A very interesting review of our new book
by Mira and Charles on June 6th, 2008Here’s a great review of our new book WHEN GOOD PEOPLE HAVE AFFAIRS by Julia McKinnell writing for Macleans, Canada’s leading magazine:
Mira Kirshenbaum’s latest self-help book, When Good People Have Affairs, prompted her friend to ask: why publish an advice book that helps creeps who betray their spouses? You’re not supposed to help those people, her friend said angrily. But Kirshenbaum, who is a therapist, says . . . it’s not the creeps she’s trying to help. They don’t want help. “They don’t lie awake at night feeling guilty and scared, wondering what to do.” Her book is for the decent person who’s “made a mistake and got themselves into a complicated, messy, dangerous situation.”
She cites the example of Abby, a church-going mother who was so torn up about her five-year affair she asked God to show her what to do about the mess she was in. Abby’s cold and demanding husband never hit her but he punched holes in the walls. He wasn’t a great lover or a great dad. The only reason she didn’t leave him was so she’d be there to mitigate the damage he might do to their son. Then she met Tom and “he kept being nice to her.” “There’s nothing more seductive than a man who genuinely likes you,” writes Kirshenbaum.
“Most good people who have affairs never planned for it to happen,” she says. “All they wanted was their share of love and happiness. Then they met someone and the next thing you know they’re in two relationships, their love life is a mess, and they feel like they’re going crazy.” Kirshenbaum quotes the latest research showing that 47 per cent of married men are likely to get involved emotionally and/or sexually with someone else, as are 35 per cent of married women.
Mending marriages isn’t the book’s prime objective. “Sometimes — many times in fact — divorce is worth it,” she writes. “It gets us out of our misery-making marriage, so we have a chance of finding happiness somewhere else.” Still, Kirshenbaum cautions the unfaithful to take into account that “there’s something about having an affair that makes spouses look worse than they are and makes lovers look better than they are — you’re lonely or horny, or mad at your partner. Something’s not right in your primary relationship. Now here’s what happens. You see the person through the lens of what’s missing in your primary relationship. If you understand this, you’ll have taken a big step.”
Don’t forget, she adds, “the fact that falling in love with someone new when you’re already in a relationship with someone else greatly prolongs that ‘first love’ stage.” Guilty feelings, too, “play terrible tricks on people and lead them into big trouble.” Sometimes guilt causes the person having the affair to confess to their partner “when really they should keep their mouth shut,” she writes.
Other times it induces a person to stay, “even though they really should be getting out.” Guilt can cause a person to make “a disastrous commitment to someone they’re having a transient relationship with,” says the author. “Give your relationship with your lover enough time for all the masks to come off before you end your primary relationship,” she advises. Spend enough time for “the possibility of getting bored or irritated with each other to appear.”
A client once asked Kirshenbaum to tell her what to look for in a guy. Do you have a business card, Kirshenbaum asked. “Write these phrases down on the back of it: not stupid. Not crazy. Not weird. Not mean. Not ugly. Not smelly.” On every item, she writes, “it’s pass or fail. If one of the people you’re involved with fails on one item, they fail, period.”
In a chapter called “Cutting the Cord,” Kirshenbaum says breaking up with someone is actually “not all that complicated.” “When you tell someone you want to break up with them, their first response is almost always ‘Why?’ That question contains a terrible trap,” she warns. It can lead into a discussion of how to patch things up. “Don’t answer the question ‘why’ and don’t go into details.” Say, “This relationship just doesn’t work for me anymore. If they ask, ‘Why not?’ the answer is ‘because it just doesn’t work for me.’ Keep trying to change the subject to when and how you’re going to separate,” she says.
In the final chapter, she writes, “Divorce is something you buy, just like anything else. It’s worth it at some prices and not worth it at others.” It’s like hiring someone to clean out your basement for you, she says. “You might pay someone a few hundred bucks to do that, but you would be insane to spend tens of thousands of dollars to do it.”
