Choices: How to Mend or End a Broken Relationship

By Lauren S. Clucas

"What to do after his affair? Should I stay, or should I go?"  

If you're asking yourself these questions, it might be time to look at the truth of your relationship. Is it the relationship you want? Or would you be better off alone?  

Whether you're

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ingenium Books
• Release date: Jun 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781989059968

Lauren S. Clucas

Lauren Clucas has a masters' degree in social science (counselling) from the University of South Australia. Her career as a counsellor has spanned over twenty years and she has worked extensively with couples and individuals in the areas of relationship and depression. In 2004, Lauren qualified as a group facilitator in relationship programmes for individuals and corporates and has run a practice in Singapore, Australia, South Africa, and Greece where she's currently based. Lauren was born in Johannesburg, South Africa to a British mother and an Afrikaans father. The youngest of three children, she matriculated in 1984, studied public relations and journalism in KwaZulu-Natal and spent fourteen years in tourism marketing before changing career paths to enter counselling. Lauren lives on the Greek island of Lefkada, in a small village called Katouna, with her husband and youngest son.

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Introduction

If you have been cheated on—or you have been unfaithful and your partner found out—then it’s likely you understand the piercing betrayal of infidelity and know how horribly undone we can become by it. There are few relationships that have not experienced betrayal in some shape or form, with affairs being far too common.

Whether you’re on the receiving end of betrayal or the betrayer, or your relationship is simply in tatters but there hasn’t been any infidelity, Choices: How to Mend or End a Broken Relationship offers the tools to help you decide whether it’s time to dig deep or whether it’s time to ditch. Either way, you’ll be choosing truth over deception.

Choices is the product of over twenty years of study of countless couples who sought my counselling during my time living in Singapore, Australia, and South Africa.

I recognised that some couples, regardless of the drama, conflict, or disharmony between them, engaged certain qualities which enabled them to push through and thrive, while others, sometimes with relatively less adversity, chose to divorce or part ways. I became curious about couples that thrived in the wake of adversity. Not staying in the relationship for staying’s sake, but because they found ways to want the relationship and to make each other feel wanted in the relationship.

Essentially, Choices speaks to being in a good relationship with yourself and acknowledges that while we naturally gravitate towards companionship, going solo can be liberating and fulfilling too.

It has become clear to me that problems occur in relationships when partners read being needed, or needing someone, as a sure sign of love. The more the dependency increases, the more intense the illusion of love appears.

Then later, perhaps when one party finds their partner stonewalling their neediness, they might question whether they’d be with that person if they weren’t the plug to their gaping sockets. Ultimately, we have a yearning to be wanted for who we are, without having to masquerade. But to achieve this kind of relationship, we first have to realise what it takes to want ourselves.

The recurring themes of mutual neglect and loss in chemistry underline an ongoing dilemma between the sexes.

Women are resolute about equality being important in all aspects of life, but they’re disappointed this equality seems to come at a cost to their femininity. The modern woman can choose her way forward and, unlike earlier generations, no longer needs to rely on a bread-winning man for survival. Women today are self-reliant and sexually liberated. There is less pressure to marry out of tradition. Being single no longer signals inferiority nor does it require giving up the right to have children. This means today’s woman is selecting a man because she wants him, not necessarily because she needs him. She’s discerning and wants him to be her equal, her counterpart, and to step up, or pitch up as we say in South Africa.

The man might wonder what today’s man is expected to be. It’s moved on from being the provider who ticks off the proverbial checklist indicating status and is more about taking control of your confidence and masculinity whilst allowing yourself to be vulnerable. It means being a man in a way that recognises and celebrates your woman’s strength and femininity.

The woman who asks her partner to man up must, in turn, take measures to safeguard her femininity and gentleness. It’s a tall order for anyone to be vulnerable with a woman who plays hard and cold and regards responding to her partner’s desire as a chore.

Being wanted, and wanting your partner, is not a natural state that can be enjoyed without conscious reflection and without changing bad habits that may have been picked up in childhood. In Choices, you will find the road map to that end state.

A constant reminder to couples throughout Choices is to aim for and maintain an adult-to-adult relationship, which is the ideal bonding pattern. It might come as a surprise to you how often major decisions—like whether to divorce, whether to stay, how to manage financial challenges, or whether to have another child—are managed from a fight-or-flight or adapted child-like state (a state of being that personifies our most vulnerable, fearful, and unwanted feelings). This is an all-or-nothing psychological state that is governed by our emotions. Couples literally act out and throw their toys when they’re in this space. Not very adult at all. Decisions made from this state might grant immediate gratification, but usually underpin choices we later regret.

So how do you go about reading this book and later using it as a reference tool?

THE ROAD MAP TO CHOICES

Section I of Choices introduces you to my personal backstory and references my own relationship experience, which continues as a thread throughout the book, and is followed by a focus on wants and expectations, wherein you are guided to update yourself on what you want—something you are urged to do repeatedly as the relationship matures.

Section II, Attachment Styles & Intruders, deals with our bonding patterns and how we can learn to recognise the role our upbringing plays in today’s relationships. I also address ways to keep the relationship safe and establish boundaries.

Section III, Infidelity & Affairs, digs deep into what is by far the main reason couples seek out my counselling. You’ll learn about the reasons people stray, and I share real-life examples from couples I’ve worked with—couples who have worked honestly and courageously to get through this trauma. Some have chosen to stay together and others to part ways after an affair. Here I outline the steps to healing for both the betrayer and the betrayed person. We also take a look at trends in sexual utopias and how these couple-sanctioned activities can enhance or threaten a relationship.

Section IV is the main section of Choices and introduces the fourteen choices that propel a healthy relationship forward. This is the material that will challenge you to be your best self in your relationship, with several choices supported by exercises and thought-provoking questionnaires. This section emphasises that your behaviour, rather than your partner’s, is what’s really in your control, and bringing your best adult self to your relationship gives it the best chance of success.

The fifth and final section details how to find closure when a relationship has ended and argues that love is not the fire at the start of a relationship but rather the endgame—like the final move on a chessboard.

Interwoven throughout the chapters, to help illustrate the results of adopting this new way of relating, you’ll read about the real-life stories of my clients—whose identities have of course been changed to protect their privacy. I will show how my approach to couples’ counselling is to view each relationship as an entity, a combination of the two people: I take notice of the entity’s disposition, its strengths and weaknesses, its levels of self-esteem, hope, and staying power. I review its way of thinking, feeling, and behaving to understand its chances of thriving, should the two people choose to learn how to get out of its way.

Incidentally, I’ve also produced a companion workbook as I’ve been asked by women and couples alike for tools to help them dig deeper into their own relationship choices as they read through the guidance in this, the main book of Choices. If such a companion workbook is of interest to you, please visit https://ingeniumbooks.com/CHWKBK.

Getting out of your relationship’s way requires letting go of blame and judgement and taking responsibility, which is far tougher to do than it sounds. As these partnerships navigated their way through the various stages of relationships and wrestled the obstacles that came their way, I captured their learnings.

You can digest these testimonies and allow them to percolate, picking them up as reference material when they become relevant to your journey.

Maybe your relationship toolbox is a little bare. You’re not alone. Like most people, you’re likely to get stuck somewhere along the line and become unsure as to how to navigate your next move. You might even share the sentiment that I’ve heard disgruntled couples voice time and time again: I want to feel wanted.

I don’t need you anymore. I don’t depend on you to provide for me or protect me or nurture me or soothe my wounds. I can do that for myself. With my needs taken care of, I can discover what’s left of us. I can see whether I want you, simply for who you are, or whether I was in love with the idea of what you could do for me.

These were the words of one enlightened young woman as stated to her partner of seven years.

Imagine your partner saying this to you. On the one hand, it might feel liberating to know you can be your true self without needing to play a role. On the other, you might feel daunted by the prospect of someone wanting to know and hopefully love the person you are behind your behaviour. I believe this is essential if a relationship is to endure in a fulfilling way.

And finally, a note about language. I’m South African, and my spelling follows the British rather than the US style, for example with S’s rather than Z’s in words like empathise and realise. If you’re in North America, I trust you can see past the slight differences and dig into the helpful, hopeful approach within these pages so that you too can make choices and take the steps forward—whether you choose to mend or end your broken relationship.

Section One

In the Beginning

person holding a balloon

Chapter 1

Scattering Ashes

October 6, 2000

Dear Dad, happy birthday!

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I hope this finds you well. All is good with Cam and me—he is such an entertainer and has me in stitches much of the time! I am loving my job, Cam’s in the crèche on-site and I’m dating a wonderful man. It’s a bit tricky because he is my boss, but we’ve been up front with the management team and they want me to stay on as long as our relationship doesn’t affect our work. We’ll spend our first Christmas together at Sierra Ranch—perhaps we can drive through to Durban so you can meet him—maybe on Boxing Day? Let me know. Anyway Dad, I hope you’ll be in good company today and have made plans for Christmas.

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Take care, love you, Laurie and Cam. xxx

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Iclose the card, glad I had sent it, and return it to the mangy shoebox. It feels so wrong, sifting through his belongings like this, finding out things I don’t want to know. Like, he must have loved me. Here lay the Father’s Day and birthday cards I’d sent him, along with an old report card of mine and a newspaper cut-out of me standing next to Ivor and some dignitaries. He never made it past Boxing Day, so he never got to meet Ivor. Maybe it was best. I page through his personal notebook stopping to decipher his scrawl, finally recognising the AA’s Twelve Steps. He’d tried to get help.

His smell is all around the brown, humble apartment. I imagine his voice sounding my name the way it did after he’d had a few brandies. The wind whistles through the salt-streaked window framing the hopeless sea he’d looked out on. The smells of loneliness, neglect, and regret. I pick up an old Polaroid photo of me with my siblings standing outside our last house in Berario where we all lived as a family. I’m holding Whisky, our Maltese poodle, my fringe ridiculously angled following various self-styling attempts, two teeth missing. My brother Wentz is in his brown army gear, thin and pale, Dee is pretty and slightly chubby, standing all voluptuous in her swimming cozzie. We’re all smiling like a normal family.

A solemn framed headline from his time at the Rand Daily Mail interrupts the dirty beige of his lounge wall:

THERE’S NO GREATER SIN THAN WISE MEN

WHO DON’T SPEAK UP

Is that how he justified his anal criticism? I didn’t even know him. Dee, Wentz, and Mom are rustling about in his bedroom and bathroom, calmly packing up his sticky goods with the same reflective curiosity. We all want to find some little thing that can help us feel something. Anything.

Granted, this morning, we managed to kind of cry. Wading into the sea, careful not to slip on seaweed-clad rocks, we’d wanted to scatter his ashes in a way that was special and dignified. But we couldn’t even get that right with him. Huddled together, we said our last goodbyes and began scattering his ample ashes only to have a strong gust slap them straight back at us. A final smack to punish us for not loving him. We had Dad in our hair, on our eyelashes, all over our clothes—even in our mouths. Talk about a bitter taste… and then we managed a little laugh-cry.

Dad is no longer around in this world but the impact he had on me lives on. Our troubled history together birthed my determination to learn about healthy relationships, which ultimately led me to become a relationship counsellor.

Now more than two decades since we scattered those dreaded ashes, and I wonder what chance Dad truly had of showing his love. None of us really loved him, and from what we know, he was terribly neglected as a child. He would have had to know love to be able to grant himself more of it, and it saddens me to think that he died starved of love’s meaning. In fact, if I’m really honest, I regret that as an adult I couldn’t show him a teeny bit of love in spite of his failings as a father. Yet at the same time, a voice inside me argues that I would only have been capable of showing such love if the choices I write of herein had been present.

Chapter 2

Rose-Tinted Glasses

When you can accept the love of another, it’s a sure sign that you have granted love and acceptance to at least some parts of yourself.

Feeling wanted is typically experienced in the honeymoon phase of a relationship, which is the first six months to two years. During this phase, our self-esteem goes through the roof as our partner holds up a mirror reflecting a person who is one-of-a-kind, desirable, attractive, funny, good to be near, energising, and so on, and we bond over areas of commonality. With our pheromones blazing, we can’t keep our hands off each other. We feel alive, we’re taking chances, and we are in the giddy land of risk… almost too much to bear at times, but we want it. We want this new person we’ve become, we want this new person we’re with, and we want this invigorating experience to last.

Without knowing it, we place our new partner on a pedestal, imagining we have drawn someone to us that is extra special, and we allow them to idolise us. Human fallibility is not on our radar, temporarily obscured by rose-tinted glasses.

I know you know what’s coming next. Yep, this phase can’t, doesn’t, and really shouldn’t last, because, quite simply, as the saying goes, if everything was extraordinary, nothing would be extraordinary. So even though we try to hold onto this honeymoon phase as long as we can, the inevitable shifts occur.

We move into the relative ordinariness of the relationship when we begin to recognise the old familiar ache of disappointment as the reality of who and what we have doesn’t match the wish-image that our often unrealistic expectations held up for us.

For many couples, this period of relative ordinariness is followed rather quickly by a termination of the relationship, only to start the rose-coloured cycle again with the next person. But for those who are ready to cultivate a more meaningful relationship, this ordinariness can trigger the transition into a more rewarding experience of love.

Essentially, this is the period when we can really get to know the person we’re with. This is when we must ask ourselves if we can love this more ordinary, less alluring person, rather than the character they were playing when they were colluding with our expectations of who we wanted them to be. Yes, we are partly to blame.

You make me want to be a better person. While it is gratifying to hear your new partner say this, you may have turned down the volume on the little voice in your head that asked what’s wrong with the person they are. There is nothing wrong with being inspired to self-improve, but it’s also important to keep things real.

I was one of those hopeless romantics who looked for Mr. Right for what seemed like a terribly long time. My hardwiring, the subconscious programming of everything that had been role-modelled so far, was moulded in a family of five with an angry, abusive, alcoholic father at the helm and a rather passive, long-suffering mother trapped at his side. I was the laat-lammetjie (meaning late lamb in Afrikaans), my sister and brother having a respective nine and ten years on me.

I grew up rapidly as we moved from house to house in quick succession in Johannesburg, South Africa. My mom was an estate agent who, no doubt, moved house repeatedly in futile attempts to change her circumstances. My dad, a works manager for a daily newspaper, worked nightshift and slept by day. The frequent moves and Dad’s schedule both had an upside. While Dad slept, we had the distraction of new spaces to decorate quietly and unknown gardens in which to scream and run about. But with Dad as the dominant energy, I learnt from an early age that life was not safe and that men were not to be trusted.

My siblings took flight from the house as soon as they could—my sister dropping out of school at the age of sixteen and my brother at seventeen, when he left to join the army. That left me at home to navigate for myself. I think it was about the age of eight that I found my first pair of super-strong rose-tinted glasses. They allowed me a fantasy escape into a world of romance, beauty, and enchantment. With these spectacles filtering my reality, Mom’s and my woes were conveniently suspended on some light, fluffy cloud that had only the best of perspectives.

Those rose-tinted glasses accompanied me through the relief of my parent’s divorce, high school, my tertiary studies, and right through my twenties, by which time I’d relocated to the warm embrace of our mother city, Cape Town. Of course, I had no idea I had adopted this romanticised view of the world as a coping mechanism. I just grew increasingly lonely and defeated as I filled up my Failed Relationship Scorecard. I became a relentless, tragic romantic, seeking my Prince of Dreams.

At some point, I realised I had developed a penchant for men who were unfaithful and deceitful, yet utterly charming and entertaining. My surreal expectations for my sought-after soulmate were constantly challenged by the bitter reality of my unresolved hardwiring.

Essentially, my relationships were void of the most vital life task, the one upon which sustainable relationships are founded. Trust. I could not trust, and I would not trust. I confused intensity with intimacy. If I felt jealous, I thought I was in love. If I felt needed, I thought I was in love.

It was only when I was thirty-three years old that I met Ivor, the man who would be my teacher, and later my husband, who would help me learn what it means to trust.

And the sweet irony in this part of my backstory is the epiphany that I needn’t have been looking for someone to trust with all my heart, but rather to learn that the real mission was to trust that I could adequately soothe and lean on myself.

Developing the habit of self-trust took a fair bit of time and, in spite of my numerous and varied attempts to sabotage the relationship, Ivor and I were married in 2003.

This is when I truly began my adventurous journey into understanding relationships.

MY JOURNEY INTO LOVE

How do we learn about love? Our first experiences of love are role-modelled through the unique and fallible behaviour of our parents, family, and close connections. Through witnessing their methods of relating, we develop a norm within ourselves that guides our own choices later in life. Sometimes we go to polar extremes to avoid being like our parents and sometimes, in spite of ourselves, we repeat what we know best. We’re safe with it. And then again, sometimes we navigate a new path altogether.

I found myself contemplating these options—repeat what I knew or forge my own unique path—in my early thirties. Living in Cape Town, and still rolling out that ball of string called Failed Relationships, I met a man who was kind, young, fit, attractive, and fun to be with. I knew the relationship didn’t offer long-term potential. But I shrugged off that idea, choosing rather to live for the moment.

I remember the day I grew up. There I was, hiking with my housemate Liesl and friends in the Amatola mountains. I hadn’t prepared for this gruelling (albeit beautiful) eighteen-kilometre-a-day, six-day hike in snowy conditions in the Eastern Cape. I felt dreadful, exhausted, and weak, and