Q and A One

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A questioner writes:

To Whom It May Concern:

Just recently I got back in contact with my high school boyfriend whom I have not seen in 14 years. We had to break up and move on because I was moving out of the country with my family, so there was never any "closure" in our relationship. Now we are both married, for most of those years, and have children.
We have been in & out of touch through the years, but now it seems that we both feed off of our e-mails and phone calls. For the past two years, my husband & I have been growing more distant and when I got back in touch with my old boyfriend, it put a spark into my life again.
My old boyfriend took the opportunity of a local conference to visit me. The mutual feelings that we both still have for each other are just amazing. It’s like nothing has ever changed!
I want more of him and I know he wants more of me, but I don't want our marriages to end because of "us." If my marriage ends it will be our own doing.

I need help or some kind of advice.

Thank you for your time!
(e-mail address deleted)

Dr. Einhorn replies:

The questioner writes, “It’s like nothing has ever changed!” but of course a great deal has: she and her ex-boyfriend are both married and have children.
This question is of interest both because of its content and its style. In content, it raises the perennial issue of the tension between marital fidelity and family integrity, on the one hand, and sexual romance and personal fulfillment on the other. In style, the writer presents a situation without asking any actual questions. Her questions are all implicit, so we can perhaps see into her situation more clearly by making some of them explicit.
First, I want to make some general comments about the issues raised in this request.
The luckiest couples are those who find their sexual romance and personal fulfillment within the context of their marriage. This requires the partners to keep developing and refining their relationship, which is not easy. There’s really no guidebook or blueprint for how to do it; if you’re lucky, you meet other couples who are doing it and learn from them. Moral exhortations are not usually helpful, especially when they come from people who so often turn out to be hypocrites, or to live excessively narrow and rigid lives, or to derive their authority from positions in institutions which themselves are of doubtful validity.
Some therapists take a value-neutral position about marriage, seeing it as just another form of relationship. I don’t. I see marriage as a special form of relationship, especially when there are children, and I am on the side of saving a marriage, when I work with a couple or an individual, if it can be saved. The partners’ motivation to save their marriage, together with the fundamental positives in their relationship, can make it possible for therapy to help them to acknowledge what they had not wanted to see about how their behavior affects one another and themselves, and to begin to make the changes that will support and revive their relationship. Everybody suffers when a marriage with children ends, so there ought to be some very good reasons why this needs to happen.
Psychologist John Gottman has studied marriage for years, and tells us some valuable things about successful and unsuccessful marriages. His work is a resource for couples who want to regenerate or rescue their relationship (www.Gottman.com). If the questioner were motivated to try to strengthen her marriage, she might familiarize herself with Gottman’s work, but it’s unclear whether she really wants to invest energy into her marriage at this time.
Now let’s look at our questioner’s situation.
She certainly is in a dilemma, pulled between her emotionally distant marriage and her “amazing” relationship with her high school boyfriend. She seems to be immersed in her feelings without having given much thought to what’s happening. In oversimplified brain metaphor, she’s mainly in her emotional midbrain and hasn’t engaged much frontal lobe activity; but she does know that her marriage, and perhaps her high school boyfriend’s, are in the balance. It is as if she’s asking for help to bring more frontal lobe activity to bear on her situation, to be more reflective about it, to use good judgment. (As well she should, for there’s a lot at stake.) She seems to be asking for help in connecting up disparate parts of her self which are not in good communication right now, but the identity of those parts is less clear than it may seem to be from her question. For example, we don’t really know, from her question, how she is connected with her husband, her children, or her high school boyfriend.
In order to help a person like this in therapy, it would be necessary to explore what her situation really is. Is she starving for relationship in a marriage that will never give her what she needs, or has she herself contributed to the distance in her marriage by holding on to her unresolved feelings for her ex-boyfriend? If she committed herself to making her marriage work, would her husband join her in the process? Would she want him to, or has she, for better or worse, already made up her mind to go for a relationship with her high school boyfriend?
A therapist might try to help her to begin to think her way through her dilemma by making her implicit questions explicit in the therapeutic conversation. Now, let’s formulate some questions whose answers might go a long way toward helping her, and us, to understand what her situation and choices really are. They include:
* How important is her marriage to her? Enough to forgo a relationship with her high school boyfriend to try to save? Why, or why not?
* How important is her relationship with her high school boyfriend? Important enough to risk her marriage for? Why, or why not?
*What about their kids and spouses?
* She says, “If my marriage ends,” but has she really considered what that would mean? What are her expectations about what divorce would be like? How would she and her husband go about sharing custody and raising the children? Does she know any divorced couples who are doing that? How is it working out for them? Would she expect a legal custody battle? An legal economic battle? How does she expect divorce to affect her relationships with her children? What would the economic implications be? Does she know how judges in her locality are disposing of such issues when divorcing spouses can’t agree? Has she considered consulting an attorney to ask what she could probably expect from a settlement agreement or a trial?
* What are her own values about marriage, fidelity, and divorce? When is it ok to end a marriage, if ever, and what makes it ok?
* Has she tried to revitalize her increasingly distant marriage? How? Would she consider ways of trying to revitalize her marriage, such as marital therapy? Has she discussed her feelings about the increasing distance in her marriage with her husband? If so, how did he respond? If not, why not?
* How has her marriage become distant? How has she contributed to that? Have her feelings for her high school boyfriend caused her to distance herself from her husband?
*What was her parents’ marriage like? To what extent has that been a template for her own? What role did her mother play in her own marriage and romantic life, and to what extent does that influence the questioner’s identity as a woman?
* What is the history of her relationship with her husband, their “story?”
*What is the history of her relationship with her ex-boyfriend, their “story?”
* What part of her is being nurtured by her communication with her high school boyfriend?
Finally, there are some issues about her personality that may also be implicit in her email.
Her confusion about what to do may be a kind of denial, against having to acknowledge that there is NO decision that she can make which will not involve substantial loss to herself and serious consequences to others whom she cares about. There is no way that she can “have her cake and eat it too.” She may need time to work her way out of that confusion, which therapy might provide.
She describes herself rather passively, as if her marriage and relationship with her ex-boyfriend just sort of happened to her. I wonder if she really feels that way, and if she realizes how passive she sounds. It would be worth exploring how much choice she feels she’s had in her life, how she came to make the decisions that have brought her to her current impasse, and whether she wants to see herself as an active, decisive, responsible person in her own life. It would be necessary to know more about her personal history for her current situation, and her attitude toward it, to make sense in these terms, which is one important reason why therapy takes time; the therapist, and client, really have to find out the relevant information about the client in order for the client’s dilemmas and choices to make personal sense.
It may even be that she is experiencing this dilemma at this point in her life as a reflection of different aspects of her own self development that are expressing themselves through her conflict between marriage, family, and boyfriend.
She needs to “get in touch with her self,” in terms of her values and the sources of meaning in her life, and to take responsibility for whatever decisions she makes. The advice I would give this writer is to find a therapist (see my earlier column on “Selecting A Therapist”) and give herself the time she needs to think through these and related questions.