Surviving Infidelity Quotes

If theft is advantageous to everyone who succeeds at it, and adultery is a good strategy, at least for males, for increasing presence in the gene pool, why do we feel they are wrong? Shouldn't the only morality that evolution produces be the kind Bill Clinton had - being sorry you got caught?

Does it count as staying if leaving is always on the mind? How much lying does a marriage need to survive?

the only people who are worth spit are the people who aren’t afraid of your pain, who’ll walk into your cracked open heart and not blame you for it.

I’ve learned from my mistakes and I’m sure I can repeat them exactly.” —Peter Cook

I tend to divide cheaters into two camps. Those who attempt remorse and those who step over your crumpled, sobbing body and go fix themselves a Hot Pocket. The Hot Pocket cheaters usually sleep like babies too, totally untroubled by their betrayals. In my opinion, the Hot Pocket cheaters are sociopaths. No adaptive anxiety, they’re totally chill and indifferent to your agony.

The “Infidelity is a symptom of larger marital issues” argument implies that if you “cure” the marriage, the infidelity will disappear. Aside from the fact that the majority of cheaters report that they are happily married, it’s not unhappiness that makes people cheat—it’s poor character. Yes, they may be unhappy. People often are. It’s what you choose to do about it.

Winning a war such as this was not about planting flags or defending territory or building fancy villas. It was not about titles or promotions or offices. It was not about democracy or jihad, freedom or honor. It was about resisting the categories chosen for you; about stubbornness in the face of grand designs and schemas. About doing what you had to do, whether they called you a terrorist or an infidel. To win a war like this was to master the ephemeral, to plan a future while knowing that it could all be over in an instant. To comfort your children when the air outside throbs in the middle of the night, to squeeze your spouse’s hand tight when your taxi hits a pothole on an open highway, to go to school or the fields or a wedding and return to tell about it. To survive.

That's the real distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who don't, but between those who want to know everything and those who don't. This search is a sign of love, I maintain. It's similar with books. Not quite the same, of course (it never is); but similar. If you quite enjoy a writer's work, if you turn the page approvingly yet don't mind being interrupted, then you tend to like that author unthinkingly. Good chap, you assume. Sound fellow. They say he strangled an entire pack of Wolf Cubs and fed their bodies to a school of carp? Oh no, I'm sure he didn't; sound fellow, good chap. But if you love a writer, if you depend upon the drip-feed of his intelligence, if you want to pursue him and find him -- despite edicts to the contrary -- then it's impossible to know too much. You seek the vice as well. A pack of Wolf Cubs, eh? Was that twenty-seven or twenty-eight? And did he have their little scarves sewn up into a patchwork quilt? And is it true that as he ascended the scaffold he quoted from the Book of Jonah? And that he bequeathed his carp pond to the local Boy Scouts? But here's the difference. With a lover, a wife, when you find the worst -- be it infidelity or lack of love, madness or the suicidal spark -- you are almost relieved. Life is as I thought it was; shall we now celebrate this disappointment? With a writer you love, the instinct is to defend. This is what I meant earlier: perhaps love for a writer is the purest, the steadiest form of love. And so your defense comes the more easily. The fact of the matter is, carp are an endangered species, and everyone knows that the only diet they will accept if the winter has been especially harsh and the spring turns wet before St Oursin's Day is that of young minced Wolf Cub. Of course he knew he would hang for the offense, but he also knew that humanity is not an endangered species, and reckoned therefore that twenty-seven (did you say twenty-eight?) Wolf Cubs plus one middle-ranking author (he was always ridiculously modest about his talents) were a trivial price to pay for the survival of an entire breed of fish. Take the long view: did we need so many Wolf Cubs? They would only have grown up and become Boy Scouts. And if you're still so mired in sentimentality, look at it this way: the admission fees so far received from visitors to the carp pond have already enabled the Boy Scouts to build and maintain several church halls in the area.

Behaviors may shift temporarily, but the core issues will remain. The feelings will also shift and change every day. After your time served, and years spent trying to make it work, it can be quite galling to have your partner pick up and leave. Many times, the narcissist does decide to head out for greener pastures— typically a new partner—and even though getting rid of him is ultimately healthier and better for you, it still stings. The sting of being rejected. The sting of not feeling good enough. The sting that no matter how hard you tried, it was never enough. While that has nothing to do with you, it is a difficult pill to swallow when they decide to pack it in and leave.

Infidelity is liberating in a sense, because the true person is revealed.

Narcissists are also prone to something called projection, whereby they place their flaws and questionable behaviors on everyone else. Jealousy is often a great litmus test of whether or not your partner is actually the one cheating; if he starts accusing you of cheating out of the blue, you can bet the farm on the fact that if he is not already cheating, he is likely engaging in an inappropriate relationship.

Infidelity is a choice. People cheat because they feel entitled to cheat. That’s it. That’s my simple answer to the painful question of why. I don’t believe people cheat because they’re broken, or they have family of origin issues, or because of the staggering powers of Facebook crushes. I don’t believe people cheat because of midlife crises, which descend on former church deacons like a toxic cloud of musk cologne. I don’t believe people cheat because of perimenopause.

You cannot cheat on someone without gaslighting and lying to them, denying their reality, bit by bit, lie by lie. Stifling their suspicions, turning it back on them, and accusing them of being crazy and oversensitive. Infidelity subverts chumps’ sense of normalcy and makes them question the solidity of everything. Who knew? Why didn’t they tell me? Did my in-laws know? Have my friends welcomed the affair partner into their circle? Did my kids know? Were they introduced? Is every single fucking thing in my life polluted?

Now, since we’ve gone ahead and acknowledged that we’re about to die, how about some end-of-the-world sex? If we’re going out, we should go out with a bang and a really good orgasm.” Meg pointedly zipped up her jacket. “You’re worried Beck and Ci will be upset if you send me in alone, but you think they’ll be okay with a little infidelity?” “It’s for a good cause,” Dante explained innocently. “Besides, if they don’t understand and we happen to survive and they happen to survive, then the ass-kicking I get will be totally worth it. And if you do anal, that would make my death so much more meaningful.

The victim of infidelity lives a lie of assumed safety with the person they love. The lie goes on for months or years, maybe even decades. But unlike the mugging victim, the infidelity victim gives freely. They’re not held up at gunpoint. No, they generously give their wallet, their sex life, their career, their children, their time—every resource they have at their disposal goes to the cheater. It’s a much more insidious theft. And the theft is possible only because we’ve been duped into believing this person loves us and is on our team.

Religious intolerance is an idea that found its earliest expression in the Old Testament, where the Hebrew tribe depicts itself waging a campaign of genocide on the Palestinian peoples to steal their land. They justified this heinous behavior on the grounds that people not chosen by their god were wicked and therefore did not deserve to live or keep their land. In effect, the wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian peoples, eradicating their race with the Jew's own Final Solution, was the direct result of a policy of religious superiority and divine right. Joshua 6-11 tells the sad tale, and one needs only read it and consider the point of view of the Palestinians who were simply defending their wives and children and the homes they had built and the fields they had labored for. The actions of the Hebrews can easily be compared with the American genocide of its native peoples - or even, ironically, the Nazi Holocaust. With the radical advent of Christianity, this self-righteous intolerance was borrowed from the Jews, and a new twist was added. The conversion of infidels by any means possible became the newfound calling card of religious fervor, and this new experiment in human culture spread like wildfire. By its very nature, how could it not have? Islam followed suit, conquering half the world in brutal warfare and, much like its Christian counterpart, it developed a new and convenient survival characteristic: the destruction of all images and practices attributed to other religions. Muslims destroyed millions of statues and paintings in India and Africa, and forced conversion under pain of death (or by more subtle tricks: like taxing only non-Muslims), while the Catholic Church busily burned books along with pagans, shattering statues and defacing or destroying pagan art - or converting it to Christian use. Laws against pagan practices and heretics were in full force throughrout Europe by the sixth century, and as long as those laws were in place it was impossible for anyone to refuse the tenets of Christianity and expect to keep their property or their life. Similar persecution and harassment continues in Islamic countries even to this day, officially and unofficially.

The Governor paused and looked reflectively over at Bond. He said: ‘You’re not married, but I think it’s the same with all relationships between a man and a woman. They can survive anything so long as some kind of basic humanity exists between the two people. When all kindness has gone, when one person obviously and sincerely doesn’t care if the other is alive or dead, then it’s just no good. That particular insult to the ego – worse, to the instinct of self-preservation – can never be forgiven. I’ve noticed this in hundreds of marriages. I’ve seen flagrant infidelities patched up, I’ve seen crimes and even murder forgiven by the other party, let alone bankruptcy and every other form of social crime. Incurable disease, blindness, disaster – all these can be overcome. But never the death of common humanity in one of the partners. I’ve thought about this and I’ve invented a rather high-sounding title for this basic factor in human relations. I have called it the Law of the Quantum of Solace.

At a certain level, credible deterrence depends on a credible enemy. The Soviet Union disintegrated, but the surviving superpower's instinct to de-escalate intensified: In Kirkuk as in Kandahar, every Lilliputian warlord quickly grasped that you could provoke the infidel Gulliver with relative impunity. Mutually assured destruction had curdled into Massively Applied Desultoriness. Clearly, if one nation is responsible for near half the world's military budget, a lot of others aren't pulling their weight. The Pentagon outspends the Chinese, British, French, Russian, Japanese, German, Saudi, Indian, Italian, South Korean, Brazilian, Canadian, Australian, Spanish, Turkish, and Israeli militaries combined. So why doesn't it feel like that? Well, for exactly that reason: If you outspend every serious rival combined, you're obviously something other than the soldiery of a conventional nation state. But what exactly? The geopolitical sugar daddy is so busy picking up the tab for the global order he's lost all sense of national interest.

December 2014, ISIS issued a list of rules for Christians living in the Islamic State’s de facto capital of Raqqa, Syria. Those who dare disobey risk calling down on themselves the full force of the Islamic State’s brutal enforcement mechanisms—as inhabitants of that tortured city are well aware, accustomed as they have become to public beheadings and crucifixions; the torture of women who are found insufficiently covered or breastfeeding in public; and the stoning of homosexuals (if, that is, they survive being thrown from rooftops). In the ISIS rules, Christians are forbidden to worship in public and to build or repair churches. They are not allowed to pray where Muslims can hear them, to display the cross, or to ring bells. They are not allowed to prevent anyone from converting to Islam. They must not aid the Islamic State’s enemies.

The creation myth is a Darwinian device for survival. Tribal conflict, where believers on the inside were pitted against infidels on the outside, was a principal driving force that shaped biological human nature.

*The majority of evangelical growth is through conversion. Islam, on the other hand, often uses threats and persecution to build up the ranks. These “conversions” are not based on conviction but are merely “survival techniques.” *Eighty-five percent of the world has a Bible available in their native language. *There have been 6.5 billion viewings of the Jesus film. *It is estimated that when Father Zakaria Botros (a Coptic Christian apologist who debates Islamic clerics) is on television in the Middle East, 60 million viewers watch. Al-Qaeda has honored him with the words “one of the most wanted infidels in the world,” and has put a million dollar bounty on his head. *In Iran, 7

Billions of people all over the world are infected with a religion at an early age when they have little memetic immunity, usually by their own parents whom they love and trust. They then spend the rest of their lives paying the price of adherence to false beliefs, and in turn infect others. Thus we can see the whole history of religions as an evolutionary competition for the replication of information. What matters here is not specifically whether the ideas are true, or whether believing them benefits their carriers (although both of these may play a role), but whether the religion can successfully get itself stored and replicated using humans as its meme machines. The winners are those that outdo the competition by developing adaptations such as enjoyable rituals, memorable stories, glorious art and music, explanations for life’s mysteries (whether true or not), or nasty meme tricks such as threats of hell, and death to the infidel. The religions we see surviving around us today are the few big winners in that long and mindless competition to infect human minds.

In his book-length review of the executive functions, Dr. Russell Barkley (2012) explored the reasons that these skills evolved in humans in the first place. He makes the compelling case that it was the selection pressures associated with humans living in larger groups of genetically unrelated individuals, which made it selectively advantageous to have good self-regulation skills. That is, these abilities became more important to survival as humans became more interdependent with and reliant on dealings with people who were not family. Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and executive dysfunction continue to have effects on the myriad relationships and social interactions in daily life. These connections include romantic and committed relationships/marriage, relationships with parents, siblings, children, and other relatives, friendships, and interactions with employers, coworkers, and customers. The executive functions in relationships also figure in the capacity for empathy and tracking social debt, that is, the balance of favors you owe others and favors owed to you. The ability to effectively organize behavior across time in goal-directed activities gains you “social collateral.” That is, the more you deliver on promises and projects, the more that you will be sought out by others and maintain bonds with them. Some of the common manifestations of ADHD and executive dysfunction that may create problems in relationships include: • Distractibility during conversations • Forgetfulness about matters relevant to another person • Verbal impulsivity—talking over someone else • Verbal impulsivity—saying the “wrong thing” • Breaking promises (acts of commission, e.g., making an expensive purchase despite agreeing to stay within a household budget) • Poor follow-through on promises (acts of omission, e.g., forget to pick up dry cleaning) • Disregarding the effects of one’s behavior on others (e.g., building up excessive debt on a shared credit card account) • Poor frustration tolerance, anger (e.g., overreacting to children’s behavior) • Lying to cover up mistakes • Impulsive behaviors that reduce trust (e.g., romantic infidelity)

Are you buying it? As anyone who has experienced infidelity knows, the pain of betrayal is far worse than the physical pain of bouncing headfirst down a flight of stairs. Could someone who risked your safety and emotional well-being for a thrill be described as “loving” you right then? No.

But they’ll be so grateful you gave them that chance! Will they? Or will they feel entitled to it? After suffering my own series of false reconciliations, reading infidelity boards, and running my own blog, I’ve yet to see the grateful, prodigal unicorn. Instead, I see refugees from failed reconciliations, some many years after the original affair. Think about it: If cheaters valued how much you’ve done for them, do you think they would disrespect you with an affair to begin with? It’s hard to appreciate what you feel is unconditionally yours. And even if cheaters do feel a true sense of gratitude for another chance, can they kill off entitlement thinking altogether?

Look, I’m sorry about your sunk costs, but put your mind at rest: Your cheater is not going to be different for the affair partner. Cheaters don’t have magical character transplants. They’re still the same selfish people with crappy life skills. Thinking they will be different for someone else is just another way of believing the infidelity has something to do with you. It doesn’t. It’s not about whether or not the Other Woman has bigger tits or a trust fund, or if the Other Man earns more money and has straighter teeth (chances are he’s a troll). It’s about kibbles. Who is a better source of narcissistic supply? The answer to that is usually—both of you. Cake.

It’s the weird fate of illicit love to cohabit with lies. But what a paradox it is that a noble sentiment like love needs the prop of a base instinct for its survival! And it’s as if the pleasures of a liaison act as intoxicants to help dampen the sense of guilt in a woman’s heart!

Cheaters make unilateral decisions about their victim’s health, welfare, and finances. And they act in secret, because chumps have value to them—value they want to continue extracting. Chumps can waste years in a marriage not knowing the truth about being defrauded. And so much of our culture wants us to think these costs are frivolous. Infidelity is the jolly subject of romantic comedies or women’s magazine articles about the naughty fun of being a mistress. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Victimless crime!

There is, also, of course, the sexual humiliation of infidelity. You know your bedroom is fucked up, if not fucked in. Your most intimate world has been violated. Perhaps your cheater ridiculed your sex life with their affair partner. Most likely you were not considered at all. You marvel at your invisibility, how inconsequential your connection was. The person you loved and knew every inch of is a total stranger. Moreover, you’re a stranger to yourself. Wasn’t I special? Wasn’t I loved?

The thing I found out about infidelity is that it’s judged as the harshest crime you can commit. People are sooner to forgive money laundering or a DWI with children in the car. But when you’re unfaithful in your marriage, forget about it. I think that when people catch wind of an infidelity in their town, the first thing they do is look at their own marriage under a microscope. In some people’s eyes, once you’re labeled a cheater, it will negate every good thing you ever do. You could win a Pulitzer Prize, but you’ll still be a cheater who won the Pulitzer Prize.

Human males, too, form alliances for gaining resources such as large game, political power within the group, ways to defend against the aggression of other coalitions of men, and sexual access to women.7 The survival and reproductive benefits derived from these coalitional activities constituted tremendous selection pressure over human evolutionary history for men to form alliances with other men. Since ancestral women did not hunt large game, declare war on other tribes, or attempt to forcibly capture men from neighboring bands, they did not experience equivalent selection pressure to form coalitions. Although women do form coalitions with other women for the care of the young and for protection from sexually aggressive men, these are weakened whenever a woman leaves her kin group to live with her husband and his clan. The combination of strong coalitions among men and somewhat weaker coalitions among women, according to Barbara Smuts, may have contributed historically to men’s dominance over women.9 My view is that women’s preferences for a successful, ambitious, and resource-capable mate coevolved with men’s competitive mating strategies, which include risk taking, status striving, derogation of competitors, coalition formation, and an array of individual efforts aimed at surpassing other men on the dimensions that women desire. The intertwining of these coevolved mechanisms in men and women created the conditions for men to dominate in the domain of resources. The origins of men’s control over resources is not simply an incidental historical footnote of passing curiosity. Rather, it has a profound bearing on the present, because it reveals some of the primary causes of men’s continuing control of resources. Women today continue to want men who have resources, and they continue to reject men who lack resources. These preferences are expressed repeatedly in dozens of studies conducted on tens of thousands of individuals in scores of countries worldwide. They are expressed countless times in everyday life. In any given year, the men whom women marry earn more than men of the same age whom women do not marry. Even professionally successful women who do not really need resources from a man are reluctant to settle for a mate who is less successful than they are. Women who earn more than their husbands seek divorce more often, although this trend appears to be changing, at least within America. Men continue to compete with other men to acquire the status and resources that make them desirable to women. The forces that originally caused the resource inequality between the genders—women’s mate preferences and men’s competitive strategies—are the same forces that contribute to maintaining resource inequality today. Feminists’ and evolutionists’ conclusions converge in their implication that men’s efforts to control female sexuality lie at the core of their efforts to control women. Our evolved sexual strategies account for why this occurs, and why control of women’s sexuality is a central preoccupation of men. Over the course of human evolutionary history, men who failed to control women’s sexuality—for example, by failing to attract a mate, failing to prevent cuckoldry, or failing to retain a mate—experienced lower reproductive success than men who succeeded in controlling women’s sexuality. We come from a long and unbroken line of ancestral fathers who succeeded in obtaining mates, preventing their infidelity, and providing enough benefits to keep them from leaving. We also come from a long line of ancestral mothers who granted sexual access to men who provided beneficial resources.

northern Mesopotamia, Timur’s forces sought out refugees who hid in caves, setting fires and thus killing them by asphyxiation. Although by this point the Christian element of the population must have been quite small, Timur did consciously target non-Muslims, boasting of “washing the sword of Islam in the blood of the infidels.” Any Christian remnants in Samarkand and central Asia were finally destroyed by Timur’s grandson, Ulugh Beg. The Asian churches—Nestorian, Jacobite, and others—barely survived even in name.

If the painful disclosure of a parallel love is to lead to a more honest future—for either one of the relationships involved—the other woman needs to be treated as a human being. She needs a voice and a place to dignify her experience. If the affair needs to be ended so the marriage can survive, it should be done with care and respect. If the lover needs to break it off to regain her own self-esteem and integrity, she needs support, not judgment. If the marriage is to end and the hidden love is to come out of the shadows, it will need help to go through the awkward transition to legitimacy. Without the perspective of the third, we can never have more than a partial understanding of the way that love carves its twisting course through the landscape of our lives.

Betrayal is neat. It absolves you from having to think about your own failures, the ways you didn’t show up for your partner, the harm you might have done. Betrayal is neat because no matter what else happened—if you argued about work or the kids, if you lacked intimacy, if you were disconnected and lonely—it’s as if that person doused everything with lighter fluid and threw a match. Sometimes I wonder: If there had been no postcard, no notebook, would our marriage have survived? I don’t know. That’s the truth.

Ironically, however—and as with other historically Muslim institutions that have been whitewashed¶—this abduction, forced conversion, and jihadi indoctrination of Christian children is portrayed by several leading academics “as the equivalent of sending a child away for a prestigious education and training for a lucrative career.”30 What is true is that whoever survived the indoctrination and dehumanization of this ordeal of fire emerged with a fanatical appetite for war on infidels and became the most feared element of the Ottoman army: a Janissary, a “new soldier.” That they exhibited a “dog-like devotion to the sultan,” the man responsible for abducting them from their families and faith, and engaged in “wild behavior” against his enemies31—that is, against their former families and faith—is further proof that they are among recorded history’s earliest victims of Stockholm Syndrome.*

If the affair needs to be ended so the marriage can survive, it should be done with care and respect. If the lover needs to break it off to regain her own self-esteem and integrity, she needs support, not judgment. If the marriage is to end and the hidden love is to come out of the shadows, it will need help to go through the awkward transition to legitimacy. Without the perspective of the third, we can never have more than a partial understanding of the way that love carves its twisting course through the landscape of our lives.

Love Hurts. I daresay there’s two or three poems, six novels and at least twelve songs on the subject. That’s how the Janus-faced beast of poetry gets written in the first place, in all its myriad of magical forms. So; why cover this hitherto uncharted and highly original territory? Why leap fearlessly into the unknown, nostrils flared, eyes flashing fire? Well, in the name of love, lust and limerence, why on earth not? Suffering is gratuitous and pointless, yet also vital, valuable and necessary. My last tête à tête gave me plenty, incorporating elements of the forbidden, of rebellion, pornography, pregnancy, parental approval – followed by fury – of infidelity, friend estrangement, life on one island that was heavenly and a second that veered between purgatorial and infernal, of violence, miscarriage, masturbating Indians, pepper spray, antipathy, disloyalty, evictions, a planned future, failed globetrotting and habitual lies, whilst being indicative of a wider, all-encompassing social corrosion, and while the story itself may remain merely hinted at or alluded to in the course of this generalised polemic, it’s as worthy or valid as any other such tale told round the campfire and whispered across the beaches of the world. All life’s a roll of the dice, tiger; ride into the bastard storm and if your wounds hurt, be grateful you survived to lick them, even in the darkest nights of the soul when the sun is a mattress fire the god of your love died in. Love Hurts, and in a stupendous and savage cosmos, it’s my right to sit at the keyboard and bleed. Besides, love, poverty and war are the necessary accoutrements to a fulfilled life; this is the all-encompassing theme of our human condition and the crooning, persuasive symphony of that philosophically unfathomable miracle of life itself… especially as love leads to poverty and war. Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward, after all. I certainly am… we choose our own chains... ~excerpt, "Love Hurts

Small families are not a new invention. For most of human history, from about one million years ago until as recently as ten to fifteen thousand years ago, all people lived as hunter-gatherers. Men hunted animals and women foraged for fruit and vegetables. Societies were made up of small, scattered bands of people. They had a good, protein-rich diet and most deaths were due to accident, predation and inter-group warfare rather than disease. The children of hunter-gatherers had an excellent chance of survival. Using nothing but the natural, stress-related methods we have discussed, women gave birth to only three or four children in their lifetime. Of these, two or three survived. Large families did not appear until about ten thousand years or so ago, when agriculture brought a change of lifestyle. In the most fertile areas, large and concentrated communities developed, living on a carbohydrate-rich diet. Disease and infant mortality were rife. The average number of children was about seven or eight, but double figures were commonplace. Even so, whole families could be wiped out in days by virulent disease. As with the hunter-gatherers, on average, only two or three in each survived.