Take Beth’s situation. She spent years with Jon. In her mind, he was her soul mate. He had virtually every quality she was looking for. The only problem was that he was married. But he had a “special circumstance.” He and his wife had a “marriage of convenience.” They never had sex, and the marriage was more of a friendship. They both turned a blind eye where cheating was concerned. They were staying together until their youngest daughter went off to college, so she’d have a stable home environment. Beth could see the light at the end of the tunnel: just two more years, and Jon would get a divorce and marry her. This is what Jon told her. She had no evidence to the contrary. Plus, she believed he was sincere. This chemistry could not be faked!
Fast-forward two years (by which time Beth was in her midforties). Jon’s youngest finally went off to college. Beth knew that any day now Jon would file for divorce, and they could get married and move on with their lives — together. And, true to his word, Jon did get divorced. But then the unthinkable happened: he also broke up with Beth!
While we can only speculate about Jon’s real thoughts, it seems that Beth was his “transitional object.” She filled a need for Jon and allowed him to tolerate his marriage. So, yes, he was unhappily married, but this didn’t necessarily mean he thought seriously about Beth as she did about him. He had essentially used her. Furthermore, about a year after his divorce, he did get married...to someone else!
With many more women in the workplace these days, bonds and friendships more readily develop between women and men. Many of these relationships are with men who are married. Some of these relationships shift from platonic to emotional and then, most frequently, turn physical. Furthermore, women are far more financially independent now and do not need men to secure their futures. We’ve even reached the point that a woman can have a career and a child entirely without a man. Overall, women have gotten a much bigger part of the pie. Women hold positions of power, run companies, and are millionaires.
Despite so many changes, however, remember that women tend to be more relational and emotional by nature. Men tend to be more logical (problem solvers) and physical. Another issue is that men tend to desire sex more than women do; women’s sex drives seem to wane a few years into marriage and more so after kids. Our bodies go through extreme physical changes, while men do not have such significant changes, and their sex drives don’t diminish nearly as quickly. However, the shifts in physical intimacy within the marital relationship resulting from these changes in women affect men significantly and may contribute to some men’s complex proclivity to stray. A lot less sex than they had early in the marriage isn’t what they “signed up for.” Being involved with a married man when you are seeking a committed or monogamous relationship can also wreak havoc on your life. Those in such circumstances sometimes even describe it as torturous!
When He’s Not That into You: This may seem like an “emotionally unavailable man” situation, but it can be tricky. The way to think about it may be that this is less about who he is at the core and more about situational unavailability. He will not be available to you, because he just doesn’t have those deeper feelings. He may be a very good, high-quality man, but mutual feeling and attraction are a must for any relationship to get off the ground, let alone be sustainable.
Don’t personalize the man that just isn’t into you. You have choices, too, and I am sure you can remember times when someone liked you and you did not like him back. The craziness comes when you don’t (or he doesn’t) accept this and move on. In the best-case scenario, the man will be honest and direct from the beginning. If this doesn’t happen, be intelligent about his behavioral cues. If he doesn’t call, text, or pursue you in some way...he’s not that into you!
Your situation may involve complicating factors — perhaps he’s your boss, your best friend’s spouse, or a neighbor. That is, you may find that seeing him is unavoidable. If you do not see him in your regular day-to-day life, consider this an advantage, since all these complicating circumstances just make things more challenging. However, you can successfully withdraw from this relationship, and chapter 7 discusses how.
You will be able to get through a breakup only if you learn to tolerate the pain of the breakup and the pain of being alone. This is the place where so many people habitually fail. The pain becomes unbearable, and so they keep going back. It’s not like a regular breakup, when you’re no longer in love, or you’re dumped, and the door closes completely. If the door is left open, you may walk back through it and return to him. In that case, your situation is similar to that of an alcoholic who can always access alcohol: you both have to find ways to live while knowing that the thing you crave is out there and potentially obtainable.
Again, the painful feelings are entirely normal. You will experience a loss and will have to go through the grief process. Feeling angry, sad, rejected, lonely, and hurt come with the territory. Chapter 9 will help you devise a plan for riding out these difficult emotions. Using the most effective strategies drawn from my years of doing psychotherapy, I offer practical techniques to help you cope with these feelings and get on the path to feeling good again. Loss can put people in a crisis state, and a breakup (with a married man or in the context of another romantic relationship) certainly fits this category. This book will introduce you to coping strategies that help you adjust to the “new normal” that comes when a loss is accepted, and it will guide you as you move forward.
These therapeutic coping strategies, which are thoroughly explained in chapter 9, make up the acronym GET SMART:
• G — Goal orientation
• E — Emotion management
• T — Thought restructuring
• S — Self-soothing
• M — Mindfulness
• A — Attachment style
• R — Reaching out to others
• T — Transformed behavior
Chapter 10 discusses moving on with your life. This will be a natural progression once you have gained some mastery of the strategies for breaking up and tolerating the associated pain, discussed in chapters 7, 8, and 9. If you have moved on from the pain of this loss, most of the battle is done. But, as with anything you are trying to change, maintaining the changes takes energy and effort. The goal will change from getting out of these relationships to figuring out what you want in life (including any future relationship). Chances are you still desire love and partnering up with someone. If so, that’s wonderful! But you need to know how to make your life as fulfilling as possible until this happens. When working to move on, there are several vital concepts to keep in mind regarding goal-setting and overall recovery, which we will explore.
We will return to relationship matters in chapter 11, which discusses in depth what a healthy relationship looks like. Information there presents a picture of what most people desire in a partner (for example, honesty, responsibility, caring), which will help you reflect on what attributes you find necessary in a romantic relationship (along with deal breakers).
In that chapter, I also spend a lot of time on what makes a relationship healthy. I focus predominantly on emotional and physical accessibility, along with emotional responsiveness and emotional engagement. I also revisit attachment-related concepts and discuss tuning in to your