THREE Reasons Affairs Hinder Leaving a Marriage

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:02]Hi, it's Lauren Laruso, licensed therapist, infidelity specialist, and author of Beyond Infidelity from Penguin Random House. Today, I'm going to talk with you about why being in an affair actually makes it harder to leave your marriage and not easier. Most people think that if they've been unhappy, dissatisfied, disconnected in their marriage for some time, that an affair is going to give them more confidence, more clarity, and more certainty. And that it's going to make it easier to actually do the thing that they've likely been thinking about as a possibility or maybe even a probability, which is get a divorce. And today I'm going to give you three very real reasons about why having an affair makes it harder to leave your marriage. The first is that quite simply you're trying to solve for and manage two things at the same time. Now, I don't know about you, but multitasking does not bring me to my finest place when it comes to execution of anything, of completion of anything, or of even being able to think clearly about what's right in front of me or what's happening. And having an affair is the ultimate multitasking.

[00:01:25]Balancing two relationships, solving for two extremely different relationships, circumstances, relational environments, and frankly, two very different versions of yourself just makes it all the harder to focus on what's real, what's true, what's right in front of you, and what it is that you have to do. Clarity about conversations you need to have. Being able to show up fully as one person in one place, feeling the discomfort of one relationship enough to be fully engaged and go to the mat around what needs to be resolved there. Those things are extremely compromised when you are split in an affair. If you're everywhere at the same time, then you're nowhere at the same time. and your brain's confusion around trying to manage multiple things at the same time and try to make a big decision that is not in the clear anymore. It's now confounded by multiple relationships, multiple factors, and multiple influences. That makes it so much harder and you stop being able to trust yourself because you understand that you're not thinking clearly anymore. Now, let's go on to factor number two. Now factor number two is related to this in that in my experience the guilt of being in an affair adds a new variable to what was previously just clear feelings about the marriage or the life you were living or the self that you had created inside of that relationship and that container before it was one relationship one self one life. When you take matters into your own hands and you begin another life, another relationship, another version of yourself that is living outside of your primary relationship and the life that's on the up and up, there's guilt. That guilt changes the way we relate to our decision, to our ability to address things with our spouse, and to our ability to speak about what we want and need clearly and confidently. The confidence is undermined because the guilt is now there and there's something to hide. The sense of responsibility that you feel now because there's an affair about hurting people, about impacting people's life, it's impacted by the guilt. When we have something to hide, when we have something that we know, when we have something that we're trying to conceal, that we're trying to dance around, that we're trying to circumvent, it makes everything a calculation that is measured against our emotional honesty, against our ability to show up whole and earnestly. It even impacts our ability to feel fully what we felt before. So that guilt makes it harder to clearly move toward the marital issues, to discuss what's at hand, to address what's at hand, and to sit in that long enough to actually make progress and resolve anything, whether you're staying or going. The resolution isn't a decision. The resolution is about tending to issues, concerns, point of tension, friction, disconnections for long enough to have addressed them fully to where your spouse could say, "Yeah, we went to the mat on that issue."

[00:04:43]That's not happening because guilt is at play as well. Now last, and this is a big one. While people often tell themselves a story that the affair is going to be a stepping stone, a bridge, or as I call it, a warm transfer out of their marriage and into a new relationship. What is most commonly the case is that now all of a sudden you're more confused because all of your needs are being met. There is both the stability of family, of the life that you've built, of everything that that holds and entails, the friendships, the vacations, the memories, the holidays, the milestones, the extended family, the way that people in that life view you, know you, think of you, and the way that you see yourself in that life, your view of yourself gets to stay intact. That doesn't have to change. While on the other side now, there's no, there's excitement. There's potentially love and passion. There's experiences that you haven't experienced or felt in a really long time, if ever, with someone brand new. And you get to be a different person, living a different life in that space. And so it introduces a brand new confounding variable of taking away the motivation that comes from being in pain and discomfort of not being where we're supposed to be, not having our needs met consistently over time, not having connection the way we need it to be.

[00:06:15]Whatever it is, if there were any marital issues that got you here, the truth is that the affair actually takes the tension and the pain away. And so what happens is that someone in an affair realizes that they aren't as motivated because they actually have everything at once. There's like 100% of the pie. The cost of this is a split life, stress, anxiety, not living in your integrity the way that you want to.

[00:06:45]The stress of that is very, very real and it takes a toll on people. It causes illness. I'll talk about that in another episode. That is very real. But it's a different kind of pain than the acute pain of living in something that so glaringly is misaligned with you or not meeting your needs. Someone likened it to the slow drip of steady pain every day is preferable to severing off your limb. So the slow drip of being in pain every day is maybe living a life where you don't feel fully actualized. Maybe living a life where you have dreams that aren't being pursued. Maybe feeling long disconnected from your spouse, maybe wishing things looked a little different. Right? Those are all of those underlying things that I don't think anyone's exempt from in their life, but that most people who are in an affair have either sold themselves a story about or have been feeling for quite some time and haven't addressed. And that puts you in a slow drip of pain. To have to make a decision about it, to have to do something about it, to have to commit to something. That's an entirely different level of pain. It involves severing. It involves loss. And the affair actually makes it so that you can avoid it because you can choose low-level continuous pain and discomfort over the massive pain and discomfort of a divorce or even losing the affair relationship. So now we come into a space where everything's more complicated. It's more complicated by guilt. It's more complicated by secrets.

[00:08:16]It's more complicated by the split self, more complicated by the overwhelm, the confusion, the juggling, the possible demands and requests from both relationships in both lives, and from the fact that ultimately now there is fulfillment in both places. The stability and steadiness of a long-term relationship in the life that has been built and the newness and everything that comes with it of the affair relationship. If any of these hit home for you, I want you to take some time, relisten to this episode, think about how that's fitting in for you. And the work here becomes to really distill it down. Your work is going to be to get clear again, to get self-connected again, and to ask yourself, where am I covering the decision to live an honest integrated life in distraction, chaos, and negative emotion? What would it take to get back to my truest, strongest, wisest version? Because that's where your real self lies. And everyone deserves that, including the people who are involved and affected with you. If you're dealing with an affair, I want to remind you as always, you are not alone, and you don't have to go through this on your own. If you're watching this on YouTube, don't forget to subscribe. And if you're listening on your favorite podcast platform, make sure you hit the subscribe button there, too. And I'll see you next week.