Manly Thor's Day Special
Perhaps it has always been the case or perhaps it is especially true of our post-feminist era but one of the things a man has to be ready for is discovering he has been cheated on. It's not a certainty but it happens enough that the odds of it happening to you are considerable. (Yes, it did happen to me in a previous relationship.)
In theory the solution seems straightforward: you'll dump her. Very few men do in practice. Not immediately anyway. The first reaction is always to try and reach some sort of reconciliation. If you can dump her immediately, the truth is that you were looking for an excuse to get rid of her anyway.
It is only if efforts at reconciliation fail that you will dump her or let her go (these are not the same thing).
The really unfair thing is that you have responsibilities at all in this. She is the one who screwed things up and it only feels natural and right that it should be entirely up to her to make them right again. But what is making them right again? Worse, you will have certain entirely natural and justifiable reactions that you will have to control in order to make it work.
How women lie about sex
As Proust said, women lie in order to avoid lying when it comes to sex. If the woman in your life cheats on you, she will build a wall of lies around the incident. Every one of these lies is a roadblock intended to stop conversation from steering into the place the lie she doesn't want to have to tell is located.
Suppose you mention that a house belonging to the parents of a friend of hers is for sale and ask her what it's like and she says, "I don't know, I was never there." That's a nice, low tension lie. It can be delivered easily. Better, if you later find out it isn't true it can be easily deflected.
Now suppose a week later you meet the friend and ask about the house and she says, "Why didn't your girlfriend tell you, she stayed over back when we were single." So you approach your girlfriend and she says, "Oh that's right, I guess I forgot." She's doing all this so she can avoid talking about something else. Perhaps her friend's brother, perhaps her friend's brother's friend. Perhaps something that happened with her girlfriend while she was staying.
And all that effort is being made to hide a secret that dates from before she met you. It all goes triple if she cheats on you during your relationship.
The odd consequence of this is that you'll peel layers off the lie before you get to it. And that will make you into a bit of an obsessive before you even know whether you should be hurt or not.
And when you do find the lie, it might be harmless. It might be that the thing she has been protecting is the memory of a boyfriend who was gone years before you arrived on the scene. It may be that she is protecting the memory of the guy who hit on her and she turned down but she feels rather good about the fact that he tried. Or it may be an affair.
So the first question you have to ask yourself is whether you even want to find out. You may not.
Why you think she lied
From the outside, as you slowly turn into some clever Sherlock slowly unmasking her, it feels like she is lying for one and only one reason: to hurt you. That's extremely unlikely. So, right off the bat, we need to get our own nightmares off the table as they blind us to what is really going on. There are two nightmares here. One is common to men and women and the other is peculiarly male.
The common one was a favourite of my mother's. She'd say, "Do you lie just to torture me? You know how this hurts me." And I'd stay silent because the truth was that it was precisely because I done something that I knew would really torture her that I lied to protect her.
The same dynamic is in place when a woman cheats on you. She didn't do it to hurt you because she planned to get away with it. No one, least of all you, was ever going to know.
The other, peculiarly male reason you think she lied is to hide what you are terrified to think may have been the best sex of her life. You think she went to another man to get something that she finds lacking in you. Again, this is exactly backwards. The problem is not what he did for her but that she did for him something she is only supposed to do for you.
An aside, when people start any new relationship, including an affair, one of their first thoughts is often how much easier things are than their last relationship. They think that they don't have to work at it. The truth is that things are going so well in the new relationship because they are working ten times as hard at this new relationship than they did the last one. That is what should bother you: that she worked so much harder at this affair than she did with you.
When she met this other guy, she was always on her best behaviour. She didn't dare put him through one of her moods because he could have left so much more easily than you would. She had to earn his attention and she did. She always dressed so as to feel confident and beautiful and she always arrived ready to have a good time. She complains that you don't spend enough time on foreplay but every time she saw this guy she had already been priming herself for hours if not days before he even showed up.
Here's a basic truth about women's sexuality that she'll never admit to herself: sex can only be as good for her as she is willing to let it be. If the sex was good with another man it was mostly because she made it that way. And that's the real problem: she should have been doing all that for you. She robbed you.
Why she really lied
She lied to keep the secret. I know, that sounds tautological but the whole point of intimacy is to be intimate and intimate is secret.
And, crazy as this may seem, that's understandable. She probably hasn't done this sort of thing often. (If she has, what the hell are you doing with her?) From a male point of view, it seems like it's easy for women to get sex; it seems like all they have to do is say "yes" to some guy. But it doesn't feel that way to her. From her perspective the problem is, "How does she make this happen in a way that feels good for her?"
Again, you'll obsess about that "masterful lover" who made things happen for her. For her the real thrill is that she actually managed to make this other guy come after her. That's really quite the trick and she is proud of having done that. (By the way, she'll lie in exactly the same way if it was disaster because that will make it a matter of shame and anyone else knowing about her shame will only make it worse.)
It may well be that she has wondered all her life whether she could do such a thing. She has watched other women do it and publicly sneered at them for doing so but all the time she has privately worried that the real reason she never has never done this is because she can't.
Here's a dark secret, she will never hate the memory of this affair. She may hate herself for giving in to it. She may hate herself for hurting you. She will never hate the thing that happened. If it was good, she will privately treasure this for the rest of her life and, crazy as this will sound, you should let her get away with that. (One of the odd aspects of this is that one of the counter-intuitive results of a woman cheating on you is that in some cases your sex life with her suddenly gets better because she feels better about herself.)
You, of course, do hate it and you think you want her to hate it too. You think you want to destroy this intimate secret and make it awful in her memory. Or, to be more accurate, you tell yourself this is what you want. You don't because the only way you could achieve this is by degrading her.
What you should want
You should want absolute and unequivocal acknowledgement from her that she wronged you. No fudging allowed. No, "I was feeling insecure and needed reassurance." Sorry, Honey, everyone feels insecure and needs reassurance. And while it may be perfectly true that you have been difficult, none of that excuses her cheating. There are no excuses and no qualifications. This is her fault and she has to unreservedly acknowledge this and apologize for it.
And you want her to work hard to restore trust and love. There are two parts of this. First you forgive her and second you decide whether you can trust her enough to continue a relationship with her. The first does not imply the second and you should tell her this.
One thing you want to be on the watch for is the apologizing-to-Rachel-Lynde phenomenon. This is an apology that does no real work. One thing people, including women people, will do when they know they are in the wrong is to get so torn up about how awful they have been that you end up suffering twice as much. First you got cheated on and now you have to live with this sackcloth and ashes routine where she is impossible to live with because she feels so miserable and she can't do anything about it because she feels so lousy. You meanwhile are left alone and moping.
Odd as this may seem, you want her to cheerfully throw herself into making it better. She should react to your being willing to consider trusting her again the same way she would react to being told the test was negative and she doesn't have cancer after all. You shouldn't have to explain this to her. If she doesn't figure it out, dump her. Don't make it a condition. Don't say unless you do this, I'm out of here. Just wait and see. If she fails, go. Don't explain, just leave.
Perhaps it has always been the case or perhaps it is especially true of our post-feminist era but one of the things a man has to be ready for is discovering he has been cheated on. It's not a certainty but it happens enough that the odds of it happening to you are considerable. (Yes, it did happen to me in a previous relationship.)
In theory the solution seems straightforward: you'll dump her. Very few men do in practice. Not immediately anyway. The first reaction is always to try and reach some sort of reconciliation. If you can dump her immediately, the truth is that you were looking for an excuse to get rid of her anyway.
It is only if efforts at reconciliation fail that you will dump her or let her go (these are not the same thing).
The really unfair thing is that you have responsibilities at all in this. She is the one who screwed things up and it only feels natural and right that it should be entirely up to her to make them right again. But what is making them right again? Worse, you will have certain entirely natural and justifiable reactions that you will have to control in order to make it work.
How women lie about sex
As Proust said, women lie in order to avoid lying when it comes to sex. If the woman in your life cheats on you, she will build a wall of lies around the incident. Every one of these lies is a roadblock intended to stop conversation from steering into the place the lie she doesn't want to have to tell is located.
Suppose you mention that a house belonging to the parents of a friend of hers is for sale and ask her what it's like and she says, "I don't know, I was never there." That's a nice, low tension lie. It can be delivered easily. Better, if you later find out it isn't true it can be easily deflected.
Now suppose a week later you meet the friend and ask about the house and she says, "Why didn't your girlfriend tell you, she stayed over back when we were single." So you approach your girlfriend and she says, "Oh that's right, I guess I forgot." She's doing all this so she can avoid talking about something else. Perhaps her friend's brother, perhaps her friend's brother's friend. Perhaps something that happened with her girlfriend while she was staying.
And all that effort is being made to hide a secret that dates from before she met you. It all goes triple if she cheats on you during your relationship.
The odd consequence of this is that you'll peel layers off the lie before you get to it. And that will make you into a bit of an obsessive before you even know whether you should be hurt or not.
And when you do find the lie, it might be harmless. It might be that the thing she has been protecting is the memory of a boyfriend who was gone years before you arrived on the scene. It may be that she is protecting the memory of the guy who hit on her and she turned down but she feels rather good about the fact that he tried. Or it may be an affair.
So the first question you have to ask yourself is whether you even want to find out. You may not.
Why you think she lied
From the outside, as you slowly turn into some clever Sherlock slowly unmasking her, it feels like she is lying for one and only one reason: to hurt you. That's extremely unlikely. So, right off the bat, we need to get our own nightmares off the table as they blind us to what is really going on. There are two nightmares here. One is common to men and women and the other is peculiarly male.
The common one was a favourite of my mother's. She'd say, "Do you lie just to torture me? You know how this hurts me." And I'd stay silent because the truth was that it was precisely because I done something that I knew would really torture her that I lied to protect her.
The same dynamic is in place when a woman cheats on you. She didn't do it to hurt you because she planned to get away with it. No one, least of all you, was ever going to know.
The other, peculiarly male reason you think she lied is to hide what you are terrified to think may have been the best sex of her life. You think she went to another man to get something that she finds lacking in you. Again, this is exactly backwards. The problem is not what he did for her but that she did for him something she is only supposed to do for you.
An aside, when people start any new relationship, including an affair, one of their first thoughts is often how much easier things are than their last relationship. They think that they don't have to work at it. The truth is that things are going so well in the new relationship because they are working ten times as hard at this new relationship than they did the last one. That is what should bother you: that she worked so much harder at this affair than she did with you.
When she met this other guy, she was always on her best behaviour. She didn't dare put him through one of her moods because he could have left so much more easily than you would. She had to earn his attention and she did. She always dressed so as to feel confident and beautiful and she always arrived ready to have a good time. She complains that you don't spend enough time on foreplay but every time she saw this guy she had already been priming herself for hours if not days before he even showed up.
Here's a basic truth about women's sexuality that she'll never admit to herself: sex can only be as good for her as she is willing to let it be. If the sex was good with another man it was mostly because she made it that way. And that's the real problem: she should have been doing all that for you. She robbed you.
Why she really lied
She lied to keep the secret. I know, that sounds tautological but the whole point of intimacy is to be intimate and intimate is secret.
And, crazy as this may seem, that's understandable. She probably hasn't done this sort of thing often. (If she has, what the hell are you doing with her?) From a male point of view, it seems like it's easy for women to get sex; it seems like all they have to do is say "yes" to some guy. But it doesn't feel that way to her. From her perspective the problem is, "How does she make this happen in a way that feels good for her?"
Again, you'll obsess about that "masterful lover" who made things happen for her. For her the real thrill is that she actually managed to make this other guy come after her. That's really quite the trick and she is proud of having done that. (By the way, she'll lie in exactly the same way if it was disaster because that will make it a matter of shame and anyone else knowing about her shame will only make it worse.)
It may well be that she has wondered all her life whether she could do such a thing. She has watched other women do it and publicly sneered at them for doing so but all the time she has privately worried that the real reason she never has never done this is because she can't.
Here's a dark secret, she will never hate the memory of this affair. She may hate herself for giving in to it. She may hate herself for hurting you. She will never hate the thing that happened. If it was good, she will privately treasure this for the rest of her life and, crazy as this will sound, you should let her get away with that. (One of the odd aspects of this is that one of the counter-intuitive results of a woman cheating on you is that in some cases your sex life with her suddenly gets better because she feels better about herself.)
You, of course, do hate it and you think you want her to hate it too. You think you want to destroy this intimate secret and make it awful in her memory. Or, to be more accurate, you tell yourself this is what you want. You don't because the only way you could achieve this is by degrading her.
What you should want
You should want absolute and unequivocal acknowledgement from her that she wronged you. No fudging allowed. No, "I was feeling insecure and needed reassurance." Sorry, Honey, everyone feels insecure and needs reassurance. And while it may be perfectly true that you have been difficult, none of that excuses her cheating. There are no excuses and no qualifications. This is her fault and she has to unreservedly acknowledge this and apologize for it.
And you want her to work hard to restore trust and love. There are two parts of this. First you forgive her and second you decide whether you can trust her enough to continue a relationship with her. The first does not imply the second and you should tell her this.
One thing you want to be on the watch for is the apologizing-to-Rachel-Lynde phenomenon. This is an apology that does no real work. One thing people, including women people, will do when they know they are in the wrong is to get so torn up about how awful they have been that you end up suffering twice as much. First you got cheated on and now you have to live with this sackcloth and ashes routine where she is impossible to live with because she feels so miserable and she can't do anything about it because she feels so lousy. You meanwhile are left alone and moping.
Odd as this may seem, you want her to cheerfully throw herself into making it better. She should react to your being willing to consider trusting her again the same way she would react to being told the test was negative and she doesn't have cancer after all. You shouldn't have to explain this to her. If she doesn't figure it out, dump her. Don't make it a condition. Don't say unless you do this, I'm out of here. Just wait and see. If she fails, go. Don't explain, just leave.
No comments:
Post a Comment