Sticky Bonds

Dr. Kalish,

You said "The deck is stacked against the marriage if you are looking only at emotions of the moment. Affairs are exciting: anxiety creates the same hormones as sex, e.g. adrenaline, cortisol. Being a parent creates other, calmer hormones, as does the security of a long partnership and shared history. Each has its own rewards."

How does the married partner to someone in this time machine counter this? What happens, from my perspective as someone whose spouse is in this time machine, is that my time with my spouse is being re-written because I cannot compete -- as you said and point out why.

Sure I have told my spouse this, and intellectually they get it, but right now they crave the "connection" they get from the feelings from the old partner.

I guess I know the answer. I cannot compete.

I guess I will just let a darn good marriage with sound finances and kids just turn to crap, as I am moving on.

What a shame! I have tried till I am blue in the face. Guess I will get selfish too.

What if I am not in a time machine, but rather have come to realize that I love my husband but I do not like him? He's inconsiderate towards me (unless MY family is trying to make me feel like crap- then he's with me) otherwise it's all well I have to work.

Well now I have 2 jobs and still attending college (I have 4 classes left until I graduate so I'm not quitting now.) I like working, he has an issue with one of my jobs because I have to work 1 night 3 or 4pm to 9:30 sometimes 10pm.

I have talked about how I have been feeling for the past year to no avail. I am not having an affair nor am I interested in having one. What I am interested in is getting myself back- my self esteem especially. Don't get me wrong my husband isn't a terrible person in general-(he doesn't say I am ugly or anything; he thinks it's funny to call me a hoochie all the time), but I am no longer happy. We do not have anything in common - well maybe 1 or 2 things, but anything I like and he doesn't then we CAN'T do it because he either ruins the experience for me by catching an attitude/ arguing with me on the way or right before the event. Which in turn makes me stressed out and can't enjoy it anyway. this even includes everyday things that need to get done- like grocery shopping with the kids, or going to my family's gatherings- which are for children b-days or holidays- that's it otherwise we stay home. If we get to do anything- it's going out to eat then go straight home- he can't even enjoy looking around somewhere without our children.

I guess what I am saying is my husband is a good father when he isn't working and is at home, he's not physically abusive (like previous relations I've been in) and he does work hard, but that's all I have been to put on my pro/con list.

Is being unhappy enough to tear my family apart? We do not argue in front of the children - well honestly maybe twice in the past 5 years of marriage, we usually wait until we are in our room and they are in bed or we don't talk about it at all and time goes on. I don't want to wake up one day and look at my life and regret not living and doing things that I enjoy. I cannot do them alone since my husband insinuates that I am cheating or meeting with someone.

I have so much more that I could say but am limited on time, so the above is just present issues that do not include past issues that also come into play.

I would never tell anyone to stay in a marriage - or leave a marriage, for that matter. That is completely a personal decision (full disclosure: I divorced years ago, no lost love).

My time machine posts are addressing all the people who contact me who have/had good marriages until contacting a lost love, they love their spouses, and they feel torn and in crisis. Probably the majority of these are men.

Some of the women on my website, who have been in lost love affairs, have left their marriages as well as their lost loves (the lost love men remained married). The reunions were just catalysts to look at their marriages and decide, even if they remained alone, they might be happier. These women are doing okay, dating new men.

The women who chose to remain in their marriages without the lost love affairs are also doing okay, with the marriages sometimes even better than before (usually with counseling).

There is a lot of soul-searching that goes into staying in, or leaving, a marriage. I am confident that you will make the decision that is right for you. :)

http://www.lostlovers.com

I relate completely to this article, it could very well be about me. Im sorry if this has happened to some of you i hope what i am writing will not upset you but this is my story.

I very innocently befriended my high school sweetheart about a year ago and we started talking online. I was happy and really enjoyed talking to him, we had a lot in common he was married with kids so was i we enjoyed discussing the same topics. However, a few months ago he said he still loved me and at first i was flattered then i thought oh no......he still loves me after 19 years?? Wow. Well we continued to talk and my reasoning was to know why he felt this way and why he was telling me now after all this time.

As the past few months have progressed I have found myself waking up every morning wanted to talk to him all i do is think about him and he felt the same way. We have spoken on the phone many times and have seen each other two times. Our relationship has not gone any further than talking, we have not even touched. Yet our conversations have become more sexual and i find myself thinking of him in this manner. I have found myself in love with him, again. Well, i think? I am not sure if its love or just infatuation. We talk about how our life would be together, our kids our spouses down to where we would live and how our families would feel about us. We talked about everything.
Very recently his wife was curious about his behavior and has found all of our messages. We have not talked much in the last few weeks but i cant help but feel like i lost my best friend. My spouse has not found out, yet. I am just so confused as to what to do....i am torn and very confused, sad and very upset with myself for letting this happen.

I am a very strong person but this is really tearing me up inside, part of me wants to run away and part of me want to run to him. He is separated from his wife but i have no confirmation that he wants to pursue anything with me due to our limited contact. Is this just a fantasy of what could be or a reality of what can be.

Yes, its a fantasy of what can be.

Yes, it might also be a sign of what can be.

But what it is, guaranteed, is something that is stopping your current marriage from being all it can be, as there are now 3 people in your marriage.

So now you are married to someone and in limerence with another person, a person from your past who has time traveled into your present.

And your husband, the guy willing to walk down the isle with you, stand by your side, father children with you, commit to you, currently had no clue what he is up against.

You are already in quick sand. Give your marriage a chance, tell your husband at once. Give him the power to decide if he wants to work on this, and give him a level playing field to try to fight for his marriage on.

Also, you are now an other woman. You are a lost lover, but also an other woman. Google some of the other woman forums and you can see some of the heart ache you are about to venture through.

Good luck to you, your family, and your old high school boyfriends family. Lots of destruction in coming all of you all's way!

Hmmm..let's try not to be mean to each other, shall we? "Very Confused" I know exactly what you are going through. I was in a physical and emotional affair with my teen sweetheart for a few years while in my mid thirties. I love my husband and would not normally cheat. Never. My advice: talk to your lost love, ekspress your feelings, have an affair if you MUST and never EVER tell your husband about it if anything happens. Only through expressing your feelings and feeling for yourself how far you are willing to go with this man you (also) love, will you find out what is right for you. Maybe leaving your husband is right for you, maybe staying married feels right.

I realized that my husband is better for me and I am now able to appreciate him and not imagine this picture perfect life with the other one. I still miss him and, but I know him (or us) well enough to know that it wouldn't have been picture perfect. This is the power they have the first loves - they have lived in our imaginations for so long and become symbols of everything we've ever missed out on. Well, I didn't miss out. I took the liberty of trying this out as an adult keeping my loving husband in the dark. A terrible thing to do - I know. But I simply had to to be able to move on.

The best of luck to you - and do not listen to anyone trying to make you feel bad about this love.

Please point out where I was being mean? Please try to point out where I was trying to make anyone feel bad?

I was being realistic.

I said nothing that I have not read Dr. Kalish write in her warnings.

Now I did give advice, and you gave the total opposite advice. Who is right? Who knows. Each situation is different and to each their own.

I guess you might feel very different if the shoe was on the other foot.

My marriage is in the throws of this situation, but thank God my spouse has had the courage to let me know exactly what they feel about their lost love, exactly where I stand, and their confusion and struggle. We either split up amicably and I have the luck of knowing why, or have a chance at a genuine recovery without the deceit and dishonesty you will take to your grave.

Again, to each their own. What works for you I would not want, and luckily neither would my spouse. Maybe that is why we have a heck of a chance at both getting past this, either separately or within a stronger union, but with authenticity and genuineness.

Hi Anonymous,
I did not know that you were the spouse of someone in a lost love dilemma. If I had known that I would have understood how your perspective is different. It is just that when I was in the throws of this affair I would hear the same warnings over and over again. Some people would try to do their best to make me feel guilty and ashamed: "Lots of destruction in coming all of you all's way!" You dont have to say that. We KNOW that, we feel that, we live that! If it was really easy to avoid all this pain and destruction we WOULD. However, my point is. I HAD to try is out to be able to move on. There is no closure in the sense that I am over him. I never will be - but I have come to terms with all the things that happened when we were young and I realize that my life probably would not be better had I been with him.

For "Very Confused": Go talk to this man. Maybe the butterflies and the skipping heart is merely like a knee jerk reaction to an old song? maybe this is really somebody you are compatible with.You have to dare to look at those feelings in order to be able to move on in life. With your marriage or with this first love. My story is exactly the same as yours. Only I was 15 :-) and he still drives me crazy. 23 years later. Best of luck to you. Be Brave and adventurous.

"I am afraid i will never be able to let him go unless he tells me too....and i know he cant do that and neither can i. So here i am, in a place i don't want to be, wishing each second of the day i could be with him and having neither the strength or nerve to say it is over with my husband. I do not wish this on anyone"

I begged my lost love to look me straight in the eyes and tell me that it will never be us, and let me move on. He wouldn't or couldn't do that - but he dared not leave his wife and three kids either, so I took charge myself and cut i off. For you it is of course different because your LL is divorced. It is extremely difficult, I know. But feelings of guilt are of no use in this situation. Greetings from Europe. Eventually, you will be fine :)

My relationships with the people I love are not in competition, and this isn't reality television that requires someone to be voted off so that another can win. Thankfully, I am also not required to hide these feelings. For me, moving on is a nonsense concept - despite having had no contact for years, a raw numbness and constant missing endures and probably always will. These emotions have nothing to do with excitement, thrills or anxiety, and aren't orientated around sex, dopamine-reward or hormones. It is only 'addiction' in as much as 'being in love' is frequently described as being a form of addiction. There have never been fantasies about how much better things may have been had I been with my LL rather than my partner of more than 20 years, nor do I idealize people or 'fantasies'. My reaching out was never to conduct an audition, and talk of how well or not LL's measure up to some arrogant expectation insults everyone involved. My FL has never been in any way perfect, and neither have I - nor have either pretended to be. We are all entirely responsible for our own happiness.

As the author mentions, one can indeed love two people at the same time - although the good Dr seems less comfortable with conceding this without resort to esoteric pretexts such as adolescent thinking, faux lost love or time machines. I find no use for these rationalizations; my LL is a profound and very primary attachment, a deep love that remained uneasily buried for decades as I kept vainly searching to make sense of the longing. Circumstances beyond my control dictated events then, and still do now, but I don't second-guess my choices. However, there is no doubt in my mind that my life could only have been significantly enhanced had my first love been part of it. Honesty does indeed set you free, but I've heard it talked about a lot more than I've ever seen it enacted. The question that should always be asked is: "can the other actually afford to tell me the real truth?" In long-term relationships, the consequences for misjudging this factor are inordinately punitive - honesty will always be commensurate with the degree of insecurity the questioner can tolerate.

I think one of the hypotheses with this LL thing is that the LL is the true love, so the relationship will be different from the current relationships. People tell themselves that the problems in their current marriage are because they are with the wrong person, they settled, etc. If only they were with their true love, LL, all would be different.

But there is no data to support that.

Here is what you know:

"There marriage problems dont have anything to do with me, his wife has been cheating on him for the last 3 years and he is just tired of living like that. We have only been talking for about 6months or so"

This is his report. People lie and misconstrue, but lets take this at face value. He is sick and tired of a woman that cheats on him, lies to him.

Yet he is the key player facilitating you doing the very same to your husband. Ok, so how does he cognitively reconcile the fact that his wife is a cheater, and now you are too! Not passing judgement on you, just saying, he was burned by a cheating wife and knows you are willing to cheat on your husband too. That will make from some long term trust issues if and when he becomes your husband.

Similarly, although ostensibly justified because of his bad marriage, he is cheating too. Thus, there is no way to slice it other than this: you are getting involved with someone who is willing to cheat on his wife, does not respect your marriage, and has shown himself to be able to justify infidelity. You too will have long term trust issues to work out.

Thus, the saying if he cheats with you, he will cheat on you is one to really consider.

Try to figure this out now, or it can become a significant growing cancer as you and your LL go forward.

I know, I know, but LL re-connects are different. You and him are different. You are true loves, soul mates, meant to be, etc. Sorry, but LL re-connects are different and the same!

Defending boundaries, working vigilantly on a marriage, and how you are coping with what life throws at you is what determines if someone will cheat or not, not the strength of the connection between them an another person. There are people with crappy connections that never cheat, and people with the most intense passionate ones that still cheat.

Good luck to you.

Very Confused, it looks like you have made a decision regarding your marriage or did I misread that? Have you decided to be with your LL?

I wrote some hard things to consider and I totally respect your response!

I wish you the best possible outcome to all this.

I hope you find peace with whatever path you follow soon!

Over and out!

my first love contacted me on facebook after 33 years of not seeing or hearing from each other when we broke he was 18 and i was 17 he wanted to go away to college and to seep with other people he did not even want to take me to the prom I was devestated he said he doid not even want me to visist in college until he slept with others he left and i started dating someone else i didnt love he came back 9 months told me he was wrong and that i should give a second chance I said forget it because i found out that before he left he slept with my best friend and other people i knew he said the reason he did this was because he was afraid of commitment and did not know how he could support me fast forward 33 years he found me on facebook apologized for his behavior said he was just being honest by not expecting me to wait for him his school was just 40 miles away we couldve wotrked it out i have been happily married for 23 years him for 25 at first he did not tell his wife that he found me we started emailing a few times i thought it was weird that he would be complaining oh we couldve been so happy i felt he was insulting to his wife i was happy in all that time with people that i knew wanted to be with me we emailed a few times he said that anything else was upt ot me i didnt understand what he meant by that he kept putting songs and things on that would remind me of him i got uncomfortabe and unfriended him my friend the one he had slept with passed away i put her picture up he continued to message me saying how sorrry she was about her death if just reminded me that he slept with her he then said he was going to come back to our neighborhood without his wife and kid meaning me to say lets get together I blocked him truly pathetic for him to believe i would risk my family for someone that would risk his i did feel drawn toit but good sence prevailed I still obsess about though hence this email I would hat it if my husband searched for a lost love on facebook

I am a 46 year old male. I have been happily married for 22 years and have two teenage children. I just recently reconnected with my first love. I knew her from early elementary school through high school, and I discovered that in high school I was in love with her. She was always so sweet and nice to me, although we never had any kind of an intimate relationship whatsoever. I never told her how I felt; I was too shy and scared. Our last day of high school, I got the courage to kiss her, which was wonderful for her and I. We saw each other publicly throughout the years as we married other people and had families of our own. A month ago, we exchanged phone numbers at a church function, and she's texted me with very nice messages as good friends, talking about our families, jobs, and everyday life. We had told each other how special we were to each other with our 30+ year friendship, and I thought that was that. Last night as we were chatting, she told me of her desires with me. I was shocked and surprised, but flattered. I know this cannot be. I have a good, loving wife, and I do not want to jeopardize my marriage. Do I break off all communication with my schoolmate? I think I should, but would it be wise? Thank you...

Thought I had a great marriage. Then my wife of 30 years rekindled with her high school boyfriend on facebook. Affair lasted 8 months till I found out. Lots of lying to me during that time. She admitted to traveling to another city to have a date, made out, said no intercourse. He's divorced. Her emails to her friend said she couldn't get over him. But, when I found out, she insisted she immediately "got over him". She said she was temporarily deranged. I really want to leave but she she is adamant she is 100% over him and loved me all along. (Sure didn't treat me that way!) He texts every now and then and once said he drove by our house. She doesn't answer but did not tell him never to contact her. Said he disgusts her and she doesn't even want to answer him. Said he will go away. Does this make any sense, that she could have a miraculous cure just because I found out?