With all the uproar over Arnold Schwarzenegger and his “love child,” our friend Ann over at WomenExplode.com just wrote about her own experience of a cheating husband.
Read I can relate with Maria Shriver ”¦ at WomenExplode.com.
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How to recognize and recover from everyday sociopaths - narcissists
I agree that some PEOPLE are monogamous and some are not. If you are not, why marry? Plenty of people live without being monogamous and without the lies. I also have a surprising (to that author at least) amount of male friends who strongly disagree that monogamy is gender based. To them, monogamy is natural.
For me the issue here isn’t sexual, it’s the dishonesty. To have a child and not claim it, what kind of a person does that? Not ones I want to know. Nor do I want to know people who put their “loved ones” at risk because they screw around. My friends need not be monogamous, I don’t really want to know about their sexual habits…but I do require honesty. I don’t respect liars. Long experience tells me they don’t respect anyone.
Edited to add: I agree it’s socially related. In those countries where it is accepted, it is also less hidden. I don’t think cheating is a sociopathic behavior so much as the lying is. X really didn’t care about sex. He knew quite well that just because he found some other woman attractive didn’t mean our relationship was over. Instead he chose to lie. He told me the affair didn’t count, because the woman had terminal cancer and would be dead before the end of the year. He was making sure I would be too. THAT’s what makes him a sociopath. A total lack of empathy or conscious.
I am not in any way defending people who lie and cheat. It’s thoughtless and cruel to deceive your partner. I’m just looking at why this is so prevalent.
I think people marry because it is the socially correct thing to do. It is what we are all supposed to do. Just like why so many kids go right into college after high school, even though they have no idea why. Just because. Our society says it’s the right thing to do. I think there are far too many people who are married that shouldn’t be married. Maybe I’m just cynical and see cheaters everywhere. It just seems like the whole idea of marriage and “death do us part” seems so outdated in this society. Nobody adheres to it any more. I think it takes a lot of guts to throw your marriage into a tailspin to be honest with your partner and tell her you want other lovers. It is a surefire way to end the marriage. Most people don’t have the courage to do that. Or they feel they will hurt the kids if they break up a marriage. When you add in fame and power, as in the case of Arnold, there’s an added element of being entitled via being corrupted by power and fame. I’m not saying it’s right or it’s excusable. I’m just saying, a lot of people make these kinds of choices. I think once a person does something like that, and they get away with it, it becomes easy for them to do it again. Pretty soon, they start rationalizing their behaviors.
Romanticfoolnomore,
I feel for you. It totally STINKS! I agree it comes down to being honest. Hardly anyone is anymore…they would rather keep what they have and lie and have affairs. What I’m saying is; if you did that to them, boy would they be pissed! So, the double standard once again.
I wish you well and a good nights sleep. 🙂
Stargazer:
Bingo! MOST people do not go into a marriage thinking they are going to cheat on their spouse. But because most of us marry for all the wrong reasons, a little ways down the road it’s like this isn’t what I signed up for and MOST people are not equipped to deal with that for the rest of their life. So they cheat. I am absolutely NOT condoning it, but we live in a fallen world. God meant this world to be perfect, but as soon as Adam and Eve did their crap, that was it. Sin infected the world and that’s what it is…sin. Plain and simple. And when we come down to it, THAT is why people cheat. If not, why is it sooooooo prevalent?? Think about it.
Because it’s all bullshit. Don’t you understand??? It has absoloutly NOTHING to do with adam and eve…lol yeah that’s my excuse for cheating on you honey..adam and eve.
PLEASE…It’s soooo prevelant because people LIE, CHEAT, STEAL, has nothing to do with Adam & Eve. CMON!
Stargazer and women curious about the wife,
First. I thought it was funny your statement about thinking “outside the box” in your post about sex. But then, I see word funnies like that sometimes. Helps to break the tension….
There’s cheaters yet I don’t think cheating makes a sociopath. There’s jerks, yet jerks don’t make a sociopath. There’s the self absorbed, yet a narcissist is not a sociopath. To me, it only achieves the level of spath when they have an agenda to destroy that which does not submit to their dictation and control. …like when a bunch of hot air turns into a tornado. Some tornados are tightly wound, almost controlled. Some are a mile wide and ripping everything in it’s path.
My husband rarely lost his temper. NO ONE would ever believe me if I described him when he was in a rage. He believed losing control showed weakness and he was NEVER weak. NOBODY other than me and my daughter has ever seen him rage that way. Yet I have watched him in full rage beat a cow with his bare fists until it was crippled and had to be shot – 1500 lbs of thick hide and bone was CRIPPLED after he beat it so hard and so long that it DIED.
Other times, coldly with control and a near orgasmic thrill on his face, he’d use a cow’s natural behavior to control her and then after making sure he had her under control and submissive to him, he’d cleanly turn to her, slice her to murder her or to snap her leg which would mean her death, and then turn to me, with that victorious exultation glee beaming on his face… and I cried why… and he quietly calmly matter of factly answered, “to teach her not to make me mad”. No elevated BP or quickened pulse. JUST COLD. After the first time I saw him kill a cow in the field (as opposed to the rage in the barn where he’d cornered a cow), he did it regularly after that, to teach another and another and another not to make him mad. But I am sure he was doing it many times before I first saw it. We used to keep cow lists and his count was sloppy, yet he was also an accountant and pretty much ocd about accurate numbers so the sloppy count didn’t make sense to me.
Yes, the gaslighting was there, and the pity play (all his girlfriends left him…boo hoo. Don’t you feel sorry for him too???), and the ridicule of community members.
At first after an incident (another fraud, ps they weren’t INCIDENTS, they were symptoms of a spath.) I thought ‘well a bad thing happened, but it was over and I could deal with it’. However, seemed like the genie was out of the bottle. Once bad things started, they just snowballed with frequency and escalated into nearly unbelievably calloused and cruelty and no longer hiding his contempt.
He began to have certain practices. If someone liked me, or was kind, he’d focus on them, be their best friend, and within a short time, they’d more more than hostile to me, they be vicious. ANd I never found out why b/c it’ not like they’d have a conversation with me ever again. Ended up NOBODY liked me. Yet statisically you know that didn’t make sense.
The women? They were plenty. I just didn’t know. I hindsight, yep plenty of disappearances but I wasn’t going to be “one of those” wives keeping a husband on a short leash. In year nine, He got a vasectomy and after that was his first open affair. It lasted a year. I didn’t know at all. With a woman that I would NEVER have guessed. at one point, I asked him if he was having an affair b/c he was so cold and nitpicked at me about everything, I could do NOTHING right. I found out about her when I saw my car at her house and stopped, knocked at the door, thinking he must have had car trouble or something and she laughed and laughed at how stupid I was not to guess. I will never get her look and laugh out of my brain. B/c he was such a prude and looked down on cheating men, I NEVER saw it coming. After that, he turned into a hedonist, nude sunbathing, skinnydipping with lots and lots of women, dancing, “private” lessons. And by then I’d moved out. Yet he still professed he loved me, that there were NO women, that he was attached and that I mattered to him and NO ONE else did, that he did NOT want a divorce, that he had not wanted me to move out but now that I was gone, he needed space to think. And considering his behavior, I agreed. I thought he’d see how far off the road he’d fallen, and he’d return to the morality he professed to possess when we married.
Maria may have known her husband was a flirt. (My husband was a HUGE flirt, the MOST charming man you’d ever meet.) Flirting is part of politics. She may have known women threw themselves at him. She may have known a story or two didn’t add up but to press it was to borrow trouble. I understand in the last year or so, she complained that Arnold had swallowed the coolaide, thought himself special, entitled, bought into all the back slaps and glad handling, had become a jetsetter highroller. I think she was looking forward to end of the governor and back to whatever their real world was. But I bet she didn’t know how bad he’d gotten about the women. I bet that once she found out about the housekeeper, she pursued all those other truths that she put aside in order to not borrow trouble. And she’s still finding out, and will continue to find out, all the ways he betrayed her. (took me years to find out. Spaths do hide a lot of truths, they enlist the help of sycophants and cronies. LOTS of peole LOVE fooling the wife. Makes them feel SOOOO important.)
What stuns me is how girlfriends or the other women are upset the wife takes back their husband. It’s like, you $#!*&wife, if you’d let him go, we’d be together. OW forget, the #!& wife is not just with a man, there’s a whole lot more to a marriage than just the husband. Protests seeming As IF the WIFE is the bad one for taking him back? Note to OW, the wife is NOYB. To be angry or contemptuous of the wife is completely inappropriate. YOU stepped on HER territory. YOU KNEW he was married. The wife didn’t know about you being a part of her future or she’d have made other choices. The wife does not have to justify herself to ANY OW. You don’t know what’s in her head and it’s not your place to know, EVER. ESP when an spath husband is involved b/c then she has a nightmare you can’t even imagine to deal with and how she does that is NOYB.
People do crappy things. They hurt people they love. They screw up. Normal ordinary people do stuff like this too. I’m not proud of the fact that many years ago I was a stripper. (Long story, but it was the only way I knew how to break free of a bad relationship). Being a stripper, I had many many married men hitting on me all the time. I couldn’t believe how many married men were cheating on their wives! Many of them claimed to be happily married. Perhaps this is one reasons why I’m so cynical about the institution of marriage. Then there was my part. Though I never had sex with these guys, I was still contributing to their lying and cheating. I also gave a fake name and age, and pretended to be interested in them. So that makes me no better than them. None of us have lived in perfect integrity our whole lives.
I hope in Arnold’s case that he is not a sociopath and that he gets hit with the full consequences of what he has done. The pain it will cause him will last a lifetime, if he has a caring bone in his body.
no comment
That is my wish too, that somehow someway my husband wakes up from being an spath and gets hit with the full consequences of his behavior and that he FEELS the pain he caused.
In fact that is the curse I screamed at my husband, that someday he could feel 1/10th the pain he caused b/c even 1/10th would be so overwhelming he’d consider suicide to be relieved of it. Even as I cursed him, I knew it would also be a blessing to him. That if he could feel, he would be free of the evil that sabotaged his humanity.
Superkid: I knew my ex-husband was a ladies man. However, I never followed him around town like a detective. The way I actually found out was when he left one of his mistresses she wanted revenge and called my house to give me the low down on what he was doing behind my back. She gave me names of women that she knew of but even she did not know the next mistress in his life nor did I.
You mentioned someone you know who returned to his ex-wife and she knew all the players in his life. How did she know everyone unless she followed him around town? Did she have people filling her in?
Joanie 123