SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Married men or women who, at the same time, pursue and enjoy new love have a strong sense of entitlement. This is especially true of those who, like my wife, hypocritically criticize others for doing the same.

The romance and excitement of new love is one of life's great experiences. But once such love leads to marriage, re-experiencing it is off the table unless the marriage ends by death or divorce. Yet some men and women think so highly of themselves -- think they are so special or entitled -- that they can pursue the romance and excitement of new love even while married.

My wife is one of those people. After many years of a reasonably strong marriage, she secretly reconnected and pursued an affair with a high school boyfriend in another state. She went so far as to deceptively manipulate me into aiding my own betrayal by having me pay for a long-awaited liaison with her new love. She was equally shameless in having me drive her to and from the airport for the secretly planned tryst. I feel like a total fool for saying, as she left the car, "have a good time." And she did.

Her sense of entitlement implies that she thought she was better than those she had strongly condemned for doing the same thing.

Woe be it to the man or woman who unwittingly marries one of these entitled assholes. Unfortunately, I am one of them.

I, too, was M'd to one of those

What has happened in the last 3 years to change your marriage?

Is your spouse doing anything to help heal the trauma and make amends?

Are you in reconciliation or limbo?

I’m sorry for you.

Hey 74,

Looks like you have stayed in limbo for quite a while, and from the looks of your previous posts, your WS seems to be exhibiting signs of regret rather than remorse.

How are you dealing with that?

Now, on to the topic at hand.

Entitlement can come from many sources; Narcissism is one, an enabling BS, or WS taking BS for granted, to name a few.

The first one is a long term behaviour that is (usually) intrinsic, and the other two are taught.

Which source do you think your WS gets the sense of entitlement from? Do you think it is inherent in her, or is it a learned/conditioned trait?

If it is inherent in her, then she would need professional help (IC).

If it is a learned/conditioned behaviour, then you will have to ask where she learned this behaviour from, and why does it persist?

*Hint: am asking you if you enable her behaviour by pandering to her whims, or because you are too fearful that she might leave you.*

74

So you have a typical WW - nothing special about her behavior.

Suggestion: (what I did in identical situation - and it is a standing offer)

Offer her a plane ticket back to the "reunion" - one-way only. Offer to pack up all her stuff.

I will bet she will not take the offer "but"

OK?

So are you willing to share your spouse? Or are you only sharing your residence and family relations now? What IS your current matrimonial relationship? And by the question I mean nothing to do with wealth or possessions or children etc.

Your post laments your situation after 45 years.

How was your relationship before the class reunion?

I'm unclear on what you want from the folks here.

Only takes one person to trash a marriage. It takes both to make a marriage 'work.'

My impression from your post is you are the only one now 'working.'

Yes? No?

I have often discussed the issue of self entitlement with my WH.

He’s a narcissistic over indulged only child. He has even put his needs before those of our children.

I too have unwittingly aided my WH’s betrayal and infidelity.

I paid for him to take his parents on a European vacation. He had an affair during that vacation and others to follow.

I bought him new expensive cars in which he drove prostitutes around in. He even used my car, which I had to sell as I became physically sick when driving my own car.

I couldn’t even go inside my own home for over a year. It took over 12 months of trauma counselling for me to even step inside my own home. I still feel anxious about going there but I manage.

STBXWH’s exAP also has this ‘entitlement’ gene. She too believes that she is entitled to have affairs with other people’s spouses.

In my perfect world, these 2 self absorbed, self entitled narcissistic a***holes, should be forced to live happily ever after together.

--The 1st Wife:

Not much has happened in the last 3 years to change our marriage. I'm not over the hurt and humiliation, but we've achieved a sort of peaceful coexistence as reasonably civil housemates. If I were much younger and weren't so closely connected to children and grandchildren, I'd divorce her out of self-respect and start over. But family and financial considerations render that overly self-indulgent. So we're in limbo. The affair, I think, is over. She's trying to make amends, but for me the trauma is still alive -- partly because I caught her by breaking into a year's worth of email correspondence with the AP and the painful combination of her words of endearment for him and denigration of me is seared into my psyche. So I'm eating what some on SI call a "shit sandwich." Don't like it, but feel boxed in by circumstance. I'll never get over what she's done to me, but I'm trying to live with it. I've been fortunate in every other aspect of my long life. To put it in perspective, if when I'm at death's door this is the worse thing that's ever happened to me, my complaint will be comparatively minor.

--Rocket Racoon:

You're right. I'm still in limbo. I'm ambivalent. Though the affair is over (and he lives 600 miles away) I see more regret than remorse. I think it's hard for a BH to discern remorse if the relationship only ended because the WW was caught. I have no reason to believe she would ever have ended it on her own. Moreover, she and he bonded as adolescents and there is a growing literature on the psychobiology of romantic adolescent bonding and how the attraction is deeply rooted in the brain with some degree of permanence. This suggests they may never completely get over the hots for each other. She's not a narcissist. We'd been married for 45 years before her affair with no sign of it. I do not pander to her whims. I think the principal source of the affair was a dormant psychobiological adolescent bond that was rekindled at their 50th high school reunion. Moral for others: Don't let your spouse go to a high school reunion without you!

Hippo16:

You're right: "a typical WW". Yet the relationship before the class reunion was wonderful. I had no reason to suspect anything before or leading up to the reunion. Suspicions began only after the reunion when I noticed she was becoming increasingly cold and distant in bed. It was this that eventually led to my breaking into her email and discovering a year of increasingly romantic correspondence with her boyfriend who is, believe me, a real asshole. Proof once again that love is blind! Our relationship is currently civil, but the bedroom cold. I'm no longer amorously attracted. I guess I'm not asking for anything specific from folks here (though I received lots of good advice from my initial posts after D-day), but I've been reading a lot about the concept of "entitlement" in social/political journalism and it occurred to me that it plays a large role in infidelity as well.

Weren’t we all...