Marriage sex-life advice: I just discovered the truth about the beginnings of my relationship. I’m devastated. - Slate Magazine

Each week, exclusively for Slate Plus members, Prudie discusses a new letter with a fellow Slate colleague. Have a question for Prudie? Submit it here. I’m a 45-year-old man, married to a 40-year-old woman, “Jane.”  We’ve been together over 10 years and married for seven. At the time we met, I was five years post-divorce and had had several messy, overlapping relationships, but had been single for the previous six months and learned/grown from those experiences. As such, it was really important for me to start any new relationship with a clean slate, and I communicated this to everyone I dated in relatively blunt fashion. As luck would have it, Jane said she had also been single about six months after a five-year, on-again off-again, somewhat casual relationship. She had many attractive qualities (smart, educated, sophisticated, and pretty), and I fell hard quickly. Jane openly shared her experience with sexual assault in college, so when we struggled to connect intimately right away, I practiced patience, and maybe naively, expected it would naturally improve based on my previous relationships (lots of great sex and wonderful feedback). Within a year of us meeting, I suffered a terrible spine injury as a result of organized fighting, and eventually needed major surgery. It was a long recovery, and while Jane wanted to get married and start a family, passion from her was still lacking. I often felt intuition that something was blocking a deeper emotional and intimate connection between us, and occasionally expressed this to Jane, to which she always reassured me there was nothing amiss and she was happy and wanted me to be happy too. We married just before the pandemic hit, had our daughter in 2021, and struggled with lots of illness the next couple years. As our health returned to normal, I longed for a better intimate connection and sex life, but Jane refused to discuss it until I was basically ready to go outside the marriage. She finally agreed to start prioritizing our sex life and to even talk about it, with the condition I began individual therapy. After a few sessions my therapist strongly encouraged me to talk with Jane about her past and our beginning. After many conversations spread over a few months, Jane finally admitted that she had withheld a major secret from me. Apparently, she was not single when we met, although she was still vague and cagey about the details. This absolutely devastated me, particularly the methodical and repeated deception, because in previous couples therapy I had asked several times if there was something blocking our connection from her past/relationship(s). At that point, I felt there were two choices, either exit the marriage or try to learn everything about our beginning. Jane was back to her old ways of not communicating, so in desperation I violated her privacy. The revelations were beyond anything I could have imagined. Jane’s previous relationship was anything but casual. She had tried for five years to “tame” the party animal because she was madly in love with him. They had amazing sexual chemistry and she was deeply passionate for him. She continued to sleep with him for a couple months into our relationship, and talked with her closest friends about still loving him deeply for nearly a year. Ultimately, his refusal to change for her and moving on to a new girlfriend is when she committed to me. We’ve been in couples counseling again for several months, and still it’s very hard for Jane to take ownership for how much this deception has hurt me, and especially for any damage it caused our relationship. Our therapist is more of a cheerleader type, and I want to be able to give Jane something tangible delineating how deception, gaslighting, etc. harm a relationship. Can you provide insight or point me toward articles, research, etc.? I’m (obviously) not ready to give up on the marriage, albeit in part because I cannot imagine spending less time with our 5-year-old daughter. Jenée Desmond-Harris: I love the extra challenge when a letter writer takes the option of ending the marriage that is not working in any way off the table! Lizzie O’Leary: Indeed! So, I am going to embrace that and run with it a bit. Jenée, you and I are both devoted watchers of Couples Therapy, and one thing I have become fascinated with is that Orna Guralnick, the therapist and our imaginary friend, doesn’t make one partner or the other one be the focus of the session. The focus of the session is the relationship itself. That is something that is a different entity than our LW or his wife. It sounds a bit like the LW wants their counselor (or us) to tell his wife that she did something wrong.Which, she did! You have my support on this, LW. But … My question for the LW is whether you want to punish your wife with research or articles because you are (rightly) hurt, or whether you want to set preconditions for the relationship to try to work in the future. Because I think a human being will naturally turn away from punishment or scolding. But if you do want to try to reconstitute trust, I wonder if framing it as “for this to work, I need some acknowledgment that what you did hurt me,” and see if she might be able to have that conversation. Jenée: That’s actually something that drives me crazy about our beloved Orna. Or I guess, more accurately, about the way couples therapy (the overall practice of it, not just the show) works. Sometimes one person has absolutely no regard for the relationship (like the guy on this season who had both made unauthorized purchases with his partner’s credit card AND was cheating and wasn’t really sorry about it) and it is very hard to watch a therapist act like there’s not a clear bad guy and everyone’s experience is equally valid. Some relationships don’t need to be saved! But I guess that’s how it works and that’s why I’m writing an advice column rather than running a private practice. Anyway, you’re right, Lizzie. And I think they need a different therapist because isn’t asking people to acknowledge out loud how their partner feels as a result of their actions kind of 101? I can understand how he can’t really move forward until he gets that. But it’s not going to happen as the result of presenting a slide deck full of peer-reviewed research on gaslighting. Lizzie: Yeah, I agree. One of the hardest things about therapy (other than insurance reimbursements), is that sometimes the therapist just doesn’t work for you! I would try voicing this issue. And you can even use language like “Look, I am stuck here. The pain from what happened is so big that it is blocking my ability to do anything else in this relationship.” That is a very clear statement of your own emotions, and if the therapist can’t help guide a conversation around that, then you gotta get someone else. I would also add that your wife is probably pissed about you reading her email (or were they texts? unclear). I totally get why you did it! But you guys do not sound like you are in a place where either of you feels safe to be emotionally vulnerable. It’s understandable, but I think if you want to give this a shot, you need to be honest about your hurt, and let her be honest too. Jenée: It’s also worth thinking about whether you’ll actually feel any better if she acknowledges the impact of what she did. It won’t change that she did it. And you rightfully don’t like that. So once you check that box, you’re going to be faced with whether you can actually be happy in this relationship. There may be a middle ground between fully reconciling and splitting up and only seeing your daughter half time, but it probably involves just kind of deciding to compartmentalize some of your feelings about what happened in the interest of what you believe is the greater good. Or who knows, maybe the therapist will pull out some new tricks and you and Jane will begin a chapter with a deeper understanding of each other. It’s possible. Lizzie: Yeah, I agree with this. Look, there are not easy answers for these kinds of big questions. The only thing I will say is that any relationship requires some degree of making a choice. Either a choice to turn away or a choice to turn towards (to use some Gottman language). I think either one is valid here, honestly. But I don’t think you can expect someone outside your marriage to do that work, whether it’s a therapist, or the ideal gaslighting PowerPoint, or even us. It is a choice you will have to make.