She Left Me for a Downgrade. Was I THAT Bad?

It’s impossible not to make those comparisons early on. The mind of the chump is trying to Pick Me Dance and looking at what facts are available, can’t sort out what it is they are trying to compete with. The truth is, FWs thrill to the deception. That’s all it is. The OM or OW could be any old body. It doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, a relationship with a FW is unacceptable no matter who they are boinking. Stop focusing on the AP and focus only on the betrayal.

When I was ensnared in the RIC, I demanded to understand how I was not measuring up. What did these OW have that I didn’t? And klootzak’s immediate answer was that they had nothing on me. The MC asked if he had the affairs because he wanted to end the marriage. Oh, no! Not at all! He wanted to stay married to me! The MC acted like I was supposed to be relieved. And then she pointed to this as evidence he must have a sex addiction – because he would hook up with any women who would take the bait of his online dating profiles. There was no evidence of him rejecting anyone. I was supposed to be happy, “See? He doesn’t want to leave you! He was cheating on you with whatever came along! He wasn’t trying to replace you!” Oh yay… I get to keep this “prize.”

Klootzak is a betrayal addict. He enjoys the pussy buffet because it’s exciting to do when he’s married. Rich, poor, young, old, pretty, ugly… those things don’t matter. FWs will jump for damn near anyone who takes the bait. They need a triangle. The deception is everything. If one of the sides is a beauty queen or a random cockroach doesn’t matter to them. The qualities of the AP do not matter. It is not a competition though FWs love it when you think it is because they hope you will dance harder.

Comparing yourself to an AP is a fool’s errand. It’s the betrayal, it’s the betrayal, it’s the betrayal!

I think it is human nature to compare yourself to someone perceived to be your “rival”. The helpful thing for me was learning it was not beauty, or sexiness, or intelligence, or wealth that made OW attractive. It was their willingness to be used in some way. They were available. FW’s have the ability to spot useful people, and quickly determine if they are willing to be used. FW’s may use charm, they certainly lie, and they only consider their own desires. They really don’t think about the spouse at all, unless it is in a vengeful way. “See what you get for not allowing me to purchase a sports car, buy something you cannot afford, etc.”

It is always about them, their wants, their insatiable need for attention. You may be extremely accomplished and have a giving, trusting nature. But once they have “used” you to their satisfaction, they move on to the next person who offers something new, or something you are not willing to do. It is a deadly dance contest; one you cannot win because there will always be someone out there willing to offer up something you won’t or can’t offer. Refusing to dance anymore is your first step toward freedom from the FW. If they just leave, and you were never given the opportunity to choose, consider yourself fortunate. The choice to stop the pick me dance feels like a defeat, although it is actually a win. Whether or not you chose to stop dancing, at some point you have to choose yourself as being a person of value. You deserve love, and respect. You do not deserve lies and deception.

IMHO, everyone needs to work on their value system and try to achieve positive change in their own life. None of us is perfect in every way. We never will be — but we can try to be a better person in some way. But the FW’s of the world are far from perfect, as well. In addition to their other deficiencies, they lie and cheat. That is their problem. You deserve so much more than a person who lies and cheats. Believe that you are worth being treated well, and your life will become so much better!

Sweet jumping Delilah! I want this quote to just follow me around and somehow just play over a loudspeaker any time someone talks about cheating. Thank you, CL:

“And yes, I’m saying cheating is abuse. It’s risking your health, it’s emotional abuse and mindfuckery, there are opportunity costs (wasted years), financial costs… it’s the theft of your reality.”

Schmoopie (“mutual” “friend”) showed manipulative tendencies before I ever felt jealous. Like she would call us crying but refuse to say why. She would lie. Treat her friends badly. These kinds of things that FW had actually always despised! (We’re all independent adults. And I just felt the need to specify it. That speaks for itself.)

After one particularly egregious and obvious event, I told FW “You know I have been thinking you like her, but after this, I don’t feel jealous anymore. There is no way you actually like that behaviour”.

Well, SURPRISE!

I somehow doubt it was worth it.

For a little schadenfreunde, my sons MIL cheated on her ex several yrs ago, broke up the family. She coparented 5children-all of whom are adults and married with their own children. In one of our private conversations, she told me about her affair and her life after. She begged for forgiveness for years, she struggled financially, she calls that her greatest regret. She continues to be “lost”, went through bad relationships. She thought this story would make me feel better about my chumpdon. It just made me see her as a liar and cheater and I lost respect. Her ex, -my sons FIL, is a great guy and made a good life. Devoted father and really stand up Dad. I really like him. Happy New Year!

Cheating isn’t about the chump or any supposed “short comings”. It is about the opportunity to cheat, the availability of an orifice, and the lack of character in the FW. It is an absolute truth that all chumps try to make sense of the situation by looking for reasons and wondering “why that person?”, but the fact is, it has nothing to do with us. We are the innocent victims of a crime, an abuse of power, or whatever you want to call it, so long as you don’t call it the chump’s own fault. I am convinced most FWs would bang a chimpanzee if they could find one and the chimp was willing.

I totally agree that the “Lola doctrine” applies in cases of knowing APs. It’s an axiom that anyone who’d wittingly bang a committed or married person is the lowest of the low. That’s regardless of what they look like or how much money they earn but, considering that someone with normal self esteem would be unlikely to poach and play side piece, it’s probably not surprising that most APs have something glaringly off about them. Studies on mate poaching psychology tend to underscore this. But today’s post made me think about something mostly unrelated to the above and it’s got me in knots.

I don’t know what kind of “demons” the OP is referring to or whether this is a typical case of a chump– out of a need to have any sense of a control– exaggerating their own faults to find cause for being abused. I’ve heard DV victims do this when first approaching advocacy services, a sort of “Well I have my faults, too…” Some victims who’d been barraged with bystander victim-blaming would say this automatically because they’d learned it’s what the social context and bad therapists preferred to hear. Then again, other victims may have internalized the DARVO accusations of abusers. In any case, when working in advocacy, I noticed it usually didn’t take very long to make survivors understand that about 90% of the behaviors they had accepted as “their faults” or “their part in the dysfunction” were, in fact, typical reactions to abuse or reactions to the gut sense that they were in danger but they’d just lost track of “cause and effect.” Anyone who’s lived with a blame-shifting abuser/cheater knows how easy it is to lose track of cause and effect. Keeping track is like trying to shovel the walk while it’s still snowing because the cycles of tension building/abuse are endless.

Also because of the nature of captor bonding/Stockholm syndrome which, as a survival tactic, depends entirely on the victims’ assessment of danger and reactions to danger being unconscious (if it was conscious, the perpetrator would read it as rebellion and disloyalty, therefore the survival tactic wouldn’t work to “inspire” the perp’s mercy), a lot of defensive behaviors are unconscious and therefore confusing even to the victim.

It’s something for survivors to bear in mind when inspecting “their part” in abuse. But for reasons that have nothing to do with the OP of today’s post, I had a realization that, one day, an actual batterer in chump’s clothing might write to CN for advice and the personal “demons” they vaguely refer to might be far more serious than they openly admit. What makes this somewhat less likely to happen is that most batterers are cheaters and are automatically made allergic to the chump perspective. But in a case where, say, a batterer hadn’t gotten around to the typical cheating part yet, I suppose it’s possible. And how would CN even know the difference?

I’m wondering about this because I’ve been doing research lately on something I was unaware of even when working in DV victims’ advocacy. Apparently victims of severe abuse sometimes monkey branch– “cheat,” if you will– in the process of escaping abuse despite the fact it would be unlikely for the same person to cheat within a non-abusive relationship. This is not to say that a chronic cheater couldn’t somehow end up being battered. But the weird thing about dyed in the wool sadists is that they’re often conversely masochistic. I would guess that chronic cheaters would be more prone to cheat on loyal partners and more likely to be inexplicably loyal– at least for a stretch of time– to worse abusers than themselves. The latter is also not to say that battering victims who don’t cheat were all “looking for Mr. Goodbar” and would have been disloyal to a nonabusive partner. Statistically speaking and contrary to old-timey, victim-blaming theories, most DV victims have nothing out of the ordinary in their backgrounds or psychology predicting that they’ll become victims, suggesting that the overall “cause” for intimate abuse lies mainly within abusers’ MOs, psychology and backgrounds and the rest can be explained by cultural biases that blame victims and leave victims fending for themselves.

But what does one do with the statistics saying that a certain percentage of genuine battering victims will “monkey branch”? I remember thinking the plot line of the Coppola film “The Rainmaker”– in which a severely battered woman starts up with a lawyer while still married to and living with the man who assaults her– was farfetched. It unsettled me and I wondered if the story line was just shitty Hollywood mythologizing that, unfortunately, gives credence to batterers’ typical demented– and usually projected– paranoia of being cheated on that drives a lot of violence. I was also put off by the fact that, in the film, there’s no warning that the “rescuer” can– statistically speaking– just turn out to be another abuser.

Anyway, I never personally encountered a DV survivor who “monkey branched” and assumed that, as much as DV victims might want to escape the danger they’re in and are especially terrified of ending up alone and unprotected, most would be far too emotionally taxed, drained and anxious to step out while still technically with an abuser. I saw a few situations where women moved from the abusive situation to a new relationship very quickly which was worrisome because of the 50% statistical risk that DV survivors will end up with a subsequent abuser.

But, again, the stats are the stats and it seems a percentage of battered women will have exit affairs. I found this kind of depressing and hard to grasp since I’d been operating on a different theory all these years. After my brain adjusted to the new information, I thought about it and realized it’s probably the exception proving the rule that cheating in regular circumstances is completely unjustifiable because DV is the one and only case where it’s “understandable”– where someone had repeatedly been put in fear for their lives would fall for the offer of “body guard services” to escort them to safety and buffer the terror of escape. Because batterers typically use financial threats and typically inhibit victims’ means of making a living, the motive to “monkey branch” could also be financially motivated– a “rescuer” offering financial support to help the victim segue to safety and self sufficiency. I can also understand the “branching” a bit because abusers automatically dehumanize themselves through violence. Plus the captor bonding/Stockholm syndrome abusers systematically induce in victims isn’t actually love so it’s foreseeable that victims, once out of perceptible danger, would be able to suddenly shift allegiance to a new partner. After all, the former allegiance hadn’t been real, only a case of enforced dependency masked as love as a survival strategy.

All the same, because of the statistical risks of landing with another abuser, the Lola doctrine still applies. It’s still not a good idea for victims to jump from one relationship to another. What upstanding person would take sexual advantage of a desperate person fighting for their lives? It’s mostly going to end very badly as it does when DV survivors start new relationships too quickly after escape. I’ve come to believe the latter is for reasons having to do with abuser personality traits, one of which is the tendency to play “rescuer/hero” and also because– other than being approached by sheep in wolves’ clothing playing hero– DV survivors often find themselves social pariahs following escape and completely isolated. In my view, survivors are typically isolated because “regular, nice” bystanders aren’t really nice enough and have a knee-jerk tendency to split the blame for abuse between victim and perpetrator. The poor behavior of typical bystanders gives an obvious advantage to abusers gushing with understanding and empathy for victims’ plights.

I’d go out on a limb and say it’s the one case where the behavior isn’t necessarily a reflection of deep seated character issues but more a matter of falling into a protection racket situation. Protracted, ongoing, extreme trauma can make people do things that would otherwise be out of character. Those circumstances are completely different than a cheater blaming past trauma for their betrayal or blaming trauma unrelated to the victim of betrayal. Military chumps have reported their FWs justified cheating as a result of battle fatigue or TBI but, if it wasn’t the chump launching shrapnel at cheaters’ heads, it’s bullshit. Abusing innocent people who had nothing to do with a separate trauma is still a character issue unless it’s a case of extreme delusional mental illness, though the solution for victims in both cases is the same: escape.

But here’s the diabolical thing about cheater rationales: most cheaters– like batterers– likely were victims of some form of childhood abuse. To the extent that former-victims-cum-adult-abusers tend to compulsively “reenact” past abuse, they often treat their victims as if victims were the perpetrators– with punitive rage, blame, hatred and callousness. Doing the latter is demented because abusers who reenact past trauma often do it with victim/perp roles reversed while still somehow maintaining a sense of victim status. They know how to feign being genuine victims because of having once been genuine victims.

There are people you marry, and people you fool around with. My ex retired and decided that the long-term investment in me and our kids meant nothing, so he left. When I finally came to terms with that, I really didn’t care if it was a downgrade or not. He was no longer invested in the relationship, period.

Thankfully, I found the perfect attorney for me who got me out of it with a decent settlement.

I’ve heard this one before. Now maybe you know why people are giving you that look because they saw her/ him ( in my case) out with someone else . Didn’t really want children. Everything was equal . We had our own lives. Marriage certificates mean nothing. The marriage was a farce. Even tho he took the money in my case I feel better knowing who he really is . A whore. But I’m truly happy I decided to have kids. He’s going unhealthy pretending to be young forever. Never loyal to anyone. No sanctity for anything. Just thankful I got out of it . Don’t waste time thinking about it. Truly. Life is too short.