The Chump Lady Survival Guide to Infidelity: How to Regain Your Sanity After You've Been Cheated On

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I’ve heard once that in an abusive relationship it’s impossible to reconcile unless you take care of the hidden shame and guilt held by the abuser (cheater). After they are abusive they feel shame and guilt, but cannot own them. Instead they feel threatened and uneasy. Not knowing how to process these emotions – other than denial they become angry with the person, who elicits these emotions – their victim. Feeling angry they feel validated to hurt again. It’s a vicious cycle and without a good therapist very hard to unravel. XH used to say, “You want to know about ME? Wow! My favorite subject!” But he’d say it in such a charming manner, everyone would laugh, including me. He’s a Southern boy – just like his father – and charm (and BS!) runs in his veins.

And I tried, Lord, how I tried, to get him to tell me what he wanted out of life, marriage, work, you name it. He not only lied to me about it, he lied to his therapist. I mean, this guy had, at one point, 3 women propping him up: wife, mistress, therapist. He said, “but we were really happy then, right?” I remember XH coming home years ago after teaching his first full semester and telling me how one of his female students came to his office, closed the door, and told him she was willing to “do anything” to raise her grade. I was totally offended. He told me he told her no and sent her on her way, but that really should have been my first clue that this kind of nonsense went on. I assumed it was the exception rather than the rule – clearly I was naive. Yes, he was an adult and he made a decision to end his life. That’s what we always say, isn’t it. How we always absolve ourselves. “This person was crying out for help but not a single soul noticed! Even though we all buy the ‘crazy’ lie, magically.” It is too late for S, but it is NOT too late for you to do what you KNOW IS THE RIGHT THING and drop this ridiculous sham of a friendship. It is also not too late for you to call her out on her bullshit in the name of this poor man who ended his life over the pain of her betrayal. These days, OW’s doing her post doc at a top university on the OTHER SIDE OF THE COUNTRY. Because nothing says, “I love you” like moving 3,000 miles away to put career before “true love.” It also gives her plenty of time and space to dazzle her way to the next step of her “career” and seduce more bylines, chapters, and who knows what out of the next old man, flattered by the attentions of a beautiful young woman…Part of me wants to admonish you for not reaching out to your fellow chump who was suffering. But he may have pulled that trigger anyway and you’d have felt even worse, as if you were a catalyst. I don’t know how much it would have helped without collective effort from several people prepared to take on L and openly dispel the lies. Infidelity is the theft of your reality. You can’t cheat on someone without gaslighting them. It’s an insidious, intimate form of abuse. One that drove S to blow his brains out. L denied S’s reality. This man who was so devoted to her, she would not treat ethically. It’s sad to me that there are genuine chumps out there looking for support and this letter writer gets to take up valuable space in one of the very few spaces available to Chumps. I think my ex had the same plan. People called me paranoid for it but it just made sense. My ex slipped up and revealed he’d been actively planning to divorce me for at least the last six years of our 20 year marriage. That’s part of why I got alimony for ten years. During that six years, I quit a job that could support me and provided me with insurance because he didn’t want to help out at home and wanted a housewife. A couple years before the discard (right before I quit my job) I talked to him seriously worrying he wasn’t happy. I offered him an easy divorce if that’s what he wanted because I felt like he wasn’t happy and didn’t want to be around me. He sobbed, begged, pleaded, took time off work to spend time with me. All to reassure me he was all in and loved me.

I came to see through my own mess that I should only be obligated to those that I choose to be obligated to, and only to the extent that I choose. I learned that kinda late, but now I’m only friends with healthy, safe people. I have only a handful of relatives on my side. One is safe, and one is in late-stage dementia and difficult, so I have certain parameters with her. I have others on the periphery that I have to interact with that I’m guarded with, and that’s fine. I’ve let go of others entirely. As a therapist friend likes to say, “I don’t do crazy. I decide what crazy is.” Thank you, CL – once again you have succinctly stated what I’ve been struggling to put into words. When my STBX was stumbling around reconciliation, I kept saying to him, “You can’t just say you’re sorry like I’m someone you bumped into on a bus,” and, “I need to see remorse — regret and remorse are two different things.” All I got was the classic, “Well, I said I was sorry. I don’t know what more you want from me.”Recompense. I think that’s the hardest one to fake. You can’t just squeak by with a couple half ass comments on this one and get a pass.

Honesty. You can’t cheat on someone without lying to them. Real remorse spits out the truth. All of the truth, and it doesn’t editorialize and say things like “she really needed me” or “he was just a friend.” Real remorse answers the same questions over and over and over again and gives truthful, consistent answers. (None of which is “I don’t know.”) If real remorse doesn’t know, real remorse does whatever it can to find out. Real remorse doesn’t balk at a polygraph. GINR thinks polygraphs are expensive and unreliable. Real remorse will do whatever it must to give you peace of mind even if real remorse thinks it’s pointless. Well that nicer older GINR Volvo ended up costing me about 5 Grand so far, and the minute I started having problems with it, about a month after getting it he washed his hands of it. And now it’s finally died and I had to pay to get it towed and I’M SO PISSED that I’m still paying for his arrogant mistakes and I need transportation! Why are you friends with someone who makes you want to gouge your eye’s out? Who enlists you in conspiracies?Agreed, the cheating friend of the poster is not a quality person anymore. She’s a cheater. Cheaters destroy lives around them; that’s just what they do. It hurts to give up a relationship with someone with whom you’ve invested love and years into, but, just like escaping a FW, the poster has to go NC with her cheating friend. You have to let her go. There’s no loyalty in her. Who is to say that she won’t destroy her friends’ lives just like she destroyed her family’s?