I have a few ideas even if I still have not worked out the bugs, but I’m a slowly trying in my spare time here to basically give words to what my gut feelings say.
In other words, like in the past for red flags etc your instinct knew it before it was found out, your gut knows a lot more than your logical mind do. Or better you do know but it was never yet articulated into words, but the feeling and instinct is super clear.
Maybe this is also why I tend to use so many words to express these thoughts, they are mine and they are intelligent qualities, still incorporeal as they weren’t expressed by names and words. It’s perfectly structured like an harmony in music, it flows, but until they are pinned down and crystallized on the paper they are not yet notes but the pauses between them,. You know the song and the melody already, just need to pin the correct keys down.
Anyway, I am doing it again, so back to the point:
Cheaters are no monster or sociopaths. Most often than not they are people we like, they have qualities and that makes them worthy.
But they have a special kind of broken inside that lies between the conscious and unconscious mind. They dream of being accepted. They seek validation.
It’s a common flaw but there’s some issue that instead of allowing them to grow up and find themselves, drops them into the self sabotage path.
They cheat because they’re running away from themselves. So they betray. Us and their inner self. This is hard enough that often they spawn an entirely new personality, fake one, but still a persona, a mask, a performance of a fantasy.
The game has tricks, because the mask becomes what defines you, and if they can’t get back into their deeper self, the mask will devour them, effectively replacing their self with the performance. And ends up into defining them.
Once you get there, you’ll lose yourself in a prison or your own making.
This is a very peculiar character flaw, it’s even easy to spot, you can feel when people are not genuine but performing, cheaters red flags are very very very easy to spot.
And that’s why the affair partners are spotting the cheaters and pinning them so easily out of the crowd. It’s not a subtle signal it’s a fucking neon sign.
Affair partners are either cheaters themselves or even more slimy and miserable when they are single (the kind of person that fails in the normal dating game so cheating is the only option).
They find each other because the signs are so obvious.
While sane people avoid both cheaters and affair partners as they smell off, because it’s so obvious.
Getting finally to the point:
The signs were there. Don’t you feel like we knew it all along?
Like all humanity we are also very receptive to those social cues, we are wired for it by nature. We also saw the neon sign, I suspect that for our partners we chose to ignore it.
Because we liked them? Sure but I am not satisfied with just that, I feel there is more.
Plenty of people you like but seeing their red flags (for whatever facet of humanity) makes you to keep them at distance. There is a metric ton of others you like with not so obvious red flags.
And we Still Do have in our lives people who carry their own red flags in this or that.
We keep them compartmentalized enjoy their good sides but always aware never to allow them in or us in their red flag territory.
It’s kind of managed in a sense, I think you can think of a number of people tha fit that description.
But we allowed our cheaters in, and instead of managing them, we gave them it all.
My understanding and unanswered question is why?
I think we have or at least used to have a complementary flaw, that is a match made in heaven for our waywards, I. Hell for us.
Unlike cheaters and affair partners we don’t possess that character flaw, that neon sign they spot in each other.
Our attachment is safer, we are more secure and we are repulsed by the idea of meddling in the sewage of infidelity.
But yet there is often a pattern in BSes that they found themselves not only once with the kind of people that cheaters are.
Sometimes it happened multiple times.
Cheaters are relatively common but is still a minority of the population and they tend to be alone and among themselves (so alone in the end, there is no love among traitors, only illusions and lies), the vast majority of people rejects them because the smell of the sewage is not appealing, no matter how pretty the face of the person swimming in the septic tank.
But we don’t, we didn’t.
That suggests to me we are fucked up in a different way to allow these people close in our lives, instead of leaving them alone in their septic tank with their kindred spirits, or just include them in our circle of "managed red flag acquaintances ". Close yes, but never too close.
I know this was likely the case for me. But I wonder as cheaters do present common traits (low self worth, validation craving, people pleasing etc), maybe we betrayed partners also have some common signs that we are. Complementing the cheater’s flaws somehow?
I can only note my experience of being constantly hit by cheater women, in a different way than other normal women (I mean emotional not just the regular attraction signs from a female, but more like infatuation), so perhaps I was broadcasting to some sort of signal that these people pick up?
Maybe we do this unconsciously?
Finding that out would be pretty useful to work on ourselves and erase that flaw from our lives.
It’s a good insurance for a path to happiness.
