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Tuesday, May 31, 2011

If You're Falling for Someone Else ...Questions to Ask Yourself


Should I Cheat?

It's not uncommon for husbands or wives to suddenly find themselves in 'puppy love' with someone new. But before you take it from emotional to physical, consider this marriage expert's advice.

Most people think it will never happen to them: falling for someone outside of their marriage. The fact is, new flames (whether it’s just a crush or an infatuation) take many married men and women by surprise.
If someone new has your attention, it can be all too tempting to act on your impulses. But before you take that step into infidelity, ask yourself some key questions to help you answer the big one: “Should I cheat?” Your answers may encourage you to seek marriage counseling to resolve those emotional health issues that made this new person desirable to you in the first place.
Flirt with these ideas before you stray:
“Am I really falling in love?”
You said your vows and meant them, but here you are, falling for someone else. What’s next? Infidelity is not inevitable. “I would say that the person who is lured by romantic love needs to slow down, not make any rash decisions, and begin to appreciate the power of the chemistry of romantic love,” says Westport, Conn.-based marriage and family therapist Janis Abrahms Spring, PhD, author of After the Affair: Feelings of Pain and Rebuilding Trust When a Partner Has Been Unfaithful. “This other person may be a better partner for them, but often feelings of love can deceive as much as they inform.”
She advises being skeptical about the promise of this new love: Statistics argue against its survival. For example, while half of all first marriages fail, subsequent marriages are actually even more likely to fail.
“Should I tell my spouse?”
“There are advantages and disadvantages to revealing a secret like this — and people really need to review them for their own situation,” says Spring. Obviously, if you decide to leave the marriage, you will have to communicate why. But if all you have right now are some strong feelings for someone else, sharing them with your spouse at this stage could cause tremendous hurt and a possibly needless loss of trust. A more effective approach, says Spring, is for you to seek personal or marriage counseling to try to figure out what is driving your attraction and address any relationship issues that may have led you to this attraction.
“Should I stay or should I go?”
Before you venture into infidelity or dissolve your marriage, consider Spring’s conclusion after many years of working with couples dealing with affairs: “Another reason why those second marriages fail is because people take themselves with them,” she says. “They haven’t learned lessons from the first marriage so they take the same missteps into the second. They haven’t taken responsibility for how they poisoned the first marriage.”
Spring points out that there are certainly marriages that cannot continue, especially those that involve physical or verbal abuse or those in which one partner has an addiction for which he or she refuses to seek treatment. However, in situations where one spouse suddenly believes he or she has just met his or her soul mate in a new love interest and leaves the marriage for that person, that straying spouse may simply be avoiding accountability for his or her own failings as a partner.
“If I stay, can I still keep the new person in my life?”
If your answer to the “should I cheat?” question is a resounding no, then Spring counsels cutting off the source of your attraction completely. This means no personal contact, no letters, no emails — not even a “friend” status on Facebook.
“As long as you are e-mailing or chatting in some way with this person, they are going to drive a wedge between you and your partner,” she says. Despite your best intentions, the hard work of repairing your marriage will never be able to compete with the fantasy of that illicit relationship. Take a tough stand — this might even mean leaving a job or a department within your organization if the new attraction developed through work — and once you’ve cut that person out of your life, ask your spouse to go into therapy with you. “You don’t have to say you’ve fallen in love with someone else, but you can say you’ve started to have feelings for people and that that’s when you knew you were in trouble,” Spring says.
“Can I have a trial run with this new person?”
Taking a few weeks to get to know this new person is a very common temptation, says Spring. People fool themselves into thinking that they would be able to see the flaws in their “soul mate” with just a little one-on-one time. Not so, she says. “When people spend time with their lover, it’s like a honeymoon,” she explains. The reality of this other person probably won’t set in until well after adivorce is final, which, she says, is bound to happen if you take off for a while with your new love.
Your first priority is to be fair to your partner and yourself. Chances are, you have a partner who really wants to have a good marriage with you and who doesn’t know you’re as unhappy as you are, she says. “If you find yourself very enchanted with somebody else and are thinking of leaving, I would suggest hitting the pause button and trying to understand what your yearnings are all about.”
Remember, infidelity can have lasting ill effects and should not be entered into lightly. You owe it to yourself and your partner to first give marriage counseling a shot — if not only to help you stay faithful, then at least to understand what’s making you look elsewhere.

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