Four Years Waiting for Her to Leave Her Husband: The Case That Explains Self-Deception in Love

A forty-one-year-old man has spent more than four years waiting for the married woman he’s in love with to keep her promise to leave her husband. Walter Riso, his psychologist, has been keeping track, one by one, of every reason she’s given for not having done it yet.

In ¿Amar o depender? (2003), psychologist Walter Riso devotes an entire chapter to what he calls affective realism: seeing a relationship as it actually is, not as one would like it to be. To illustrate just how far the human mind can go before accepting an uncomfortable truth, he draws on the case of a patient he identifies only by the initials P. R.

A recently separated man looking for stability

P. R. had been separated for eight months when he came to therapy. His wife had left him for another man, and he, hurt and in a hurry to rebuild his life, started dating various candidates until he fell for a coworker: married, a regular confidante of his, and, as Riso describes her, an “amateur therapist” for his own problems.

Very quickly, the two started making plans for the future. She would separate, he would take the place of new husband and father to her daughters. They saw each other up to four times a week. According to Riso, the compatibility between them (humor, values, interests, sex life) seemed almost perfect.

The list of reasons that never ran out

Riso, as his psychologist, soon began suggesting caution. His clinical experience told him something uncomfortable: when one of the two people in a relationship is married and the other is completely available, it’s usually the available one who ends up worse off.

But every time it seemed the separation was finally about to happen, a new reason to postpone it would appear. Riso reconstructs, almost like a litany, the string of explanations he received over the following months:

• “Her husband fell into a depression.”
• “The business is doing badly.”
• “Her father-in-law is dying.”
• “She was raised by nuns.”
• “She’s the youngest of eight siblings.”
• “Her husband won’t let her separate.”
• “She’s very attached to her children.”

Riso makes an observation that sums up the underlying problem well: none of those explanations accounted for the simplest and most painful possibility of all, that she simply didn’t love him enough to take the step.

When it finally happens… and lasts two weeks

After a year and a half, the woman finally separated. To everyone’s surprise, including her own husband’s, the decision lasted barely two weeks. Guilt, the daughters, her mother (especially her mother, as Riso underlines), her mother-in-law, and even her own psychiatrist pulled her back. There were more attempts afterward, all with the same outcome.

Riso writes that, by the time he told the case, P. R. and his partner had already been together for four years under the same conditions, celebrating their anniversary at a discreet restaurant, far from anyone who might recognize them. The latest update P. R. brought to therapy was, in Riso’s own words, “hard to believe”: “This time she really is going to separate.”

What self-deception does with evidence

Riso doesn’t tell this case to judge P. R., but to show how self-deception works when there’s an affective attachment involved. According to his framework, the mind finds very varied ways to sustain a hope, even when the available facts point in the opposite direction:

• Justifying how little you receive, attributing it to external causes rather than to the other person’s genuine lack of decision.
• Accepting every new excuse without noticing that the list of excuses never stops growing.
• Measuring the passage of time in hope, not in results: every month that passes gets read as “we’re getting closer,” instead of as a sign that the expected change might never happen.

Riso sums up the core of the problem with a sentence that could have spared P. R. much of his suffering: “I think I love you, but I’m not able to go through with it.” That sentence, he notes, would have been far more honest and useful than any of the excuses gathered over four years, though also far more painful to hear.

Why it’s so hard to accept the obvious

Affective realism, as Riso frames it, doesn’t mean systematically distrusting another person’s promises. It means something simpler and more uncomfortable: paying the same attention to what happens as to what’s promised. When the two haven’t matched for years, according to his framework, the most likely explanation is no longer found in external circumstances (the husband, the family, the timing), but in the actual decision, made or not made, of the person from whom a change is expected.

P. R.’s case doesn’t have, at least as far as Riso tells it, a resolved ending. And it’s precisely that lack of closure, four years after the first promise, that makes his story such a clear example of how affective attachment can sustain, almost indefinitely, a wait that the facts themselves have already answered.