Married Boyfriend

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Visitor's Question:
My married boyfriend came to me two years ago after years of being unhappily married to the mother of his young son. At the time I just thought he wanted a friendship as I was a week away from moving cross country when he first showed interest. Over time our relationship grew through emails and phone conversations, and when we finally decided to meet again it was practically full on love. Since then he decided that he did want out of his marriage and asked me to move back to where he was, which I did eagerly.

I was being told that things were underway with him getting a separation from his wife. It was a very difficult and painful year once I moved back, having to accept that he was not with me on most nights but at home. I had tremendous difficulty being patient with their (slow to me) momentum towards a separation and made it clear from the start how unhappy it made me that we could not be together in the way we both wished.

As it turns out I recently found out from him that he lied to me for those two years about his relationship w/ his wife. The truth was that he never felt ready to leave his home b/c he feared losing his son in any way and also wasn't prepared to create a lot of tension in his life (he was finishing a very stressful job). So instead of being up front with me from the beginning he lied to me, with the intention of being ready at some time later to separate, but did not want to risk losing me if I said I could not wait for him (which I know I would've moved on if he had told me so).

We love eachother tremendously and I could not break things off with him b/c of this love. So now he has sworn honesty and that he's giving 110% to getting out this summer as he covertly planned (he knew his son would be away at the grandparents all summer so he could work on talking to his wife and thus finally do what he wished to do).

My biggest problem now of course is trust. I do feel confident that he does want a divorce regardless of me and that he loves me deeply. I just can't help but worry that he could straight faced lie to me again one day whether it's something big or small. We're taking a break until he has actually moved out and initiated the separation b/c we have been in a vicious cycle of me attacking him and he fearing me, thus our relationship has suffered.

I have so much pain and confusion now that I just don't know what to think about us. I love him and do want to see him a "free" man so we can have a future but what about all that's been done? If he successfully gets out and we are together should I just move on from what has happened these last two years and hope we never face dishonesty again? Is trusting someone after such an assault a leap of faith?

I think we came together at the worst times on his part and that hopefully once he's accepted his new life as a divorced father we will have no reasons to even think about lying. I do understand why he lied to me even though I do not condone it; if it were me in his shoes I would very possibly have done the same thing just to ensure we would not lose eachother until I was ready. But how do people move on successfully?!

Our Suggestion:
I understand fully that you love this guy despite what he's done. Love can be a really powerful motivator. But let's really take a hard look at what he HAS done, and try to do it sort of objectively.

This guy was in a marriage to a woman, and had a child. He wasn't happy. That's OK, it happens, not all marriages are perfect. But he had a commitment to her to make things work - or if they were NOT working, to let her go so she could find someone with whom things WOULD work. Instead, he stayed because it was easy, in essence trapping her with him and with a situation she couldn't have been very happy with either. And, facing a problem, instead of trying to make it work, he ran off to talk with you instead. So he had an existing problem at home. He let it perpetuate, didn't try to fix it. He redirected his energies to something new.

So he then lied to you about his plans, and obviously he lied to and betrayed his wife. So every person he was involved with, he lied to for his own personal reasons.

Yes, he loves you. But love involves honor and trust. Trust is THE most important thing in any relationship. If you can't trust someone about relatively little things, how can you trust someone when life or death things happen? How can you know they will be honest with you when it really matters - if they can't be honest with you about emotions? Let's say he does leave his wife and moves in with you. We already know that his solution to difficulty is to lie and find the easy road. Now, no relationship is EVER trouble free. There are always stresses! So the instant your relationship with him hits a stress, he will start lying. That is how he deals with it. If he starts having other female friends, you will have to worry, because you KNOW he has a habit of getting close to other female friends because they help to "ease his stress". And if you two have a stress, and he refuses to deal with it, and starts talking to this other female friend about it, you have the exact same situation happening all over again.

And if you confront him about it, he'll lie, because that's how he handles difficult situations. He doesn't tell the truth.

Even your "solution" involves him making covert plans and sneaking around. That is NO way to start a relationship!

If you love him, set him free. Tell him you will have a relationship with him when he is 100% ready to have a relationship with you and to be 100% honest to you, his wife, and others in his life. You cannot make him do those things. He has to be able to do those things ON HIS OWN. If he eventually comes back to you fully and completely ready for a 100% honest relationship, to talk about and work on every issue with full honesty, then you have a chance. But I wonder if he will really be able to come back to you in that state - I wonder if his wife will talk him in to trying some more, and he will just drift along lying because it's the way he has gotten used to living.

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