and then realizing that they don’t actually like living in the changes they made. 

To echo what I said at the beginning of this episode, sometimes people think that if this were to happen to them, they would be doomed to eternal misery.  They would just be screwed, and that would be the end of the story.

What I want you to know, based on my own very immediate experience of having made a major life change that did not work out as expected, and being in the thick of figuring out what exactly the pivot will look like, is that you really aren’t doomed to eternal misery if you make a change and you don’t like the results you create.  You really aren’t.  I am in the midst of a very weird moment in my life, and while it certainly is weird, I assure you that I am surviving just fine, and if you find yourself in a moment like this one, you can survive just fine, too.  In fact, I’m finding that there are many awesome aspects to my current experience of change, and you may find that to be the case too, if you ever make a big change only to quickly want to get yourself out of the change you’ve made.

There are seven things I want to say about making big changes in your life that apply to my experience of moving to Costa Rica and quickly deciding that we wouldn’t be staying that also apply to changes related to infidelity situations. 

First, if you’ll pardon the use of a baseball analogy, it is really important to remember that when we swing for the fences, we are not guaranteed to hit a home run.  Whenever we step up to the plate, we have the opportunity to take our best swings at the ball.  But we don’t get any guarantee that we’ll hit a game-winning grand slam, or even make contact between our bat and the ball.  And if we wanna play baseball, we have to understand that this is just part of the game.  If you are going to play the actual game of baseball, accepting that you will swing for the fences and miss is essential if you’re going to step up to the plate at all, and keep stepping up to the plate over and over again. 

Similarly, swinging for the fences in our lives, metaphorically speaking, does not guarantee any particular outcomes.  We sometimes think that if we’re brave enough to go after something big, we SHOULD be rewarded for our courage by getting what we want, or getting what we thought we’d get out of our efforts.  And we might get exactly what we hoped for!  We definitely might.  But we also need to recognize that we might not.  And we may do ourselves a great favor by deciding that if we go after something big and we don’t get it, or we don’t get it right away, that’s okay. 

IF we want to swing for the metaphorical fences in our lives, that is. 

Now here’s the thing.  You don’t HAVE to swing for the fences, literally or figuratively.  You don’t have to play baseball and you don’t ever have to swing a bat.  And you don’t have to go after big things in your non-baseball playing life if you don’t want to. 

But if you are going to go after big things, your experience of doing so will be vastly improved by being willing to diligently pursue your desires without being desperate for any particular outcomes.

Now some people say, “Why on earth would I swing for the fences if I don’t know I’ll hit a home run?  Why on earth would I make big changes in my life if I’m not certain they’ll work out exactly the way I want them to?”

Well, for a couple of reasons.  One, because sometimes you want something so much you just wouldn’t be able to live with yourself if you didn’t go after it.  If you want to hit a home run very badly, if you want to play major league baseball and win the World Series more than anything, you have to be willing to swing at thousands upon thousands of pitches and be okay with not hitting a home run every time.  And with not even hitting the ball a lot of times. 

With some things in life, we may find intrinsic value in trying to do the thing, or going after the thing – even if the outcomes don’t end up being what we’d hoped.  Going after your desires can be a profound act of fidelity to yourself, and you may find inherent value in that, regardless of what the results of your efforts end up looking like. 

The second really important thing I want to say is that my experience of recognizing that this Costa Rica thing isn’t going to work out is shaped in great part by the fact that I went after this life change for very clear reasons that I liked very much.  If you’ve listened to many of my podcast episodes or you’ve participated in my course or worked with me one-on-one, you’ve heard me talk about this.  Making decisions for clear reasons that we like is how we prevent regretting our choices.

I was ten million percent sure that I wanted to give living in Costa Rica a shot.  I was ten million percent sure of why doing that was important to me.  So even though we’re deciding to pivot, even though things did not turn out like I thought they were going to, I will forever have the satisfaction of having done everything in my power to make this dream of mine come true.  And it did come true… just not in the way I thought it was going to. 

We tend to think that our satisfaction with our choices is determined by the outcomes we create through our choices.  But we don’t have total control over those outcomes.  What we do have control over, however, is our decision-making process.  I have total respect and appreciation for how I made the choice to move to Costa Rica.  And since I feel good about that, I have no reason to regret my decision.  I can deal with the fact that things didn’t turn out the way I’d hoped without getting into any drama about thinking I’d made a bad choice.  I didn’t make a “bad choice”!  I made a choice for reasons that I really liked, and the experience of living in that choice was full of suprises.  And life is like that some times.

The third thing I want to tell you is that the material consequences of the decision to leave Costa Rica after just having gotten here a few months ago are not insignificant, in the context of our particular lives.  A lot of time and energy and money went into getting here.  And now there’s a whole bunch of money and time and effort involved in figuring out what the next choices and changes look like.  And actually moving again!  And although dealing with this stuff isn’t necessary delightful, it’s totally do-able.  I have had so many clients tell me, “Well, I can’t leave my marriage to be with my affair partner because I’d have to get divorced, and that’s so much work, and divorce is expensive, and then I’d have less money, and then I’d have to find a different place to live, and I just don’t think I could do all of that!”

Trust me people, you COULD do all of that.  You don’t have to do all of that, but you could, if you wanted to.  As I’m currently in the midst of planning my second international move within six months, I assure you that even if the challenges associated with making big changes after you’ve already made big changes are not challenges you’re thrilled to be dealing with, you can deal with them.  One moment at a time.  One choice at a time.  One emotion at a time.  One dollar at a time, or one monetary unit at a time.  Is it fair to not particularly want to deal with this stuff?  Sure.  But we can recognize the annoyance and difficulty in dealing with life’s challenges without making life’s challenges into insurmountable obstacles. 

The fourth thing I want to say about this Costa Rica experience turning out a lot differently than I’d thought it would is that I have learned SO MUCH from things going in this direction.  And am STILL learning so much.  As strange as this might sound, I’m kind of glad things are turning out this way.  This is turning out to be a completely different adventure than I thought it was going to be, and I am up for that.  Sometimes in life we get exactly what we want, and that turns out great.  But sometimes we don’t get what we wanted, or what we thought we wanted, and that experience ends up being even richer and more interesting than getting what we thought we wanted ever could have been.  Sometimes there is so much value in being willing to let life toss us around a little bit, and be surprised by life’s developments. 

So there’s an interesting balance we have the opportunity to strike between being willing to have desires at all and go after our desires and sometimes go all-in on our desires, while also recognizing that maybe our known desires are just a starting point.  A starting point of what, you ask?  I think there are many possible answers to that question, and getting into that would take me totally off-course, so I’m just not going to go there today.  But for now, I’ll just say this: being willing to embrace your desires and go after them without gripping tightly to the idea that you have to get what you wanted, or else, is such an awesome way to experience life.  Some would say it’s the only way to experience life without driving yourself crazy!

Fifth: major life decisions come with mixed emotions, more often than not, and that has definitely been the case for me as my spouse and I have come to the conclusion that we are not going to stay in Costa Rica for the long haul, as planned.  I’ve had ALL KINDS mixed thoughts and mixed feelings about this unexpected turn of events.  I could devote a whole episode to the topic of my mixed feelings about leaving Costa Rica.  But instead, I’ll just say that I am at times DEEPLY sad that we are leaving so soon, even though I’m confident that pivoting is the best decision we can make right now.  Just because I’m certain about this decision doesn’t mean I’m not sad about it.  Sometimes people think that if they’re certain of a decision, they shouldn’t feel sad about it, and often, that just isn’t the way it works.  Certainty doesn’t automatically cancel out sadness.  And you don’t need to let sadness cancel out certainty.

The sixth parallel I want to draw between my Costa Rica moves and infidelity situations is that when you do bold things in life, people are probably going to have something to say about it.  People had things to say when I told them I was moving to Costa Rica.  People have had things to say when I’ve told them we’re doing a rather abrupt turn-around.  And some of these comments have been insightful and nuanced and supportive – in my opinion – and some of the things people have said have been pretty ridiculous, in my opinion. 

And that’s just the thing about humans!  They get to think whatever they want, and they get to say whatever they want.  They get to have opinions about you and your life, and they may choose to share those opinions about you and your life.  And sometimes you might really like what they have to say – but sometimes you might not! 

And a lot of people are TERRIFIED of being on the receiving end of other people saying things about them and their choices that they don’t want to hear.

If you are scared of that, I invite you to enroll in my online course, You’re Not the Only One.  I’ve got a whole section devoted to dealing with other people’s opinions.  You’ll love it.  For some of us, learning how to deal with other people’s opinions is a bit of a project – but it’s a project that is WELL worth your time and energy.  So go enroll in You’re Not the Only One and start dissolving your fear of other people’s opinions.

The great news is, you get to set boundaries when it comes to dealing with other people’s opinions!  If you’re making major changes in your life, you may find it necessary and appropriate to let people know about those changes.  Like, I found it reasonable to let people know that I was moving to Costa Rica.  And now that I’m leaving Costa Rica, I have even more people to tell about my decision.  People here, and people in the US!  It’s a whole thing that I get to announce, over and over again. 

And so for you, if your infidelity situation involves major life changes like moving, or ending a relationship, or announcing a new relationship, you may find it appropriate to tell people about these changes.  Or it may be pretty darn necessary to tell people about those things. 

But here’s the thing.  You can communicate your major life decisions to people without believing that it is incumbent upon you to JUSTIFY your major life decisions to people.  Notice how I haven’t given you a laundry list of reasons why I’m leaving Costa Rica.  I’ve told you some things are untenably difficult, but I haven’t gotten into all the specifics of what exactly is difficult and why daily life isn’t feasible.  I haven’t attempted to convince you that my decision is okay.  Because, quite simply, it’s my decision, and it’s my business.  I don’t have to justify it to anyone.

And you don’t have to justify your decisions to anyone else, either.  As I just said, you may find it necessary or reasonable to INFORM some people of your decisions.  And you might want to explain your reasoning behind your decisions, at least to some extent, to some people – but giving people some insight into your choices is different from attempting to convince other people that your decision is okay.  You don’t have to do that!  If other people don’t like your choices, that’s their business.  And if they try to make it your business, you get to set boundaries.

For example, as we’ve been telling people that we’re leaving Costa Rica, some folks have told me or us that we HAVE to stick it out.  Some folks have attempted to offer “solutions” to our problems.  And I’ve had to say, more than a few times, “Thanks, but we’re not in the discussion phase of this.  We’ve made a decision.”  Sometimes I’ve had to say that more than once to the same person.  Can it be frustrating – or even scary – to have to re-state your boundary to people?  Sure.  But it’s do-able. 

Seventh, and on a closely related note, the more you live your life in a way that is boldly true to yourself, the more other people may be perplexed by your choices and your actions.  And more specifically for today’s purposes, if you make a big bold life change, and then un-do that big change, other people may have all kinds of reactions.  Put simply, they may not understand what you’re doing at all, and by extension, they may not understand YOU.  And they may take the liberty of telling you that.

Here's the deal, people: your job isn’t to make your life intelligible to other people.  Your job is to make your life intelligible to YOURSELF.  And when you do that, when you focus on making your life intelligible to yourself, two things will happen.  One, other people’s opinions of you or misunderstandings of you will matter less.  And two, when you are confident in who you are being and what you are doing, other people tend to get the message.

So work on being faithful to yourself.  Let that be your job.  And if you don’t yet know how to be faithful to yourself, it might be time for us to start working together.    

I know some of you are listening to this episode thinking that you won’t know whether or not my life turned out okay until you hear an update saying that I’ve relocated somewhere that I love, and everything’s great, or something to that effect.  But here’s the thing: everything is ALREADY okay.  I am already okay!  In this moment of dealing with changes and challenges that I did not anticipate I would be dealing with, and in the context of a lot of uncertainty about what will come next, I am better than okay.  I’m in the midst of a strange moment in life, for sure, but this moment is transformative, and fertile with possibility.

If you’re considering making big changes in your life that are related to your infidelity situation, let’s talk.  I can help you ensure that you are as confident as you can possibly be in the choices and changes you’re making.  And then I can help you execute the changes you want to make with courage and enthusiasm – both in spite of and because of the fact that we never know for sure what will happen when we swing for the fences in life.

And of course, if you’ve made a decision related to your infidelity situation that has not turned out to your liking, and you’re unhappy about this, I can help you deal with this.  Let’s work together and find a way to turn your lead – or what may look like lead – into gold.

When you’re ready to work with me one-on-one, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com, and sign up for an introductory coaching session.  And if you prefer learning on your own, you can enroll in my self-guided course, You’re Not the Only One, which contains teachings and assignments that go beyond what I offer on the podcast.

All right everyone, thank you so much for listening.  Have a great day.  Bye for now.