I don't know if you've heard but something happened at a Coldplay concert. A lot of people are talking about it. It's on the news. A lot of people have thoughts and opinions and judgments, and there's a lot of funny memes out there, but it has brought to light a topic, the topic of affairs, that we need to talk about, especially on a podcast that's about long term relationships. We're not dissecting the celebrity story. Sorry if you want to get into the juicy gossip. Not going to happen here, but we're going to be talking about how this very public moment resurfaced a lot of private pain for individuals and couples around the world. This isn't a topic I love to talk about. I'm going to be honest. It's personal for me. I was the kid impacted by affairs more than once in both my family of origin and extended family. But it's because of that and my work with couples that I know how crucial this conversation is, and who better to have the conversation than somebody who's been on the ripple effect of what happens when people make this decision. This episode is not about judgment, it's about understanding the complexity of affairs, what they are, why they happen, and how they affect everyone involved. So go grab yourself a warm drink and let's dive in. Speaker 1 1:11 Welcome to relationship, reset, reignite, reconnect, rebuild, the podcast for high achieving couples who want to transform their relationship from surviving to thriving. I'm Katie Roessler, a relationship coach and counselor with over 15 years of experience helping busy, overwhelmed couples rebuild connection, trust and intimacy. If you've been together for years and feel stuck on autopilot, disconnected and frustrated by constant miscommunication, you're in the right place, each week, we'll explore practical tools, relatable stories and strategies to help you reignite the spark, rebuild your bond and create the relationship you've always dreamed of. Because no matter how long you've been together, it's never too late to hit reset. Let's dive in. So when I knew I wanted to do this episode, I was really mindful to be careful of me just sharing from what I know about affairs and working with couples for over 15 years, because it's not my specialty, as I shared earlier, not really something I'd love to dive into, but I can say with confidence, probably every couple years, a couple I work with has been impacted by an affair, Whether one of them has been involved or their family member has done something when they were growing up, and it impacted how they looked at their relationships. So I wanted to be really mindful to go back into the education around affairs, rather than the opinions and thoughts about it. And I really love the Gottman Institute's definition for what is an affair. They say it's any emotional or sexual connection outside the relationship that breaks the agreed upon boundaries. That means, if you are in an open relationship, if you're poly, you have agreed upon the type of relationship you're going to have. This is for those who have broken the agreement of we are going to stay monogamous. It's just going to be you and me. Now, there are different types of affairs, so let's talk about what those are, so that we're just really clear on there are many different types of affairs. The first one emotional affair, it often starts with a friendship, then becomes intimate without being physical. I often hear with my clients who've had emotional affairs that they really do fall in love with the person. They share things much more vulnerably than they do with their partner. They feel so much more emotionally supported by that individual, and they truly fall in love in a romantic sense, with this person. They never cross the line of being physical. So they tell themselves it's okay, but it's actually breaking the emotional agreement between them and their partner that and their partner that, hey, we're going to be monogamous. Monogamy isn't just about sex. A second type of affair is a sexual affair. This is purely physical but emotionally distant, right? Like this is just about sex, and it's not fully just a one night stand. This is like you go and have sex with this person, and that's what it's about. The third type of affair is a virtual or a digital affair. This is someone that you are sexting with. This is someone that you have emotional connections through DMS. This could even cover porn addiction with secrecy, right? We're not sharing that we have this addiction, but it's creating this other relationship, in a sense, and so as so many of us are online, virtual and digital affairs are on the rise as well. Then we have the long term affair. This is really where a person creates a secret Second Life. This is what we just got exposed to. And then can see for public viewing at the cold like concert. In a long term affair, the person has partnered up with someone that's really like a girlfriend or a boyfriend, and this is their person. It's not just sexual, it's not just emotional, it's all of it. And it really is like having a second life. Then there's the one night stand. This is the impulsive often rooted in kind of like escape or there's a crisis. It can be with somebody at work, it can be with a friend, it can be a neighbor, who knows, but it's usually just a one night thing, and there's a lot of shame and guilt that comes with it. Actually, there's shame and guilt that comes with all of this. But in particular, with the one night stand, there is that feeling of regret pretty fast. And then lastly, there's the type called the exit affair. And it's a way that somebody ends their relationship without having directly to confront it and say, Hey, I'm not happy anymore, and I don't want to be in this relationship. They decide to go outside the relationship in order to break their current relationship. Now, one of my favorite couples therapists to follow, Esther Perel, always says affairs are often less about sex and more about desire, desire for attention, to feel alive, to feel seen. There's something that we feel like we're missing in our lives, and we often blame it on our partner, but it's usually more about us than it is the person we're in a relationship with. So why do affairs happen? You know, sometimes it isn't even about being dissatisfied in the relationship you're in, and it's often about feeling disconnected from ourselves. You know, the longer we're with our partner, it's just kind of monotonous, and our lives become a bit monotonous, right? It's just mundane and the same thing over and over. And not only do we feel disconnected from our partner, but we really start to disconnect from who we are, what we want. So the affair becomes sort of like a quest for our identity, feeling of vitality, right, or having autonomy and freedom. See, you could have a really good marriage, and an affair can happen and have nothing to do with your actual marriage. It isn't about a failure of the marriage at all. It's really about the individual trying to figure out something about themselves, trying to better understand or find this piece of them they feel like they've lost. The sad thing is, they're trying to do it through the connection with someone else, and not realizing it's something they have to find within themselves. Now sometimes an affair can happen because a person feels disconnected from their partner. They feel a lack of emotional or even sexual intimacy. There's always sort of a turning away in the relationship, and there's an absence of boundaries with others. All of a sudden we start sort of attaching to anyone who gives us attention, and the more that we start to experience that, the more we start to avoid difficult conversations with our partner, we kind of turn towards what feels good, what's the dopamine hits, that extra smile that coworker gives us, how the neighbor always stops to really talk to us and have a conversation with us, where we feel like our partner never takes the time to do the same. And then another reason why affairs can happen is around a power imbalance or a sense of entitlement. There are some big cultural differences around affairs. There are some countries where the man is entitled to have an affair if he's angry or upset at his partner. It's a normal part of the culture. It's not something they are happy about, but it is normal and kind of accepted and swept under the rug. And this is why often, when I work with couples who are culturally different, we have discussions about fidelity and what it really means to be committed to your partner, just so I can check in on what was normal growing up, or what was normal in the culture that you were raised in, we can start to see the imbalance of one partner emotionally like Over functioning, overdoing, over committing, over giving, and one under functioning. I don't need to give my 50% because they over give. Anyways, that imbalance starts to create a sense of lack, which makes it easy then for us to go, Okay, well, let me go and find my other half. The other partner is going to give me what I need or want outside of this relationship. So affairs rarely happen just because they're often the result of layers of disconnection or unspoken needs or even long held resentments. They can also be because there's something within ourselves that we feel so disconnected from that we want to find ourselves again, and we believe we're going to do that through someone else. See, affairs rarely happen in a vacuum. They're often the result of layers of disconnection unspoken needs or even long held resentments, and sometimes they're about trying to reclaim a sense of being alive where life or partnership feels numb or mundane. Now let's talk about the ripple effect of an affair for the Coldplay concert couple. I can't believe I'm even calling them that, but you know what I mean? Clearly, there are two individuals who are going to be impacted, as well as the friend on the side who clearly was in freeze response. I mean, do you just stare at the camera anyways. Okay, so there's the impact on the couple who were originally committed to each other, right? Trust is broken, and the betrayed partner experiences trauma and grief and identity shock, and in this situation, it is very public, then the partner who is involved in the affair, they might feel shame, guilt or confusion, a sense of responsibility now to two individuals, not just one, and really an uncertainty of what is it that I actually want? Who do I want to be with, and if they want to be with both people, what do you do next? Right? Like, well, how do I negotiate that out? Clearly, one of them has been okay with it, but the other one didn't know. And I often say to couples, what happens is you have made a choice and removed the freedom of choice from your partner. You have disrespected them on the level that they don't have a choice to stay in this relationship or not with an individual who wants to be in a relationship with someone else, you have taken that from them, and often the person who's had the affair isn't thinking that way. They're thinking about their needs and desires and wants and what feels good again, it is. It's an endorphins. It's a dopamine hit. This is why a majority of couples who have affairs don't stay together, because eventually all of that wears off, and they realize, oh, because there's no more secrecy, because the honeymoon phase is over, because whatever, this actually doesn't work. Now let's talk about the impact on children. If there are children involved, see, affairs don't just happen in the marriage, they happen to the whole family system. No matter how much secrecy is involved, kids feel the tension, and as they get older, they have more of an understanding of what's going on when they're young, they can often internalize the confusion and the secrecy and emotional neglect and kind of feel like maybe they're being rejected. Their parent is choosing someone else, another family, instead of theirs, and they really it can be really damaging to their self esteem and their need for approval from that parent. As they get older, there can be this level of anger that creates a boundary and basically disconnect in that relationship. I don't want to have anything to do with you. You're dead to me, those kinds of things, right? Because as we are teens, we are starting to better understand our own relationships. We're dating, we're having romantic involvement with people, and it's like, oh, wait, my parent was able to do this to someone. I don't want to be with someone like that. How could they do that? Right? There's a lot of series of thoughts. The other thing that can happen is then the teen starts acting out by doing similar things, cheating on their partners, losing a sense of respect and responsibility for the relationships that they're in. It can lead to trust issues in their adult relationships, they can start to have, like, be very hyper vigilant, constantly checking on things, feeling an anxious attachment style to their partner, or avoid an attachment because they don't want to get hurt, right? They can start to avoid intimacy. And if you haven't listened to my episode about anxious and avoidant attachment, I'll make sure it's in the show notes below. But things like this are how that type of attachment style can be taught, in a sense, right, can be triggered. And for me, I didn't just witness the pain of what an affair can do. It shaped how I saw relationships. It shaped how I trusted my partner and past partners, and even how I saw myself in the role of relationship. And it took a long time, both personally and professionally, to untangle that, to be honest, because when you've been impacted by this as a teenager, it just really shapes a lot of the things that are going on in your life during that time and how you go into young adulthood. Now let's talk about is healing possible after an affair? Okay? First of all, affairs are not new, right? Like for decades, actually, centuries, affairs have been going on, and because we've had very patriarchal society, they've been, in a sense, been swept under the rug or just accepted. Even some of our favorite political leaders and activists have had public multiple affairs, and yet we still praise them and think they're wonderful, but then we have judgments on the women or men who stay in relationship with them, right? So it's a little bit weird, but that's for another day. The question again is, is healing possible after an affair? Yes, actually, it really is, but it requires a level of full transparency and accountability that sometimes the other partner is not willing to do. It takes time, whether it was a one night stand or a long term relationship that the couple is now having to deal with and understand how to rebuild after. But couples can rebuild through consistent, dependable actions. The thing is, it's not about going back to how something was that will never work. If you try to do that, then you might as well stop. It's about creating something new in the relationship. It's creating a new version of your relationship. Think of the affair, of it like a wake up call. We can't go back. It clearly wasn't working. So how do we start to rebuild and create a new relationship that we're both excited about and we feel a sense of ourselves in as well. If you've been through an affair, your relationship will never be the same, and that's not always a bad thing. Sometimes what comes after is stronger, wiser and more authentic, but only if both people are willing to do the work. So let me Speaker 1 14:12 encourage you in this way, if you've gone through an affair, whether you're the one who had the affair or your partner had the affair, please don't suffer in silence anymore, and if you're the adult child carrying the old wounds of decisions that your parents made or parent made again. You don't need to suffer in silence. You definitely need to seek support from a professional trained in how to repair a relationship after an affair. In the coming months, I will have some specialist speaking on this topic, so that'll give you some ideas of people you can work with affairs are full of pain, but they're also full of information about what's not working, what's been lost and what needs to be healed. This is really hard work, but it's not hopeless. So here's some things to think about this week. Whether you've been impacted by an affair or not, where do you feel disconnected from yourself or your partner? What boundaries have you started to let slide? Think about are you dressing a little bit nicer because you know you're going to be seeing someone? Are you writing a little bit later at night with a coworker than you should be? Have you let some boundaries slide that are a slippery slope? And lastly, ask yourself, what do I need to feel safe, seen and secure again in my relationship and again, those questions are for if you've been impacted by affairs or not. So where do you feel disconnected from yourself or your partner? What boundaries have you let slide and what do you need to feel safe seeing and secure again in your relationship? Okay, that's all for this episode. I really appreciate you taking the time to listen to this one, as I know it is a hot topic right now, but we need to speak a little more truth to what's happening and what's going on. And even though this isn't a topic I'd love to talk about, and at times it can still bring up painful memories for me. Just really want to honor those who are being impacted right now from this very public event, and also those who are being impacted secretly because their situation wasn't shown at a Coldplay concert. It's not easy, but it's definitely something you shouldn't have to suffer in silence for. Okay, everybody, I will see you next week. Thanks for tuning in to relationship reset. If you found this episode helpful, share it with a friend who might need it too. Don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It helps more couples discover these tools to rebuild their connection too. And be sure to hit subscribe so you don't miss next week's episode. It's gonna be a good one. Your relationship is worth the work and the rewards, totally worth the effort. See you next week.