Romantic Jealousy: Causes, Symptoms, Cures (12 page)

Just then passionate sex became very important to Lillian:

Maybe I am no longer the same person who fell in love more than ten years ago? Certainly I have very different needs today than I slid when I met Dave a decade ago. As a thirty-five-yearold woman (no (hildren, successful career) I find that passionate sex (or the lack of it) is far more important to me than ever before. I am no longer working to build a career. I enjoy my work and feel successful. I think this is the age when a woman is supposed to reach her sexual peak ... Perhaps that is why I crave passionate sex in a way that I did not use to.

According to Lillian, it was boredom with marital sex that precipitated her illicit affair. But, clearly, boredom was only a small part of the story. It all started during a party at which Dave pointed out to Lillian a grubby-looking bearded man wearing a dirty, torn T-shirt, and said, "Isn't that the most disgusting-looking man you have ever seen?" Earlier, Dave had heard the man talk about his teenage daughter in lascivious terms that just added to the negative impression made by his appearance. Soon afterward, Lillian chose to have an affair with this very man:

About six months ago I became involved with a man who elicited passion in ►ne that I did not know I was capable of feeling. For years I had just figured that I was not a very sexually oriented person. Though Dave and I had much more exciting sex before we were married and during the early years, we had not had passionate sex for at least three years prior to my affair with this other man.

Although my affair was with a strange and crazy man whom I no longer have any interest in or desire to see, it elicited some powerful feelings at the time so much so that it was impossible for me to hide the fact that I was having an affair.

Lillian's behavior could have made it easy for Dave, who claimed to be "not the slightest bit jealous," to discover the affair. But he simply refused to notice the hints she was dropping all around him. So she started to make those hints bigger and more obvious until he finally Understood and responded, for the first time ever in their relationship, with tremendous jealousy. His interrogations enabled Lillian to tell him about the affair-something she secretly wanted very much to do. In fact, letting him know and making him jealous were the main reasons she had started the affair in the first place:

Indiscretions on my part aroused Dave's suspicions, and I ended up telling him (in stages) the full extent of my extramarital involvement.

Dave was wounded to the core. I [is infinite trust in me dissolved, and he said he lost the capacity to trust completely. It would do him no good to divorce me and try to find another woman he could trust, since lie had lost the capacity for complete trust in another person. If I-whom he loved and trusted so completely-could betray him that way, then anyone could, at any Iimc. Ile had never felt such jealousy before, and never wanted to feel it again.

Once Dave discovered the affair and was appropriately jealous, Lillian suddenly lost interest in the other man:

When I came so close to losing Dave, my emotions swung hack powerfully toward him. I no longer cared about the other man or the affair, but only about repairing the damage I had (lone to the man I love-my husband. I felt that I would kiss his feet for the next ten years if that were necessary to will back his love and trust ... to restore the bond and comfort that I had ruptured.

It was mostly my intense desire to right the wrong and stay on the good-wife path in the future (as well as his love and need for me, and his perception of my love for him) that convinced Dave to give me another chance.

Coming to therapy was part of Lillian and Dave's attempt to "right the wrong" and give their marriage another chance. Their work as a couple was fueled by Lillian's "passionate desire to heal Dave's jealousy and pain, and repair the damage I had done ... and not lose the man I had loved all these years and still love so much"

As is often the case when an affair is explored openly and nondefensively, Lillian and Dave realized that the affair was, more than anything else, a communication. The affair enabled Lillian to communicate feelings toward Dave that she was too embarrassed to admit even to herself, and too scared to communicate directly to Dave:

Clearly the affair had more to do with what I was feeling toward Dave than what I was feeling toward the other man, especially given that the other man is of absolutely no interest to me anymore. Now that I am not acting out affair-type behavior, feelings about Dave are surfacing that I was not allowing myself to experience before.

Perhaps the affair was a way of doing something to prevent myself from knowing what I was feeling toward Dave, since these are threatening feelings. I experienced anger, resentment, disappointment, concern, fear. I am beginning to see the affair as a way of not having to experience these feelings.

In a tearful and highly emotional session, after much encouragement and with great effort, Lillian and Dave were finally able to open up to each other. They discussed all their feelings, negative and embarrassing as they were. The result was a tremendous relief. Lillian was able to tell Dave about her anger and resentment. She said she was afraid that if she expressed her anger and disappointment (she envisioned these emotions as a monster she was keeping in the closet), something terrible would happen and her whole world would collapse. Dave was able to admit his jealousy, despite his belief that it was a negative and shameful response.

Lillian discovered that despite her "terrible feelings" Dave still loved her, and actually was delighted to find out what had been troubling her all along. After learning that jealousy is a protective response to a perceived threat to a valued relationship, Dave was able to share his jealousy and his financial insecurities with Lillian and discover that her feelings toward him were not altered because of this. With the emotional relief they experienced during this mutual exploration came a powerful surge of the old passion. And, as both reported, "sex has never been better."

Open discussion also enabled Dave and Lillian to confront directly the sensitive issue of money and to come up with a solution that suited them both. Dave continued in real estate while training for a new career with a much better potential for providing a stable and secure income. In the meantime they decided to rent d part of the house, which helped ease some of their financial stress.

Lillian and Dave's case demonstrates that an affair can be a form of communication to the mate. As Lillian said:

The affair needed to be looked at as communication to Dave, rather than as an inability to restrain my impulses. I needed to look at what I was feeling toward Dave, and trying to communicate to him by having an affair-and by being so obvious about it.

This case demonstrates several key points of the systems approach. Dave and Lillian, in their years of marriage, created a system in which the unspoken rule was that Dave was the stable provider. When Dave changed this established pattern he broke the rule. Lillian punished him by having the affair, thus breaking the fidelity rule. Dave's jealousy, an unusual experience for him, and Lillian's fear that he might leave, brought them to therapy.

The focus of the therapy was not the unconscious roots of Dave's jealousy or Lillian's infidelity, but instead on the rules governing the marriage. As a result of this exploration, Lillian and Dave were able to compromise and accept a change of rules with which they both felt comfortable.

Throughout therapy, the affair as well as the jealousy it triggered were treated as a couple issue. The therapy made it clear that Dave and Lillian each played an active role in the process that led to the affair, and each played an equally active role in trying to save their marriage when they perceived a threat to it. Treating the affair and the jealousy it triggered as a couple issue enabled Lillian and Dave to reestablish trust and turn the traumatic event into a growth experience.

lane and Dan: An Affair as a Form of Escape

The most common trigger of extreme jealousy is an illicit affair. As noted earlier, virtually all the people who were asked about it said they would feel "very jealous" if they discovered their mate was having an illicit affair flow should such jealousy be treated in a constructive and growth-enhancing way? While the jealous response seems justified, it not only causes excruciating pain for the individual (as noted earlier, P'ISD which has been used to describe the reaction to aerie jealousy triggered by an affair, was first used to describe the response of soldiers to a battle trauma), but also can be destructive to the relationship and, in extreme cases, lead to violence.

Systems therapists look at the affair in the context of the relationship as a whole The affair is not "something that just happened" to the unfaithful partner, but a statement about something important that happened to and involves both mates. In a book dealing with treatment of marital conflict, Philip Guerin and his colleagues note that affairs "almost always represent externalization of a dysfunctional process going on within the family."I Their approach to the treatment of affairs, which is shared by many systems therapists, focuses on three goals:

1. bringing out the part each spouse played in the process

2. changing the behavior of both spouses

3. reestablishing trust in the marital relationship

The following case illustrates this systems approach. The case involves a woman called Jane, who found out that her husband of thirty-five years, Dan, had had an affair.

The discovery of an affair is painful for both mates. It sets off a crisis in which ordinary daily functioning suffers severely. The first thing Jane needed to do was learn to take one clay at a time and make priorities in her daily responsibilities so she could manage what was most essential. Then, to minimize the emotional impact of the affair, both Jane and Dan needed to understand the parts each of them had played in the affair, the function the affair served in the marriage, and the process that had led up to it. Understanding these things does not mean that people are not accountable for their behavior. Dan had an affair, Jane did not. Yet both were responsible for the state of' their marriage. Since an affair often is seen as an unforgivable sin, it is important for both mates to place the affair in the larger context of their marriage.

Many times an affair is a refuge from relationship problems or from pain in one's personal life. To understand the function of Dan's affair, it is necessary to understand the state of things prior to the affair. Two problems seem particularly relevant: an operation for cancer of the prostate that Dan had before the affair and Jane's overinvolvement in their daughter's divorce.

The prostate cancer operation was traumatic for Dan. Not only did it make him confront his own mortality, it made him question his sexual adequacy-something he had never questioned before. lie desperately needed Jane's support, but Jane was too involved with their daughter's recent divorce to notice. She stayed with their daughter for weeks at a time, and when she was home they spent hours on the phone. In fact, when Jane first sought therapy it was to discuss her daughter's marital problems and how she could best help her resolve them.

Over the course of the months following the operation, an emotional distance grew between Jane and Dan. Each felt distressed, yet was unable to share these feelings with the other. Dan's affair with an attractive woman, ten years younger than himself, helped him get the emotional and sexual reassurance he needed. It started when June was out of* town. Dan had a business dinner to attend and didn't like the thought of going alone. It was natural for him to invite a woman who was working in a nearby office to join him.

After dinner she invited him for a drink at her apartment, and Dan rediscovered how wonderful it was to talk to someone who was totally attentive and focused on him, the way Jane had been during most of their married life. The fact that a young, sexy woman still found him attractive and desirable was exhilarating. With her he felt more alive sexually than he had in a long time-more manly, more interesting.

As long as the affair remained secret, Dan had his sexual and emotional needs met, and Jane was free to continue her intense involvement with their daughter. When an anonymous phone call from a watchful secretary in Dan's office informed Jane of the affair, Dan stopped it right away. He told Jane he was sorry for what he had done and for the pain he had caused her. What he wanted more than anything else was to forget the whole thing. But Jane was inconsolable in her jealousy and couldn't let go. She barraged Dan with questions about the affair, searched through his drawers and office files, couldn't stop thinking about it, and vacillated between humiliation, rage, and despair. Her jealousy brought her back to therapy.

At the beginning of my work with Dan and Jane, I encouraged Jane to talk about the feelings she had experienced since the discovery of the affair. It was important to validate the emotional turmoil she was in, without making Dan the villain. Pursuing Dan for details added to her emotional turmoil, and it was important that she stop the interrogations. She was able to do that by focusing on her role in the marriage and the affair.

Once both Jane and Dan understood the function the affair had in their marriage and the roles both of them played in making it happen, and once they were able to talk about the affair openly, the arduous task of reestablishing trust in the marriage began. Many couples, relieved that the crisis is over, hope time will take care of old wounds and drop out of therapy before achieving this difficult and important goal.6