Today we have a letter that is extremely relevant to the dynamics of an affair - and also challenges us to be truly honest with ourselves.

There’s an old saying, “never wrap a bad act inside a good intention.” We are so good at telling ourselves what we want to hear. We are experts at concocting plausible cover stories for something we know we shouldn’t do. Getting at the truth requires us to sit down, ask some hard questions, and sit quietly so we can hear the sound of the lie buried below the surface.

This is the backdrop for today’s letter.

Dear Lauren,

I have a specific issue that I'd like help with. My former affair partner lives in an area of North Carolina that got completely destroyed by hurricane Helene. I'm worried that he's okay.

We've been no contact for awhile. I've agreed with my husband not to contact him, but the fact that I even think about and worry about him upsets my husband. I don't know what to do about this. He'll say "the only reason you two don't talk is because of me."

How do I handle this situation without hurting my husband, but also being truthful that I'm worried about him?

Sincerely,

Worried in North Carolina

In my response, there’s some gently delivered, but clear-eyed guidance on what’s really at play with Worried in North Carolina.

This situation is grounded in the unique dynamics of an affair and, also, it’s a challenge for all of us to get honest about what motivates us and do the work so we can hear the sound of the lies we tell ourselves.

I’m so grateful that Worried has been brave and shared this situation. It has allowed us to open a conversation that is both universal and specific - and that’s the reason this newsletter exists.

Here’s my response:

So much of what drives us in life is based in shame and anxiety - and the ways we act out to avoid them.

Worried in North Carolina has delivered a huge gift to all of us by having the courage to speak up. The illusion of control and the avoidance of shame are thoroughly interwoven in the issue that has been presented.

There’s the belief that she is doing a “good” thing by reinitiating contact with her affair partner, even though she has made a promise to her husband and herself to be no contact. The natural disaster is the seemingly-plausible cover for the real driver - anxiety abatement.

The anxiety can be driven up by a wide range of things, but I suspect there’s a strong desire to look good and be well thought of, which, sometimes, is really a response to feelings of shame. I’ll show everyone how good I am because I have doubts.

These are universal conditions that have very specific expressions in the affair dynamic. Strip away the top layers and what’s underneath is undeniable: recovery is based in the integrity that is found through aligned intentions and actions.

“To thine own self be true” is found when we really know ourselves. The possibility of distraction by circumstances and conditions - and self-deception - is real, which is why I am so glad Worried spoke up. It takes a lot of courage to pierce the bubble.

I'm so deeply grateful for you all being here with me again this week. Please feel free to share this with a friend, start a discussion thread here in the community, and join us on Instagram and join my mailing list so you never miss an update on our new courses and opportunities for getting unstuck in life and relationships.

With all my love and support,
Lauren

Response transcript:

This letter is super relevant because it brings up the issue that's unique to affairs where, because it's an illicit relationship, affair partners don't have the type of access to each other that a normal relationship that isn't so fraught would have. This becomes a huge problem when there's illness or emergency, or something that's urgent that can't be communicated or checked in on, in real time.

That happens during affairs, and it can happen after affairs, as in the case with this letter. What happens when we're not able to reach out to someone that we care about because of the terms of our relationship...?

I have a lot of compassion and understanding for why this is so hard. Again, under normal circumstances, you would want to reach out, you would let them know that you're thinking about them, that you care that they're okay, but these are not normal circumstances.

You have made a promise to your husband that you won't be in contact with your affair partner out of respect to the marriage, out of respect for yourself and for your husband. It sounds to me like you're coming away from the reason you made this decision, too. You made it for yourself because you made a choice that you are committed to your marriage, and that you are working to repair, and establish honesty.

So when you're thinking about it, as if you’re going no contact just for your husband, you're undermining being honest with yourself - that this is something that you need to want and be committed to as well.

You need to stay laser focused on that goal if your goal is recovery. If your goal is healing, your marriage and healing, the broken trust, then no, you can't reach out and see if your former affair partner is okay even if there has been a natural disaster in his town.

When you reach out, you're also undermining your affair partner's boundaries. You're not respecting his healing. You're not respecting his boundaries, his right to move on. You have no idea what he wants in his life and what he needs around this, and by inserting yourself in what's going on in his life you're reestablishing contact and you're reconnecting and you're stepping back into something that is no longer yours.

It's no longer your business what is or is not happening. In his life.

So let's talk about what your urge to reach out to him is really about.

It's about anxiety. And it's about control.

Your affair partner was an adult with his own life before he met you and he'll keep being an adult. With his own life after this is over.

So it's actually our own anxiety that's flaring up when we tell ourselves a story that maybe they're not okay and that maybe we need to check on them or do something or step back into their life. We're doing that, not for them, but for ourselves.

And that's why it's about control. Stopping contact and committing to that and committing to understanding that things are going to happen in his life and things are going to happen in your life that you're no longer a part of that. You're no longer communicating to each other. That is part of letting go control. That is part of accepting the circumstances that you are no longer in each other's lives, and that to step back into that, to reinitiate contact is destructive.

It's destructive to him and it's destructive to you moving on. So, this is about you needing to self-sooth. This is about you needing to exercise self-restraint. It's about you reminding yourself that you are releasing your affair partner into his own life.

Now, if your husband feels that the only reason you don't talk to your affair partner is because of him that's something that you need to examine. What's going on there for you, that you still feel that there's a role for you, and you affair partner in each other's lives.

This isn't really about your affair partner, and, frankly, if you do or don't talk to your affair partner it doesn't have to do with your husband either. This has to do with you.

So what's going on here where you're having trouble establishing boundaries and holding them yourself? I understand the urge to reach out to someone that you care about, especially when something disastrous like this has happened in their life. But if we're walking the line, if we're walking the line of recovery, then you need to walk your line...

We can always come up with all the reasons in the world to justify why we're doing something.

But really, ask yourself, why you're doing this for you? Are you uncomfortable with the idea that something may have happened in his life and that you're not the person who is reaching out to care about him. Are you worried about how you're going to look?

Are you worried about the impression that your lack of contact is going to make on him? What is this really about for you?

Letting go and living a life of recovery is realizing that someone else's life is no longer our business. That someone else needs to handle what's happening in their life without us. That our business is to live our own life. Our business is to stay focused on ourself and our business is to do the next right thing based on our goals and what is ours to do. Knowing what's ours and what's not ours that's the work of recovery.

So allow yourself to be worried, allow yourself to wonder. That's all normal. But remind yourself that this is about your anxiety and about control. That this is more about your anxiety than about the possibility that he's really not okay and needs you to step into his life.

I hope this helps.

Today’s letter comes from an unfaithful spouse who had a multi-year affair. The relationship has ended and he’s wondering how to move forward. What was his role in the affair relationship not working out? Does he tell his wife, even though the affair has ended?

This question - do I disclose the affair, or not - is one of the most complicated, and conflicting, issues we encounter here. As a community of people who span the three sides of the infidelity triangle, I want this to be a place where we can learn from each other and get on with our healing, so I took the question to our Instagram community. Check out this post and please spend some time in the comments. There is some heartfelt wisdom in there.

Quick reminder, your support as a paid subscriber is a critical part of maintaining this space. Together, we’re creating and cultivating a new narrative around infidelity. Your paid subscription creates more room for us to do our work as public educators and conveners of this unique space.

And now, on to this week’s “Letter to Lauren” where “A Dumb Guy” writes:

Dear Lauren,

I'm a married man who was having an affair with a married woman. Our affair was long distance, as she lives about 12 hour drive from me. She said she was unsettled with being ignored in the bedroom and in general conversation. I was unhappy with being ignored in the bedroom and constantly arguing with my wife about everything. Our affair was mostly online, we met on a public safety professionals forum in 2019. We would send each other sexts through Snap. We had a 1000 day snap streak going. We would snap each other pretty much every hour. It changed in January of 2023 when we first met up. Our interludes included hours long passionate sex sessions when I passed through town. She even flew out to see me and I lied to my wife about where I was going. We had sex for the last time in September 2023. Since then she would say "I'm all yours". I would reply in kind. I could tell that me not divorcing my wife was draining on my affair partner. She left her husband, sold their house, but did not file for divorce yet. 

In July, I was excited that I was going to a Metallica concert and sent her a snap, it had the song Whiskey in the Jar in the background. She took the song personally and told me to fuck off. About a week later, we FaceTimed and she and I formally broke it off as the timing was not right. She wanted me to get my shit together and choose, she said that our relationship was on hold until I did. She told me that she was hanging out with her ex, and it was platonic. We tried to continue being friends, only on Snap, as we blocked each other on socials and phone numbers. It fell apart. She said we had no chance of getting back together, didn't want me sending her gifts, and that she was just my friend. I told her that it was unhealthy if we stayed friends and we deleted each other from Snap. I tried to communicate with her unsuccessfully since. How do I get over her and move on? Do I have to tell my wife to repair my marriage?

Sincerely,
A Dumb Guy

Here’s my response:

In today’s video I challenge “A Dumb Guy” to look at his own emotional maturity and communication levels before even considering whether to tell his spouse. Even if the affair is over, the disclosure is going to be traumatic and the choice to inflict that trauma on another human being is a massive step.

I also encourage him to check out Lindsay Gibson’s Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, which is a fountain of insight on how to heal from distant, rejecting or emotional unavailable parents.

Please feel free to share this with a friend, start a discussion thread here in the community, and join us on Instagram and join my mailing list so you never miss an update on our new courses and opportunities for getting unstuck in life and relationships.

With all my love and support,
Lauren

Response Transcript:

Dear Dumb Guy,

The fact that you signed this “dumb guy” tells me that you've got some healing to do after this affair… That you feel really crappy about yourself, probably after this affair, but also in your marriage. This is a great opportunity for you to double down on learning about how to restore your sense of self and self-worth after what's happened. It feels to me like this affair has a lot of hallmarks of emotional immaturity. It feels like the relationship was really rooted in sexual tension and sexual chemistry, and that it was an outlet for both of you to be getting those needs met, and to feel alive.

The limitations of this relationship though, feel vast. From the physical distance between the two of you and the lives that you have, to the fact that it sounds like your relationship left a lot to be desired in terms of communication — productive, healthy, mature communication. “What are we doing? Why are we doing it? What's the goal here?”

So because the communication wasn't clear and wasn't forthcoming and honest, it built up a lot of resentment. And it leads to the moment where you snap her something sort of immaturely inane — it's it's normal, you're going to a Metallica concert — but she's probably like “read the room! I left my marriage, I sold my house and you're whistling your way to Metallica!”

She's pissed off, but were you actually talking about it? There's this vacuous space in which you're snapping each other, meanwhile you have some unspoken expectations going on here for what's supposed to be happening instead. And the need to communicate through these situations so, so, so, so strongly is immense. So that's what stands out to me as lacking in this situation.

I don't know the song Whiskey in the Jar, but she tells you to fuck off because she's just really pissed that you're acting like there's nothing wrong. You say the relationship fell apart because the timing wasn't right. But I think the relationship fell apart because the communication wasn't right. And because the honesty, and the integrity of how you were showing up in that relationship wasn't as strong as it would have been required to be.

And so I think your work is actually to do some self-reflecting on how you communicate in relationships. Are you avoidant? This letter gives me some avoidance vibes. It feels like maybe you wait to be pursued, either in conversation or in life. And then, there's either conflict or resentment or upset, and you can react to that, you can respond to that, but what about you coming forward into a relationship with vulnerability and honesty? With sharing your truth instead of this more reactive stance? So again, I don't know you, but that's just the vibe I'm getting from this letter that makes me jump to some conclusions about where your work could be. It's worth looking into.

And when it comes to getting over this relationship, make a laundry list of all the reasons that this relationship wouldn't have worked out — from the distance, to the emotional immaturity and everything in between. You know, when I read this letter, what stands out to me is this relationship would have led to the same pitfalls and disasters that you probably have in your marriage.

Again, I'm being really blunt, but you were in an affair and the amount of discord and disconnection and interpersonal communicative strife that was happening in that dynamic is probably a reflection of how it would have gone. You probably would have ended up being a hot and cold relationship dynamic moving forward.

So check what I'm saying against what you think could be true because you're the one who's in this experience, I'm not. But honestly, my fear is that you were going down this road, but perhaps you hadn't done some of the work to address what you bring to the table in a relationship, and this would have turned into a really volatile relationship where communication left a lot to be desired all over again.

Now do you tell your spouse?

This is a really, really, really big question. And so I actually turned to our Instagram community. You can go onto my Instagram @laurenlarusso and look for my post. Look for the reel, in which I asked the community to share their feedback and their experiences of their spouse telling them about the affair and what happened, because it does run the gamut, and I love the fact that we're in a community where we can hear from people who have real lived experiences. So I want us all to benefit from that. And when it comes down to it, you have to take a step back and reflect on your own life. And reflect on the question, “what's my goal here? Is my goal to just unburden myself because I feel so bad about myself, aand I can't live with myself? Or is my goal to really actually move forward in an honest relationship, whether that's with my wife or without my wife?”

Because the truth is disclosure ends that relationship now, whether or not you're able to start a new relationship after that is up to both of you. Or whether or not it ends that relationship and you seek to then cultivate an honest open relationship with someone new eventually, that's another possible outcome. But it’s so important to reflect on the question. “If I do tell my spouse about my affair, what's my motivation?”

And getting underneath that and not being reckless about it because the truth is that infidelity is a trauma, and it's happened. Some people might argue, ‘You know what? You did it, you owe it to them to let them know that this exists. They're always going to be feeling it. And so, disclose it.” The flip side of that is that now this person has to live with a tremendous amount of trauma. And are you ready to handle that responsibly? Are you ready to handle whatever the outcome might be from that?

And are you ready to do the work that you need to do? To come to the table and learn how to be in a new version of a relationship. And that new version is going to require you to learn the emotional maturity that was perhaps lacking in your marriage. And was definitely lacking in your affair.

Wherever we go there we are. So if we don't do our work, then we're going to keep on re-enacting our own pitfalls in our own life, because we are recreating the same interpersonal dynamics and situations. So I want you to really maybe do a little reading on emotional maturity.

The book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents is a really, really beautiful book that can help you just learn about emotional maturity. Maybe it was modeled for you growing up, maybe it wasn't. But if you read that book, you can seek to reflect and see if you can find yourself in any of that. And if so, what would an evolution look like for you in terms of emotional maturity?

So I hope this answer helps. And I'm so proud of the community that we have here, where we can hear all sides of infidelity. And I'm so proud of the community that we've cultivated here, where we can talk about all sides of affairs, how it affects all of us, and really figure out how to become unstuck in our lives, move forward, but also use infidelity as the catalyst to create a better life, a better version and break through our barriers.

Until next week. This is Lauren with letters to Lauren.

Thanks so much for being here.

This week we have a letter that speaks to us all.

Mrs. W, our letter writer, is touching on universal themes of authenticity and the struggle to be your whole self throughout life’s many stages. As you read her words, you’ll see why this was one of the most impactful letters I’ve received. It begs the question: how do we move forward when we have new knowledge, new information, that we can never un-know?

Let’s get right to it!

Dear Lauren,

I'm a 41-year-old mother of two and I've been married to my husband for 18 years. I was 38 years old when I met and shockingly fell in love with my husband's unmarried female coworker. Never in my life did I ever imagine I would be “that person”, but also never in my life did I imagine I was gay. Falling in love with her, I experienced a love I've never felt and only thought possible in movies. I finally understood why I had so many unsettling feelings during my marriage, even though my husband truly is the near perfect human and partner. He of course found out only about three months into our relationship and was broken over it. He has stayed by me and his coworker is a part of our everyday lives.

My feelings for her haven't changed and neither has the extreme guilt I feel about those feelings — discovering I'm gay so late in life, and destroying the life we've built and my family, to be truly happy in my own skin with the one life I have. We've been stuck in limbo for three and a half years. Do you ever work with women in my situation?

Sincerely,
Mrs. W.

Simply said, YES… I work with people in Mrs. W’s situation all the time and it is more common than people would think. If you would like to schedule a session with me, or Michelle Leon, our other amazing coach, you can start the process here.

Below is my response to Mrs. W, where I explore what happens when we are confronted with new truths and are tasked with incorporating those new truths into our lives — lives that were built on our old truths, or previous knowledge. I explore the idea of living in a space of “middle knowledge”, which is that great hallway of the in-between, where we know something is right for us or that a change has to be made, but we aren’t ready to accept what it means for our lives.

Please remember that paid subscribers make it possible for us to convene this space. You are here because you see that a nuanced approach, in a safe and compassionate space, grounded in rigor and truth-telling, is valuable. I’m so grateful for it. Your paid subscription creates more room for us to do our work as public educators and conveners of this unique space.

Here’s my response:

What I love about Letters to Lauren, and this week's letter, in particular, is that the themes of love and life and relationships apply to all of us. If you're a betrayed spouse, if you're in an affair, if you are an affair partner, it doesn't matter. The ideas and the themes of how to be whole and how to be authentic as you evolve through your own life and relationships are why we're here. Letters to Lauren, and all of the work we do together, is possible because we are willing to have the hard conversations that are going to help you learn, grow and become unstuck.

Remember, once you know something, you can never unknow it, no matter who you are. And when you free yourself, you free everyone else around you.

I'm so deeply grateful for you all being here with me again this week. Please feel free to share this with a friend, start a discussion thread here in the community, and join us on Instagram and join my mailing list so you never miss an update on our new courses and opportunities for getting unstuck in life and relationships.

With all my love and support,
Lauren

Response transcript:

Dear Mrs. W,

This is a situation that's not as uncommon as you think.

I do work with people who are in your situation all the time. Here's the thing that is hallmark to affairs: the experience oftentimes opens the door for you to know something about yourself; for you to know something inside of yourself. Once we know something, we can never un-know it. All we can do is bury it, suppress it, try to push it away or try to live in what I refer to as “middle knowledge”, which is the knowledge where you're holding both things to be true, subconsciously — the old construct and the new construct.

But you're in this unresolved space, and it sounds to me like you've been living in middle knowledge for a really long time, that in order to live your most authentic version and your authentic life, because of what you now know, you would have to make a change.

But holding onto your old life and your old constructs is still doing something for you. And my work for you would be to explore what it's doing for you to stay in limbo. Once we know something we can and we will never unknow it. And so your life is going to be a trajectory in which you now know something that you can't un-know about yourself.

That is an irrevocable truth. And anyone who has an affair ends up knowing something about themselves, about what they want, about how they feel, about their desires, their vision for the future, feelings even about where they've been thus far, what they've had thus far, it opens Pandora's box to knowing.

Now, obviously that knowing is limited because an affair is not a real-world relationship. It can become one and it sometimes does. But it's more, in this case and in many cases with affairs, about identifying what it is that you know now, because of this, that you will never unknow. In your case, your understanding that your sexuality in your current and future is a complete departure from the knowing about your sexuality that you had in your first phase of life.

You say that you're learning that you're gay this late in life. And it does feel late because obviously you wish you had known this so much earlier, but you also have more of your adult life left to live than the adult life that you've already lived. How do you want to live that adult life? It's better that you find out at 38 that you're gay and begin to explore what it's going to require you to move into your more authentic version.

Now, obviously, you've got a lot good with your husband and there's nothing wrong with figuring out how to preserve the best parts of that. And that's kind of your work that you're going to have to do together. But I will say that when it comes to your husband, as is true of any betrayed spouse, his best life is not with somebody who is living outside of their authenticity. His best partnership is not with somebody who is settling for being with him and suppressing their knowing in order to persevere in a life with him. That's not authentic, honest alignment. And when one person in a relationship is out of alignment and out of their authenticity and trying to live in a space where they ‘don't know something they already know’, the entire partnership suffers. The entire partnership feels it.

And so I would encourage you to look ahead and say, what's it going to require of me and what's it going to do to both of us to live in a space where I am suppressing my authentic version and my authentic knowing? That's not fair to either of you because I can almost guarantee there's someone out there that's going to love your husband, who is obviously a beautiful, wonderful partner and human, and be with him intimately and relationally in a way that's in alignment for him as well.

Because if he's with you and you're out of alignment, then he's living a life out of alignment because he's not with someone who authentically wants to be with him. Maybe he's with someone who wants all of the parts of the life that you built together, and there's nothing wrong with that. We all make choices for many different reasons, but that's something that you would both really need to talk about and choose into together.

Like if we keep going together, why? What are our values here and what are we going to live without because of that.

If you're gay and you've realized that you want to be with a woman and, instead, you're staying with your husband in order to preserve all those other parts, what are you going to live without because of that, and what is he going to live without, because of that and what's the toll that's taking on both of you?

And is it just going to be the situation where 5, 10, 15 years down the road, you can't sustain it. One or both of you is unfulfilled or out of their honest alignment. And you end up having to move towards the thing that you now realize that you've just kicked down the road.

So I think, you know, if you have a family, if you have kids, it's the hardest thing in the world, but if you choose into yourself authentically, you're setting an example for them. And you're not setting an example of martyrdom where you're telling yourself a story that everything has to stay the same so you don't affect anybody else. You're going to be affecting everybody else no matter what because you're trying so hard to live a life that doesn't fit you anymore authentically. And when we free ourselves, we free everyone around us.

It's a beautiful Liz Gilbert quote that I love, and I always come back to, "when we free ourselves, we free everyone else in our life."

And it doesn't mean that they aren't freed kicking and screaming, resistant, angry, and that they don't feel free right away. They may absolutely feel victimized instead. But I guarantee you, if you make one-degree choices towards freeing yourself, you are freeing everyone else you love and care about because if we are not free in our relationships — we are punishing, we are affecting and we are also keeping everyone else who's in that relational construct from being free. I guarantee it.

So, two pieces of reading that I would have for you, and I recommend one of these books all of the time. The first one is The Way of Integrity by Martha Beck. Go read it and she talks about coming into herself as a gay woman who was married to a man and finding a life of authentic integrity. And the second book, if you haven't already read it, is Glennon Doyle’s Untamed. There's this beautiful scene in it where she's braiding her daughter Tisha's hair, and she says, “if I wouldn't want this marriage, this life for my daughter, why am I choosing it for myself?” And that line just flat-lined me when I read that book, but hers is also a story of coming home and into yourself.

It's a process. It's painful. It's an evolution. It doesn't come, you know, with these golden sunshine beams, as you leap through wildflowers, it comes painfully, but on the other side of that pain is the woman who wants to feel alive and whole in her own skin. I hope this helps.

I was in an affair for three years. We initially met at a previous job and kept in touch and got close during Covid, right after she transitioned (MTF). It was a hard time for both of us. We became best friends and ultimately fell in love with each other. I've never felt a connection like that with anyone else. She gets the way my brain works because hers works in similar ways. When we talk, it's effortless- intellectually and emotionally stimulating. She's taught me so much about love. She loves me for my entire being. I love her — her essence, everything. I love my husband and he loves me too, but our connection is nothing like this.

We have two kids and keeping up with their busy lives takes a lot out of us. My AP has two kids too and is divorced. She struggles with mental illness and isn't working right now. She feels beat down as a result of the fallout from her transition, has a lot to work to do on herself to feel safe in the world so she can actively participate in it. Regardless, part of me really wanted to be with her. I broke it off only to go right back to her.

Then I disclosed our affair to my husband, telling him I was confused and in love with her. I chose to stay with my husband, because I love him and I wasn't ready to give up on my marriage and hurt my kids, as much as I love her. My AP and I are in no contact, but I desperately miss her. I can't stop thinking about her. It's only been two months which I know is nothing, but I can't shake the feelings of ambivalence about both situations.

I don't want to let her go even though I should to focus on my marriage, but I'm afraid of losing my true love. Even though we are working on things, I don't desire him, I desire her. I feel like I'm pretending/going through the motions with the "safe", "right" choice. I'm frustrated w/ myself — why can't I be happy with what I have? What if apples aren't enough for me? (apples/oranges post). How will I know what's right for me? I don't want any death bed regrets.

Sincerely,
Death Bed Regrets

Dear Death Bed Regrets,

It can feel like you’re going through the motions after an affair, especially when you’re grieving the disconnection from one relationship while trying to forge ahead in another. I’d encourage you to give it time, and be patient with yourself as you seek to know the path forward. Being in an affair changes our brains, and it takes time for what’s referred to as “affair fog” to lift. Allowing time to recover also, importantly, allows your brain to recalibrate. This brings the neural pathways that are responsible for critical thinking online again.

You determined that the right path forward is with your husband and children, out of love, out of duty, and out of a desire to keep what you value there intact. Those are completely valid reasons, so I don’t want you to diminish them by telling yourself that they’re “safe” and “right” as a negative thing.

Furthermore, your affair partner is adjusting to life after her own transition. You’re both in a period of getting to know yourselves again, under new circumstances, each with your own unique challenges. I wonder if it’s beneficial for her, too, to be no-contact right now, so she isn’t getting her heart broken by a relationship with someone who isn’t available, as she tries to heal and ground herself in the world.

It’s hard to be “happy with what you have” when you’re coming down off the high of an affair, AND grieving the loss of what you can’t or don’t have. Give your grief time and your recovery time, and let yourself feel it fully. The rub of an affair is that you can’t have both. And so you made a choice. Remember that if you’d chosen to be with your affair partner, you’d be grieving different losses — of your marriage and your family. And you may be wondering why you changed the very fiber and fabric of your life — just as you’re wondering now why you didn’t.

It’s human nature to want what we can’t have. Your job is to get closest to your truth, while also being loving and honest with the people you care about in your life. Be honest with your husband, if possible, about needing time to shift back into your relationship with him. You’re grieving your affair, and that grief often prevents connection with a spouse with whom you’re seeking to return. It’s okay to need to ease into intimacy, to need to take space to recalibrate and rediscover yourself, so you can take these parts of yourself back into your marriage, should you be able to.

And, if time continues on, and you don’t feel you’re being your most honest and authentic version, then you can always reassess your choice. The only person who can know what your absolute truth is is you. But your affair partner deserves to be with someone who is certain about that commitment and change, and you deserve to give your choice of your marriage and family a chance by allowing enough time to work through your feelings so you know what’s there and what’s possible.

Stop trying to be happy with what you have and don’t force a feeling. Just allow your feelings. Part of an affair is wanting both things. It’s the nature of an affair. And ultimately, everyone must eventually make a choice, unless they reach their death-bed still in an affair (some do).

Continue to remind yourself why you made the choice you did.

Be careful not to put your affair and your affair partner on a pedestal that compounds your pain unfairly to yourself.

Just allow yourself to acknowledge that you loved her fully and truly, and that you also love your family fully and truly. Two things can be true at the same time.

Ask yourself every day, “what is my truth today?” Maybe your truth isn’t your husband or your affair partner. There’s so much more available to you that’s being missed because of the focus on these two people, and who is right. What is my truth today? Maybe it’s peace. Maybe it’s feeling a glimmer of joy. Maybe it’s connecting to the love you have for your children as they make you laugh. There are so many more truths available to you other than the “BIG OUTCOME” choice that’s hurting right now. Allow yourself to be in each day, each moment, and I trust that the rest will become available to you.

With all my love and support,
Lauren

I have been in an on and off again relationship with a married man for five and a half years. He filed for divorce two years ago, but is still living at home and claims she is delaying the process by not signing the parenting agreement. I hate to lose him but I give up. There is no reason for it to take this long. I’m lost.

Sincerely,
Giving Up

Dear Giving Up,

You’re not lost — you’ve just been sitting in the quicksand of another person’s life and are looking to the other person who is in the quicksand to get you out of it, as well.

I’d recommend you read my previous Substack letter for additional insights about the delayed experience of divorce due to fears around parenting and parenting plans.

My question to you is: are your boyfriend and his ex-wife living by a parenting agreement while they’re co-habitating? What is the delay in signing the parenting agreement if there is one in place that’s already set a precedence? What is he doing to facilitate forward motion around it (or not)?

Cohabitating with his child(ren) may be allowing your partner to delay the inevitable experience of only seeing and being with his child(ren) part of the time. It’s a painful transition, so I wonder if your partner doesn’t have the motivation himself because of his own feelings around it.

That being said, if you’re “giving up” then I’d recommend you do live out the changes you wish to see. If it’s taking this long, if you’re over your limit of waiting for things to change, it’s time to make changes in your own life. What will that look like? What will you do?

When we feel our own life is on hold because of another person, our task becomes to have the courage to begin living on our own terms. They can meet us where we need them to be when they’re ready, when their lives match and meet us in the ways we haven’t seen or experienced from them yet.

This doesn’t need to come from a place of anger or defiance. Rather, it’s better to come from a resolute place of acceptance of the circumstances. Your partner isn’t moving forward in his divorce. That’s his stuff. There’s a reason it’s not being pursued actively and completed, and while his wife may be delaying, he may also not be doing his part to motivate the entire situation forward .

Instead of feeling lost, begin to ground yourself where you are. What path forward do you need to take to begin to feel free and good in your life? Where else can you focus your attention so that you’re not feeling constrained, but rather, connecting with the abundance of life? Waiting for another person is a drag. But using the freedom we have in our own lives while they lag behind can be invigorating. It can renew the trust we have in ourselves, too.

Even identifying small changes that you can make will be helpful. You don’t have to be a victim of another person’s circumstances, but so often, we become one. If you begin to step forward in your own life, for yourself, you’ll infuse a new energy into the dynamic by default.

Change yourself, change your approach, change your outlook, and you change everything.

With all my love and support,
Lauren

I was the one who had an affair….the wife! It started out as trying to fill a fantasy for my husband. Then the lines got blurred and I stopped sharing and started having a friendship with a single male. We then became friends with benefits with a high sexual attraction. He’d date other people a little in between and still have sex with me.

This happened over 10 years ago and went on for seven years! I just recently told my husband after five years of no contact with the other guy (he ended it after finding someone and getting married).

Yes I could have ended it myself. We had times where we didn’t see each other let alone have sex. How do we fix our relationship? It went from husband wanting a fantasy played out to me not including and talking/telling him and doing what I wanted. I didn’t love this other person, sex wasn’t as good as it was w/my husband it was just different. He expected nothing from me.

Is it possible to recover? What do I do? I know it’ll be up to him to forgive me or even try to. We have kids I don’t want to lose him or them. He truly does make me happy and I love him. I want to fix this and him because I broke him. I see it in his face and in his restless body.

Sincerely,
Lived Fantasy

Dear Lived Fantasy,

It’s not that unusual for a fantasy dynamic to be taken offline into an affair. But, when your husband and you agreed to indulge his fantasy, there was a divergence in the agreement when you continued the relationship in secret.

Now that you’ve admitted this all to your husband, you’re worried about being able to salvage your marriage.

My question is, what caused you to start and keep your own fantasy secretly, after openly sharing in his fantasy together? Your husband was able to share his desires for you to fulfill. But the pivot came when you took your desires and fulfilled them without involving or including him. Reflecting on the reasons for your divergence in what otherwise would seem like an open and honest sex life, could be really illuminating.

You chose to be honest with him now for a reason. I would focus on that reason. Healing will take time, and a commitment to showing your husband as well as telling him that you’re committed to honesty and to the marriage. You could have taken what happened to the grave, but you didn’t. You wanted your husband to know a part of you that otherwise would have remained a secret.

It hints to me that you wanted to be closer to your husband, and that your lie felt like a space between you, a chasm you wanted to bridge. You wanted your husband to be a part of what was only yours. You wanted him to know what only you knew. You wanted to be in it together, perhaps.

And now, you are, but you’re having two very different experiences of the same thing. Your husband’s pain and hurt is unavoidable. As the unfaithful spouse, you’ll have to find the tolerance and acceptance of the discomfort of seeing the pain caused by your behavior reflected in your husband’s eyes, face, body.

There is much healing to be done. Help him understand why you did what you did. Help him understand how much you value him and your marriage. Help him understand what you want for your future together.

Bit by bit, little by little, I believe that if we stay the course of honesty, transparency and openness, a couple can grow and become closer from what once stood between them. The affair is over. What you have now is the ability to forge a new marriage together. It sounds to me like you have a lot good between you. Focus on the good, focus on building it and making it even stronger, and know that at the same time, you can’t take away the pain and destruction that’s incurred. You can only be patient toward it, be relentless with your love toward your husband, and seek to heal and grow in every possible way as an individual and a couple because of this.

When we grow after our greatest challenges, we demonstrate one of our most important qualities as humans — resilience. Let go of the idea of “fixing” and focus on the idea of building something new together.

I hope this helps.

With all my love and support,
Lauren

My wife cheated on me four years ago, and I have spent the time since working to reconcile… or have I? We worked through the initial shock during the early days of COVID-19 in 2020, with a few marriage counseling sessions, a lot of discussion about what happened and why, and then we were both forced to work from home.

Since I found out (D-day was Dec. 26, 2019), I have learned a great deal about her… and much of it is NOT good. She claimed that she made a mistake, loved me, wanted the marriage to work and said she would do anything “not to lose her family”. However, her affair partner was a colleague (her boss) and he moved back to the east coast at the same time of discovery and confrontation. She then proceeded to communicate with him for months, hiding DMs and texts on different technology platforms. What she wrote was intimate and longing and she even asked if they could survive the years while she “honored her children and obligations to her marriage”.

Discussions about the affair always ended up in a defensive death-loop of hyper emotional justification and the facts in her narrative shifted from conversation to conversation to the point where I just threw my hands up. Now, almost five years later, I question why I am in this marriage. We are friends and we laugh and talk — never about the affair as the conversations are exhausting and unproductive. I have instigated the conversations from the start: I found the marriage counselor, moved us from the home with the bad memories, researched, read, and listened to vital Podcasts.

But now I wonder if I was so hell-bent to fix things, that issues remain partially, or inadequately, addressed. Did Covid, a new home, a new job, sending the kids off to school, exhaust my spirit for our marriage? Or am I now recognizing the likelihood that the marriage will fail?

Sincerely,
Reconsidering

Dear Reconsidering,

I can empathize with the idea that you went into triage to save your marriage after the revelation of your wife’s affair. Now that the dust has long settled, you have concerns, both about your wife, and about the meaning of the imbalance in those early efforts — concerns that are making you question the authenticity and durability of the reconciliation between you.

Here’s the part of your letter that I want more about, but that you don’t embellish on. You write:

“Since I found out (D-day was Dec. 26, 2019), I have learned a great deal about her… and much of it is NOT good.”

What, exactly, have you learned about your wife since discovery?

And what, exactly, constitutes the majority of it that “is NOT good”?

This sentiment of yours feels to me like the most important trailhead. Walking down it may lead you into honest insights about why you’re having new and shifting sentiments about the marriage.

It’s unfortunately common for two things to be true after an affair: 1) That the unfaithful spouse continues contact with their affair partner in devastating and detrimental ways, and 2) Recovery for a couple takes years, with the affair remaining a wound that, though it heals, leaves a scar.

I wonder what your wife’s explanation was for why she told her affair partner that she was waiting out her marital obligations for the sake of her kids? Was it the affair talking, or was there truth? And if there was truth, how, and why, have her feelings and desires changed since she wrote that?

Those words may have wounded your ability to genuinely trust your wife’s real desire or intention to be with you. Indeed, it’s a knife to the chest to know that, at any time, your spouse considered a relationship with you obligatory.

All of that being said, I want you to assess your feelings about your wife as a person and as your choice of life partner at this current juncture in your lives — as separately as you possibly can from the historical context of her affair. It sounds like you may be the one who is now having a change of heart, and despite the friendship and goodwill you have toward each other (which make for a pleasant and positive family and companionship composition, I’m sure) leave you with deeper concerns that strike at the heart of your marriage.

“Now, almost five years later, I question why I am in this marriage”, you write.

Pause-inducing words, indeed. Now is the time to pay attention to exactly why you’re writing those words.

You’re at a new and different crossroads now, five years later, than the crossroads you faced in the immediate crisis mode of infidelity. With the urgent triage of crisis in the past, you can approach the gestalt of your life, and what you personally want from your life's partnership, with fresh eyes and a clear mind. To the extent that you can evaluate things from that perspective, increased awareness and self-honesty may present itself further. Once it does, you can consider whether approaching your wife with these insights would be helpful in determining a way forward.

With all my love and support,
Lauren

First, let me tell you how much I appreciate the work that you are doing. Affairs are shrouded in so much secrecy and guilt that they are only discussed behind closed doors. You are bringing too light how incredibly painful and life disrupting affairs are for everyone involved. If I could tell people anything, outside of having a drug addiction, having an affair is one of the most destructive things you can do to your own personal well-being as well as that of your family.

I have been involved in a relationship with a man who lives with another woman for the last eight years. He splits his time between the two of us. As far as I know, she is not aware of me. He has never shared his reasons, but I don’t believe he’s ever going to leave her. Yet, whenever he feels me pulling away, he eludes to us having a future together and draws me back. I’m such a fool. I am ready to take the steps to break up with him. However, I don’t know how.

He is on a business trip and traveling this week, next week he will go to his home with her and the following week he will come to stay with me. It’s his birthday. I feel awful about breaking up with him while he’s on a business trip or right before his birthday. However, I’ve never felt more strongly than I do right now about breaking up with him. I feel like if I don’t do it now I may lose my courage.

Also, I think doing it by text would be awful given the number of years we’ve been together and how close we are. Yet, I feel like texting and blocking him will close the door permanently and therefore might be the best course of action. However, that feels so cold and heartless. I would like to do this in a way that is graceful and kind. What are your thoughts?

Sincerely,
Ready

Dear Ready,

First, thank you for your kind words. Second, I can hear how desperate you are to capitalize on your courage and strength to finally end this relationship for good.

Think about it this way — if you were in a normal relationship, one in which two people were on equal ground (no third parties here), you’d feel very connected to your knowing that the relationship had run its course, wasn’t working for you, couldn’t meet your needs, etc, and you would express that in an act we refer to as “breaking up” with someone.

With an affair, however, we often feel that we can’t break up with our partner. It’s very unique, in that our attempts to break up are usually less successful and effective than they would be if this was a normal breakup “in the real world.” In the real world, there would perhaps be a lot of tears, perhaps a little negotiation from the person who didn’t choose to do the breaking up, expressed care or regrets, and generally you’d part ways with perhaps a bit of contact, or maybe a little bit of back and forth before you’re done for good.

With affairs, there’s a power differential that doesn’t exist in regular relationships that has a profound effect on our brain — whereas we’ve lost our sense of power over our own self, our choices and our agency. In that way, as also reference, stopping the relationship requires an all-out addiction-level battle, rather than the usual difficulty we encounter in ending any regular intimate relationship.

All of that being said, ending an affair requires an extraordinarily high level of conviction, commitment, and boundaries.

So when it comes to ending this affair, I want you to stay focused on two things:

1. Your central truth that the relationship not working for you, period, and

2. You.

There are two things that none of us can negotiate with, and they are the truth, and what is right for someone else.

If we try to negotiate with the truth or what’s right for someone else, we’re really just focused on getting our own needs met at any cost.

I’m going to say that again: If we try to negotiate with the truth, or what’s right for someone else, then we are really just focused on getting our OWN needs met.

The truth is, you’re unhappy in this relationship. Its benefits don’t outweigh its limitations and drawbacks. You’re in pain. This relationship does not meet your needs. Period. And by the way, stay in the present. One of the biggest ways affairs get rekindled is promises and assurances of the future. You wrote in your letter that this is exactly what happens to draw you back in.

At present, the relationship does not meet your needs. If he decides on his own accord to change his life in the future, he can come and find you then to see if you’re still available. Until then, you’re taking care of yourself and moving on. There’s nothing to negotiate about that central truth.

When it comes to HOW to express all of this, stay focused on yourself. You can certainly go cold-turkey if that’s what you need, but it also sounds like it might feel best to YOU if you take one attempt to express it earnestly in person or by phone once and for all, before you take step two and block and cut him out entirely.

It can be helpful to explicitly state what boundaries you’ll be maintaining to end the affair, so that you both know what to expect.

“Because this is so hard for both of us, I’m going to take responsibility for making this change. I’m going to block you so that I can commit to my own healing and getting my life back. This isn’t out of anger or hate, it’s out of love for myself. Please don’t send me letters or gifts. I won’t respond. I ask that you have respect for my need to heal from this relationship.”

Let him know that breaking up with him isn’t a play to begin the usual dance of getting him to win you back. Often times, moves to end an affair are seen as an invitation by the other party to make a stronger conquest. No. This isn’t a bargaining chip or a game of tug of war so you can see how much he cares about you.

It’s you caring about you, finally, once and for all.

If you stay laser focused on your absolute truth, and YOURSELF, you have two grounding points to return to time and again. Like a tree with roots, you’ll be better equipped to return to your own strength even if heavy winds cause you to bend and sway.

And, if you haven’t already, I can’t recommend enough the Finding Freedom Masterclass for Affair Partners. It’s designed to support you in greater depth as you make this tremendous effort to change your own life — for yourself, and for the better, once and for all.

With all my love and support,
Lauren

Coming from a history of affairs on my dad’s side, I never thought I’d be the one to also have one. It is absolutely mind blowing to think about, but somehow I’m here. My affair partner and I are both married, have kids and have very busy lives. It’s been going on now for almost two years.

It started out as an innocent outreach for work, to a full on text everyday, sneak out to just see each other at the grocery store, then to sexual encounters at hotels. All of these feelings brought so much clarity, since I’m in an emotionless/loveless marriage of over 15 years. My AP made me feel alive again, I felt wanted, heard, desired, the whole nine-yards.

It recently just took a turn and has become 99.9% sexual and the emotional balance has basically vanished. The insane lack of communication and boundaries has me feeling extremely frustrated, he will reach out whenever he wants to then vanish for a week. I’m so over it, or at least trying to be. I’m going on almost two weeks of no contact, nothing was said, just receiving texts and not engaging.

I felt stronger at the beginning — when something was on my mind I could speak to it, but now I can’t seem to tell my AP why I’m frustrated or sad because I feel so ridiculous for having these feelings towards him. The no contact is affecting my everyday life. Why is this so darn difficult? I feel like an addict, I’m addicted to the feels like a drug.

Sincerely,
Going Through Withdrawal

Dear Withdrawal,

I’ll cut to the chase and affirm that yes, an affair is like a drug. I’ve shared before how the interval nature of an affair lights up and engages the same reward pathways in the brain as an addictive substance — cocaine to be exact.

So the way you’re feeling is appropriate given the effect that this relationship has on your brain. Your neural pathways have been wired for it now, and going through withdrawal, and re-wiring the brain is no easy or quick feat. Like any recovery, it’s painful, it’s grueling, it makes you want to turn back to the source to ease the suffering, and it takes time to stay the course before things get better.

Understanding that the interval reward system that you’ve been reinforcing with your AP for two years now has changed your brain wiring is a helpful baseline — and, at present, your affair has turned a corner, dwindling even further. Without a place for you to process your thoughts and feelings with your affair partner, you’re alone and struggling as you seek to extricate yourself.

I’d encourage you to establish a consistent relationship with a trusted therapist as a receptacle for all of your experience, and as a guide to help you through. Isolating yourself will compound your pain, and healthy and trusted relationships are what heal us when relationships are what’s broken us in the first place.

What’s important for me in reading your letter is the part where you say your affair brought clarity about your loveless marriage.

What if we take the affair for what it is — a spotlight for yourself on your own life — and, keep shining light into the dark corners of what you might otherwise avoid dealing with. If your marriage causes you pain and loneliness, and your affair causes you pain and loneliness, that’s a pattern. The only way we break our own patterns is to finally, once and for all, decide that we’re going to do the uncomfortable thing of changing what we’ll accept in our own lives.

Perhaps your own infidelity has also given you the gift of empathy for your father’s struggle — that, I don’t know. But take this affair for what it’s given you, and instead of looking back or going back to it, figure out what it’s going to require for you to clear space in your own life for your own recovery.

I loved these conversations on recovery — ‘The Nine Truths that Just Might Heal Us’ with Laura McKowen on the podcast “We Can Do Hard Things.” Laura hits on the core of the work all of us have to do in our lives, of taking ownership of our icky bits, being responsible for our own healing, and moving forward.

Your work, dear writer, is that of recovering your SELF. Work that is difficult, scary, and also oh-so-incredibly beautiful and ultimately rewarding. You’re poised to take responsibility for the shit in your own life, and get busy uncovering and discovering your authentic version. Anything else is just delay. Make that your goal, and become unwilling to return to anything else but that. That is the path of recovery.

With all my love and support,
Lauren

I am having an affair with my oldest friend of 30 years. We have known each other since the age of five. We began this affair about six months ago after I became a divorced, single mom of two boys. My married affair partner's wife suffered from a severe stroke over two years ago.

While she has improved immensely in these two years, he has shared that he has been rendered a caretaker and while on paper is married, he does not feel that he is. Essentially, emotionally divorced from the marriage but not legally. While I have never asked this of him as I wear the hat of friend...as well as...partner, he has shared that he will always take care of her and he could never run from the situation. I find this to be noble and am proud of him for his sincerity in staying for her. We both had really bad things happen to us - I was left by my husband, and his wife suffered this horrific stroke - but yet we found each other and have loved each other through it.

To add to this, they were in an open marriage prior to this happening. While I understand my role — I made this conscious choice — I don't know where to go from here. I know how I feel about him and I know how he feels about me. However, I feel like I'm stuck. I can never have a life or future with this person but I don't want to leave him either. I genuinely love him and want the best for him — even if that's not with me. I also think that as understanding as I am, I also have wants and needs. I want to grow old with someone and have a future with someone. I think I deserve that, too?

Sincerely,
Stuck Friend

Dear Stuck Friend,

The helpful, though difficult, aspect of your scenario is that there’s no pretense that your married affair partner may leave someday. He’s been entirely clear with himself and with you, and you’re in the relationship with eyes wide open to its limitations. You admire him for the very qualities that motivate him to stay married to his wife. And yet, it is good that you’re recognizing very clearly that you have wants and needs of your own. To wish for real companionship after your divorce, to want to share life fully with a partner you love, to not want to grow old alone, is worth a lot.

Where my antennae went up in your letter is where you state that they were in an open marriage prior to your affair (and, I believe, prior to the wife’s stroke). If they were able to negotiate and navigate the terms and value of an open marriage before, are they capable of having these conversations again?

I am assuming that they since re-closed their marriage, and that your married affair partner has transgressed now by engaging in an affair. Open marriages all have their own terms and agreements, and some agree that one or both partners can have a significant relationship, a girlfriend or boyfriend. Without knowing what their previous terms were, it’s impossible to know whether there’s a precedence for having a full relationship outside of the marriage, or whether their open marriage had other parameters. I’m assuming it had other parameters, but, there still is a precedence for their marriage having terms other than monogamy.

I wonder whether your married affair partner could approach an honest conversation with his wife about his loyalties, the limitations of their marriage, and his own wants and desires moving forward. Is there a world in which his wife acknowledges the value of re-opening their marriage? If so, could this be freeing to everyone involved?

This seems to be the next frontier to explore. There’s a New York Times Modern Love written about a couple who opens their marriage as their lives and their health changes. It could be a helpful example, so I’m linking it for you here.

Should there be gracious and generous terms to be navigated, you may, indeed, not be as stuck as you now feel you are.

With all my love and support,
Lauren

I’ve been in a relationship with a married man for almost a decade. We met professionally and for many years we danced around physical intimacy while we grew our friendship, out of sight of our family and friends. We eventually became intimate and have stayed so, despite the occasional ebb when guilt largely leads him to retreat, albeit temporarily.

Over the course of our affair, I’ve divorced for reasons that pre-dated him and rebuilt my life as a single person. He has remained committed to his marriage, though after all of these years, I know he loves me. And I love him. We never say this out loud, however. Somethings are better left unspoken. We are the best of friends and amazing lovers. And while I would love nothing more than to be in an open relationship with him, I accept that is not our reality and I would rather have him in my life like this, than not in my life at all.

I live an otherwise full life filled with friends, family and professional success. I don’t fully understand his commitment to his marriage or what role I fill in his life and heart that his marriage doesn’t. He is, despite this, a good man who never intended to have an affair or hurt anybody. In all other ways, he is loyal to her and the life they have built (no kids).

The guilt sometimes causes him to retreat. But he always comes back to me. He also feels guilty that he can’t give me more. At the present, I am content. But am I just fooling myself? Can affairs continue like this long term just because the alternative of not being together feels worse than the risk of harm by staying? Will the guilt eventually ruin him and our relationship? I’m not unhappy in this affair even though I wish it could be more.

Sincerely,
Content

Dear Content,

Here’s what stands out to me about your letter: you don’t describe any suffering, nor do you describe any pain.

If your needs, feelings, or requirements for partnership in life should change, your feelings may change. But you describe yourself as content at the present moment, and you describe a dynamic that seems to have largely worked for you over the past decade.

It sounds like your married affair partner is careful to keep his marriage separate from your relationship. You don’t speak of love to each other, nor do you speak about his marriage or any difficulties or discontent. That leads me to believe that he (and you) compartmentalize your relationship as separate from his relationship with his wife. At times, the two may bleed into each other — for example, with the guilt you describe.

Should the guilt you describe translate to pain and suffering for one or both of you, then there may eventually become an inflection point in your relationship.

When you ask about “the risk of harm by staying” I assume you are referring to the risk of harm to yourself — not the risk of harm to his wife. At any point, there may be harm to any or all of you in this love triangle. That is a risk you are assuming by being in a relationship with someone who is married.

And yet, there are indeed affair partners who are content in the role. The natural limitations of the relationship work for them. It affords them a freedom in their own life that they might otherwise feel burdened by in a traditional relationship. Without the responsibility of nurturing a full partnership, with all the mundane realities of everyday life, you find yourself thriving in a full life of your own.

And here is the thing: all any of us can do is make the best decisions we can at the present moment, based on the experiences, feelings, and priorities we have at that time. At this time, your wishes for the relationship to be more don’t outweigh your contentedness at everything else your relationship provides to you. That seems to be your bottom line.

I don’t hear you racked with guilt to the point of pain and suffering. And so, Content, I’m going to determine that you’re not anywhere near that inflection point that tends to naturally stress-test affairs into a space of decision-making and change. As long as you are being honest with yourself about how you feel, then you aren’t fooling yourself.

With all my love and support,
Lauren

I've been married to a good man and father for thirteen years now, and while he possesses many admirable qualities, I find myself struggling with feelings of attraction and connection towards him. Initially, I married him because he was the complete opposite of my father. Recently, I've met someone else, and I've found myself developing strong feelings for him.

The physical attraction is undeniable, and he makes me feel loved and valued in a way that I haven't experienced in my marriage. While my husband is kind and respectful, I don't feel the same level of emotional connection and attraction towards him. In our marriage, we don't communicate much, and we often maintain a facade of being the perfect Christian family, raising our eight-year-old son without much conflict or disagreement.

However, beneath the surface, I feel a sense of emptiness and longing for something more fulfilling. We can’t talk like a friend or laugh together. I'm torn between honoring my commitment to my husband and pursuing my own happiness and fulfillment. I feel conflicted and unsure of what steps to take next.

Despite the differences in our religion, and financial stability between myself and the man I've met, I find an inexplicable sense of calm and joy in his presence. He brings out a side of me that feels youthful and alive, and I'm drawn to him in a way that I can't fully explain. Our conversations flow effortlessly, and I feel a deep desire to share my thoughts and experiences with him.

It's perplexing to me that I would feel such a strong connection to someone who doesn't fit the mold of what I thought I was looking for in a partner. Despite his differences, he makes me feel understood and cherished in a way that I haven't experienced before. I'm struggling to reconcile these conflicting feelings and make sense of what I truly want and need in my life. I've been struggling with feelings of guilt and confusion.

Regards,
Perplexed

Dear Confused,

Your conundrum doesn’t seem perplexing to me, though the feelings you’re contending with I am sure are perplexing for you.

This seems pretty straightforward in that your husband checks all of the right boxes, but you describe your marriage as lacking genuine intimacy. The new man you’ve met, on the other hand, doesn’t check the right boxes, but presents a genuine sense of intimacy.

Isn’t the “mold of what you thought you were looking for” a reference to external mate qualities? Meanwhile, the new connection you’ve found is described entirely in internal qualities? So, let’s call the checklist that led you to choose your husband an apple, and let’s call the newfound emotional connection that doesn’t fit that checklist an orange.

And you are wondering why the apple isn’t an orange.

Shouldn’t my apple be the only fruit that satisfies me? How could an orange possibly?!
I was told that I shouldn’t want oranges. But this one seems good for me, and I want it! What is true?!

What’s happening is that the two fruits aren’t the same. They aren’t made up of the same stuff. They present differently on the outside, and possess very different flavors on the inside. Yes, they both have fiber, water, and are called fruit, but otherwise, they’re not the same fruit.

So you’re perplexed because you’re trying to apply logic (shouldn’t I only want apples?) to your emotional experience (I’m attracted to an orange!). And one does not equal nor negate the other.

It is certainly distressing to have opened your eyes to new wants and needs that are being met by another person who isn’t your husband. Yet it sounds like you were well aware of those wants and needs before this man walked in to your life… You just didn’t have a reason to confront them in a way where you met your life choices face to face and called them into question.

It sound like your choice of your life with your husband fills many, but not all, of your wants and needs, and your connection with this new person fills the other unmet parts of your wants and needs. The two are completely different.

All of our wants, needs, and priorities are legitimate. The extent to which we shape our life choices to reflect them is what varies. You very much value the apple that you’ve sustained yourself on in life thus far (stable, not my father, same religion, financially sound, good parent, respectful) but now, you’re realizing to your great surprise that you also very much like oranges, in an entirely different skin, with an entirely different feel and composition (emotions, connection, vulnerability, intimacy)!

What delight oranges are! I was getting a little sad and hungry sustaining only on apples, but now, I feel so full! What is this feeling?

Does this analogy help you make sense of your confusing experience?

If there is indeed a choice for you to make here, then you just have to be as clear with yourself about exactly why you want to sustain the rest of your life on either apples or oranges, now that you know the taste of both.

I would encourage you to tune in to the feelings you had about your marriage and your husband before your connection developed with your newfound friend. Why was your marriage the right choice for you? Do those priorities and choices still stand now? On a scale of 1-10 how important are they, in contrast to the new choices you’re confronting? (The Decision-Making Method can help).

Know, too, that you will never un-know the taste of oranges now that you know it. Sometimes, when we can’t have all of something, or it isn’t meant to sustain us into our future, we can at least savor the memory of it within our minds, hearts, and souls.

With all my love and support,
Lauren

I recently found out I am carrying my boyfriend’s child. He is married. We have been together for two-and-a-half years. A year and a half ago he went to a divorce attorney. Due to his finances (he is asset rich and cash poor in the millions) he would not be able to divorce his wife without being forced to sell his business and lose his livelihood.

We have continued on in the hopes that he could correct his finances and afford the divorce. But now there is a baby — one I am not sure I want but am also unsure that I don’t want now that it is here. My immediate thought was “he is married, I have to protect him and get an abortion.” He wants the abortion, to stay married and continue the affair. That is not an option for me.

I had assumed he would do the right thing and finally leave his marriage to take care of me regardless of if we had the baby or not. But I was a fool. He has offered me 100k to have the abortion and sign an NDA. How did I spend two-and-a-half-years with this person and not see how terrible they are? I will resent him if I have an abortion to save his marriage, career and finances.

I want to have or not have the child for the right reasons, and I am struggling to separate my decision from his marital situation. And this has caused guilt and shame that I have never felt before towards his wife. I want to tell his wife everything.

Have you seen these circumstances before? What happened? How do I separate his marriage from my decision? Should I tell his wife and not take the money, as my gut tells me? Any advice or stories you could share would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Alone

Dear Alone,

What a decision and what circumstances. Know that you are not alone, though it certainly feels like it when it feels as if your life, and the life of your boyfriend and unborn child, are in your hands. What a weight for you to be holding.

Today’s letter response is unique in that I’m including Senior Infidelity Specialist Michelle Leon for her thoughts on your letter, too. I wanted to give you a little extra care, and I’m so glad I did. Her response echoes every sentiment I would have written for you myself.

Michelle writes:

“Alone, yours is a reality that is faced more often than people realize — unplanned pregnancies do happen as the result of an affair. In this particular circumstance, it is complex to navigate the dynamics and to consider what the best choice is, but the only choice that matters in this moment is the one you will make for yourself. 

You seem to have insight into your situation, as you mention that he has turned out to be someone you don't recognize after having spent 2.5 years in this affair with him. He told you he wants you to terminate the pregnancy, to stay married and continue the affair — it sounds like he is clear about what he wants, so where do your wants fit in here?

He has been able to maintain his finances, his marriage and his affair. Now, it is time for you to consider what you want for your life, irrespective of his demands. 

While you could go and tell his wife, you will have to think about what your motivations are and what outcome you were hoping to have from it. Are you hoping that if you tell her, his marriage will end and he will come to you to start your life together, finally? Are you hoping that his life "blows up" just for the sake of it and perhaps hoping that this will give you some satisfaction or peace of mind knowing that his life is in turmoil?

I would encourage you to think long and hard before doing something that is irreversible and may not give you the outcome that you are hoping for. Or, it does give you the outcome you are hoping for, but creates new, unintended consequences as a result — consequences that could have a domino effect of negative outcomes for all those involved. These are considerations for you to make. When we take matters into our own hands this way, it may not work out how you had imagined, so it's important to think about that. 

While I can’t tell you whether you should continue with the pregnancy or not, I would encourage you to think about what your fears are about having this child, and consider your own values and beliefs.

Certainly, if terminating this pregnancy under duress and against your values is what you choose right now, the potential for resentment is almost certain, and your affair may not withstand the weight of it. Similarly, if you choose to have the child, your affair may not withstand the weight of the decision. So, the outcome is quite possibly the affair ending either way, which is why it is so important for you to make the decision based on only yourself and completely without consideration of him or his marriage.

You are the one either going to be living the decision, no matter which way you choose. 

Certainly, unplanned pregnancies that have been the result of an affair do give way to children being born and growing up with their mothers, sometimes unbeknownst to the married affair partner. There are many, many stories about this — it has been happening since the beginning of time! Your situation is complex, but not unheard of.

It comes down to what can you live with. If you terminate, will you be able to live with knowing that, and will you even want to continue the affair? If you have your child, are you able to accept the reality to (likely) be a single mother for some time? That of course, this is not an uncommon familial arrangement to be in, but you will have your baby and be a mother, if that is something that you have longed for in this life.”

What Michelle is driving home with her poignant considerations and questions is that YOUR hopes, dreams, wants, values, beliefs, present and future are THE crucible here. Yes, Michelle and I have seen these circumstances before, and each situation is unique and is handled uniquely. Getting clear for yourself is the only way forward.

Alone, I’m going to give you a task. Sit somewhere alone, close your eyes, and envision yourself in a bell-jar. A safe space all of your own, as if you are completely enveloped in glass. Now silence the noise, projections, and demands of anyone else. Then, consider these two aspects separately and as honestly as you possibly can for yourself: your relationship and your pregnancy.

I want you to spend time intentionally separating your decision about your relationship from your decision about your pregnancy and having a child.

Your very real horror at your affair partner’s response to the pregnancy — his offer of money, silence, and continued affair — hints to me that you’re fairly clear that he’s not the partner you desire in this life.

But, all of your feelings about him are clouding and mixing with your singular decision to keep the pregnancy and become a mother, or terminate. That is no small choice, but it is completely, and only, yours to make.

With all (our) love and support,
Lauren and Michelle

I’m a married man who fell in love with a coworker. It started as just sex, but turned into a lot more. We are in love and have a lot of fun together.

I know I need to make a decision, as my affair partner wants me to decide between her and my wife. I know I need to choose my wife, or at least try. I’m having a hard time picking the right to time to end the affair. I don’t want to, but I know that I need to try to.

I’m afraid of the hurt I’m going to cause my affair partner, as she is such a good person, friend and lover to me. I also can’t stand the feeling of seeing her with someone else. I’ve never been so depressed in my life.

My wife can see the hurt I’m going through, but has no idea why. I’m so lost on what to do and how to do it. I’ve done your MasterClass and I’m still in limbo on how to navigate the pain I’m about to go through.

Sincerely,
Dreading the Loss

Dear Dread,

You’re right — knowing the decision you need to make is different from feeling able or equipped to actually make the change. You say, “I am so lost on what to do". But you’re not lost on what to do. You are actually are very clear about it. The real issue is that you are afraid to do it because of the sorrow, loss, grief, pain, and suffering you anticipate.

We usually know what’s right for us, we are just afraid of it. So we confuse ourselves and complicate our reality because we’re afraid. I’ve been there, too, and goodness it’s excruciating!

You’ve walked yourself into a situation of your own making, and so the hard, courageous, and unfortunate reality is that you’re going to have to walk yourself back out of this situation.

The best thing you can do is hold yourself accountable — both with yourself, and with your affair partner — by completely owning your choice, as well as owning your fears, heartbreak, and regret. Get vulnerable, get humble, and get honest.

The way out of this is to engage a generosity of heart and spirit you’ve likely never had to engage before. You need to let your affair partner go out of love. And you need to do so out of the selfless need to set her free.

You’re going to have to give yourself a lot of tough love on this one. It won’t be pretty, pleasant, or easy. But you have to lead with your knowing, with your conviction about what’s right. That conviction is the main thing you have going for you. There are many unfaithful spouses who struggle a lack of clarity about what’s right or what their choice should or will be. You are clear. Which means that your singular work is to gather the strength, courage, grit, and resilience — and compassion for your affair partner and your wife — to do what’s right.

You don’t want your AP to be with anyone else. You don’t want to lose her. You love, cherish, and value her. But you’re not available. You are with someone else (your wife). When you imagine your AP with someone else, that pain you feel is exactly what it feels like for her to know you’re with your wife. You can empathize with that pain.

And, your wife is confused. Your affair is causing her pain, too. When a betrayed spouse notices and bears witness to the changes in an unfaithful spouse but don’t know their source, it’s so disorienting and destabilizing for the marriage. Your affair is eroding your connection at home, and your wife cares for you and wants you to be happy and well. She has no idea why you’re not. There’s distress all around.

The pain and depression you face when you think about ending your affair is normal. The withdrawal is intense, the grief is tremendous, and you will have to treat it like any recovery. One day, one minute at a time, knowing that it’s going to feel worse than death before it gets any better and you can feel yourself return, slowly but surely, to life again.

The words in your letter clue me in that fear of negative emotions is at the root of your hesitance to act. You worry about the right time because there feels like no right time to start the wheel of pain in motion. You worry about facing, and feeling, the hurt and the consequences of your choice.

So I’ll tell you this — waiting does not help. Avoiding pain only delays the inevitable and causes more pain.

Here’s what does help: staying clear about the outcome, and using that outcome to guide your every minute’s choices as you move forward. The outcome is that you want and need to reorient to your marriage and to your wife. Be kind, be clear, be consistent in doing so.

I reiterate: take ownership and responsibility, with yourself, and with your affair partner. Your affair partner is allowed to have her feelings, which may include fury, rage, grief, and upset of her own. But you’ll both have to walk through the fire in order to get to the other side.

Spend time with yourself getting clear and getting centered. Then, use that clarity to navigate your way forward. Solving this, and getting yourself out of this, is going to require you to take all that conviction you have about returning to your marriage and apply it, using both your words and actions, to return to a life of alignment.

With all my love and support,
Lauren

Dear Lauren,

My husband had an affair, and when I discovered it, he did all of the right things: ended the affair and all contact with his affair partner, has recommitted to our marriage, and does everything he can to affirm me and our relationship.

My problem is that despite all of his efforts, I can’t stop ruminating. The intrusive thoughts are horrible. It feels like not a day goes by that I don’t think about the affair, or him with his affair partner.

Is this my life sentence? How do I live with this? I want to stay married, but I worry about my own ability to recover. The thoughts come at random and I can’t stop them. It’s making my own mind feel like a battleground. Help!

Sincerely,

Mentally Hijacked Spouse

Dear Mentally Hijacked,

You’ve been handed something couldn’t control and you didn’t ask for: your husband’s affair. The revelation of infidelity is a trauma for a betrayed spouse, so I first want you to understand your reactions as a trauma response.

Rumination and compulsive, intrusive thoughts are the brain’s attempts to keep us safe under threat. By keeping the threat at the forefront (aka: continuing to think about it), we feel more prepared to protect ourselves. We are thus “safer” by our mind’s estimation.

The problem with this is that there isn’t a current threat. It’s in the past, it already happened, but we need to do some work to let your brain know that.

So a big part of the work of healing your trauma will be the work of informing your brain that it can catalog what happened as a past event.

Remember, your brain is in a state of hypervigilance. And that vigilance is ‘keeping you safe’.

In the video below I’m giving you some of my best practices for interrupting your thought patterns in effort to reprogram your trauma response. When you redirect your compulsive thoughts, you decrease the anxiety and distress that’s being perpetuated in your present life by the past betrayal.

The more you practice it, the weaker those thoughts will become, and the stronger your sense of present-moment-awareness will be, and this will give the much-needed feedback to your body that you’re safe.

This takes repetition, and it takes time. Be patient with yourself, and know that healing is a long game. But if you’re relentless about your healing, you stand to give yourself a set of tremendously valuable tools. These tools are also outlined in greater depth in my course for Betrayed Spouses.

Also, as I mention in this video, the more we have a thought, the more our brain produces that same thought. It becomes what we refer to in therapy-speak as an “automatic thought.”

Take this weird example of the power of our automatic thoughts: A few years ago I was reading an article in a pop-culture magazine about Jennifer Lopez’s legs. This article stated that JLo keeps her legs smooth by shaving them every two days. No idea why my brain clung onto that bizarrely intimate fact, but bear with me, I swear I’m about to make this relevant!

Since I read that article YEARS AGO, my brain produces that fact every damn time I shave my legs. It’s an unhelpful thought, it’s irrelevant, and, frankly, it’s annoying. But its an intrusive thought that has turned into an “automatic thought.”

I don’t have to do anything for my brain to automatically remind me that JLo shaves her legs every two days. Because my brain believes its a very useful fact for me, and so it created an association for me so that it can give me a friendly reminder about JLo every time I’m minding my own damn business in the shower.

Your brain works the same way, but even more intensely when it comes to your husband’s affair. You’re minding your own business, and WHAM, a random association or trigger brings a thought or an image to mind. BUT, what I want you to do is push back against those thoughts so that they don’t dig a deeply entrenched channel indefinitely.

You want to train your brain to recognize other thoughts as more helpful and adaptive. I don’t bother doing this with the “JLo shaving routine” thought because I sort of wave it away like an irritating gnat. It’s not harming me the way your thoughts are.

I share how you can do this in the video below. You may also want to try exploring EMDR therapy, which is a type of therapy that helps the brain categorize traumatic events as being in the past. Everything I mention in the video below can and should be run past your doctor, prescriber, or therapist. Give yourself the support you really need, and don’t delay!

Remember that we are all our own healers. Your husband is supporting your healing with all of his efforts, and now your internal efforts can take you the rest of the way. Don’t expect your trauma to ever be GONE, but if we tend to our traumas diligently and properly, they ideally become but a faint whisper that sometimes presents in the background of our otherwise robust and thriving life.

Remember that getting there will take time, but someday you’ll notice that you’re doing better today than you were two months ago, and two years from then you’ll be doing even better. Have faith, and do everything in your power to take care of yourself.

Take back your mental and emotional power and focus — nothing deserves to take this from you in this one precious life we have.

With all my love and support,

Lauren

Dear Lauren,

I’ve been married for 18 years and have two teens. My marriage seemed okay until I cheated a year ago.

It’s something I never even thought about. Now, I’ve been having an affair for four months. This affair has helped me realize that my husband has been emotionally unavailable and I have not felt loved by him for years.

I’ve talked to him about this and he hasn’t tried to change, and seems to think I would never leave. I feel bad for cheating and think he deserves better. However, I don’t think he can love me the way I need to be loved.

Does cheating mean the relationship is over? Where do I start?

Sincerely,

Unmet Needs

Dear Unmet,

Here is my video message for you about where I believe your marriage is, and below it I outline where I believe you should focus as you move forward.

Your marriage is now in crisis. So I would encourage you to reflect on why your marriage “seemed okay” previously. Sometimes, there was one version of ourselves that knew what we knew then, and now there’s a version of ourselves that knows something different because of our experiences.

I would encourage you to assess the version of yourself that believed your marriage was fine until you had other information or insight available to you, and then get clearer with yourself about exactly what changed for you since then, why it changed, and how it changed.

A helpful exercise would be (to the best of your ability, because an affair changes your perception and can create a revisionist history) to write down everything you felt in your marriage before you stepped out. What was good? What was great? What did you have to accept? What was and wasn’t available there?

Then, write down everything you now feel about your marriage. What is good? What is great? What do you have to accept, and what do you find unacceptable now, and why? What is and isn’t available there? Why or why not?

Since affairs change our own lived experience, it’s important to do this work.

And, if you need even more information, I encourage you to begin DIGGING DEEP for it. Get into couples counseling with your spouse, and begin to have the overdue conversations. This way, you gain better information about the possibilities in your marriage, rather than simply making your best guess about whether the marriage is over or salvageable.

Simply put, I’d like to see you gain critical information that would likely come from your husband realizing just how dire the situation is, by heading to counseling to address your concerns and needs. Being honest with him that the marriage is in jeopardy is usually a shock to unsuspecting spouses. How he responds to this truth is important feedback that both of you deserve to encounter.

From there, you may figure out if you can do better TOGETHER, or whether you each need something different, apart. It may be absolutely true that your husband can’t love you the way you need to be loved. Only you know.

And, you’ll know this with even greater certainty if you engage in valuable conversations around the limits and possibilities of your union, and are clear about your decision to move forward without him if that’s the case.

The marriage may not be salvageable if you’ve already decided and determined that he’s incapable. But, you, and your marriage, deserve to be given the rightful chance to address that question.

Cheating doesn’t mean a relationship is over, but it does ideally mean that version of your relationship is. Whether you can begin a new one together or not, is the question.

With all my love and support,

Lauren

PS: I’d highly recommend the Decision-Making MasterClass for Spouses in an Affair as a way to gain clarity, and to actively work through your concerns and questions about your marriage.

Dear Lauren,

I have been married to my husband for 17 years and together 26. My husband had a 7-year affair with a woman that I considered a family friend. Since I found out about the affair in 2022, he promised to stop the affair but continued to see her on and off until sometime in 2023.

Now he claims he has stopped seeing her and sleeping with her but he continues to speak with her on the phone. He denies this but I snooped on his phone and know that he speaks with her regularly. I have expressed my dissatisfaction with this situation. I feel like he has more loyal to her and her feeling matter more than mine.

I asked for a separation and attempted to date. He discovered I was talking to a someone who I told I am separated. He called the man up and scared him away. The man has since stopped talking to me. My husband says he is working on the marriage, and should trust him that he is trying to manage his affair partner and is no longer involved with her. He tells me to trust him that he loves me and is not leaving me.

He has stopped going out and stays in the house most of the time unlike in the past when he was out almost all the time.

The continued communication and lack of boundaries with this woman worries me. I'm wondering if I should accept that he is unable to commit to the marriage and has fallen in love with this woman and is incapable of leaving her. Should I move on with my life and stop trying to fix what is dead? I am confused on if I should believe and trust the process or listen to common sense that he is lying and doesn’t want to end his affair.

Sincerely,
Continued Contact

Dear Continued Contact,

There’s an important difference between privacy and secrecy. Privacy is something we all need, but it’s important to distinguish that privacy isn’t being misused for the purposes of secrecy, especially after an affair. Privacy is healthy, whereas secrecy in this context is destructive and self-serving. Your husband is still engaged in secrecy, which to me, prevents you from feeling safe and actually prevents the affair from being truly over, even if it’s over physically.

In my opinion, your gut is giving you accurate feedback, because if he’s still talking regularly to his affair partner, then they still have a relationship of some kind. And if he’s hiding that contact from you, then he hasn’t restored the part of your marriage that integrates transparency and honesty into affair healing. Of course you’re going to feel the way you do, because there’s evidence to support that the dis-ease and mistrust that you’re feeling is legitimate.

Affair healing involves a lot more than just not going out anymore. Though that’s of course a positive change if he was going out a lot during the affair, as we can guess, if he’s still in regular contact with his AP then he doesn’t really need to go out because the affair is over physically but the connection isn’t over emotionally.

If your husband needs to get himself to counseling so he can receive support in being more clear and boundaries with his AP, then he absolutely should do so. And if he needs support in getting clear about committing fully to the marriage, in terms of BOTH FEET being in the marriage and his loyalty and focus being completely there, then counseling can help with that, too.

What I don’t know from this letter is how the marriage is going post-affair discovery in other ways and other areas. While your husband doesn’t want you seeing other people, his display of possessiveness isn’t enough for me to know how strong or how durable your marriage and connection are.

If I were to make some assumptions from your letter, it feels like there is a real lack of regular, honest communication going on here. Are you two going to take your marriage to the next level, and create something better from this crisis, or are you going to ease back into some level of an uneasy status-quo, where you wonder if you’ll ever really feel secure again?

You wonder if you should ‘stop trying to fix what is dead’. Do you feel that your marriage is dead? Are you trying to fix it harder than your husband is? Those are important feelings for you to get curious about.

In order to “trust the process”, there needs to be a process. If you don’t have one, or can’t get yourself to therapy, you can always follow the guidance of a book for couples, such as “Healing After Infidelity” by Michele Weiner-Davis. You and your husband could have a book club where you read the books at the same time and meet weekly or bi-weekly to discuss each chapter or use the prompts in the book as a basis for necessary conversation.

If you’ve given your marriage your all, and you feel that your requirements for safety and trust aren’t being reciprocated properly, then you may indeed have a decision to make. Keep paying attention to what you are or are not receiving from your husband, and to your own heart. At baseline, we all deserve to feel safe in our primary relationships.

I have a gnarly cold so there’s no video from me until it’s kicked, but I hope that my written response to you helps.

With all my love and support,

Lauren

Dear Lauren,

I am/was an affair partner. It’s been awful. I think it is finally over and I am just trying to be at peace with everything that has happened, and understanding of his thought process. It is so hard because everything we have shared is almost identical to what you talk about.

We have had amazing emotional connection. He says he feels so different with me. He has also gone back and forth with leaving his wife for me.

She has known about me for about eight months. She discovered our affair about two months in. I don’t know if I can believe him about everything he says, and if he shares his entire truth with me. This past time he told her he was meeting me we met and talked about our future, and him leaving her and logistics and finances and worked out a real plan.

He notified his son that they were going to split. He told his mother about me, and that he was leaving her. When he finally went home to tell her that he wanted to leave, I guess she got angry (as to be expected) and he said that he felt guilty and panicked and backed out. He messaged me a week later telling me that he felt guilty and that he should have pushed through.

I guess I just want to know was he ever actually planning on leaving? Does he just get off on talking about a future with me and playing pretend? Or was this something he actually wanted?

It is so hard to wrap my brain around and come to terms with. It’s out of my control but it’s all I can think about. Also, we all work for the same company. Next week she and I have to attend the same meeting. She knows who I am. This will be our first time seeing one another in person and I am totally panicking. I don’t know what to do.

Sincerely,
Plans and Promises

Dear Plans and Promises,

Oh the rollercoaster! It’s so real. The stark reality is that plans and promises are just that: plans and promises. Oof. It seemed as if your married partner was on a path, and that path was real to both of you. And yet, a path of plans and promises can change until we are at the end result of that path and plan and the result is actually being lived out.

Because of this, until someone is truly available, there’s always that risk that they won’t ever be. This is why it’s so painful to get involved with someone who isn’t available.

We hinge on hope, and in your case, that hope turned on a dime. Now your focus must be on your own personal recovery, which is the most worthy place to pour into.

What happened with your married affair partner sounds like it was largely about fear. Fear is the biggest blocker of change for all of us, in all parts of our lives, and in his case, that fear became a preventing factor.

That being said, he also may have had more than fear — he may have also rethought the reality of leaving his wife, his marriage, and his life. Perhaps things were not so bad at home as he made them out to be, or perhaps he hadn’t done enough work there to feel that his leaving was warranted or not premature, or a host of other personal reasons. One key phrase is when you say he would be “leaving his wife for me.” Usually, leaving for another person is a far weaker reason than leaving for one’s self, because of a deeper understanding of the incompatibility or unworkable nature of the marriage.

So, if he was leaving “for you,” that shaky reasoning could also have been a reason there wasn’t follow through.

In my video to you here, I address some common themes around fear of leaving a marriage that may have played a part in what happened. Below that, I address how you might handle your upcoming workplace complication.

As for the fact that you all work together, your work is to make yourself whole again in the wake of what happened. That means that you are undoubtedly are in an awkward and challenging situation, but I’d give his wife as much space as possible out of respect for the dynamic.

In your own space, conduct yourself as professionally and normally as possible. Our personal lives shouldn’t play out in the workplace, and especially not the fall-out from a workplace affair.

Do your own healing work, focus on regaining your sense of self and coming back into your most whole and authentic version. That’s the version you’ll bring to work, and the version of yourself you’ll head into all other relationships with.

If you want some supplemental reading, I recommend the book, “Getting Back Out There” by Susan Elliott, as a hopeful, encouraging, and mindful guide to dating from your most authentic and honest self.

With all my love and support,

Lauren

Hi Lauren,

I’m an AP who is slowly gathering the courage to leave my married partner.

I am trying to let myself really feel what the affair is doing to me and also trying to fully internalize what I am doing to this man’s wife. I’m starting to feel constantly distressed and sick that she (seemingly) has no idea what her husband has really been up to for several years.

I want her to have all the information necessary to make a decision about her marriage and I know he’ll never give it to her. I could leave him and just disappear, but I’m afraid he’s just going to keep doing this (please know the irony of me caring about her now is not lost on me). The thing that worries me most is that I’m not his first affair. After the first one ended, he made a big show of recommitting to his marriage, only to fall in with me less than a year later.

He claims his marriage was already in shambles when we met and is still a nightmare, but I’m afraid neither I, or his wife, are getting or will ever get the whole truth. I think his wife at least should have the facts about this current affair.

I’ve had the letter to her written for months. Do I leave and tell her? Or do I just leave?

Sincerely,
Truth Seeker

Hi Truth Seeker,

As you slowly gather the courage to leave your married partner, stay the course. Use your distress and sickness over your part in the destruction to unwaveringly motivate yourself to end the affair. You’ll need it!

I wonder whether your desire to drop a bomb on his marriage is partially a transference of your own difficulty, pain, anger, and resentment, shrouded in a cloak of righteous indignation and justice — as these things so often are.

I expand on my thoughts in this video message to you.

Be focused on reinstating and regaining your own integrity, and be relentless in the pursuit of it for yourself.

Getting out of your lane and involving yourself further by dropping a truth bomb, I feel, will only arrest your healing and make you feel worse, not better as you anticipate. It’s just a hunch. Adding more pain to pain just makes… more pain (and chaos).

With all my love and support,

Lauren

Dear Lauren,

I’ve been in an affair with a married man for almost six years. We met on a business trip, and he wasn't wearing a ring and said he was separated. I was fresh out of a divorce from a 25-year marriage. He seemed like the perfect man, intelligent, a gentleman, interesting, and kind. Our relationship was long distance, so I had no concerns. Two years in, he broke down and told me that he was still living with his wife.

I was shocked and devastated. He told me he didn’t love her, but was trying to help her get her kids raised. They don’t have kids together but he felt guilty over the impact of his own divorce on his children, so he wanted to stay for his step-kids. He begged me not to give up on us, and I believed him.

I allowed things to continue like this for two years, but his continual promises of leaving led to no change. I broke it off last year, but when he begged me to take him back, promising that things would be different this time and that he’d move out by the end of the year, I took him back.

I asked him a few months ago when this is going to end. He said he’d do anything to keep it going. I didn’t understand what he meant when he said it. But now, looking back, I think he meant both having his wife and me.

I desperately want and believe that I need to break up with him, Yet I can’t find the strength to do it. Why am I allowing myself to be treated like this? Why do I want a man who can so easily lie to both his wife and me?

Sincerely,
Desperate for Change

Dear Desperate for Change,

The video I recorded for you is a direct line of love and encouragement from me to you. While my words may sound tough at times, know that it is tough love because I believe without a doubt that you already know what you have to do and why, so I have relative confidence I don’t have to beat around the bush with you.

You’ve had a long runway where your married man’s words are mismatched from his behaviors. You’ve had enough evidence to know that he isn’t making any active changes in his life. And, the most important part is in how this is impacting you.

Here is something I say to affair partners all the time:

If you’re not willing to end your relationship with him, then how can you expect him to do the same with his wife?

If we are not willing to do the hard, courageous, right thing to change a relationship that isn’t working for us, then why are we expecting another person to do the hard right thing to change a relationship that isn’t working for them?

There’s a rhetorical aspect to this question, but more importantly, I want to also shed light on the fact that we stay in relationships that don’t work for us because there is something about it that is working for us. As human beings, we don’t do anything that doesn’t work for us on some level. So ask yourself, “what about this is keeping me in it, FOR ME?” Not his words, not his promises… what is it doing for you from a completely personal and individual standpoint?

Get underneath what that is for yourself. Is the relationship keeping you safe from dating or being alone after a 25-year marriage? Do you believe that he’s the only one for you, so staying in it is easing your fears of losing him? Are viscerally allergic to somehow abandoning people who seem like they’re relying on you, or upsetting them, so you feel too uncomfortable and just wrong when you try to fully walk away from someone you care about in order to save yourself? There can be many reasons we stay in a relationship that is very evidently not working for us. We need to level with ourselves first about what those reasons are.

Then we can work on walking ourselves out of that reasoning.

The following video includes my personal thoughts to you. Also, my course “Finding Freedom for Affair Partners” will give you the step-by-step mental and personal reset that you’re looking for, to find the courage, conviction, and self-love to change the way you orient to this relationship. If you can take it, I’d highly recommend it!

Believe that you are worthy of the type of relationship you want to be in. The person could be right, but the conditions aren’t, and no amount of self-negotiation is going to change that.

All my love and support,

Lauren