What I Learned From My Affair With a Married Man

Present...

I Learned About Myself:

1.) I learned what I am NOT here for. I am NOT here to do anything blazingly successful or visible in the world. I am not here to make my parents or anyone else proud. I am not here to meet external standards of any kind of success. I am not here to be the next J.K. Rowling or Suzanne Collins. 

2.) I am NOT here to attach myself to another person, wrapping myself around and living through their problems, trying to "save" somebody ill. I am not here to be them, I'm here to be me. I am not here to use this escape route to avoid Number Four. I am not here to use saving someone as a shortcut to self-worth or happiness. I am not here to trade saving someone for something I'm supposed to provide for myself, that I'm afraid I'm not good enough to be able to.

3.) Each person is responsible for saving themselves. I can't reach into Chi's head, or my mother's head, no matter how their pain moves me, how sorry I feel for them, how much I wish their lives could be different, what I read, what I know, what worked for me, or how much I think they should do whatever worked for me. Their salvation is their own learning, takes place in their own head, and therefore they are the ones who have to reach it. I am NOT God, and I can make no one else do ANYTHING.

4.) I am here for self-development. All I'm supposed to do on this planet is become self-supporting, self-sufficient, and self-responsible. That means that money, health, happiness, and meaning in my life come from me, all me, and only me. I'm supposed to develop my own talents and my own self-belief and self-worth, nobody else's. I'm supposed to heal myself and no one else. I'm not here to take care of other people. I am here to evolve to taking the best care of myself, and to become perfectly okay all in myself, and all by myself. I'm here to believe in myself and to learn to joyfully do what I do best. It will be whatever it is, and that's good enough. Period. 

5.) I do not need anybody else's anything. Ever. 

6.) I may never have anyone else in my life ever again. If not, then that's the way it's supposed to be. I'm primarily meant to be alone in this life, because of Number Four.

I Learned About Affairs:

7.) Attractions between people already involved in relationships and people not a part of the existing relationship are there to show us something. Therefore, simplistic moral answers, although they may be reflective of the learning that's meant to take place, aren't the answers themselves. If we concentrate only on strict moral rules, and on how bad we are for wanting to be with a "forbidden" person, instead of looking for our own answers, we might miss something important. What we should concentrate on is the spirit of why the rules are there, not their literal syntax, or the threat of spiritual punishment. 

8.) Every affair situation is different.

9.) All three people bear responsibility.

10.) An affair is always symbolic of what needs to be developed in our lives. When we look for that, we're on the right track.

11.) Psychology and astrology can be helpful shortcuts to some answers we need. Both are worth a look if you're struggling.

12.) Affairs start in childhood. All adult relationship problems do. Therefore, if you are struggling with affair-related issues, GO BACK TO YOUR CHILDHOOD. You could probably use professional assistance to do this.

Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda...

September 26, 2017

PAST...
(written BEFORE the update on 10/22, scheduled, and left here because there are some other good insights in it.)

Chi and another good friend of mine are both atheists. Neither one of them believes in any, and I do mean ANY, underlying spiritual purpose in life that can’t be scientifically proven.

I used to be that way, too. So many horrible disappointments occurred in my life that I concluded there simply was no benevolent force in the Universe. (People want to call this God, but I do not believe it is some angry punitive Superbeing who watches us and demands that we believe this, think that, do this and don’t do that, while worshiping reverently on our knees. It has a lot more to do with US, and what WE chose to come here to experience in order to evolve. And WE chose that, NOT Someone Else.)

Some of this IS scientifically provable. Look at what psychologists know and have been able to prove about the genesis and resolution of problems in human relationship.

It’s when it starts to intersect with the astrology and the two agree and reinforce each other that things start to get a little scary. When I started to see the gifts in self-understanding that the worst things in my life have had to offer me—Simon and Chi leaving, the afteraffects of a childhood with a mentally ill mother—and the healing pattern there is in them, should we choose to take that path, that’s when I realized there really is something more after all, and we aren’t just the victims of a cruel, evil, and random universe.

When you’re an atheist, and all you believe is hard science, you can miss that. Last night, my other atheist friend brought a section into writer’s group, of the memoir she has been writing. In it, she’s writing of a time much earlier in her life when her marriage was in trouble, and she embarked on an affair with a colleague in graduate school. Here she is, marveling all these years later at the strength of her attraction to this person, and still not able to comprehend it into her seventies. At the time, she chalked it up to pheromones, and the memoir chapter devolved into a trip to the morgue where she tried to convince the M.E. to do a search for a human vomeronasal organ.

 

Good, fucking, grief.

Here I’d been rereading these blogs and telling myself, I’m crazy. Nobody reading this will ever believe me, and for good reason. I’m clearly a crazy, desperate, horribly lonely and empty person who needs to close the computer up for good, unless it’s to search for someone new on Match.com. (And that person had better look out.)

But last night, I saw that I can see why Chi and I happened, and everything the two of us, and Rory, were supposed to get from it. I see what the blocks were in my life, and what I’m really supposed to be here working on and growing in, and how Chi showed that to me. And I see what he was really supposed to have worked on and grown in these past two years, and how I showed that to him. And how both of us have shown that to Rory, and she to us. It’s in the psychology. It’s in the astrology.

And because I have the ability to know and suss out these things, and see WHY things happen, life doesn’t look like senseless pain, the way it does to Chi and my other atheist friend. It’s painful, all right, especially this week—more on that to come—but it’s no longer SENSELESS pain. And I worry about it a whole lot less. I mean, the concept that I am SUPPOSED to be alone at this point in my life—without that, I’d still be the miserable wreck I was when I started therapy two and a half years ago.

So, this shit may sound a little woo-woo, but it is FAR from useless.

It means I won’t still be sitting around a writing table at age seventy-two, sadly wondering why my life was so senselessly painful, and unable to make any meaning or peace out of it. I won’t be like elderly relatives I have known, still crying about why they were treated so badly by their parents, into their own NINETIES.

In fact, if I knew a little more about the marriage in question, and had the charts of each person, I could probably tell my friend a good deal about why it happened. The person in question even once said to her that they were old souls who knew each other in another life and planned to come together in this one—which her ultra-scientific mind immediately pooh-poohed.

You’re going to reach seeing the meaning in your life experiences really fucking slow that way. But, it’s each person’s own choice.

And right when I was feeling really stupid and silly over the whole fucking thing, that happened. Amazing. 

Painful though many events have been over the last four years, at least I don’t have to live like Chi and my other atheist friend. And I have a feeling that is turning out to be a very good thing.

By the 24^th of September, I had heard no more from Chi. Looking more closely at the relevant transit, I guess that’s to be expected. All it really says is, I’m trying to guess what’s going on with the trends in my life, and highly likely to be wrong.

The first time I saw it, I jumped to conclusions and assumed I'd be trying to figure out what was going on because I’d heard from him.

(Um, actually, when you think about it, that is exactly what happened. I did hear from him. In a very sneaky way, with lots of plausible deniability. And then I started trying to guess why!)

If there’s any more, I thought it would be this week. The reason I believe that is: The transits that talk about an ongoing resumption of a relationship start in the middle of October and go through November and on into next spring and summer. If he waits too much longer, he’s going to miss them, and effectively break our date.

But the fact is, these transits go on a long time. All I can really tell is, if it's getting on into late spring/early summer and he hasn't spoken to me, he isn't going to. But I'm not able to pinpoint when any closer than that. I had guessed mid-September, and I did hear something, but that was it.

What I need to think about is how to just build a life all alone, because either way, I will still be alone a long, long time. Maybe for the rest of my life. If the astrology is correct, I have to throw Chi a gauntlet: We both have to get well, and become emotionally well people. And emotionally well people don't try to pursue two relationships at once if they have to lie and deceive to do that.


If he lets that gauntlet lie there, I'm alone. If he never shows up again, I'm alone. When you have so many problems being alone, alone is where you NEED to be, not in a relationship. When you're perfectly happy and perfectly fine all by yourself and you don't need a relationship, that's when you can be in one. Not before.


Except, quite interestingly, for Chi. In order to accomplish some of my life objectives, so the astrology goes, I don't have to have a relationship. In fact, I will probably accomplish them more readily without any close people at all.


But Chi. He has Venus on his North Node. Relationships and learning to navigate properly within them are a major reason he's here. He can't accomplish his objectives in this life without one. So if it isn't Rory, and it isn't me, it's going to be someone else.

WHY the Right Answers Are the Right Answers, Book Three

FUTURE

(includes ANOTHER PREDICTION.)

So we’ve seen that all three of the people in my triangle, Rory, Chi, and me, all didn’t grow up right due to unhealthy parenting, and we’ve all given up on ourselves in some way. We each have the child’s desire to avoid the hard work of growing up by fusing with someone else who will kiss the boo-boos on our knees the way Mommy should have when we were three, and who will take over our problem areas and do them for us.

But we’re not three anymore, and we don’t need Mommy to kiss our boo-boos and take over and do it for us. What we need is to experience our own feelings of strength, and the competence that comes in finding out we can do it ourselves. Rory and I need to do whatever it is we want to do on our own, without somebody super-competent in worldly affairs like Chi there to take over for us in case we can’t. Chi needs to esteem himself appropriately on his own, instead of martyring himself to someone else so we’ll keep telling him he’s okay.

(It doesn’t matter WTF we say anyhow. He doesn’t believe it anyway. His believer is broken, and nobody can fix that but him, under the guidance of a competent therapist.)

Everybody in the triangle needs to grow, heal, and develop so they feel okay on their own, standing as separate people, and don’t smother their significant other, in the event that they do have someone.  I can look back over the past four years, and the entries in this blog, and I think I’ve done most of my work and am about there.

What I saw two and a half years ago was Chi waking up and realizing he needs to get there, because maintaining this infantile fusion state with other people has costs. Yes, they love him, but they don’t love who he really is, because he’s too scared to show them anything they won’t love. So he’s kept the parts of who he really is that will disappoint anyone under wraps, and acted and pretended to be who others wanted and only who others wanted, for forty years. It hurts to be someone else and not yourself all the time, and two and a half years ago Chi noticed it was getting more and more and more and more painful. Especially when you’re with ANOTHER person who also wants fusion because she doesn’t want to grow up, either, and that person’s need for fusion manifests as caustically as Rory’s.

Here’s the sad thing. Looking down the road at Chi’s transits from about 2023 on, if he doesn’t complete growing up emotionally within the next seven years, and he gets paired with someone weaker than Rory, he starts acting just like her! Demanding emotional fusion and caretaking from his next partner—only in a sullen, whiny, needy, complaining way that’s childishly, babyishly demanding and drives his next partner away.

So:

Seeing that this is the problem for all three people—this fear of how tough the world is, that we’re in some way not good enough, that we’ll never be good enough to be loved or to competently take care of ourselves, so we think we need someone else to be Mommy and do it all for us—obviously, growing out of it is good. We all need to grow out of unhealthy Neptune into mature adult beings.

But, there’s only one right way. And, for anyone contemplating an affair out there, that is: Your ASS in the therapy chair—with somebody COMPETENT—finding out what went wrong in your particular childhood. Reading the books, watching the videos, keeping the journal, suffering the pain of remembering what happened to you, crying the tears, listening to what your therapist tells you and doing as you are asked.

That’s what I’ve done the past two and a half years, and that is the process you see reflected in this blog.

Not that that’s the only way to do it. There is another way, and it sounds something like this:

I feel stifled in my relationship. I feel unhappy. This person is treating me badly. I find another person who treats me better. (What’s talking here: the need for growth, the need for health, the need to develop oneself as a whole person.)

But when I try to leave—! Uh, uh-oh, but my son said this. Uh, uh-oh, but my daughter said that. Uh, uh-oh, but my cousin just WON’T approve! Oh, whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa, but everybody is looking at me funny! Oh, whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa, but Rory just showed me real emotion (for five minutes out of the past twenty years) and she was angry and she said everything was allmyfaultandI’mabadguy! (What’s speaking up and talking here: Unhealed, unhealthy needs for approval; unhealed, unhealthy needs for fusion with other people.)

So what happens? The person runs to the second partner, feels unlovable for doing something so bad, then runs back to the first one and feels unloved again. Back to Number Two, feels unlovable and bad, back to Number One, feels unloved. Ping-ping-ping-ping-ping! like a pinball in an arcade machine. And unfortunately, in our case, it’s pretty clear that THIS triangle can become stable, last a miserable seven years, and destroy ANYONE’S chances of getting well.

Folks, THIS is why the right things are right. THIS is why we don’t have affairs. THIS is why the better way is working in the therapist’s office to grow ourselves up in a careful, compassionate, thoughtful way. THEN we can decide which relationship is right for us and why, and we can carry that out with a minimum of back-and-forth trauma to everyone. Because when we’re weak, scared, and afraid to do that work, look at what happens. If we just give up the ping-ponging and sit ourselves down in the therapy office and do some damn work on our damn childhood, we can see it if we’re being slaughtered in our primary relationship and we really have to leave someone, and we can do it in a growth-promoting way, with as little damage to ourselves and other people as humanly possible.

And this is why all three charts in my case are in perfect agreement that a stable triangle starts in the next month and wreaks TERRIBLE havoc, and why I’m getting all this advice no matter what oracle I consult, NOT to enter it. Why the tarot says that right about now, either ORDERLY STEPS are taken to SOLVE THE PROBLEM or an unhappy family situation ensues, and the person who decides that outcome is the most feminine knight in the deck, riding slowly and carefully along: ME.

I have to put my foot down and not allow this person to run from pain and try to solve his childhood wounding in a way that won’t solve it: an affair.

All I can say is, thank fuck for all that Saturn I wrote about earlier, all those difficult circumstances that made my life hell for so long. At every horrible mess I fell into, I always wished I had had access to all the facts BEFORE I made the decision to do something, because if I had, I would never have made the choice that I did.

Well, now, thanks to that horrible childhood that made me read all that psychology, and those enchanting four months, the loss of which drove me to astrology, I had the capacity to do the work to see all this ahead of time, so I can heal the right way and insist that others do, too. If I didn’t know then what I know now, I’d be so scared of losing Chi again that I’d hang on and refuse to let go this time.

When the truth is, if he will not get himself into the therapy chair and heal from his childhood at the hands of alcoholic and woefully incompetent parents, he will always live his life dishonestly, and he’ll never have a relationship that does not end in disaster.

And it’s important that both he, and I, know that.

And now that I DO know that, there is NO EXCUSE for ANY unhealthful behavior on my part over the coming months. (Should the occasion, in fact, arise.)

Folks, there really is only one right way.

Go to therapy, not your affair.

WHY the Right Answers Are the Right Answers, Book One

PRESENT

At the height of my torment over being DUMPED by my married man, I spent some time on a website and chat room for people struggling to get over a breakup.

I found it singularly UNhelpful.

For one thing, those people don’t like it if you’re too upset. You find the place because you are upset, for fuck’s sake. Some people there were comfortable talking to someone as upset as I was, and that helped. But then I couldn’t talk to them, because people who were UNcomfortable , banned me.

Gee, that was helpful. One day on here I will put up a post on how to help someone who is upset. Really, really upset.

The other thing they do there is impose rules. You were supposed to just cut off all thoughts of the person and move on. There was an actual support group for doing that.

There’s one thing wrong with that. YOU DON’T LEARN ANYTHING.

I have discovered that it really is the truth: when we encounter pain in our lives, WE’RE SUPPOSED TO BE FUCKING LEARNING SOMETHING FROM IT. When life is hard, when life is painful, when life is disappointing, when life is miserable, when you feel that you have been singled out by the heavens to be treated truly horribly and unmercifully—so there must be something wrong with you to warrant the punishment—when life fees so unbearably, so desperately, desperately painful that you just want to give the fuck up and DIE…

You can bet real money there is something important you are supposed to be learning, and you just haven’t figured it out yet.

I’m going to post (or repost) a few things I wrote last year. Bear these in mind, and then I’m going to show you how they are true. Compare these to the blogs that are coming, and see for yourself whether they’re not. But first…I wish to stipulate two things.

1.)    Yup, what’s happened to me most of my life has been horrible. Horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible. And most of my life it felt like it was because of me. Why would people treat me this way unless I just wasn’t good enough? And if you’re reading this and you feel this way, I want you to know that from the vantage point I have now, I am grateful for every single thing, because I FIGURED IT THE FUCK OUT. I now know WHAT I WAS SUPPOSED TO LEARN, and I know that I could not have learned it without every single thing that’s happened. And now I’m going to share these things with you.

2.)    Over the past month, I have of course been forced to recognize that the time forecasted by the horoscopes (which have so very accurately forecasted everything else I’ve been through) is just about here. The Reappearance Of Chi. And I’ve had to honestly ask myself, What if this time the horoscopes are wrong? September comes, September goes…October comes, October goes…and he’s still gone. 

Draw a bunch of angry black squiggles on either side of a blank piece of paper and then draw a straight line down the middle. That line represents, “Health.” The angry squiggles represent everything that is not healthy. On one side of the line is my side of the relationship, and on the other side of the line is Chi’s. I have come to recognize that all I have control of is my side of the line. On my side of the line, I can work like a GODDAMNED DOG to get MY toes ON. THAT. LINE. 

And I cannot do one thing more. I can make myself and my side of that line as healthy and as UNsquiggly as I possibly can, and that’s MY half of a healthy relationship. The other person also has his half, to which I cannot cross over, over which I possess no power, and which I cannot affect, no matter how crafty or manipulative I might be or how hard I might try. (Or, for the record, how hard I might think I NEED to for whatever reason.) 

In any relationship, the person on the other side of that line is the only one responsible, and the ONLY ONE ABLE, to get his own toes onto the Line Of Health. If the other person cannot or will not do this, there will be no relationship (or if there is, it will be some permutation of your worst nightmare.) What we’re about to see is whether Chi is capable of making another run at getting his toes on that line or not, and which relationship he will do it in. (The horoscopes are laying heavy odds, but that is all they are…odds.) If he can’t get his toes on the line, or Rory accomplished this feat in their relationship and now he is, too, I won’t see him again (or I will, but he’s going to be acting erratically and irresponsibly), and there is NOT A DAMN THING I CAN DO ABOUT IT.

And that, friends, is called life. 

Robin Williams once said that the worst thing in life wasn’t being all alone; it was being with people who make you feel all alone. We would all do well to remember that as we struggle in relationships with the married.

Now, here’s a flash from the past, and then we’ll continue.