October 11, 2024
Oh, by the way, so is your wife.
Recently I was asked to join an online community of current and former mistresses. An interesting thing that happened recently is everybody heard from their former affair partner, some after many years … and then all but one of the affair relationships broke up at the same time.
Two of the other situations involved long, long marriages that were absolutely miserable, yet the guy, despite having found someone who was bending over backwards to offer them the love, sex, attention, and connection he said he wanted, just couldn’t, just couldn’t, just couldn’t, leave.
Oh, the guilt! Oh, the (grown) children! Oh, woe, the pain other people would never get over, the what-will-people-say’s, the what-will-people-think’s.
In one case, the guy actually did divorce, but continued to treat the situation as if he and his ex-wife were still married. Despite LIVING WITH his ex-affair partner/then girlfriend, he continued to state that the ex-wife was his family and not his new partner. While not contributing anything financially to his new living situation, he continued to send the ex-wife more than contractually obligated in the divorce, even though she just bought a new car, took expensive vacations, and while married, refused to even touch him in bed at night (she literally built a wall of pillows between them, then claimed she had no idea how hurtful that was), and then refused marriage counseling.
And she wondered why this guy had an affair. Oh, my fucking god.
Even therapists who excoriate the extramarital affair will sometimes admit: You cannot treat people any way you want and expect there will be no consequences. When you abandon your spouse and refuse any sort of remedy for their loneliness, bad things will happen.
Sometimes the bad thing that happens will be an affair.
People bitch at me for blaming the spouse, but, in this case? Come on.
Guy Number Two longed and longed to leave, but the source of guilt: Wife has a lingering terminal illness. Even though she was descending into temper tantrums and literally threw glass at him, he felt too guilty to leave.
Statistics show that in the majority of cases, it’s women who file for divorce and actually leave marriages.
Statistically speaking, that old Jessica Lange movie appears to be the truth: Men Don’t Leave.
People can kick the living shit out of them; they can meet someone who loves them and is just bending over backwards to give them what they say they want. And it doesn’t matter.
I think the hooks are duty, obligation, low self-esteem, overinvolvement with family feelings, and underinvolvement with their own.
My ex-affair partner, a codependent adult child of an alcoholic, has severely low self-worth, so although he complains about “having to take care of all these people,” that’s what he gets his self-worth from, because he doesn’t feel worthy of anything to anyone any other way.
That, and these people resonate SO deeply with how upset others are that they can’t care about their own misery. If anyone anywhere might be upset, they can’t behave any differently no matter how they are being treated or how it makes them feel.
I got this kind of argument when I went no contact with my family. My brother had a fit over what it was doing to our mother that I stopped speaking to her.
As if that was supposed to be the ONLY thing I looked at when making decisions.
Nobody cared how distressing her behavior was to me for years and years and years and years, nobody cared that it was literally a constant source of great and ongoing concern for me.
Nobody cared that I was constantly upset by how she acted. Nobody cared that here I was on the other end, devouring books by Harriet Lerner, struggling to figure out how I could act that would make the constant upheaval stop. Nobody cared about my feelings or EVER asked me why I just left my family and stopped speaking without explanation.
Nobody seems to have ever had the thought that for me to do that, things must have been bad, indeed.
All anyone ever cared about was her, her, her, and all I was supposed to care about was her, her, her.
But the fact is that it’s the job of a family to care about your feelings, too, and in a real family, you are supposed to count, too.
Nobody ever gave a living shit about how I felt. I was just supposed to act and act and act and act in order to make them comfortable.
In that sense, I finally realized, I DIDN’T HAVE A REAL FAMILY AT ALL. Ever.
I have to say, that made me feel a lot better about leaving.
Your mother, yes, is actually supposed to care about your feelings!
Oh, by the way, so is your WIFE.
But the cheating man whose spouse really is abusive or neglectful and is refusing to work on the problem never, ever, ever, ever reaches this simple fact.
He will take absolutely anything from absolutely everyone. His only sense of self-worth is in making everyone around him happy, and seeing those nods of approval, no matter how he himself feels in the spousal and family relationships.
If he doesn’t stay and do exactly that, he’s so paralyzed by guilt over not making others happy that he just can’t, just can’t, just can’t leave, no matter how badly he’s treated, no matter if he’s already left, even! The guy with the sick wife? Moved out for one week and found an excuse to run back home.
Please note, ladies: There’s nothing you can do with or for a person like this.
We mistresses get hooked in by how sweet, how caring, how sad the person is. We want to be the balm for their suffering, the person who finally loved them the way they always deserved to be loved.
But these people can’t accept love. They can only accept guilt, duty, and suffering.
They think it is their only due.
Don’t try to rescue these people, because they cannot and will not be rescued.
Just understand they’re really married to their compulsion to feel guilty and not-good-enough.
Put away your silly dreams of What Could Have Been, and just walk on.