I don’t like to pretend

I was doing research for one of my stories (actually, I fell down a blog rabbit hole), and found myself reading about cheating spouses. There are several years long blogs about cheating spouses. If you think your spouse is cheating on you, there are step by step instructions on how to find your spouse’s on-line accounts, how to identify your spouse online and how to decode the online lingo of cheating spouses. They’re mostly betrayed women writing about their experience and how they are coping with all the emotions.

Apparently there is a long list of message boards where said cheating spouses go to brag about their cheating adventures. There’s also a long list of message boards where the third party goes and brags about how many spouses they’ve conquered, and what the cheating spouse does for them.

I’ve only read the betrayed women blogs, because that’s all I had time for today, but they are actually quite interesting. One of the betrayed wives, we’ll call her The Wife, wrote an entire post on one particular woman, we’ll call her the Mistress, who was having an affair with a married man, the husband. (Not the betrayed woman’s husband, some other husband). The Mistress had been writing about how wonderful The (cheating) husband was to her and that she was just a little vacation from his busy work and family life.

At this point, the Wife (woman writing the post, who she herself was betrayed by her husband of fifteen years), chimed in, with a very condescending tone, about how the Mistress had no idea if the husband really did have a nice job, how she was stealing the kids’ college fund and how she clearly was falling for this man. All this after the Wife called this woman delusional, a whore, a hooker, and a prostitute. Then the writer goes on as if she was talking to the Mistress to tell her that she needs to go home and close her legs to married men.

Mind you, the Wife forgave her husband’s transgressions because he is a Sex Addict with a healthy portion of child abuse. The husband had to go through rehab and therapy because of all the pain he felt and had caused his wife.

I’m not going to try and decipher any of this, because this is a psychotherapist’s nightmare of entanglement. I will say that making other people feel shitty doesn’t make me feel good, putting other people down doesn’t make me higher, and we only judge other people to make ourselves feel superior. She calls the Mistress delusional. Aren’t we all delusional? The Wife was delusional that her husband wasn’t cheating and the husband was delusional for thinking that the Mistress was with him for any reason besides the “allowance.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve never been cheated on (that I know of). I don’t know what the Wife, the Mistress, or the husband are going through. I know that everyone in this story has some serious issues and traumas to deal with, including the Mistress. Being mean, insulting, judgemental and condescending to some random woman online, who has her own demons to fight, isn’t going to change the fact that your husband broke your trust and pissed all over your marriage vows. I thing that this particular story caught my eye, because the wife sounded like she was ‘so above it’ and I’m thinking ‘hey, what happened to compassion?

I trust my husband. In the event that he’s cheating on me, would that make me delusional for thinking that I’m the best wife ever? If my husband was looking for a hookup, that would make him delusional for thinking that he can find something better than me.

Pick a side, if you want. I’m not sure who I’m supposed to be rooting for here.