Hi there,
I'll share a quick and funny little vignette about my home life before we launch into more serious territory! I live in a small beach house on the Connecticut coast, and my neighborhood comes alive in the summer with walkers, bikers, runners, and all the summer people out and about. I live on a u-shaped street, on the rounded corner, which means my entire house is a fish-bowl. People walk by all day, it's nice because it's never lonely. It can also be awkward because there's no privacy. This morning my dog was out on the lawn barking at a pair of walkers. When I shouted (from inside the kitchen where I was scrambling eggs) "Charlotte! No!" the couple enthusiastically waved at me inside my house... with my bowl in my pajamas...
People do this to me all day; they wave at me inside my house.
Anyway, before I got up this morning I admittedly scrolled social media for a minute. I saw a carousel from The Cut about Only Fans creators. It outlined their journeys and how much they made, and one creator mentioned that she met men a few times a month for $7-$8K per month.
That made me think about all the clients Michelle and I work with who have spent tens of thousands of dollars (sometimes hundreds of thousands) on their affairs. This can range from helping an affair partner with home expenses, to keeping them on retainer, to paid sex, to floating vacations, hotel rooms, trips and dinners. The range is enormous, and so is the outlay.
It made me think about how significant the time and money lapse is when it comes to infidelity.
Here's what I mean: the amount of money that's spent on illicit rendezvous, and/or the amount of time spent in an affair or pursuing extra-marital activities, is wildly disproportionate to the amount of money and time that's usually willing to be spent on personal recovery, discovery, growth, and healing.
Why? We invest in our pleasure, in escape, and in our fantasies of ourselves; we seek to naturally avoid pain and discomfort. The simple fact is that to do the hard work of putting the equivalent effort and resources behind recovery isn't a pleasant place to indulge.
We short-change our lives when we invest in destruction, then fail to equally invest in meaningful and purposeful reconstruction -- regardless of what outcome that investment leads to.
Which leads me to my next point about the overcompensating betrayed spouse. Many betrayed spouses end up overcompensating for the amount of time and money spent in the affair that then isn't put back into recovery. Most are forced to accept the fact that shared marital resources were spent on something that caused pain and suffering to them.
You can't get the money back, it's been spent. You can't get the time back, that's been spent elsewhere, too.
But then, often, when a betrayed spouse asks to invest in recovery, like counseling or intensives, there's ambivalence, resistance, or chronic avoidance.
"I don't have time," is an excuse to side-step the hard work of personal healing, when endless time was found for the affair.
"I don't know about that, how much is it? That seems like a lot..." is the resistance to professional help, when hundreds (and usually thousands were spent on the affair.)
A little story of my own: I remember sitting at a desk overlooking the marina of our local resort with a stack of printed and collated credit card statements in front of me. I checked in there, even though it was down the street from my house, because my ex-husband was hosting his family at our shared home during our divorce. Otherwise, I never would have spent the money on a hotel room for just myself. That would have been ridiculous.
I sat poised over this stack of papers with a highlighter. What was I doing? Marking up a journey of spending and time I hadn't been invited to nor a part of. The stack of papers were three years of credit card statements for a card in my ex's name that I hadn't known about until the legally-required discovery process of our divorce.
I was furious. Blind with rage. To see where our mutual money and time had been spent, printed line by line, week by week, was not only heart crushing all over again, gut-wrenching, but also maddening.
Meanwhile, after affair discovery, I had played the co-dependent overcompensating betrayed spouse. Professionally. When he refused to move back into our bedroom or engage in real healing efforts, I bought a new mattress for the guest room to make sure he was comfortable. I kept presenting him with new books and articles I'd read that would help enlighten him, too, and I kept begging for conversations that I ended up having to emotionally break down completely for him to begrudgingly acquiesce to having.
It's crazy-making. Insanity. Where was my time and money going? Toward desperately trying to learn, heal and figure out a way forward where we were a stronger, more honest, more evolved couple and individuals.
Where was his going? To a later-discovered burner phone and continuing to play both sides.
If this sounds or feels familiar, stay with me. I know it's hard. It's the hard reality of the insane alternate universe of infidelity.
It's what an affair does to the brain, to a life, to a family, to a relationship. It makes what once made sense make no sense anymore.
It makes a person you thought you knew, trusted, and relied on, a complete stranger who'd rather avoid you and the relationship you've invested in, than save the sinking ship.
When we're in an affair, it's likely we will continue investing in secrecy over investing in a commitment to figuring things out. Despite the insanely high cost of that choice.
This is because an affair has legs of its own. The bond there, the experience there, the stories told between the ears in that space, overtake the reality of life. That's where the money goes and the time goes, and when it's discovered, unfaithful spouses have to go to great lengths to conceal it, or they admit that they literally lost their mind and acted like money was water and time was endless.
The affair is also where the marriage goes to die, because for everything that gets poured into an affair, an equal amount is taken from the marriage.
There are only so many resources we have in this life. Time, attention, and presence are the most precious ones. When those have exploded in the secret nest of an affair, the marriage begins to suffer slowly, limping along on crumbs, on the dregs of the bottom of the coffee cup.
And by the time it's discovered, the resources have been turned inside out. In your heart, in your mind, in your groin, and in your gut. And financially, the revelation of financial infidelity is just as devastating as the realization of how many other resources have gone elsewhere, for however long it's gone on.
This is why I do this work -- to help people experience just a little less pain, confusion, and suffering because they get real insight into what happens when infidelity takes hold. Life gets hijacked, and it's inevitably never the same again.
Now, where that leads to for one or both parties is up to them, and that's where I found myself musing this morning as I wished that all of us would consider investing as much in self-improvement, self-awareness, and self-healing as we do in our pleasure, escape, and fantasies.
I do it, too. It's very human. It's for another newsletter (maybe I'll write about that next week), but even though I invest literally thousands of dollars a month in my own development, when I reach for a pair of new shoes? I'm not thinking. I'm feeling. I'm buying those shoes to fill a fantasy of who I am in them.
But it's so important that we also fantasize about the version of ourselves, on the inside, who inhabits those shoes, that car, that beautiful house. That relationship.
So I want to ask you to reflect for yourself this week; where am I investing in my insides, and where am I investing in my outsides? All of that time, all of that money, what would it do to for me spend as much time and money on the inner work as I do on the outer?
And what would be the result?
Until next time, with all my love and support,
Lauren
P.S. - What I'm Reading: Oh my.... my partner's neighbor passed on the book The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers, and wow, it's incredibly written. Highly recommend, if you're looking for a beach read that's not fluff, but real literature. It's almost too well written, because it brings the slow simmer of an affair to life.