My name is Sam Vaknin, and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
Some people, men and women, enjoy sex only when they cheat on their spouses. Sounds counterintuitive and implausible, but how very true?
These people were molded in their formative years early on to associate leisure and intimacy with risk, with deception, with adrenaline. If these are missing, risk, deception, excitement, thrill, adventure, the unexpected, the unpredictable, the forbidden and the dangerous. If these elements are missing, they do not enjoy sex. They are aroused by their immorality or perhaps amorality.
Their horrid promiscuity excites them, the chase, the mind games, the power plays, the conquests. Actually, the less socially acceptable they act, the more illicit, the higher the degree of betrayal or self-debasement and self-upiliation, the greater the decadence, the deviance, the perversion and the shock value, the greater the resulting carnal titillation.
This type of compulsive behavior is a variety of roleplay. Such people need a narrative, a story, a confabulation, a script, in order to get sexually aroused and to enjoy a sexually uncomfortable encounter. The role they assume is that of a promiscuous and treacherous prostitute.
But the very fact that they take on this personality in a cinematic rendition, this very fact makes them feel removed and distant from their own misconduct. In a way, it absorbs them.
They say, it was not me who did it. Well, I don’t know what came over me. I felt dissociated on autopilot, like an observer, very guilty.
When asked why they behaved the way they did, they typically shrug it off and the most common answer is, well, I don’t know.
Ironically, these cheaters are inordinately attached and bonded to their emotionally thwarted, masochistic, co-dependent, financially generous and enabling spouses.
To fully enjoy sex, these cheaters need to remain married. They need someone, the spouse, to cheat on them. They need someone to torture and torment, someone to lie to, to betray repeatedly and to blame for their own misbehavior. It’s a form of alloclastic defense.
They fiercely defend their spouses. That’s a joke. While they cheat on their spouses everywhere and literally with everyone, they still defend their spouses and extol their families to anyone who will listen.
They make clear to their lovers, one night stand partners, fuck buddies, they make clear that any arrangement they have outside the marriage is temporary and will not last.
