Dear Chump Lady,
I would love to hear your take on this:
When my former significant other (SO) was sneaking around behind my back having her affair, she would wait until I went out of town and then invite her affair partner (AP), (from another country!), to book a flight and spend time with her in our house, in our bed. I found out when I discovered chat transcripts between the two of them on my laptop. Here’s an excerpt from one of the chats when they were planning their first meeting in the flesh (ugh):
SO: Yes, you’ll be in this room with me at that point…more likely upstairs ….AP: I don’t mind where
SO: I suspect that similar things will be happening no matter which room we are in
AP: Well, we don’t need to confine ourselves to one room
SO: You won’t feel confined here 😉
Other remarks made it clear that AP had booked a hotel room, but still it was important for the two of them to defile every damned room of the house. I wasn’t supposed to find out (or was I?), but I did, and it felt like a flashing neon “fuck you.” The sheer hostility of the violation made me reel.
Is this a part of the sick excitement or something?
Thanks,
A Fan
Dear AF,
First off, AF, I’m so sorry. What a sick, sociopathic fucker she is. Second, AF — Eww. To answer this I’d have to imagine being inside the depraved mind of your cheater, which is asking me to untangle that particular skein of fuckupedness.
Pardon me a moment while I get my hip waders, so I can muck through the fetid swamp…
My first thought is that she’s simply not thinking of you at all. Which I know is a very unsatisfying answer and perhaps the most obvious. Neither she, nor her foreign fuckbuddy give a shit about your shared life together. (Perhaps someone should explain our local customs to the poor idiot — we don’t shag in strangers’ homes.) It is a shocking reminder that you do not factor into their decision-making at all. There’s no honor among thieves or cheaters. Can you imagine how that conversation would go? Hey, I’ve got a hotel room! Oh, good — because you know, my bedroom is sacred and off limits. I can fuck around on AF, but I draw the line at doing it in our home.
There is no boundary when it comes to kibbles. Perhaps some cheaters have rules (I’ll screw people I meet on adult friend finder, but I won’t pay for sex… or I’ll pay prostitutes, but I won’t have an emotional affair), but most cheaters apparently have no limits to what they’ll do for kibbles. Their narcissism is so intense, the need for kibbles so great, as to block out any sentient thought whatsoever.
That’s one take on it. I ran this one by my husband and he had a different take on it. He thinks boinking in the family bed is something women cheaters are more prone to. That they audition affair partners for roles in their life. Maybe they’ll trade in their current partner for a better one! So it’s all part of a big Let’s Play House fantasy. That’s where she lives, so that’s where she’s going to play house. I wonder what the fuckbuddy looks like in my kitchen, my bedroom, etc. It’s like a sociopathic game of paper dolls.
As theories go, it’s interesting, but in my experience men are just as prone to fuck someone in their own homes as women are. In my case, my ex brought his OW to a vacation cabin and did the deed in flannel sheets I had bought us. (How do I know? I found her underwear. Classy.)
So that brings us to the “sick excitement” theory. Yes, I do think they do it for a sick excitement pay off. It’s that thrill of deceit thing I talk about here. If those two cheaters shared a life together, having sex in their bedroom would not be nearly the hijinks it would be as having sex in your bedroom. The trespassing is part of the high. It’s not a transgression if it’s allowed and accepted.
That’s why I call bullshit at open relationships, btw. Most cheaters don’t want them. They want to CHEAT. They want to gain advantage over an unwitting innocent. They’ll take an “open” relationship if they get found out, but the preferred form of cake eating is dependent upon duping. I get more at your advantage and you don’t know about it — hahahaha.
You could go further into the skein of fuckupedness and ask yourself why it’s so important to them to play such sick games to “win.” Perhaps they hate you and it really is a big “fuck you.” Perhaps they feel aggrieved and it’s their way of evening the score. But that underscores again how sick the whole thing is. First off, if they hate you — really, the only way they can “fight” you is if you have one arm tied behind your back and you’re blindfolded? Do they think they can only attack you if you’re at a severe disadvantage (you don’t know what they’re up to)? And if they are aggrieved, are these actions proportionate to your crimes?
No, of course not. Unless you drown kittens and torture small children. No, the problem is that people like your former SO don’t ascribe meaning to things. Which is very scary — to be that compartmentalized. Even to say they are compartmentalized implies there is a compartment somewhere there with some substance and feeling inside, it’s just walled off. But no, it could be a bed is just a bed is just a bed to her. It’s not a bed you shared together, where intimacies were shared, where you said you loved each other. To her it may be just… a bed. Convenient. Naughty because you’re not in it, the fuckbuddy is. Whatever she said she felt for you was just situational, fleeting, impermanent, variable. You ascribed meaning to it because you’re a real person with real feelings. A bed is something you shared and so you gave that bed meaning.
There are normal people out there like you AF, who can connect. Who ascribe meaning to shared experiences because they FEEL those experiences. You need a person in your life who has boundaries and who is capable of creating sacred spaces with you and keeping those places safe. What she did was a grotesque violation to your sense of safety. She defiled what should be your safest space — the place where you lay your head each night to sleep. The place you make love.
I’m glad to read she is your former SO. And I hope you burned the bed and got some new sheets. Wishing you a much happier new year, AF.
AF, I am sitting here shaking my head. Dreadful for you to have to experience that sort of thing. I find that cheaters who take their other people into their spouse’s home are just all kinds of sick. All I can say, really, is: thank goodness you had the good sense to make her your ex SO and aren’t trying to do some kind of reconciliation with a person who would do such a thing. Well done, you.
CL, your response is great. I have to say though, this part: “My first thought is that she’s simply not thinking of you at all. ” really says it all.
Unfortunately for the BS, who is the person who ends up gobsmacked and brutalized when he or she finds out about the situation, the affair is really just not about him or her. It is about the cheater, who is selfishly doing what he or she is doing with an equally selfish other person.
I think that’s why it is so awful when I see the BSs on surviving infidelity (they are quoting your latest HuffPo blog post on there today, CL, by the way) struggling so hard to understand why the cheater did it. Even though we all know it is not the BSs fault, that digging for the why screams: “I must be in there somewhere, I must have figured into this somehow…” But the honest truth seems to be: no the BS didn’t. And maybe that’s the most hurtful thing of all, we were non-entities and totally marginalized. We were made “other” in our own marriage. And that SUCKS.
Likewise, when some BSs get into that pattern of wondering about the other person, and, god forbid, engaging with the other person — that seems to be about exercising some kind of control again, or the BS reasserting his or her position as “spouse”. Well, if the BS’ spouse didn’t think one second about the BS’ feelings, then why the hell would the other person have the BS’ well being at heart? Female BSs especially do this, like: “How could a woman do this to another woman?” Especially if the Other woman was originally a BS, because then she KNEW the pain she was causing and yet she still did it. Yes she did. Because she was only thinking of herself.
These are selfish people who cannot be understood and no time should be really wasted on trying to understand them. Understanding them will not make the pain go away. Only distance and a concerted effort to move on with your own life will make that pain fade. Or at least that’s been my experience.
Dear Chump lady fan:
I am so sorry your wife is a narcissistic asshat.
I really do empathize, my STBX had trysts in one of our very first homes. The home we occupied right after getting married.
It is now a furnished rental home, but he boffed his OW there. Seriously, how cold and uncaring.
I can relate to your astonishment and feeling that it had to be some time of royal Eff you, but then I also agree with Chump lady’s hubby that perhaps it wasn’t a royal Eff you, it was just that,they just weren’t thinking about us at all. They were thinking about themselves. Period.
My STBX lied about using that honeymoon house for his trysts, but I had a feeling he had because all of sudden it needed some major renovations, and it wasn’t put up for rent for a long while.
I confronted him, but he lied and lied and then one day way after the affair was discovered, and during a false reconciliation, I found proof that he had taken the OW there.
It was just as painful as originally finding out about the affair.
I think these cheaters are just self absorbed and selfish and all manner of screwed up.
Sorry to hear your wife was as big of an asshat as my STBX.
Yes, I have to agree that violating the marriage bed itself is some kind of special Fuck You on the part of the cheater.
In my case, his last, long term affair was with a dyed-in-the-wool, bipolar and probably personality disordered bunny boiler, who has spent the last 3 years since D-day making my life a living hell. She left long voice mails at my work phone detailing every sexual act they performed on each other. She also left them on my cell phone voice mail and sent texts and emails, until I shut down all those accounts. And (remember this was pre-chump days) I actually agreed to talk to her once. She was on the phone for an hour, breathlessly detailing every hook-up, in between lecturing me on how I had pushed him away, and what I needed to do to “keep” a man. But the one thing I remember from that god-awful conversation was her prim insistence that they had never done it in our house. Don’t know why that stood out, or why she felt compelled to throw in that little factoid. Funny, huh?
last troll kept it up for 7 years after I left.Only stopped when she was charged with assault
My lying ex-husband swears that they never did it in our marital bed, but I know that I and my cheater ex-husband did do it in our bed and that was reason enough to get rid of it.
So I did. Got my own brand new bed–new sheets, new spreads, all my own taste, very lovely. Apparently this is very common housekeeping among the betrayed.
Back in the day when I was still doing The Dance on the one hand, and on the other hand eagerly purging all his crap from our family home, I asked him if he’d like to have the King-sized sheets that we used to have on our bed–all once very nice linens. He said he did. I told him that he and she would be snug as two bugs in our marital bedding.
They both are disgusting. No way in HELL would I be caught dead doing what she’s doing. What trolls they are.
Ew.
Be gone with the losers.
Oh, but you know where they did do it? In our family truck. THAT made me mad. That was our family vehicle, one we’d taken many trips together in, and they’d defiled it. And after he left, he drove our kids around in that car. I never told them what their father did on those seats. That would have been cruel.
How can someone do that, invade a family sanctuary? How thoughtless and callous and stupid can someone be? Like barn yard animals, coupling just wherever, with no regard for anything or anyone.
Well, of course, nothing is sacred to these people. And that’s just sick.
I have no illusions, AF. I’ve got a STBXH, not an XH. I do not for one moment believe that he would not have used our bed if he’d had time. And of course, for about 1 week of every year, he’d know that I’d not be around. That week would be my birthday week. STBXH has a lousy track record of staying on top of my birthday, so I figured I’d visit my mom that week. After all, she’d at least bake a home-made cake, not get a cake from the local supermarket. Heck, my office throws a better party than he does. Anyway, STBXH knows that I’m gone during that time and would have no hesitation bringing the OW here.
I’m going to go along with CL’s husband, though, and say that on his part, it’s not an issue of defiling our marital bed. It’s convenience. It works. That he wouldn’t think about the larger issues just shows how narcissistic the cheater mind really is.
I, too, am glad that he’s an ex SO.
I would totally believe that cheating women are more likely to actually WANT to do this sort of thing, whereas men are more likely to compartmentalize and just do what is convenient for them…
My husband didn’t have sex with the OW in our bed… what happened in my case is she volunteered to babysit for us so we could go to a concert and stay overnight. So, she got to play house with my own children and sleep in my bed. Her husband was here briefly as well and her child stayed too. According to him when I spoke to him after everything came out, she begged him to have sex in our bed (according to him he wouldn’t do it, but who knows). So she got to essentially play house, even if my STBX wasn’t actually with her, while he got the convenience of going to his concert. I had sex that night as well. Grrr. My husband uses whoever is convenient for him.
Like lifting their leg and peeing on your stuff, eh? I bet you’re right.
She babysat your kid and slept in your bed? OMG. Depraved.
yeah, seriously. It’s the shit like this that was worse than him just going off and having sex with someone else. It’s like it never occurred to him how twisted it was and how it would make me feel. Nope. The thoughts were just “I would like to go to this concert. This person (who I happen to be fucking on the side) can help make that happen for me”
STBX didn’t have sex in our bed but did have sex in the living room after a party, when I’d fallen asleep. I can’t figure out which piece of furniture he used so might have to dump the lot of it.
Wow, AF, that is horrendous. I don’t know how someone would have an AP into the home without recognizing how wrong that is. I hope you are taking good care of yourself and friends and family are giving you support.
I don’t think my exh brought anyone to the house as he traveled so much while I worked in town, but I have cleared out much of our shared furniture and belongings. I sold things on Craigslist, hauled boxes to Goodwill and like Stephanie bought a new mattress set, sheets, etc. as well as doing the remodeling he was always putting off. (I guess if you are gambling behind your wife’s back, your not really willing to apply for a loan.) The house may be a little bare in spots but what here is mine. It’s a comfort to come home to.
So AF, best wishes to you for a much better year. You deserve it.
-Duped
I’m getting some of that remodeling done, too. New roof, new fence, new windows, etc. And when I make repairs on the house, now I don’t have to step over his lazy ass playing video games on the floor.
UhN!
Good for you, Duped!
New bed, comforter, etc. for me too! Painted the room and will be doing some curtains and new pictures as well. It’s MY room now. I also painted the family room soon after he was out, including the fireplace mantle. Something he thought I was “crazy” to do… then when I did it the room looks so much better I know it pissed him off 🙂
So many of our stories are eerily similar. When I moved, I was so excited to do my bedroom the way that I wanted it– light walls, light comforter cover, light-colored carpeting. Every bedroom I shared over the years with STBX was depressing– very dark and stuffy looking. Although I have no evidence that the OW was ever near the last home we shared together, I was still quite happy to leave him with all of the old furniture and to get things that I finally wanted.
They’re all control freaks, aren’t they?
I know I’m replying to old comments-still makes me feel better?I threw out the bed he’d rooted one of his trolls in(while I was in the next room!) , threw him out and bought a new bed.Several other trolls before I threw him out. Let him come back(day of my cousins funeral, he knew I’d be shattered). Couple of weeks later they did it again in my new bed.Just pissing on me.
Now, THAT’S therapy!
Where’s Erica?
Erica? If you haven’t done so already, time to do some rearranging of your house. Maybe some painting, purging, repairs, etc. It is wonderfully regenerating!
yup done it 🙂 Though I have some more to go…
I remebber Clooney’s character, in “Descendants” inquiring about this and being told that his wife and her Ap had done it twice in their bed.
I believe both my XW’s did this in our homes, as well.
To me, it is just more proof of how incredibly depraved they are.
I know I keep saying this, but these folks are wired siignificantly differently thant non-cheaters and nothing they do surprises me. I think we just have to actually start accepting that we will never understand or relate to what makes them tick.
Arnold:
As others have already mentioned, IMO, the having sex in the marital bed, or a honeymoon hotel or house or anywhere that may be sensitive to the faithful spouse is likely part of the depraved thrill and the conquest.
I occasionally read as many posts as I can stomach from cheaters at Doccool.
It seems the other women in particular see luring a married man as a huge conquest and a testimony to how sex and desirable they are.
They all seem so delusional.
They make these claims that the OM loves them even after he unceremoniously dumps them on Dday.
It’s just another example of their self delusion.
I read somewhere that pathological narcissists go through cycles of devaluing and idealizing themselves just as they do with all the relationships in their lives.
Sara, I think the NPD/sociopath analysis on most of these folks is spot on. Thye are incredibly sick , weird people, as are those OW’s you mention on doccool.
I am no prude and, at one time, due to certain qualities I had no control over and can take no credit for, I was viewed as fairly desirable by women. But, I could never bring myself to act as these people do. Their promiscuity astounds me, frankly.
This may be a whole “nother” discussion, but , I have noticed that the greater number of sex partners a person has in his or her life seems to give some indication of their proclivvity for cheating. The women and men I know who are cheaters, for example, seem to have had many times the number of partners that I have had(that is not saying much, I guess).
When I tell my friends who knew me in college that my first sexual partner was my first wife, when I was 30, they are aghast.
My husband’s OW was a single mom who lived with another single mom. They each had a bedroom they shared with their children, and would take turns using the living room couch for fucking guys after the kiddos were tucked in. I guess my husband tired of that inconvenience/absolutely disgusting trashiness, and our bed provided a convenient alternative.