Infidelity: How do we trust—and fully love—again?

May 25, 2021

Glennon Doyle:

Hi, everybody. It’s G. Thank you so much for coming back to We Can Do Hard Things. Before we get started talking about infidelity, which is our topic for this week. Another easy one. I just wanted to say this, I am so grateful to you. I woke up this morning thinking I am having more fun with my work right now with this podcast than I’ve had in a decade. And I don’t know, it feels so much less lonely than writing. When I start to write a book, I’m just gone by myself in my head, which is not always the safest place to be, for years. And the other day I told Abby how much fun I’m having interacting with all of you and doing this with my sister and my team. And she said, oh Glennon, and now you know what it’s like to be on a team sport. Oh my gosh. Okay. I get it a little bit, but my team sport involves just sitting and talking. So anyway, I’m just grateful for you because you being there as why I get to be here. Thank you. And now we’re going to jump in to a very juicy episode all about in fidelity. Sweet Jesus. It’s a tricky one. Let’s just roll.

GD:

Today, we’re talking the hard thing of infidelity, which each of us has a long, interesting history with. What is your definition? There’s a million different ways we can talk about infidelity. Okay. So for today, the kind of infidelity that I have been thinking about in preparation for this conversation is sort of romantic infidelity, infidelity inside of a romantic relationship. And I would define infidelity as a sort of breaking of some boundary that the people inside of your relationship have mutually agreed upon.

Amanda Doyle:

Great.

GD:

Do you have a definition of infidelity for this, for our purposes today that is different than that? Or the same.

AD:

I can go with yours. That sounds good.

GD:

Okay. So we’re talking about infidelity, meaning the breaking of a boundary that was mutually agreed upon previously between the people inside of a romantic relationship.

AD:

I mean, I guess mine is, I think of it more traditionally. Like you have had a relationship of some kind that is not faithful to the marriage outside of the marriage. So, I mean, I think there’s a thousand different that you could be, that you could break a kind of pact you had, you know, you could overspend, you could gamble, you could make a decision that we should have agreed to together. I don’t view those that as infidelity, I viewed the actual, like physical or emotional relationship established with someone else that is not your partner.

GD:

Okay. And you mentioned marriage. So I probably widened it because I think it doesn’t have to be marriage. Right. It’s just some kind of commitment, but I guess it could be, I guess the reason why I wanted to start outside of marriage is because my relationship with infidelity starts very early. Okay. In seventh grade, my first real boyfriend, Adam, who I felt I loved deeply. I was at the seventh grade bonfire and it came to my attention through other people that Adam had left me without telling me for Susie. You remember, Susie?

AD:

Oh, I remember Susie.

GD:

Beautiful Susie with the long red hair who was just so lovely and kind and nice.

AD:

They’re always nice.

GD:

Yeah. By the way, Susie is now married to somebody that we knew in high school and is amazing and has a fantastic family. So solidarity with Susie now, but less so then. Less so then. And I remember walking away from, leaving the bonfire and standing by myself in the dark, away from the warmth of the belonging of the bonfire. That was for people who had boyfriends like Adam. I had been cast away and I just remember standing by myself, listening to Garth Brooks play I’ve Got Friends in Low Places and just understanding that my life was over and that Susie and girls like Susie would have everything and I would have nothing. And then I remember going home and laying in bed inside of my room, which if you might remember, Sister, was covered wall to wall, not even a space of wall because every inch of my room was covered with pictures of long-haired glam metal band people. My deepest loves besides Adam, where Jon Bon Jovi and Sebastian Bach from Skid Row. Yep. And Jani Lane from Warrant. Brett Michaels.

AD:

Oh, can’t forget Brett.

GD:

No. Now it strikes me that the things that they all had in common were that they all looked a lot like girls. Abby pointed that out. But then I went on to have a serious boyfriend in high school who cheated on me and then a serious boyfriend in college who cheated on me. And then I got married and had a real serious bout with infidelity inside of my first marriage. So anyway, it’s been going on forever. Sister, what’s your experience with …

AD:

I mean, at least you had a good run through sixth grade.

GD:

I did.

AD:

Things were good before then.

GD:

What was your run?

AD:

Well, I didn’t know we were going back. I just have my most recent, I just had my most recent bout. I mean, my first marriage ended through an email message from overseas and essentially what happened. And I’ve never talked about this before, so this is odd, but, essentially in desperation to try to save my marriage, I had given this ultimatum. Unfortunately for me it was enthusiastically received.

GD:

Explain what it was. So they understand, you said something like …

AD:

I said, something like, well this is getting more complicated, but my husband’s job was the center of his life. And, I was tangential to that and I knew that if we ever had a family that that would continue to be so, and I didn’t want my kids to have the same experience I had, which was that they were always going to be second to the priority of the job. So I knew at that point that I wouldn’t put them in that position. So I would have to choose between having a family and staying married. And so I said he had to choose and he very quickly chose and asked for a divorce. So I think there’s several things that were unique about that, but one of them is that between the time I received that message through now, he wouldn’t speak with me. So the totality of processing time I had for that entire experience, you know, this man, I was madly in love with that that was completely over was two 10 minute conversations. So there was no, there was no shared grieving. There was no processing, there was no closure. It just went from like being the center of my world to being gone in a moment.

GD:

I have heard this described as ambiguous loss, that can never be defined and can never be processed. And is one of the hardest grieving processes.

AD:

Yeah. I remember you told me about that, like years after, and it made sense to me and it’s, it’s basically a loss that there’s no closure or clear understanding around. So it, it leaves the person in a constant search for answers and that delays any kind of grief process that usually unfolds. And it’s basically just a total mind fuck, because you can’t, you can’t move through the process of grief because you don’t even have the initial answers to begin to understand your situation. So, basically, I had no information and it was just a lot of self-blaming and, a lot of questioning myself and, and it was terrible. And then a few months later I received a gift in the mail, and it was a baby’s first Christmas ornament.

GD:

Yes. I remember this day.

AD:

And that led to me finding an online baby registry, which strongly correlated to the conception of my husband’s new baby during our marriage. So, but again, I had no context or ability to process any of that.

GD:

So somebody had accidentally sent you that baby gift to your home. That was for you.

AD:

Yes.

GD:

Yes. Okay. Got it.

AD:

So apparently yes, the process had unfolded too quickly for people to update their addresses.

GD:

Right, right, right.

AD:

Right. That’s right. So that’s basically how I learned part of the story of my marriage after the fact. And, and that’s how I learned that I would never actually be able to know the story of my marriage and as a very kind of logical thinker and person who likes to understand things in order to process through them, I think having to totally accept that I would never have answers and that I would never actually know my story, and having to be okay with that, I think that was the hardest part. And so I feel like I have the story of infidelity, but I also have this like ghost of infidelity.

GD:

Yes, which is different than mine because in my marriage, I was told by my ex-husband, I think about 10 years in that, in the middle of a marriage therapy session, I was told that he had been unfaithful to me many times, starting very near the beginning of our marriage. Which began the opposite of your situation, just a grueling day in and day out, years in and years out, processing of how that happened and why that happened and how we were going to recover. So we had very situations. Do you remember that day that I called you?

AD:

Oh, oh yes. Quite clearly. Yes.

GD:

What was it? Cause I remember leaving the marriage therapy, I think telling him and the therapist to fuck off, in one way or another and walking out and then sitting in my minivan. And obviously as usual, you were the first one that I called or did I text you for what happened?

AD:

No, you called me. You called me and just told me what he had just said. And it was just numb, numbness. And I obviously went and got on a plane and came there.

GD:

We had different experiences. And when I still, when you talk about it are at the aftermath of our reactions was different because, and I think this is true of, of many relationships. People often ask how Craig and I can be such good friends now and how we can co-parent so well after something like that. And I think that the reason why is the same reason why I had a different reaction to my infidelity than you had to yours. You were in love. You were deeply in love.

AD:

Desperately, desperately in love. Yes.

GD:

You were deeply desperately romantically in love. And so your experience was the experience of a woman who has been devastated by a romantic break. By betrayal, in a romantic relationship. My fury was the fury of a mother who somebody had just messed with her family.

AD:

Right. You were just pissed.

GD:

I was just pissed, yes.

AD:

I was crushed.

GD:

Right. Because we didn’t have, we never did have that deep, deep, romantic connection. We had a family unit. Right. We would both say that now we married each other because it was the right thing to do. Not because we were desperately in love or because it was the right. We weren’t right for each other. So it’s like, I tell people, we have such a good divorce now because it’s like, maybe you can either have a fairy tale marriage, or a fairytale divorce, but you can’t have both because like, in your situation, there was such passion. There was such passion and passion cannot be switched on and off. It just kind of moves from love to hate.

AD:

Correct. Right. Correct. And your strength of your relationship was that you were always doing together in partnership, what was best for the kids? So it was a very specific kind of betrayal because this quite obviously was not ideal for the children. And so that was a breach of your particular code.

GD:

Yes. We also had infidelity. I really did think that everybody was, and for me it was the rage of a mother who someone has just wrecked her family, you know? Also I would say I still, the rage of body violation, like the feeling, the knowing that you have gone out and exposed your body to something that you have now brought home to me. It feels like to me, it feels very close to breaking consent.

AD:

I think that’s fair. Yes.

GD:

Yes. That part still makes me extremely ragey years and years and years later, while I’m in even a new marriage and we are co-parenting beautifully and all different levels of forgiveness have been had that still, you know, that feeling when you think of something and you have to actually shake your body to stop thinking about it.

AD:

Yes.

GD:

I have to like shake my head and move on when I think about that.

GD:

So Sister, there is this idea that I can’t wait to ask you about this, that a lot of people bring up when we talk about infidelity in terms of like, so it takes two to tango. This is the thing, like, what was your responsibility? Do you have any feeling of responsibility around the infidelity that happened in your marriage? What would you say to that?

AD:

I mean, listen, I think, I believe that both people are equally responsible for the ecosystem of a relationship. And I also believe that every person is singularly responsible for what they freely do with their own genitalia. So and / both.

GD:

Yes.

AD:

Like say the issue in marriage is conflict. Okay. One person might be disproportionately responsible for bringing conflict to the marriage, but that does not allow the other person just to go around saying, Hey, we’re even because my preferred conflict avoidance strategy is having sex with other people. They do not. It is horseshit to try to hoist on someone else, your own responsibility for your actions, even while both people are responsible for whatever, you know, misery or happiness you’re living through at the time.

GD:

Right. Because that’s kind of what you signed up for. You signed up for better or for worse, all of these complicated things. Still when things get worse, you’re not going to go have sex with other people.

AD:

Right. It’s assumed they’re going to get worse. Like we specifically say it. It’s like, disclaimer, it’ll be a lot of worse and some better.

GD:

I want to talk about this (laughing). A lot of worse, some better once a month, maybe. Okay. So this is your favorite question. And I remember having so many fun conversations about this when your marriage imploded, and then there was no way to talk about, just the weirdest. You especially loved sister when people would ask you or still ask you, So what happened? What happened? Like you would say that your marriage was over in the way that the boundaried way that you would say it, and then someone would follow up with the concern on the face and the, What happened? Right. Can you talk to us about that experience?

AD:

Yeah. I just think, I think that this question is always for the benefit of the asker and never for the person who is going through something very hard. And so I think the reason that people ask this question is because they need a way to understand what happened to you in a way that can be digestible to them so that they can decide who’s a villain and who’s a victim and they can develop an insurance policy for their own relationships.

GD:

That’s right. That’s right.

AD:

And it is because, it’s untenable to have to accept the fact that 40% of marriages experience infidelity. So when you see a couple that has gone through this, you need to immediately understand who’s responsible. I think who’s responsible is a similar question. I don’t know, a single person who’s experienced infidelity who has not gone back and replayed every moment of their life to see what their role is in it. That is that kind of simplistic question is for the asker. It’s not for the person who’s enduring what they’re enduring. And I think it’s deeper to me than this idea that that’s an annoying question. It actually asks the person to betray this very sacred thing to them. Because just as real as the trauma that ended my marriage was the very real things that were inextricably part of that. It’s like all of those memories I cherished. All of that shared experience. All of the dreams for my future. All of the hope and investment I gave in that was all part of the same bucket. And it was just as real as the reality that ended it. And I think there’s this ask we make of people who’ve gone through divorce to kind of like it’s a sporting event. And it’s like, was that a winner or lose? Was that real? Or was that fake? Was that a hoax?

GD:

Or was it his fault or her fault?

AD:

Right. When in fact it is all of that is sacred and all of that is real, no matter how wildly it ends and how traumatically it ends. You’re asking someone to encapsulate and betray the sacredness of everything that proceeded it by asking them to give you like a two sentence description of what went down.

GD:

Because everybody wants a formula.

AD:

Everybody wants a formula.

GD:

If you tell me the formula, then I can fix mine and adjust my formula. So that doesn’t happen to me. It’s math.

AD:

Yes. So I’d like you to betray the sacredness of your entire experience, turn it into a punchline for me so that I can have something to walk away with. And you can feel like shit after I walk away, because you know that your experience is so much more complicated, so much more real, so much more nuanced, than you’ll ever be able to describe to someone, but good, because now you feel better as you walk away. You’ve decided what happened to me. And I just wish people, I really, I wish people would stop asking folks what happened. I mean, I really wish people would be more intellectually honest. And if they have care for that person, first of all, if you have curiosity, mind your damn business. Because curiosity has no place in grief and say nothing. If you care about that person, you just go up to them and say, Life is impossible. And this is impossible. And I know your story is complicated and sacred to you.

GD:

And let me do your laundry.

AD:

I’m here for you. And here’s a roasted chicken. Okay. That’s it?

GD:

Yes. That’s right.

AD:

Don’t ask for things from people who are grieving.

GD:

No, and you don’t try to control it or explain it it’s you just show up and you be brave enough to be still and present in the face of things that don’t make any sense. Right? Friendship is two people not being God together.

AD:

Correct. It doesn’t make sense. Like, Hey, the jig is up both life and relationships rarely make sense. So I’m trying to make sense of my experience. Don’t ask me to make sense of it for you.

GD:

Is there any, in terms of forgiveness, people are always asking. I think forgiveness is one of the most complicated, weird unexplainable concepts. It’s not a finish line that you cross. It comes and goes. It’s not something I’m ever really, truly able to hold on to. I remember in the aftermath of the infidelity in my first marriage, working so hard, doing all the things that anyone could ever tell me might heal us. Right? All the things that, the therapy, the date nights, the conversations, the exercises, retreats, just all of the things and just waiting for forgiveness to just like fall upon my head as a reward for the long suffering. Right. And it just, you know, we had our moments of where I would look at us and be like, we’re doing it. Maybe we’re still a family, but I was still ragey all the time and triggered so much anytime there was any requirement of me to be physically intimate.

AD:

Right.

GD:

My body would just react. Like I would cringe just, it was just my body desperately trying to protect myself, you know? I would over and over again, just go in my head. How could he do this to me? How could he do this to me? How could he do this to me? And then there was this one morning where I woke up and thought, Wait, how could I do this to me? Like, I am the one whose body is telling me that I am not safe. He can’t change what he did. He’s doing all the things. The only one who can change what’s happening right now is me. Right? How could I keep doing this to me? How could I keep putting myself in this situation that my body is begging me to understand is not safe for whatever reason. Right? So for me, I came to the point to understand the only way I could forgive Craig is to divorce Craig. This isn’t everyone’s answer. I have dear friends who have found forgiveness within their marriage, but for me, my anger was a signal saying, You do not believe that you’re safe. And my anger was saying, you need to restore a boundary that has been broken. Or you will never feel safe. This is your responsibility. Right? And so I had to put the boundary of we no longer have any sort of expected physical or emotional intimacy at that point. And that, when I put that boundary up is when I started to feel forgiveness because I had made myself safe again. I had restored a boundary.

AD:

It allowed you to love him fully because you had the access to you that you could offer without the access to you that you could not offer.

GD:

That’s right. That’s exactly right. I had to, I mean, in some ways I really had to be faithful to myself. It was a self-faithfulness, right. Stop ignoring what you know. Stop ignoring what your body is telling you.

AD:

It’s so interesting because I feel like this parallel track of our two experiences. You needed to have the absence of a particular connection in order to be able to forgive and to open yourself up. And my experience, all I wanted was that connection and was denied it. And it’s so interesting because my idea of forgiveness, the way I understand it, is it’s forgiveness is releasing a particular connection between you, which is funny, because that’s what you’re saying in a different way. It’s for me as someone who was that, that was the center of my world. And I wanted it so much. It was this idea that like, when you can’t be connected in love, it’s better to be connected in any other way than to not be connected at all.

GD:

So even hating them, hating them, perseverating.

AD:

Oh. Because I mean, passionate contempt is the second best thing to passionate love. The worst thing is the worst thing is indifference.

GD:

That’s right. Because the opposite of love is indifference, it’s not hate

AD:

That’s right.

GD:

That’s still a chain connecting you to that person. So if you’re someone right now, who’s listening, who is feeling like they can’t let go of their unforgiveness or their rage or their anger, it might be because that’s your last connection to that person.

AD:

It makes total sense. It is a home for what you just lost. For the home you just got kicked out of. I mean, that the idea that you would have to accept nothingness where the center of your world used to be, the idea that you actually do not have a meaning to that person outside where forgiveness exists, right? Because when you’re forgiving it, you’re releasing the need for that. And like when two people are holding this contempt or this sense of being aggrieved against each other, they still have power over each other. Or they have the semblance of power over each other. In fact, I am still able to, to channel the intensity of my emotions towards you. And when really the worst, I mean, for me, the worst thing in the world, and especially where you are loving someone so much and not getting anything in return. I mean, indifference and apathy is the final frontier. When you can actually accept that.

GD:

Because when you can accept that, when you can accept the nothingness and that is the forgiveness, and then that leaves room, it leaves space. It leaves time to build something else or to move in a different direction because that holding on that, that chain of intensity is always a flowing backwards. Right. Okay. We’re going to take a break. We’re going to come back and answer some hard questions about infidelity. I love you, Sister.

AD:

I love you, sissy.

GD:

You’re so smart. You’re so smart.

GD:

Okay. Let’s hear our first question.

Jen (caller):

Hi, Glennon. Hi, Sister. My name is Jen and I related to both Untamed and Love Warrior deeply because I also dealt with infidelity in my first marriage. I’m about to marry a wonderful man, but I’m afraid my baggage from my previous betrayal is already sabotaging us. My question is this, How do you keep the infidelity in your first marriage from effecting your new relationship? Thank you for talking about hard things, Glennon and Sister.

GD:

I love her.

AD:

I love her too. I mean, it also, isn’t just effecting your second relationship. I mean, it affects everything that is, it’s like when you’ve experienced something that deeply, whatever kind of grief it is, you just carry it in your bones. It’s just like in your bones forever. And it’s part, I mean for better or for worse, it’s part of you. So I feel like for me immediately, one of the things was that it made me question everything about myself and my ability to make decisions and to evaluate things, because it’s really hard in the aftermath of that to integrate what you know now with what you thought you knew then. So you question, if anything is real and I mean, maybe that actually very much affects next relationships, because it’s hard to say like, Is this real? Or is this …

GD:

Yeah, it’s like getting to this point in your life where it’s like the end of the Sixth Sense movie, or it’s like, I see dead people. And then you look back at your life and you realize you are not experiencing the truth of things. Like you thought everything was one way. And it’s actually another way, which makes self-trust, I think that is probably the biggest consequence for was for me, not just, not just a love was broken, but like my relationship with myself, my self-trust. I mean, I’m going to say something to Jen, which I didn’t think that I was going to share, but I just, her vulnerability makes me want to tell this story, which I hope no one uses against me eventually. But anyway, I’m just going to say it. So Jen, I so deeply understand what it seems like is happening with you right now. So after, when I fell in love with Abby and married Abby, I was petrified. I would, I think for the first year, maybe longer, I was constantly afraid that my life was going to repeat itself, that I understood that I was experiencing deep love and loyalty, but I thought that I kind of thought I was experiencing that before, too. So there was a part of me that felt like this so annihilated me before that I have to constantly stay on guard so that I never get that vulnerable again, because that kind of vulnerability leads to just soul annihilation. Right. So, so I just stayed on guard. And what that meant was that I was, I think I was a little bit paranoid actually. I mean, I had a very hard time trusting Abby.

AD:

Which is amazing. If you know Abby, it’s like, she’s actually probably one of the only people worthy of trust.

GD:

Exactly. She’s the be most loyal, loving person on earth, but Jen’s new partner could be too, like the point is it doesn’t have anything to do with the other person. It all has to do with you and your fear and your commitment to never getting hurt or duped again. Right. So this kind of fear and paranoia just came to this moment where one night I actually found myself picking up Abby’s phone and going through her texts.

AD:

No! I did not know that.

GD:

Yes. I know I had to tell it for Jen.

AD:

Wow.

GD:

So I did, and I just was sitting there going, Glennon, What you doing? What are you doing? And I just, it was like a rock bottom, right. It was like a trust rock bottom. And I felt like crap that night. I actually told Abby about it the next morning.

AD:

What was her reaction to that?

GD:

So, I remember her face at first, which looked kind of terrified and upset and a little bit mad. So I was …

AD:

All fair reactions.

GD:

Yeah. (laughing) So I was scared. And then she freaking said, Okay, what else do you need to see?

AD:

Oh my God, it’s not what I would’ve said.

GD:

No, no, no, no, no, no, no me neither. Me neither. If it was reversed, I would have been, well, I don’t know. But she said, What else do you need to see? Do you want my email? Do you want, she said, I want to you to see everything for as long as it takes until you understand that you have nothing to fear. And that was so her and so beautiful because it was just like, she understood that it wasn’t her. She knew it wasn’t her. She knew it was me. And some sort of, almost very, and I don’t take this lightly because I know this isn’t a specific diagnosis in the mental health community and it’s an important one, but it is a little bit of what feels like post-traumatic stress, right? It’s like this healing is healing that you are so freaking lucky if you have someone who’s willing to allow you to heal, even when it feels gross.

AD:

Yes. I mean, I think that that is so interesting because it is rarely, well, I think in many cases, it’s exactly that it has to do with your perceptions of the world post that first trauma and that affects your entire relationship. So I feel like for me, my reaction came not as much as a jealousy situation, but it was that I had this kind of imprint and self-perception based on my first relationship that I carried with me, which is a whole different kind of self-sabotage. So I remember …

GD:

Like what? What was your self-perception?

AD:

Okay. So the very last thing that my first husband ever said to me before he walked out the door for the last time was, You’ll never be satisfied.

GD:

Ahhhh …

AD:

And I don’t know if he meant it like a curse or a prophecy or his way of blaming me for the end of it. But I really, I allowed that to imprint on me for a long time where I just decided that that was true about me, that I will never be satisfied. And I think that you really have to look at because from very early relationships on, we just kind of adopt what people told us as truth about, about ourselves.

GD:

About ourselves. Yes.

AD:

And that it took me a long time to decide which by the way, made the whole Hamilton craze, like really awesome. Every day for three years.

GD:

Isn’t that the ultimate gaslighting too? It’s like, that’s like everyone calling women at difficult. It’s not that I can’t meet your needs, or I refuse to is that you have too many needs. It’s not that I’m not, it’s not that I’m not enough. It’s that you’re too much.

AD:

That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. So it took me years to move from the truth that I understand now, which is that, that man was never going to satisfy me.

GD:

Yes!!!

AD:

Right. Like it, and I will never again tell myself that I will never have love because I require too much. It’s right now, I understand that I am worthy of the kind of partner who wants to love me the way I need to be loved. And that’s what I have now, but I imprinted that on myself based on my relationships. And it did sabotage for a while because I would tell myself, you’ll never be satisfied. So what you require of this relationship is too much. So it’s not even worth going for. It’s not even worth saying. So I think that that’s a big piece of it that is worth looking at.

GD:

I love it. It’s like switching it in your brain to, I will never be satisfied to like, thinking about him and going, you will never be satisfying. (laughing)

AD:

We’ll have to get that to Lin. See if he can rework it

GD:

It’s so good. I love it. I love it. And also just one more thing, just one more thing I want to say before we move on from that is I think that, you know, it could be easy to say, and now I trust completely, and everything’s perfect and I’m never scared. Right. And I would say that that is not true, that I am much more, I’m much less scared. Four years later, I’m kind of settling into this belief and trust, and it feels really good, but I think there’s always an element to an understanding that love is never safe. That like you cannot, if you’re going to choose love, you’re necessarily not choosing safety because it’s a risk to give your heart to someone. And at any point, you know, you could be annihilated. So it’s like, I think I’m just understanding that I’ve read this quote somewhere that said, we’re only as alive as we are willing to make ourselves be available to be annihilated, right. Like that is love. And that is life just risk, just allowing it to maybe even happen again. But that that’s still the right thing for me is to just live open to annihilation, I guess. So just to Jen, you know, I do think that there’s hope, and I do think that there is a comfort and trust and love that sets in, but there’s also the awareness that no matter what it is always a risk, that is what love is.

AD:

Okay. Sister, we have a question from Laura who asked you this? My wife has deep intimate friendships with other women, which leave me insecure. So we are always debating the definition of emotional infidelity. Do you have a definition? Ooh, that’s interesting.

GD:

Hi, Laura. Um, okay. So I think that this, I have found that this issue can be trickier in relationships between two women than it is sometimes in relationships between a woman and a man. That’s my personal experience. I think because, you know, we tend to have deeper relationships with people who are our same gender. So it’s just a hard thing to navigate in the beginning. Like what kind of relationship or what kind of emotional intimacy is saved just for the two of us and what can we still have with other friends? And it’s hard, it’s tricky and hard.

AD:

This is blowing my mind right now, trying to imagine how you would navigate that. Trying to imagine John, like at his buddy’s house, having like four beers and me being like, What are they talking about? Are they connecting on a deep emotional level? (laughing)

GD:

Exactly. Yeah. It’s tricky. And it’s so, you know, it’s an ongoing thing too. I mean, I can talk to you about what emotional infidelity feels like to me. I’ll talk to you about a personal experience that I have with this in my life. It feels to me like there’s an energy of openness and tension. That is an emotional openness intention and intimacy that are, that is usually reserved for people who have made a commitment to each other. This is what we usually agree to, right. That we are only going to have that sort tension and openness and intimacy with this person also that should be discussed and negotiated. Right. That’s one problem we have is we don’t talk about what is it to each of us, but to me, that’s what I would say it is. And then there’s this thing that can happen where it’s like that tension between the two people is like, okay, say it’s like a tug of war, like a rope. Right. And you’ve promised that you’re only gonna hold on to that sort of tension and openness and tightness and intimacy with this person. And then somebody else like grabs that kind of attention from you. And, it happens, okay. Like, you know, all of it, the butterflies, the whatever it can happen, but there’s this energy that you can encourage, like you can, you feel it catch you and then you can stay open to it. It’s almost like you, you pick up a rope with that person, too. Right? You sense possible tension. And then you engage with it, you pick up the rope and then you find yourself with two ropes. Right. And look, I think it has to be defined by each person. That’s the thing it’s like, I can’t tell if you, I’ll just use Abby. I can’t tell if you, Abby, are being emotionally unfaithful only, you know, because you know the energy. Right, right. So it requires such a level of self-honesty. It’s like, you know, I have a friend who told me that when she tends towards this emotional infidelity thing, she’ll find herself wondering if she should delete an email. Like if you’re thinking about deleting an email … it’s this wild self-awareness, you know, and look like I have. So when we talk about all the sexual, physical infidelity in my first marriage, well, three years after that, I discovered that infidelity, which had been going on for my entire first marriage for 10 years, I walked into a room and saw Abby for the first time and well, everyone who’s read Untamed knows the rest of the story, but I would say, and I want to get your perspective on this, Sister. But after I went home that night after meeting Abby and we spent, I don’t know, maybe four minutes alone together in a hallway talking, and then spent the rest of the evening on a dais in front of a thousand librarians at a convention.

AD:

Talk about sexy.

GD:

So sexy. For me.

AD:

I know like your perfect first date, actually.

GD:

Exactly, exactly. So my story, this, you know, is it was a dramatic one. And I know that not most are like this, but I just dropped the other rope. I felt such an opening and aliveness and desire probably for the first time in my life. And that I just, I went home and I didn’t have anything figured out, obviously, but I never touched Craig in a romantic way again. I just, by the way, picked up the other rope while I was still married. Right. I mean, you’re going to … go ahead and tell me, tell me.

AD:

Okay. I’m just going to say that I feel like you sometimes just like posit this emotional infidelity thing. And I would just push back on that a little bit, because what I saw happen in that situation is that you had worked for years and years to try to connect and make sense of your marriage and to try to come alive in it for years, you tried to do that. And then, and you were working your ass off on it. And then you met Abby had this moment where that aliveness was immediate in you and you within two weeks had said to me, had never touched Abby at all, but had said to me, I am leaving Craig, no matter what happens with Abby, because I have now found that aliveness in me that I always thought I was incapable of bringing to this relationship. So I will be this alive, whether it’s with Abby or without, and for me, that’s a very big difference.

GD:

So basically it was like, I was having my it’s not I will never be satisfied moment. I have found the possibility that maybe it wasn’t just me.

AD:

Well, and also that it was a faithfulness to yourself. Like you were just working so hard and beating yourself up for years that you couldn’t get there. Right. Then you got there when let’s be fair, I mean, it was like three minutes in a huge room. It wasn’t because you had some amazing connection with this woman. It was, you got there and you realize I’m not leaving this woman who is me, who I just connected with. And also, I feel like the other part of that is, as soon as you knew, Craig knew. I mean, you talk to him right away. So I don’t know. I just think there’s some nuance there.

GD:

Yeah, there is. I think though, how I would like to, and thank you, everyone deserves a sister who will explain to the world why everything you do is fine. I love you. I guess what I would like to end this episode all about infidelity is with, is that having said everything we’ve said, it’s freaking complicated, it’s complicated. And sometimes the rules on the paper and in black and white make no sense when it comes to love and intimacy. And sometimes we break each other’s hearts and there is always hope and there’s always second chances. So I think …

AD:

Life is forever tries.

GD:

Life is forever tries and sometimes it’s just a matter of, we show up, we screw up, we try again, repeat forever. So Sister, I want to know this. Do you feel like after all of this pain that infidelity has caused, do you feel like there’s any silver linings to having gone through the experience of infidelity?

AD:

I mean, I really do feel like, and not to sugar coat it, it was horrible. And took me 10 years to realize that there was any good that came out of it. But I think for me, there was this new understanding of the world that I didn’t have before that. And I was very much based in that life was a formula and effort in equals outcomes out that there was that, that was just the flow of life. And whoever was having a terrible time of it should really just buck up.

GD:

Merit based, merit-based marriage, merit-based love.

AD:

Yes. And I think that that having everything crashed down and being like, but that wasn’t fair or the right way, or that shouldn’t have happened to me. It wasn’t, so this is not, what’s supposed to happen. Kind of gave me a whole new perspective on life and what people are going through and this empathy that I didn’t have before, I just didn’t have it because I didn’t understand that the world was just happening to people and that people were just doing their best. And there’s just like, when you’ve had a crushing blow like that, that has devastated you, it feels like there’s part of the world that’s living on the surface and the part of the world that has lived underground and you can connect with those people. You can actually see them. And understand them in a way that people who haven’t ever gotten cut off at the knees. I’m not sure they do understand that.

GD:

Oh, that’s how I feel about everything. I mean, all of the clubs, I’m a part of that. I wouldn’t really have nobody chooses to be a part of, but that’s when that kind of shit happens is when you really start to understand the world and other people and that kind of empathy and non-judgment is a gift also because it’s like a lack of, it brings an ease to your life because when there’s no formula, you’re just like, huh, there’s just an ease to not forcing everything into boxes.

GD:

I think that for me, the silver lining is that I have found this kind of self-fidelity. You know, when in my first marriage I would have, I knew something was wrong. I just knew it like the, you know, the way we know deep in our bones when something’s off. But, you know, I was told over, no, what’s, you know, you’re crazy. That’s why in Untamed the phrase I repeat so much is, You’re not crazy. You’re a goddamn cheetah. It was like a rally cry in direct opposition to the gaslighting of women all the time. You know, you’ll never be satisfied. You’re too much. You’re crazy. You’re emotional. It’s all in your head, all of that stuff that we get told in a million different ways, but I will never ignore myself again. Right. When I feel that there’s something wrong, whether it’s in my primary relationship or my friendships or my life or, the world, I will no longer just assume that there’s something wrong with me. I will trust myself and believe myself and not abandoned myself and be loyal to myself. Right. I will assume that there’s something wrong. Not that there’s something wrong with me, but that there’s something wrong and I won’t allow myself to be gaslit anymore. So that kind of fierce self-fidelity. I mean, most of us are trained the first vow we ever take, if we do, is to somebody else, we don’t even learn what self-fidelity is. Right. So that’s the silver lining for me. Sister, let’s take a quick break and we will come back and try to figure out what the hell the next right thing could be about infidelity.

AD:

Don’t check your partner’s phone.

GD:

Okay, we’re back with the Next Right Thing. Okay. Here’s what I think we should do Next Right Thing as it relates to infidelity. Okay. Number one, we could try not to cheat on anybody this week.

AD:

Good. Always a good goal.

GD:

Yeah. We can try.

AD:

Just seven days. You can do it.

GD:

I mean, listen, you know, nobody’s perfect. Just try just your best.

AD:

It can be like Bart Simpson, I can’t promise to try, but I can try to try.

GD:

Yeah. Try to try. Try to try. And then I think this is cool. Okay. I think one of the reasons why we are also confused about fidelity is that we don’t really take the time to decide what fidelity means to us. Right. So maybe if you need some extra credit or you have some extra time today, just kind of think about what fidelity means to you. Like what does, what is the importance of loyalty to you? What does fidelity mean in terms of a friendship in terms of a romantic relationship in terms of self-fidelity? I mean, I know that my vow to myself is that I will never abandon myself. I will never be in a relationship, in a church, in  any sort of community that requires me to abandoned myself ever again. Right. That’s the most important fidelity to me. So spend some time this week thinking about fidelity, if you want to be like an, A plus student, talk about it with the partner. All right.

AD:

I have one too. If you think, if you’re not currently partnered or aren’t ready to be thinking about it that way. I think it would be interesting to think about what is something that an imprint that about you, that you’ve adopted from some relationship, whether it was a partner or a parent or something, a truth that you’ve accepted is true about you that actually may not be. And just how you might want to just examine that and think about how that might’ve been more about that person than it is about you. And how maybe you can let that go.

GD:

I like that one. Let’s do that one. Okay. So try not to cheat on anybody and then do Sister’s Next Right Thing. That’s great. And when life gets hard this week, we love you, just keep telling yourself we can do hard things.