Changing Curses to Blessings
February 11th, 2010
By Susan Heitler, Ph.D., Conflict Resolution Therapy Topic Expert Contributor
Click here to contact Susan and/or see her GoodTherapy.org Profile
Horror of horrors—you’ve just caught your spouse listing his name on internet sites for meeting sexual partners. What now!! You are furious, and you let him know it in no uncertain terms.
Now fast forward one month later. What used to be a lovely marriage has turned into a nightmare. You are perpetually irritated. Nothing your husband does seems right in your eyes, and you let him now this in no uncertain terms as well. At first your husband looked remorseful about his internet searches. Now he tells you that he only does these searches because you are so difficult to live with. Your relationship has gone from bad to worse, and both of you have begun using the d-word.
The three biggest contributors to divorce are the 3A’s: Affairs, Anger, and Addictions. As a couple, you and your husband are now showing three of the three—his inappropriate contacts with other women are a form of affairs, with or without physical intercourse. They may also be addictive, or at least compulsive, behaviors. And by dealing with your husband’s problem in anger, you are raising the count to three.
One possible remedy: Call a truce. Tell your husband that while you have been very distressed, you would like to apologize for dealing with the dilemmas the two of you are facing with anger. Offer instead to approach the challenges as partners.
Suggest then that instead of fighting you would like for the two of you to have a quiet and mutually respectful heart-to-heart talk. The goal of talking would be to build a shared understanding of his pattern of reaching out to other women. With shared understanding you have potential to find new and mutually gratifying solutions to your conflicts.
IF the two of you agree to explore the problem you are facing in a quiet search for understanding you might want to start by asking your husband if he sees his internet listings as “ego-syntonic,” that is, a pattern that he thinks is fine, or “ego-dystonic,” that is, a pattern he feels bad about and would like to change.
If your husband sees his sexual connecting with other women as acceptable behavior, you may be best off saying “I love you, and at the same time, I am leaving the marriage. Multiple sexual connections makes our marriage contract null and void. Let’s talk about how you can still be a great dad to our forthcoming child, and how we can build a positive co-parenting relationship.”
If on the other hand your husband expresses remorse or shame about his pattern with a desire to change, then the problem is not him or you, the problem is the problem. Aim to be partners together vis a vis the problem of his out-of-bounds sexualized behavior.
Go together to a bookstore. Many books there should offer the two of you insights about compulsive multi-partner sexual behavior. Books by Frank Pittman, Shirley Glass, Peggy Vaughn, and Dave Carder are among my favorites on the subject of infidelities.
Schedule a series of quiet talks to discuss what you have been learning from the books. Discuss your families of origins’ experiences with infidelity. What happened in your family that may have pointed you in the direction of marrying a man with wandering tendencies? What happened in his family that suggested to him that meeting many women is what men do?
Try also the following two questions, which should prove useful for exploring both his affairs.
1) “If you were to look at what you’ve been doing in the best possible light, what has it been intended to accomplish?”
2) “What might be a better way that might accomplish the same goal without the costs of affairs and anger?”
Then, or simultaneously, take the same quiet talking plus bibliotherapy approach to understanding the role anger can play in undermining a marriage. See the games that teach about anger at www.poweroftwo.org. Talk over what you experienced with regard to anger in each of your families of origin. And discuss the two questions above.
Finding a therapist who can serve as your guide in these discussions could be very helpful. Even without a therapist to aid you though, if you each stay calm and introspective, with both of you refraining from talking about or criticizing your partner, and both of you seeking to understand your own input into the problems instead of succumbing to the temptation to blame the other, you may be amazed.
The internet listings started out as a curse between you. With quiet talking, open information flow, and a spirit of mutual self-discovery, the curse has potential to bring the blessings of understanding, growth, and love to your home. Even difficult conflicts such as those about the biggest problems in a marriage, the three A’s of Anger, Addictions, and Affairs, can be resolved with cooperative talking, exploration, and problem-solving. A conflict resolved is a relationship transformed. Go for it!
©Copyright 2010 by Susan Heitler, Ph.D., therapist in Denver, CO. All Rights Reserved.
-
Find the Right Therapist
-
13 Comments | Click here to leave a comment.
Comments
I’m sorry but if I found out that my husband was looking for other sexual partners online I know that that would be the end of our relationship. It’s one thing to look at other women but to actively solicit them as a partner? No way- that would be it for me. What a major breaker of my trust that I have in him, and I would never be able to trust him again.
You make an important point. Looking for alternative partners is a serious violation of the marital contract. And your initial reaction is probably how most people would feel initially.
At the same time, I have found in my clinical practice that of spouses who stray in any way, some turn out to be fixable. The straying turns out to be either an inadvertent wrong turn, or a kind of call for help, especially when they do it in a way that was bound to be found out.
Still, you are absolutely right that it is quite possible that leaving someone like this will turn out to be the best solution. Trust in sexual fidelity is a cornerstone of strong marriages.
Wendy, I can see why your husband might be looking for others online. You sound like a cold fish. I feel sorry for your husband. He’s likely your whipping boy and servant and will grow tired of living under your house rules.
I could never have accepted my partner who has been seeking others online…whether I was married to the person or not, I could never have accepted him…
Jim I think that is a pretty unfair assessment seeing as how you know nothing about me at all other than what I have typed here. I don’t think that it is unreasonable at all to expect that my husband would not look for other sex partners online or elsewhere for that matter. If that is what your own marriage is all about then that’s between you and your wife. But to make a judgement about someone else and her marriage is pretty closed minded don’t you think? I don’t know what your marriage vows were to one another but I know what mine were and they did not include looking for other sexual partners. That would be a mjor betrayal of my trust and that of our family, and I guess if that makes me a cold fish then so be it.
I just think Wendy is right and that no person would be cool about his/her wife/husband look for another person for sex… I mean, come on…this is not a porn movie that we’re talking about, this is a marriage and marriage means being cimmitted and I’m sure you would agree with me committment does not allow you to look for other sex partners.
Thanks Steven S for being a male voice of reason! Watching a porn movie here and there, even with your spouse, can add a little spice to the relationship. I don’t think that there are many that will deny that. But to actively seek another partner? That is WAY beyond what I would ever be comfortable with, and I think that if the same thing happened to others who have been writing here, he or she would feel the same way. This is just too much of a violation of the marriage, and how someone could ever recover from the trust being broken like that is beyond me. I would be in counseling for years trying to overcome that one!
Bravo on the prevailing opinion here that seeking a sexual partner via online websites is behavior that would have a devasting trust-breaking impact on pretty much any spouse.
I totally agree that seeking another partner, online or in any manner, constitutes a major violation of the marriage contract. Like the more traditional means of becoming involed in an affair such as becoming excessively cozy with a business associate, reconnecting with a high school flame, or seeking a sexual opportunity during a business trip, all infidelities require major intervention for healing. It takes major growth on the part of both partners to turn these curses to blessings.
At the same time, it genuinely is possible in many post-infidelity situations that both parties can not only heal from the infidelity but at the same time end up rectifying other major personal and marital difficulties.
In the case I am describing above, the husband had lost his job. When his many attempts to find work repeatedly yielded no successes, he gradually fell into a deep depression. Isolating at home, as people who are depressed are prone to do, he spent hours alone on his computer. Eventually sexual sites began to excite him. The energy from these felt like an antidote to the hopelessness and powerlessness of his depressive state. In his desparation, the thought occurred to him that maybe the excitement of an illicit affair could jolt him back into being able to function again.
Meanwhile the wife also had been suffering. Her husband’s job loss triggered panic in her. What if he never would be able to find a way to earn an income again? Even with her working, their savings were gradually dwindling. Then over subsequent weeks, as she saw her husband retreating into depression instead of going out each day to hunt for work options, her anxiety turned to anger. Needless to say, the more she angrily criticized her husband for staying home and isolating at his computer, the more depressed her husband had been becoming.
Talking together after the discovery of the husband’s having listed his name on a partners-seeking website finally broke the bubbles of depression and anger into which each spouse had retreated. Both spouses realized that their problem was the problem–how the husband was going to regain employment–not each other. They determined to work together as partners instead of isolating and blaming, came up with a plan for a move to a city with better employment options, and the sun rose again in their world.
Great to hear about how that story turned out. I can definitely see how turning to the internet seemed a logical option to the man, but that he was using it to prop up how he was rreally feeling about himself on the inside. Glad to read it turned out OK for them in the end though.
I think the anger definitely stems from the trust being broken. Once that has happened, it is extremely hard to be able to trust someone from not behaving in the same manner again. Whether it is just for fun or an addiction that will lead to no other actions, the fact that the person is looking leaves the always wondering “what if they had the opportunity” and no matter what the spouse says they will or won’t do, that what if door is opened.
If he ever has the nerve to tell you that he strayed because it is your fault and you just don’t do it for him anymore, run to your nearest divorce attorney and get the ball rolling!
And once the trust is broken many times there is no reparing that fracture.
I totally agree with the common thread in these last posts. Even minor violations of monogamy vows can create serious doubts about the trustworthiness of marital fidelity. Trust provides an essential foundation for comfortable and confidant enjoyment of a marital partnership.
Leave a Reply
By commenting on this blog you acknowledge acceptance of this Blog's Terms and Conditions of Use.