How Quickly Did You Fall Out of Love After D-Day?

I kind of envy people who had the magical “Poof! Luv-be-gone!” moments as if using one of those bathtub lime removers sold on QVC.

For some chumps, I imagine that enviable “poof” moment is just the radical acceptance that the person they thought they married who appeared to have certain lovable qualities didn’t have those qualities and wasn’t who they pretended to be.

But there’s another possible explanation related to Stockholm syndrome– something you see quite often in domestic violence advocacy: survivors being amazed at how suddenly and thoroughly any love they thought they felt for their tormentors dries up.

From what I saw, this generally doesn’t happen that quickly if victims aren’t getting support from the justice system and their abusers are still at large, in the throes of a post-separation rampages and still a danger to survivors. But if the abusers in question are arrested or something else happens to sap them of whatever power they formerly wielded over their victims, victims can experience that sudden radical shift in feelings.

I remember some survivors (especially the ones who’d spent too long seeing shitty therapists who applied the “family systems/split blame” theory of domestic abuse) expressing alarm over this, as if something was wrong with their ability to love and if this sudden dearth of affection could happen regarding their feelings for their children and other blameless loved ones. So, as advocates, we’d present the reassuring possibility that what they felt for their abusers all along– or at least since the first act of abuse– wasn’t love at all but a survival-based false display of loyalty that suddenly became unnecessary the moment the abuser was de-clawed in some way– lost their power.

In other words, the second these survivors no longer had to grovel for amnesty from their abusers to inspire mercy (or the moment they realized it was pointless because abusers would escalate anyway), all former motivation to do so simply stopped. Of course some abusers are so terrifying that their victims may remain afraid of them even beyond the grave and therefore might continue this “imitation pining/faux wuv display” even after the abusers are gone. But in a lot of situations, once the danger has passed, so goes the captor bonding.

In my opinion, this isn’t a reflection on survivors capacity for real love, just a reflection of the fact that abusers aren’t lovable. I think this was a relief for a lot of survivors, especially if they’d been frog-boiled by the culture or their abusers to believe that being “perfidious” and “loveless” was precisely the thing that made them deserving of abuse.

I think this might potentially explain why a lot of FWs amp up their vicious verbal abuse while they’re cheating and also begin back-filling the whole marriage as terrible because chumps were supposedly always so “unloving.” It might be attempt to simultaneously reboot conditioning (where victims are made afraid of the consequences of their abusers perceiving victims as less than completely loyal) and reboot the fear program, all to solidify the captor bonding so victims don’t leave in the face of betrayal. In short, some survivors who find themselves stuck in the “pining” stage might consider that they’ve been conditioned to fear being perceived as “loveless.”

But I suspect that what can also break the conditioning spell is when FWs scrap the “love bombing” portion of coercive control, possibly because their affair partners are demanding exclusivity. This may be why abusers amp up the negative conditioning– to compensate for withdrawing the “positive reinforcement.” But this can backfire because victims of abuse are most likely to try to escape at the moment that the danger of staying in the relationship starts to exceed the considerable danger of leaving it.

Whatever is the case, to the extent that cheating = abuse and cheaters = abusers, chances are this “gloves off” behavior on the part of FWs during affairs is simply an escalation of coercive control that had always been there, not a sudden radical change or “switcheroo” as some perceive. Dr. Emma Katz wrote an interesting argument for Substack about how erroneous it is to assume that abusive relationships only became abusive from the first punch or obvious act of domestic violence. Instead she argues that abusers typically enact coercion and control from the get-go but often through controlling gestures that the culture brands as “love” or romance. So there is a chance that, deep in survivors’ ancient autonomic nervous system– aka, lizard brain– there was always an inkling that the abuser was an abuser, therefore the victim never really had a chance to develop genuine love in the first place. In that case, once many victims are out of danger, any feelings they once thought were love might up and disappear in a flash.