Love and the ego and sex and the ego are big topics. I’m going to dedicate at least a full chapter in my book to them—probably more. Today let’s look at the situation of an extramarital affair: A man becomes smitten with a woman he works with and starts a relationship with her while still married. He hides the affair from his wife of 20 years, though some of his coworkers know about it. And the other woman knows he’s married.
A year later the husband asks his wife for a divorce. The wife is shocked. She finds out about the affair only after they separate. On top of the already painful transition, she is faced with the knowledge that the man she loved and trusted for 20 years is highly unconscious. Her image of him collapses.
If she can step out of this, out of her pain body—her alive emotional wounding, and see that people can only behave according to their level of consciousness, she can forgive him. But she has lost that important relationship, which is still very painful. She truly loved and cared about him. When there is deception like this in the ending of a relationship, it’s unlikely the exes will stay connected, with the exception of those with shared young children. But the friendship, the trust, and the respect is usually lost.
However, if the husband wakes up from ego and apologizes for deceiving his ex, there is a chance they can still be friends. I’m hoping “I’m sorry, I was under the influence of ego” will be a standard soulfelt apology once people start becoming aware of their egos. That’s the “making amends” step of Ego Rehab.
Another angle of this is whether the man was under the influence of ego when he first became smitten with the other woman, before there was any deception (deception is always ego.) Were the feelings themselves egoic? Sometimes these things just happen, right? We can’t control our emotions.
This is true. It has happened to me, where I suddenly fell madly “in love” (or maybe “in infatuation” is a better term) with one of my healers, as I’ve discussed before. I wasn’t looking for love, it was totally unexpected. But I now understand it was egoic love.
There’s a simple test to know if your love is egoic: Is there fear there?
Are you afraid to tell your love interest the Truth? Are you afraid you will lose them? Are you afraid to ask deep questions, honest questions? Are you afraid if you don’t do what your love interest wants, you’ll lose them? Are you afraid to be your Self with them? Are you afraid of other people finding out about the relationship? Are you trying to control each other in any way? All forms of control are fear. Any and all fear in relationship means you’re in your ego.
I was afraid to ask the healer what was going on in his relationship and whether his partner knew about his feelings for me. Actually more importantly, I was afraid to even ask if he had feelings for me! I just assumed that he did – I was projecting my feelings onto him. I was afraid to ask any tough questions of him, in fact.
When he did sometimes tell me he was happy with his partner, my ego didn’t want to hear that. She told me he was really not happy with her and wanted to be with me! Otherwise why would he keep flirting with me and leading me on? Of course, the obvious answer is that he was unconscious and his ego was just toying with me. For years I really didn’t want to believe that. I wanted to believe my ego’s alternate reality.
Now I know to watch out for my romantic fantasy director/truth denier ego in relationships. She has many pairs of rose-colored glasses!
Back to the cheating husband and whether he was in his ego before the deception occurred…If when he was smitten with the new woman he thought these feelings were special, that they were something to be protected, and thus he was AFRAID (that’s the key word here) of losing these butterfly-new-love romantic feelings and her, then it was an affair of the ego, run-of-the-mill ego intoxication! (Although there could be true love underneath, but it’s tainted by ego. I’ll talk about ego-tainted love in a later post.)
If, however, there was no fear, just a strong and deep shared connection and knowing that they wanted to be together, and no need to deceive anyone, no need to hide anything, then it was likely not egoic. Then it could really be a divine connection—especially if there was no fear that they were making the wrong decision or that their relationship could not work out or a feeling that they needed to hide it from others, including current partners—as if it was something special to be protected and hidden. True Love doesn’t need protection, concealment, suppression, or deception. True Love does not contain fear.
