This man has shown a clear inability to be open and honest with both Sarah and his wife. Photo / Getty Images
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I was recently unintentionally involved with a married man. We were together for about four months and during this time I was under the impression he had separated from his wife of 20 years. It turns out this wasn’t the case and they were very much still together. I alerted her to the situation as I felt she had a right to know. They’ve decided to stay together and make their marriage work but he is still actively contacting me on the side saying he still has feelings for me. I still feel the same about him and think we could be great together but I won’t do anything while he’s married. Do I tell his wife he’s still contacting me or step away from the situation entirely? – Sarah
Dear Sarah,
Like so many people, it seems that you have been miseducated about the nature of love. We are told online, on TV and in the movies that love is a feeling. Yet any relationship expert will say, “Love isn’t about feelings; it’s about choices and actions.” That’s not to say loving feelings don’t exist, but they are far from the most crucial thing in establishing and maintaining a long-term intimate relationship.
We are counselling you to be wary of overestimating feelings’ importance when deciding if a relationship is worth pursuing. If we need to feel loved, giving feelings more weight than they deserve is easy. We get dazzled that someone can feel that way about us, get overcome by the strength of our emotions and don’t think straight. People often worry they’ll never experience these feelings again, yet most of the time, they do.
Another way to say it is that falling “in love” is easy, but developing a solid relationship is hard work and requires good decision-making, trustworthiness and respect. Sadly, despite how you feel about this man, there is little indication these more critical factors are present. It is like saying that a house feels great to you and deciding to buy it without a building report. A house can “feel” fabulous but not be a wise purchase because it is full of rot or on unstable land. You would be wise to stop and more objectively reflect on whether this man is good relationship material.
There are a lot of red flags that should raise serious questions in your mind about why you are investing more of your life and emotional energy into this relationship. In the “building report” on this man, he has shown a clear inability to be open and honest with both you and his wife. First, he led you to believe he had separated from his wife when that was not the case. Now, he has led his wife to believe he is committed to making their marriage work, yet he continues to lie to her about staying in contact with you.
These choices also suggest he cannot make tough decisions about whether to leave or work to improve his marriage. To work on his marriage would be to forego having contact with you. He seems to be kidding himself that he can do a bit of both. This is a doomed approach. At the very least, he is confused about how to proceed; at worst, he is a selfish, skilful manipulator indifferent to the harm he is causing you and his wife. Either way, he is making a mess in the process and is on a course that is already causing pain to people he says he cares about. In all conscience, we cannot advise you to keep the door open to the possibility of any future relationship with him, even if he does leave his wife, given his track record. He may have many excellent or attractive qualities, but he is far from ready to do intimacy well or safely.
All of this raises a fundamental question: why are you not acting on these red flags, or how are you overlooking them? This man was blatantly dishonest to you. He tricked you into a relationship that violates your values. Why did you not immediately walk away to protect yourself from more deceit and hurt? Are you too understanding and forgiving? Do you need to expect more for yourself? You deserve someone with the strength to be honest so you can make wise choices based on accurate information about what is happening.
His wife likewise deserves accurate information, which answers the second part of your question. Urge him to be honest with his wife – you shouldn’t have to do this job for him. But if you can’t be sure he will follow through on that, then by all means, tell her yourself. You already have felt the impact of thinking you were living by your values of not getting involved with a married man and being robbed of your right to live according to your values by his deception. His wife deserves accurate information so she can make wise and informed decisions about how she is living. If you don’t tell her what’s happening, you are actively colluding in his deception of her. Is that who you want to be? Lying by omission is still lying.
Coming back to you, we encourage you to take a good, hard look at yourself and why you are continuing to consider a relationship with someone who has behaved in these ways. Are there aspects of your upbringing that would explain why you don’t expect better for yourself? For example, did you struggle to feel loved by a parent because they were so caught up in themselves? Or were you left feeling unimportant in the face of a large family, poverty, a high-needs sibling or some other demand on your parents’ time and attention? If you don’t have answers to these questions, you might want to consider doing individual therapy or a course such as https://www.inrelationship.net/relationshipready.
So many of us end up “looking for love in the wrong places” because we underestimate the need to understand and care for ourselves and, instead, look to others to heal our inner wounds. But, while being with a caring and supportive partner with whom you can be safely intimate is an ideal context in which to do our healing, no other person can fix our inner wounds, no matter how caring. Only we can do that for ourselves. And, as a rule, we rarely end up in a healthy relationship before we have made some real progress on that healing journey.
We strongly encourage you to restore your integrity by “step(ping) away from the situation entirely” and by ensuring that his wife is given accurate information. Instead of wasting your energy on a relationship with a man who is not in a fit state, we encourage you to focus instead on building a relationship with yourself that is more empathic and respectful that will, in the long term, allow you to have much higher standards for how you are treated in future relationships.
• Verity & Nic are psychologists and family therapists who have specialised in relationship and sex therapy for more than 25 years. They have been working on their own relationship for more than 40 years and have two adult children.
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