UBT: Envy Kills More Marriages Than Infidelity
The Universal Bullshit Translator digests The Holistic Psychologist’s claim that envy kills more marriages than infidelity does.
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Hi Chump Lady!
I attached a screenshot from an Instagram account I generally like, and this post upset me. Can you ask the UBT to take a look?
Sing Along Chump
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Dear Sing Along Chump,
On the face of it, this isn’t bad advice — marry someone who wants to see you succeed. I think your point of contention is comparing envy to infidelity and declaring the greater harm envy.
The Universal Bullshit Translator is at your service.
Callings and passion
Marry the person who has found their calling and passion.
Okay. Could their calling and passion be unloading the dishwasher? The UBT is a practical machine.
What if their calling and passion is opening a kite boarding shop and going $20K into credit card debt? Perhaps wait to marry them until after the kite board fever has broken.
The UBT is a utilitarian apparatus. Calling and passions are fine, but domesticity tends to be more about dishwashing and paying bills on time. The UBT is worried that someone who sees their life as a grand operatic passion will not concern themselves with the minutia of shared responsibility. But that doesn’t make for a snappy Instagram post.
Envy and infidelity
Envy kills more marriages than infidelity does.
Is there a death registry? Do we have statistics on this?
Let’s compare these two scenarios:
I hacked my husband’s phone and discovered he has a secret passion for kite boarding. Versus. I hacked my husband’s phone and discovered he has a double life with someone named Doris.
This filled me with profound jealousy for kite boarding! For Doris! WHO IS SHE?
Can you breed with a kite board? The husband has a second family with Doris.
Come on, Holistic Psychologist. These things are not equivalent. Being insufficiently supportive of your partner’s dreams is not the same thing as f*cking strange and bringing home gonorrhea.
Let us all rise
Marry someone who loves to see you rise because they’re rising too.
That’s nice. That’s preferable to “sulking in a closet while you attend the awards ceremony solo.” But it’s not the hanging offense infidelity is.
The UBT would point out that the Holistic Psychologist, “Claire, 33, has been married to Tom for 3 years…” appears to have zero personal knowledge of chumpdom. But probably does understand what it is to feel covetousness. And speaking from her ass, would like us to understand that covetousness is really BAD. Whereas cheating is something we shouldn’t take too seriously as marriage ending. It’s nothing on par with not supporting your partner’s kite boarding passion. Ask a divorce lawyer. They’ll tell you.
I think that the Holistic Psychologist might need to maybe just take a break from the Internet for a bit.
From my perspective, I’d reframe “Marry the person who has found their calling and their passion,” as “Look for the person who doesn’t need to blow your candle out to make their candle look brighter …. find someone who admires your candle rather than being threatened by it.”
LFTT
The “Holistic Psychologist” is an interesting character, and in an open marriage or thrupple.
If her account is still around in a few years, I would imagine her tempo is going to shift to “where have all the good men/women gone?” when the metaphysical bills she racks up with polyamory come due. It’s her pop-psych BS why I think more people are choosing their peace.
Agree that infidelity is worse than envy – however sometimes they are linked – the envy leading the FW to seek comfort elsewhere with someone who is going to think they are wonderful. Mine was envious of my success but reframed that as my disloyalty and lack of love this justifying the affair. Excess envy is often based on narcissism.
You are right here too. Whenever I did well my XhC would sulk..He REQUIRED central stage and if the spotlight moved from him, that was a good reason to find other worshippers.
Hogwash from the moron insta psychologist aside, I would agree with this take on envy and Narcissism.
FW narcopath is an executive now but early on I was climbing faster and made more money within a few years which didn’t make him feel good. We already had DDay #1 and I should have left. Because of raising kids I went part time in a lower paying field but that only fed his arrogance and entitlement. Hooker habit!
When I won public accolades in that field he “jokingly” dismissed it in front friends who were congratulating me.
You just can’t win with a Narcissistic personality disordered FW. They’re incapable of being a truly supportive loving spouse.
What would that even feel like? I learned no matter what I did, to make sure HE got praised too.
Bad advice for sure. Mine found his passion (ballroom dance instruction), was still constantly envious of me (tore me down at every turn, esp. professionally) and was also a cheater.
Rarity, have you see the movie DANCE WITH ME with Richard Gere and Jlo? It’s an emotional affair called not an affair to keep us chumps relieved. When someone tears you down they are having emotional affairs and mire. They have to make themselves feel better, no matter what
Same as mine! (Except for the different passion).
In my case, it’s likely that cheater’s jealousy of my success led to his lies about himself, and then perhaps to cheating as a way to feel superior to me and to put me down.
I won numerous national awards in my field, which was very public. Cheater not only ignored the awards, he also denigrated my position to others. It was as if I was, say, a cabinet secretary, and he told people I worked as a secretary for some little town. I was shocked speechless when I overheard him say that to his coworkers at a party. Fortunately, one colleague –who was also my friend– spoke up, named my position and organization, and said she wouldn’t call that little.
He fabricated credentials, degrees and awards in order to get recognition similar to mine. Then he resorted to finding a young woman on the internet and planned to marry her, specifically so others would wonder what he had “to get such a hot babe on his arm.” As I mentioned recently, he actually said he wanted someone stupid who wouldn’t question him.
He never acknowledged my accomplishments, not even a card or a text, let alone a party. While I don’t know if he was sulking in the closet, he never once attended any awards ceremonies for me, even the one that was broadcast on national TV.
Insecure JERK,
GoodFriend,
Congratulations on being able to succeed despite a spouse not supporting you (which ends up making everything harder).
I was never a nationally known Successful Person but I did eventually design a model of functioning in my area of expertise that (for a time) brought me attention and praise. I had toiled quietly for decades and was ok with that and my Cheater was accustomed to the spotlight being on him.
Based on the secrets I dug up…I think that my success (and the attention and respect I gained in the moment) came at about the time that Cheater realized that the skeletons in his closet were legion and if ever exposed, public opinion would not go well for him. I knew about one OW and thought that was it but there were likely many more and I had no clue. He had moments of looking panicked.
I think it’s super cool that you were so successful. Chump Pride flag flying
There are those who walk amongst us who really think that Figuring Everything Out is a reasonable and realistic goal. They think that they can even prevent infidelity and all other relationship ills if the only figure out that magic fairy dust….and Claire thinks it is getting a partner who has already found their calling and passion.
Oh Claire….life and humans are so much more complex than that…and it wont “affair proof” your marriage (not that she said it would but it was veering in that direction).
I used to read a Christian based portal where about 20 different writers posted essays on all sorts of topics (with a Christian spin). One gal wrote on “Relationship Mastery” (her phrase, no kidding). By the time I stumbled onto that site, I had already been Chumped and the idea that someone would claim to have mastery over relationships (with other actual human beings) who have free will and agency…it boggled my mind. It rang of absolute desperation to control others…which – if you understand Free Will – is antithetical to Christianity in the first place.
(Another essayist wrote that women who are really loved by their spouses were more special to God than other women)
I tried my best to write kind, reasonable explanations to these 2 writers of how their philosophies were not consistent with basic Christian teachings, but eventually gave up.
I am, yet again, thankful that the internet didnt exist when I was young and clueless and thought I had Figured Everything Out.
Yes, I went down that rabbit hole too, ignoring free will and thinking that if I just had the right formula, I could save my marriage. Nevermind the horrible choices that my husband was making that were marriage-breaking.
After he left for the final time, there were people at church who gave me the “lots of sex and better dinners” talk, as if that would have kept him home. They did that for years, even post-divorce. Not at all, in his case. He had decided to ditch marriage and family and go off to the beach to find himself. Period. Some time later, one of his siblings was claiming that if we relocated to a new place and started over, that would do it. No way. All of our problems would be there too, and I completely didn’t trust my then-husband at that point.
So I ditched his family, and we divorced. Ultimately, I ditched that church as well. I found a church that doesn’t bug me for being divorced. Frankly, I waited too long to do that. Good now, though.
“Lots of sex and better dinners!” Haha, so funny! Sounds like it could be a country western song!
Sure could be!
I actually tried it. Didn’t work. We had a lot of sex, and I made fancier dinners.
He left anyway, TWICE.
When people shamed me with that, I didn’t even go there, as confused as I was. I just said, “None of your business on either front.”
Deeply steeped in faith-focused hope, I hung in there for YEARS both in a cloaked abandonment (he left but said he wasn’t leaving leaving, he was just “working” 3000 miles away) and later in a wreckonsillyation. He moved back but complained and moaned as if he had personally invented suffering.
I finally gave up and prayed to God that I would no longer try to keep him connected to our family “if there is a place where he could be happy, I free him from obligation to us, he can go”. Within about 2 weeks, he dropped dead. Straight-up, I thought he would go to California, not Purgatory.
Oh, my. An unusual answer to prayer, indeed.
Mine ran off to the beach and stayed there, other than coming back to get his stuff and put the family house on the market. The attorneys weren’t involved yet, but I was glad to have that financial cushion for what I felt was inevitable. He thought selling the house would force me to reconcile. Nope. We had moved out already.
He is now in his seventies, remains in a beach area, and is in very poor health, last I knew. We haven’t heard from him in years. But yes, if he were no longer on this earth, there would be a measure of relief.
More than infidelity? Hmm…interesting sound bite. What if you have both?
I thought that I had married someone who wanted both of us to shine. He claimed that he didn’t care that I had the better job and made more $$$. And he claimed that he wanted kids.
Well, come to find out when the marriage was cracking, all of that was hogwash. In retrospect, he wanted to be the only one who shone. He deeply resented our children and me. While separated, he even talked about completely cutting our college kids out of our lives if we reconciled because he viewed them as competition for my affection. By the way, he also said the same about the dog we had adopted after we separated, saying that she would have to be euthanized if we reconciled. Of course, he also denied all that in another conversation. And I knew there was infidelity despite all of his work to hide it. Ultimately, it came to light during the divorce process.
Big nope. One time, my long-term therapist commented that my ex really hadn’t been marriage material with all of his mental health issues. He showed signs of borderline personality disorder from the very beginning and then became a pill addict, which brought in elements of narcassism. There wasn’t anything to work with in the end.
I was never envious. I fully supported him finding his “calling and passion.” It turned out that one of his passionate callings was another women.
During those years of his engagement with his passionate calling he loved to see me rise (hobby) because it took me away for the weekends.
Jeesh. You can’t make this sick sad stuff up.
I hear you. Happened to me, too. When you pull somebody up, they don’t prepare you for them stepping on your shoulders and kicking you down when they don’t need you anymore.
Today i Laughed so hard over this blog!!!!! The turn of words in so funny!!!
False Equivalency from the IGNORANT. How many chumps have been accused of this. My #1 ExhC said I liked a guy I worked with in the ER.I had to work with him and he was fun, but never ever have an affair with him!! This is what my ExhC told our TEEN daughter as a false Equivalency as COMPARED to his 2.5 year affair. So let’s call it what it is, another lie to excuse cheating..not unlike the excuses of “you bother me with your throat clearing, gas, grey hair that makes me feel old, too occupied with—————–fill in the blank “..that moving goal post. You’re jealous? The marriage must end. My XhC had ongoing emotional affairs. I beat the jealousy out of me as I thought all these woman wanted what I had. Crazy right? I had no idea he was grooming me to allow more, given I was so understanding ..until he blossomed his full force basement life. Who knew?
I have to say that with Tracy in my head ALL THE TIME, I have never been the same. I can read the blue print 🖨 within minutes. Tracy has the key that unlocks 🔑 the lies that cheaters tells us and the lies we tell ourselves. I might be one of the chumps freed from hell but there is also a UBT within my soul. I can never be the same.
I have learned that generally speaking for chumps, whatever we did or didn’t do, the opposite will be the reason for their cheating.
Yes! Exactly!
Manipulators manipulate. You can’t deal with it at all. Period.
If anybody needs a living, breathing, wet sample of what false equivalency is-look no further!
Why, yes, you should absolutely marry somebody that has found their calling and passion…and is realistic about it(I like the kiteboarding example).
I imagine that more than a few marriages have and do founder because one person is grinding while one person drifts.
A 50-word-or-less infographic on a pop-psychology Insta should not be convincing anybody that a lack of drive is less ok than infidelity though (at least that wasn’t looking for confirmation bias). I just don’t see the connection.
We can boil the whole infographic down to “fix your picker” and call it a day.
See I dunno otherwise…it happens I already had my passion and drive when I met my Traitor. I’ve known what I wanted to be since I was 14. I’ve been blessed to achieve that dream and am privileged to get to dream some more. I pulled her up so she could have her dream, too. Doors were opened for me, so I opened them for her. Just like the picture said!
Look at where THAT got me.
It got me used. It got me betrayed. And it turned out that the jealousy and paranoia was VERY well placed.
Maybe you need to marry somebody that has a passion and a dream…but is also passionate about “us” and wants to keep working on that, too. And also that person should probably be comfortable with who they are and who you are as well. And maybe…JUST MAYBE…see you as something more than a stepping stone to whatever deluded greatness they think they are owed.
Have a Mighty Monday!
Jeff,
I suspect that the problem that many of our Cheaters suffer from is that they frame things in terms of a “Zero Sum Game” and thus they can only be winning if someone else (usually their Chump) is losing. The whole concept of a “Positive Sum Game” is entirely beyond them.
And “Have a Mighty Monday” to you too.
LFTT
Personally I think cheaters are the most envious people on the planet so why choose just one cause of marital demise when you can experience both?
Not everyone differentiates envy from jealousy but I think the two are different with envy being about coveting what others have and jealousy being about defending what’s supposed to be yours. Then you can parse jealousy further into “warranted”– in the case someone really is trying to filch something that’s yours– or projected and paranoid.
Anyway, I think you can add “paranoid projected jealousy” to the list of destructive crap most cheaters engage in. Triple the fun.