In which Wolf tells his story about the value of integrity. Watch this episode on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/3BRquKjKIBY
I was born in Hollywood California in 1965, and grew up in Los Angeles. I started learning to program computers when I was 11 and started lifting weights when I was 14. I learned how to ride a motorcycle when I was 27 and got married when I was 29. My two boys were born in 2000 and 2004. I divorced in 2009 and remarried in 2018. I currently live near Las Vegas.
And now you know everything about my life!
Well, truthfully now you know almost nothing about my life. Almost nothing.
But here's the thing: if you were one of my family members or best friends, the timeline I just gave you would obviously be true. Anyone who knows me well would agree, "Yep, that's all true."
Of course, in any life there's always a lot more to tell: stories within stories. And right now, I'm not about to give you my whole autobiography. But I'm telling you this to make a point: because one of my core values is integrity. It's important to me that all the pieces of my life fit together.
A topic I'm going to keep coming back to is the importance of having a coherent system of values by which to live your life. Let me tell you a little more about my life, one of the stories within my story that deals directly with conflicting values.
My first marriage was pretty unhappy. We were naïve and got married for entirely the wrong reasons. Having two children didn't make it better.
(Clip plays)
"If you encounter any problems, and tensions, and arguing that you cannot resolve yourselves, you will be assigned children. That usually helps, a lot."
(Clip ends)
Late in my first marriage I had an affair. I actually didn't set out to have an affair, but there I was. Suffice to say that on the good side I discovered aspects of my being I never could have found out any other way. On the bad side, I had started living a lie, and I hated it. I was living a double life: I was out of integrity.
Integrity as a value is about wholeness. When you are in integrity, you're walking the talk, and your life is a single story. If you had asked me at the start of my marriage whether I was the sort of person who could ever cheat, I'd have said, no way! One value I've always held very strongly is loyalty, and I knew I could be loyal to my marriage. I had no doubts.
But now I was stuck. I had a several options: I could have continued my affair indefinitely, and since it was long distance, there was really no reason to think I'd get caught. Or I could have just ended it, never mentioned it to my wife, and gone on like nothing had happened. But those options would just have made me a successful cheater, and wouldn't have addressed the reason I was open to cheating in the first place: my marriage was (to put it mildly) unfulfilling.
If you've seen the play Hamilton, you know that in 1791 Alexander Hamilton started an affair. His situation was then compounded by extortion from his paramour's husband. And when the news of his indiscretion started to leak, the scheming of his political rivals. He eventually decided to write a full public confession in what became known as the "Reynolds Pamphlet," and while he succeeded in dispelling accusations of political corruption, he pretty much torched his marriage.
Here's the thing about values: life presents us with a series of choices about which values we are to uphold at any given time. When values conflict we're faced with choices that seem to require us to sacrifice one value to another. Hamilton decided that his integrity as a public official needed to be upheld, even at the expense of his marriage. In fact, if he'd tried to hold out he might have eventually ended up losing both, so he took definitive action to limit the damage.
Like Hamilton, I knew there was no undoing what I had done. Unlike Hamilton, my situation had none of the monetary or political intrigue, but I definitely had an accuser: my own sense of integrity. Something had to change, and nothing would change in my own spirit or character by my simply sweeping my situation under the rug.
After a great deal of soul searching I decided on my own plan of action: that I had to re-integrate my story, and that there was only one way to do that: I confessed my affair to my wife.
It was the single hardest thing I have ever done, and it felt like I was driving a knife into her heart and mine at the same time. I told her that I was sorry for betraying her trust, but I wasn't sorry for falling in love with another. I was willing to stay together for the sake of our children, but I wasn't willing to simply continue our relationship as if nothing had changed.
Not surprisingly, she filed for divorce soon after that. I knew that was the most likely outcome. But I had told the truth. I was again living a single story.
It turns out that for me, integrity is a higher value than loyalty. My affair put me in the situation where I had to admit that I had been disloyal as a way of becoming whole again.
Of course, I also had a plan for how to live my life after that: while we can never undo our grievous mistakes, we can ask ourselves that magical question, "What can I do differently so this never happens again?" At that point I decided that I'd just never get married again. If you don't choose to live monogamously, you can't actually cheat, right? What followed was a number of years of experimentation with alternative lifestyles like polyamory. There are a lot more stories within stories there as well, but for now I'll just say that I eventually learned who I really was and what I really wanted. Eventually I met a woman who was in every respect a match for me, and actually worth 100% of my devotion, and we're now truly, happily married.
Along my path I've met some people living two, three, even four separate lives; siloing their relationships, telling different stories— different lies— to different people, and even adopting different personalities to try to get what they need. For these people, their worst nightmare that they try to avoid at all costs, is to have people from different silos compare notes about them. How exhausting!
An old friend of mine once said, "Live your life as a tale to be told." People who know me well know this about me: I don't tell everyone everything about my life. I tell the stories about what I've learned, and that I hope others can learn from. But my guiding light is this: if someday after I'm gone everyone got together and told all the stories about me they know, that they would all fit together into a single greater, integrated story. To me, that's what integrity, what wholeness is about.
Here's my takeaway for anyone who's ever felt they've lived a double life: there are two key components to getting back into integrity with oneself.
The first is being willing to finally tell the truth, and accepting the consequences.
The second is to have a plan to never do it again, which in theology is called repentance. Repentance simply means to turn and go the other way. At first I thought I was done with the absolute commitment of marriage. After years of additional life experience I eventually realized that what I was actually done with was rushing into relationships that seemed to give me what I wanted, without actually giving me what I needed. And to figure out what I really needed, I had to figure out who I was at a very deep level, which is a story for another day.
But what do you think? Let me know in the comments, and please share the video with someone you think would like it too.
See you tomorrow!