My husband is in love with another woman

And here is why I am delighted

Yesterday, Dan (my husband) was on his way back from a date with someone he’s been seeing for several weeks now. It was around 11:30pm. We got on the phone.

Me: Hey, wanted to check in with you. How was your date?

Dan: It was really good. Actually, we had quite a milestone today.

Me: Tell me.

Dan: She told me that she loves me. And I told her I love her, too.

Me: Mmm! What was that like?

Dan: It was just surreal. Wow. I just don’t have words.

Me: That is amazing.

If you haven’t been following my work and journey the past few months, let me catch you up real quick.

We got married in 2016, when I was almost 26 and he was 27. For me, marriage and children were boxes to check, largely so that I can stop experiencing the pressure to reach these benchmarks in order to belong in society.

I did not realize at the time how much I had abandoned myself in pursuit of checking off these boxes. But I lucked out because I found Dan, someone I met through a family friend, which meant everything was logistically easier to get married. I lucked out even more when I saw that he was so devoted to me even when I had not one fucking clue what love was.

I was too busy trying to be a good Korean girl who followed the rules. Love was not interesting to me at the time.

Over the course of our marriage, I fell in love with Dan in the ways he taught me how to love. I expanded my capacity for the uncertainty, the pain, and the joy that came with love and how beautiful and magical it all was as we grew together in our partnership.

But I always knew something was off. Especially after kids, I felt stuck in our relationship when we just didn’t have the luxury of sufficient time and energy to recover from the chaos of raising two children.

Every time we got stuck, I would yell for divorce. I did not have the tools or the language to describe what I wanted or how I would go about getting it, but it was simply not what was going on at the time.

So even when I invoked divorce, it was not really what I wanted. It was simply the only other option that I thought was available to me. Deep down, I knew that my heart would be broken even more if he were to leave. It felt like we would be throwing in the towel without actually investigating what was really going on in our hearts. It was like, I was trying to give up before even trying because I was too afraid to even find out. It felt too hard.

So as I was grappling with the back and forth in my mind, I came across the work of Millie Boella and Nick Piperno on Instagram (@decolonizing.love), where they talked at length about the concept of decolonizing the way we loved by looking at our sexuality and relationship orientation, and how that played into the ways we operated in harmful heteronormative, Christian, patriarchal, supremacist, and capitalistic systems.

One thing I resonated with the most was that our attachment arose from the fact that a lot of us want our partners in marriage (or any monogamous relationship) to meet all of our needs. And often times, we are not even aware that we are requiring our partners to do it.

I then slowly started to see the ways I required Dan to show up in a certain way in our marriage. I dictated the way he interacted with our kids, how he spent his time, how he talked to me, how he worked, how he talked to other people.

I was quite an oppressive figure in his life. And I did not like who I was being.

I was making him responsible for how I felt. I gave him power over me. Meaning, my emotions depended on his decisions.

It was a fucked up place to be.

And the reason I found myself in this fucked up position was that I was bending over backwards to blindly follow these rules:

• I am supposed to be married.

• Healthy marriage means I am committed.

• Commitment means ignoring my desires for the sake of staying monogamous.

• I must stay monogamous in order to avoid judgment and stigma.

• Avoiding judgment and stigma is more important than exploring who I am and what I want.

So my underlying expectation in marriage was, “Hey, look at all this work I am putting in and all the sacrifices I am making to stay in this marriage and ignore my own needs. This better pay off.”

Oof.

The reality was that Dan could not give me everything I wanted. Nor could any one person.

But that did not mean that I deserved any less.

Which meant that I had the power to exercise my agency in getting what I wanted from different people on my own terms. Kind of the way friendships worked. Kind of the way children work. The way family works. You have different people in your life to give you different resources. I was subscribed to the arbitrary rule that you could not do the same thing for romantic partners.

Under the institution of compulsory monogamy, you are supposed to stay together out of “love,” where you need to do taxes together, raise children together, coordinate your calendar together, plan parties together, manage friends and family together, help each other feel better after fights, and plan for the future together ALL while being capable of being turned on by the other and be willing and available to have sex with each other, and ONLY each other, at any given time.

It’s like back in college, where you are assigned to a partner for a group project, and not only are you supposed to get a good grade on it, you’re also supposed to have sex with each other.

It’s quite uncommon and very unreasonable.

So Dan and I sat down and walked through all the ways we were subscribed to rules that we never truly consented to. Why was monogamy important to us? Was it because it was truly what we wanted, or was it because dealing with the judgment would be too much work?

What made us jealous or lonely or resentful? Was it really because of what the other person was doing, or was it because we did not want to be resourceful and take responsibility for our own emotions?

In what ways have we suppressed our own desires? How have we dulled our skills in communication in the effort to silence what we really want in our hearts?

Of course, it was not easy. There were a lot of misunderstandings and ruptures. We sought support from Nick and Millie. We continued to make the attempt to relate to each other and hold each other in our emotions. We did not rush.

And what we found was that we slowly became clearer about what we wanted, and when we became more clear about what we wanted, we began to take it upon ourselves to get that for ourselves.

For example, what Dan really wanted was an acknowledgement of how jarring and traumatic it was for him to feel like he had to undergo the transition from monogamy to non-monogamy outside of his own will. He really wanted to be seen on the ways I affected his emotions.

When he was witnessed in his humanity, he felt less of a need to make me responsible for changing his experience of his own humanity. Meaning, he needed less from me to change his emotions; rather he simply appreciated my acknowledgement of his emotions for what they were.

And what I wanted was for him to also acknowledge that I wanted to be seen in the ways I was also hurt. I wanted to be seen in the effort that I had put in to hold space for his emotions at a level that I felt was disproportionate. I wanted to be seen in the ways my thoughts and feels were disregarded when I disagreed with him on a number of matters.

Spelling out and admitting to the ways I was not being seen and wanted to be seen already felt freeing because I was allowing myself to be known.

Before, I had suppressed so much of my truth because I was afraid of being known.

When I was not being known, I felt like I didn’t really exist.

So when we began to know each other more deeply without the need to change anything about ourselves or each other, we watched our sense of obligation and duty dissolve.

We began to see who we really are as a person. Outside the roles of partner, parent, daughter, son, citizen, worker, among many others.

As a human being.

It went from:

“You are a partner. That is your role. Therefore, you must do this and that in order for you to be a good partner to me. How you fulfill your role speaks to your value as a human being.”

To:

“What a lovely and interesting human being you are. What are you experiencing right now? What would you love? Where did that desire come from? How can I support you? Let me see how available I am to support your desires.”

When we felt like we could fully exist as sovereign human beings, we began to feel more sufficient in being able to support the other out of organic desire.

As we watched our partnership become something that was fully voluntary rather than compulsory, we became more open to how we would fill each other’s cups. A part of that was that we became very comfortable with the idea of opening up our marriage to see how we could be resourceful in meeting more of our desires with more connections.

As we opened up our marriage, I began to witness the ways Dan’s desires were met by other women. I was delighted to see Dan be more witnessed than what I was capable of giving him because that meant that I got to see more of his humanity shine without requiring myself to be different from who I was.

I watched the good girl in me break free from own own chains. The good girl who felt like she needed to follow all the rules in order for her to even think about doing anything she wanted.

The good girl who thought that she needed to be a dutiful wife, an obedient daughter, a successful woman.

I no longer needed to follow those rules because I began to see that I was responsible for no one’s emotions. Human beings are capable of taking care of themselves, and I did not need to take care of anyone else.

That did not mean that I could not still show and give care. It just became more of a voluntary experience.

I offered care for Dan, my kids, my connections, and those in my support ecosystem because it felt generative for me.

Because it was what I wanted. Not what I thought I *should* be doing.

Even the times when it felt painful. Like my kids. There are times when I fuck up. The other day, I did not like the way I was lashing out at my kids for climbing on top of me.

But I decided to show up anyway, even in my own guilt and shame and pain, because I wanted to. I wanted to keep experimenting on the ways I could love my children.

Because for me, that is what love is. Saying yes to the uncomfortable emotions because it feels generative for me to stay close to them. Over and over again.

So I watched myself learn what love really meant all over again. And then embodying what I learned because this time, I got to build my own definition of love.

I had decolonized love in my life on my own terms.

So when Dan told me that he had fallen in love with another woman, I could not help but be delighted that he was experiencing his own humanity more deeply because I was full. I was full with my own resourcefulness.

Meaning, I did not need anything from him to experience love for myself. If I wanted to experience love for myself, I knew how to get after it. And if I were to be heartbroken in that process, I knew how to hold myself through it.

I was free because I had no requirements of anyone.

And when I was free, all that was left was to experience was my own humanity and all of its interesting nooks and crannies.

But y’all. This doesn’t mean that I don’t feel uncomfortable emotions. Let’s be really clear here. I am very much human as fuck. Here was one nook and cranny that came up in the same phone call yesterday as he was driving back:

Dan: Since our relationship is getting serious, I would love to sit down with you and start thinking about having her at our house and make sure that you are comfortable with it.

Me: Okay. I appreciate you considering me, and I am very much delighted about the part where you are in love. But there is a bit of resentment that is coming up for me if you are available to hear it right now.

Dan: Go ahead.

Me: So we’ve had numerous conversations in the past about this, before you fell in love, where you had drawn hard boundaries around bringing our partners home. You had stated that you will want to have at least months of you getting to know about my partners before you would feel comfortable bringing them to our home. I know I agreed with this, but now it is starting to feel like a double standard where the timeline for you is much shorter than months.

Dan: You know what, you’re right. What is coming up for me is that there was a bit of internalized sexism where I was holding men to a higher standard and that I trusted them less. Which is understandable, but I see how it is affecting our partnership in this. This is not fair to you, and I am going to noodle on this. We can also unpack this together so that I can address my biases and think about being flexible about my own preconceptions around how things ought to be.

Me: Thank you. I really appreciate the way falling in love has softened your heart and is almost forcing you to look at some of your biases and continue the work of decolonizing our hearts and our relationships.

Dan: Yeah.

Me: Don’t get me wrong. I would be delighted to have her come over. You know I have always welcomed that idea. I also operate under the paradigm that women *are* safer to have around than men. It’s just the double standard that I am concerned about. And I value fairness and reciprocity a lot. I am sure there are some biases of my own that come up as a result of my desire for fairness and reciprocity. I agree that we can sit down and talk through all this in our next Dangela Time.

Dangela Time is our weekly sit down where we unpack some of the ruptures, disagreements, or blindspots that have come up throughout the week. It’s a cute little thing we do. Also a very important thing we do for our partnership.

Anyway.

We are not in the business of avoiding the wrinkles and uncomfortable emotions that inevitably come up as a result of being human.

But what we *are* in the business of is building the skills to communicate those wrinkles, what resources we want, and how we want to be available for each other in getting those resources. It is how we practice our love and partnership in a way that is sustainable and generative for both of us.

If at any point it becomes unsustainable, we get to exercise our agency in how we want to address that. Do we want to make it sustainable again, and how will we go about that? If we don’t want to make it sustainable again, how will be honor each other’s decisions and expand our capacity to let go of the other?

Because ultimately, it is about honoring the agency of the human that you care about deeply. This becomes easier when we sharpen our own skills in honoring our own sense of agency.

And I wonder how the global landscape would change if we fully embraced the concept of decolonizing our minds and our hearts so that we can reclaim our freedom to want what we want and do what we want.

If we stopped attempting to control other people’s thoughts and behaviors.

If we paused and listened to the other person’s humanity, no matter how hard it felt.

If we stopped making demands and started asking questions.

If we expanded our capacity for pain and uncertainty to honor the magnitude of the human complexity.

I wonder how we would be able to address the different kinds of oppression and violence - whether it’s silent or loud - that we see in our homes, our workplace, in communities, and between countries.

It is easier to point fingers than it is to look at how we are perpetrating harmful systems that attempt to dictate how we live our lives.

Dismantling oppression begins with looking at the ways we are part of the harm.

It begins with the inquiry around where we are being harmed. Where we are suppressing. Where we are enduring. Where we are shaming.

Within our own selves. First.

How do I want to express myself so that I may recognize my own existence?

How will I honor myself? How will I identify my own pain and make decisions around it?

Because without me, I cannot care about those I want to care about.

And today, I delight in Dan’s profound experience of his humanity. And I delight in the privilege to partner with him as I experience my own humanity at the pace of my own body.

***

You know, this morning, I saw a spider in our foyer, and I lurched with disgust. I whispered “fuck” under my breath and rushed to get rid of it. I am sorry to all spider lovers. I really fucking hate them.

It was interesting because I had more of a visceral reaction of disgust with a tiny fucking spider than I had with Dan telling me that he was in love with another woman. 😂

For me, this feels like a great place to be because when I am disgusted by a spider, I can get rid of the spider relatively quickly. But if I were to be disgusted by my husband being in love with another women, boy, would that take a lot of fucking work to undo.

Which is why I built the kind of relationship where I have no requirements of my partner. Or anybody that I am in relationship in any capacity. This is with family, colleagues, bosses, friends, connections, and others in your community.

This means that what you are left with is pure freedom.

When you don’t require anything from yourself or anyone you’re in relationship with, you start thinking about what you WANT to do. Not what you NEED to do.

And that is what I am in the business of facilitating as a relationship coach.

Imagine being in a place where a spider gives you more heartache and anything that your partner does. Imagine the freedom you will feel because you find it difficult to feel attached to anybody.

Let’s get to that place now. Stop letting harmful systems win in suppressing your own sense of agency. Find out how to work with me as your relationship coach: angela-han.com/offer