Love the One You’re With

Sarah Miller

You won’t change him. Focus instead on why you chose him

2. Your desire to have sex with someone else is about you, not him.   
At age 50, 12 years into a happy marriage, writer and spiritual teacher Trebbe Johnson found herself madly infatuated with a younger man.  “I wanted to think the whole thing was about this new guy, about ‘us.’ I wanted to believe that what we had was this crazy passion, this other-worldly connection.”  But as she thought about it more and talked about it with her friends, she was led to a revelation—this longing she felt was about that myth that there’s one perfect beloved for us out there, a sexual and spiritual union that will complete us.  “What we’re really longing for when we yearn for someone else is the desire to be part of something bigger than ourselves.  I was convinced that this young man was my path, but when I thought about it I saw that what was really in my path was writing a book about desire.’’ (That book turned out to be The World Is a Waiting Lover.) It is so easy to think that Dan from accounting is your long-lost soul mate.  But could it be that you imagine that Dan sees you in a way you wish you could see yourself?  Or that there are things about Dan that you wish you could incorporate into your own life?  Because you can accomplish all of that staying in your present relationship. No Dan required.

We know it’s hard, but when lust strikes, sublimate. Put all your energy toward something—running a marathon, drawing a self-portrait that actually resembles you, writing 50 pages of a memoir—that will cultivate the self-esteem and generate the excitement you thought you’d get from cheating.

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