Case Study: Tom and Susie
Tom and Susie met in their teens, are now in their mid 40s and have been married for over 20 years. They have two children who are now both away at university. Over the course of their relationship Tom had had several affairs. They decided to come to Relate after the most recent affair had ended.
They had always had a volatile relationship, in part due to the affairs, but they had never split up. When she was in her early teens Susie's parents had gone through a very bitter divorce and she had always been adamant that her children would never go through what she went through. Tom had always been aware of this. However, now that they were no longer children and were living away from home, Susie wanted to explore what her feelings really were for Tom and whether they really should stay together. For Tom, as he began to see it all slipping away, came the realisation that he really wanted their relationship to continue and the affairs to stop.
Affairs are not uncommon and can be very painful experiences for both partners in a relationship. During their sessions Tom and Susie explored how the affairs had happened, what had been going on in their lives at that time and discovered that the first had begun shortly after the birth of their first child. Instead of discussing what they were feeling and experiencing at becoming parents, Tom, who was feeling 'left out' as Susie appeared to spend all her time focussing on the needs of the baby and not his, began an affair with a junior colleague at work. Throughout their marriage there had been several long and short term affairs; when an affair began to get too serious it would be 'discovered' and would then end. Susie would explode and then forgive Tom and for a while they would seem close, but after a while Tom would feel excluded and another affair would begin. Counselling helped them to begin to communicate to each other what they both wanted from their relationship and how to begin to change their past cycles of behaviour. They acquired new tools for coping in order to commit to going forward in their relationship with a new honesty and openness.