February 14th, 2010Life Coach Sheila’s Open Letter to Cheaters on Valentine’s Day
Stop! Before you read any further, I will tell you what this IS and what this is NOT:
This is NOT a lecture, in which I am pontificating on what is “right and wrong”…
This IS a confession from me to you, as a woman who has been “the other woman” and my own expression of compassion and love for you, as a man or a woman who “cheats” on your spouse, but I know deep inside that you are really “cheating” on yourself…
If you want to hear what I have to say, which is written with love and compassion, read on…
In this letter, I’m sharing with you what I have learned in my personal and professional experiences about what it means to be “in love” with another human being: it means to be so connected with this other person, so inside the love for them, that concerns about yourself and your own needs are superseded by your desire to give to, to take care of, and to contribute to the needs of the other. When we are in an energetic and emotional state of being “in love” with someone else, we are literally incapable of looking at another person for our own needs to be met: we are in an energetic, spiritual, and emotional condition of enfoldment, wrapped inside a “love” which says “I cannot see another person in the way I see my beloved, because there is nothing else I need or want”.
For several years, I loved a man who had been married twice, and admitted to me that he had really never been “in love”. Perhaps he loved his wives in the way he loved his sisters or good friends, with some affection, respect, appreciation, and even some lust or passion from time to time. But what I know about this man is that he had a need and/or wanted to have the companionship of a domestic partner at all times. He needed and/or wanted the safety of being with a woman he could trust. What I also know about this man is that he had a deeply intense and passionate nature, but seemed (at least with me) to pull away from those intense feelings when they would emerge.
What I observed in this man with whom I had shared my heart and my body for years: he enjoyed receiving my passion; he craved the pleasure which I give him, wrapped in my passion and love for him. He knew that I loved him and expressed that he “treasured” the way I expressed my passion for him. However, he was not able to openly reciprocate similar emotional intensity. It was almost as if it was painful for him to open his heart to me, to admit any feelings beyond friendly affection and/or lust. I’m willing to accept the possibility that he just didn’t have any deep feelings for me at all, and that simple fact caused him to feel uncomfortable in the presence of my passion for him. We may never know… But what was clear through his actions was that he was in this long-term “affair” with me for what it gave to him – not for what he could give to me.
Throughout the years, I gathered information and understanding about this man: he was married to a woman he described as his “best friend” and that they “worked well” in their domestic partnership. I observed that there were significant advantages for him to share his financial assets with his wife, and she with him. I understood that having financial stability and domestic tranquility was important to him. Conclusion: he lived life in the context of “what’s in it for me?”
Other aspects of my so-called lover were that he often engaged with cyber-sex in order to “connect” with stimuli which would assist him in “getting off” when horny. He admitted to his habit of “hitting on” women, in order to experience a momentary “high” or “rush” in the excitement, giving him the experience of being alive and vital.
Once I was able to step outside the fog of my own addiction to him, I was also able to see more clearly that this man whom I loved but who could not love me was an addict. He was addicted to stimuli that turned him on: it was all about what others could do for him.
Having been an “addict” to things like shopping, sex, and work, I quickly recognized an addict when I saw it: we addicts find anything and everything to fill up the empty spaces, to distract us from the pain of uncertainty and the feelings of emptiness that are heightened by living a life which is characterized by what’s in it for me… In our blind frenzied search for more stimulation, for “fill me up” experiences, for more things and outward distractions from feelings we have that are uncomfortable and/or desires we have that are unfulfilled, our addictions increase and the intensity of them grows. The more any of us looks to other people for affirmation and/or attention, to the acquisition of things to validate our self-worth, for the attainment of trophies and accolades for proof that we are valuable, okay, and even sexy, our addictions expand and intensify.
Perhaps I had been participating in my own self-made illusion of love and passion, fueling my own addictions in the process. During the several years of sexual encounters, I had the illusion that I was “in love” with this man and that that love which I felt for him would be enough to sustain me, despite having the experience that he did not or could not reciprocate my love in the way in which I was offering it to him. However, I would often break off the “affair” when I had reached a tipping point of my own feelings of loneliness and emptiness in the exchange. I often complained that ours was a one-way relationship; it was not a balanced two-way exchange of emotion and generosity.
No matter how many times I would break things off, complaining about the one-way street, he would come back to me in the guise that “I want to try harder” or “I promise it will be two-way babe!”…Nonetheless, it would quickly devolve into the one-way street once again: He didn’t “get it” that when any of us lock ourselves up in a self-imposed prison of one-way relationships, we have locked out that divine connection which comes from a two-way flow of energy and generous intentions. (You could see it as an extreme example of the “EGO” getting in the way of ecstasy–”Edging God Out” is what the EGO does!) That two-way open and loving relationship is what creates real excitement, passion, and satisfaction.
During my last sexual encounter with him, I stepped back and once again observed myself giving, giving, giving… And once again I observed him taking, taking, taking. I experienced myself as the purveyor of pleasure and he was the happy recipient. However, once he had walked out my door, the profound realization that came to me was sad, very sad for me: I wasn’t sorry to see him leave my home…I didn’t miss him…I felt empty and unsatisfied I felt unseen, unheard, and yet again sexually and emotionally incomplete, since it was rarely if ever his practice to ensure my having an orgasm. (During my long and loving marriage, my beloved husband would never have imagined leaving our marital bed without my being totally satisfied!)
As I reflected back on this last encounter, I stepped back from myself and asked: “what the hell is this!?!? This is no lover! I may be his lover, but he is not my lover!?” I marveled at the extent to which my love for him had blinded me to my own needs… Even more to the point of this letter, I felt like I’d been hit between the eyes with the reality that what we were doing together was a dead-end street: it was a fragmented energy; it was not a two-way street. Dead-end….Or…Deadened…
After he left, I began to think about energy: everything is energy. Thoughts are energy.
When he goes home to his wife, how can there be a totally free-flowing energy of openness and sharing? He’s just been with me and he has something to hide! He cannot be totally open with his wife, because he has something inside that he cannot share. There has to be some kind of shame or guilt that creeps into his relationship with his wife. And…I have become a part of that!
As I thought of my own role, my own participation in his self-made prison and the limitations he is placing on his intimate relationship with his wife, I began to recoil at my own capacity for duplicity and secrecy. I began to realize the damage I was also doing to my own energetic system, my own sense of integrity, my own inner world of self-love and wholeness.
I began to realize that the very prison he was creating for himself had also become mine:
I was not in a relationship which allowed me to love freely, which allowed for the divine free-flow of energy. Ours had not been a two-way street: it had not been what I like to call “sacred reciprocity”. I had been fooling myself to think it ever was!
Looking at the harsh reality of the years of frustration and confusion, in which I experienced agonizing restraints and inaccessibility time after time, month after month, year after year, the picture became clearer and clearer to me: Here I was, crawling in the desert like a thirsty traveler, and there he was standing nearby with the flask of water in his hand, but refusing to give me any of his water to drink…
If I just flip this “harsh reality” for me, and see it as a mirror image of his own reality: as he was holding back, not allowing for the free-flow of energy and delicious passionate exchange, he was also not allowing for the free and ecstatic sharing of pure unconditional love! He had been cheating himself of the pleasure that comes to each of us when we know we have given another human being joy, have given another human being the “water” of life’s precious vitality, called love. In holding back from me, and also holding back from his wife, he was also “cheating” on himself!
My love for this man had become a gift to myself: it opened my mind and my heart to the plight of all men and women who are trapped in a prison of their own making: unable to liberate themselves from a fear of being truly intimate with their life partners. This self-imposed prison is painful: I’ve witnessed it.
In this open letter, I am inviting you men and women who are currently cheating on your spouses to consider the extent to which you are really cheating on yourselves: consider the possibility that you could be experiencing a bliss and a pleasure beyond measure, if you would only allow yourself to totally unleash your passionate self with your life partner, to open your heart to him/her, to share everything with him/her…even your most secret fantasies!
Allow yourselves to be totally vulnerable, to feel all those “painful” feelings of fear and nakedness…emotional nakedness—but along with this vulnerability is included the ecstasy of true intimacy, true transparency, true giving and receiving without barriers, without resistance, without restraints!
Allow yourself to give your spouse all the excitement and juiciness you have been inviting from others in your life – give your partner whatever your deepest longings have been and what it is you have been seeking from others! In other words, whatever it is that you have wanted to receive (attention, passion, unconditional acceptance), give it away to your spouse!
Open yourself to your partner. Allow him/her in to your heart. Look at your spouse with new eyes and ask yourself: “what can I do for her today?…how can I make his day more joyful?” Look at your spouse with the ongoing question of what YOU can do for him/her, rather than what he/she can do for YOU! Give yourself away with no holds barred, and know that you will also be giving to yourself, in the process. Do it! NOW!