Why Can’t I Leave Him? Do I Love Pain?

Watch your back. Quite a few studies have found high rates of psychopathy among “mate poachers”– i.e., witting side pieces. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S019188691400628X

For what it’s worth, I have a kind of long “heads up spiel” about cheaters and their proxies. Take what makes sense to you and helps and toss anything that doesn’t.

Another interesting thing I read is that female “poachers” (as opposed to male mate poachers, which seems to be a slightly different kettle of fish) tend to be something called “male directed,” meaning they operate on a stereotypically “macho” system of cowboy aggression– negative relational strategies, revenge, payback, one-upmanship, etc. They may compensate for this not-so-girly aggressive inner life with exaggeratedly “feminine” or twee/child-like external behaviors (talk in a baby voice, play the giggly cheerleader, etc.) but theoretically there’s a spooky amount of rage and aggressive capacity lurking under the surface. They are also arguably “male directed” in the sense of supporting immature men’s misogyny– what CL has dubbed “Vichy” women who “blow the patriarchy.” I think of the women I’ve met like this as the ultimate NLOGs (not like other girls) who pick-me dance with hubris towards other women. They like to hear a partner putting down exes (or chumped partners).

It could partly explains the attraction to cheaters– the chance to “win” against another woman by “taking” something away. It’s also a bit “hybristophiliac” in a sense (people with a sexual attraction to liars, cheats, felons and killers because it feels so special to be “spared”). The most extreme cases may even lose interest in a man once his primary partner dumps him because this type of aggression requires a triangle– there has to be a victim in the mix in order for them to get off. There’s a whole argument about why that is that’s well summed up by something some ancient Greek wrote, “Luck is when the arrow hits the other man.” In whatever effed up childhood dynamics these people endured, there always had to be a scapegoat so, if you weren’t victimizing, you would end up the victim. Kill or be killed. Think of it like a superstitious rite, as if it’s actually comforting to some people to harm others.

Also watch your back as far as cheater boy is concerned. He might be more aggressive than you think and a lot more vengeful than you imagine if you try to escape. As a former advocate for domestic violence survivors, I learned that, even if not all cheaters beat, all batterers cheat. There are some disconcerting overlaps between the two things.

From my experience, cheating can be a red flag for someone who could be dangerous in some way, whether it’s overt violence or such callous disregard for the safety of people close to them that bad things tend to happen around them (deadly STDs, illness, accidents, etc.). I’m waiting for the social research to be performed which identifies any association between cheating and domestic violence because I’m pretty sure there’s a strong correlation. This is because, also from my experience, another overlap between DV and cheating is that cheating on committed relationships requires not only a dearth or absence of empathy but a degree of sadism and hostility. In batterers, the hostility is internally generated.

To my mind, the biggest overlap is that all batterers primarily engage in “coercive control”– a pattern of subviolent psychological, emotional (often financial) abuse and subtle or overt scare tactics– that’s even being criminalized in some countries because, statistically speaking, it’s the best predictor for eventual violence. All cheaters also engage in forms of coercive control against partners in order to facilitate cheating. Look up discussions between Dr. Ramani and Dr. Christine Cocciola on Youtube on the subject of “coercive control” for a good overview and an idea of where that behavior is heading in the long run.

DV researchers have all sorts of theories as to why abusers generate so much rage and hostility specifically towards intimate partners. The best theory I’ve read so far is the concept of “masked dependency.” Just for a summary, because of whatever demented horror show experiences abusers had in childhood at the hands of parental figures or other close adults, abusers never really grow up. They’re all petrified babies. Their “attachment” style is like that of an infant or toddler but in really twisted adult form. Consequently, they tend to develop pathological, infantile dependency on partners that’s dominated by two extremely contradictory, intense dueling fears of abandonment or “engulfment,” both of which are also internally generated (meaning the partner doesn’t have to do fuck-all to generate these fears) and self-fulfilling. For instance, because batterers tend to love bomb and heavily “mirror” partners at first in order to draw partners in super, super close, this can set off the abuser’s terror of engulfment. Basically because the abuser is faking who they are in order to quell their fear the partner will abandon them, abusers begin to feel as if they’re “losing” themselves. Naturally in both cases– whether the fear is of being ditched or suffocated– the abuser cannot take responsibility for generating their own negative feelings and will instead blame the partner.

But here’s the “masked” part of masked dependency. Also due to whatever horror show childhood dynamics that shaped them, some abusers are catastrophically ashamed of their infantile dependency. They know that if others saw them for the mewling, raging babies they really are down deep, they’d be universally rejected. They’d have a harder time getting laid. I think particularly for male abusers, this level of dependency seems especially unmasculine. So they intensely try to conceal it from others and even from themselves. The scariest part of this scenario is that, in a statistical sense, some of the most explosively violent abusers may never display, for instance, the cartoon jealousy that’s typically associated with “wife beaters.” They may rage with jealousy but it’s all unconscious. They may appear to most people to be “feminist allies” and don’t tend to spout openly misogynistic views. But when they blow, they blow the biggest apparently.

Overall, the dueling fears dynamic arguably leads to the infamous “push/pull” in abusive relationships where, in order to suit the abuser’s crazy, ever shifting internal terrors, the abuser will keep shoving and pulling (in an emotional sense, or eventually quite literally) the partner either closer or further away. If the abuser feels “suffocated,” they push. If they feel afraid of being left, they pull.

Because this is all happening due to the abuser’s internal freakery, there is literally nothing the partner can do at any given moment to allay these fears. In fact, everything the partner attempts to this end will make it worse. If the partner assures an abuser who’s afraid of being left that they– the partner– will never leave, this instantly sets off the abuser’s “engulfment” terror. Or vice-versa– if the partner assures the abuser that the latter will be given “space,” this sets off the abuser’s abandonment terrors. In the end, because contented, healthy people feel somewhat in control of their lives and realities, even the partner’s relative contentment itself can set off the abuser’s fears– because if the victim has some control of their lives, this means the abuser does not have total control. And abusers’ main addiction is to total control. The need only snowballs over time. Basically the abuser needs the partner to be unhappy.

In turn, the dueling internally generated fears are what arguably prompt the internal mental “bitch tapes” to begin where the abuser begins to build an imaginary “case” against their partner for all the things the partner does which the abuser dementedly believes are “causing” these uncontrollable, infantile fears. They become like double agents secretly scanning and watching their partners for flaws or faults in very category. It’s like they keep a little blame bag and keep “collecting” things the partner does and says that the abuser pins the blame for all their rage on.

Once that bag is nice and full, the abuser will cash those blame chips in on some form of betrayal– typically (for most abusers) cheating is the “main” expenditure. But those blame chips can also “pay” for endless lies, abusive gaslighting, financial abuse, endangerment, maybe a nice tantrum or smear campaign or terrifying rage or even violence– even murder. This system of blame and rationalization is sometimes called “neutralization”– a mental trick whereby a wide range of serial offenders justify their offenses at victims’ expense. Confabulated blameshifting and distorting the characters/deeds of victims are basically intrinsic to serial offending. Even serial killers do it. It’s sometimes called “reduction of self punishment” but I lean to the idea that it’s part of image management. Abusers may have attenuated sense of empathy but are more prone to feel a sense of societal stigma for their misdeeds and this stigma causes shame. Shame can make one appear “shifty” and furtive to others– basically causing a kind of psychic “smell” that others can pick up on. This could risk scaring away prospective victims or alerting bystanders that the offender is “off.” So reducing shame/stigma is a way of passing for “normal” or appearing “innocent”– the better to be able to strike again.

I have my own pet theory about why cheating is sort of the all-purpose way of dealing with both of abusers’ dueling fears. The “push” involved is obvious– betrayal is a way to distance oneself from a partner. But the “pull” part isn’t quite as obvious. The abuser is so fearful of abandonment that they will compulsively hedge their bets by creating “backup” relationships. Cheating also helps to mask the fear of abandonment by flouting it (“who needs that bitch anyway? I got bitches on tap!”) and by– voila– displacing it. Making the partner jealous almost “relieves” the abuser of their own gnawing, concealed territoriality and paranoid jealousy. It also is a way to punish or seek revenge against the partner for supposedly “causing” these humiliating, infantile fears of abandonment. Finally, cheating is a way for abusers to manage their image in order to pretend they’re not actually abusers. As the abuser predictably and progressively generates more and more distrust, stress, tension and fear in their primary partner, the abuser uses affair partners as sounding boards to display their artificial “positive” side or to play “victim” to as a way of compensating for the sneaking feeling that they– the abuser– are in fact a really destructive, shitty person. Of course the diabolical prank for a witting affair partner is that if they have the “luck” of ending up as the primary partner, the cycle of bitch tapes and punishment will simply be aimed at them.

Personally I came to suspect that battering is really just the violent enforcement of one-sided monogamy which suggests in turn that anyone who’s enforcing one-sided monogamy (which is cheating in a nutshell, otherwise it would be a mutually open relationship) has the potential to be scarily aggressive. If it does eventually turn out that there’s a correlation between battering and cheating, the biggest caveat is that, like battering, cheating may be intractable. The only things that even minorly dent recidivism in domestic abusers is jail time plus intensive therapy. But even then recidivism is 97.5%. Scarcely reassuring.

If you’re wondering why it’s so hard to leave someone who may very likely be setting off unconscious lizard brain fear in you (because the above pattern is scary), look up resources for “captor bonding/Stockholm syndrome.” I think we all have felt like we had “tigers by the tail” when involved with someone who showed telltale signs of lacking basic empathy. The classic fear is that worse might happen if you let go of the tail.