What Did You Discover About Your Cheater’s Double Life?

What I discovered about double lives is that, if you’re able to find out some of the things they don’t want to tell you, double lives are hilarious in a haha-groan-ick kind of way.

The first comic effect is the vast divide between the romantic fantasy FWs and their proxies think they’re living vs. the humiliating, pathetic reality of it. CL just published a great Substack article about how, statistically speaking, most FWs and APs can’t possibly be as objectively irresistible as they seem to think they are and this proved true in my situation. For example, FW assumed he and his direct-report affair partner were being discrete but that, even if some knew about the workplace affair, he imagined himself the envy of all men for his conquest. Meanwhile, his younger coworkers had running jokes about the affair and eviscerating nicknames for him and the affair partner.

But seeing the humor doesn’t necessarily preclude grasping the seriousness of the fallout. It was actually one of those icked-out younger coworkers who anonymously blew the whistle on the affair because he knew kids were involved and was losing sleep over it.

If you’re going to have this kind of bad news delivered, I can’t think of a better emissary than someone who gets both the absurdity and the horror at the same time. I think the way I found out helped me sidestep certain typical D-Day hazards like being infected by a cheater’s romantic delusions about their behavior or that isolating fear that bystanders are applauding the betrayal or wondering what the third party has that you don’t have, etc. I didn’t even have a chance to sink into that toxic mental trap because I got some of the slapstick details right out of the gate about the adventures of “Viagra Dick and Debbie-wise the Gutter Clown.”

But there was definitely some real horror involved, like the way my kids– who all have complex and expensive medical needs– were starved of critical resources by massive secret financial dissipation during the affair and ended up with worsening chronic health issues. FW was playing the overworked martyr and pretending we were poor while basically watching the kids crash. It explains why he would rage at me and accuse me of “pessimism” and “catastrophizing” when I would try to tell him about the kids’ growing health concerns and their need for out-of-pocket remedies. The kids were also destabilized by FW’s escalating coercion and psychological abuse towards me. Worse, there was this kind of “Roman circus” effect where he use the negative impact his behavior had on me as grounds to cast me as an “unfit parent” and began making custodial threats. For instance, he decided my stress-induced radical weight loss and increasing insomnia were proof of “ED” and general craziness, ergo “dangerous parent.” I started having serial nightmares about him taking the children away.

The abuse and entrapment got so bad over the course of more than a year that it was actually a relief to learn the truth. The “Deep Throat”– who called from a burner and was pretty cautious at first for fear of being shot as the messenger– also seemed relieved when I started laughing and opened up about the absurd stuff he’d been forced to witness or learned about. It was a truly weird conversation because we were both cracking up.

But again, getting the irony of something or engaging in gallows humor doesn’t preclude grasping how awful the thing is. In fact, as a survival response, gallows humor can apparently measure the degree of trauma involved. I read later on a message board for HR professionals that bystanders to workplace affairs– especially extramarital affairs– can often experience symptoms of PTSD. There seems to be an intuitive understanding among humans that people who engage in double lives and major boundary violations can be potentially dangerous so bystanders may feel stricken with fear of retaliation if they “tell” or if it’s even known that they know. Consequently, they may feel burdened with the knowledge of collateral harm and develop issues with their own moral identities.

The above all seemed to apply in the case of the “whistleblower.” I guess that’s one very important thing I learned about double lives: not all bystanders automatically default to assuming victims had it coming as a means of defending their own silent complicity. After all, every dictatorship has underground resistors. I feel very lucky that I got proof of that principle at a time when I could have gotten bogged down in existential despair, isolation and exhaustion. The truth can definitely set us free but the source of the truth matters and whether we’re getting it in unexpurgated form and not just bits and pieces filtered through abusers’ self-serving delusions.

That was another thing I read about– something called “cognitive capture” where victims end up being spellbound (also called “projective identification”) by perpetrators’ rationalizations which, in serial offenders, usually involve demonizing victims and fabricating false moral grounds to commit the offenses. But that can only happen in isolation or when social context echoes and supports perpetrators’ false alibis and distortions.