Infidelity Isn’t an ‘Accident’
Her ex said his infidelity was an accident. Oops. After navigating the single scene after her divorce, she finds she’s able to turn down married men. On purpose. Without making a mistake.
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Hi Chump Lady,
I’m working through my divorce and reentering the world as a single woman with a whole new lens.
At a business event this week, I was reminded that infidelity doesn’t just happen, it’s a series of choices.
I sensed that a man at the event was interested in me. And frankly, I found him attractive. I assumed he was divorced since he does not wear a ring, rarely mentions his wife, and when he does it’s with the disdain typically reserved for ex’s. So I was quite surprised to learn he was still married and quite relieved that I had stayed professional at events with him.
After learning he is married (he claims, unhappily) I reflected on how many choices go into infidelity, and how ridiculous it is to call it “an accident” or a “mistake.” He chooses not to wear a ring. And he chooses to act available. He chose to invite me to share a ride with him to the next event (4 hours from our home city) in his camper van.
I, by contrast, chose to talk loudly in earshot of him about how infidelity is never excusable and to decline his invitation to share his camper van, and to avoid being alone with him altogether. (As an aside, this is a business retreat event that gets pretty personal, so discussing my own divorce was not weird in this context.)
See how that works, cheaters?
I found this man attractive. And then I CHOSE not to act on that, because I don’t sleep with married men. Chemistry is not destiny. And there are probably at least a dozen choices he and I would have to make between here and falling into bed together. I recognize that he is not available, ergo I will put up several boundaries to avoid doing something that isn’t in alignment with my values. I will not, for example, take 5 shots of tequila and then say yes to a tour of his camper van. See how that works?
It just struck me as very edifying to recognize this in real time, after my cheater leaned hard on the “I drank too much and made a mistake” excuse. He made a dozen choices before that choice. That’s not an accident.
Anyway, just wanted to share for any chumps being fed the “one mistake” narrative.
Love,
Chumped with Honey
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Dear Chumped with Honey,
I think you were within your rights to reject that guy just on the basis of “camper van.”
Who goes to a work conference in a camper van? Is there a waterbed back there and shag carpeting? An airbrushed sunset? Can he not afford a hotel room? I have so many questions… best left unanswered.
Thanks for the public service announcement that cheating is not a mistake (singular).
The popular discourse usually glosses over how affair partners get to the bumping uglies stage. Instead we get euphemisms or minimizations. It just happened. The heart wants what the heart wants. They were “just friends.”
Cheating is often cast as the one-time mistake. A drunken oops! at the conference. Instead of a long-standing pattern of behavior. Do you think that’s the first time your coworker has propositioned someone with his camper van? No, he CHOSE a camper van because his life is a moveable bedroom.
Way to rush to judgement, Tracy!
Look, if my blog has taught me anything, it’s that serial cheating is the norm and the one-time exit affair is the anomaly. Instead, the conventional wisdom has it in reverse. But consider the evidence of the Ashley Madison hack and the Epstein files — double lives are a lifestyle for many. A lot of greedy people prefer an abusive power dynamic where they’re the winner and you’re the chump. The heart wants what the hearts wants? The heart wants more at your expense.
So, no, infidelity is not an accident.
It’s a deliberate power move. And as you rightfully pointed out, you can avoid a fetid night of romance in a camper van by having a clear set of ethics.
The same cannot be said for our exes.
And we shouldn’t forget that some cheaters might even try to harass and coerce their “accidental” targets into complying. In this sense, the above account gives me the cr**ps, to be honest.
Yeah, that guy is an obvious sleazeball serial cheater. Creeps me out too.
Whoopsie, I was naked with another person tripped and somehow fell into them. It’s magic.
It’s a series of choices
Josh McDowell, that’s crazy talk! Everyone knows tripping, flipping and encapsulating part of another person’s anatomy or inserting yourself into another person is a daily risk. These things just happen! It’s never anyone’s fault. I know you’re just ignorant of the facts. Happy to set you straight.🤣😂🤣
Those who would have you believe that their cheating was “just a simple (or singular) mistake” are looking to have you believe that they lack agency and thus cannot be held accountable for what were clearly deliberate choices and deliberate actions.
LFTT
Those that want to believe it’s the alcohol, the bipolar, the drugs, the weekend, the boys I was with, the place I was, the excuse, you weren’t there, I’m bipolar and have no stop signs( i ALMOST FELL FOR THAT ONE)I can’t live alone for 2 hours, the others were doing it, OR my last cheaters excuse, YOU WERENT MEETING MY NEEDS, jump higher like the cafeteria lady at work did…the list goes on and on for as many Hindu gods there are like 3.3 million.? My absolute bottom line is, if they roll over so easily I need to protect myself and see a lawyer. It will never ever be a one time mistake. They are just prepping you for more, and grooming you to call it a disease they can’t help.
Fraudster would have me and other people believe he was the victim of a romance scam catfisher. He knew what they were; he watched the show “Catfish” weekly and laughed at the stupidity of people who fell for them. Then he went on a dating website and made a profile. Those were choices. Then he looked at pictures of women and chose one. A whole buffet of choices.
When I showed him how ludicrous her messages were–probably because they were being sent by multiple people working the scam– he said he thought she was stupid and that once she was with him, she’d look up to him and he could manipulate her easily.
Every time he went out to get gift card, open a credit card, send bank and wire transfers, was another choice on his part. So was getting burner phones, stealing my and my family’s money, etc.
Nobody should look at a married or committed person who gets catfished as a victim.
My ex husband did the same thing. He set up a profile on a dating chat as “no longer married” and fell for a “catfish” scam. Once I found out he claimed it was “just once and a mistake”. Setting up the account, chatting with multiple women, sending e-cards of love for 5 months, etc. wasn’t a mistake…that was all intentional. I assured him my filing for divorce was no mistake – it was intentional. Happily divorced for 8 months now.
2 years of peace for me. Way to go.
The guy who got massively ripped off by the oldest scam on the internet? He said this?
Yes. He said that he some of the things she wrote were very stupid, and he liked that because she’d look up to him and accept his decisions without question.
Keep in mind that this was in 2019, before ICE ramped up. She had been increasing the amount of money she needed daily (yes, he’d send her money every day) and she wrote that she needed over five or ten thousand dollars (I’ve forgotten the exact amount) to get papers because she was born in Puerto Rico and ICE was after her as an illegal immigrant. People born in Puerto Rico know that they are legal US citizens. He wrote back that since she was born in Puerto Rico, she was a US citizen at birth, and all she had to do was contact and embassy and request another copy of her birth certificate. She ignored that, replied that she needed the money to get her papers, and he sent it.
He often wrote to her that he was an international businessman who worked mega million deals.
“She” (probably a group of male scammers) told him her grandparents left her a $5,000 trailer in Arizona, and that a New York City realtor wanted to buy it as an investment property. Because of course wealthy New Yorkers want crappy old $5000 trailers for investment. He then contacted the realtor, repeating the international finance BS, and said he was protecting her and wanted to make sure this was legit.
The supposed realtor spelled his name three different ways on different emails, and a quick online search showed me that nobody by any of the names was licensed in real estate, that there was no such firm in NY state with either of THOSE misspellings or anything similar, and the only person with that name on the Internet was a young criminal with a lot of very nasty tattoos.
Somehow my ex gave this guy access to his credit card. That’s around when I found out about “her,” and he was positive that the guy would repay $5,000 to my ex’s credit card. So ex reported it as stolen identity.
He now claims he has nothing to apologize for because he was another person when he did all this.
Allegedly, in the financial world, it is not uncommon for people to get scammed because they believed to be the scammers themselves. Your ex sounds a little bit like that (in this case, he probably wasn’t in it for financial gain, but hoping he would be able to use and exploit this “naive” young woman).
I agree, and I don’t doubt he was scamming her by making false promises to pay for her college AND to open a beauty salon for her to work at, and to marry her and find a way for her to have children. He was such a skinflint that for gifts he’d give me checks with VOID written across them in big letters.
There is nothing accidental about a one night stand or a long term affair.Full Stop
There is one slightly funny aspect to categorizing affairs as “a (singular) mistake” or “accident”– that it makes APs’ heads explode to be reduced to, say, a case of food poisoning from eating old sushi.
Amen! It’s a practice run
I’ve been having this argument with my current h for quite some time. I told him even in a one night stand there are lots if decisions made to do so. It is not a mistake it is a conscious choice. It’s still cheating even if it happens once. He thinks I’m too judgmental. I don’t care.
He knows I’m out if he does that to me. He says he never has. I sometimes wonder. Since he minimizes it so much.
Honest opinion? A man who doesn’t say he would be appalled if he even came close to a one night stand, who chose to get so drunk he made bad decisions, is not a man worth having. Your soulmate would not minimise the affect this would have on you and wouldn’t hesitate to condemn this behaviour too.
I would wonder about that too. Keep your eyes open.
trust your gut
Shag carpet. Right. Because he was hoping to take her not simply to the business retreat, but (all puns intended) to Rugburn City!🤢🤮
And just for all my fellow chumps’ information, my FW XW, an exit-affairer if there ever was one, seems to be the type of FW cheater who uses exit-affairing over and over again to get out of a relationship when she’s not being kept “happy.” Immature/selfish person that she is to the core, when it comes to relationships, at least.
I fell for her seduction when I was twenty one. I could try to make the argument that my brain wasn’t fully formed, but the harsh reality was it was very difficult for me to resist a beautiful young woman whom I had pined for for years (we were friends for years before anything happened romantically), while trapped in my shy nature (my own stupid fault).
It didn’t hurt that she was making it clear that we would end our mutual virginities together (and yes, I’m sure I ended hers as sure as she ended mine). I was then and still am a red-blooded, strongly cis heterosexual male.
I guess the main difference to us now is she chooses to repeat her affair behavior over and over again, whenever she’s not happy with her partner. I don’t.
I’ve been single for going on nine years. It’s only in the last two that I felt a desire to try and find a female partner again. I have made some strange attempts to find one, but I haven’t broken my moral code.
I contrast that against the FW XW, who can’t seem to be alone without someone enthralled with her constantly, and I believe her current partner is the same. Fine with me. I simply insist that they don’t bother me with any of their bullsh*t. So far, hard gray rock seems to have done that.
So, no, it’s not likely a “simple, one-time mistake.” It’s a series of sh*tty decisions that you can resist, if you have the moral fortitude. Cheaters don’t have that.
A man without arms cannot hug.
Great point and good on you for stopping this FW in his tracks. After having been betrayed AND discovering that i was also unwittingly an AP (he lied about his marital status and I had no idea) years ago to my ex FW, I am extra careful about how I interact with straight men (I’m a straight woman).
People of GOOD character make it clear if they are married or in committed relationships: they wear rings, talk openly and respectfully about their partners, and may be friendly but not overly flirty. In other words, they don’t send mixed signals. In contrast, people of BAD character cause confusion (deliberately) in their quest for kibbles.
For example, I recently met a man through an activity; I found him attractive, smart, and funny, and he seemed to reciprocate my feelings and has been very flirty towards me. I told a friend about him and she informed me that he is dating someone “But it might not be serious.” That is a NO for me. If he is dating someone and hardcore flirting with someone else then that is an indicator of bad character IMHO. Are my standards too high? Maybe. But that is a risk I am willing to take to make sure that I do everything I can to avoid becomeing an AF and/or a chump again.
Well said!
Smart move on your part gained from hard won wisdom.
My (soon-to-be) Ex always said he made “stupid mistakes” (10 years worth of escorts, webcam girls and corn) and that he has a weird twist in his brain. They really don’t like calling it what it is, right? Deliberate choices.
They get very good at the stories, the excuses, the lies. Sadly I trusted and trained my now ExHC that I was a full on Chump. My marriage and my precious family were more important than believing that what I was adding up 2+1= 7 was not making sense. I know better now, but almost too late
And Google is helping FWs make it impossible to call it what it is like p*rn j*nkie, J*sus cheater, etc.
I’m waiting for the day when you can no longer type “corn”. Honestly what is the point? A change in word does not change the concept.
I say that instead of just misspelling, we go full Chaucer. Like who could fault anyone for writing things like
Graphik foul-lust wone
Crist falsere
Fuk
Tote-fouler
Ex H FW narcopath did the same decade long double life and tried to tell our kids it was a mistake – singular.
That’s even worse, just lump it all together as one singular mistake…
An accident?!? Cheating is an accident!?? That’s worse than calling it a mistake. A mistake is a single bad choice. An accident is when you slip on an icy patch and fall. Are these people claiming that they slipped on a banana peel and all their clothes fell off and they landed on top of a naked person?
Cheating is no accident!
Cheating is the result of hundreds of choices to do the wrong thing. When I was first divorced I learned that there are men who see an attractive woman not wearing a ring, and they immediately say something about their wife. I respect those men.
There are other men who wear wedding rings but they will buy you a drink and ask you to their hotel room. A man who does that has already made dozens of bad choices.
That kind of man or woman is a predator. Full stop
Many years ago in my 20s there was a man I met at a party who had one of those camper vans with a bed in the back and wanted me to join him there for sex because he said it would “strengthen” his marriage. At least I had the sense to decline that invitation. I thought it was very creepy.
It’s not the first time I’ve heard that crap.
Uber creepy!
Starting with DDay #2, false reconciliation and even post divorce in near NC, I realized that I was fed literally millions of lies over nearly 3 decades by the narcissistic personality disordered sociopath. Deliberately and maliciously, so that I’d be kept in the dark about my own life and continue my indentured servitude of the Sparkly Turd.
It’s all premeditated, like murder.
You were poisoned slowly as I was
When I was 22, I was newly married, had just moved 3000 miles from everyone and my spouse was deployed to Japan for 6 months. Rumors of deployment infidelity swirled around like smoke in a bar.
I thought to myself : None of us find ourselves naked in a room alone with someone without a few steps leading up to that point. Maybe the best first step to remaining faithful is to not be alone with someone. At some point in the deployment, I wanted to have a social visit with a friends XH but did not want to have it become inappropriate so I followed my rule and planned a chaperone. If truth be told, I was attracted to him and he was a midlevel rock star and we didnt have enough of a friendship to warrant meeting for coffee alone. He declined the invitation, I cancelled the chaperone and all was well, but the whole episode was ill-advised. I WAS tempted but the rule I made for myself saved me from falling into the cascade of poor decisions with a bad outcome.
I did eventually admitted to myself that the whole idea was flawed and I was blessed to have learned the easy way and not the hard way.
My process of making good decisions became more sophisticated in the years after. Now, my first red flag is feeling a sense of intrigue when interacting with a man and calling all the mental “soldiers” of my inner boundaries.
I conjecture that a lot of people dont realize that avoiding cheating is often a passive process, there will be times when it takes intentionality and effort.
So this is my personal wordy way of agreeing with the person who wrote this letter.
My sweet husband 2.0 has a tender heart and he would be destroyed if I ever cheated. My life’s task is to protect his sweet heart and I dont care if I have to look like a dork in the world to do this but I will.
Not looking like a dork at all, but a bish. A woman of bravery, integrity, strength, and honor. Wear it proudly!
Our third marriage counselor (Yes, I should have recognized it was over with the first one. Hopium is a damnable thing.) who was more like a cross between a life coach and summer camp counselor for middle schoolers used the word “mistake” when addressing Cheaty McLiarface’s betrayal. I (fairly) calmly responded that a mistake does not last eight years.
This. Very this.
Like other things in life, it’s a cascading tree/web of choices. At any point you are able to cease the behavior. At any point before the precipice, you are able to turn back.
We all had the same offers and temptations. You find out a lot about a person in those circumstances. Reality is that when faced with the same temptations that we all demonstrated better decision making guided by significantly less entitlement.
There’s a line. Beyond the line exists a slippery slope. Buy the ticket, take the ride. There are days…today happens to be one of them, where I wonder if the entitlement for some people isn’t just that they will be able to cross that line scot-free, but also that they will be able to seamlessly recover without anybody else noticing.
I got “I never intended for this to happen” during D-Day. And I called her on that. I replied with “But you encouraged it.” No question, no seeking clarification-it was a statement of fact. She had nothing. If she didn’t intend for that to happen, she probably should have set and enforced a boundary. I could untangle the skein of her decision making but I can’t risk the brain damage necessary to emulate that idiot’s decision making.
Feliz Jueves!
Jeff Washington. I was on a team to use the crash cart on our cardiac wing if any patients heart went haywire. In my ACLS critical care training, we had to memorize a decision tree of what to do next if for example / the heart stops or goes into erratic beats. You follow the decision tree to determine what to do or nor do next. Every second is a decision and you don’t take the next step if its not what you need to do. Same with a marriage. You want to keep it, you STOP ✋️ and take another path. It’s not easy but youe gift of fidelity feels honoring to your mate. Absolutely nothing is an excuse
Exactly. There were a couple of times super early into my relationship with my Traitor where somebody made overtures. I let my now-Traitor know what was happening and set pretty firm limits with the people making overtures. No secrecy. No secondary gain. Sure, the validation was neat, but I loved my Traitor more than I wanted ego cookies from people that knew better. I also wanted to role model what I wanted to see when that day came for her. And that never happened-no, not once! But there I go, expecting out of the universe what I put into it.
One of the few questions I asked before I realized I wasn’t going to hear anything of value was why he never took the opportunity to stop his cheating and/or patronizing sex workers when we moved – first out of a major metropolitan area where we met and married (didn’t admit to cheating then, but looking back and knowing he told me only what amounted to after this move, it likely included this time too), to an area where we could buy a house, then a third location to be nearer to family – all he had was “I don’t know.” Probably true on its face – I don’t think he ever thought beyond immediate gratification/sick self-soothing in that lizard brain. It made sense to me that any of these would have been great points at which to shake/slap himself out of it, stop abhorrent and dangerous behavior, and start again. But he didn’t know. That’s how much me, our marriage, our baby, that life was worth to him. He didn’t know.
I’m sorry chumponit..but thinking that moving, changing jobs, having a baby, not having a baby etc etc would stop the cheating and start fresh is like the promise, I will stop drinking, gambling, lying, over eating, if we move, change.jobs, get pregnant or not..has NOTHING to do with the compulsion to wander. My bipolar sex compulsive ex H had ongoing emotional affairs that I adjusted to..buy all along he cheated…we did all the things especially change jobs, but that just opens the door to fresh green grass and pastures…nothing stops it.
I very much understand now that nothing would have made him stop – actually, it was clear as the words were coming out of my mouth (since he never did!), but my mind at that time was probably wading around in some sort of time-traveling, bargaining stage of grief.
The lack of ego mass differentiation in these Traitor types is truly astonishing. It amazes me that we ever solidified the notion of “society” with that sort of thinking(or lack thereof) pinging around.
Carlo Cipolla’s “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity” was eye opening. Those who will wantonly destroy others as well as themselves are out there in droves, it seems.
I thought the same thing as CL as soon as I heard camper van. 😄 If the van is a-rockin’ don’t come a-knockin’.
Also, I would avoid anyone who talks trash with work colleagues about a spouse, ex or otherwise. It’s a red flag and inappropriate behavior IMO, even if your ex really is trash. Mind you, I wouldn’t go to a work retreat at all if I could get out of it, as it sounds like little more than an excuse for people to get drunk and engage in affairs. I would question the motives of an employer who offered something like that.
That aside, of course it’s not an “accident” or a “mistake.” My FW first cheated at a work conference but after becoming confused by my questions he inadvertently let slip that he was planning on doing so as soon as he knew OW was going to the conference. I’m pretty sure all FWs are at the very least hoping they will get the chance to cheat, if not outright looking for opportunities.
Re: the trash talking of exes, I would make an exception for people who are being subjected to post-separation abuse. I had a (female) coworker who frequently talked about things like this while going through divorce (apparently her ex was making her life hell including financial abuse and using their mutual child to manipulate her into being in contact with him more frequently etc.). Of course, I don’t know if all of her accounts were accurate, but I think sharing information like this with a wider audience might be self-protective to some extent.
Good point. I guess it depends on how close you are to people at work. My philosophy in work relationships is not to get too close, because if you fall out with them you’re stuck working with them. But yeah, if you need protection the more people who know the better.
Agree – I have had coworkers in bad or getting out of bad relationships, only looking for validation that something was wrong (or if they weren’t going to say anything, I certainly was!)
My Ex used the word BLUNDER over the word Mistake to cover all the choices involving his double life. Did he purposely choose that word as the one that made him less culpable? Was he thinking that Blunder implied a lack of awareness and intelligence on his part which led to him being hood-winked into the relationship with this cunning, wily and conniving woman? He was innocent! He was tricked!
Am I over-thinking this or does anyone else think there is a shade of difference in the 2 words?
It’s all semantics. I would agree with the implication of a lack of intelligence though.
This post is where I land. I DO NOT BELIEVE in one offs or it just happened ONE TIME.i know this blog site does suggests the one time SORRY FOREVER romp is possible, but I soundly disagree. Any cheater, even one time, made CONSCIOUS CHOICES in a million different twitches of the brains DNA. A one time event, IF THERE IS SUCH AN ANIMAL is a series of choices. I call a one time drunken sex act or drug induced decision, or ” we were separated ” or or or.I call that one time thing a PRACTICE RUN. Did you forgive? Ahhh..good, did you weep and beg and keep them by their liar promises? Even better. Zero consequences? The gold standard. Practice in grooming YOU to adjust to their wandering. Hey, I still have all my cookies and even if you are angry at them every minute, not a problem, they can blame YOU for their attitude in becoming a wife / husband they can talk about to all the woman or men they wish to jump on. You nagging shrew!! When CL say she is cynical I join her in that line. Cheating is a choice. Serial cheaters are those who cheat for a month or a year even with one person. Why? They go back over and over again. Serial? period. You might say, but 2x, my cheater only cheated ONE NIGHT. Sadly,that means he or she rolls over way too easily. Protect yourself completely and utterly. Buckle your seat belt. That was a testing practice run. You are not safe. I live on a 50 plus community. Do you know who hit on me when I first arrived? ONLY MARRIED MEN. They got to know me and guess what.? I am left completely alone. It starts with boundaries. Hugs to all the chumps. Those who think they have a unicorn ( you don’t) and those that know better.
All those choices add up. At any one time, it might be several to a dozen, but if they have been cheating for weeks, months and even years for some cheaters, imagine the amount of choices it took. Every time they did anything in relation to the affair. It’s mind boggling! And even further so once the cheater claims, “it was a mistake or I couldn’t control myself do to my bipolar”, which was in my case for cheater FW#2.
But if you think about that for a minute, he claims he was out of control but then think of all the rational choices he had to make to cheat every day for 5 months. Especially opening a new credit card and giving it to her, which she promptly charged up to the max with shopping and a dog grooming apptoitment for 167 dollars. I mean…his choices all seemed to have sound of mind to make those choices.
That’s what I told him, at least, when he kept saying he could not control himself, but yet he had all this control to lie and sneak around. open credit cards, go to work, etc. I told him, “you can’t claim to be both out of control and in control at the same time.” He just shut up.
While the mania may have made it easier to make that choice, he was still making choices every damn day for months. And he knew it was wrong, too, hence all the sneaking around.
It amazes me that they say some of the dumbest things and expect us to believe them!
“you can’t claim to be both out of control and in control at the same time”
They want it to work both ways – whatever lets them wriggle out of the mess they very much got themselves into, competence/culpability aside.
Also, if this scenerio ever happens to me like the poster today, I think I would take his name and do a simple search on google, find his wife and give her an annonmyous tip as to what this sleaze bag is doing! So gross!
I get that, but it is unlikely she will believe you. He will already have several canned comments to tell her either the accuser is crazy or she is crazy or it is a mix up. Or the innocent “Huh, did you get a number so I can call and find out what the heck is going on” or a hundred other denials.
Plus if the accuser is identified, they will be called crazy, or a stalker etc.
It is infuriating really.
Good point. But I really think that husbands/wives/BF/GF of cheaters can sense that something is going on, when they are being cheated on, and sometimes all it takes is someone to say something, I would hope the wife of this dude would start watching him, get a PI or something. But alas, some people would rather remain in the dark than know the truth. I get that for sure. I am glad I found out all those years ago about my cheater. However, there is a tiny part of me, 1% probably, that would not like to have known and the life I had wouldn’t have been exploded and destroyed, my heart would not have been broken, etc. Sunk costs, shared life and all the other stuff Tracy talks about here. So I get it. But at the end of the day, better to know who the person really is that you are with and know what they are capable!
Of course there’s a million choices made to screw around. It’s no mistake. It’s deliberate.
I never once even THOUGHT about cheating on my husband. Never. Thought. About. It. Ever!
And I suppose I had the opportunity as I traveled for work frequently. With men. The nature of that business was chock full of only men. Attractive men. Wildly successful men. Amusing men. It never crossed my mind. And I would say that in my youth I was above average in the looks department. Never had even a pass. Must have been giving off a “don’t even” vibe without knowing it.
Sure, I’d heard of adulterers, but those types were the very dregs of society. Subjects of gossip . Or in books. Or movies. Or on the TV. One just didn’t. I never met an adulterer.
Until SparkleDick.
Some Chumps are like you and me. We didn’t think that somebody we knew could be a cheater. I think it takes us longer to see and accept that it’s happening to us because (we think) we’ve never met any of those people. Of course once my eyes were opened I realized just how common it is.
My soon to be ex husband was upset and angry that I ‘chose’ divorce after discovering a 4 year affair. He ranted that divorce wasn’t his choice. I pointed out you chose to cheat and you chose to lie. In fact for 1460 days he chose to lie, meet up with this woman, sleep with her, shower with her, go behind her husbands back and mine and lie, lie lie to me every day, either by omission or some flimsy untruth. Chump lady gave me the straight talk and I stopped with the pick me dance. Now I simply don’t care and Tuesday is on the horizon.