Q: Hello Doctor, I wrote to you on 9.4.14 about my extramarital affairs. You had asked me if I was deliberately seeking a relationship without any commitment. ..and why I am still with my husband…I was seriously involved with this other person and ready to leave everything for him. I had strongly hinted to him about it too. He too had been telling me how he sometimes feels like ending his marriage ..and thats why it hurts so much to know thst he was planning family with his wife and left me when she got pregnant. .I confessed to my husband about my past affairs(I too have caught him having few in past) . We had few fights …I dont want to live aLife of lies and pretending. Thats why I asked my husband for divorce but he is not agreeing to it. The law under which we are married , makes it almost impossible to divorce without mutual consent. Incorrigible differences or mental cruelty is very difficult to prove without physical evidence. My husband has made it very clear that he will never agree for divorce. I am stuck now with a person whom I do not love or even like. Dont know what to do….
– F.N
A: It seems your immediate problem is legal. You say divorce is impossible without your husband’s consent. That does not sound right to me, but I’m not a lawyer. Orthodox Jews have some such rule: namely, that the husband has to agree to the religious divorce. Perhaps there are ways you can manage to live away from your husband. I know these remarks must strike you as superficial and uninformed, and they are; but I think the matter is worth exploring. It is possible sometimes to put pressure on a recalcitrant husband.
When you mention your lover saying one thing and not following through, you are making a familiar complaint. In fact, husbands who stray but who return to their wives eventually are common and notorious for being unreliable. In general, it is sensible to pay attention to what someone does and not what he, or she, says. It is not so much that people tend to dissemble when they reach out for something they want–although that might be true in this instance– it is that people day-dream and do not know really what they want. They like to imagine a life with someone else without picturing at the same time how it would be living to some extent without children and without the friends made during the course of a marriage. If a married man does not make a definitive move to divorce his wife within a few months of initiating an affair, I think he should be presumed not to really want to leave. The reasons he gives for not leaving do not matter.