Letters to the Editor
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What's the problem?
Your current husband knew you cheated on your first husband. He knew you were a scorpion when he married you. He's got no reason to be surprised when this situation blows up in both your faces...and it will.
Until then, have fun.
Oh, and you have no right to be surprised when you discover that he's cheating on you...with a married woman.
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This is the single most disturbing letter Cary has published. I feel ill.
LW,
Why did you write to Cary? I find your letter alarming as you very likely suffer from a serious psychological disorder, and may well be a sociopath or a borderline personality. You have a profound lack of empathy and seem to have no innerness or even an appropriate level of moral self-awareness. Your behavior is terribly cruel and selfish, and it absolutely will come back to haunt your relationship (I know people who have cheated and those who have suffered the terrible effects of being cheated on by a trusted partner). Don't delude yourself: the sex-buddy friend you treat so carelessly may well decide he wants more and will make your life hell. Or he will dump you, after informing your husband. Your husband deserves better than you and he may figure that out.
You are a serial cheater who does not feel guilt? Who has not remotely matured or learned to feel respect and empathy for others? Why in the hell did you marry again? Since the vows are utterly meaningless to you, why did you lie through your teeth when you spoke them to your husband? I feel terrible sadness for him as he got stuck with a self-centered risk taker who doesn't feel much of anything but delight in her own impulse-gratification.
You frankly don't deserve any generous responses from Salon LWs as you have already excused your own monstrous behavior and I am sure that we will not make any impression on you whatsoever, given that you care not at all for your husband's feelings (or your first husband's feelings or your friend's feelings and so on and so on).
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Flipside, the problem is that we don't know what pile of baloney "but I love you blah blah blah" this bitch fed her current husband
to coax him into marriage. This bitch is scary. She's the type who shoots up her workplace or runs over some poor person in her SUV and feels "no guilt" because justice is all in her own mind. Get some meds before you hurt more people!
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Love & Denial
This is a woman so seriously in denial I wouldn't know where to start. Or perhaps I do: "I love my husband and I'm very happy with him". You don't betray people you truly love. Someone this self-involved probably isn't capable of true love. Someone who describes themselves as a "lapper" (once you have a word for it, you know you're in trouble), is not a feeling, caring person. This person is an opportunist and opportunists only look out for themselves. There's no room for love there.
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Cary wrote...
"...because you have recognized that you have a problem, you are probably not a true sociopath..."
But this isn't quite right, is it? Even a sociopath could recognise that serial cheating on unsuspecting partners is frowned upon by society generally, and that's not quite the same as recognising that one's behaviour is actually a problem.
To anyone with an ordinary degree of empathy for others, it would be very obvious that deceiving someone who loves you about a matter such as this is wrong - there'd be no need to ask such a question.
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Maybe not a sociopath...
but a piss-poor excuse for a human being nontheless. True, her current husband was foolish not to know "once a cheater, always a cheater." But his stupidity doesn't excuse her bad behavior. The fact that he's none the wiser doesn't make it okay. How do we feel about raping the comatose?
Just once I'd like to see Tennis call a bad person a bad person.
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Salon LWs, are we being punked? Seriously,
why do you think this LW wrote in? I don't think she gives a rat's arse about what we think (or what Cary thinks).
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cheating
Well, most people get married because they want an exclusive relationship. In many cases, this is not too difficult to define. So they get married. No one makes you get married, and cohabiting or living singly or whatever is also fine, you can do whatever you want. But in general the idea if you decide to get married is that you want some sort of monogamy. You can be conscious about creating your relationship with your spouse, or you can just let society jerk you around. Maybe you don't know which is which, or haven't had the chance to find out the difference. This is not to prudishly go over the top regarding lapses, but just to say a general sense of what is going on, and how that relates to what you want from your relationship, is not a bad idea. A fundamental clarity about what you want from your life and relationship might not be a bad place to start. You can do anything you like. But figuring out how to do that requires knowing what it is, and possibly, what it also means.
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"Not Yets"
Often people who know they have a drinking problem go to AA and then stop. They do so using excuses ... "I haven't lost my job" or "I haven't lost my family". Yeah, not yet.
You too hazily recognize that you have a problem, that there is a rattlesnake in your midst, but it hasn't bitten you. Not yet.
Get a grip before the bad thing you know is going to happen happens.
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Fake!
I call fake on this letter. It sounds like the imaginings of a misogynistic guy who got dumped or cheated on.
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Do you have any idea who you are?
Really. Do you ever ask yourself the question, "Who am I?"
It does not sound as though you have the introspective capacity of a sand flea. It sounds as though you are incapable of being alone, but have as little interest in others as you do in the depths of your own mind. Certainly you seem to have no capacity for empathy; you treat other people as though they are extensions of your own whims. It sounds as though you are merely a bundle of impulses and sensations, which vary but slightly from moment to moment.
Can you even envision yourself spending time alone, without external forms of entertainment? Can you even envision yourself looking into your own mind? What on earth could be back there?