Treating your Infidelity Situation as a Life Project
People. I have news for you. The way you think about your infidelity situation MATTERS. The way you orient yourself to the fact that you are cheating — or doing whatever it is you’re doing — will determine the way you take action in regards to your situation.
If you tell yourself that your infidelity situation is a problem that’s impossible to solve, you’re probably going to prove yourself right. When we believe things are true, we tend to behave as if they are. And then, through our very own actions, we produce evidence that our beliefs are correct.
People who think their infidelity situations are great, grand mysteries or unsolvable problems tend to stay confused about their infidelity situations for months or years or longer. People who think their infidelity situations are impossible to resolve usually don’t do very much to actually try to resolve* them.
If you want to stay stuck, or confused, or dwell in limbo for a while longer, that’s your prerogative. But if you want change, I have a suggestion for you.
Consider thinking about your infidelity situation as a life project, or a bit of important business that has landed in your lap. It doesn’t really matter how or why this important project came to you. What is important is that the situation is happening, the project has presented itself, and you can either choose to deal with it, or not. If you don’t want to actively deal with your infidelity situation, that’s fine — stop reading this article and go do something else!
But if you want a resolution to your infidelity situation, if you want things in your life to change, you may want to start thinking about your infidelity situation as life project that is important to address, and worth devoting time and effort and resources to solving — and something that is possible to resolve.
Here are 8 ways you can think about your infidelity situation as a life project — as opposed to an unsolvable problem, or a grand mystery you can’t possibly unravel.
1. You can choose to recognize that your infidelity situation, like any other project, is going to require a certain amount of project management. That doesn’t mean you have to follow any particularly fancy project management techniques. But it does mean that you decide to approach your situation/project at least somewhat systematically.
2. You can recognize that like many other projects, the first stage of your infidelity situation life project may be to define the nature and the scope of the project. Sometimes projects present themselves to us, and their scope and objectives are pretty clear from the outset. And sometimes that doesn’t happen. Sometimes a situation lands in our lap, and we know we want to take it on as a project, but we don’t have a clear sense of what the project entails. We don’t know exactly what questions we’re trying to answer, or what our main objectives are. We just know we have a situation on our hands that we want to do something about. And when this happens, our first order of business is to start defining the scope of our project, and the objectives of our project. And this is a perfectly legitimate phase of a project, or project within a project. It’s not a PROBLEM to not know exactly what we’re trying to solve for. Getting clear on what our project is all about is just part of the process of dealing with something important — especially if it’s something we don’t have much, or any, experience dealing with.
3. Similarly, you can recognize that infidelity situations are projects that contain multiple components — and that you cannot address all of these components at once. For instance, if you’re married and involved with someone else, you need to decide what you want to do about your marriage, and you also need to decide what you want to do about your relationship with your affair partner. And in order to make each of those decisions, there are probably multiple things you want to evaluate and consider. And there are probably at least a handful of other matters you need to address, too. You can do yourself a great big favor by recognizing that in order to complete your project, you’ll need to slow down and do one thing at a time.
4. On a related note, you can decide that even if you don’t know exactly what it’s going to take to resolve your situation, or complete your project, you are willing to figure it out, one tenacious step at a time. This is where a lot of people get stuck and stay stuck. They say, “I don’t know what to do about my infidelity situation!” and don’t even attempt to take a step forward. You can decide that you are going to try to figure it out, and that you’re going to keep trying to figure it out until you get to a resolution that you consider satisfying.
5. You can decide that if you’re trying hard and you feel like you need help, you will ask for help. It doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that. I work with clients who are engaging in infidelity and one thing I hear a lot is, “I wish I’d started working with you sooner!” So often, we are reluctant to seek help, for all kinds of reasons. But this reluctance usually doesn’t do anything great for us.
6. Consider that you get to decide how long it will take for you to resolve your infidelity situation, or complete your infidelity situation life project. Sounds wild, right? We usually don’t think that it’s possible to just decide how long it will take to complete this kind of a life project. But here’s the deal: you COULD make all of the choices that you need to make right now, in this very moment. You could make decisions based on what you already know. Or you could allow your situation to drag on forever. And if you allow it to, it probably will.
7. You can recognize that just about any major project in life has the potential to be a real pain in the ass at times. Yes, dealing with your infidelity situation in an intentional, deliberate way may be hard and uncomfortable in plenty of ways. But that’s true of just about any important endeavor you might undertake. (And, NOT dealing with your infidelity situation in an intentional, deliberate way can be plenty hard and uncomfortable, too.) Remodeling a house can be a real pain in the ass in lots of ways. Changing careers can be pretty hard and uncomfortable at times. But we do these kinds of things because we trust that it will be worth it in the end.
8. You can ease off of your perfectionist tendencies and embrace the idea that there may not be a way to resolve your infidelity situation “perfectly” — whatever the hell that might mean. But by being willing to resolve your infidelity situation imperfectly, you will actually be able to resolve it. And sometimes getting something done adequately is far better than not getting it done at all.
Infidelity situations — in my humble opinion, anyway — are important life projects that are worthy of our serious time and consideration, and are worthy of investing our time and energy and resources into resolving. But we don’t have to see infidelity situations as OVERLY important. We don’t have to make them seem so monumental that they become impossible to address.
For more on how to turn your infidelity situation into a life project that is possible for you to resolve, check out this week’s episode of “Your Secret is Safe with Me.” Available right here, or wherever you access podcasts.
*Important note: when I say “resolve” your infidelity situation, I don’t have a particular vision for what that should look like for you. In essence, what I mean is that you make changes in either what you’re doing or what you think about what you’re doing, so that you feel good about how you’re living — and so that you don’t have to spend so much of your precious time and energy thinking about your infidelity situation!
