Self-Soothing Options That Aren’t Cheating
One of the more ridiculous excuses given for cheating is that it’s a self-soothing, coping mechanism. So the Friday Challenge question is: How did you manage your feelings in ways that didn’t result in infidelity?
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“Squeaks” made an interesting observation on this UBT post about the woman who blamed her infidelity on her unspoken loneliness.
Cheating is a choice and there are other choices.
These narratives are so frustrating because they’re kinda plausible.
Like yeah, I think everyone goes through periods of loneliness in their relationship while their spouse is focused on personal or professional development, or what-have-you. Of course attention from someone attractive feels good, especially if you’re having a sadz over how neglected you feel. That’s all very relatable.
But none of this REQUIRES that you do something so awful and harmful to your spouse as having an affair. ffs. Get a dog. Find a therapist. Make some friends. Meditate. Go for walks. You can soothe your feelings of temporary loneliness with stuff that isn’t another person’s genitals. It really isn’t that difficult.
These people are just so effing uncreative. Maybe that’d make a good future Friday challenge — what did you do in the low points of your marriage to self soothe, that wasn’t “have an affair”?
Great idea, Squeaks.
We all have disappointments and setbacks.
Even deep in my chumpy hopium and spackle stages, the cheating-as-self-soothing coping mechanism excuse never landed. Organizing an affair just seems like a lot of EFFORT. Clandestine shenanigans involve booking hotel rooms, purchasing burner phones, and coordinating calendars. It’s not a long soak in the bathtub.
So, let’s belabor the point with a Friday Challenge. How did you meet life’s slings and arrows without wandering genitals?
TGIF!
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If I feel the need to disconnect from whatever it is that is p*ssing me off, I pick up one of my guitars and try and learn one of the songs that I’ve always meant to learn but have never quite got around to. YouTube is a brilliant resource for this (as it is for learning many other things too) …. I wish that it had been “a thing” when I first picked up a guitar in the 70’s.
Also cooking, drawing/painting (watercolours), writing poetry (badly) or just dropping a handwritten letter to someone I haven’t seen/spoken to for a while.
LFTT
Ironically had to do a lot of self-soothing in the last year I was with cheating ex, because he was very emotionally unavailable for long stretches of time due to “work stress” and “depression” (which I later found out was the effort of cheating) and didn’t want to spend time with me. I took up gardening and also spent more time with my friends. I also spent time browsing Reddit or watching things to distract myself.
Self-soothing is such a valuable skill – now in a healthy relationship I still use it occasionally if we have a disagreement we need to return to later due to current commitments like having work the next morning or being too stressed to have a productive conversation. But the difference is they are infrequent and we do actually return to the issue(s) and resolve them.
“Ironically had to do a lot of self-soothing in the last year I was with cheating ex, because he was very emotionally unavailable for long stretches of time due to “work stress”
Right? Not once during the year of discard, including him treating me like dog shit, did I say “hmmm, guess I’ll go out and round up some strange”.
I spent a lot of lonely time in my marriage to FW. He would be very passive aggressive with me and when I asked for some intimate time would maybe agree but then put me off to the point I’d wind up falling asleep waiting for him or he’d just be distracted. I was disappointed and hurt. Yet I never cheated on him in the 30 plus years we were together. I got busy with church committees, church choir, school committees when our daughter was in school, gardening, sometimes cooking or baking and spent lots of time with friends. I was also working full time so I put quite a bit of energy into that.
I still felt I missed having intimate times with my husband but cheating on him was never a thought or an option.
The gym. Running, lifting, reaching new goals. Me and my friend would get up at 5 am and hit that treadmill.
This was when I really got into appreciating physical fitness. I was even going to an all-women’s gym. One day one of the teachers saw me checking in to a class and said “Wow, you live here!”
I was struggling with a new exercise and another teacher said “You can do this, I’ve seen you work out, you love torture.”
The dedication to the gym has continued ten years on. I’ve done two half marathons and countless 5 and 10ks.
My fiancé said to my future FIL, it takes an exploding volcano to stop me when I want something.
Turd cheater who made me lonely is long gone, but I have visible abs at almost 40. (I have seen him outside his shop. He has a pot belly and a bald spot that reflects the sun.)
Oh yeah the gym! I forgot about that. I did that too and it was open 24 hours so I spent lots of time there. I did not exactly lose a lot of weight but I did feel so much better. Both physically and mentally.
Klootzak had to “travel for work” or “study at the library” or “attend networking events” a LOT in the latter half of our marriage. Things I did to get through focused on other positive things:
1) spent a lot of time taking our child out exploring the world, having play dates, etc.
2) made social plans for dinner out with friends
3) read books which, after I was introduced to them, ended up being a lot of books about narcissism and eventually LACGAL
4) gardening, yard work, cleaning the house, painting, etc. as he was never around or interested in doing it and I wanted to keep the house looking nice
5) called out of state friends and my FIL to chat about whatever and I think this is how my FIL started tuning in to how checked out klootzak was
6) Picked fruit with our child and learned how to make homemade jam and can it. Sent jars to family and friends as gifts.
7) Learned to bake Irish wheaten bread.
8) Attended festivals.
9) Invited friends over and sat on the patio while our kids played in the yard.
When the pandemic hit, that was when he was around more and locked down where I was “allowed” to go. He didn’t like my friends. He didn’t want me talking to his dad. He was suddenly around not liking all the things I enjoyed when he wasn’t around before. And of course, his supply was mostly cut off so he wasn’t happy about that. I later found out he was still out getting strange as we were coming out of lockdowns. I was doing OK but not happy his attention was elsewhere. I communicated to him and he said he NEEDED to do these things for his career and our future. So I stuffed it down and did so many other things to soothe. But I didn’t once consider cheating.
Getting outdoors has always been soothing to me. I live in a big city so I try to leave it and go hiking a couple of times a month but locally I head to parks, ravines, botanical gardens, or just tree-lined streets to calm my nervous system. My FW exes deprived me of touch so I also try to get massages when I can afford them and treat myself to a bath with soothing music. Taking care of myself in non-food ways (I am lifelong disordered eater) is a challenge but one I am slowly meeting. Oh and connecting with this community!
Massages are awesome! I definitely hold a lot of stress in my upper back and neck, so it helped me come back physically.
The last summer of my marriage, while my husband was filling OUR boat with bikini clad 20 year olds and coming home after his weekends and telling me this, I binge watched Homeland, while sitting in our living room gazing at my gardens I knew in my heart my future grandchildren would never see. Life can be so painful at times.
I kept living life. Raising the children, keeping the house, enjoying my hobbies, socializing, greeting him at the end of long day at work with a hug and a hot meal. Enduring his mood swings because I thought they were caused by work stress and my inability to be constantly upbeat. I could not fathom that he was living a completely compartmentalized life and I was just another component.
I got one great piece of advice that really worked. It came from my so-called Switzerland friends–they actually said they were neutral like Switzerland–who came when cheater assaulted me and then-tween who tried to defend me against a man more than twice his height and weight. Their served up some heavy pressure NOT to report or seek medical care!!!, then took cheater away to their home.
They made one comment that actually helped:The wife said I should focus my energy on cleaning and downsizing. Her goal was to get me to prep the house for sale, and she was clear that I should move into a smaller space. But it was a great way to channel stress and energy, since most initial efforts were on getting his stuff out for pickup, and throwing out trash.
He used travel to cheat.
I used travel to self soothe, to learn about the world and my place within it.
House projects, running, reading, knitting/sewing…you name it. When we had our daughter, I had quit my part-time job with plans to be a stay-at-home mom for her early years, so I spent a lot of quality time with her during her first year of life before everything imploded. I was always a self-sufficient and communicative person and so maybe those traits were my blinders to what he was doing – I never thought cheating was ever an option to express unhappiness in a relationship.
I keenly remember the loneliness in my marriage to someone who traveled a lot and soothed himself with overwork and 2 different affairs. Never once did I think to seek out an affair.
I frequently met up with friends for lunch, I took long baths and long walks, and especially during Covid lockdowns I read more, the classics sitting on our bookshelves which I previously hadn’t gotten around to reading.
And I enjoyed watching what I wanted, as much as I wanted, during his travel stints, without his constant control and judgement. It was freeing for me to eat dinner while watching a favorite show – he always made us sit at the table to eat.
The loneliness I sometimes feel now as a single person is far less hard than the loneliness I felt while married to an avoidant and a cheater.
Up to the point the ink is dry on divorce papers, someone would have to be playing with a home lobotomy kit to get involved with the kind of person who’d get involved with someone still married on paper. I have such massive ick and cringe reactions towards those types of personalities that it was never even a temptation. I wasn’t going to ride that bull twice, especially after learning that I’d unwittingly married a serial combo cheater/mate-poacher (all his targets were married or engaged and one had little kids whom he met. Ugh, retch).
So literally ANYTHING is more soothing than that because nothing could be less so. I also think that, for het women and gay men particularly, it’s like Russian roulette if you consider research correlating mate poaching with antisocial personality disorder So the game I play in my head is more like “What’s a better purpose to risk your life for other than bonking a he-poacher?”
— Volunteering to guard water points in third world conflict zones where women are frequently abducted and raped.
— Joining the Immigrant Defense Project.
— Being a foreign correspondent or domestic whistleblower.
— Hunger strike for an important cause.
— Eating conventional lettuce.
I find often enough it’s about reconnecting with the things that got set aside. As part of my practice as a mental health professional-I emphasize that ongoing small efforts mean that there never has to be a “nuclear option” in points of crisis. There are obviously going to be temptations, but my practice as a therapist revolves very heavily around “removing barriers”-and yes, that includes the ones that are self-imposed.
I was codependent (for better or for worse) and starting to prioritize myself again-she sure as hell had reneged on whatever vested interest she had in my wellbeing. I dunno, I was too busy trying to “win her back while still doing my part” than “evaluate my options”.
When in the doldrums of the Pick-Me Dance, I set aside more time for self-care. It was just another variation of how I comported myself during the “marriage”-put my head down, kept grinding, played the long game. She was too busy “not attending to the master’s degree she said she was focusing on” to meet any of my needs or make me feel seen or safe emotionally (and frankly? Even at my most optimistic during that period of my life, “asking for an open relationship the day after my diabetes diagnosis” told a very big story about where I was in the pecking order for her). You DO have needs, they DO need me. The Traitor culture unfortunately has not found a way to do that ethically.
A lot of this was spending more time with my friends when she was “unavailable.” If I did complain about her, they would commiserate and help me work through my negative feelings. Instead of, you know, telling me to cheat or “find better”(it got back to me that this had occurred-which was funny-none of their households were in order, their significant others were hitting her up for money, and at least one of them has been arrested since then. But hey, “don’t take criticism from people you wouldn’t take advice from”).
She also went vegan (which I think in some ways was a guise to murder Date Nights to make it easier to uncouple from me given the betrayal-finding a place we could both eat became brutal-did I mention this all happened after I got diagnosed diabetic and needed to change my diet?) so I got used to going out to eat alone and going to movies again by myself (in my “do I want this idiot back?” phase I made a list of everything I could remember that we were supposed to see, play, and do together that she backed out of at the last minute. It was actually pretty staggering!) I started to take myself on the dates that I was being denied. And there was steak!
I had a fantastic Saturday morning ritual where I’d go to a local diner with a book and have a leisurely morning. It became the highlight of my week. It got to the point where they’d just point me to a booth and bring me my coffee and my order. They got big tips for that. Broke my heart when the place went out of business-haven’t found a suitable replacement yet.
By and at large I really just reconnected with my hobbies. I got back into model building (placed in a local competition!) and writing. I started to dabble with more longer term goals like game development. I had actually started running D&D again right before D-Day.
Truth be told it was most of the things that I put aside to meet her needs, spend time with her, help her with her homework, take her to see her family at less than a day’s notice, or got subsumed by 80 hour weeks when I got promoted at work trying to give her an even better life.
Since her departure, I’ve written three novels as part of NaNoWriMo, continue to cultivate model building, write short stories, and go on road trips with friends a couple of times a year. I’m trying different things. I’m doing things I never would have had permission to do (at least without getting judge-y comments).
Three novels! Wow!
I taught composition for over a decade, and my students always said I should participate in NaNoWriMo. I’ve always been more of an expository writer, though. When AI began appearing in their writing, I shifted to other areas and am happy with that. At a private school, it’s easier to switch classes than at public institutions.
Now I travel (some international), play Mahjong at breweries, have dinner with friends, and hang out with our young adults, who want nothing to do with Dad. Oh, and my dog is my constant companion.
I took exercised by walking, college classes, read, and of course worked hard at my job.
The possibilities are endless. Mine don’t include addictive mind-altering substances, illegal activity, unethical behavior, morally bankrupt depravity, or anything else that I know would be harmful to myself and others.
I recently did some writing on things I loved to do as a child. Interests and hobbies I had as a child. There’s a lot!
I added to it with a bucket list and vision board of things I want to learn, places I want to go, experiences I want to have, new interests and hobbies I want to explore.
(A romantic relationship is not on my list yet)
There’s SO MUCH and in doing that writing I started to feel hopeful and excited about life again, even more so because there is not anyone in my way telling me I can’t or otherwise thwarting my plans.
It revealed how much of my energy, which sadly was wasted, was being spent on my so-called marriage. Ruinous amounts of time, energy, and attention I now wish to spend on people, places, things, and activities that bring me joy and hopefully contribute to the joy and well-being of those around me.
Affairs are about taking. About being a soul-sucking black hole jerk. LIfe feels much better to not be someone like that. Being more caring, more decent, more giving, to myself and others. That’s how I want to do it. The ultimate in self-soothing.
♥️
”I was lonely” – “I was unhappy” – yeah, welcome to life. You think I wasn’t? Developing into a mature human means not going for the adrenaline rush 24/7.
I gave my kids a book about the benefits of developing intellectual, physical, and creative outlets. Reading and exercise easily fill the first two but the creative can be overlooked. I’ve done cross-stitch and started knitting a few years ago. I can watch tv or a movie and still be productive. There are lots of YouTube tutorials to keep moving forward, and supporting a LYS (local yarn store) = meeting good people.
To self-soothe I took up kayaking, which got me outdoors, and gave me the pleasure of movement and of observing so much: sun on the water, the way the wind ripples along the surface (or kicks up white caps), and all the critters that live near or on the lake. A one-eyed beaver swam circles around my boat. I cruised by the shoreline where muskrats denned in the root systems of the trees lining the lake. A family of otters once ran down the floating footbridge where I was paused and leapt over my hand. I’ve watched hawks, ospreys, and eagles dive for fish, cormorants “hanging their wings” on snags or rocks, various ducks dabble and dive, kingfishers rattle on down the shore, turtles lined up tree limbs of submerged fallen trees, fish swimming by or spawning along the shore. I even watched a pair of snapping turtles mating.
My marriage was always difficult. Early on, he was highly controlling about my time away from him. Even time with my best friend and business travel made him very unhappy. So when my bestie proposed meeting for dinner and then helping with an evening church kids’ program, it was a win. That was OK with my husband because it was church. And I actually changed jobs to a position with less travel. There were other reasons it was a good move for me, but yes, I was on the accommodating side more than I should have been.
That was who I was in our marriage until the final long-distance separation, when I realized that I was taking all the blame and tying myself in knots, trying to save the marriage. He even told me that it was up to me to fix things. Nope, I ended all talk of reconcilation, and then he wanted a divorce because, ya know, his rebel wife. He had Scripture.
Anyway, back to the marriage. So, we had kids. My high-profile job was eliminated while I was on maternity leave, and I chose not to go back. I wanted to be a SAHM, and of course, the religious guilt. Frankly, it was rough. The first baby had colic, and I was deeply lonely. I couldn’t juggle the dinner meetings with my friend, but I continued the evening kids’ program with the baby in a sling. At least I was out with people once a week during the work week. Twice a month I went to a mom’s group that met during the day at people’s houses. My husband worked long hours and went back to school, so he wasn’t around much. He was not on board with me getting out in the evenings other than the kids’ program. After all, his mom handled a bunch of kids alone while his dad was a traveling preacher. He was anti-babysitter, so no dates with just the two of us.
We moved and had another kid. I homeschooled PK-12, and snagged an evening adjunct professor job that my husband was OK with because it paid for the kids’ activities and a family vacation every year. I taught local classes for kids that led to doing that online. All during the day, of course. But sigh. He was no longer into me; that was clear. Frankly, it never occurred to me to cheat. I was busy with the kids and teaching. I accepted my situation. I accommodated his needs. I kind of lost myself, frankly.
But the marriage developed deep cracks and shattered after he retired. He had become a pill addict and had significant mental health issues that became full-blown borderline personality disorder. Looking back, all the signs of his unresolved childhood trauma were there. And I was in denial about his addiction, which made our home life chaotic. As a friend of mine who ran addiction treatment centers once said, addicts don’t have relationships; they take hostages. I joined a twelve-step group during my separation and continue to serve there in a leadership role. It still grounds me.
But my wonderful attorney got the divorce done for me after quite a mess, and eventually we were done with the closeout too. I always had my suspicions, particularly in relation to an old girlfriend of his, and his infidelity was confirmed during the divorce. My ex fought everything, of course. Both legal teams acknowledged that the nit-picking and foot-dragging were yet another form of coercive control.
Now it’s been years since we heard from him. The kids are grown and are lovely people. And yes, I’m still a teacher even though I no longer need to work. It keeps me young and gets me excited every day during the school year. Now I just teach middle schoolers and love their quirky souls. Life is amazing on the other side!