He donated sperm to help a friend start her family. A decade later that gift shattered his own. Esther talks through the consequences of a secret.
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None of the voices in this series are ongoing patients of Esther Perel.

Each episode of Where Should We Begin is a one-time counseling session.

For the purposes of maintaining confidentiality, names and some identifiable characteristics have been removed, but their voices and their stories are real.

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I have been in a relationship for the past 17 years.

2 and a half years prior to our daughter being born, I was approached by 2 friends about donating sperm for them to start a family.

I never told about the donation and I actively lied about it.

I received a text message from an acquaintance I know.

2 of their kids are twins, and she texted me that the father of the twins is my partner.

At the same point that I made this donation, I was also having a relationship with another woman.

How do we move forward and is this a pattern?

And I don't get a chance to redo this with anyone else because I'm 49 and I'm now disabled.

It makes me question myself if I'm being weak to stay.

How do you get over a betrayal this deep?

heard of many lies in the course of my 40 years of working with couples.

Sometimes it's the lies of cheating or stealing or sexual abuse.

And the secret is I donated sperm to a couple of friends.

And 1 day when you asked me, and I responded without responding, the secret turned into a lie.

I have something called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.

It's a connective tissue disorder, And for me, it affects my spine really bad.

So now I have a gait impairment and it's affecting my voice and my hands will curl up.

So I could be fine walking around and then it'll hit me and I'll start having a gait, like all of a sudden I'll lock up.

And it adds layers into the complexity of our situation because I don't trust my body.

I trust that he will physically take care of me or be there for me and show up for me for any sort of a medical need.

But there's other parts that I've lost trust in and I really want to hear your insight because they're severe betrayals and I want to know if I can build that trust back.

And not only that, are there times when you stay with someone that you can't completely trust because you love them and you're really happy with your life?

Or am I always gonna feel like there's gonna be another shoe to drop?

But I'm glad you just framed 2 very clear questions.

Can you rebuild trust after it is broken?

The question I bring is how to rebuild trust after this betrayal, which is that I donated sperm to a lesbian couple 2 and a half years before our daughter was born.

They pitched me and yeah, yeah, this is something I can do.

But I especially when we got pregnant, I had already signed away all my rights, but I was uneasy about the situation, to say the least.

I was feeling like it's too late, I can't do anything about it.

So you have 1 question that you both share about what happened, why you did what you did and how you managed it and why it became a secret.

And then you have a question about now that the secret is revealed, there is how do you mend the betrayal and then there is how do you manage the reality of the fact that there are other children.

And what does that mean for you individually, for you as a couple, and for all of you

So 1 thing I'm going to put right in front here is that you have just learned of this.

So a lot of today is completely infiltrated with the recency of the news.

If we had this conversation in 6 months, we would be having a different conversation.

We're going to have the time that we have today, and it will be a conversation that's going to end with 3 dots at the end of the sentence.

I'm going to go back for a split second because I Can't meet a couple without being very curious always about the origin myth the origin story every couple has a story of how they met and what brought them together and That helps me understand also

the betrayal so we've known each other for 17 years.

But we hadn't been, and he kept someone else that he had been seeing.

He loaned me his laptop and his email was open.

And he had been having a full-blown two-year affair with this woman.

We spent quite a bit of time apart, and he, for the first time, started therapy.

In those months of therapy, I was really trying to dig into what was driving me.

And coming out of a divorce, I still wasn't ready for a relationship.

I was making a lot of decisions based on what was good for me, or like ego-based things at the time.

I think he is extremely arrogant and that he thinks he could get away with it.

But I think that you have traits that sabotage us as a couple and However you look at it, it also could be your own integrity.

I could be completely off base, but how on earth do you live this double life for 11 years and have a magical relationship.

If you're not so arrogant, you believe you can get away with it.

She's able to hold many contradictions about him.

The man who lies to her and cheats on her, but also the man who takes exquisitely good care of her since she has been ill.

The man with whom she has created a beautiful life and the man who has kept a secret and lied flat in her face.

The ability to hold those contradictions is a feature of mature love.

My selfishness was based around, around my traveling or doing what I wanted to do.

How do you do what you want and get away with it?

And what allowed for the magical thinking is that in some level it disconnects you from reality.

If I don't tell it, it will not be known.

You know, my fictitious reality becomes reality.

That's how we sometimes can live with the deception and convince ourselves that it's better like this, that it would be too painful to her or to your daughter, that you've worked so hard at creating something so beautiful.

He too lives with a contradiction because he's acutely aware every time that he's lying.

And he is going to confirm that with a host of examples.

And the delusional thinking that accompanies it is that if I don't talk about it, the longer I don't tell, the more it will disappear.

So he goes back and forth between, oh, it's nothing, and it is the secret that sits in the middle of the relationship.

Well, I think that that sums up a lot of the situation and or the reality I was living, which is the longer I don't tell, this gets to continue.

How we're living and the happiness that we have with each other, all 3 of us gets to keep going.

In our relationship, there were 100 different times that I wanted to say it.

You're watching a movie and there's a situation that has some similarities, or you watch some documentary and 3 kids who never knew each other come together.

And I want to say it, and I could never find the words.

And I was too afraid of our magic to end, our relationship.

2 weeks before, a week before, the mom had texted to reveal this.

We were having the discussion laying in bed, like are we really this lucky to have this good of a life.

would say that probably every other month.

We would have a moment of, I love you so much, we're so lucky.

Which is part of the confusion for me to realize I was being lied to all of that time when I was so emotionally intimate with him.

That moment felt so pure and perhaps it was, but if this huge weight was on his shoulders and now he's feeling such relief, that makes me believe that it must have still been on his shoulders when he was pretending like everything was great.

Or that because everything was great, it kept mushrooming the fear.

Like that's why I say as a human being, I can understand at a certain point why he didn't tell.

Now, I don't agree that it was right, but I get it.

Every time people talk about the truth, it always is about living with the consequences of the truth.

In a way, he doesn't tell you the truth because on some level he knows for a fact that You won't go for that.

When a long-held lie or secret explodes in a relationship, It has the capacity to make us question the entire story of the relationship.

Does that mean that everything else is now redefined in light of this new piece of information and the whole thing was a lie.

The whole thing was a fraud, not just this lie that sat in the middle of the relationship.

But at other times, like here, what existed between these 2 people is no less true, authentic, and heartfelt.

And it sat on the same couch together with the lie.

It's not because there was a lie, even though it is what we often feel at first, that the whole thing was a fraud.

The whole thing was a lie because there was a lie in the middle of the beauty.

That is actually what I'm moving through right now.

And sometimes I want to say whatever was between you was real as well.

It's there was this, there was this beauty.

And the fact that it was magical, as you both described, only reinforced the need for the secret.

I see in their body language that they both understand the irony of this, that because the relationship was so magical, as they both call it, it actually incentivized for the lie to be kept under wraps even more.

The more beautiful the relationship, the bigger the risk that it could be destroyed.

But At the same time, because it was so strong, it now has the ability to hold on and stay grounded even though it is being slapped left and right by all these new discoveries.

For Some couples, when the lie explodes, it is the end of the relationship.

And for those of you listening, where a lie and a betrayal was the death knell, this may become more challenging to listen to, because you may not have had the opportunity and the groundwork necessary to survive a lie.

It hurts so bad to see that she's been destroyed by this, like she's shook.

And the fact that I made the decision to donate sperm, That I made the decision

1 definitely led to the other is what I mean.

If you had told her, what would have happened?

I almost guaranteed that we wouldn't be here today and that we would have not had a relationship.

When you began to be serious and you said, 2 years ago I donated?

You would have said, then we have no chance?

I believe in same-sex marriage and sperm donation and all of that.

For me personally, I want to be with a man who wants to be with his biological children.

I also know the couple that he donated to, and I would not want to have half siblings with their children, and that's not the situation.

And you knew those people back then as well?

So there was a reason for you not to tell.

In conversation, She said things like, I don't want to be with a man that has any children from a previous marriage.

I don't recall it that way because I actually don't feel that way.

I think I would be okay if it were a man coming into my life who had children.

But it was the deception and it was the choice with people who I knew who in my opinion were not an appropriate choice.

If we separated now and I were to meet a man with other kids, I would take those kids on.

And to be honest with you, I'm not having those feelings about the twins.

And it might be because everything is too soon.

I found out via text right before the holidays from 1 of the moms, He did not tell me.

So again, it's another secret that I discovered.

And why did that mother connect with you and not with him?

I do not feel like it was her secret to share.

So with her life in chaos, it could have been her looking for stability, camaraderie, family.

She did say, we are family now, and our children are half-siblings, and I know you're going to do the right thing." This was all said in the same sentence.

But finding out again of such a significant betrayal by evidence presented to me, not by him sharing it with me, is part of my pain in moving forward with someone who I really wanna be with.

If I'm being honest with you, I want to be with him.

I think he's got a lot of charming traits.

So I know if we don't work out, I will be okay, but it's not really what I want to do.

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