One Relationship. Two Truths.

Hi, Esther. I'm calling because I'm struggling to make sense of an asteroid of a heartbreak that's just left me really at sea and holding two opposing truths that I just don't know how to fit them. into my head at the same time. I was in a two-year relationship with a man where the connection was unlike anything I'd ever felt before. I'd never been loved like that. It was...

just magic. He made me feel alive in a way I hadn't known before, just so special and cherished. And we were poly and both had primary partners. I've been with my husband for 11 years and poly for almost five. And my relationship with this boyfriend was amazing, but it wasn't perfect. So he told me he and his partner weren't out to their friends and had a don't ask, don't tell arrangement, both of which were things that previously had been.

hard nose for me and make me super uneasy and I raised concerns about them all the time and he always reassured me and convinced me it was okay and I loved him so I believed him but almost almost two years in He got backed into a corner by his friends and they forced him to admit that he'd been lying to me and cheating on his other partner the entire time. She had no idea who I was to him and he was never Polly.

It was a mind-bending, world-shattering rupture. It completely upended my sense of reality and there had been just so much lying and emotional manipulation and I was just in shock. But I couldn't walk away. I couldn't bear the thought of losing that love. And I was just so confounded. And I clung to my boyfriend and also held him at an arm's length.

And, you know, he tried to break down the walls and delusional thinking that led him to do this. And there was growth. There was healing. But the shadow of what he'd done never truly left for me. And eventually I caught him in another lie and finally ended the relationship. And that was two months ago. And I still feel so at sea. I experienced this.

life-affirming love with the same person that lied to and manipulated me for a very very long time and I just can't seem to make those things live in the same story I feel like I'm flipping between realities so my question is how do I integrate these two truths how do I relate to this experience that was meaningful in ways I can't describe and also just so earth shattering. They seem to cancel each other out. Thanks for listening.

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We can start with what comes flooding out, or we can start with you giving me just a little bit of background on your relationship with this man, your marriage. Your decisions around polyamory and your choices around polyamory. I think that if I have a little bit more context, it'll help me help you. Yeah, of course. Okay. So my husband and I have been together for 11 years, married for eight and poly for almost five. We started polyamory.

You know, I feel like as many people did kind of coming out of the pandemic, kind of looking around at the world and being like, oh, my God, there's we were so shut off from the world for so long. Now I want to be even more opened up to it. started the process as like a casual experiment. Mutual? Mutual. Me leading the charge.

And we started the process right away with a relationship therapist to kind of, because we had a good relationship. Everything was going well. We didn't want to blow it up. So we started by. finding a relationship therapist who specializes in non-monogamy and reading some of the books and things like that, and did it very slowly and gradually. And then eventually it did get to a point of...

polyamory more than just an open relationship or non-monogamy. You said we had a good relationship. Is it had or is it also have? Have. Yeah, it's definitely have. My husband is my rock, my home person, complete sense of stability and security.

Through the breakup process with my boyfriend after this betrayal, that definitely was difficult for my husband and I as well. That was a huge... upheaval as far as like what he thought I should do versus what I did and how you know different you know better than anyone how intensely people react to infidelity.

and the strong feelings that people have about it. And so, yeah, that was extremely complicated. It's extremely complicated to deal with an infidelity within the relationship, even more complicated to deal with it with multiple intensely attached... relationships but we managed to work our way through that and he even through his struggling with it supported me the whole time um and i'm

deeply grateful for for how he pushed through what was he was fighting his instincts to let me move through this in the way that he saw that I had to you you know

all the characters and you know all the details of the plot. But I don't want to make any false assumptions. So when you say the infidelity, is it the infidelity of your boyfriend? with his wife, of which you became a lover that you didn't know you were? Yes. A secret lover, a secret lover that you didn't know you were. Yes.

That is the infidelity that I'm referring to. When I found out about it, obviously my world was completely shattered, but I was just, I feel like I froze in time. I did not know how to react. It was like looking into a mirror. moving my hand and in the mirror my hand was not moving. That was the level of dissonance that it created in my head. I did not know how to move forward at all.

And of course, my husband was like, so you're never going to talk to him again, obviously. And I was like, oh, I don't know what I'm going to do. I can barely breathe. How did you find out? So my boyfriend and his girlfriend midway through last summer broke up. And it was... told to me that the primary reason why they were in secret about being poly was because of her wishes. And then so when they broke up a few weeks later, I started asking, okay.

Now that you're no longer together, can we please be out? I would love to meet your friends. I'd love to meet your community. Any struggle that we had had throughout our relationship was based around the secrecy. I was uncomfortable with it the entire time. And so now that...

The girlfriend was no longer in the picture. I started asking if we could open up. And so he told me, yes, I want to do that. I want to be open to my friends. I want to be out. I want people to know about this. I want you to meet my community. I'll start telling them. So he started to tell his friends that he had been poly the whole time and hadn't told them and they didn't know. And in the process of having these discussions, it started to go on for a long time.

longer than I thought made sense. So I started to ask questions and be confused, which was a theme throughout our relationship. What ended up happening was that while he was telling the friends this, that he had been poly the whole time, they went to the ex-girlfriend and...

basically said to her, Hey, we know about Polly. We know that you don't have really anyone to talk to about this. So we'd love to be able to support you. And so anything you want to talk about, we're here for you. And her response to this was, What are you talking about? I'm not Polly. I have no idea what you're talking about. And so the friends found out that he had been lying to his girlfriend the whole time and forced him to come tell me.

The truth. Okay. And what did he actually reveal? He told me, I lied to you. She doesn't know. She hasn't known the whole time. We were never poly. I was cheating on her. And I'm so sorry. At least that was clear. That was very clear. Yeah.

He was backed into a corner and had no choice. And he never tried to deny it or make it less than it was to me. He did deny it and make it less than it was to... people in his community because when I was put in touch with the girlfriend and I was put in touch with many of the friends and we had long discussions.

He had told them we had only been together, oh, we'd only been together one month, we'd only been together two months, all of these minimizing things. But of course, now that I was in touch with them, I was going to answer any question that any of them had. I did meet up with the girlfriend the next day. She reached out to me and was like, I would really love an opportunity to talk with you. Like, I don't blame you at all. I know that it was not.

You didn't know and you've been deceived just as I've been deceived. But I find it would be really helpful for me to be able to talk with you and understand timing and understand the truth because I don't believe anything he says. And I said, of course, of course. I will meet with you and tell you anything you want to know. I am so sorry. I can't believe that this happened. And so we spent four hours together and I answered all of her questions and had to tell her so many things she didn't know.

I had to tell her it was two years. There were vacations together. It was a full, intense, loving relationship.

There was also, apparently, this entire charade happening. And that's where I am having the biggest difficulty. Because... But there may be another story. There may be actually not just there is the truth of what he told me and the lies of what he told me, but there is also potentially a third story, which is... And he too had real feelings for you. And he lied. That's what I believe to be true. Meaning that the relationship that you had, you know, may not have been... The charade is...

all the lies that made this thing possible and the deception and the duplicity and the violation of trust and the betrayal. Yes. And then there is... Did what we've lived together, what we said to each other, what we felt together, is there any truth to that? Was I deceived just around the poly and the... arrangement that he had with his girlfriend and the fact that I was illicit and secret? Or was I deceived also in the feelings that I thought he had for me? Yeah, this one.

Esther, I never doubted. Okay. I never doubt the intensity of his feeling and mine and the reality, the intense unmatched reality. of the love that was there. I never doubted that part. Good. The part that is impossible for me to fit in my head at the same time is the other parts of him, the other things he was doing at the same time, the ways that he was manipulating me, the ways that he had so little self-awareness afterward.

in how people would react to him and the ways in which he was just so blind to how deeply he'd hurt so many people and how much in the right every single one of those people were. to pull away or recoil or react however they wanted to react. The person that I knew was this emotionally intelligent, deeply empathetic person who... saw me in a way that I've never been seen. And I think I saw him in a way that he's never been seen. And it's so difficult.

for me to think about how many other sides of him were behind the window that I was looking into. I don't understand if they're two separate people living in the same head or if it was one person that I just don't understand. And it's so hard for me to think about now. And I think just, what if I see him? What will I do? Who will that person be? Will it be my person? Or will it be the person?

who who lied and manipulated and is there not just to the point of of what he did like there's one story that gives the scale to it that I think is helpful to understand the level of manipulation that happened. He let me meet her while we were together. And he was telling me... that she knew who I was and that I was meeting my metamor. And she had no idea.

who I was and we met each other and hugged and I told her, oh, I'm so grateful to finally meet you. This is amazing. Like, it's so nice to finally meet you. And so I met her and she met me. And she had no idea who I was. And we both walked away. She walked away thinking she was meeting a work friend. And I walked away thinking that, oh, my relationship has so much more stability and security now.

Just the level of deception and multiple truths layering on top of each other was just very difficult, very difficult to comprehend. We have to take a brief break, so stay with us and let's see where this goes. Support for this show comes from Shopify. When you're starting your own business, finding the right tool that simplifies everything can be a game changer. For millions of businesses, that tool is Shopify.

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First of all, your kindness, your respect, and your ethical striving is really remarkable. Just want to put that out there. It highlights the responsibility that we take when we make certain life choices. And exactly as you say, when the cast of characters is expanded and there's the hearts. and bodies and minds of a number of people that one has to hold at the same time. Did you discuss this with him? Was that part of the truth-telling session?

what was it for him why did he need you to meet her why did he set up that scene what was that scene about he wanted to give me what i wanted he wanted our poly relationship to be true and he wanted to give it as much truth as he could and he found a way to make that happen and after i found out i went into our text history. I exported the whole thing and put it into ChatGPT and wrote a prompt to extract every single time that one of the keywords that would...

say he was talking about poly or relationships or anything. I wrote a whole list of keywords that would pull out every single time that he had lied. And there were 63 pages of lies and 63 pages of him convincing me. Whenever I raised a doubt or a concern or a question, does your girlfriend know that I'm here? Does your girlfriend know that we are in your family's special cabin together for a whole weekend? Does your girlfriend know that you love me?

Does your girlfriend know that the eggs that I gave you from my chickens are from me? So many things like this. And I read them all out loud to him and made him listen to the whole thing. And it was so hard. I have such difficulty accessing my righteous anger. I need to dig so deep to pull it out, to pull out the anger and the resentment and the disgust and... I have to pull it out because the feeling of grief and heartbreak and loss is so much bigger and it overshadows those.

And I know those are what I'm expected to feel and expected to express and focus on. And I have such a hard time. And I try really hard to make sure that those things stay. I hold those things because those are also true. And there's just so many. things to hold at the same time. And I don't know how to look at him in my head now. When you look at the 63 pages...

of truth that Chagipiti delivered to you or of lies. I'm imagining it could make you really mad, but I'm also imagining that it gives you a sense that... You were on to something. You were never totally fooled. You were in a blur, but you kept your finger on the pulse for the entire two years. Something was off. Yes. Both.

Because sometimes we get angry at the person who deceived us, and sometimes we get angry at ourselves for having allowed ourselves to be deceived. And to be able to go back in the archive, in the digital archive like you did, and pull out... all the questions which showed that your intentions never wavered, that you wanted to be responsible, ethical, open, transparent, all of that, and that you were misled. But it's not that you forgot your North Star.

You kept your compass. Yes, I did. Okay. I think that that observation needs to be highlighted too. But then the next thing is, and then does that make you mad or does it, you know, you may be grieving now and I'll talk to you in six months and I'll hear a completely different tone and a different emotion. This is the first one and this is the one you're in. When you say I'm expected, no, you're not expected.

Some people enter through the gate of grief and some people enter through the gate of rage, but they meet each other somewhere because one needs the other. At some point, the grief needs to also have its resentments expressed. And at some point, behind the ridge is a sob. Two months, you know, it's not long. Yeah, it is not long. I think... I am afraid that if I really tap into the rage and the anger,

Because I have. Multiple times I've dipped in there. I have gone into that zone and let it fill me and written pages and pages about it and said these things to him as well before we went no contact. But every time, there's a very fast rebound to love and forgiveness because I think I am afraid that if I let the anger...

And the disgust and the recoil exist for too long. If I leave the door to that room open for too long, that it will erase everything else. It will erase all of the... life-changing magical experience of being loved in that way and I don't want to erase that either I get it I get it if I allow myself to only focus on the wrongdoings, on the betrayals, on the lies, on the manipulations.

I don't know how to hold the fact that the love, the intimacy, the specialness that we both felt was equally true. Beautiful, supposedly honest, transparent intimacy lives in the same bed as a packet of lies. Yes. And your question is, is there one I should believe more than the other? Or does one automatically erase the other? It's how do they coexist? But they are. They do.

They do. You go, I imagine that some moments during the day you're focused on one of the 63 pages and then another moment of the day you're remembering a conversation, a moment, a touch. a whisper and you go back and forth and you think, how can I go back and forth? So it's like, there's two questions. Can they coexist? But in fact, often they do coexist and people say, what does that mean that they coexist? Yes.

How can they be so seamlessly coexisting? How can they be such bedfellows? You know, how can these two so different feelings live inside of me? But they do. What do I do with it? How do I relate to this? Which one do I listen to? How do I jump from one to the other? It's a different set of questions because they are coexisting. I hear it. You're telling it to me.

Am I hearing that accurately? Yeah, you are. And I think you're right. The question is a completely different one. Right now, it feels like they do coexist. And they're like two animals in my head fighting for space. And maybe the question is not, can they coexist? They do, as you said. But the question is, how do I get them? to quietly lie next to each other. Beautiful. Yeah. And when you imagine them lying quietly next to each other, what do you see?

Imagine that I met you a year from now. And I just say, oh, wow, I've always wondered. What was happening to you after one conversation that we had? And I remember you talking to me about these two forces that lived inside of you. Your deep hurt and anger at having been so deceived and misled by this man who you had loved like never before. And you said to me, I so would like for them.

to continue to live inside of me, but to lay next to each other quietly. And it looks like this is what happened. And I just got curious, how did you do it? What were the steps? How did it unfold? How did it happen? I think the way that I got them... to lie gently together is to not to not be a third animal entering the ring and trying to wrangle them with the same violence that they were using against each other, but instead just soothing them both.

letting them both exist. I try not to let the existence of both of them rile me up. I try to accept that they both exist. And then they exist together and understand that they can lie down. I don't think I knew that they could. I don't think I knew that it was possible. I think I thought one had to win or there was some magic to be done to integrate them into one animal, but two animals cannot be one animal. And I...

stopped fighting that. I stopped fighting that. I stopped trying to force them. How? And just let them settle on their own. How did I stop forcing them? I stopped trying to tell a clean story of a story that was such a mess. I just let it. be a mess because that's what it was and stopped trying to cram it into something tidy or something easily swallowed. by people who ask questions or raise their eyebrows and just let it be what it was. Just keep walking. Was there a lot of judgment around you?

I mean, did you have the feeling that people wondered why you allowed for this to go on so long? Why didn't you see? Why did you not? Yeah, not about people thinking that I should have known or anything like this, but it was more about, like, it took me a very long time. to leave my boyfriend after this because I was so turned upside down and inside out and confused and terrified of losing the love and just...

unable to process reality. It took me almost five months to properly end the relationship after this happened. You said that...

You finally left because you found there was another revelation. Yes. I don't think, and I'm, to this day, I'm so grateful that he did it again because... I don't know that I would have been able to walk away without a clear... My feeling was maybe there is a way that we can save this. Maybe there is a way that he has... changed and evolved and figured out the ways in which he was wrong. And he is going to basically reject everything that he...

ever did and was to be this new person, this new evolved person who learned from his mistakes. And there's something admirable and interesting in that. And so what ended up happening was... Our agreement at the time was that if either of us wanted to date another person, we would let the other person know. And his part of the agreement was that he was not going to be dating anyone else because he was...

very not ready for that. And I had an instinct to check his phone and I had never done that before. We were on a vacation and everything was so beautiful. I kept feeling like this is too good to be true. It just, I was like, this is too beautiful. It's not right. It doesn't make sense. I need to make sure that this is right. And I checked his phone. And he had been on the apps and gone on a date without telling me. And he did it again.

In a much smaller, tinier way, of course, I'm not trying to compare this to what he did to his girlfriend. This is nothing in comparison, but it was just a final proof to me of this is okay. you you've had a chance to redeem and even after the work the amount of emotional labor I did with my partner and my community and justification and the amount of effort that I had put in to try and to make this relationship work.

And for him to lie again, I was not willing to give any more chances. So that was the end of that. We are in the midst of our session. There is still so much to talk about. So stay with us. Support for Where Should We Begin? comes from Masterclass. As we approach the end of the year, you might need to take stock of your resolutions of 2025. Did you run that 5K or break your takeout habit?

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Each. Do you know when that was? It was when I was walking down a forest road and understood for the first time that fighting them was... Just completely futile. And that they could lie down in the same place if I let them. And why that moment? What clicked? I think the first moment where I knew that I could stop fighting them was when I stepped back and actually looked at them.

Before I had been so in the ring with them that I couldn't step back and see them both. I had to extract myself from the fight. You know, I just had an image of a ring. And I thought, who's in the ring? As you stepped out of the ring, how would you describe each of these? forces. On my left... On my left is the force in which is contained the... memory of the goodness and the magic and the experience of aliveness that was so true and good and there the whole time.

And on my right is this slippery, squirmy creature that was lying and manipulating. and is also so broken. Like I feel bad for that creature too, as much as I am. But the feeling bad oscillates between a mother looking at a child that has... misbehaved so badly or did something really horrible. You know they did something bad, but you still want to protect them. On the other hand, the other feeling that I have towards it is this righteous...

intense anger and reproach and disgust and recoil. And those two feelings fight as well.

I tried to write something once about how it felt. And I said that he was like a little boy who had been reckless and went out and... was playing with a gun and accidentally shot his own dog and everyone was so angry at him for shooting the dog and was being you know so cruel and and yelling at him and telling him how badly he's done things and i as the mother ran up to him to like cover his ears and protect him from all of these people and as

I'm holding him, I realize that I am the one with the hole in my chest because I am the dog. And so it's just such... dissonance at the same time. So looking at the creature on that side, I cannot decide if I want to protect it and help it. Or if I want to run away from it and scream at it and tell it how much it has hurt me and continues to hurt me. And I want to do both of those things. And the creature on my left, the other side, I just want to keep it in a box safe from the other one. But...

It can't be in a box safe from the other one. They have to be in the same ring. And they can. If I let them. So what changed is that it seemed at first that you had to choose between being angry, righteous, disgusted. And between holding a certain compassion for him. Which, in holding that compassion for him, you actually protect what's on the right. Yes. It's not just that you protect.

him but you protect a little box filled with aliveness and love and possibility and that doesn't mean you excuse him that means that You look at what you call the brokenness, but by softening it and just seeing him a little bit with his own challenges. And there's a tiny bit more of a... compassion and kindness in it, it actually preserves and doesn't destroy the sense that everything you experienced was a lie.

rather than he lied about everything you experienced to somebody else. I had never thought about it in that way, that me, my intense need. To protect him is my intense need to protect what I hold dear about what we had. Those are the same. And I don't know if I would even say protect him. I mean, it's just seeing him with a tiny bit more compassion, you know, seeing his humanity, his difficulties, his dissociations, his whatever.

Whatever the names we want to give to the things. But seeing his behavior for what it is, it's not what you're seeing. It's the kindness and the compassion that you bring to it. Actually. humanizes and preserves what you experienced with him and allows you to separate out that he lied to someone. But what you experienced together was also very real. That's what you need to do at this moment. You know, if I meet you in 27...

You may tell me, you know, what a fool I was. What was I doing there? How naive of me. I had all these clues and I didn't. It's okay. It evolves, by the way. Heartbreak and the narrative that accompanies it. At this moment, I haven't asked you about the aliveness and about the... what actually made this relationship so powerful and so intense and so difficult to leave for that matter. Because sometimes when we meet someone with whom we experience...

things we've never felt before or not to that level of intensity. Our fear is that if we leave the person, we leave everything that is all these goodies, that all of that stays with them because they're the ones who brought it. When in fact, when we leave, it's not in them. It's what we created together. So when we leave, we take some of this with us. It doesn't just live inside of them. It lives inside of you as well.

But the fear we have is if I leave this person, all these things that I've experienced with this person, I now have to give up. I now have to mourn. They stay with them. They don't. Some of it does, but a lot of it goes with you and goes with you into your relationship with your primary partner and other lovers that you will have and partners that you will have. And to really get that. That the aliveness is inside of you.

is a major piece. It's the first step of when you left him, even though you associate your leaving more with the fact that he kind of made it impossible for you to stay. He gave you the final legitimacy to think, I may love you, but I don't respect you. and this puts me so much out of integrity that I can't stay here. But on the other end, it also takes time to see what I felt here will go with me in the future of my life.

I'll remember this. And then at the same time, I'll remember, and this is the quiet sleeping together in the same bed. I remember that, unfortunately, this person was not able to really... claim this choice and be open about it and make it so that everybody could feel dignified about the experience because that's the opposite of the disgust, right? It's to feel the dignified experience of it.

I don't want to feel any shame. I don't want to feel any deception, any slime around me, or what did you call it, sticky? No, slippery, of these slimy things on my body. You know, when we experience disgust, one of the first things we do is, it's like, but our whole body shakes. It's a physical rejection. How do I claim the physical rejection and the physical delight?

I'm not talking just about sex. I'm talking about the experience of delight. It's also physical. It comes with a sound. It comes with a facial expression. It comes with the shoulders are down. Yeah. And sometimes when you are looking at them more quietly relating to each other as you're walking in that forest, I invite you to physicalize it as well.

Not just the plot and the words, but also how you experience them physically. It's to give them a sound, to give them a bodily shape inside of you. Because our bodies... can change sensation much sooner than our mind. If you're cold and I put a sweater on you, you're done being cold. If something is sour in your mouth and you take it out, it's not gross anymore. So our body, our skin, our inner sensations can help us navigate. different realities, different stories. They're very useful. Disgust.

I mean, you're seeing me now, so you see my whole body is demoing disgust for you. But the light is like... And you can go back and forth between them. And you can choose disgust and delight. And you can choose compassion and anger. And you can choose connection and lies. I mean, you can choose the different tensions. But when you walk in the forest, physicalize them. Literally express them with your body. Yeah, I like that idea a lot.

Raise my glass to this quiet lying together of two opposing forces in one bed inside of you. And I want to raise my glass to the words that you're going to give me, actually, in your parting words for each of these forces. What would you like to say to them? Now that you're outside of the ring that you feel that you have more agency that they're not busy tearing you apart but that you're trying to integrate them.

Inside of you. I'll start with the side of the delight of the memory. of what it was. I'll never wish that away. And I'm deeply grateful for it. And even though remembering it is paired with pain, I still cherish it. And the other side was one of the hardest things I've ever had to endure. But I did. And it taught me to be soft. And it taught me to be like a blade of grass bending in the wind rather than something rigid. And it taught me to be much more...

accepting and forgiving and understanding of nuance than I ever was before. And even though it was horrible, I did walk away with that and that's something. And so I will let them. with both of their lessons, be together now without any more fighting. Thank you. This was an Esther calling, a one-time intervention phone call recorded remotely from two points somewhere in the world. If you have a question you'd like to explore with Esther, it could be answered in a 40 or 50 minute phone call.

Send her a voice message and Esther might just call you. Send your question to producer at estheraparel.com. Where Should We Begin with Esther Perel is produced by Magnificent Noise. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, in partnership with New York Magazine and The Cut. Our production staff includes Eric Newsom, Destry Sibley, Sabrina Farhi, Kristen Muller, and Julian Atten.

Original music and additional production by Paul Schneider. And the executive producers of Where Should We Begin are Esther Perel and Jesse Baker. We'd also like to thank Courtney Hamilton, Mary Alice Miller, and Jack Saul. The holidays mean more travel, more shopping, more time online and more personal info in more places that could expose you more to identity theft. But LifeLock monitors millions of data points per second.

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