SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I've been doing a fair bit of self-assessment, collecting things in my head to take to my first counseling appointment. One thing that keeps repeating itself is a love of newness. I love traveling to places I've never been, meeting and getting to know new people (too much, it seems), listening to new music, eating new cuisines, feeling new feeling, thinking new thoughts. Conversely, repetition and routine equate to boredom, stasis, perpetual living death. I honestly cannot tell you how many different jobs I've held since I started working. College took me seven years to complete; it seemed every year I changed majors, starting with astrophysics and ending in theatre (and changed disciplines three times within the theatre).

But there are some things that I keep. I have a few friends I've managed to keep over 25 years. Well, one. A couple that have made it over a decade. My wife, despite recent events, is someone I plan to have in my life when we're old and gray and sitting on a porch swing, embarrassing our kids and sharing mischievous looks. We have a date.

This hatred of routine and love of the new is, I worry, at odds with what's necessary to make a long term relationship work. Anyone else have the same issues?

This resonates with me. I get bored easily and feel like I'm never satisfied. I always need something new or different.

Hi there HerrTrubeit,

I think I have suffered from what you describe. Throughout my life my interests and career choices (and the communities that go with them) have morphed from one into another. Sometimes seamlessly, sometimes more catastrophically. What morphed along with them was my sense of who I am, since I was drawing that from the people and things around me rather than from within.

The last four years I have been turned very inward while going through the process of recovering from infidelity and fixing my shit (although personally I like to think of it as becoming a real girl). The community I had pre-D-day was OM and his community. I also had BS, his family and my family but they were very secondary characters in the cast of players in the EvolvingSoul show. Obviously soon after D-day anyone affair related had to go so my community got a lot smaller and I am only just now beginning to feel okay about expanding it again.

One of the really surprising things that has happened is that as I have begun to view my relationships differently (thinking less about what I'm getting out of them and more about what I'm putting into them) for the first time I have experienced a true deepening of my relationship with a significant other, if you will, and to some extent with my family as well. And that's something I had never thought about before. Deepening. I never knew what I was missing. And what it feels like is not anything anyone could have described to me before it started happening. It just had to be experienced to be understood.

Why I was afraid of that deepening is more detail than I should go into on your thread but I guess I mostly wanted to say that I completely get the craving for the new. If you let that part of you be in charge of all the decision making, though, it can limit the range of your experience as an emotional being.

Your post made me think. So thanks and welcome again from this EvolvingSoul.