If you want to feel vindicated, if you want to validate your ignorance, your biases, your prejudices, your inanity, and in some cases your inborn, inbred stupidity, there’s a coach for that.
There’s a public intellectual who would tell you everything you want to hear, who would tell you that you’re right, that you’re great, that you’re an intellectual giant, that the rest of the world is wrong, science is wrong, authority is wrong, expertise is wrong, history is wrong, only you are right.
And these kinds of coaches and public intellectuals laugh all the way to the bank and they make very frequent trips to the bank.
Trust you me.
On the back of this mass gullibility, there are public intellectuals who claim that cheating in a marriage, extramarital affairs, strain, deception, lies, concealment, they’re all good things, they’re therapeutic, they revive the marriage, they imbue it with spice, they resuscitate it. They make it sound as if cheating were an altruistic act, an act of love and the affirmation of the marriage vows.
And of course, I’m not talking only about marriage, I’m talking about committed relationships in general.
Affairs are known as extra dyadic, extra dyadic sex. We are talking about having sex with someone outside the couple when there has been an agreement between the members of the couple to maintain sexual exclusivity culminating in some cases in monogamy.
Yesterday, I published the following short text on Instagram.
If having an affair has revitalized your marriage, then your union has always been sick and dysfunctional based on deception, mistrust and object dependency.
A mentally healthy marriage, a mentally healthy relationship never, never survives an affair.
And this provoked a storm. And of course, people were bandying about all kinds of public intellectuals who claimed that there’s nothing wrong with cheating. Cheating can inject a lot of verve and energy into a more abundant and dying relationship.
And that cheating is nothing but a form of acting out, a dysfunctional way of coping with the difficulties of togetherness.
First of all, allow me to clarify what is it that I’m talking about.
I’m referring to cheating and I’m using the word cheating judiciously. Cheating is an affair with another person outside the couple.
An affair which involves deception, by the way, it doesn’t have to be sexual, it would be emotional. It involves deception.
I am not referring to an open marriage or an open relationship or polyamory or the lifestyle, aka swinging or cocondry. I’m not referring to any of these practices because they do not involve deception, concealment, backstabbing, betrayal. These are consensual arrangements.
Any arrangement between consenting adults, which involves no coercion of any kind and no harm whatsoever to others is perfectly legitimate as a way to pursue happiness and well-being.
So yes, I have actually a very liberal mindset when it comes to human sexuality. I’m not precluding any type of consensual arrangement as long as it doesn’t harm others.
And some affairs are consensual, for example in polyamory.
But when the affair involves concealment, lying, hiding, betrayal, to forgive this magnitude of deception and rejection, you need to be mentally impaired somehow.
Only people who are mentally unwell forgive deceptive affairs. Period.
There’s no exception.
Forget all the nonsense and all the self-justification because people self-justify. Forget all the mitigating circumstances. There are none.
There is no mitigating circumstance to stabbing your loved one in the back, to betray her, to lying to him, to concealing the most important part of your life from your togetherness. There is no mitigating circumstance, no explanation, no justification. Period.
Period.
Period.
If the marriage is of two psychologically impaired people, people with psychological problems, no number of affairs can fix this kind of union, this kind of marriage.
Affair is not a magic bullet. It is not a panacea.
Affairs reflect the psychological dynamics of the two people involved in the couple, in the diet.
And if these dynamics are sick, dysfunctional, pathological, the affair would signify these underlying interactions between the couple, between the pathologies of the two members of the couple.
How affair can fix, revive, resuscitate a healthy relationship?
This is rank nonsense. It flies in the face of all the evidence we have.
Affairs can resuscitate or revive or inject or spice up unhealthy, dysfunctional, pathological unions or diets or couples where the two members of the couple, or one of them at least, is mentally ill.
To accept an affair, to forgive it, to move on, to embrace it requires mental illness.
Again, period.
Period.
Not pleasant to hear, not palatable since many of you have committed adultery and infidelity. And you don’t want to hear that. You want to justify yourself. It was an aberration. It was a one-off. I didn’t mean it. It was a difficult period. I felt misunderstood. I didn’t have enough sex. I didn’t have enough love.
And all other bullshit intended to justify the unjustifiable and excuse the inexcusable. Serious mental illness is for life. It is incurable, though it is manageable.
Ignore the self-interested nonsense online about healing. The self-help industry is a scam if you didn’t catch up to it by now.
So what do mentally healthy people, healthy, not impaired, not dysfunctional, not unhealthy, not ill, not disordered, healthy people, what do mentally healthy people do in the wake of an affair, in the aftermath of cheating and betrayal?
They break up. Mentally healthy people break up after a deceptive affair. End of story. No other option, no other alternative unless you are mentally unwell.
If someone doesn’t break up, doesn’t separate, doesn’t signify, doesn’t walk away in the wake or the aftermath of an affair. They are mentally impaired in some manner. There is not a way about this.
The people who remain in a relationship where a deceptive, devious, backstabbing, lying affair has taken place. These people are not mentally well. Their boundaries are porous and non-existent. They are dependent or co-dependent. They regulate externally. They clingy, they are needy. They are parentified. They are trauma bonded. They are too anxious to face life and reality. This is known as constriction. They cannot perceive their partner as real. They are dissociative. I can continue the list. Borderline, narcissism, I can continue the list.
100% of people who even contemplate or countenance the possibility of remaining in a bond where their intimate partner and significant other has rejected them, deceived them, lied to them, concealed from them, backstabbed them, bedmouthed them with another person.
If you consider to stay, even contemplate the possibility of staying in such a relationship, seek therapy. Something is seriously wrong with you. ###
