Dear Prudence,
I’m a 45-year-old man, married to a 40-year-old woman, “Jane.” We’ve been together over 10 years and married for seven. At the time we met, I was five years post-divorce and had had several messy, overlapping relationships, but had been single for the previous six months and learned/grown from those experiences. As such, it was really important for me to start any new relationship with a clean slate, and I communicated this to everyone I dated in relatively blunt fashion. As luck would have it, Jane said she had also been single about six months after a five-year, on-again off-again, somewhat casual relationship. She had many attractive qualities (smart, educated, sophisticated, and pretty), and I fell hard quickly.
Jane openly shared her experience with sexual assault in college, so when we struggled to connect intimately right away, I practiced patience, and maybe naively, expected it would naturally improve based on my previous relationships (lots of great sex and wonderful feedback). Within a year of us meeting, I suffered a terrible spine injury as a result of organized fighting, and eventually needed major surgery. It was a long recovery, and while Jane wanted to get married and start a family, passion from her was still lacking. I often felt intuition that something was blocking a deeper emotional and intimate connection between us, and occasionally expressed this to Jane, to which she always reassured me there was nothing amiss and she was happy and wanted me to be happy too. We married just before the pandemic hit, had our daughter in 2021, and struggled with lots of illness the next couple years.
As our health returned to normal, I longed for a better intimate connection and sex life, but Jane refused to discuss it until I was basically ready to go outside the marriage. She finally agreed to start prioritizing our sex life and to even talk about it, with the condition I began individual therapy. After a few sessions my therapist strongly encouraged me to talk with Jane about her past and our beginning. After many conversations spread over a few months, Jane finally admitted that she had withheld a major secret from me.
Apparently, she was not single when we met, although she was still vague and cagey about the details. This absolutely devastated me, particularly the methodical and repeated deception, because in previous couples therapy I had asked several times if there was something blocking our connection from her past/relationship(s). At that point, I felt there were two choices, either exit the marriage or try to learn everything about our beginning. Jane was back to her old ways of not communicating, so in desperation I violated her privacy. The revelations were beyond anything I could have imagined.
Jane’s previous relationship was anything but casual. She had tried for five years to “tame” the party animal because she was madly in love with him. They had amazing sexual chemistry and she was deeply passionate for him. She continued to sleep with him for a couple months into our relationship, and talked with her closest friends about still loving him deeply for nearly a year. Ultimately, his refusal to change for her and moving on to a new girlfriend is when she committed to me.
We’ve been in couples counseling again for several months, and still it’s very hard for Jane to take ownership for how much this deception has hurt me, and especially for any damage it caused our relationship. Our therapist is more of a cheerleader type, and I want to be able to give Jane something tangible delineating how deception, gaslighting, etc. harm a relationship. Can you provide insight or point me toward articles, research, etc.? I’m (obviously) not ready to give up on the marriage, albeit in part because I cannot imagine spending less time with our 5-year-old daughter.