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I wish he would have been a gambler, a drug addict. Anything but sex. What you're about to hear is an unscripted, one-time couples counseling session. For the purposes of maintaining confidentiality, all names and identifiable characteristics have been removed. But their voices and their stories are real.
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I thought I had the perfect marriage. After 36 years, I found out that my husband had been cheating on me from probably the week we were married. I was totally blown away. From a very early age, I was sexually abused as a kid. And it also came from a very abusive family, physically abusive. Sex became a way out.
I call it visual aids. There was never an emotional attachment. Mostly one-night stands and pay-for-play. It's one thing to meet a couple where there was a one-off affair or a two-year or three-year or five-year affair even. But this couple is decades of prolific, compulsive dalliances.
It asks the question, what kind of marriage did these people have? And yet, this is a woman who says, "My husband, I know he loved me." He was a good husband. He was always home. He was always, he was the best father ever. Always there with our children.
Always loving to me. I never knew anything was wrong. The way I feel about her never changed. I love her and I always looked out for her. We shared everything. Both of them come in with a definition of what has happened to him and that definition is that this is a man with a sex addiction.
The first time we sat in with a professional and they said sex addiction and then they used compulsion and it was like, what's the difference? And what would be the difference for you? It almost makes it better to know that it was an addiction because that's an illness. Compulsion is control. Better for me to say I'm an asshole than I'm sick because once an addict, always an addict. If you're an asshole, you can learn. You're not an asshole anymore.
There's a lot of questions about the diagnosis of addiction at this point. On the one hand, it gives men a dignified way to name what they have struggled with and to seek help. On the other hand, there is a sense that there is a lack of scientific evidence to support the analogy between sex addiction and any other form of chemical dependency. I think it's a useful concept to use, even if it's a metaphor.
Any infidelity is a complex conundrum of personal and cultural and physical factors. And so this couple invites us into the labyrinth of sexual compulsion and its long-term effect on a couple. This is Where Should We Begin with Esther Perel. I wanted to find some way to make it work, to forgive him, to understand, to just...
keep our life. You know, we have a very full life. We have children, grandchildren. And I didn't want to throw that away. And through everything that happened, I believe that he didn't do what he did because he wasn't happy in our marriage. He wasn't happy with himself. He had demons. And I'm trying to understand, do I wholeheartedly believe it? That's another story. And so here is a woman who
is able to make an important distinction, which is that she knows this wasn't about her, she knows it wasn't an unhappy relationship, she knows he was unhappy. And from that place, she also chooses to stay with him and to rebuild the relationship. And for her to be able to say that to her children, to her friends, to her community, is a real challenge.
The way that it happened for us, we didn't have any kind of formal disclosure. We had eight months of staggered disclosure. I had eight months of staggered disclosure. It was brutal. Telling our kids. Our kids knew everything. Why? When somebody tells me to be honest, I became honest. He wasn't allowed to see our grandchildren. He and my daughter don't even talk today. She's living in another state. And if she murdered you?
Yeah, she was very mad at me. For not throwing him out? Well, I did throw him out, but for not ending it. They thought I was weak. They thought I had Stockholm syndrome. They felt I, you know, because I've been together, we've been together so long that I never... How many years? I met him when I was 15 and we'll be married 40 come next year. So they just felt that I was too weak in character. And they weren't, they didn't like what they saw.
If it was once a stigma when you divorced, today the new shame is choosing to stay when you can leave. And that is the challenge of a lot of betrayed partners. What's wrong with you? Woman, where is your self-esteem? Now that you can go, now that you can divorce, how come you don't? And she's dealing with that new shame. As much pain that it caused my kids to go through this, I'm glad that they know.
Glad that they know what I was, what I am now, and that I was man enough to face the demon and do my best to get beyond this and not let that whole portion of my life define me. And my father, most of my lessons from my dad, I learned what not to do because of what he did. Say more. Well, my father was...
very abusive person physically, mentally, and a philanderer. And I grew up with him being very physical with my mom. So I learned not to do that because I remember the pain that it caused me to see my mom getting beaten up.
This is a man who as a boy had to absorb a lot of very difficult, scary situations. And most of us don't know how to do so. It's too much. It's too frightening. And we begin to dysregulate. We don't know how to hold all these emotions inside. And this dysregulation will often lead us to seek
other means to regulate, to calm ourselves, to deal with our depression. My dad never stepped up and apologized to us. So I taught my kids a lot. You know, I was there for them. They learned a lesson from me how not to be a man from this, how not to treat your wife. It bothers me because I wasted
59 years living a mask. And now, if you meet me, you meet me. And it's a wonderful feeling that I don't have to have all these things in my head, what I can say, what I can't say. What happens when the secret deserves? When the shroudedness is removed? Two things come up that are the hard thing for me to get by is still the shame and the self-pity.
I'm not proud of my actions. And the voice of shame says... I can't believe you did this. How did you do these things? You're no good, you know. How could you have just been this human being that was living a dual life? That's the shame. And then the self-pity part, which is even harder for me to get over now, which is I wasted my life. I can't have a 40-year marriage with her. I gave up a lot of things.
My kids didn't really know me. I was this other person. As much as I was involved with them, I wasn't present in my life. You can't get that back. The sadness runs all the time. There's a pain right here that's there all the time. Never goes away. It was there before, too. Never. No, you didn't know it. I didn't know it. You made sure never, never to feel it. Right, right. But that's there now. And I call that the sadness.
And then sometimes that sadness reaches a point where I can't get out of bed. And then what do you do? I've got to really fight. One of the things the 12-step program talks about is the maintenance part of it. It's what you're supposed to do on a daily basis. So one of the first questions I do every day is I ask, "What can I do to make your day better? What can I do to make my kids' lives better?"
This is not a situation where you slug along and you hated your life and then you find this and then you really wonder why was I here all these years. This is the story of I thought I had a perfect life. We had a very good sexual relation together and I find out that my husband has been having a sexual problem for the entire duration of his life. Does that invalidate everything you felt?
Does that invalidate every trip you took, every dinner you had, every celebration? Or does it say, "This is the most bizarre thing, but there were two realities living side by side, one of which you actually have nothing to do with. It has nothing to do with your marriage." How does one element like this, however huge, does it change the entire history? Does it change everything you believed in?
Or does it have to find its place because everything you believed in was, and yet there was a whole other reality? That's something to consider. That and that versus that instead of that. I didn't believe that at first because I ripped up every wedding picture I had. Any picture that I found that was of he and I during that time was torn to shreds.
anything, my wedding dress. I had our wedding vows on tape. Cut that to shreds because that wasn't real. You don't stand up in front of all these people, make these vows to me and then a month later, break them. It wasn't real. We all understand that the future is unpredictable, but we expect that our past
will be dependable and that we can look back and trust what we experienced. And when you are betrayed by your partner, you lose the coherence of the narrative of your life. And maybe the essence of the betrayal is when we rob somebody of the story of their life. So yeah, that part of it takes away from what I
thought I had. I mean, he was a good husband. He was always home. He was always, he was the best father ever. Always there with our children. Always loving to me. I never knew anything was wrong. And I don't want to say I'm one of those women who lived in, you know, a tunnel without any peripheral vision.
I'd, you know, if something came up, I'd question him and he'd tell me the story and I'd believe him. Why not believe him? He's never done anything to cause me to mistrust him. Now I look at him and if he tells me this pen is red, I will turn it 15 different ways today. And that's a huge issue for us now. So, yeah, I mean, we had a good marriage and that's why I'm still here.
And I don't doubt for one second that he didn't love me with all of his heart. Not for one second. Do you hear that? I'm here. Which means that when you take your piece of shit, you have to know that your wife has this incredible ability to see that what you did was really hurtful and at the same time that you did it because you were hurting. I don't think she gets all of that 100% yet. She's coming around to it.
And very lately, she's been coming around to it, I would say, within the last four to six weeks. She's finally starting to see my side of the story. She's been so... And it's a wonderful feeling. It makes me want to cry, because it just validates what I'm doing and what I am. Her pain has been just so overwhelming that whatever I was going through didn't matter. She needed to figure out...
her side before she could even start to think about why I was doing what I was doing. There was just so much anger, hatred towards me. - And a complete rollercoaster. - Rollercoaster is being gentle. - Disgust. - Oh yeah. - Attraction. - I still hate him for what he did to me. I hate him for it. I, you know, I can't come to terms with accepting it. You know, whatever the reasons were, he still cheated on me.
for a very, very, very, very long time. And when he first got caught a number of years ago, 15 years ago, and swore to me it was a one-time thing and looked at me in the face and held my hand and said, oh, my God, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry. I will never do that to you. I will never cause you that kind of pain again. And only, you know, 12 years later to be caused pain
Undescribable pain. Worse than anything I could ever have imagined. I'm now supposed to trust him? That he's never going to do that again? The question of trust, that he will never do this again, is completely premature. Okay. Tell that to him. Tell that to him, because that's a huge issue. My answer to this woman in this moment should have been, "It is unacceptable. It feels too big to accept."
When you have a new element that enters into the narrative of your life, you start to wonder, does it color everything? Does it redefine the entire story? Does it make everything else fraudulent? Or do you actually hold on to it and you say what was, was real. And then there was this other piece living in the shadow.
that was also real. And how you integrate those pieces of the reality and come back to creating a coherent whole is an essential part of the process at this moment for this couple.
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spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash Esther. Rules and restrictions may apply. Vitamin water was born in New York because New Yorkers wanted more. Like more flavor to go with all the flavor. A refreshing drink after climbing six flights of stairs to a walk-up apartment or standing in the subway station in 100 degree heat. Drink vitamin water. It's from New York. The point of if you do this again or not is central, but there are so many more things to understand here.
Okay. I mean, you're not just trusting that he's not doing this again. You want to trust the human being. Right. And that comes from him being able, as he learns about himself and as he connects with his own trauma story, because that ultimately is at the core of everything he's been doing. I mean, I don't have to tell you, but I'm sure in your 12-step meetings, there are a lot of men who,
who were beaten by their dads. Yes. And a lot of men watching their dad beat their mother, wanting to save the mother, not being able to protect the mother, and then disconnecting and being able to only relate to women as long as they were as anonymous and as objectified and as commodified as can be so that you don't have to worry about them. Did I make sense what I just said? Yes. Yes, it does. And while at the same time,
being super responsible and fatherly and a good husband at home. This man pays to play, as he calls it. And I would probably say that he pays to heal. He pays to take care of his pain. He pays so that he can acquit himself of any emotional debt. If it's casual, if it's transactional, if it's recreational, if it's anonymous,
It frees him from the emotional responsibility that he feels towards the women that he loves and cares about. It gives him a certain room for simplicity and selfishness. To me, a lot of the honesty is about that. It goes beyond the sordid details of your sexual outmaneuvering. You know, the story is not a story of sex.
I've tried to explain that to her many times. Yes, but for that you need to bring in the other content. Because what is so difficult for any partner is the level of compartmentalization. You have lived with it. It's kind of a second skin. For the person on the other side, it is something inconceivable. And so then you wonder, who was I with? Mm-hmm.
Not is what we experienced real, but who was I with? Who's the guy? And the guy was both. He was both. And now he's working on one thing, and that is to find some way to integrate his good self and his bad self. And these two have most of the time lived very, very, very separate in you. No more.
And there's nothing I could think of that would ever want me to go back to that place. I get it. But when you talk about being honest, this is a different story of honesty. For all of our adult life, she never knew about my sexual molestation. She didn't know about it until I was... As a matter of fact, nobody knew about it until I was 59 years old. I took some sort of responsibility for that because...
I didn't say no, I didn't fight. It happened on more than one occasion. With? An older male. I just put it in a place and it just, and I went on. I think what's important in what he describes is that he tells us about an experience that many, many boys have. They live with tremendous shame.
and tremendous sense that they're damaged, and tremendous sense that maybe they could have prevented this, or maybe that that's what they deserve. It internalizes a sense of dirty, bad, and that begins to be the split between the good me and the bad me. I could have an entire individual session with him about his past, about how the split emerged and then was fostered and so forth.
But I also know that they came as a couple. And part of what needs to happen with him so that they can really begin to mend is for him to step out of himself and to be able to reach out to her.
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How much does he talk about what he did to you versus what happened to him?
you would say he talks more about what happened to him than what happened to me. - Correct. I'm sensing that. That is off balance. - Okay. - So listen to her very carefully, because I think she may have tried to say this already more than once. - I really feel that you talk more about you and the pain you're going through than the horrific pain you caused me.
All of your pain was self-inflicted. You made choices, you made decisions, you put yourself out there. But everything that was done to me is not something I asked for, not something I wanted to be party to. I mean, I know you know you hurt me, but I don't think you really get the magnitude because it always switches back to you. But the point of the whole story is... Before you butt.
Can you just tell her what you just heard so that we know that it reached you? That I'm not compassionate to your trauma and I talk more about my own trauma than your trauma. Is that... Mm-hmm. ...pretty well sum it up? Talking about it, it just brings us both to such a bad place and all it does is bring out anger and hate from you.
Every time I try to talk about this. So let me try to help you do this in a way That is more healing and less activating because you're in a certain phase you've gone from the 59 years of trying to deny everything numb myself feel nothing medicate and
And now I'm in touch. I'm in touch with myself. I'm figuring it out. I'm putting the pieces together and it's making sense for the first time. There is no mask in front of me and I am so deep into myself. I'm so freaking self-absorbed. It's still more about me. It was about me then and it is about me now. And now you got to step out of yourself for a moment because it's always both. It's what it meant to you and what it did to her.
If you attend to her primary concern, then she can attend to your primary trajectory. But she can only do that if there is space inside of her. And that space is created because you are saying to her, how are you doing? How much have you been thinking about this today? I cannot believe what I mean. And that I cannot believe from a place of responsibility, not from a place of shame.
I take responsibility. Yeah? Be very clear. I take 100%. There is no excuse. There are a couple of reasons. But the problem is that if you go to her and you say to her, I can't believe how I treated you, you have to be able to not say, I feel so bad about me for having done this. It's the difference between I feel so bad about myself versus I feel bad for you.
That makes a lot of sense. And what she needs is for you to finally step out of yourself and actually be able to say, "I feel so bad for you." I didn't do it to you. I didn't cause you all of this pain in your life, but you caused me all this pain in my life. You have to find a way to help me through it. I came to you last night. I hug you.
And you have to let me say that. But people, you're going to help each other, help each other. You're going to learn that together. So when you get all upset that he has to, he has to, he doesn't know. He doesn't disagree, but he doesn't know. So you tell him what you want. Don't tell him what he has to or what he does wrong.
It's good that all the time. Tell me what you want. I'm there. I am all in. I am 100% all in. I believe you. I am self-absorbed. I got to get out of that. Do you understand the difference? Yes. Not until 10 minutes ago. So I would like just to hear it. Speak from that place. The 12-step program very clearly says you're not supposed to say I'm sorry all the time.
that your actions are supposed to speak. Just mumbling, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," is not. It's waking up in the morning and first thing telling her, "What can I do to make your day better?" It's putting her before my own self and needs. And I demonstrate this every day. And it's important for me... It's beautiful. It's beautiful. But your wife is more isolated than you.
Okay. And she needs not an apology. She needs an acknowledgement of her experience. Yep. It's just that. You can use the words you want. You can use your body. When he speaks, he wants to be there for her, but it's more about him. When his body speaks, he's actually there for her. And the moment he holds her, both of them start sobbing and they have crossed the bridge to each other.
I can't imagine what you're going through. But I'm here for you. That was good. Do you understand the difference? Yes, I do. She needs, on occasion, for you to leave your belly button and reach out to her and feel bad for her and not so bad just for yourself. Otherwise, she's left all alone to try to justify...
What's wrong with me that I am here accepting this? Where's my self-esteem? Something like that. That's exactly, yeah, that's it. And she's dealing with that new shame of where's your self-respect? What kind of woman would let herself, you know, particularly even her best friends may be questioning her. And that barrage is
she has to confront and often alone because he has a community. He has the 12-step support groups and he has an entire new family with whom he can discuss all the issues that he's grappling with, whereas she's often quite alone. Part of why he can't see what you're going through is because he's responsible for much of it and he can't look at himself.
It's not happening for no reason, and it's not happening out of callousness. It's very hard to stay in the position of responsibility and guilt versus shame. - Very hard. - Okay? But this is your practice, your relationship practice, is to be able to feel more guilt, because guilt is the responsibility towards another person. - Mm-hmm. - But then when he crosses... - Mm-hmm. - You need to also be able to hear it. - Hear it.
and not say, "I need you to or you have to," when he's actually in the midst of doing it. That's probably our biggest problem. Because every time, not every time, a majority of the time when I do cross over, instead of getting a pat on the back, I get slapped in the face. So I don't cross over. Right. But I want you to know this is a bit of a beast for many people in your situation. It is one of the most difficult
Because I don't think she means to slap you. I don't think that that's her intention at all. What she's trying to say is, why am I not feeling any better, even though you're supposedly doing what I say I want you to do? That's spot on. And that is true and normal. I understand they don't apologize, but apologizing is different from acknowledging the other person's experience. Yeah. Yeah.
How have you come to understand what has happened to him all these years? By reading about it and being educated that men, women do this because of their need to soothe. And had he ever disclosed that any one of the people that he was with, there was more than just sex, I probably wouldn't be here today. But there was nobody that...
was more than just casual sex. That feels better. In what way? For you? Because of me, he just, he loved me. You know, and then I question, how could you really love me if you did that to me? You know, fidelity between a couple is sacred. It's sacred. I wish he would have been a gambler, a drug addict. Anything but sex.
Just something that I thought was ours. To be told that it wasn't and for the amount of people and years, you know, and we calculated in my head exactly how many years it was. 22 years. 22 years. We're married 36, you take away the 2, you take away the 12. You cheated on me for 22 years.
It's mind-boggling. I didn't cheat on her for 12 years. It's just mind-boggling. Mister, your wife has just said so many important things and the only thing you respond to is the calculus? We go through this all the time, is the calculus. You have to respond differently than what you just did. You can do better. Yeah. Yeah. It's a horrible thing that you had to go through that. You're...
You're my family. And as crazy as it sounds, how can I do this to my family? I have the answers, and I know why, and I know why I don't want to ever have to go there again. And that's the part that scares me.
You know, once an addict, always an addict. I don't know. I sit in rooms with a lot of guys that have what they call slips. And I can't understand how anybody could slip. Once you get it, once you understand that...
It's not real. It's just going to add to shame. It's just going to add to depression. It's not going to... Again, I'm not worried about what it's going to do to you. I'm worried about what it's going to do to me. You're asking me what could drive me off the road. And I'm trying to tell you... You know what may be more helpful? Don't try to convince her. Okay. Because you can't be that certain either.
I would suggest that you simply tell her your process, but don't try to convince her. Okay. Do you understand? And most of the time, talk less and touch more. Talk less. You over-talk. You think? We know that about him. You know, because it is the one language between the two of you that never got contaminated.
And that is very special because in most situations it could be exactly the reverse. So when she gets upset, half the time all you need to do is hold her and just say, I'm here. And for the rest, if you allow me, shut the fuck up. Good advice. What you're saying is meant, is meant really well and it's not coming across. I know.
So you just hold her and at the best you tell her it's okay, don't talk. And you stay for a moment, quiet, sad, with we have each other and it is freaking uncertain. The reason this woman or this couple will be able to overcome this and to turn this tragedy into a triumph is because the rest of their life was so solid.
It is because they had a good marriage. It is because they had a good sexual relationship, particularly because they had a good sexual relationship. It is because he has been there for her. So I think they can overcome it because they have a very rich tapestry that has never wavered. You just heard a classic session of Where Should We Begin with Esther Perel. We are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with New York Magazine and The Cut.
To apply with your partner for a session on the podcast, for the transcripts or show notes on each episode, or to sign up for Esther's monthly newsletter, go to estherperel.com. Esther Perel is the author of Mating in Captivity in the State of Affairs. She also created a game of stories called Where Should We Begin? For details, go to her website, estherperel.com.