![]() Work on your low self-esteem, your need to get constant, fleeting validation from men, and your fear of intimacy and being fully seen and loved by someone else. You are creating a continuous cycle of selfishness and self-sabotage that is fundamentally damaging your ability to love and be loved – and it’s time to stop. They feel insecure and cheat, then feel guilty which heightens their poor self-image, and suddenly they believe that they’re so damaged and unhappy that they need and deserve more love and attention and validation than other people to fix them, and hey presto, they’ve justified cheating again. There’s no good in being a martyr and romanticising your pain and previous behaviour, which people who serially cheat can do. Your actions are selfish and are hurting your partners, but you are also hurting yourself, and you need to realise that – and start making different choices. You know what you are doing is wrong and is eroding your relationships from the inside, but you continue doing it, compounding your idea that you’re a bad person, which strengthens your need to keep loving partners at a distance, and increases your desire for cheap, fleeting boots of validation from men who don’t really care about you. That’s what guilt without changed behaviour is: self-sabotage. And you never have to fully accept that you could be worthy of love and rise to the occasion by being a good partner, because by cheating you are telling yourself every day that you are a bad person and that real, committed love isn’t for you. You never have to make the sacrifice required of a loving monogamous relationship and choose the work of commitment, because you either get with other people or keep your relationships at a physical distance. You never have to grapple with the vulnerability of a fully committed, honest relationship, because your cheating and lying prevents you from being in one. You never have to grapple with your own deep insecurities or work on your own damaged feelings of self-worth, because you constantly have a man distracting you from them. ![]() In order to prove yourself desirable and worthy, you need to have someone be faithful and committed to you, but you still need the extra validation of other men to prove yourself desirable – and you need to lie, and deceive and hide to do it.Īnd what does all that lying, deceiving and hiding do? It puts up a barrier between you and real vulnerability, real intimacy – with others, and yourself. ![]() You are terrified of being alone, and you are terrified of your partner also being with other people, because in your mind, those two options prove that you are not good enough. ![]() You know what you are doing is wrong and is eroding your relationships from the inside, but you continue doing itīut you don’t just want to feel attractive which you could do by embracing what you love about yourself and self-validating, or even having a harmless flirt with someone – you go further and cheat.Īnd you don’t just want to freely enjoy getting with lots of people, because if you did, you could stay single or have an ethical, non-monogamous relationship where you could, for one example, have a primary partner and still get with other people, all while being open and honest.īut those two options – remaining single or being in an open relationship – feel too vulnerable for you. Most people enjoy the validation of having someone consider us attractive. You say that you like the validation of being wanted by men. The reason I think that avoidance is the key here is because your reasoning for cheating isn’t as straightforward as you claim it to be. I could be wrong, but I suspect that this relationship is another way of avoiding the vulnerability and intimacy of a committed relationship, in a way that cheating is also a way of avoiding the vulnerability and intimacy of a committed relationship.Īnd the tragedy of your pattern is two-fold: one, you are repeatedly, knowingly deceiving and hurting people who are brave enough to commit fully to you and two, you are repeatedly telling yourself, through your own actions, that you are not a good person and not worthy of love – which causes you to continue to avoid it. Distance allows you to control your dynamic in a very particular way, and the question is whether you want to relinquish that control for something more messy, vulnerable, inconvenient, taxing, effort-filled, revealing, boring, and gloriously flawed – and I don’t know if you do.
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