Cheater of the Pack
Posted by fxckfeelings on May 12, 2014
Everybody knows that trust is a big part of marriage, but that doesn’t just mean trusting your spouse, but trusting yourself to keep both your junk and your doubt in your pants. If you find yourself with major problems in either of these areas, trying to be normal and ignore your misgivings or mistakes will probably make things worse. Instead, accept that you’ve got a screw loose, and then you’ll have a much better chance of gaining the strength you need to manage out-of-control thoughts and/or actions and learn to trust yourself, or at least your limits vis-a-vis the contents of your slacks.
–Dr. Lastname
I can’t understand why I cheated on my wife again, not just because it was so painful the first time around, but because I know, for a certainty, that I love her and don’t want to break up my marriage. I never intended cheating, but I fell into a great conversation with an attractive colleague at work, and, before I knew it, we were exchanging messages about how wonderful it was to see one another and when we would meet again. When my wife found out, it was agony for both her and me, as I felt terribly guilty and I didn’t want to lose my marriage. After months and months of couples’ therapy we patched things back together, re-established trust, and I felt happy with her. Then, without warning, it happened again at an out-of-town sales conference, almost exactly the same thing with a different woman, and now my wife wants a divorce. My goal is to know why I do this thing and whether it means I really don’t love my wife and would be happy with someone else or whether I just can’t be monogamous.
Guys who can’t understand why they cheat when they don’t really feel like it are like alcoholics who can’t understand why they got drunk when they weren’t even in the mood to drink. Emotions are the main motivation for infidelity as often as alcoholism is motivated by thirst.
More often, infidelity is, for lack of better words, a character weakness, a deeply ingrained need that you’re neither going to figure out nor get out of your system. That’s why the First Step in both AA (and CA, Cheaters Anonymous) is accepting your helplessness to control yourself.
You’ll never stand much of a chance of managing your weakness if you don’t accept how strong it is and how unlikely you are to ever bring it under complete control through therapy, understanding, or whatever, even when it doesn’t seem to be causing cravings or unhappiness.
It’s certainly possible that your relationship with your wife has soured and you’ve discovered someone who’s a better match. If so, however, you would probably have more negative things to say about the frustrations of living with your wife and the qualities you see in your new friend that would better suit your needs. Unfortunately, it’s more likely that the excitement of new romance is just irresistible to you.
If that’s true, the good news is that there’s nothing much wrong with your wife or your marriage. The bad news is that you may not be able to manage monogamy.
As ever, if you try too hard to figure out why you cheat, you’ll probably cause more harm while avoiding a fact (step one, above) that you need to face. Figuring out why means finding flaws in your wife, marriage, and self, and finding yourself in therapy for a very, very long time. And all that leaves you with is false hope in your ability to regain your self-control after you finally discover why you lost it.
Accepting that you’ll never know the reason means that you have to figure out what you want to do with a major, semi-permanent disability. You may decide, simply, that you can’t stop yourself or that it isn’t worth the endless effort, in which case, you need to figure out rules for being honest and avoiding disappointment. Of course, you should let potential girlfriends know that you don’t do monogamy and limit your time together so that your actions don’t cast doubt on your words and your partner becomes convinced that you can take on more commitment than you should.
If you decide that marriage is still worthwhile, regardless of your instincts, then you’ll have to watch yourself carefully for many, many years, accepting the humiliation of identifying yourself as someone with hard-to-manage behavior, engaging in regular conversations about the problem, and inviting friends or others with the same problem to warn you when they think you’re in trouble.
You should never really make marriage vows, but you can honestly promise to manage a powerful anti-marital instinct to the best of your ability. First, however, you have to take the first step, be honest with yourself, and admit you have a problem. From there, it’s one day/romantic temptation at a time.
STATEMENT:
“I feel guilty and upset with myself for cheating on my marriage and causing pain to everyone, but I know now I’ve got behaviors I don’t have much control over. I will think carefully about what’s worth doing, given what I now know about myself, and then make a good effort to manage these behaviors while living up to my values.”
I don’t know why I can’t trust my husband, but I’m always on the edge of suspicion and jealousy. If we’re getting along well, I find myself thinking of his college girlfriend and whether he enjoyed sex with her more than with me. If he’s quiet, I wonder whether he’s interested in someone else and is just deep in thought, thinking of her. I know he isn’t, because he’s really a great guy and isn’t sneaky. I’ve even talked to him about my feelings and he’s very understanding, but then they start again and he gets impatient when I ask him for more reassurance. I’m just nuts. My goal is to stop my crazy feelings.
When you say you can’t trust your husband, you’re doing yourself an injustice, because it sounds like you do trust your husband but can’t rid yourself of jealous, suspicious feelings that keep popping into your head. On some level, you know you can count on him, but you just can’t stop having crazy feelings to the contrary. Don’t then equate your real opinion with what your crazy feelings are telling you. You are not your illness, and it’s the illness, not your real opinions, that makes you so paranoid.
I’ve seen pathological doubt and jealousy develop in perfectly nice people suddenly, and for no apparent reason, which is why I consider it an illness. That said, I can’t offer useful information about diagnosis and treatment, but I can tell you that asking why this should occur (see case above) is likely to cause speculation about possible causes of mistrust that leave everyone feeling at fault and do absolutely no good.
Trying to talk it out with your husband, as you’ve done, usually runs into the risks and obstacles you’ve described. It wears out your partner, offers relief that is no more than temporary, and gives you reason to bring up the subject again. Instead of asking yourself why or your husband how, just be aware that weird intrusive thoughts just happen, and then be quiet and find something to distract yourself until the thoughts pass.
That’s probably the best technique for almost every disturbing nasty rumination that creeps into your brain and won’t go away; keep busy and, instead of avoiding whatever gets your ruminations going, go about your usual business and assure yourself that you can tolerate the thoughts until they go away by themselves. Ask a therapist to teach you physical and thought exercises for managing painful ruminations while keeping your perspective. Check out possible medications that might reduce the thoughts; they’re not guaranteed to help, but the risk is low and they occasionally work very well.
Even knowing as little as we do about the brain, it shouldn’t surprise us that it can play tricks like this and insert totally unreasonable jealous doubts, all by itself. So don’t change your life to avoid having these doubts. Instead, accept the burden, and you will discover there are lots of techniques that can help you bear them and help your marriage survive.
STATEMENT:
“I feel haunted by crazy thoughts, but I know they’re not getting worse and that I have no reason to give them validity. I will stand by my usual methods for judging what’s real and true and not change my life in order to avoid thoughts I hate to have. I will learn to bear them and respect myself for doing so.”
