246: Yes, You Really Can Find Love Again

Hey everybody, 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 judgements.  So much of the so-called “help” 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 start dealing with your infidelity situation in a way that you feel great about, I can help you do it.  There are two ways you can have me as your coach: we can work together one-on-one via Zoom, or you can enroll in my online course, You’re Not the Only One.  To get started with either of these options, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com.  Together we will find you some relief and a clear path forward.

Today’s episode, as the title would suggest, is about finding love again after you’ve experienced it in a particular way with a particular person.  But before we talk about people love, I’m going to tell you a story about losing and finding a different kind of love.

A little more than four years ago, my first dog died.  And this was a major life event for me, but not because I hadn’t previously had to deal with many deaths.  I’ve dealt with a fair number of human deaths in my life.  And prior to becoming a dog parent, I’d had more than a few pets as a kid as and an adult, and they all died, some at a ripe old age, and some prematurely.  And I was sad about the deaths of these humans and animals, to varying degrees, when they happened.  Some of these losses were significant.  But none of these experiences with death prepared me for my experience of the death of my first dog.  If you know, you know.  Some say the human-dog bond is experienced by many to be uniquely precious, and I certainly found and still find that to be the case.  And with my first dog, well, he was special to me in ways I don’t have words for.  Prior to suddenly wanting a dog one day, I’d never considered myself to be a dog person, and I was TERRIFIED of dogs when I was little.  TERRIFIED.  So getting a dog, and falling in love with that little creature was a surprising and singular experience for me.  If you’ve never had a dog yourself, this might all sound very weird, but the relationship I developed with my first dog was indescribably special.

So there was that, but there was also the matter of a little delusion I had that this dog of mine was going to live forever.  And obviously I knew this line of thinking was delusional, but I also kind of believed it anyway.  When he was a puppy – like, maybe six months old – somebody casually mentioned the fact that he would die someday and it was a perfectly reasonable thing for them to say within the context of the conversation, but I burst into tears as soon as they said it.  I was like, no, actually, THIS dog is never going to die.  Or, at the very least, I thought he was going to live until he was at seventeen.  THAT thought wasn’t entirely unreasonable.  He was a Westie, and Westies do live that long, and sometimes a little longer. 

But as it turned out, Seymour – my first dog - died pretty suddenly when he was 13.  To say that I didn’t see it coming would be a tremendous understatement.  In retrospect, I see things differently – he had some health issues come up in his last few weeks of life, and in hindsight, it’s obvious that they were more serious than we – and all but the last of the vets we took him to – thought they were.  But at the time, I didn’t know that he was dying until the last day of his life when we took him to an emergency vet service and a vet we’d never met before was like, “Um, yeah, this situation isn’t what you think it is.”  We woke up that morning thinking we just needed to get him through the day, which was a Sunday, so he could see his regular vet again on Monday, and by 10:00 am Sunday morning we realized we had to put him to sleep.  And once it became obvious to us that he wasn’t going to improve, we were very certain that we didn’t want him to suffer for any longer, so we put him to sleep later that day. 

And on the one hand, this was the only thing to do, and on the other hand, I had no idea that this was what was coming.  I didn’t want my dog to suffer, but I also didn’t want to be without him, and I’d had, like, seven hours to go from thinking he was just having a really bad spell to holding him as he took his last breath.  I hadn’t contemplated the idea that he was dying, much less anticipated his absence, and I missed that little fucker SO much.  I remember telling a friend of mine that if I’d been given the option, I would have given up a finger if I could have had two more months with him.  And at the time, I really meant that.  I was dead serious.  I’m not sure that I would have given up two fingers, but I definitely would have given up one.  That was how much I loved Seymour and loved his presence in my life.

And learning how to live without him was sad, sad, sad.  It was necessary, of course, but it was intensely sad.  I just wanted to still have him.  I just wished I could have had a little more time, if nothing else. 

And at first, my spouse and I were like, “We have to get another dog, but there’s no way we can get another dog right now.”  Both of those things were equally true at once.  And then a few months passed and one day the first of those truths became the only truth, and I suddenly felt DESPERATE to get another dog.  I wanted another dog, and I wanted one immediately – or, at the very least, I wanted to know when and from where our next dog was coming.

And within a few more months, we had a new Westie puppy lined up.  And I was so excited.  All was right in the universe again.  And then we got our new puppy, who we named Julius, and he was absolutely perfect.

Except, of course, he also wasn’t.  He was the cutest, sweetest fucking thing in the world.  He was amazing and wonderful.  And he also was a puppy, and a total pain in the ass of a puppy at that.  But worst of all, he wasn’t Seymour.  And I kind of hated him for it.  This was totally unfair and unreasonable of me, but that didn’t stop me.  I thought I’d wanted a new dog, but after we got Julius, what I quickly realized was that what I really wanted was my old dog to come back to life.  Even though I really did know that that wasn’t an option. 

Put a little differently, I was stuck on having ONE very specific thing.  I wanted one uniquely precious creature.  One particular dog.  And to an extent, there’s nothing wrong with that, and in fact, loving one particular thing is great in some ways.  Being convinced that one particular creature is uniquely wonderful can make our relationship with that creature uniquely special.  And that can be a really, really lovely experience to have.

But we can’t always have the particular thing we want.  Or if we have it, we may not be able to have it forever.  All living creatures die, and they may die before we do.  And if we’re talking about human creatures, humans may break up with us, or move to Antarctica, or otherwise exit our lives.  And when this happens, we sometimes think that we’ll never find anyone else to love again.  Or at the very least, we’ll never be able to find someone that we loved as much as that one particular person.

What happened with me and Julius was that after my initial bout at being mad at him for being a crazy puppy and for not being the reincarnation of Seymour, I fell in love with him for being exactly the dog he was.  It didn’t happen overnight.  It took probably a few months.  Maybe more than a few months.  And at that time, those months seemed like forever, but now that amount of time seems completely irrelevant.  I started to appreciate him more and more for being the creature that he was, instead of focusing on the fact that he wasn’t Seymour.  And this happened both intentionally and unintentionally.  I mean, in addition to being a little high-maintenance, he was a ridiculously cute and sweet puppy, and it was hard not to appreciate that and enjoy him for that.  He was, in some respects, a better dog than Seymour was, right out of the gate.  In some ways it was ridiculous to not instantly appreciate him just the way he was, but all the same, at first I didn’t care about that at all, I just wanted Seymour back.  But the more I let myself love little Julius, the more I loved him.

What I wanted even more than being stuck on wanting something I couldn’t have – namely, to have Seymour back - was to have a dog that I loved, and to love the dog that I had.  And once I got through my initial resistance to loving a dog that wasn’t Seymour, I was all-in on Julius.  ALL IN.  And then, about a year after we got Julius, we got Lakshmi, and at first I wasn’t too sure about her either, but then, same as with Julius, I started to love her, too.    

And before long, my heart was so full of love for these two amazing, uniquely wonderful little dogs that I just didn’t have the bandwidth to miss Seymour like I once did.  It’s not exactly that I didn’t or don’t miss him anymore.  Sometimes a memory of him will arise and I’ll feel deep pangs of sadness.  As I’ve been putting this podcast episode together I’ve been thinking about him a lot and I’ve been thinking more about his particularities than I have in a long time and as I’ve done that, I’ve missed him.  But although he will always have a very special place in my heart, for the most part I’m just too damn busy loving the dogs I have now to actively miss Seymour.  I’m too focused on being present with Julius and Lakshmi who are right here in front of me, being their wonderful selves, and demanding my attention and care all day every day.

And the reason why this is the case is because I allow this to be the case.  I COULD dig in my heels and focus on memories of Seymour and continuously think about how singular my love was for him and find reasons to unfavorably compare Julius and Lakshmi to him.  I could do that.  And I did do a bit of that, for a while.  But not for too long.  Because, as I said earlier, what I really want, more than anything, is to have dogs that I love, and love the dogs that I have.  As the Stephen Stills song goes, “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.”  And so I do.  And my heart is so full of love for THESE two uniquely precious dogs that one of these days it just might burst. 

This wasn’t inevitable.  In addition to the option of focusing on memories of Seymour instead of loving the dogs in front of me, I could have also said, “Losing Seymour was just too painful.  I can’t go through that kind of a loss again, so that means I’m not going to get another dog.”  Or perhaps, “I’ll never love a dog again the way I loved Seymour, so why bother getting another one?”  But I didn’t do that.

I tell you this story because I talk to a lot of people who are on the brink of losing their relationship with their affair partner – or are at least potentially on the brink of losing that relationship - and are not happy about that.  And a lot of these folks are not only displeased about the possibility of losing their relationship with this particular person, they are CONVINCED that they will never find anyone else who they can share the kind of love they have with their affair partner again.  Convinced.

And it is absolutely true that the love you share with a particular person is its own uniquely wonderful thing.  It is entirely possible that there are some specific elements of your experiences with your affair partner that you will never experience in the exact same way with anyone else.  That’s what makes a singular experience of love so amazing, after all.  It is unique and uniquely precious.  Would we get as invested in relationships as we do if we didn’t find particular people uniquely wonderful?  Possibly not!

But even though we can and do find particular people to be particularly wonderful, that doesn’t mean any one person is the only person you can find uniquely precious.

A lot of people fight me hard when I tell them this.  And I understand why.  When you’re in love with someone – and perhaps especially if you’re scared of losing that someone – you may not have ANY INTEREST AT ALL in considering the possibility that you could love someone else.  You may just want your particular person.  And that’s fair enough.  When you are involved in a relationship that you love and appreciate and value, the idea of being with someone else may not be appealing AT ALL.  And that’s fine.  That makes sense.

So timing matters a lot here.  If you’re still involved with someone, but you’re afraid your relationship with them may be coming to an end, the point is not that it’s time to get out there and find someone new.  Rather, the point is that if you want to, when you want to, you can find the kind of relationship you want to have again.  It is important to keep that in mind, however abstractly, as you’re thinking about the end or the possible end of your relationship with your beloved affair partner.  Because if you believe that it is only possible for you to experience the kind of love or intimacy or sex or all of that and then some with one particular person and only that person, a) you will subject yourself to unnecessary suffering, and b) that belief may guide your actions in ways that create results that you don’t really like.

And as much as you love your affair partner right now, you really might want to be with someone other than them someday.  Yes, you might REALLY WANT love with your particular person.  But what you might want even more than them specifically is to experience love in a particular way with someone who is fully available to experience love with you.  What you might want even more than a relationship with your affair partner is a non-affair relationship with someone you are delighted by who is also delighted by you.

Also, if your affair partner decides they don’t want to be with you for whatever reasons, do you really want to be the end of your love life?  Do you really want your experience of giving and receiving love to be determined by any one person’s decisions?

Some people tell me, with great vehemence and conviction, “Well, I’ve lived for all these years and I’ve never met a person like my affair partner before, and that means it is highly unlikely if not downright impossible for me to ever meet a person like them again.”  And to that I say, only state your wishes.  The fact that you’ve never experienced a connection with someone that’s like the connection you share with your affair partner isn’t proof that you can never have that kind of experience again.  And moreover, you could argue that the fact that you’ve experienced what you have with your affair partner is proof that you’re capable of co-creating this kind of connection again.  If you’ve found it and done it once, that’s proof that it’s possible.

It’s a little like orgasms.  There was probably a time in your life when you hadn’t yet experienced an orgasm, and at that point, you didn’t know what you didn’t know.  But after you experienced your first orgasm, were you like, “Well, okay, that was great, but I guess that’s never going to happen again”?  Possibly not!  Possibly, you were like, “Let’s figure out how to do that again!”

And, just as a side note, if you’re listening to this and you have not experienced an orgasm, and you want to, you can explore your capacity for orgasm.  Just because you haven’t had one yet doesn’t mean you can’t.  Some people experience orgasms really easily.  Some people don’t.  And that’s a whole other topic entirely, but the analogy is important.

When it comes to being able to find the kind of love that you want to experience again, after you’ve lost it with someone you really cared about, consider this.  A lot of us – probably most of us, if not ALL of us – do not come into the world knowing how to give and receive love.  A lot of us – or again, maybe more than a lot of us – do not come to life pre-programmed with an understanding of how we want to connect with other people in intimate ways.  A lot of us do not know, from the moment of birth, what we want out of love and sex and romance and relationships.  And so we figure it out as we go along, to varying degrees.  Maybe we very consciously explore and evaluate what we want out of love and sex and relationships and romance from a pretty young age, maybe we don’t.  And especially if we don’t, but even if we do, we may think that whatever we DO learn about love and sex and romance is all there is to know about these things. 

But then, one day, something happens, and we suddenly become very much aware that sex and love and romance and relationships can be so much more than what we thought they could be.  And sometimes these sorts of realizations are facilitated by a relationship that happens to be an affair relationship.  These kinds of quantum shifts in our understandings of what is possible in the realm of love and sex and relationships can happen in other ways too, of course, but for the purposes of this podcast, the most relevant example is affairs, or other experiences of infidelity.  We’ve been going on, minding our business in life, maybe not have ever having had experiences of sex and love and romance and relationships that were all that amazing, and then wham.  We meet somebody, an affair begins, and suddenly we see the world in color instead of in grayscale. 

And of course it’s partially because of the specific person we’re involved with that we’re having the incredible experience that we’re having.  But it’s also because we have – however accidentally – stumbled into an entirely different way of being ourselves, and relating to another person.  We are discovering new capacities for experiencing love and sex and connection that are within us, and are not completely dependent upon the wonderful person we’re involved with. 

And the capacities of yours that you have discovered with your affair partner are transferrable.  You can connect with others in the way you’ve connected with your affair partner.  Once you know you have the capacity for this, you can do it again.  If you want to.  Will your connection with other people be exactly the same as it is with your affair partner, or any particular person, for that matter?  No, of course not.  But it doesn’t need to be.  When you start to realize how deeply you can love someone, or how great sex can be with someone you’re insanely attracted to, a particular quality of connection becomes the point – rather than having to have a very specific someone or something that you don’t have access to.

Now some people say, “Well, my affair partner just fell into my lap, I wasn’t seeking out a connection of any kind, and I think that if I were to intentionally look for the kind of relationship I want to have, I’d have a very hard time finding it.”  And I understand what people are getting at when they say this.  If you haven’t amassed a lot of evidence through your own experiences that you can look for love and find it, or look for the kind of relationship you want to have and find it, or seek out great sex and experience it, it may be hard to conceive of the possibility that you really can go after and find any or all of these things.

But you can.  Whatever you’ve learned from your connection with your affair partner can inform your sense of what you want, and what it is possible for you to have.  When we’re seeking something, we tend to find what we expect to find.  So when you know what you want and you believe you can find what you want and have what you want, you’re in a much better position to look for the kind of intimate connections you want than you were before you met your affair partner.  The version of you that is looking for love – if that’s what you’re looking for – after their affair is not the same person who hadn’t yet experienced tremendous love before their affair.  When YOU are different, you are in a different position to seek and find what you want.  Starting, quite simply but very importantly, with having a much better sense of what you want.

And when it comes to believing that you can’t find anyone else to connect with in the way that you want to, let me remind you that there are about eight billion people on this planet these days.  Even if we control for things like geography, age, gender, sexual preferences, taste in music, and whatever else you want to control for, there are still a lot of eligible humans out there who you could form a mind-blowing connection with.  Sometimes people tell me, “Well, I’ve met a lot of people before, but I’ve never met anyone like my affair partner before,” and to that I say, great.  Now you know that these kinds of qualities in a person exist, you can start looking for them in other humans.  And there are a lot of other humans out there.  Now that you’re more attuned to the kind of experience you want to have, you can tune your antennae to start detecting the signals you want to pick up on.

Sometimes people are like, “Well, okay, I believe that I COULD find love again, but it might take a long time!”  And to that I say, what counts as a “long time”?  And why are you worrying about that right now, anyway?

Some years ago I was in a training thing of sorts, and the husband of one of the women in the group died.  If I remember correctly, he had been in poor health, and maybe she’d known that he was likely to die soon.  If my memory serves me, his death wasn’t a complete surprise.  At any rate, this woman started going on dates within weeks after her husband died.  It MIGHT have been like one or two weeks.  I don’t remember exactly so I’m not 100% sure of this but I promise I am not exaggerating for dramatic effect.  And I didn’t know this woman well, so I knew there was a lot about her situation that I didn’t know, and when she said she was trying to date weeks after her husband’s death, I thought, well, who knows, maybe he’d been sick for a long time, maybe they had some sort of agreement and she’d been dating people before he died, maybe she pre-grieved his death for so long that she’s ready to get out there and party.  Literally or figuratively.  But then not too long after she announced that she was dating, she came crying – literally - to the group because dating wasn’t going well because she missed her husband too much.  And interestingly, no one in the group suggested to her that she might need some time to just miss her husband before she bothered with dating.  Which I found a little perplexing.  And if the circumstances had been a little different I might have spoken up and offered my opinion, but given the nature of the situation, I didn’t.

However, I will tell YOU my opinion about this woman’s situation and situations that are even remotely similar now.  And it is this: when a relationship that we care very much about ends, we may need time to grieve the loss of that important part of our life before we can even think about what it means to “move on.”  And the only way to find out how much time we need is to allow ourselves to experience our grief, and see what happens.  And there are certainly ways we can deal with grief intentionally, and that might – might – mean we can get through it more efficiently.  But being reasonably efficient with how we navigate grief doesn’t mean we get to rush through it.

So if you’re worrying about how long it might take you to find love again, that MIGHT be an indication that you need to hurry up and be right where you are in your life for a little while first.  It’s a lot easier to find love when we’re okay with not having it.  That doesn’t mean you don’t want it.  It means you hold your desire lightly.  What does it mean to hold our desires lightly?  Well, that’s a big topic, and it’s one I’ve talked about in other podcast episodes, such as Holding Our Desires Lightly, with Katy Dion, which is episode number 92, and Wanting Something and not Having it Yet, which is episode 113.  For today’s purposes, I want you to consider staying away from questions like “Well how long will it take me to find love again if it doesn’t – or didn’t – work out with my affair partner?” for a while.  If questions like that are burning a hole in your brain, I encourage you to set them down for a bit.

Instead of focusing on “how long will it take?”, start thinking about how ready you are to experience love again.  Are you available to giving and receiving love?  Are you available for a relationship?  Are you available for sex with someone other than yourself?  Why or why not?  And if so, to what degree?

Focus on your capacity to experience love and sex and connection and intimacy.  If you find that you really don’t have much capacity for those kinds of experiences right now, maybe this isn’t the time to seek them out!  Maybe this isn’t even the time to try to build your capacity for those things!  But if you desire and you feel capable of intimate connection, then seek and ye shall find. 

The actual business of how you might go about looking for love is another topic for another time, and it’s an important one.  But what I see, over and over, is that people who are available for the kinds of connections they want to experience and believe that they can find the kinds of connections they want to experience tend to find those kinds of connections pretty easily.  Maybe even a little too easily.  So see if you can allow your cherished experiences with your affair partner serve as evidence of what is possible, rather than as evidence of what isn’t possible.  Allow whatever you’ve shared with your affair partner to serve as evidence that you can find love and lust and intimacy and delight with another person.  Allow your experiences with your affair partner to prime you to have the kinds of experiences you want to have again.  Allow whatever you shared with your affair partner to serve as your initiation into a whole new understanding of how good intimate relationships can possibly be.

Another wpisode which is very relevant to what I’ve been talking about today is episode 123, which is called something like Abundance vs. Scarcity of Love.  If the question of whether or not you’ll be able to find love again, or find the kind of connection you want with someone other than the person you’re currently involved with is a big one for you right now, go listen to that episode, too.

If your infidelity situation is something you find even remotely challenging to deal with, I encourage you to enroll in my private, online course, You’re Not the Only One.  In this course you will learn how to start navigating your infidelity situation systematically and deliberately, rather than unintentionally and haphazardly.  And there is a lot to be gained from making this shift sooner rather than later.  Instead of ruminating and driving yourself into analysis paralysis, enroll in Your Not the Only One and learn how to use your power to think about your infidelity situation to your advantage, instead of continuing to use that big powerful brain of yours to do unproductive things like worry and speculate.  You can enroll in You’re Not the Only One through my website, mariemurphyphd.com.  And of course, if you want to work with me one-on-one, you can begin that process by going to my website, too.  If you want to work with me one-on-one, the first step is to schedule an introductory coaching session with me.  We’ll meet via Zoom, so that means we can work together no matter where you’re located.  I can’t wait to meet you.

All right everybody, that’s it for today.  Thank you so much for listening.  Bye for now.