The Sanford Wives

Posted by fxckfeelings on July 6, 2009

In honor of our nation’s birth, we’re doing our patriotic duty this long weekend and helping out one of our elected leaders (at least until he’s forced to resign); this man may no longer be a hopeful for the White House, but he’s already the commander-in-chief of feelings. We also reach out to his wife, who probably is less in need of a shrink than a good divorce lawyer.
Happy 4th!
–Dr. Lastname

I’ve always had a God-given gift for communicating with people and have tried to use my gifts to lead people in a moral direction. In recent years, after achieving success as a lawyer, and marrying a truly remarkable woman, I felt a calling to run for office and, with her help as campaign manager, I was elected to office. I wasn’t afraid to take unpopular positions if I felt I was doing the right thing, because I trust my passion; that’s what connects me with people. About a year ago, I felt an unbelievable sense of connection with a beautiful, foreign woman. I’ve never felt so close to anyone, and it seemed unfair to either one of us not to share our love. But instead of having a beautiful experience to share and then put behind us, I became obsessed. It distanced me from my wife, who sensed that something was wrong, and it distracted me from work. I had to lie, and I hate lying. Finally, and with great relief, I confessed the truth. But I still can’t stop thinking and talking about her and now my marriage and political life are a mess. In the past, passion has brought me all my success and I need passion in my life. Now, I want to recapture that passion in a way that revives my marriage, interest in my job, and relationship with the public.

To successful politicians, who often have your style and personality, intense feelings often seem like the core of their being, and what makes them special. Such feelings give the gift of easy communication, charisma, material success, votes, and a certain je ne sais what the ladies love (and, sometimes, the dudes—here’s to you, Larry Craig, for having more charisma in your feet than most of us have in our entire bodies).

Sooner or later, however, your skills work their mojo, you achieve your goals, and life settles down to boring conversations with family and the same old guys at work (even if many are relatively famous), and at that point, if passion has become your elixir of life, you may feel like you’ve lost your oxygen and slid into meaningless mediocrity. The spark, as you might call it, is gone.

Making it your goal to sustain the high level of passion in your life (because passion seems to give your life its greatest meaning) is very dangerous, because you won’t be able to satisfy that need without pushing yourself to do things that will threaten your commitments, promises, partnerships, and sense of yourself as a good person. Your desire will make you cross the line (including, but not limited to, the “sex line,” per your description).

Politicians are supposed to be cool and calculating, but, if you are, it’s because you’re also abnormally driven by excitement, adrenalin, and need. Which means you’re abnormally prone to getting into trouble, particularly if you think excitement is what you’re supposed to be looking for. Which is why you’re one of a fine fraternity of politicians who just can’t keep it in their pants.

Give some thought to whether passion is as important to you as you think. It’s true, passion will put bounce in your step, joy in your heart, and inflate your air-mileage points, and the public may forgive if you they don’t think you’re too hypocritical.

On the other hand, it will also make you a self-centered and unreliable asshole, particularly to anyone who needs you as a stable parent or partner. That’s where you and the Kennedys have more in common than you think, except that John Sr. never waved a Bible around, so he was much less vulnerable to self-deception.

If you want to restore your marriage, you need to revise your idea of the importance of passion in your life, much as an alcoholic must assess the impact of alcohol. You must decide whether you can give up the thrill of a good sparking and just endure the common, humiliating irritations that always crop up in long-term relationships and families.

You must also decide whether it’s meaningful for you to put yourself through withdrawal, abandon your role as Bible hero and poly-soul-mate, and embrace being blamed by wife and kids for common domestic frustrations. Unless you find it meaningful to embrace this goal, nothing will change. And you’ll be down one wife and one shot in hell in 2012.

If you do decide to subordinate your passion to other values, you can’t expect to get off easy. Your passion won’t give up. It will push you to touch others, talk more, meet yet more soul-mates, speak to the crowd, and avoid the ordinary. You will need to build great strength to keep it from controlling you, and keep up your vigilance one day at a time.

Take some solo time to think about it, maybe in the woods off the Appalachian trail, to think about it, and then let me know whether or not that’s your goal.

STATEMENT:
If it is, compose a statement to help you manage your “my feelings, myself” instincts. “I value my political gifts for everything they give me, and they’re a big part of who I am and how I function, but I can also see they are particularly good at getting me to be a jerk. If I want to be a good guy and claim the kind of self-esteem that comes from doing the right thing rather than from surfing the high of relationships, I’ve got to work harder than most people to examine the consequences of my most basic yearnings and desires and accept the pain of frustrating most of them most of the time. That’s the cost of my goal, not of being true to my feelings, but of being my own man.”

My husband used to be my best friend, and I would have told you we have an exceptionally complete marriage, because we worked hand-in-glove in his job as a politician, for which I managed his campaigns, and as friends and parents of terrific kids. I always saw him as a man of integrity until he told me, recently, that he’d fallen in love with another woman and couldn’t stop thinking about her. He promised to stop seeing her, and then lied about that, and then the whole thing became public, which was a huge humiliation for the whole family. I’m pretty tough, so this hasn’t slowed me down or destroyed my confidence, and I really know I didn’t cause this by doing something wrong, but my goal is to put my marriage back together.

You begin on solid ground, because you’re not trying to figure out what you did wrong (except marry a politician). Still, it’s always unwise to make it your goal to put a marriage back together without first considering whether you really can, and whether it’s a good idea.

You and your husband would like to consider the marital problem as something he can control by taking the time to recover the loving feelings he once had for you; but the kind of loving feelings he’s looking for are probably not in his power, or yours, to recover, whether you seek them through prayer, therapy, or the long, sunset walks on the beach with a side-order of groveling.

That’s because those feelings depend on a relationship’s being new and unencumbered by mutual responsibilities, like kids, and things that go bad and smell bad and keep you from doing what you want. So seeking renewed passion seldom revives marriages, even if you find the secret of his sexual joy (hint: you might need to purchase a lot of self-tanner).

On the contrary, the priority of intense loving feelings is usually antithetical to marriage and bodes ill for your reconciliation or the longevity of his future liaisons, particularly if they involve living together and sharing kids and a bathroom.

So don’t make it your goal to salvage your marriage—though that’s a good wish—nor to summon up forgiveness. Instead, work to assess whether your husband’s values have changed and whether he wants to establish a kind of control he’s probably never had before. Or, if control looks unlikely, you need to decide whether the marriage is worthwhile, anyway.

Once you’re ready to accept the fact of his bad habit, it’s not hard to assess the likelihood of his getting stronger. It’s the same as assessing an alcoholic’s likelihood of recovery. He’s more likely to recover if he owns up to the problem as chronic (not one-time), and likely to be repeated regardless of remorse.

If he thinks he has to feel like recovering before he can recover, he won’t recover, because feelings (blech) like his don’t change. He has to decide that his values are more important than his feelings before there’s a hope of change.

Fundamentally, he needs to admit that his impulses will never be completely under his control, and that, regardless of his shame, he’ll be honest about them with you, and watch out for them every day of his life until his testosterone dries up, and then probably longer.

Lady Bird Johnson, LBJ’s wife, would probably challenge you to ask yourself whether it’s worth breaking up your marriage, even if you decide you can’t trust him to stop having affairs. Try to put aside your hurt because you know his infidelity isn’t personal, it’s just the way he is. That was the path another former-first lady took, and she’d argue that getting to be Secretary of State was a pretty fair trade-off.

If you can still be together, still work together, then your goal is to make the best of things for your family, not decide whether you’re angry enough to leave.

STATEMENT:
Compose a statement to protect yourself from anger, hurt, and self-doubt. “My husband’s infidelity does not detract from the fact that we’ve worked well together to do a lot of good, including his political work and building our family, and it certainly says nothing negative about the quality of my love. It’s a problem he has that has caused all of us much pain. I’m not sure he can control it. I need to assess whether he can stop and what our marriage will do to our family if he can’t. I’m determined to do what’s best for the family, regardless of my hurt and humiliation.”