I went on The Deeper Love Podcast with Alex Croxford to talk about something most people will only discuss with a verdict already in hand.
Alex works with women in the aftermath of an affair. It’s a room almost nobody will sit in without judgment, and she does it, which is why I said yes.
What she asked me to do was explain the mechanism. Not to excuse anything — that’s a separate conversation and it doesn’t go away. But there’s a question underneath the moral one that almost never gets asked, which is: what was the body doing?
Here’s the short version. A nervous system that has been shut down for years does not respond to reason. It responds to signal. When a woman has spent a decade running on conservation — no preferences, no wants, no volume on anything — and then something finally registers as alive after years of registering as nothing, the system reaches for it with everything it has. Because it has confused aliveness with rescue. It isn’t a character assessment. It’s a body that got one bar of signal after a long time with none, and lunged.
I think there’s real harm in women being handed only the moral conversation. If the two options on the table are I’m a bad person and I had my reasons, most people pick one and stop thinking. Neither tells you what was happening in your body for the ten years before, which is the only part you can actually do anything with.
We also got into why marriages go transactional and how quietly it happens. Why the mirroring you learned at nine is still running at thirty-nine. Why talk therapy can be excellent and still not reach what’s frozen. And the finish line, which Alex has as little patience for as I do.
I brought my own story too — the divorce, the layoff, the year I couldn’t locate myself. Not the same situation, but the same underlying question: who are you when you’re not who you had to become?
Fair warning: this one goes to tender places. Read the room in your own body before you press play.