Letters to the Editor

• Compulsive risk taking

  [Read the article: I'm cheating on my husband and loving it. Is that a problem?]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  It will make me sound like an idiot, but I had two girlfriends like this. Number one was a bit of a drama queen, and playing two boyfriends off against each other was I suppose fun -- this included humiliating people. However, she was infuriated when the other boyfriend and I met by chance and after growling had a drink and compared notes . . . seems we were both hearing the same stuff. Her then best friend married my college roommate, and so every now and then I get hints about the latest train wreck, more than 20 years later. My other girlfriend/fiancee was also a serial cheater -- we finally split up, and then she showed up pregnant with the little problem that I was a candidate - and she wanted me to agree that if I was the winner, I would agree to adoption -- I said absolutely not, that if she did not want the child I would raise it. I lost as it happens. Every now and then I hear from her -- her life is also a train-wreck -- and she thinks I can fix it, but I am married to a wonderful woman who I love very much.

  In any event, I have often wondered at the behavior of both -- and now I read this letter. LW is not one of these women, a few years too young, but she could be. At the end of the day, it was not just about the sex, it was about some sort of risk taking compulsion -- in girlfriend number one a desire to be the center of some sort of drama, the key actor with all attention upon her. The fact that eventually all her relationships fell apart, first with the boyfriend/partner, then steadily with her circle of friends as each found themselves dealing with another of her serial of victim became the toxic side effect. I do not know much about her life today . . . I have moved to another country, and as far as I can tell, few of her circle have anything to do with her. Number two's life is an even bigger train-wreck from what I know -- she has now changed her name (she called my mother trying to make contact with me and gave the new name.) Who knows why, loathing of her father or some stalker she picked up along the way. On some level I'd like to help her, but what she seems to want to to return to before she wrecked things (and I don't), and more to the point, my partner and his wife, who know her from law-school would kill me before I got hauled into her maelstom of drama, not to mention the risk to my wife's emotional well being. Number two had a lot of affairs, at work, at school, who knows . . .

  The letter writer seems to be heading in the direction of numbers one and two. She wants to be caught, or at least she wants the thrill of risk-taking, she wants the personal drama. Look at what she is doing -- cheating with multiple men, one of whom will sooner or later be indiscreet, having sex with a client (if she is in several professions, law, medicine, psychology, business-accounting, etc., that can lose her her license), and finally writing this letter (which is pretty risky.)

  A final point - early in my legal career (career 3-5 depending on what you count) I found myself working on a white collar crime case involving the collapse of a bank with significant fraud by the President (who is still in jail.) There were two defendant in our case (the President was on the run), and the one we did not represent (she was broke and relied on a public defender) with the private firm doing work for both (if the jury convicted one it would convict both), had been a lawyer and CPA and was GC and CFO to the bank, and as it happens the Bank-President's mistress. We got them off -- but she lost her husband, her home, her law license and her accounting license -- for all I know she is living on public assistance. So morality aside -- DON'T SLEEP WITH THE CLIENT!!!!

  Permalink Tuesday, October 9, 2007 02:25 AM