Did Your Cheater Pretend to Hate Cheating?
The Friday Challenge is: Did your cheater tell you they hate cheating? Perhaps at the very moment they were, in fact, cheating? What kind of mindeffery is this?
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A show of hands:
How many of you felt safe in your relationship because your cheater was such a vocal critic of infidelity?
Did they have an estranged relationship with a parent who cheated? Were they aghast in sympathy for some celebrity chump? Did they swear on their sainted grandmother’s grave that they would never do such a thing?
I suppose fake outrage is one way to throw you off the scent, or it could just be human cognitive dissonance. The cheater who made me Chump Lady told me quite convincingly that his exes cheated on him. How it’d been such a crushing blow, but he’d done therapy, and wasn’t bitter. I totally fell for this unlucky-in-love schtick. (Ex-wife #2 laughed heartily when I related this story to her. He was a serial cheater going back decades as it turned out.)
But maybe to him he did feel betrayed. How dare these women have agency and LEAVE him! (Putting aside the whole wandering dick issue…) The point was, his story comforted me. I didn’t think it was in his moral universe to cheat on me, but certainly he would never do such a thing because he knew how it felt. (He didn’t know how it felt. He did, however, enjoy inflicting that pain on innocents.)
Did you have a cheater who pretended to hate cheating?
Any interesting reactions when confronted with such hypocrisy?
TGIF!
🙋♀️Happened to me! His mom was an affair partner and he really disrespected her for that. Also, he caught our neighbour with another man and he was so, so upset by that. He spent two whole days talking about it and in the end he called her husband to tell him, which I was super proud of 🙄 So yes- I thought he was anti-cheating!
This is my cheater to a T. I still believe in his case it’s plain cognitive dissonance. He did believe it until he found twu wuv. then, borrowing from Groucho Marx, those used to be his principles and when he didn’t like them, he had others.
He told me he had been cheated on by his previous partner, with his Best Friend. It had crushed him. He had been so depressed that he missed an entire year of uni. He hated cheaters with a passion. When we watched The Devil Wears Prada he hated the main character because she is a cheater. I was the one going “Well, she’s not great, but she just didn’t know how to handle it…” and he went on to give me a very detailed reasoning about it, similar to what I read here on CL.
A few years later, when he started his own affair, he did tell me “Hey, remember that I used to think that infidelity is the worst in a relationship? So Best Friend told me something else and I think he’s right. He told me that infidelity is a symptom of problems in a relationship. What do you think?”
At the time I honestly thought he was asking for said friend, who did indeed have a history of cheating. And I said “Just tell Best Friend to leave his girlfriend and go live the single life”. It never even occurred to me that he was “just asking for a friend” or to ask why that had changed his own perception.
A week later he left me, and then I felt like an idiot for a long time for not seeing through this.
Yes, Best Friend was still the same who had cheated on him. Turns out FW did not hate cheaters, he just hated his ex.
I love the way they use the cover of someone they know/knew to tell you about their “adventures”. A friend of mine/a guy I knew in high school/guy at work, etc. it wasn’t until my son was in high school that I caught on. My son told me about his teacher who always told crazy stories about a “freind”. My son said, yeah, every time he tells us about his freind, he’s just talking about himself. It suddenly hit me that my husband did the same thing. D-day followed shortly thereafter.
Ex-Mrs LFTT’s father was a Cheater, and Ex-Mrs LFTT was absolutely aware of the devastating effects of her father’s cheating and the lengths to which he went to avoid “consequences” on her family ….. and yet not only did she cheat, she deployed her father’s “consequence avoidance strategies” against the kids and I when she got found out.
LFTT
Oh yes, this is spot on.
My exes father cheated on his mother while my ex was in university, 10 years ago. He told me how he got into a fist fight with his father when he found out. Cheating was a deal breaker for him and he valued loyalty above all else.
I have screenshots of past chat history where we specifically discuss cheating and how he would never do that and we both respect each other enough that we would talk to the other person if we were unhappy enough to cheat.
The fallout of his father’s affair was constantly affecting his life. He expressed a lack of respect for his father’s AP (who he is still with). His aging mother was going to be his responsibility.
When we started dating, I had just gotten out of a 7 year relationship where I was cheated on. He knew this, he knew I was planning to stay single after that relationship but convinced me we were soul mates through love bombing and mirroring and weaving his “sad sausage my cheating father” story.
God damn he played me good.
Same experience here. I met him about 10 months after his fiancée dumped him. She packed her boxes and moved out and he claimed she never said why. Over the years, he hinted heavily that he believed she had been cheating on him as she took up with some wealthy guy very quickly after. He said she must have been a gold digger just like his family said. (They did say that. The girl had a reputation.)
We discussed cheating before we were married and it was clear that if one of us wanted out, we would part amicably and probably be friends forever because we wanted what was best for the other.
While we were married a dear friend of mine caught her husband cheating and they divorced. Klootzak couldn’t say enough about how horrible the cheater was to do that. Same thing when the Tiger Woods cheating came out.
It turns out cheating is only horrible to klootzak when other people are doing it and he isn’t part of the action.
I had the same experience. When we were teens my ex was extremely vocal about how much he hated other people for not controlling their “urges” and that he couldn’t stand cheaters. He had a lot of hate for many other negative traits as well, which made me think growing up that he would be a safe person to build a life with. Color me surprised in my mid 30’s when he turns into all the things he complained about and hated in his teens. He also pulled the whole “Coworker is having an inappropriate relationship” schtick to half confess what he was doing with his howorker. Fun times!
Oh yeah – said his father likely cheating on his mother, made comments about his friend going to strip clubs and how sad that was… Now I know that it was projection and just another way in which he tried to stay hidden and deflect any suspicions of wrongdoing.
Mine pretended to hate lying. When we got into conflicts with others, he would, “You know how you can tell she’s lying? Her mou
th is moving!”
(Sorry, hit post on accident.)
Last May his girlfriend of ~4 years left him for another man after cheating on him for a year. NOW he thinks cheating is just deplorable. No apology for what happened in our marriage, of course.