Getting Involved in a Love Triangle to Avoid Dealing With Problems in Your Relationship

In the past, I've written about love triangles from the point of view of the person who is the other man or the other woman.  I've also written about how triangulation in families can lead to love triangles later on in an adult child's life.  In this article, I'm focused on how one or both people in a relationship use love triangles that involve affairs as a way to avoid dealing with the problems in their relationship.

Getting Involved in a Love Triangle to Avoid Problems in Your  Relationship

What is a Love Triangle?
Love triangles involve three people.  In the type of love triangle that I'm discussing in this article, there are two people who are in a primary relationship and a third person who is in an affair with one of the people in the primary relationship.

As opposed to a "menage a trios"(translated as a "household of three") where all three people are consenting to the romantic arrangement, in a love triangle, all three people are not consenting to the arrangement.  Usually, one of the people in the established relationship is either unaware of the third person in the triangle or knows about it and is opposed to it.

In the "rivalrous triangle," where each person knows about the other, two people are competing for the attention of the person who is involved with both people.  So, in other words, if Peter  is involved with Mary and Ann, and both women know about each other, they are each in competition with each other for Peter.

In the "split object triangle," which is what I'm discussing in this article, the person in the triangle involved with two people splits his or her attention between two people.  So, for instance, Betty is involved with both Steve and Joe, and she splits her attention between both people.  Joe and Steve may or may not know about each other.

There can be many reasons why people, who are in a primary relationship, engage in love triangles.  One of the main reasons is that they're unhappy in the primary relationship and get involved with someone else in order to avoid dealing with the problems in the primary relationship.

The person who is involved in this type of love triangle is usually involved in an romantic or sexual affair and wants to keep the third person in the triangle a secret from his or her primary partner or spouse--at least in the beginning.

In many instances, the person, who is involved in a primary relationship and in an affair, uses the affair to leave the primary relationship.  So, not only is s/he avoiding dealing with the problems in the primary relationship, s/he also has problems leaving an unhappy relationship without  having "someone in the wings" (the person that s/he is having an affair with).

Having a new romantic partner, who is "waiting in the wings," gives him the motivation and courage to leave the primary relationship.

As compared to the established relationship, the new relationship is usually exciting and, because it's new, it usually doesn't have longstanding problems like the established relationship.  So, it seems more alluring and attractive.

But, often, the same problems develops in the new relationship.

Rather than working out his or her emotional problems related to the established relationship, the person  entering the new relationship brings all of the "emotional baggage" to the new relationship.

Also, if s/he has problems coping and communicating, this will likely be a problem in the new relationship which could lead to an ongoing pattern of affairs where this person looks to escape to a new person each time there are problems in the current relationship.

Getting Involved in a Love Triangle to Avoid Problems in Your  Relationship

Not all love triangles end with the breakup of the established relationship, even if the spouse or significant other finds out about the affair.  Nor does everyone who gets involved in an affair necessarily want to end their primary relationship.  Many marriages and long-term relationships survive the love triangle or affair, although there will be much work to do to overcome the hurt and mistrust because of the infidelity and betrayal.

A Love Triangle as a "Way Out" of the Established Relationship
Let's look at a specific example of a love triangle where one of the people in the established relationship is looking for a way out of the primary relationship and gets involved with someone else in order to avoid dealing with the problems in the primary relationship and also a way out.

The following is a fictionalized scenario that is an example of how love triangles are used to avoid and also to leave the primary relationship.

Harry and Linda and Harry and Ellen and Harry and...
Harry and Linda were married for five years.  They met while Harry was involved in an unhappy relationship with another woman.

Initially, when they got married, they were close.  But over time, they grew apart and they each became resentful about their differences, which were many.

Harry wanted to have children, but Linda didn't, so they never had children, which Harry resented.

Their sex life was never very passionate, and by the second year of their marriage, they were barely having sex.  Harry was much more sexual than Linda, and resented her refusal to have sex.

Linda wanted to move back to the West Coast, where she was raised, but Harry didn't want to leave his job on the East Coast, so they stayed on the East Coast, which Linda resented.

Linda was a saver and Harry was a spender, so they were usually at odds with each other when it came to money and making financial plans.

A few years into their marriage, Linda, who wasn't religious or even spiritual when they first got married, felt drawn to the religion that she was raised in as a child.  She wanted Harry to join her at church services, but Harry was never involved with any religion and he wanted no part of it.

By then, Linda and Harry were barely communicating.  Linda tried to talk to Harry about their problems, but he refused to talk or to even acknowledge that they were in crisis.  Then, she told him that she wanted them to attend marriage counseling, but he refused.

At that point, they were coexisting in the same house, but slept in separate rooms and spent their free time apart.

Harry knew that Linda wanted to try to repair their relationship but, as far as Harry was concerned, their relationship was over and beyond repair.  But he was too afraid to leave the relationship and to live alone, so he remained stuck in an unhappy relationship where they could neither go forward nor go back.

Then, one evening, while Harry was at a business convention, he met Ellen, a young attractive woman, at the hotel bar.  After a few drinks, they were flirting with each other and Ellen invited him to her room.  This was the beginning of their affair.

Getting Involved in a Love Triangle to Avoid Dealing With Problems in Your Relationship

With Linda, Harry felt old, tired and bored.  With Ellen, Harry felt young, attractive and passionate.  Although Ellen knew that Harry was married, initially, she didn't care because their relationship was mostly sexual.

Linda began to suspect that Harry was having an affair because she noticed the change in him.  Instead of being grumpy, irritable and spending the weekend in rumpled sweat clothes, Harry seemed happier, energetic and he was dressing better.  He also stayed out late during the week and would say he was going to the office on weekends to do work.

When Linda confronted him, Harry adamantly denied being involved with anyone else.  But, over time, he realized that he cared less and less about Linda's suspicions because all he could think about was being with Ellen.

He also realized that now that he was seeing Ellen, he wasn't as afraid of leaving Linda and being alone.  He didn't want to hurt his wife, but he was feeling a yearning to finally be free and able to spend all his free time with Ellen.

Within several months, Ellen began pressuring Harry to leave his marriage and to move in with her.  No longer happy to just see him for a few hours when he could get free, she would tell him that she would stop seeing him if he didn't spend all night with her instead of leaving after a few hours.

Harry told himself that he didn't want to stop seeing Ellen, so he spent the night with her.  But on an unconscious level, he also knew that Linda wouldn't tolerate this and that staying out all night would precipitate the end his marriage without his having to tell Linda directly that he wanted out.  This is what he really wanted.

Getting Involved in a Love Triangle to Avoid Dealing Problems in Your Relationship

When Harry got home the next morning, he found Linda already packed.  She told him that she would have been willing to work on the marriage, even though she suspected that he was having an affair, but when he stayed out all night, she realized that it was over and that he no longer cared how much he hurt her.  She was flying out to the West Coast to live with her relatives.

Part of Harry felt relieved to be free of his marriage.  He also felt guilty about cheating on Linda, but he pushed aside his guilt, and he continued to see Ellen.  Soon after Linda moved, Harry moved in with Ellen.

Within a year, he and Linda were divorced.  When Harry received the divorce papers, he felt a flood of sadness and guilt that he could no longer push away.

Never having learned how to express his emotions, Harry didn't know what to do.  He tried to talk to Ellen about it, but she got angry that he wanted to talk about her about it.  And, whereas their relationship had been so passionate before, Harry no longer felt as sexually attracted to Ellen.  He began to see all the differences between them and felt lonely.  He wanted out of his relationship with Ellen, but he didn't know how to tell her.

Within a few months, he started an affair with another woman, Nicole.  After Ellen found Nicole's texts on Harry's phone, which he left out in their bedroom, and she ended her relationship with Harry.  Harry  felt badly, but he was mostly relieved not to have to tell Ellen that he wanted to end the relationship.

After this pattern repeated itself a few more times with other women, Harry knew he needed help.  As avoidant as he had been to see his problems, he couldn't help seeing that he was repeating the same pattern in his life. He knew he would never be happy in a relationship until he got help in therapy.

Harry explored his pattern of getting involved in love triangles and avoiding the problems in his current relationship by finding someone new.  He also explored his fear of being alone.

He was able to make connections between this pattern and the triangulation that went on in his family when he was growing up (see my article:  How Triangulation in Family Relationships Can Lead to Love Triangles).

The lack of communication in his family, especially when it involved emotions, lead to triangles in his family where his mother and his sister were aligned against Harry and his father.  Harry's father also had numerous affairs that eventually lead to his mother ending the marriage.

Harry could see the parallels between his family triangles and the love triangles that he got involved in as well as similarities in the way that his father avoided dealing with problems with his mother. He knew that his father used these affairs as a way to get his wife to leave him, rather than telling his wife directly that he wanted to end the marriage.

Harry never liked this about his father, and he was unhappy to realize that he was following in his father's footsteps (see my article:  Discovering That You Developed the Same Traits That You Disliked in Your Parents).

In therapy, Harry learned to overcome his fears, deal with his uncomfortable emotions, and express his feelings.

After many missteps, Harry was able to enter into a healthy long term relationship, deal with his emotions, and express his feelings as problems came up.

Conclusion
There are many reasons why people enter into love triangles.  One of the most common reasons is to avoid dealing with the problems in the current relationship by entering into a new relationship that seems exciting and new.

Having a new person "in the wings" waiting will often give the person who begins the affair the courage and motivation to leave the established relationship or, like Harry and his father, to get the other person in the primary relationships to leave.

But this is only a temporary "solution" because sooner or later problems will develop in the new relationship and a person who cannot cope with or express uncomfortable feelings is bound to have a similar experience in the new relationship.

Psychotherapy can help someone who is caught in this pattern to develop insight into his or her problems, including underlying issues from his or her family of origin, and develop the skills to tolerate uncomfortable feelings as well as the skills to express those feelings in a healthy way.

Getting Help in Therapy
Many people, who enter into committed relationships, don't have the maturity or skills to be in a committed relationship.  Often, in these cases, they didn't grow up in a family where there were healthy models to learn from, and they didn't get help in therapy to overcome the problem on their own.

Getting Help in Therapy

When things go wrong, they will often look for a new and exciting relationship to get out of the current relationship.

After cycling through several relationships in this way, many people will recognize the pattern and realize that they have a problem.

If you recognize this pattern in yourself, you could benefit from working with a licensed mental health professional who can help you to understand and overcome these destructive patterns.  By overcoming these patterns, you have a better chance of having a healthy relationship.

About Me
I am a licensed NYC psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR and Somatic Experiencing therapist who works with individual adults and couples.

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

Triangulation in Families and Love Triangles

When we think of "triangles" in relationships, we often associate them with "love triangles" where a person is romantically involved with two people at the same time. 

Typically, we think of the man or woman who is married or in a primary relationship who is having an affair with someone else. 

These relationships are often complex and usually don't end well for the people involved. But less talked about are triangles in family relationships and how this can lead to "love triangles" when children from these families become adults.

Triangulation in Families

What is Triangulation in Family Relationships?

In certain families, family members form unhealthy alliances against others in the family. This could be a mother and daughter against the father or a father and son against the mother or mother and son against the father or father and daughter against the mother, as well as other permutations of these triangular relationships.

Basically, in triangular relationships, there are usually two people against at least one other person. The two people who have aligned with each other usually have an unhealthy, enmeshed relationship with each other and the other person that they are aligned against is the odd one out.

Needless to say, these triangular relationships are emotionally unhealthy and detrimental to all members of the family, regardless of whether they are part of the enmeshed alliance or the odd one out. These triangular relationships form for a variety of reasons. Generally, there is a power struggle going on in the family and the two that are aligned are trying to have power over the other family member.

Often, when children, who are in families with triangular relationships, grow up, they tend to triangulate in their adult relationships, often leading to illicit affairs or to triangles in their own families with their spouses and children.

A fictionalized account will serve to illustrate these points:

Tom:
Tom grew up as an only child. As far back as he could remember, his parents were always arguing.

When he was about seven years old, Tom's father, Scott, started confiding in Tom about how unhappy he was being married to Tom's mother, Nancy. Tom would listen to his father, just feeling happy that his father was spending time with him. Sometimes, he worried that his father would leave the household so, at those times, he made sure to pay extra special attention to his father's complaints, even though he didn't understand them.

Even though he didn't understand, Tom still felt it was important to be on his father's side. When he saw how unhappy his father was and he feared that his father would leave the household and abandon him, he felt very angry with his mother. Often when he was alone his mother, he would tell her, "Stop fighting with dad." Usually, his mother would respond by saying, "Your father is an idiot," which made Tom feel even more angry.

Tom's parents sometimes argued at night and this kept Tom up most of the night. When it was time to go to school, Tom was too groggy to get up. Often, this caused arguments between Nancy and Scott, with Nancy telling Tom that he needed to go to school, and Scott telling Nancy to leave Tom alone. Nancy usually left for work before Scott, and she would tell Tom to get up, get dressed, eat his breakfast and go to school. But after Nancy left, Scott would tell Tom that he didn't have to go to school and he could stay home with his paternal grandmother who lived downstairs.

Tom felt that his father was on his side since Scott allowed Tom to stay home. He especially felt this way when his mother got home and scolded him for not going to school and his father defended him.

Even after his grades began to slip, Scott allowed Tom to stay home from school when he didn't want to go. During that time, Tom's school engaged in "social promotion" so that even though he was not doing well, they kept allowing him to go to the next grade.

This pattern continued into Tom's adolescence. It seemed that Nancy and Scott had completely different ideas about child rearing. When Tom was 14 and Nancy found out that Tom was smoking, she hit the roof and forbade Tom to smoke. But when Nancy wasn't around, Scott would provide Tom with cigarettes, and Tom thought this was "cool" of his father. When Nancy got home, she detected the cigarette smell on Tom and she and Scott would get into a screaming match.

By this time, Tom saw his father as "the cool one" and his mother as "the witch." Around that time, one day when Nancy and Scott were fighting about Tom failing his classes in junior high school, Tom lost his temper with his mother and told her to "shut up." He was filled with such rage against her that he felt like hitting her, but he punched the wall instead and broke his knuckles.

Nancy and Scott argued all the way to the ER. Seeing the dysfunctional dynamic, after attending to Tom, the ER doctor recommended that the three of them attend family counseling. Nancy agreed, but Scott and Tom refused to go.

By the time Scott was 16, he was smoking marijuana with his friends. One of those friends' mother called Nancy and told her that her son was smoking marijuana with her son and she wanted to put a stop to it. When Nancy told Scott about it, he brushed it off and told her that she was making too big a deal about it. When Tom got home, he found his parents arguing about it and he aligned with his father against his mother.

After Tom moved out on his own, his parents decided to get a divorce. Tom still had a lot of anger towards his mother. He felt that she was always trying to stop him from doing things that he wanted to do, but he thought that his dad understood him. He also thought his father was better off without her.

When Tom was in his mid-20s, he entered into a relationship with Ann. At first, he enjoyed being with her and he had fun. But as the relationship got more serious, Tom became fearful of the intimacy. He knew that he loved Ann, but he often found the relationship to be "too intense."

One day, he met Susan at a local bookstore, and he started dating her without telling Ann and without telling Susan that he was supposed to be in a monogamous relationship. Once he began the affair with Susan, even though she was unaware of it, Tom entered into a classic "love triangle".

After he began dating Susan, he felt more comfortable in his relationship with Ann. Whenever he felt that things were getting "too intense" with Ann, he would go out with Susan. After a while, he got good at juggling these two relationships. But one day, Susan confronted him by telling him that her friend saw him with Ann and that it was obvious that he was in a relationship with her.

Tom tried to lie, but he knew that Susan knew the truth, so he admitted that he was in a primary relationship with Ann. He expected that Susan would leave him, but she told him that she didn't want to end their relationship and she begged Tom to leave Ann for her.

Tom wasn't sure what to do. He liked seeing both women and he wasn't sure if he would be happy with just one of them. He considered Ann to be his primary relationship and, after he thought about it for a while, he told Susan that he wasn't leaving Ann. To his amazement, Susan continued to see him, knowing that she was "the other woman."

Then, one day, Susan found Ann's telephone number on Tom's cell phone and called her. She told Ann all about her affair with Tom and that she would wait for Tom to leave Ann. When Ann angrily confronted Tom about this, he felt that Ann was overreacting. He left Ann to go be with Susan that night, and the two of them aligned with each other and agreed that Ann was blowing things out of proportion.

Susan told Tom that she would never leave him and she would wait for him as long as it took. Tom was very flattered by this. In the meantime, Ann threatened to leave Tom if he didn't end things with Susan. When Tom told Susan this, she told Tom that Ann couldn't really love him that much if she was threatening to leave and she was the one who really loved Tom, not Ann.

Two weeks later, Ann ended the relationship with Tom. He was surprised that he missed her as much as he did, even when he was with Susan. He tried to get Ann back, but she refused to see him or take his calls.

Susan was thrilled that Ann was out of the picture because she thought that now she would have Tom all to herself. But once Tom was no longer in a "love triangle" with Ann and Susan, he began to feel very uneasy. He didn't want to spend all of his time with Susan. It frightened him and he felt it was "too intense." So, when he met Linda, he began dating her without telling Susan--until Susan found out and she left him.

Tom's relationships continued in this way until he was in his 30s and he began to feel that his life was empty. He continued to create "love triangles" without fully understanding why. By the time his next relationship with a woman named Amy ended, he felt despondent and exhausted. He loved Amy more than any other woman that he had ever loved and his feelings frightened him more than ever, which lead him to engage in his usual pattern--to cheat on her as a way to distract himself from his scary feelings.

After Amy left him, Tom realized that he couldn't continue to live his life this way, and he began psychotherapy. His psychotherapist helped Tom to understand the connection between the triangular relationship he had with his father and mother and the "love triangles" that he formed in his romantic relationships. He realized that he had a lot of hard work to do in therapy to overcome his fear of intimacy so he could have a healthy relationship.

Over time, Tom was able to confront his fear of intimacy. He entered into a relationship with Betty and, whenever he felt tempted to act out by going outside their relationship, rather than act out impulsively, he talked about it with his therapist and avoided the impulse to act out. He also worked through the effects of his dysfunctional relationship with his parents.

As the above fictionalized account illustrates, people who create "love triangles" in their relationships often (although not always) grew up in families were there was triangulation. When they become adults, triangulating seems normal and natural to them and, not only will they do this in their romantic relationships, but they often create these triangles in their friendships, pitting one friend against another.

Triangles in families and in romantic relationships usually give the person at the head of the triangle (like Tom) the sense of power. Triangulation also serves as a defense against feeling alone and vulnerable. It usually creates havoc in families and romantic relationships and is detrimental to all involved.

Getting Help in Therapy
If you are aware that you tend to create triangles in your family or your romantic relationships, you owe it to yourself and your loved ones to get help. 

Rather than continuing in destructive patterns that are damaging to yourself and to those you care about, with professional help from a licensed psychotherapist who has expertise in this area, you can learn how to function in healthy and loving ways in your relationships.

About Me

I am a licensed NYC psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR and Somatic Experiencing therapist.

I work with individual adults and couples.

I have helped many individuals and couples overcome the detrimental effects of triangulation so that they can have more satisfying relationships.

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during regular business hours or email me