Esther Perel’s Myth of the Good Cheater

I’m thankful to not be with my power hungry cheater anymore. I don’t care for selfish, self serving people in my life and cheater took himself out of my life. I am truly grateful to not have to deal with him anymore. The person I thought I married wouldn’t have hurt me like this. It truly shows it was all a farce xo sweet

She will ape all your stuff and pretend it’s her own and do a total U-turn on what she said before and have no shame about it I suspect. It will be her ‘new perspective’. Can’t write the same book twice.

I’ve found that since knowing what the Dickhead did to me, I now view all cheaters by the lens in which I view him. It might not be fair to all people as I happen to know a lovely lady who cheated on her first husband and has been faithfully married for the last forty years. But, I can’t help it. Cheating is cheating is cheating. Someone was hurt by someone who did not care. This whole quest for aliveness is pile of crap. I wanted to feel alive again but didn’t sink to cheating and hurting my spouse. God, I’m so glad he’s out of my life.

My cheater used me, hid money and led a double life. I think he would have continued his double life but realized the jig was up. We talked and he moved out. His AP hasn’t seen behind the mask but she works with him and knew he was married. They deserve each other. APs goal is to marry her cheating, man boy. A cheater is a cheater…

When you discover infidelity there will likely be at least one Esther Perel in your life, if not many, ready to downplay what occurred and pacify your shock and horror with any number of flimsy defenses or justifications.

No matter how well meaning, this is a form of gaslighting (aka abuse) that can make you pause, doubt your gut instincts, and remain stuck in a horrendous situation when you should be summoning the courage to take action and enforce consequences. But taking action means the life-altering specter of divorce and all of the emotional and logistical upheaval that entails.

You’re at a crossroads — stay stuck or summon the courage to stand up for yourself. One path is long term soul-crushing. The other path has its initial rough patches followed by freedom and the scary unknown of finding a new way. It’s human nature to stay with the devil you know, even if it’s killing you. Fuck that! Hire an advocate to fight for you and strike out on your own path! Godspeed, my fellow chumps!

Mine had a three-year “meaningless” romance with a college bud. I mean she said she “loved him” but it wasn’t “true love”. Or so I was told.

Sure wasn’t fun to be twisted all around the logic and it still hurt like hell.

I kinda just shrug now. She doesn’t really know what true love is anyways.

Here’s what I have to say to Esther.

1) If she was a polyamory advocate and devoted her life to teaching people how to be polyamorous in ways that aren’t harmful, I would have no argument with her. My argument with her is that she blurs the line to commingle polyamory and deceitful abuse via sex. They are not the same. At all. And it’s unbelievably irresponsible for her to stir them together.

2) She’s out of line. If a person handed me a glass of poison, told me it was juice, and I drank it believing it was safe, and I was permanently injured or died, we would call that a crime. And we would be right. It’s willful harm. Even murder. If a person tells me they are sexually faithful, brings home a poison on their body (HPV, HIV, etc.), I engage the person’s body unprotected because I believe it is safe, and I am permanently infected with a communicable disease, am injured, or die (hello cancer), or someone else is hurt (hello unborn), I would also consider that to be a crime. The law might not, but I do. The clear intent for (or at least willingness to do) harm feel equivalent to me.

Lying about sex is emotionally bad, yes. Abusive, yes. Terrible character, yes. It’s also physical poison. That’s not a side issue. It’s incredibly central to the whole fucking point.

I can’t think anything good about a person who downplays the physical poisoning of another person. I can only think “you are condoning willful harm and killing”. That person will never have my sympathy or my listening ear. Until she loudly and broadly denounces anything she has ever said about deception being positive in any way, I will consider her a fraud and a toxic person and refuse to hear another word from her abusive mouth. Full stop.

There was a wonderful reply to an article about an affair in London’s Daily Telegraph yesterday. It was very graceful. It went along the lines of

“I should be bull whipped for what I did to my beautiful wife and children. Luckily for me, she understood that I was in a ‘what about me’ crisis and has forgiven me, sort of.

It showed an understanding that what he did was unforgivable. That he is grateful beyond words that someone better than him prevented the destruction of his family. That he knows that he broke something in her, and completely deserves her lack of true connection since that moment.

I think he gets it.

‘Falling in love with your soul mate schmoopie, while horrifying, is at least understandable at some level’
Yikes I hardly ever jump at something CL says …. but falling in love with the coworker IS as understandable to me as fucking around for fun. NOT UNDERSTANDABLE- ‘Falling in love with the coworker’, while the betrayed spouse thinks everything is perfectly fine and keeps investing until the sudden discard …. is hell on earth.
It’s not easy for me to understand how somebody would keep building on a spark when they have a loving spouse at home- these things don’t happen overnight. That betrayal is enormous.
Frankly, I think I would rather think that someone was fucking around for fun (an asshole) rather fucking for twu wov with my replacement

So true.

But don’t forget the thrill of Duper’s Delight’.

The ex fuckwit tried to get me to live in the same flat as he and his whore. But of course she wasn’t his whore, she was “your friend too, and she’ll help with the bills”. Vomit. ????

Luckily I found out about the affair before that happened, but I can imagine the thrills they both would have had, “she doesn’t know what *we* know”, snigger, snigger.

Actually it was a good thing for me he tried for it, if I ever get sad and misty I remember that, and sheer cleansing rage reminds me of what a total shit bag he is. ????????

Anyone who professionally deals in infidelity must absolutely contend with this website. It would be a great oversight to overlook this treasure trove of experience–maybe even a kind of malpractice. Also, as you state, the largest ‘one stop shop’ for chumps that exists, probably ever. Who would ever ignore such a dataset?

Ms. Perel seems to want us to think that she only deals in unicorns–those remorseful and almost “accidental” cheaters who really just want to be understood and feel terrible about their transgressions and want to make it right, willingly and enthusiastically. So, what, she is writing for like 5 people?! As we all know, unicorns are very very rare creatures.

I don’t have a UBT of my own but from my time as an advocate for survivors of domestic violence, I have a rusty old Batterer Apologist Translator. “Your experience goes way beyond cheating” has several tiers of interpretations that become progressively more demeaning and negating but all mean the same thing.

You’re experience goes way beyond cheating = If you had any objectivity, you would admit you’re a battered woman instead of labeling yourself a survivor of mere cheating so you must be corrected and barred from my clinical territory as a threat to objectivity and collective human knowledge= You don’t have an overview of or the right to name or interpret your own experience because “clouded by trauma” and therefore dangerously subjective = Being a victim in the case of domestic abuse is not situational nor a neutral identifier merely indicating an encounter with a perpetrator but something that defines you, something you’re born to and which exists in perpetuity so the clouded state is permanent stigma…

I worked with a fellow DV survivor advocate from Ireland who, like a lot of Irish rebels, was a serious student of the North American civil rights movement and knew more than most North Americans on that score. She explained how the “clouded by trauma” tact was commonly used to silence civil rights activists who were survivors of racial abuse themselves. The individual seeking to undermine the authority of the activist would first try to elicit the activist’s personal experience of racial abuse and inequality by feigning sympathy and interest, but then would jujitsu the activist’s personal experience as rendering the activist less, not *more*, qualified to speak out against inequality or weigh in on policy, etc.

Cute trick. The tactic probably has a name. The Irish advocate scoffed that, by the same token, no cancer researcher could be taken seriously if they or anyone close to them had ever had cancer. In any case, this is exactly what Perel is doing with that “way more” remark. The thing is, it’s not just an attack against one type of victim but against the credibility of all victims. I also believe it’s also a scare tactic used to get people to deny any kind of victimization, as if “victim” were a dirty, stigmatized word instead of, again, just a neutral identifier indicating someone has had an encounter with a victimizing force which says zero about the victim and everything about the victimizing force.

The latter is another common trick in the arsenal of modern institutional and corporate victim-blaming or “manufacturing consent” as political analyst Noam Chomsky puts it. The way in which Perel claims that typical cheating does not involve victimization is made more potent by how people scramble madly away from being labeled a victim these days due to the stigma that’s been deliberately fabricated for that purpose. If there are no victims, then there are no victimizers. Great for victimizers! Ergo, Union Carbide didn’t poison and kill thousands in India, the drone program didn’t murder 22 civilians for every enemy combatant, and Dow Chemical hasn’t committed genocide against Native Americans in Canada for generations. Cute and very effective. You can see why the premise is popular in the corporate sponsored media and in corporate sponsored social science.

It’s all very interesting because Perel is the daughter of Holocaust survivors and, at least by attempting to discredit a critique by hijacking the definition of the critic’s experience and thereby highlighting the “subjective” nature of that perspective, she’s basically spitting into the wind. Though, as far as I know (correct me if I’m wrong), Perel is too clever to admit to any truly personal brushes with adultery (whether in her family of origin, her own marriage or because she was a side chick back in her student days to some married prof at the University of Jerusalem? Who knows), the fact that she, out of obvious territorial defense, hijacked someone else’s right to label their own experience is very telling aside from being a cheap shot by someone who knows perfectly well they’re shielded from the same kind of personal attacks by the untouchability of Holocaust survivor experiences. It’s like someone punching you and then screaming “But I’m wearing glasses!” as you’re about to cold cock them back.

As far as I understand, the following is the most Perel says about the link between being personally a member of a survivor group (if second gen) and her interest in infidelity.

First Perel breaks down Holocaust survivors into two categories, which to me is a false binary that depends on one group being demonstrably “totally healthy” and the other “totally unhealthy.” As she puts it, there are “those who didn’t die, and those who came back to life”. “[T]hose who didn’t die were people who lived tethered to the ground, afraid, untrusting. The world was dangerous, and pleasure was not an option. You cannot play, take risks, or be creative when you don’t have a minimum of safety, because you need a level of unself-consciousness to be able to experience excitement and pleasure. Those who came back to life were those who understood eroticism as an antidote to death.”

I have no idea if Perel illustrates serious caveats to what seems to be her driving principle, for instance that a frantic crusade for self fulfillment to counter trauma frequently leads to disaster. It also ignores the fact that many abusers use past suffering as entitlement-fodder, which is quite typical of antisocial personalities and Nazi apologists alike. How many times have we heard from apologists that the Versailles treaty caused the rise of Hitler?

What’s more, it isn’t just survivors who utilize eroticism to chase away the specter of death. Hitler fucked and likely murdered his own niece and Nazis themselves used eroticism as an antidote to the death they dished out. Rape of prisoners was commonplace in the camps (mostly by guards but often by other prisoners, though discussion of the latter has been discouraged). Then there’s the documented fact that medical personnel conducted drunken orgies at Hadamar, the institutional child killing center in Nazi Germany where thousands of disabled children were gassed, starved, beaten and drugged to death– the extension of the “T4” eugenic murder campaign that virtually wiped out the entire population of disabled adults and children in western Europe.

Vladimir Nabokov, who not only survived Stalinism but lost a brother to the Nazis, frequently draws a connection between “uninhibited eroticism” and violent authoritarianism. Like his beloved literary beacon Kafka, Nabokov juxtaposes perversion against average Joe horniness. But what seems to distinguish the two things for both authors is defined very well by “gestics,” a theatrical device coined by playwright Bertolt Brecht:

“The pomp of the Fascists, taken at its face value, has a hollow gest, the gest of mere pomp, a featureless phenomenon: men strutting instead of walking, a certain stiffness, a lot of colour, self-conscious sticking out of chests, etc. All this could be the gest of some popular festivity, quite harmless, purely factual and therefore to be accepted. Only when the strutting takes place over corpses do we get the social gest of Fascism.”

In other words, a “social gest” is an otherwise neutral and normal human activity or endeavor (like a parade, like eroticism) that is chillingly transformed into something ugly and inhumane by its requirement for victims.

Eroticism in cheating arguably requires victims, otherwise why not file for divorce and/or announce the intention to stray before the fact and allow the other partner the right of choice over their bodies, their health, their home environment, their emotional labor investments, finances and futures based on fact?

As most clinical observers and presumably reformed cheaters attest, the added sexual excitement of cheating largely depends on “sneaking around”– the existence of a victim, although usually one transformed into an ogre which may be the deeper injury. As CL and so many adultery survivors have pointed out, the “strutting” or “eroticism” involved in cheating commonly takes place over STD exposure and other forms of physical endangerment and abuse, financial abuse, traumatized children who are statistically more prone to develop depression and self destructive behaviors, shock, gaslighting, character assassination and similar typical neutralization attempts by cheaters to rewrite history and alter the characters of the betrayed spouse to justify the betrayal, uncharacteristic suicidal ideation on the part of the betrayed, etc.

In any event, buckle up, CN. I suspect a psychobabble war has been declared, one with stakes that go “way beyond” the issue of cheating and get into modern, expedient concepts of “victimology” itself and what constitutes the very nature of abuse of power. Perel’s next oeuvre may bring with it some very science-y negations of chump perspectives (of course oozing with lugubrious “sympathy”) and will likely get a good amount of press since the blurring of lines between victim and perpetrator is a favorite message of every stripe of abuser of power.

Oh, wait!
Esther Perel, do you want ME, the cheated wife, who is raising his baby, cook his meals, wash his underwear, iron his shirts AND have my own career,
do you really want ME to “understand an act of infidelity” ?
Let me ask you one question: how long is this act in your book? A year and a half?
Oh, you answered before: “my article does not directly apply to your situation”. You answered before, because you don’t want to “understand” a commitment for life!

It’s ok, calm down, you won’t get any hate from me. The virtual reality you are constructing now may fit some looser while they are still presentable. Once age sets in, them, you will choke with your own words!