Dear Aunt Silvia
I’m married, but I’ve fallen in love with someone else. This person is also a married man and my former workmate.

After a long time, one day we met at a wedding which we had both attended outside the country and during the two days we became so close and love blossomed between us. One thing led to the other even after we came back home.

The thing is that I find my husband very boring and unloving, unlike my new found lover- who is very interesting to be with. Both of us have two children in our marriages, but at the same time we are thinking of asking for divorce from our respective partners. Please help me; my feelings for this man are driving me nuts.
Doriane.

Dear Doriane,

Many of us have experienced some version of this situation, whether we choose to pursue it or not is up to us to make the decision. Although one’s attention may be on the new loved one, we always look for underlying causes of difficult situations.

The most obvious underlying cause in this situation is that there is a problem with your marriage. In order to move forward with a new relationship, it’s necessary to resolve pending issues with a current one other than resolving to move into a new relationship without trying to solve the problems with your partner.

There are moral questions here certainly, but from a practical point of view there’s even more involved than that.

You can’t run away from your problems. Whatever the situation may be with the existing relationship, unless it’s dealt with you will carry the same difficulty forward into a new one. 

This is our problem as human beings, and we have attracted the environmental circumstances which mirror it. Until we deal with the problem within ourselves, we will continue to attract similar circumstances anywhere we go whether we choose to cheat in our current relationship or not.

If your current relationship has become boring, it’s because you are bored with yourself. At some point we have assigned power over our level of interest in life to our partner and abdicated it for ourselves. This tendency causes us to look for a different partner who will provide interest for us.

Eventually of course, we will see that the new partner cannot provide non-stop stimulation either. In actual fact, no one can. It’s our level of interest; therefore we are responsible for it.

Perhaps there is something unendurable in the current relationship, such as abuse. What then? We are still seeking satisfaction from the outside instead of within ourselves.

We may be viewing the new partner as a rescuer, someone who will bring closure for us. This rarely works either because then we’re attempting to have someone else provide closure for us. Our difficulty with closure has not been resolved, and tends to pursue us in other relationships until the end of time.

If you lack the excitement that you are seeking then why not create it yourself and see if your partner will not like it. Responsibilities are weighing on us so much that we end up forgetting the married part of us, not because you want your marriage to fail , but due to the fact that we have to work extra hard to put bread on the table and hence we end up living like robots.

Seek professional advice, when children are involved it is a totally different story. Put your act together and stop sleeping around-you need to be strong to make your marriage work, sometimes the grass on the other side is not as green as you think.

Ends