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    When Good People Have Affairs: Inside the Hearts & Minds of People in Two Relationships
    When Good People Have Affairs: Inside the Hearts & Minds of People in Two Relationships
    When Good People Have Affairs: Inside the Hearts & Minds of People in Two Relationships
    Ebook315 pages4 hours

    When Good People Have Affairs: Inside the Hearts & Minds of People in Two Relationships

    By Mira Kirshenbaum

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A world-renowned therapist, Mira Kirshenbaum has treated thousands of men and women caught in the powerful drama over what to do when an affair reaches into their emotional lives. Now, in When Good People Have Affairs, Kirshenbaum puts her unsurpassed experience into one clear, calming place. She gives readers everything they need to cut through the thickets of fear, hurt and confusion to find their ways to happier, more solid relationships with the person who's right for them. For example, Kirshenbaum identifies seventeen types of affairs, helping readers figure out which type they're in and what it means. Is it a:

    --"See-if" affair?
    --Ejector-seat affair?
    --Distraction affair?
    --Unmet-needs affair?
    --Panic affair?

    Kirshenbaum encourages honest answers to such questions as:
    --What am I missing in my marriage?
    --How do I decide between two people when it's like comparing an apple to an orange?
    --How do I decide to end my marriage, end my affair, or end them both?

    She leads readers through six easy-to-navigate steps that will take anyone from anxiety to clarity. When Good People Have Affairs will be a lifeline to any man or woman who feels caught between two lovers, and its insights are indispensable to anyone else touched by an affair.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateMay 27, 2008
    ISBN9781429944700
    Author

    Mira Kirshenbaum

    Mira Kirshenbaum is clinical director of the Chestnut Hill Institute, a center for therapy and research in Boston, and has been treating patients in individual and couples therapy for more than thirty years. She is the author of ten other books, including Our Love is Too Good, To Feel So Bad, Everything Happens for a Reason, and When Good People Have Affairs.

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    Reviews for When Good People Have Affairs

    4.5/5

    17 ratings3 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Was intrigued, but ultimately, the book was one massive rationalization on why cheaters cheat, when at the end of the day, it has nothing to do with circumstance and everything to do with character.

      That’s why you have people who are serial cheaters despite being in a good marriage and people who never cheat regardless of their situation.

      I also can’t stand her notion that cheaters have the upper hand and freedom to keep an affair secret after it ends and carry on their marriage as if it never happened under the guise of “not wanting to hurt the other party.”

      That ship sailed the second one party cheated, lied and manipulated their spouse to enjoy their forbidden and sexy liaison behind their partners back becuase their bored.

      Cheaters don’t have the luxury to engage in an affair, decide it’s not want they want, and come back and continue their marriage and continue to lie to their spouse as if nothing happened….it’s literally the ultimate self centered action.

      That isn’t prioritizing your spouse and marriage, it’s prioritizing your comfort and need to not completely destroy what you built based off your selfish actions after finally realizing what a huge mistake you made.

      If you genuinely care for your spouse, fess up to your mistakes and leave it up to them if they believe their marriage to you is salvageable.

      Good people don’t cheat, good people don’t lie to their spouses, good people don’t manipulate their spouses in believing something that isn’t true, and good people certainly don’t keep an affair secret after it’s all said and done to selfishly remain in a marriage their actions would have ordinarily destroyed if the truth ever came out….your marriage is based off a lie at that point, but hey, if you can live the rest of your life with that guilt, go for it.

      Cheating is emotional abuse at the end of the day and who wants to stay married to someone who treats you like that, or even keeps the truth from you and makes a fool out of you as you go along with your marriage never knowing they were unfaithful.

      All in all, I would skip this read. However if you’re cheater and you want to be validated that you’re still somehow the good guy, this book is for you.

      But at the end of the day, cheaters need internal help on why they cheat in the first place, not rationalizations on why cheating doesn’t make them a bad person (again selfishly motivated to help make them feel better as opposed to what’s best for their health, their spouses health, and the overall health of the marriage.)

      Whether you’re a victim of cheating or the cheater who genuinely wants to mend what you broke, skip this read.

      Good people don’t cheat, broken people do.
    • 5/5
      I highly recommend this book to all married couples, whether they are having an affair or not.
    • 4/5
      Kirshenbaum does some things for you here that I really appreciate--and that a lot of other people who find themselves in this sad, confusing situation will too. But it's not really the things you'd expect. The touchy-feely title promises understanding, commmiseration, ultimately absolution and a faith that you didn't want things to be like this. And I think that must attract a lot of people feeling crippled by remorse and fear that they'll get into another situation as intolerable as the one they created, so Kirshenbaum is to a certain extent savvily marketing or preying on the vulnerable, depending on your perspective.

      And while she does make the right noises, comfort's not her thing; she figures clear vision and bold actions will fix the problem, and that will be a comfort in and of itself. Basically 90% of this book is "which one do you choose? Your partner, your lover, or neither?" And so she goes through all the aspects that you know but need a calm, cool third party to walk through with you--what are they like in themselves? With you? What are you like with them? Can you connect? Respect one another? Have fun? Hotly do it? These are essential questions for those people hung up at this stage of the process.

      But for those of us who have come to terms with exactly what we were doing when we were doing, and why, something in which we can be aided by Kirshenbaum's seventeen-types affair schemata, this is actually less of a problem than the popular view would seem to suggest.

      So I guess what I'm suggesting in short is that the "here's what you were trying to do, and why you wanted to do right by everyone, and here's why it didn't go that way" stuff was good for me and could have been expanded, and the "here's what you do now" stuff was only of limited relevance since I already made my choice, and then there's the kind of weird upper middle-class American thing about pandering to the soggy middle in all things, and the weird subterranean anti-poor prejudices that go along with it, and you get the feeling Kirshenbaum wouldn't be your favourite person, but she helps you out here, man. I guess what makes a good therapist is (patly? mostly?) the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes, and what makes a good writer is the ability to convey that in a compelling and real way, and Kirshenbaum has the former but not so much the latter, and you need a spoonful of genteel intellectualism sometimes to make the bald assertions, the "THERE ARE SEVENTEEN TYPESOF AFFAIRS" and "YOU NEED ALL OF THESE CONDITIONS TO SUCCEED IN ARELATIONSHIP ALWAYS" and "NEVER TELL" (and with this one especially I have a complex relationship that is nevertheless ultimately defined by my total rejection of it as a principle of conduct) that sometimes in this book we see.

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    When Good People Have Affairs - Mira Kirshenbaum

    INTRODUCTION

    "YOU JUST DON’T

    HELP THOSE PEOPLE"

    What shall we call them?

    Not cheaters. Cheater is a name for callous, mustache-twirling creeps and low-slung nymphomaniacs who are just trying to get away with something. It’s a name for users. For sociopaths.

    The men and women I’m talking about here are good people. That’s what we should call them, because that’s what they are. It’s just that they’re good people who made a mistake and got themselves into a complicated, messy, dangerous situation. They couldn’t cope with one person, so they got involved with two! It’s the last thing they ever thought would happen.

    It’s because they’re good people that they lie awake at night feeling guilty and scared, wondering what to do. Wondering why this is happening to them. Wondering how to avoid hurting the people they care about and how to make sure their own needs don’t get lost in the process. Wondering what’s best for everyone. And trying desperately to figure out how to do what’s best.

    It’s easy for bad people. They just focus on trying to make themselves happy. But good people are concerned about everyone involved and end up feeling completely overwhelmed.

    YOU TAKE PEOPLE WHERE YOU FIND THEM

    Infidelity is a controversial topic. A friend of mine was pissed with me for taking it on. You just don’t help those people, she said.

    Well, sure, if someone came to me and asked me to bless going ahead and starting an affair, I’d say don’t do it—you’ll cause more problems than you’ll solve, and you’ll hurt people you care about.

    But people almost always come to me after they’ve already complicated their love lives. So what am I going to do, yell at them for having made a mistake? I wouldn’t do that, just like if someone came to me with AIDS, I wouldn’t yell at them for not practicing safe sex. You take people where you find them. And then you try to help them.

    People who have affairs just want to find some real happiness and love in their lives. But they are opening up brand-new territory for themselves without a map or a compass. After all, infidelity can be anything from a passionate kiss with someone at a Christmas party to a full-blown relationship. Sometimes the attachment is mostly sexual. Sometimes—surprisingly often, in fact—the affair is mostly emotional. Sometimes it’s with a stranger on the Internet; sometimes it’s with a spouse’s best friend.

    So where do you draw the line? If your partner would feel hurt and betrayed by what happened, then it’s infidelity.

    WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

    I wrote this book because so many people came to me asking for help with this problem, and they had nowhere else to turn. The more research we did here at The Chestnut Hill Institute, the more people we interviewed, the more stories we uncovered, the more I realized that people in this situation need a lot of help, not just for their own sakes but for the sakes of everyone involved. Here is just some of what people told me they needed:

    To understand how a person like me could have gotten into a situation like this.

    To have a sense of how these kinds of things usually play out, and what all the issues are—sexual, emotional, and otherwise.

    To see clearly and confidently which of the two people they’re involved with is the one they should be with.

    To know how to deal with all the feelings that come up in their situation—guilt, loneliness, depression, anxiety, shame, fear of loss.

    To know how to factor kids (if they have any) into the equation.

    To see how to handle the personalities and practicalities once they know which person they want to be with.

    To learn how to heal the relationship they end up in.

    Until now, the story of these men and women has never been told. Shame and fear have kept it in the closet. And so they haven’t had the understanding that might save them from ruining many lives.

    Now things are different. We now know that we can help people understand how they got where they are—it turns out there are seventeen different reasons why people have affairs. We can help people make the best possible decisions for themselves and everyone they care about. And then we can help them do what has to be done in the healthiest possible way.

    This is like being an emergency room doctor: Damage has been done, but you can still save lives and help people become whole again.

    But I do understand how a lot of you feel about people who have affairs. Better than you might think.

    I KNOW WHAT IT FEELS LIKE

    You see once, a while back, my husband had a relationship with another woman. As far as I know—and believe me, I checked!—it wasn’t a sexual relationship, and it didn’t last very long. It was an emotional affair. But that didn’t matter. It never does. It hurt me, and us, a lot. Affairs hurt everyone involved.

    So does that leave me biased? You might think so. But here’s what happened instead.

    Like everyone in my situation, when my husband first confessed what had been going on, I felt violated, betrayed, devastated. I felt my whole marriage had been a lie, and that my husband had destroyed it.

    So, sure, at first I hated my husband. Worse, I despised him. For a long time I thought he was a horrible person who’d done a horrible thing. Period.

    But then the man I’d known for so many years started coming back into focus. He stood before me every day, and that person was a good person. I saw how sorry he was and how hard he was trying to make things better. So I had to deal with the head-exploding reality that he was a good person who’d done a horrible thing.

    The problem is that good people don’t do horrible things, I thought. Well, I eventually realized, maybe good people don’t do horrible things, but they do make horrible mistakes. They get in over their heads.

    And often they feel pushed into doing things they wouldn’t do otherwise—a reality that made me look at the role I played in the whole mess. In fact, I wasn’t blameless. I’d been overworked and felt undersupported, and I’d pushed him away.

    Of course, I would never want anyone to go through anything like what I went through.

    But I never want anyone to go through anything like what my husband went through, either.

    MAKING US WHOLE AGAIN

    You might be wondering if I have a hidden agenda here, such as trying to keep relationships together at all costs, or trying to break people up, or whatever. Well, I do have an agenda, and I’m happy to proclaim it openly. Call me a die-hard romantic, but my agenda is for everyone to find love—real love, lasting love.

    And good people who have affairs share this goal. For them an affair may be the best way they know how to figure out what to do with love in their lives. It might be a mistake, but it’s also an insight— something has been missing, something isn’t working right, something needs to change.

    Once it’s begun, an affair can become a process by which people sort out their lives and—if they do it right—make their lives much better. The one thing good people who are having an affair say more than anything else is I just want what’s best for everyone. They really mean it, and if they handle things right, they can get it.

    [1]

    NO REGRETS

    AFFAIRS COVER A LOT OF TERRITORY

    Here’s how Jessica, 37, put it: "In a million years I never wanted to be in a situation like this. To be in a committed relationship and then find myself having an affair—this just isn’t me. But it is me. I’ve done this. And now I’m scared. All I wanted was to find some love, and now this whole thing could blow up, and I could lose everyone I care about."

    People like Jessica, like most people having an affair, feel very much alone. But they’re not. In fact, they’ve got plenty of company. As actress Sienna Miller said in a 2007 Esquire interview, commenting on her breakup from her boyfriend Jude Law following his affair with his kids’ nanny, "Every single person I know has experienced infidelity. It’s not the first time it’s happened to me, and it probably won’t be the

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