UBT: Marriage and Affairs Are ‘Different Universes’
The Universal Bullshit Translator digests a Guardian column where a man explains his affair as existing “in a different universe” compared to his marriage. Apparently, it’s okay to screw around, so long as you do it in a different space/time continuum.
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You can all stop sending me the Guardian’s This Is How We Do It, ‘My life with my lover exists in a different universe to my marriage’ — a sex column featuring the septuagenarian Schmoopie Viviana and her “very married” boyfriend. The UBT has considered this steaming pile of crap and is demanding more Lebkuchen.
I’m sorry UBT, I will not feed you more German Christmas confections because the featured FWs are AARP age.
Harrumph. MORE Cookie!
Who do you think you are, UBT? Walter Reuther? I will not cede to your demands. You’re only one machine. You cannot unionize.
MORE COOKIE!
Sigh. Okay! Geez.
(Really, you all have to stop sending me this article, or send Lebkuchen reserves instead.)
It’s a special affair, the marriage not so much.
The Guardian’s This Is How We Do It series tells the story of two luvahs, each from their own soppy perspective, relating how amazing their sex lives are. It’s like Penthouse forum for pensioners. We begin with Viviana.
Viviana, 72
There was always a sense that we were psychically, as well as physically, merged
Viviana, 72, wants you to know that beneath that Marks & Spencer’s acrylic jumper, is one hot mama. She may be a grandmother with a dusty bowl of butterscotch sweets, displayed in her luridly wallpapered parlor (cover the damp with florals!), but at heart she is a wild bohemian.
Sebastian and I have been together for seven years, but we haven’t had sex – or even seen each other – for the past two.
Sebastian is real. I am not being catfished.
Sebastian is married and our relationship is a secret. We met through work, but when Sebastian retired, he moved 300 miles away.
We’re very close. In that I’m-a-secret-and-he-moved-three-counties-away kind of way. But aren’t we edgy?
These days, he is with his wife 24/7 doing retirement activities.
He could fuck me or play pickleball. He chose pickleball.
But before he moved away, we were able to spend at least one day a month together.
BECAUSE I AM ENCHANTING.
Come closer and unwrap that butterscotch.
He’d arrive on my doorstep, and the first thing I’d do is press my mouth to his, not to kiss, but to breathe in one another’s breath. The sex that followed felt like an extension of that strange, intimate breath: there was always a sense that we were psychically, as well as physically merged.
You can tell a lot about a man’s psyche by his breath mints.
We may not have seen each other for two years, but I still feel fused with him. We usually exchange 40-60 messages a day.
This way he can imagine me to be whomever he likes, and is not confronted with my actual presence. Why pay for phone sex? I’m here Sebastian!
Some are erotic, but many are mundane.
I do not care for the details of your gout, Sebastian.
The constant communication keeps our relationship fuelled and intense. I’ve felt more emotionally distant from partners who I was actually living with.
Probably because I was checked out with imaginary ones. But yes, I have a RELATIONSHIP and it’s real and intense. We just go years without seeing each other, because he’s very busy building model railroads and planting daffodil bulbs for his wife. But constant communication is our fuel. #onread #emotionallydistant
Of course, there are times when our situation feels desperate.
How much pickleball does a man need, Sebastian?
We were almost able to meet this past summer and had put months of planning into it. He booked tickets to a gig he knew his wife would never want to see, and so was able to travel alone. But then I got Covid, and we had to cancel. We were both shattered with disappointment.
I’m happy to pass along my Chlamydia, but never Covid.
Anyway, we were both shattered with disappointment when he went home to his wife. #thishurtshimtoo
That pesky marriage gets in the way of our affair.
We are now back to trying again, but the reality is that even in the best of all possible worlds, we won’t get to see each other more than twice a year.
The pickleball tournament schedule is really grueling. But he does find the time to send dick pics.
I don’t feel jealous of Sebastian’s wife because there is no way that anything in his marriage could be akin to the intensity of what we share.
OMG HE CALLED!
His wife never feels this kind of elation.
I genuinely don’t think I’m taking anything away from her. They are dedicated to one another, but there isn’t the kind of intensity between them that would be diminished by him paying attention to me.
My sparkletwat shines brighter. I am a very special orifice.
I have never felt any guilt, because I view this relationship as a gift.
I have never felt any guilt because my empathy synapses don’t fire. I view this relationship as a gift, just like the boxed set of Marks & Spencer’s bath salts I have stashed under my jumper, away from the suspicious eyes of department store detectives. If you didn’t want me to take Lilac Splishsplash, you shouldn’t have made it so enticing!
I was 65 when this began, and I’m 72 now. The way I see it, if something this special is put in front of you, you can’t walk away from it.
That’s exactly what I told the officer. He released me after my niece showed up and explained early onset dementia.
Sebastian, 65
Now we hear from dreamboat, Sebastian. Is it true that he and Viviana share a special love that can only be consummated once every few years? How can we have what they have?
The first time I kissed Viviana was at her home, pressed up against the wall in her hallway. I was meant to be visiting for a casual lunch, and the attraction came out of nowhere for both of us. I remember leaning in to greet her at the door, smelling her scent, and feeling overwhelmed.
Is that…. Lilac Splishsplash?
As we kissed, she said to me: “How married are you?” I replied: “Very married.” That was seven years ago – and I don’t think we’ve ever explicitly discussed my marriage since.
Because explicit discussions have no bearing on explicit actions.
I don’t feel guilty about our relationship, because I have conceptualised my relationship with Viviana as existing in a completely different universe to my marriage.
And that’s what matters — not what you do, but how you imagine things. I have conceptualized my embezzlement as taking place on Neptune and the laws of Neptune are very different than earthling laws.
Similarly, I imagine my affair exists in another universe apart from my marriage. In zero gravity, I can get my dick up.
Viviana and I have a keen interest in theoretical physics and the concept of the multiverse helps us – we never discuss my marriage because it simply does not exist in our world.
I am not a cheater, I’m a theoretical physicist.
My marriage is perfectly wonderful and fulfilling. My relationship with Viviana is not a replacement for something that may or may not be missing elsewhere.
My wife appliance is perfectly functional. Appliances never care if you conspire against them. Does the dishwasher care if I send 40-50 text messages to the microwave? NEVER.
I miss Viviana very much, but we are creative, and are able to adapt our relationship to our situation.
The demands of pickleball are all consuming, and I adapt to the situation by getting jerked off at the local strip mall massage parlor. Viviana must understand that I miss her very much, but I prefer the anonymity of sexting over her 72-year-old pussy.
Communication is key to every affair.
Over time, we have developed codes, so we can communicate our sexual activities almost as a secret language. Any reference to “ice-cream”, for example, implies a recent orgasm.
The ice cream at the strip mall is to die for.
I write her love letters and send her handmade jewellery,
.. from paperclips. Because it started as an office romance. Get it? What woman doesn’t thrill to paperclips. I’ve also been known to macrame a friendship bracelet. #giverhersomething2remember
and we are constantly sharing images and videos as a way of staying connected.
AARP had a very improving video on gout. I tagged Viviana.
We have built up a collection of more than 10,000 images that we refer to as our “archive”. If she mentions the colour red, in passing, for example, I might send her an image of her red-painted nails from several years ago.
I love a red nail. Outshines the liver spots.
Updating and returning to our archive is more than just a way of keeping a record, it is our way of giving our relationship reality and history.
I’m very married, but please enjoy this digital archive of random shit I’ve curated.
I don’t see my messaging with Viviana as impinging on my relationship with my wife – I feel like that communication is going on in a parallel universe to my existence at home.
The UBT fervently hopes that your wife sends divorce papers to your parallel universe.
Whereas other partnerships calm down over time, ours has maintained an intensity comparable with a new, budding relationship. Of course we miss each other, but the flirting, planning and anticipation keeps the passion level high. It was desperately disappointing when we missed seeing each other last summer, but while the distance is a challenge, it has also become a part of our ongoing dance.
Of course we miss each other, but I have a wife. And local masseuses. And the universe is so very large and ever expanding. So, I don’t have any time for you at the moment, Viviana, (what is time anyway but a construct?) but you’ll understand as a fellow theoretical physicist.
This is hilarious; these people are deluded. I think though, sadly that this is how many cheaters and their schmoopies operate. One of FW’s affairs was with a married Canadian colleague and I’ve read emails between them professing their intense love for each other – but how they were “never going to run away to join a circus together”. Wtf? They could only ever have seen each other once or twice a year – with maybe a few hours’ fucking opportunity on each occasion. It was bonkers; who are these idiots? Very obvious that for Sebastian, the plotting is the fun and Vivianna is a little aide project. Vivianna has projected some great romance on a tawdry Darby & Joan affair more suited to a sitcom!
🤣God they’re boring aren’t they.
It could be a symptom of a growing ‘meh’ for me; Recently, the more I think of my ex Fw and his dime-a-dozen dick-shine Eurotwat, the more I think dear God what a boring man he actually is.
To find all the tacky manufactured crap of their twu luv exciting? Fuckwits and Schmoopies really are creepy, sad little oddballs.
And Sebastian and Viviana? Their own heads are so far extended up their Christmas pine cones that they won’t be coming back out until the Easter Bunny strings Sebastian’s rusty baubles over the Xmas tree.
There’s just no ‘there’ there is there?
You nailed it!
And here I was thinking that only Marvel and DC had multiverses. Turns out “MCU” actually means “marital cinematic universe.”
Fancy that.
Physics gets misused pretty frequently in popular culture (no, quantum mechanics does not explain the soul) but this garbage is really next level. The existence of parallel universes (for which there is no actual evidence), if they exist, does not imply “moral obligations are different if I travel 30 miles from home”.
Say what you will about physicists’ moral culpability in other areas (and there’s a conversation to be had about the atom bomb) but I refuse to take any blame for this blathering idiocy.
I think there’s something like this on that famous spoofy “cheater loopholes.” https://maxtkramer.com/the-great-book-of-relationship-loopholes/
It’s actually a joke in Deadpool 3. You pretty much only go multiverse when you’re out of ideas and on the way down/out.
This is just sad and pathetic. Viviana is in for a rude awakening when the first age related health issues crop up, and Sebastian disappears from her life like a puff of smoke. Alternate universe? WHAT alternate universe, I’m a happily married man!!
He already did. “Too bad about your Covid. Well, I’m off to the gig!”
He really already has disappeared. He uses her for emotional support and kibbles through all the texting and he doesn’t have to screw her anymore.
Because if he wanted to be with her physically, he’d be with her physically. He doesn’t want her anymore. Serial cheaters tend to lose interest quickly. He gets tons of attention from her and he probably has a new OW close to his new home to actually screw.
I’m envisioning shades of Baby Reindeer following a UTI-triggered bout of dementia with Viviana camping day and night at the bus stop across the street from his retirement cottage in a spangled red disco dress screaming abuse at his wife.
Yes, you certainly hit it spot on. My ex FW is in his late 70s and as you may expect, has many health related issues (including getting a lovely Foley catheter inserted) I no longer have any responsibility to help wiih his health isses, so he was left on his own. The many women he cheated with over the decades have vanished…I do recall back when he complained to me that all of the other men in the waiting room at the urologist’s office had someone with him and he had no one…aaw…sorry he was not able to call a prostitute to come and wait for him and drive him. He is about 6 years my senior and in lousy health, but yes, I have a few minor health issues, too. I have great female friends and an adult son to help me. He now has staff at the facility where he lives to help him. All the women he cheated with are like a puff of smoke you mentioned. Long gone…Nothing left but the remnants of STDs…
If I were a prostitute I would absolutely sit in his urologist’s office and flip through a magazine for my usual fee. After all the man has needs.
Septuagenarian “GFE” (girlfriend experience a.k.a. pretending to like the client).
Ha, love that. I don’t know, maybe one of them would, if they served alcohol…or they could sneak it inside a Starbucks cup (long-time trick of his to get booze into booze-free places). Thanks for the chuckle. Not my problem.
That is some weapons grade dissociation right there.
I do wonder, however, in which universe will their consequences land when Sebastian and Viviana get found out ? I suspect that they hope that it is an altogether different universe to the one that they occupy …… I hope that Sebastian’s wife and her legal team pull his wallet through his ar*e in every single possible parallel universe simulateously.
But I would say that wouldn’t I?
LFTT
There are some folks in this world who are either smokin’ some really good shit or are so fucked in the head they are in need of some professional help.
Wow, just wow. I guess Cheaters and their Schmoopies never grow up!!! They just always seem to chase the sparkle! I am in a relatively healthy relationship (we have our moments but they are not frequent and don’t carry on) but when I look around things like this and other craziness seem to be more prevalent than ever. What happened??? Why can’t people have the conversations any more?
Narcissists think rainbow stars shoot out of their asses. I had a former coworker who thought she was spezshul; that men 30 years younger found her hot; that store clerks treated her with reverence. No, they were just being polite to an older woman. I used to think she was delusional but realized she was a narcissist like Viviana here. Sebastian is just an opportunistic old tool who is using Viviana as a free phone sex worker. Viviana won’t figure that out because her narcissism won’t allow her to think she’s not spezshul.
Enough to (almost) put me off ice cream.
Although this is nausea-inducing BS, I do appreciate this sentiment: “My marriage is perfectly wonderful and fulfilling. My relationship with Viviana is not a replacement for something that may or may not be missing elsewhere.”
It exposes as false the assumption that the chump must have been so terribly flawed that the poor cheater just HAD to look elsewhere for…satisfaction. Instead, many cheaters simply feel they deserve more because they are special.
It boils down to immaturity and entitlement. My ex tells me I’ll always be his best friend and soul mate (ummm NO!) but the excitement of his 15 years younger AP was his last chance at “the thrill” again. Do these cheaters really think they are new and thrilling to us non cheaters at home.
That’s so disturbing! I went totally NC with my ex as fast as I could so he didn’t get the chance to say things like that to me but soooo many other people did. Even my sister was like, “So, you’re just never going to talk to him again?” with an eye roll.
Yeah, that’s what happens when you talk about killing your wife and have a whole secret life and like to fuck kids. Your wife just divorces you and never talks to you again. Even without the pedophilia, I can’t see why I would ever want to talk to him again after that. It’s so bizarre that people have this expectation that they can betray and destroy you and you’ll still be their friend. It’s definitely immaturity and entitlement, astronomical levels of it.
oh wow. im so sorry this happened to you.
Sheesh. After the divorce and before I went 100% no contact, my narc ex told me I would always be his forever Valentine. I said, “Yeah, right”, and shook my head. The fact that they spew this BS and expect it to spackle over the damage they caused makes me SMH. He also said he “deserved” to pursue his serial husband poacher coworker cos he had a “right” to be happy and SHE told him we had lost our spark. The last time he saw my son he said, “I really love your mom” and my son said, “You have a funny way of showing it.” Crickets after that. (My son is grown with children, so he knew about the cheating and abandoning us all.)
If their affair is so very harmless and innocent, why don’t they let the wife in on the secret? Surely she would be fine with knowing she’s been put at risk for std’s, lied to for seven years, and sharing her retirement account with shmoops…
I am not a cheater, I’m a theoretical physicist. — Best line ever!
“Gordon doesn’t need to hear all this, he’s a highly trained professional!” – scientist right before the world ending resonance cascade in the game Half Life.
Relationships for Dummies.
Literally.
Also, Santa Claus is real. If you don’t stop making that expression, your face will freeze that way. If you close your eyes, no one can see you. Denial is a river in Egypt. My weight is right there on my driver’s license.
The Truth Is Out There!
Nothing dysfunctional about this. Nope. Nothing at all.
Can someone please locate Sebastian’s wife so we can send the rescue party?
In other news, I wonder how Beyoncé is feeling this morning about her decision to stay married to Jay Z?
I’m just going to say, I’m tried of Beyonce. I don’t see how she’s such a strong, empowered woman like she’s constantly held up as. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if she knew all about what he was doing and liked it. Plenty of women are disgusting degenerates too;
I have no idea about Beyonce’s personal situation, but I do think that we need to be careful not to accuse someone of conspiring in their own abuse…and enjoying it.
Many non-chumps assume that their own partners couldn’t possibly sustain a double life without their knowledge, but as we know, it happens all the time. It happened to me.
With all due respect I am tired of celebrity worship and do not believe these people deserve special treatment. I give zero grace to my ex husbands girlfriend for staying with him after he’s been exposed as a pedo so why would I give an ounce of grace to an extremely wealthy women who could easily take her children and leave her pedo husband? My ex’s girlfriend faces possible homelessness if she leaves and I still see her as a dogshit degenerate but supposed to give a pass to a billionaire? No thanks. If she leaves him I’ll give her some credit for that. If she stays, she’s just as disgusting as he is.
What evidence do you have of that? I’m disappointed she stayed with JayZ after the cheating scandal, but far from thinking she’s okay with it, she poured her guts out in Lemonade and then drank the reconciliation Koolaid. It’s more likely that she’s another talented woman that a lesser talented FW has to drag down.
Agree Katie. I do not find her brand of female empowerment empowering.
It reeks of trying too hard and fails the authenticity test. Exhibit A: she exploits actual contemporary artists who are women by literally copying their art and reproducing it in her music videos. Total plagiarism.
But in any case as Velvet says above, “Queen Bey” may be pondering why she stayed with a cheater and now, allegedly, a rapist when she could be totally liberated and actually truly empowered 🤷♀️
I read that, and I hope she’s reconsidering that decision. And then I thought about how creepy it must feel to be married to him right now — because if it were my FW, I would totally believe the accusation and I know how creepy it makes me feel to even consider it.
Even if he wins the suit he left himself wide open to those allegations by hanging out with Diddy and dragging his family through the sewer in the bargain. His cheating certainly didn’t help. If she doesn’t want to look like she’s in the Ghislaine Maxwell school of rape enablers, she only has one choice here– do a Shakira and wash that stink off immediately or watch everything she’s worked for turn to shit.
Yes HOAC 🎯 Shakira is the gold standard and looks actually empowered not the fake shame-based and yes enabling version that can’t be single or divorced like B. And who was the as yet unnamed female celebrity (the fourth person) in the room allegedly watching Diddy and Jay-Z while were allegedly doing whatever they allegedly did?
He’s married, and they are delusional. They’ve justified this every which way and aren’t about to let it go.
And 40-50 texts a day? Does his wife ever question why he’s on his phone so much? How much is he really paying attention to her if he’s so occupied with Vivi?
This will break down at some point when there is a significant health problem. If it’s him, Vivi may never know. And Vivi will likely be on her own if it’s her.
Just not good. Nope.
I know my ex was constantly in the bathroom. I used to feel sorry for him for having such a terrible time pooping. I used to buy him all sorts of stool softeners and fiber drinks trying to help him out. That’s where he would text people. When he got a phone he could take into the shower, his showers became so much longer. It was really noticeable. I look back on that now and shake my head, I didn’t put it together at the time and I actually felt sorry for him. Ew.
I almost missed the very first fact in his discourse. He was at Vivienne’s home for a ‘casual lunch’. Whoa, This crosses the line right off the bat for me. If a great husband is schmoozing other women, having lunch alone at their homes, leaning in to breathe the woman’s scent, I would say that he just might! be a serial cheater.
Serial cheater for sure, with a large control group for his science fetish: “Whereas other partnerships calm down over time…..“.
Totally. The real reason old Viv hasn’t seen him is probably because he found some local sidebangs but they’re half his age and/or hookers and don’t get his old fart jokes and references so he breadcrumbs Viv to Frankenstein together the full “girlfriend experience.”
Cheater wasn’t just “Cheater”, he was Major Cheaterpants of the Marine Corps where their motto is Semper Fidelis (Always Faithful) but they dont tell you what they are faithful to.
Me and a number of my friends have learned that the faithfulness they speak of is mostly to their dicks.
Way back in the 20th century, Cheater would tell me things about the OTHER guys cheating to throw me off the logical path that he would do the same. Turns out, there is an alternative multiverse explanation for a lot of their cheating:
Many of their deployments locate them on the other side of the International Date Line, so they live in a different day than their wives and if you aren’t in the same day, you cant be married.
There are other times when they likely use the “I might die here, I deserve a good boink” or the “love the one you are with” excuse that allows coworker sidefucking. I wonder if he was ever caught in one of these relationships…his permanent record (that I got a copy of when he died) did not reflect anything specific but he did not get a promotion that almost everyone with his circumstances would expect, so there may have been some subtle punishment for bad decisions that they were keeping from the Wife Appliance.
So ye, this multiverse excuse is widespread (even though I did not use it and stayed faithful when he was away for 6+ months at a time).
Oh my gosh, my FW did the same thing! We met in the Army. He would tell me how other guys were “throwing away their marriage to screw some gross desert queen.” He would feel so sorry for their wives and their children, and on and on and on. All while lying to me and he was probably worse than any of those guys if we were to compare their actions.
I think you’re right about him getting passed up for promotion. They do stuff like that. He probably did get caught screwing somebody’s wife or something and they kept it quiet but punished him that way. I’ve seen that happen a few times.
For those who aren’t military affiliated, a desert queen is what they used to call deployed female soldiers who would make themselves available to screw during deployments. They were often unattractive and all around unlikeable on every level women who enjoyed suddenly having so much male attention because there were so few other women around. I explain that as someone who was a female soldier so I don’t find the term offensive. It is fact. These women exist and they delight in ruining marriages because it makes them feel speshul. I had the unfortunate privilege of serving with some of these women. I’ve never, ever heard of one of these relationships lasting beyond the deployment but they’ve broken up lots of marriages. I was in in the late 90s and early 2000s so deployments were often in the middle east hence desert queens because you were in the desert. There may be a new term for it now, I wouldn’t know.
Looking back, he seemed to have a set of rules that kept me and his work world separate. He always chose to live far from work…his choice to have to do a long commute was always puzzling to me.
I was SO trusting..never suspicious at all. When I look back on it now, I can pinpoint specific women I now think he was involved with.
We packed for a big move on our 5th wedding anniversary …I had 2 little kids underfoot and was supervising the packers and cleaning the house. He was supposed to do an errand and was gone for 3 hours with the errand undone (I was literally too busy to stop and demand an explanation). The nice, older husband from next door came by and saw the circus and said “Where is_____ (husband)?”. I took it in stride as I did everything and didnt even think he was fucking someone until years later when I learned he was a cheater. This one sticks in my craw…if he cheated that day and left me in the situation he did to dip his dick, that would be a profound betrayal.
Then there was the time he claimed he had to work on Thanksgiving when he had a normal desk job….and the time our stuff was being delivered at another duty station and he claimed he couldn’t possibly be home for it. My now husband explained to me how he handled moves and he was there to keep the logistics from landing all on his then-wife.
He also literally blamed me for him not getting promoted. He was so mean.
Married to a former Marine Corps officer as well. He was all God Country Family type. His father was also a full bird colonel. Mine was a lawyer and would prosecute or defend marines. He was one of those holier than thou Marines. I feel like those are the worst kinds. He retired and went into private practice and have an affair with his 15 year younger associate and all I heard was he deserved to be happy. His father would be rolling over in his grave if he knew what his golden child son was up to. Fooling around is a major no no in the service, good thing mine was out when I found out or I would have turned his ass in.
Same with merchant mariners, I guess. All was good when he worked in the local port, but when he started doing the big cargo ships all over the world, that’s when it all happened. A waste of 30 yrs of my life I can’t get back.
Snort! My STBX husband thought his secret sexual basement was in another dimension. Until it wasn’t. #theEarthlingFoundOut
To me the Viviana-Sebastian freakwit delusional folie a deux very clearly illustrates that it isn’t so much whacking genitals together that is the FW addiction, it’s the deception. As a chump I know that putting one over on the wife appliance, and excitement of winning the pick-me competition for Sebastian’s affections is the gasoline that powers the betrayal engine.
When the ability to hurt someone who loves and trusts you excites you, you are a malevolent person of low character. Better you had never been born.
Same here. I guess he read that article too cos he verbally vomited all that BS…”I can love two people at once”. “The love I feel for you is separate from the love I feel for her”. “We are living in parallel universes and it will be OK” (He really said that) Unlike this couple, he DID confess his soulmate (of 2 months) intense love for this serial husband poacher coworker, and expected me to congratulate him (really). I told him I live in ONE universe and while he had free will to do what he wanted, I did not have to travel to another dimension. Plus I told him he was delusional which is NOT something you want to do to a disordered midlife crisis amygdala challenged Cluster B narcissist. I filed, he stalled, 3.5 yrs later, finally divorced after 30 yrs. No contact is my salvation.
To recreat a world of fantasy, is an escape..but you cannot escape forever…which is why consequences are so important. The word NO, shakes this dual universe for awhile as chumps break free. After filing and a protection order in place, my STBXH called from the ER for a pick up. I didn’t respond. His daughter did. He called again, during an ER visit saying he needed me beside him like the old days. I think his idea waa, no matter how much he hurt me, my heart could not resist taking care of him. He said the last OW was not as good as me. Ooookaayyy…Well, it wasn’t long before another online gal filled my chair beside him and will likely still be there since they married 2 months after our divorce was final. It’s truly not what universe the cheaters imagine they are in, or how many butterflies there are around the world and in Mars…it’s truly the Universe I am in and how I will not ever be taking care of a cheater or changing sheets, pads, taking to Appointments, or or him leaving me to romp as the chemo drips into my veins…this was ALWAYS a fear for me. In my heart ❤️ I would be abandoned in my hour of need. Not happening now. I am so grateful 🙏 he was so horrid I had no choice. He freed me to live again. Miracles of a broken heart that remains in this universe and not in fantasy land. God is good
After reading this again, Tracy is hilarious and brilliant in her prose!! This makes me sick to read what goes on in the minds of cheaters.. and let me say that in the USA the store Aldi’s has plenty of Lepkuchen RIGHT NOW! Get the magnificent UBT all it wants!! It’s a hulk of metal from the other Universe that can reason! Pretty amazing 👏!!
Its like they are trying to reenact “Same Time Next Year”, which is a bullshit play.
Just more proof (as if we need it) that FWs are a disordered breed who vibrate on a different frequency and specialize in compartmentalization.
Their genitals must have the capabilities to bend space and time to create another universe, a higher plane of existence outside of what us mere mortals are capable of…or…they have deluded themselves into thinking theoretical physics and the multiverse is a good cover for their morally deficient characters.
40-50 texts a day and he hasn’t seen her in two years. I know it’s wrong, but part of me hopes his wife has a real boyfriend (or three) and is having the time of her life.
Alas, as tempting as the idea of a revenge affair might seem in the wake of a traumatic D-day, the catch 22 is that only skeevy psychos would even agree to sneak around with a still-married person even if the spouse of the latter was a raging abuser and deserved it. Basically anyone worth having would never do it.
breathing in each other’s essence. people are so weird. #thatisll
1970’s “Joy of Sex” had typical beanie hat and bongos poetry, one of which had the great and exciting lines of “I am the dung that made you fertile”.
Just so steamy to read.
Much of what I see written by cheaters reminds me of that caved in skull “poetry”.
It’s like a line from bad poetry.
I envision the wife busting into this “different universe,” and FW going pale, saying, “How did you get here?!” and devoting the rest of his dumb life to trying to figure out dimension-jumping.
Or, in this case, dimension-humping.
She writes about this guy the way I used to write about my internet girlfriend back in high school/early college. It is probably actually more cringe (but only just just!) because I was like 19 at the time and this…”person” knows better.
I don’t know if I’m going to make it to 72. I hope if I do that I am not as socially, morally, and emotionally bankrupt to think that any part of what this individual is doing is acceptable. I’d actually feel sorry for her if she wasn’t a willing participant in the destruction of somebody else’s universe if/when they find out.
Cookie cutter fuckwittery abounds!. “You lower-order beings would not understand-it’s a different universe!” Why do I feel like every person I have ever met that feels like that they have somehow outsmarted “the system” ends up on their ass and its never their fault? And who do they go back to? The same people they alienated with their smug self aggrandizing bullshit. The foot you step on when you are on your way up is also attached to the ass you might have to kiss on the way back down.
The house always wins.
Have a Mighty Monday!
As we kissed, she said to me: “How married are you?” I replied: “Very married.
But not really. I mean I’ve got you up against a wall so… married? Maybe. Maybe not. Oh wait – it gets you off if I’m married? Okay I’m very married.
My marriage is perfectly wonderful and fulfilling. My relationship with Viviana is not a replacement for something that may or may not be missing elsewhere.
Maybe something in my perfect, wonderful marriage is missing. Maybe it’s not. I never really thought about it. My wife should make me a sandwich. I’m bored. What’s on the toob? I know – I’ll text Viviana, she’s always a sucker for my bullshit….
I could barely finish this for laughing so hard. Thanks for the perfect Xmas gift, UBT.
This story reads like the usual fakery they put in the Guardian these days, tailor made to provoke a response.
The “different universes” nonsense is just a pretentious way of describing compartmentalization.
Husband is compartmentalizing, which is something people with personality disorders routinely do. Unlike Schmoopie here, he’s not telling himself a story about their true love and how they’ll be happy together someday. He’s perfectly comfortable being “very married” to his wife (by which he means he presents outwardly as a good husband) while having his fully remote side piece elsewhere.
It isn’t an accident he hasn’t seen her for two years, and if COVID hadn’t messed up the concert date, he would have come up with some excuse on his own, you can be sure. He is getting all the kibbles he needs from Schmoopie’s texts and her desperate belief that he’s going to see her some day in person again, he really will, just as soon as he can make an excuse to sneak off. She won’t admit to herself that it would be trivial for him to get away if he actually wanted to.
During (false) reconciliation with my serial cheating then-wife, I asked her how she could have sex with her boss at lunch and then come to me and the kids and act like everything was normal. I just couldn’t imagine doing that. And she said coyly, “I think I’m just really good at compartmentalization.” And she said it as if she were proud of it, like it was a kind of superpower, like telekinesis or mind-reading, like it made her special and different from us . . . muggles. It gave me the shivers. She had no idea it made her a sociopath with zero empathy.
That these entitled FWs are pleased with themselves for maintaining a double life is beyond troubling.
That my ex pulled off such a deception and lied with such ease for at least 3 years still upsets me (it’s been 5 years since d-day); frankly, it’s worse than the actual illicit sex, if that makes sense.
To the people who think that cheating is a harmless act of defiance (I’m looking at you, Esther P.), think again. We chumps suffer FOR YEARS from the abuse inflicted by cheaters who maintain a double life.
[Note: My ex refused to admit that he had a double life, only that he’d been having an affair for about 3 years. On occasion, they had sex in each other’s marital beds, which, in a weird way, he seemed pleased about because it was frugal. WTF!]
“That my ex pulled off such a deception and lied with such ease for at least 3 years still upsets me (it’s been 5 years since d-day); frankly, it’s worse than the actual illicit sex, if that makes sense.”
Same here, I mean the last year started out with cool distancing, then it turned to ugly shouting and screaming at me; I knew by then he was up to no good. But up to that time, though neither of us were perfect; we got along, he still seemed engaged on the surface and in the bedroom. It is weird beyond belies. Lordy I felt stupid. I realized in time he had a lot of folks fooled, but still weird that a human can do that.
The multi year deception feels far worse than the sex acts they engaged in.
Here’s the AI overview on compartmentalization:
Compartmentalization is a psychological characteristic of serial killers that allows them to separate their feelings of stigmatization and guilt.
Cubing
Serial killers can rapidly shift personas to create different impressions on different people. This is called cubing because the sides of a cube are all part of the same shape, but only one face shows at a time.
Doubling
Some serial killers, like Nazi doctors, can create two distinct selves. For example, Nazi doctors had one self that engaged in experimentation and extermination of inmates, and another that maintained their life outside of concentration camps.
😳
#FWgoals.
After reading a series of studies on violent abusers and spouse-killers in prison settings, I got the impression that abusers largely aspire to be sociopaths and employ all sorts of mental gymnastics and strategies to repress any lingering vestiges of pesky empathy that might get in the way of things they want.
Anyway, it might explain your exFW’s bragging pride over her ability to compartmentalize if she’d worked and toiled towards that goal for a long time. It reminds me of the Marquise de Merteuil’s infamous speech from from Dangerous Liaisons when she explains how she virtually “trained” herself to become a sociopath (we can probably take the bit of proto-feminism in the monologue as bragging/rationalization that she had to work harder at it than men so therefore became a better sociopath than most men):
Vicomte de Valmont: I often wonder how you managed to invent yourself.
Marquise de Merteuil: Well, I had no choice, did I? I’m a woman. Women are obliged to be far more skillful than men. You can ruin our reputation and our life with a few well-chosen words. So, of course, I had to invent, not only myself, but ways of escape no one has every thought of before. And I’ve succeeded because I’ve always known I was born to dominate your sex and avenge my own.
Vicomte de Valmont: Yes, but what I ask was how?
Marquise de Merteuil: When I came out into society I was 15. I already knew that the role I was condemned to, namely to keep quiet and do what I was told, gave me the perfect opportunity to listen and observe. Not to what people told me, which naturally was of no interest, but to whatever it was they were trying to hide. I practiced detachment. I learned how to look cheerful while under the table I stuck a fork into the back of my hand. I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn’t pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think, and novelists to see what I could get away with, and in the end, I distilled everything to one wonderfully simple principle: win or die.
Thank you Tracey, this one made me laugh so much. Definitely a good start to the day. ❤️ keep doing what you’re doing, calling out shitty behaviour. Apologists can keep apologising and putting up with UB.
“He spends all of his time with his wife but whatever it is they have together is obviously nothing compared to his once a month fuck with me that hasn’t happened in two years!”
I would expect this kind of logic from a slow 15 year old girl who was groomed by an older married man. It’s nearly unbelievably pathetic coming from an adult woman in her 70s. I genuinely struggle to believe this. I know people suck but how does one reach that age and remain so moronic? Unless it’s dementia? Is he actually abusing an elderly woman with dementia? Is that what’s happening here?
I hope his wife finds out.
I see it as yet another version/facet of “We’re just friends/cousins/neighbors/symbiotes” etc.
There’s no delusions like self delusions, and many people will go the route of childlike pretend in order to rationalize away the facts about their actions.
“Oh, we once had wild passionate sex in our marriage? No, that was my evil twin! It’s TrUe lOvE with (insert dick of the day here)!”
“Oh, we once loved each other? No, that was a parallel world! My heart is taken by the writhing passion tentacles of Yurr’agh Thugga!”
And my favorite: “it’s not like I’m hurting anyone.”
Oh, the chump is “no-one” or not even a person in their eyes.
Awesome.
This is exactly what my STBX told me: the little affairs he had online would not take anything away from our relationship, they would even add, because his sexuality was on the rise (of course he failed to mention, that he developed a porn habit, so the sexuality that arouse was not a mutual fun thing, it was an alone, “my time” fun thing for him).
Anyway, dear Chump Lady, would you be so kind, and take this letter to the UBT, because it is starting to get to me. I am in real hard pain over him, and now I feel I love him dearly, and honestly I have no idea if i am the narcissist in the relationship trying to hold him back. I am in such great pain, i actually can feel my IQ level drop and i blame myself for everything, for not being nicer, not being more understanding, not uncovering the secrets with more love and holding space for him. He is a wonderful guy and he is awful too. please help me.
Just for context: weve been toghether for 14 years, built a carrier together on stage, had an intense and beautiful-ugly relationship. I had lost hope so many times but stuck around, and now he is the one turning his back to me and its crushing for me knowing that he is abandoning me.
ANyway, here is his letter: I’m sorry! I never wanted to take anything away from you. I never wanted to hurt you, not even when I felt like you hurt me with your words, because you never hurt me in any other way. Maybe my guilt stopped me from wanting to hurt you, but I’m sure that even without it, I wouldn’t have intentionally hurt you. I know that despite this, I’ve hurt you many times. I realized too late that secrecy is just delayed harm, and it can hurt even more than other things.
When you’ve already started down a dark path and have gone as far as I have, it’s not easy to find your way back to the bright source of honesty. It seems easier to keep going into the increasingly dark unknown or to give up and turn your back. Despite all this, I tried not to turn my back and give up. How many times did I promise to change and that things would get better? I truly believed in myself. How many times did you beg me to be honest and tell you if I wasn’t fully committed? How could I be honest when I had secrets and didn’t want to contradict myself? How could I admit to things I was so ashamed of, even in front of myself, and that would stab another knife into your heart?
For a long time, I didn’t think about why I was doing the things that were like ticking bombs, ready to launch knives into your chest. Slowly, I began to understand that there might be something behind them, and they have consequences. Yet, I still have a bad electromagnet inside me that activates beyond my control sometimes and simultaneously turns off something else. It starts a system I don’t understand and shuts down functions in me that govern my decisions.
It’s hard to describe, and even harder to turn inward and examine the feelings that have shaped my secretive and shame-filled personality. I don’t know what triggers that magnet, and I’ve wondered why it even activates. It might be something unrelated to anyone else—just about me. I’m not searching for what or who triggers it because I never wanted that system to control me. But to this day, I haven’t figured it out, and I think I’ve been looking in the wrong places. I need to approach it from an out-of-the-box perspective, but I’m not capable of that because I can only see myself and our situation from one viewpoint. I can’t analyze my feelings differently when I’m immersed in them. It’s like asking a competitor to judge themselves.
I want to know if that magnet activates in other situations, or if I wrongly connected some wires at the beginning when we built this relationship. This is all just searching for the source of my sins, and with that comes remorse, which is another difficult practice. My guilt has far outgrown the box I designated for my conscience. But you can still see what’s written on my conscience. You dictated it, and I etched it in for years. There’s no room for more letters; we’ve filled every corner, and I feel like that’s all it can hold. I can’t promise or ask for more. I don’t even feel entitled to, except to figure out what lies ahead. But I wouldn’t have dared to ask this, and I still won’t. I’m just telling you that I don’t see another path to the light.
I was ashamed to say it because I felt like I was too late. You’ve said so many times that we should change direction. I believe that every path eventually finds its way, and things that are meant to come together will meet. We’ve braided everything together into one big strand, and now it seems impossible to untangle the one strand that’s pulling at our skin. We need to unravel everything and weave it anew. That doesn’t scare me. Maybe because I’ve grown tired of being afraid and I’m leaping blindly into the unknown abyss. Or maybe because I find comfort in the thought that’s been whispered in my ear for days: “Everything will be okay.”
We’ll reweave the strands. Everyone will start from their innermost threads and work outward, and the strands meant to meet will cross paths again. We’ll weave in what you think is right. I wouldn’t be surprised if you decide to completely leave out all my strands from your braid. I’m sure that if there’s any good strand salvageable from all this, I’d like to weave it into mine. I leave the decision to you, because I’ve made too many decisions behind your back that I think led us here.
It’s hard for me to let go of what we had together. Now I realize I wasn’t trying to escape as much as I was trying to fill a void with disappointments, distrust, secrecy, and guilt. I’ve cut you off from the tap where you could drink safety, trust, honesty, empathy, and vision for the future. I don’t want to take anything from you—not opportunities, time, or peace. I don’t want to cut myself off from the tap either, but you have every right to close off all taps from me, and I still wouldn’t feel it was unjustified.
I’ve hurt you, and I’ve been hurting you. Now it doesn’t seem like it because the braid as a whole looks so good that we don’t even feel how it’s pulling at our scalps, and the thought of unraveling what we’ve braided scares us. But the strands will remain; we just need to rearrange them. It won’t take away the whole thing—not even half of our lives. And I’ve slowly started to feel like we’re approaching the halfway point of our lives. Will I waste the second half too, or will I try to take some control over my life and listen to my conscience, which tells me, “Stop it, don’t hurt anymore,” and my mind, which tells me to question everything? What if? What will happen if?
I want to see. I want to fill that hole near my heart with something else. I’m not afraid of moving, nor of being alone, as much as I’m afraid of hurting you again and facing us all over again. So instead, I won’t promise anything other than trying to live and behave in the most humane way possible and to stay as open as I can. We have to go through this now. I’m sorry if you feel like I dragged you into this hell. It happened suddenly, but it couldn’t have happened any other way. Maybe even later and even harder.
The long-awaited package has arrived late and might seem like a surprise, but it doesn’t feel that way to me. With this hard-earned honesty, I only wanted to ease things, not hurt or abandon you. From now on, I’ll try to stay honest rather than leading us both astray. Everything will be okay. Think of the many strands—they just need to be placed next to each other. None of them will disappear; we’ll simply sort them and start over. It will go quickly. It has to. I hope you find that tap where you can get everything I couldn’t give you, and everything it sometimes seemed like I didn’t want to give. I hope I won’t remain a bad memory in your mind and that the wounds I caused, which still bleed, will heal quickly.