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Relationships
How People End Up Torn Between Two Lovers
Therapy can help you clarify and process this critical, painful life decision.
Posted November 8, 2021 Reviewed by Davia Sills
Key points
- People who fall in love with an affair partner typically thought it would never happen to them.
- While moving forward with a decision may feel impossible, not moving forward can intensify the pain.
- Therapy can offer indispensable help at times like this.
As an experienced sex therapist, I’ve been privy to clients’ deepest, most shameful secrets. Often, they tell me things that their closest friends—or even their spouses—don’t know.
Feeling torn between two lovers is one example. People often wait till they are desperate before calling me. They feel paralyzed with indecision and tormented by guilt (it’s the ones who aren’t wracked with guilt that I worry most about). Clients often assume that I’ve rarely, if ever, heard a story like theirs. They love two very different people for two very different reasons.
Chances are, as you read this, you are feeling one of two things: “This person is an absolute menace and should drown in their own guilt!” or “OMG, I can’t believe she’s writing about me!” Maybe you also feel fear—“What if my partner does this to me?”—or superiority—“I would never, ever, act this way!” But here’s the rub. Many if not most of the people who come to me with this life challenge say both of those things—“I never thought I’d be capable of this!” and “I can’t imagine how awful it would be if my partner did this to me!”
The fact of the matter is relationships are complicated, and there are no easy answers here. If you can relate, no doubt you have compelling reasons to leave each of your relationships and equally compelling reasons to stay. This is the murky realm of the human psyche, a place I’ve become accustomed to, spending my career escorting folks as they make their way through the fog of existence. There are no clear paths, but it’s always comforting to walk in uncertain territory with another beside you. So, it’s great when people take the step to come to therapy.
A therapist can help you unpack the complex issues
Why did you fall for temptation? Are you expecting too much out of your primary partner? Have you recognized your role in your relationship challenges? Have you clearly communicated your needs with your primary partner? Are you unhappy with your life and distracting yourself with a lover rather than looking within? And don’t ignore the potential benefit of couple’s therapy. It can help unearth a level of relationship intimacy that has been lost along the way.
Depending on the people involved, I sometimes ask if an open relationship is conceivable. More and more, couples are recognizing that one love for a lifetime isn’t necessarily realistic, and from an evolutionary perspective, it certainly isn’t what Mother Nature intended. But open relationships are tricky for the majority of couples, so it’s usually not even a consideration.
Of course, not deciding on a path forward generates its own challenges. One, you will likely get caught. Today’s technology is so sophisticated that spouses discover affairs even when they aren’t looking for them—such as when a smartphone shares texts across all devices. This horrific drama is what lands many couples in therapy.
Sometimes couples recover from such a discovery and, in fact, become stronger. But there are no guarantees here, and it’s probably just as likely that years of pain and rage will ultimately get played out in court. But even if the affair isn’t discovered, indecision slowly corrodes relationships until all the love is gone. This is the easy way out, though, because it’s much easier to leave someone when you hate them than when you love them. But it’s also much more expensive because hate fuels a legal bloodbath.
Is there a third option? Maybe not. So much of life is about making the least-bad decision, and every choice here will bring tremendous pain. But waiting for the situation to play out probably increases the odds that rage and hate will amplify.
Making a choice
If your choice is to end the marriage, leaving a loved one has many complex reverberations. Of course, we immediately think of the children if we have them. But it’s also necessary to consider all that your spouse is losing because it’s much bigger than just you. So much that they hold dear, including how they have conceptualized their future and how they’ve understood their past, are now on the chopping block. A person’s identity is shaken to the core when they are no longer part of a “we.” Folks survive these changes, of course—and with good support, they can even thrive as a result. But these brutal transitions are slow and arduous for all.
If your choice is to end your affair, this too brings tremendous pain that you can really only process privately since it was never a public relationship in the first place. Continued contact with your lover is compelling but painful. It must be avoided so that healing can begin.
Life has a way of putting us through our paces. Your challenge may be this, or it may be something completely different. But few of us come through life’s journey unscathed. As technology advances, it’s possible that long-term intimacy will only become more threatened. Whatever your challenges may be, rising to them with an open heart strikes me as the gentlest choice for all.
To find a therapist, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.
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