Meaningless Flings and the Myth of the Good Cheater

I guess I’m excluded because my ex’s affair wasn’t “meaningless,” – it “just happened.” He “just happened” to start a relationship with a much younger married co-worker while we were also married and lie about it. And after they were found out and both getting divorced, moved in together, though from what I’ve heard, they both tried to lie to their families about that too. After she dumped his ass and he tried to come back to me, I believe he did try to sell it to me as “meaningless” – although I pointed out that you can’t move in with someone else and divorce your spouses to be with each other and then try to say it was “meaningless.” I also pointed out that he said extremely hateful things to me during that time. So then it became “I was crazy, I don’t know why I did any of that.”

So maybe that puts me in the “way beyond infidelity” camp too. I have no idea what that means, perhaps I should phone my ex and ask him, I’ll bet it would make sense to his narc mind.

While some people might be able to forgive a “meaningless” one-night stand, I don’t believe I could – that’s a special kind of evil. So you’re willing to ruin everything with your spouse for something that means absolutely nothing to you? That’s pretty cold-blooded.

Infidelity is committed the entitled, self-absorbed, weak-willed and shallow-minded. NEVER once do they think about the others who will be pained by their actions. They live in the moment, and prove they are as shallow as the fucking they do with their fuckbuddies. It was never about commitment with them.

I know a lot of people who have been cheated on and more than a few cheaters. And I’ve never come across anyone who felt, even remotely, that cheating was self-actualization.

I can only assume that these folks (this lady and Dr. Tammy, etc.) have a need to spin infidelity in this way, and so they do. They need a novel viewpoint, something unique, to sell their books and get their articles published. The stone cold, hard, dirty and downright un-glamorous truth isn’t high class enough. We are simple minded and that’s our problem. LOL

Yeah, I’d be pissed about the comment that your situation went beyond infidelity. Perhaps it did. But here’s the rub; the rest of the story isn’t what usually does a marriage in. Most of us can deal with financial woes and other assorted crap. It’s the cheating that’s the deal breaker. So no, it’s really not any more complicated than infidelity.

She can write a book. I don’t know anyone who could believe that crap. Because it’s crap. But hey, I guess it makes for a good academic conference break out session.

Cheating can never be meaningless. The cheater is an adult who understands the multiple consequences for his/her marriage and the pain it will cause his/her partner, children, family and friends but doesn´t care (narcissists have no empathy). Therefore, they take risks knowingly, they plan consciously, they steal time, love, money from their family without hesitation because, as CL repeats often, they feel entitled to do so. And if they kept it secret, they know it is wrong. Full stop.

Every time I managed to get my “good” cheater to understand that the cheating part was all his fault he acted a bit guilty but then came up with some way of blaming back on me (he once said to me “No, it is impossible that all this is my fault…it just can´t be…”). His justification was in the Esther Perel sense “I didn´t mean to hurt you but I needed to feel like a “man”” while at the same time his acts of betrayal and indifference at home humiliated and denigrated me as a “woman.”

This is plain, straight-forward psychological abuse and seeing it like this has helped me on the road to “meh.” Before I had the chance to read CL and other literature on narcissistic abuse, I accepted my responsibility for communication problems, boring sex, etc that all couples have, but now I now see them as all tainted by the cheating…how can you “communicate” or establish a good sexual relationship with someone who is thinking about how soon s/he can get out the door to have his next rendezvous? I used to think my STBXH was depressed and could not be affectionate and was going through a period of sexual malfunction, and I tried to understand it, but now I realize that it was
his form of abuse by not giving me what I wanted the most: his love. It is obvious that he was perfectly capable of giving everything I wanted to someone else, “so there, so I could feel like a man.”

I heard “it meant nothing” from my cheater about his long-term affair, visit to an erotic massage parlor, ads on Craigslist etc. But he told his affair partner how much he meant to her, and he spent a lot of time, effort, and money making all of this happen.

If I hadn’t told him I was done, he’d still be playing this game. Only when I walked away, did AP “win” her prize.

It meant nothing. It meant everything. Well, which is it then?

What am I not getting about the difference between regular prostitutes and the Russian Hookers often mentioned on this blog? It just kills me because thats where my husband went, half way around the world to get Russian ass…must be some good stuff !!!

CL, that twitter response by Esther Perel to you was patronizing.

“My heart goes out to you- my article does not directly apply to your situation, as your experience goes way beyond infidelity”.

Let’s look at her response to you more closely:
1. She established she has a heart. She feels pity for you.
2. She also established you seem confused. Poor bitter CL, you are delusional to believe her article directly applies to your situation.
3. She then says “your experience goes way beyond infidelity”, but she does not elaborate what she means by this.

Basically, she put you in your place. Her faux sympathy was passive agressive. She estalblused you are confused about what “beyond infidelity” means.

Esther Perel’s response to you , showcases how to manipulate the discussion. She does not want to debate. Her response was to shut you down. How can you debate someone who has a heart and feels pity for your bitter confusion.

It’s obvious, Esther Perel cannot deal with her intellectual paradigm being criticized or questioned.

Hey…Esther Perel, can you explain what “beyond infidelity” means and how that jives with “exuberant self actualuzation” in regard to cheating.

I’m thinking that these psychologists who use this bullshit psycho babble are just as harmful as the cheaters themselves because they become incredibly prolific with this Blame the Chump rhetoric, which results in the RIC. Also, I believe that this bullshit psychobabble is largely responsible for the idea that cheating is self-actualizing.

Every time I hear that come out of the mouth of a psychologist, I wonder to myself, why on earth would a therapist, who’s job is to help people navigate emotional pain, sympathize with the cheater, rather than the person who has been harmed by the cheating actions?

Then I think, because that “psychologist” has something to gain from a social attitude that excuses cheaters and punishes the victims. Usually the thing they have to gain is justification for their OWN adulterous acts.

Anyone who so fiercely defends the act of infidelity either has never experienced it or needs justification for it. Even chumps who are stuck in reconciliation don’t defend infidelity that hard. Chumps in reconciliation want something different. They want the cheater to understand their pain and change. People who need to justify their cheating want their chumps to take responsibility and place blame pretty much everywhere but where it belongs, on themselves.

So, Esther, psychoanalyze THIS:

1) We view cheating as wrong BECAUSE IT FUCKING HURTS. Finding out that someone who promised you monogamy broke that promise HURTS. It’s the same with other forms of betrayal. If someone tells you one thing, then does the opposite, then has the audacity to tell you that their choice to betray you was your fault, IT. FUCKING. HURTS.

2) It hurts because it is a betrayal of TRUST. Especially when it’s a marital vow. Marital vows, aside from being spoken before your whole family and a gathering of friends, is actually legal and binding. Which means when you agree to marry someone (and no one held a gun to the cheater’s head here) that you are legally bound to hold that contract you signed at the wedding and then dropped off at the county office of records. So it’s not like the cheater, especially the ones who have been carrying on affairs for years, didn’t have any WARNING that they were entering into an arrangement that was monogamous and kind of a big deal.

So unless every single cheater on the face of the earth got married on a whim in Vegas, they had some idea of what they were getting into.

Which also means that the chump, i.e. the victim, also had plenty reason to believe that the cheater was going to HONOR those vows. That’s trust. We also TRUST our spouses to communicate with us. If our spouses really feel that they need to go out and “find themselves” we trust that they will TELL US and something can either be worked out, or a divorce settled. Which IS possible. Two very close friends of mine did just that. The husband felt that his life was not where he wanted it and that he needed to get out. There was no other woman, there was no lies, there was no blaming the wife. They talked about it, they reached an agreement, and amicably divorced. Yes, it was painful, but it was HONEST. I still talk to both the husband and wife, I still talk to their daughter (who is in her 20’s and was a bridesmaid at MY wedding) and everyone who knows them was supportive.

See? It’s possible to reach “self actualization” WITHOUT the profoundly narcissistic act of actively and willfully BETRAYING the person who swore vows to.

3) ANY affair “means nothing.” Seriously. All of them. They all mean nothing. Want to know why? Because if the cheater’s marriage actually meant something to them, they wouldn’t cheat in the first place. That’s why chumps don’t cheat. Because our vows and our relationships MEAN something to us. Cheaters cheat because they don’t care. Ergo, no affair actually means something. You’re probably going to wrench your brain and try to turn that statement into some psychobabble about my insecurities or what have you, but your continued and increased defense of your cheater sympathizer position only proves my point further. So please, go ahead and argue how affairs mean something, considering that would contradict your original statements. Have fun working that out.

4) Anyone who’s idea of self-actualizing is the knowing and willing deceit of someone who cares about them is someone I don’t want to be around. Because *drumroll* I can’t TRUST that person not to fuck me over for their own gain.

5) We as a society view lying, cheating, betrayal and stealing to be bad things because they HURT people. This is a basic tenant of ethics necessary for harmonious living. Can you imagine a society in which no one valued truth-telling? In which no one valued respect of someone else’s property? In which no one valued the lives of others? It would be absolute CHAOS. This has been the basis of ethical theory for centuries. I would think that someone who supposedly has a degree in psychology would have taken at least ONE ethics course in that time. Even if you haven’t, it’s not hard to do a google search. We have values and ethics so society doesn’t go to hell.

One of the main things about cheating that hurts so much aside from the betrayal, is the actual, psychical consequence on real human bodies. “Whatever do you mean?” you ask.
It’s the spread of STI’s. Cheaters aren’t magical, disease resistant super beings. They can, and do, pick up STI’s. There are some people on this very blog who’s ex-spouses not only picked up STI’s from their sleeping around, but infected them. Ask those people how their ex’s “self actualization” affected their lives. “But the chump didn’t use a condom either!” you argue. Why should a chump be expected to use a condom with their own SPOUSE? Some of them were trying to have a baby and start a family. Some of them were using more permanent forms of contraception and trusted their spouse to not pick up an STI from their extramarital fucking. (See how we’re back to that whole trust thing?)

This is how cheating has larger negative implications on society as a whole. Diseases being spread by people who don’t care. For those who were trying to conceive and ended up infected with STI’s from their spouses fucking around, that means a higher risk pregnancy and also the risk of infecting the child in utero. For those who aren’t trying to conceive, that’s the infection of one more person who now has to exercise even MORE caution in their future relationships because of the mistakes of someone ELSE. Does that sound FAIR to you? NO! It isn’t!

And for the infected SERIAL cheater, that’s the risk of infecting even more people and then having them go off and risk infection for even more people. And no, I don’t TRUST serial cheaters to use protection. Why the hell should I?

Got any self-actualizing excuses for that shit?

Look, Esther. As chumps go, I had it easy. I wasn’t married to the cheater. And while he was on the verge of moving into my lovely, lovely home, he did not. While I had a 30+ year friendship with this man, and not one unkind or cross word in that time, I didn’t have children with him or property to divide, etc. I have a doctoral degree from the most influential program in my field, a great job, an adequate income, friends and family, none of which were altered a bit by the betrayal. Moreover, I was already in therapy with a highly skilled woman who has an understanding of who I am and where I have come from, and my friends showed their love, loyalty and true worth every day.

So when I tell you that the betrayal nearly destroyed me, perhaps you will get some idea of what these people who have long-term marriages have endured. The cheater in my life went from a seemingly–seemingly–loving, attentive partner one day to someone who found fault with everything about me, about us, the next. Only that wasn’t expressed as direct criticism. He changed everything about how he treated me. He stopped calling and texting. We had spent every night together; suddenly, he couldn’t do that. He stopped telling me about important events in his life and stopped caring what happened in mine. He talked about finally “starting a new life” but in the same conversation denied that he was ending the relationship, a cruel form of gaslighting. He dropped me off at the door on my birthday and didn’t bother with a gift. He picked fights and then used my reaction to his unkindness to justify more unkindness. He started smirking and patronizing me. He refused physical intimacy, which had been like breathing for us before, so I thought. In the midst of this, he went to his friend’s funeral and 8 hours later called to say he was too tired to see me. But not too tired to speculate about why the sister of his deceased friend didn’t seem to be around. Or to call a few weeks later to talk about how she wanted to buy his mother’s furniture. All the while, I was shocked and sick and had no idea what was going on–because he lied. Because he withheld crucial information about why he was disengaging and what that would mean for me. Because he denied the relationship was over. Everything was different but he just “needed time” and “had to make changes” but “was optimistic about us in the long run.” And why did he play me that way? We weren’t married. I didn’t as yet know for certain about the MOW. But he had my money in his business account. And he needed a new phone. And a new truck. And he had to take off work because of a death in the family. And his daughter needed….you get the point, I am sure. And, of course, I had been a true friend and a source of love and encouragement for him for 30 years. Why give that up?

When I finally discovered his FB page, dated 3 days after the funeral of his buddy (the married other woman was his only “FB friend” and there was no public activity at all), suddenly all of the lying, gaslighting, blaming and trashing of our relationship made sense. It made sense that he moved back to his parents’ former home, because she lived 5 minutes by foot from there. It made sense that he wanted to be alone so he could text here when she was available.

I cried nearly every minute I was alone for 4 months, from the time the gaslighting started until after his last cruel message on Valentine’s Day, when he said he wouldn’t speak to me because I had “accused him” of having an affair. There were times when I was trying to hold the relationship together that my chest hurt so much I though I was having a heart attack. I couldn’t eat or sleep and for the first time in my professional life, my work suffered. I worked well through the deaths of both parents, a divorce, surgery, my mother’s dementia, the death of a close friend, but this betrayal blew up my heart. I lived literally from one minute to the next. It’s almost exactly a year from the death of his friend, and this week I’ve had some “anniversary moments,” but at last I don’t think of him all day, every day as part of the background noise in my life. I go whole hours without his name or the things he did to me crossing my mind. I’m 62. We were supposedly planning for the rest of our lives, and I made major financial decisions, including tapping my 403B retirement and a home purchase, based on his promises and commitments. And he walked out of my house one day and just never came back. He didn’t call when my cat died or the pipes burst or the temperature hit -30 with wind chill. I loved him with my whole heart and I was devastated. The hardest part for me was that he had sworn for years that I was the love of his life and after years of holding back, I let myself be fully vulnerable. Nothing in the world was as wonderful as resting my head on his shoulder and breathing in the smell of his shirt. And he dragged my heart behind his pickup truck for 4 months and would probably still be gaslighting me if I hadn’t caught him cheating with a woman who doesn’t even like to work, who has three kids, and who spells “happy” like this: “happpppppyyyy.” A woman whose husband seems to love her as much as I loved the cheater. I didn’t sign up to share his attention, time and my money with anyone else. It’s sad, Esther, that you don’t feel any empathy for those of us who were promised we were in a “safe place to fall” and found out, instead, that we had given our hearts to someone who used and abused us.

People that violate others, that lie and that live inauthentic deceptive lives are actually creating profound meaninglessness in their own lives. Being a fraud pretending to be an honest person while hiding who you really are and what you are really doing is exactly how meaninglessness is created. Violating using and deceiving others is wrong and this “wrongness” is not some complicated psychological concept or ideal. It is simply the factual truth.

Self-actualization is not gained or attained by deceiving and violating others! Using and violating others so that you get your own narcissistic needs met, at their expense, is not a spiritually evolved or psychologically evolving action to take. It is an act of degradation to your own integrity. It is a deluded act of “false self” enhancement that actually violates the authentic self of the person committing these acts. No one is bettered or evolved by choosing to be out of integrity or by being deceptive or by knowingly violating others or the rights of others. These types of actions are degrading and a self-annihilating acts that only serves to spiral a person and their life into true meaninglessness.

The truth is, a very large number of cheaters are not ever going to change in any fundamental or significant way. These professionals know this. It is not some secrete or something that is not well understood. They know that it is highly unlikely that the fundamental underlying structure of a person’s character is going to change. This reality is denied by many professionals and relationship gurus alike. The people that financially prosper or make a living from “helping couples through infidelity ” need to be in integrity and need to be clear regarding the TRUE reality of these situations. Chumps have often already had their sense of reality seriously and needlessly distorted by the gas lighting and lies of a cheating spouse. I think a lot of the cheaters get a big hoot out of this psychological bull, where they are made out to be wounded or somehow just these evolved seekers of some profound “self-actualization” through acts of infidelity and deceit. They see this opportunity and they grab at the chance to use the professional setting to continue to blame shift, minimize or to rationalize what they know in reality is nothing but narcissistic self-entitled abusive violating behaviors and choices. To say that cheating is a conscious or unconscious attempt for self-actualization is a delusion at best. To normalize abusive violating and predatory behaviors is irresponsible. Maybe when professional stop blaming authentic individuals, that have integrity and a conscious, for the narcissistic abusive behaviors of others and when the normalization of abusive behaviors is not tolerated or bought by the masses then this abusive dilutedness will stop. The truth is most often not complicated at all.

When a profession minimizes and justifies behaviors and choices that are not justifiable very real damage is caused and any opportunity for authentic change is lost. When behaviors that are violating to the wellbeing of others are packages into deluded or distorted frameworks based on untrue assumptions all so they can sell a book or build a practice around this concept is irresponsible, predatory and even criminal. This amounts to taking advantage of the vulnerability of people that are experiencing traumatizing and life shattering events. Abuse is not normal and people do not self-actualize by choosing to violate and deceive others.

Cheating, infidelity, lying and deception, none of these behaviors should ever be normalized or falsely empowered, justified, or glorified in any way. These behaviors are harmful and destructive to families and to children. They are harmful to the countless individuals that are affected by this type of abuse and violation. Normalizing behaviors that are damaging to our society, to families and to individuals actually causes a lot of confusion about something that is not confusing at all.

It’s really very simple. If you do not believe in monogamy and want to be free to sleep with anyone you want to, then don’t get married. If you ARE married, but realize you no longer love your spouse, you are attracted to someone else, or you would prefer to sleep with anyone you want to, get divorced FIRST, then do whatever you want.

If you choose to get married, remain married and carry on an affair, then the problem is not marriage, it is YOU and your poor character.

Let me see “beyond my ex’s infidelity” was a family destroyed, money (college funds) and savings stolen, children abandoned, a life’s work (28 year “relationship,” 20 years married) undone, a financial future annihilated, a house and the twenty acres it stood on foreclosed (easily affordable mortgage payment, but not so much when a spouse’s affair partner becomes more important than his own family’s expenses). A life story a lie, for the spouse and the children he blew up. Starting over with a credit history that affects the jobs you qualify for. Being in debt because in the two years leading up to dday ex was setting his new life and love up to match our standard of living. Children who are just beginning to become young adults but who now realize that someone you love most can betray you. In small, big, and meaningful ways. Ask my kids how their important celebrations (birthdays, graduation from high school and then college, holidays) are not as important as the guy attending with his new family in tow. My kids are devastated and are struggling with all the shit their dad continues to throw their way. Try being the sane parent, day in and day out. Hey I would have happily divorced his greatness BEFORE all those great memories of our last years together. So many secrets. So many lies. It gives all those family memories a new slant. The best thing about our divorce is that I no longer have someone telling me I am crazy, and I am no longer spackling and telling myself this marriage seems “off.” Oh and let’s not forget those doctors visits. And discovering the HIV test dated two years before you learned of his affair. Piece of cake. I wish my ex the best, and Schmoopie too, on their road to self actualization. No matter who they hurt.