True Love Breaks a Marriage

Truth be told, it counts as one of the more compelling stories of therapy. The patient recounts it in the New York Times. Her name is Samantha Silva. She writes novels and screenplays.

She tells what happened when she, married with three children, fell in love with another man and decided to divorce her husband and to marry her lover. While embarking on this painful journey, she enlisted the help of an elderly London therapist, who guided her through the experience.

As for the question of whether the therapist was encouraging her to break up her family and to marry her lover, it seems not to have been the case. He was fairly neutral, which is more appropriate than you think. After all, the decision that Silva faced was one of those where there is no good alternative. Either side involves pain and loss. As for the other option-- stay married and have an affair-- Silva was living in London and her lover was in Boise, Idaho. Thus, an illicit affair was not practicable.

I would also mention, because she does not, that her passionate love affair, her divorce and her new life in Idaho can constitute material. You see, writers are always looking for material, and in this story she found plenty of it.

So, it’s a story of two couples, friends for years, where the husband of one couple fell in love with the wife of the other. And, let us be clear, Silva did not have a bad life with her husband when she fell in love with David. She was not escaping a hellhole of an abusive marriage.

From spring to summer, we debated whether to tell our spouses, the harm we would cause by leaving them, the happiness we might miss if we didn’t. Despite my husband’s dalliances, he and I shared a rich intellectual connection, a big life. Our children felt secure. David’s were grown but still in early adulthood. We had compromised in our marriages, denied parts of ourselves, often felt lonely, but who didn’t? Weren’t we happy enough?

We tried so hard just to think. But reason was no match for our frantic, raw desire.

Of course, the “raw desire” touch feels a bit overdone. After all, and I hesitate to say this, raw desire, the kind that overwhelms your rational thought, does not last forever. 

Again, it feels like a lose/lose situation. If you think that such situations are rare, think again. Here Silva explains:

I told him David and I wanted to be together but couldn’t see how without causing unimaginable pain. The storm we had tried to anticipate was a tempest. Our spouses might never forgive us; we didn’t know if we would forgive ourselves. I didn’t want to go back to my marriage but didn’t know how to leave it.

Anyway, she had found, with her lover, something that she did not have in her marriage. And she believes that finding this desire made her more essentially human. This is a psycho philosophical question, and it may be what one tells oneself when one is about to lay some serious pain on the people one loves the most. As it happened, the therapist heard something lucid in her protestation of true love:

I told him I knew there was dopamine coursing through my brain, but that I had found, with David, a way of loving I recognized as love. Being with him restored me to some essence of who I was as a human being.

“Do you hear how lucid you are when you say that?” he said.

And then, right or wrong, the therapist counsels her through her efforts to explain herself to her children. After she has made her decision, he has little choice but to steer her through the process:

He counseled me through telling my children, terrified as I was. My son had left London for his freshman year in Cairo, where the Arab Spring was at full tilt. I had to tell him over Skype. He would not speak to me for almost a year.

My two daughters were paralyzed, in shock, and grew distant.

It is worth noting that Silva caused some significant harm to her children and that she nearly lost them. To think that your children are going to feel better when you abandon them to find true love is exceedingly naive. Children do not care about the lust that is coursing through your loins.

So, she was living in London. David was living in Boise, Idaho. When she moved to Boise the local population did not embrace her as a culture heroine:

In Boise, even acquaintances took sides, called me names, averted their eyes in the grocery store, crossed the street to avoid me. Old friends dropped me without a word. Everywhere felt like exile.

I told my therapist the tiny table at DK Donuts felt like the postage stamp my husband had predicted. “My best friend says I’m a pimped-up, postmodern Hester Prynne,” I said, “who’d better start embroidering her own Scarlet A.”

I could almost hear him smile.

“Stand up for yourself,” he said. “She’s right. Don’t let yourself be punished for choosing happiness.”

I am not sure what else he could have said. When you are being ostracized, you need connections, not judgments. As for whether Silva was choosing happiness by abandoning her children, I would have my doubts, but I suspect that I would also have supported her. After the decision is made you cannot do very much to change it, even if you believe that it might end up badly.

Curiously, and compellingly, the therapist closed their last session by explaining that he himself was the product of an adulterous affair that his mother had. His mother left her husband and abandoned three children for true love and for her new baby. How did it work out? The woman spent much of her life in grief and guilt:

“I am the child of an affair my mother had with a man she loved and left her husband for,” he said. “She had three children, but she never saw them again. I lived with her grief, and her guilt, all my life. She never forgave herself.”

I felt my chest sink. Nothing could have prepared me.

“I’ve tried so hard to be your advocate. I want you to have the happiness you deserve,” he said with a wistful smile. “But the whole time we’ve been in therapy about this, I’ve been in therapy about you.”

One can question his willingness to share information that might have made her decision look a lot worse than it felt. One can also say that his own experience was merely anecdotal and thus, not entirely relevant. 

Still, he seems to be saying that he knows that her decision might not lead to lead to the unalloyed happiness she imagines. But that it is not his job to threaten her with nightmare scenarios. 

Silva closes by telling us that her story has a happy ending:

He was hopeful my children would come to see me as more whole, and more capable of nurturing them, which they have. He accepted my vision of a loving, equal relationship with David, which we still have today, 12 years later. He trusted me with my own life.

Maybe, in our time together, he was talking to his mother too. To all mothers, all wives, all women, across time. But mostly, he was talking to me.

If the therapist was talking to all mothers, he was not presenting the decision as simple and direct. Silva seems to have avoided calamity, but other people have not. If the therapist was talking to all women and to all mothers, he was saying that they should not imagine that they can purchase true love and even lust by abandoning home and hearth and husband. In some cases it might be the best course. In some cases it decidedly is not. 

Then again, regardless of whether the story really had a happy ending, the truth is, once you have damaged that many of the people you love you have a vested interest in finding a saving grace.