Welcome to Happily Even After Betrayal with Life Coach Jen. This podcast is where we talk about betrayal and divorce and what it actually looks like to live through those experiences while still being a parent, a grandparent, a partner, or just a human trying to keep it all together. If your heart feels shattered, your nervous system feels dysregulated, and your future feels unclear, you’re in the right place. Here we focus on understanding what happened so you can rebuild your identity, restore your confidence, and find peace. So you can create your happily even after one episode at a time. Hey friends, welcome to today’s podcast. I’m so glad you’re here.
Relationship Equity Explained Simply
Today I’m talking about relationship equity and asking the question: Am I throwing away everything I built? So many of you, including me, have thought this. And I saw an Instagram post of a guy talking about relationship equity. And my brain went, oh my gosh, this is such a great topic. I’m going to explore this regarding betrayal and divorce. And so hang in there with me, right? We’re going to, I’m going to talk about it. When I heard this phrase, you know, I just thought it would be something good we can all relate to, especially if we’ve owned a house. We all know what equity is, right? So let’s say you bought a house 20 years ago. You put money down, you’ve made your mortgage payments every month. Maybe you’ve remodeled the kitchen or the bathroom, you’ve replaced the roof, you’ve painted, you’ve planted trees, and they used to be really little, and now they’re, you know, your yard’s full and it’s grown in. And you’ve put money, time, energy, and probably a lot of sweat equity into this house. And over time, you have equity. So of course you don’t casually walk away from it. And I think we do something very similar in our relationships, especially our long-term marriages. You’ve been married for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, and some of you 40 or more years. And you’ve built this life together. You’ve had babies together, you’ve raised children, you’ve bought homes, you’ve gone on vacations, you’ve survived financial struggles, you’ve survived health struggles, you’ve celebrated birthdays and Christmases and graduations. Maybe you’ve buried your parents together or your brother. You’ve sat in emergency rooms together, you’ve laughed together, you’ve cried together, you’ve built traditions and friendships and community together. You know each other’s families, you have thousands of memories that nobody else on this planet shares quite the same way. That’s relationship
Why Betrayal Makes Decisions Hard
equity. And then betrayal happens. Suddenly you’re looking at this relationship that you’ve invested decades into and asking, What do I do now? Why leaving can feel like losing everything? This is one of the reasons deciding whether to stay or leave after betrayal can feel almost impossible. Because you’re simply not deciding, do I like this person? You’re looking at everything you’ve built. I remember thinking about this in my own marriage. 26 years is a lot of relationship equity. There’s a whole life there. So when someone says, why didn’t you just leave? I think they don’t understand what they’re actually asking. You’re not leaving because you had a bad Tuesday. You’re potentially changing an entire life you’ve spent decades building. And there can be this thought, if I leave now, what was all that for? Or I gave them the best years of my life. I’ve invested too much to start over. I’m not going to let the affair partner win. I don’t want everything we’ve built to be for nothing. And I want you to notice something. Those thoughts turn your decision into winning versus losing. If I stay, maybe I win. If I leave, maybe I lose. Or sometimes the opposite. If I leave, I win. I showed them they can’t treat me that way. If I stay, I lose because I’m allowing them to get away with it. But what if neither is true? What if staying isn’t winning and leaving isn’t losing? What if there’s simply two different choices about what you want to create next? So, relationship equity, it’s real, right? I don’t want to dismiss the investment that you’ve made. Sometimes we’re so quick to say, well, don’t just stay because you’ve been married 25 years. Okay. But let’s have compassion here. Twenty-five years matters. Your memories matter. Your family you’ve created matters. The sacrifices you’ve made matter. The love you felt matters. The person you were in that marriage matters. It makes complete sense that you would hesitate before walking away from something you’ve invested so much into. But here’s why I want to offer you something different.
Equity Is Information Not Obligation
Relationship equity should be information in your decision. It doesn’t have to make the decision for you. That’s a big difference. You can honor everything you’ve built without using it as a reason you must stay. And you can value your history without requiring your future to look exactly like your past. So what happens to my equity if I leave? This is the part I really want you to hear. I think sometimes we imagine that if our marriage ends, all of our relationship equity disappears. It doesn’t. Maybe you finally learned how to listen to yourself. And maybe you learned that abandoning yourself to save a relationship doesn’t actually save the relationship. That knowledge comes with you. Your growth comes with you. Your wisdom comes with you. Your memories come with you, your children don’t disappear, your history doesn’t disappear. The good years don’t suddenly become fake simply because the marriage ended. You don’t walk away empty-handed, you take yourself with you. And hopefully you take a wiser, stronger, more self-aware version of yourself with you. Don’t confuse investment with obligation. Here’s where relationship equity can get tricky. Sometimes we turn our investment into an obligation. I’ve already spent 25 years here, so I have to stay. And I want you to imagine that with our house analogy, imagine you owned a house for 25 years. You’ve loved it. You’ve raised your kids there. There are pencil marks on the wall. We’re showing how tall your children were each year. There are incredible memories there. But now imagine the house no longer works for you. Maybe it’s too big. Maybe you can’t afford it anymore. Maybe the foundation has major problems. Maybe you simply don’t want to live there anymore. Would selling the house mean the previous 25 years were a waste? No. You could love that house. You could appreciate everything that happened there. You could even grieve selling it, and you could still decide, this is no longer where I want to live. I think relationships can sometimes be similar. And please hear me. I’m not saying a marriage is a house. I’m not saying you should leave. I’m saying your previous investment does not automatically determine your next decision.
Choosing To Stay From Agency
Staying can also be a powerful choice. Now let’s talk about that side of it, because relationship equity can absolutely be part of why you choose to rebuild. Maybe you look at your marriage and say, we have something here that I still value. There is enough good here that I want to see whether we can repair what’s broken. That is a valid choice. But if you’re going to stay after betrayal, I don’t want you to stay only because I’ve already invested too much to leave. I’d rather you eventually get to. Those are very different energies. One is fear, one is agency. One says, I can’t leave because I’m invested too much. The other says, I could leave, and right now I’m choosing to stay and see what we can create. That’s empowerment. And I don’t know if you remember, but I’ve told this story about a song that the last year of my marriage, between year 25 and 26, the year I got divorced, I had a share song that became my anthem. And it was I’m strong enough is the name of the song. And I had the thought, I’m strong enough to live without you, and I’m choosing to stay. And for an entire year, I kept repeating that thought because I wasn’t ready to walk away because I still was hoping that my spouse would change and that we could rebuild our marriage. But at the end of that, I realized, no, I dropped the part that I’m choosing to stay, and I just decided I’m strong enough. And that was so empowering that was able to get me to say the hard thing that I wanted a divorce, and I did, and I was ready to walk away. The equity has to continue growing.
Are You Building New Equity Now
Here’s another piece of this analogy I really like. When we talk about equity in a house, we don’t only care about what it was worth 20 years ago, we care about what is happening with it now. I think the same question can be useful in our relationship. Are you still building relationship equity? Not did we used to have a good marriage? Not were we happy 15 years ago? What’s happening today? Is there honesty? Is there accountability? Is there repair? Is there emotional safety? Is there empathy? Is the person who betrayed you willing to look at themselves? Are both of you willing to do the work? Is trust slowly being rebuilt? Are you becoming more authentic with each other? Because you can have a tremendous amount of historical equity and still be living in a relationship that is no longer creating new equity. That’s worth paying attention to.
Your Good Memories Are Still Real
I think this is another place our brain can go after betrayal. Was my entire marriage a lie? And I know many of you have thought this as well as myself. I just thought, oh my gosh, has every memory that I had contained betrayal in it? Like what was real, what was fake? So maybe parts of it were, parts of it were a lie that you might not have even known were a lie. But hear me out. Maybe that they were lies and you just didn’t know about them. And you’re allowed to grieve that. There’s so much grief in that. But betrayal doesn’t necessarily mean every good moment you’ve ever experienced was fake. If you laughed on a family vacation, you laughed. If you loved your spouse, you loved them. If you were happy when your baby was born, that happiness was real. At least it was for you. And that’s all that matters in this. If you created beautiful memories with your children, those memories are still yours. Someone else’s betrayal does not get to steal every good experience you’ve ever had. You get to decide what those years mean to you. And I would challenge you to do that. It’s very powerful, and you get to reframe whatever stories, whatever truths that you want to. So ask yourself. If you’re trying to decide whether to stay or leave, instead of asking, how can I throw away 25 years? I want you to ask, knowing everything I know now, what do I want to create with the years I have ahead of me? I think this is a very powerful question, and it gets you to focus on your future. So it’s a different question. Can you hear it? Can you feel it? Because one question keeps you looking backwards, and the other one allows you to honor your past while you move forwards. Maybe you’re 45, maybe you’re 55, maybe you’re 65. You don’t know how many years you have left. Neither do I. So, yes, let’s honor the 20 or 30 or 40 years that you’ve already invested. And let’s also value the next 10, 20, 30 years that you have ahead of you. Those years matter too. Your future deserves equity too. You didn’t lose your investment. And if you ultimately decide to leave, I don’t want you telling yourself, I wasted 25 years. Maybe there are things you wish you would have done differently. Of course, we all have those. I have them too. But I don’t think my 26-year marriage was simply a waste because it ended. I became a mother, I created a family, I had many experiences that I treasure. I learned, I grew, I also experienced a lot of pain. And eventually I learned how to choose myself differently, and all of that comes with me. The relationship ended, but my growth did not. That’s relationship equity too. And if you choose to stay, you aren’t weak, you aren’t stupid, you aren’t letting them win. Maybe you’re choosing to take the equity you’ve already created and see if the two of you can build something different. But rebuilding requires two people. One person can work on themselves, one person can heal themselves, one person can change their side of the relationship. But rebuilding trust and intimacy after betrayal requires participation from both people. Remember that. Pay attention to that.
Three-Column Equity Inventory Exercise
Your relationship equity inventory. So here’s something I want you to do this week. Take out a piece of paper and create three columns. In the first column, write what you built. What is the relationship equity you’ve created? Children, memories, friendships, experiences, financial stability, traditions, love, whatever belongs there. Okay, write it all down. Just be creative. Secondly, what I built inside of you, inside of yourself. This is equity, but that nobody gets to take from you. Your strength, your wisdom, your capacity to love, your resilience, your boundaries, your compassion, your kindness, your ability to survive hard things, your understanding of yourself, anything else that you think of. The third column, what I want to build next. This might be with your spouse, and it might not be. Don’t make yourself decide that yet, unless you already have, and that’s totally valid. Just ask, what do I want my life to feel like? What kind of relationship do I want? What kind of person do I want to be? What does honesty look like? And this this one is gonna take a lot more thinking, okay? What does emotional safety look like? What does love look like? What does peace look like? What do I want the next chapter of my life to contain? Because here’s what I hope you remember. You aren’t starting over. You’re starting from experience, you’re starting with knowledge, you’re starting with everything you’ve learned, and you’re starting with relationship equity. And whether you choose to stay and rebuild your marriage or choose to rebuild your life outside of your marriage, you get to take the most important equity with you, who you are and who you’ve become.
Getting Unstuck And Finding Support
So don’t make your decision based solely on what you’ve already invested. Don’t make it because you think leaving means losing. And don’t make it because you think staying means winning. Ask yourself, what choice helps me create the life and relationships I want going forward? You don’t have to know the answer today. Healing will create clarity for you, and clarity helps us make decisions from a much different place than fear. If you’re stuck in that place right now, wondering whether to stay or whether to leave, whether your marriage can be rebuilt, or whether you’re simply afraid to walk away from everything you’ve invested, would love to help you. Please schedule a call with me. They’re free. Meet with me, talk to someone. And if it’s not me, talk to someone else. You need help. You cannot do this alone. It’s really hard to try. Believe me, I tried for decades and it didn’t work. We’ll talk about where you are in your healing journey and what’s keeping you stuck and what your next steps could look like. Because whether your happily even after includes your marriage or doesn’t, the equity you’ve built in yourself goes with you. I hope this was a helpful podcast. If you liked and enjoyed it, please share it with your family and friends. And I will see you next week. Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of Happily Even After Betrayal. If you want to understand what stage of betrayal you’re in, head to my website at lifecoachgen.com. That’s Jen with one N and take the free quiz. It’s a simple step you can take today toward creating your own happily even after.
