In Love with a Married Man?

Your washer-dryer breaks down. You go to the local store and the salesperson tells you that there are no washer-dryers available right now. They will be coming soon, but no one knows exactly when. You are then shown a range of washing machines and you consider whether you can make do without the drying feature. So much laundry is piled up at home and you need something now. The salesperson also claims that with this particular washing machine, you probably won’t need a dryer anyway.

So you buy the washing machine, clear the laundry and all is well for three months, until the seasons change and it starts to rain every day. You then wish you had waited for the washer-dryer because what you have isn’t what you really wanted. And you do need a dryer even though you were told you wouldn’t need one. Well, the salesperson misled you, but you chose to believe him.

Who Is to Blame Here?

Now lets apply what just happened to relationships. You are lonely. You dread holidays, you fear the future and maybe your biological clock is deafening you. You know what you want from a partner, but you never seem to meet anyone who ticks all the boxes. You want someone now. So along comes Mr. Unavailable. He may be married, have a girlfriend, have several girlfriends, carry emotional baggage or even have a personality disorder or alcohol or drug addiction. But he’s ready to fill that empty place in your life right now.

You know that he isn’t really what you want, but you have been so lonely for so long and you have a deep fear that you will never find someone special. So you take him home and begin a relationship (or at least that’s what you think it is). Everything is fine for the first 3 months. You are both trying to impress the other, you are both excited at having met someone new and you love the honeymoon period. All is wonderful.

Then it gets shaky. He calls less, he backs off, he needs to spend time someplace else and you are wondering why this is happening. You then enter into a cycle of looking for answers. You change your own actions in an attempt to get back the guy you had for the first three months. You wonder when he will change, when he will leave his wife, why he doesn’t stop drinking, why he treats you so badly. When he led you to believe that he was going to be enough for you, he was misleading you, but you chose to believe him.

Who Is to Blame Here?

The moral of this story is that if you enter into something, anything from purchasing a washing machine to starting a relationship, what you see is usually what you get. You enter into an agreement that accepts the terms as they stand at that time. That washing machine was never going to turn into a washer-dryer. You bought a washing machine and that’s exactly what you have. That married guy came to you with a wife. You accepted those terms – you agreed to those conditions. You started a relationship with a married man (attached, drunk, addicted, jobless) and that’s exactly what you have.

Who is to blame here? The psychic who tells you that he has no intention of leaving his wife? The man who came to you married, told you he was married and can’t understand why it was ok then and now it’s not ok? What we have is often exactly what we agreed to – and we only have ourselves to blame.