Choosing Between Lover Or Spouse

Choosing between lover or spouse: You have a decision to make.

It may be that somebody has told you that you’re not in love with this other person, that it’s a fantasy, an infatuation, or that it will go away. I’m assuming you’re here because you’re trying to choose between leaving to be with your lover or staying with your spouse. In other words, you’re married, but you’re thinking: “Maybe I should end the marriage and go to be with this other person because I’ve never felt love like this.”

If you expect me to tell you that you’re not in love with that person, then you need to change your expectations. I won’t. I understand that you are in love with that other person and will not deny that, but I will ask you to think about a couple of things as you plan your future.

You need to make the best choice concerning everyone (especially yourself) as you make this choice.

My name is Dr. Joe Beam with Marriage Helper. We deal with all kinds of topics having to do with relationships, including this: “I am married to one person, but I am in love with another person. So I’m trying to decide whether to end my marriage and go be with this other person.”

Now understand, it is a “kind” of love. In the social sciences, we can identify various kinds of love. By the way, the one we never try to identify is true love. Why? Because that’s whatever a person is feeling at the moment. It’s too subjective or too different per individual. Therefore, we can’t quantify or identify it.

But, there are many kinds of love we can identify. For example, if you’re madly in love with this other person, we can look at specific characteristics and classify them as limerence in the social sciences. It’s a kind of love, without a doubt. It’s an intense kind of love. If you’d like to learn more about it, be sure to check out our other articles and videos. Look for the ones that talk about limerence.

I understand it. I’ve experienced it.

I’ve been in the very spot that you’re in now. I was married to one woman, and I was madly in love with another. So I had to make a choice.

“Will I end this marriage? Will I divorce my wife so I can go be with this person who is the true love of my life?” To me, it was the kind of thing that people today call “soulmates.”

I understand the intensity of that decision. But the very fact that you’re reading this means that you haven’t decided. Now, I’ll suggest a thing or two that you should seriously consider if you’re trying to make that decision. What I would call “essential considerations.”

First, Think About Who Your Decision Will Effect

One would be, “Who all will be affected by your decision?” Someone is going to be hurt by whatever decision you make. You say, “What do you mean?”

Well, if you’re married to one who loves you and wants to be with you and if you leave them for this other person, then you are hurting the person you’ve been married to for a while.

Or if you decide, “No, I’m going to end my relationship with this person that I’m madly in love with, and I’m going to go back and make my marriage work,” then you’re going to hurt that person.

And by the way, either decision is likely to wind up hurting you.

So, it’s not a matter of, “How can I make a decision that hurts nobody?” Because at this point, that’s an impossibility.

I mean, I wish it were a possibility, but it’s not. Someone’s going to get hurt.

The Possible Negative Effects On Children

Oh, and by the way, if you have children in this marriage, then you’re going to hurt them too. No matter how old they are, it’s going to cause them some kind of pain. So younger children have some effect that comes from the parents’ divorce. Older kids have a little bit of a different impact from divorce.

If you’re thinking, “Well, how are children hurt?” There’s a plethora of research out there about that. I’m not saying it’ll doom your children, or it’ll destroy their lives forever. But, understand this (because I will never lie to you); it’s almost impossible for it not to hurt them.

For example, if you have school-age kids, we know that some of the ways it will manifest itself will be in their grades, particularly in courses involving logic, like science and mathematics. Why? Because their emotions will become a little bit raw. And it’s also more likely that they will get involved in some kind of behavioral problem. I’m not saying they necessarily will, but the odds of that happening increases.

Also, if you divorce and have kids, and your spouse winds up marrying somebody else, then those kids will have exposure to that other person. Now, you’ve got a whole new thing going on. You’ll consider how good a new person is; this new person might enter the picture if your spouse remarries.

Your kids get exposed to other relationships.

You have to be thinking, “Wow, I don’t know if that’s always going to be a good man or woman in my kids’ lives. How are they going to be affected by that?”

Now, I’m not trying to beat you up. Remember, we always tell the truth no matter what. All I’m trying to say is, if you’re going to make this decision, I hope you’re considering things. If you’re a good person trying to make a decision that’s going to cause the least amount of damage as possible, you’re going to be thinking, “Who’s going to be affected, and how is it going to affect them?”

Now, be honest with yourself. Don’t listen to somebody who says, “Oh, kids are resilient, no big problem, they’ll get over it, that’s fine.”

One guy who was leaving his wife for a woman that was 20 years older than him interestingly said, “She told me that my three year old and my one year old wouldn’t have any negative effects if I leave those two little girls and come be with her. Because years and years ago, she left her husband, and it had no negative effects on her little girl at all.”

Now, I asked him this question: “Do you think, since she wants you to be with her, that she might be a little bit slanted in her opinion about this?”

And because she doesn’t want to feel bad about whatever could have happened negatively in her daughter’s life. “Do you think maybe she wants to see only the good and not the bad?” So, in other words, I’m not sure that that person is a good resource to help you make that decision.

She has a biased interest in you deciding a particular way.

We sometimes hear counselors and therapists say, “Kids are resilient. No negative problems, everything will be fine! I’ll help him get through it.”

That’s wrong! If they tell you that the kids are resilient or that “there are no long-term problems and that they’ll get over the short-term problems very quickly,” that counselor or therapist does not know what they are talking saying.

Good counselors are fantastic! If you’ve got a good counselor, use him or her to help your kids if you decide to make any decision that causes your kids pain. But, be very careful that they don’t say, “kids will get over this fast.” Article after article after article in the scientific journals or social science journals all have information about all the various ways this negatively affects kids.

Now I’m not saying you can’t make your own decisions. Indeed, you can. But I’m saying, “Be honest with yourself.” Don’t believe the lie or tell yourself the lie, “No problem! The kids will be fine, and there won’t be any negatives of this to them.” At least be honest and say, “If I decide to go this way rather than this way, then this is how it’s going to affect my kids.”

At least be honest with yourself because you love your kids.

And if you’re thinking, “But I don’t have kids. You just spent a ton of time talking about kids, and that does not apply to me.” Well, still think about the lover and the spouse. Because whichever decision you make will harm them.

You say, “Well, how?” Your spouse will go through a mourning period because you’re not going to be there if they want you to be there. That’s kind of a “death” in a sense. Also, it’s going cause your spouse to have a lot of self-questioning, like, “What’s wrong with me? What did I do wrong? Why am I not equal to this person that you left me for?”

You know that they will go through those kinds of things no matter what you say and what you do; they’re going to.

On the other hand, if you leave the lover and go back to your marriage, then the lover is going to go through those same kinds of things, wondering, “What’s wrong with me? Why would they leave me? How in the world could you come and get involved with me and lead me to love you so dearly and now back out of it?”

It’s a tough decision. And as I’ve already said, either way, somebody’s going to get hurt.

Here’s How Limerence Happens

If you are deeply in love with this person, experiencing this thing we in the social sciences call limerence, you probably didn’t go looking for it.

I mean that there was a person in your life that you had some “contact” with. Maybe they worked in the next office or saw them at lunch because you always went to the same place. Perhaps you went to the same church. Maybe this other couple was your best friend, and that’s how you got involved with them because you always had access. Access is the key.

In the beginning, you found out you could talk to this person about things that you typically don’t share with other people. They were very accepting. You probably didn’t have your first conversation that way. But because you liked each other, enjoyed each other, or found them attractive, things changed. Somewhere along the line, you started opening up and sharing your heart, mind, thoughts, fears, aspirations, and all those kinds of things.

Conversations with them began to become like the following: “Nobody gets me as you do. Nobody’s ever understood me as you understand me.”

Then they started opening up to you. So that understanding got stronger, not just this other person understanding you, but you understand them, and then you formed an intense emotional connection.

For example, “I don’t think anybody else has ever felt this way, ever. I mean, why couldn’t my marriage be like this? Why have I never experienced a relationship like this? I don’t even know how to tell anybody else because I don’t think anybody else has ever felt this way.”

It’s almost like two souls are merging into one body.

That connection is so immense that you don’t want to lose it, yet you are reading about it here. This probably means that you are also thinking, “But I’m married to this person over here, and it would be wrong to leave him or her for my lover.”

So, you start hiding things.

You started going places where Nobody would know where the two of you were. You talked about things beyond what you can or should talk about with anybody that isn’t your spouse. Maybe you probably held hands, which led to hugging, which led to kissing, and in all likelihood, you made love to each other, and you have had a mixture of feelings about that.

You’ve been hiding and hiding, and you don’t want to hide anymore.

You don’t want to have to sneak off to some restaurant in another town. You don’t want to slink off to some hotel somewhere. In fact, you want it to be open. You just want to be with this person. So that’s how it all began, and now you’ve arrived at the present.