Once a cheater, always a cheater. Cluster B personality types only escalate and get better at hiding their cheating and social betrayal of spouse and love interest hospitality.
If you live with or know a person who gaslights their mate, understand everyone involved has been socially and energetically exposed to a profoundly toxic and dysfunctional state.
The phrase once a cheater, always a cheater is what it is. A stark warning to people who think Love Fraud predators are socially and or romantically attractive.
Having an affair or romantic tryst on the side of a relationship is narcissistic as well as anti-social behavior.
Is it easy to feel an attraction socially or emotionally to attractive people? Sure.
If you are attracted to someone does that mean you are a hospitality abuser, abusing and romantically neglecting your spouse? Not unless you choose to hide the attraction and to act on impulse or in a calculated way to keep your romantic relationship with your primary mate going while misleading them into believing you are not interested in or have never been involved with a paramour on the side of your relationship when you have.
Understand this.
People who are serial cheaters by nature like lying to their mate. They are turned on physically sexually and emotionally by the idea of cheating in a way someone not Cluster B who happens to fall in love or into like with a romantic attraction on accident while they are going through the motions of being in a committed relationship to another.
Someone who does not thrill at the idea of hiding an affair or who strives to untriangulate their affections is not the kind of person who fits the character of a serial cheater — even if they have more than one clandestine interlude. How they treat both partners is key to understanding why someone might, for instance, feel compelled to enter into an exit affair.
Exit affairs are not the same thing as serial cheating, but it’s a slippery slope to define the difference between someone who enjoys manufacturing romantic drama using betrayal tactics to heighten the emotional intensity of the experience and someone going through a life and romantic ethics crisis.
Exit affairs are the types of cheating where one person meets someone they are interested in casually romantically then uses their typically fleeting or passing only interest in spending time with that individual as a reason to end their more significant or primary romantic relationship.
If someone does that, realize they are profoundly human, behaving in emotionally and socially egocentric and caustic ways towards self and others, and that they are likely to seriously benefit from being actively involved in ongoing DBT or some form of psychoanalytic therapy.
Serial cheaters are different — they are not trying to escape. They are not cheating to manufacture an excuse to leave or owning up to having romantic feelings for another in an attempt to force their primary love interest to end the relationship in a reactionary and impulsive manner to save their own face.
Men don’t trip and fall into a vagina. Fifteen vaginas in less than three years’ time, to be more for example specific.
Women don’t accidentally have sex with a man they choose to have sex with on purpose.
People don’t gaslight who are not aware of their guilt.
Signs someone is a serial cheater?
First off, they cheat. On purpose. After planning the event or if presented with the opportunity to cheat, they immediately go into full clandestine and Machiavellian “how to hide or to cover this up” type of mode.
Once the lie to the spouse or significant other mode is engaged, expect the secondary blurts and machinations to begin flying from their brains to “win”. The prize they seek is to have their cake and to be able to eat it too — with no gross implied reference to anything even remotely sexual.
You see, to a person who is glamoured by the idea of serial cheating, it’s never actually about the sex at all.
Cheating, to a serial cheater, relates to feelings of power and entitlement being able to do and say whatever they want, whenever they want, in life with zero consequences aside from getting what they actually desire on a whim minute to minute basis. It’s about forcing their closest and most trusting loved ones to bend to their will and to believe lies to prove the betrayed person is unquestioningly and seemingly endlessly willing to believe false assertions the predators make about reality to the detriment of the abused while freezing the predator’s biopsychology in a position of FLAME ON style grandiosity.
If you ask them where they have been — causally while making conversation… asking them something like how was work or where did their work travels take them that day, expect to be met with a slew of lies and a flurry of “You are just insecure! You never trust me!”
This is a major red flag if you know full well you are neither insecure nor mistrustful of actual trustworthy people. But it’s an even bigger flag if you ask them a question about their day or how they spent their time out of your site in an effort to connect with them and they slam that social information as well as the romantic connection door tight.
If you ask them if they cheated and they reply with a slew of insults and verbose denials coupled with making ad hominem attacks on your character for asking, understand the person in question displaying shifty behaviors is running a Narcissistic Abuse script in their head that either reflects that they actually are a serial cheater trying to hide actual willful behavior and or they witnessed adults having the same type of conversations when they were little and they are likely to be acting out subconscious trauma memories in order to be able to better understand caregiver adults who left them with scars.
Expect the Narcissistic Flip. You know… when the person doing the abusing accused the victims of the abuse of deserving abuse and of themselves being the Abuser.
If you are talking about why someone disappeared for three nights and days with a woman named Nancy in the present, it really does not matter what anyone else did or said related to Jim one night after a party back two or three decades earlier during another romantic drama or entanglement incident.
They turn their phone off then claim the reason why is because they cannot work and listen to you go on and on asking them questions about why they are behaving in such a bizarre, rude, and socially provocative avoidant manner.
It is a sign they know what they are doing is wrong while they are cheating — to the point that they don’t want their mojo deflated during the hours when their paramour and they are “connecting”.
The serial cheater will be very involved in hawklike controlling your life — except for the hours when they are sneaking off with their sidepiece or love interest on any given day. On normal days when someone else is not monopolizing their time and their romantic interests cheating, expect them to be all up in your face… until the phone rings and their sideline love interest calls them away.
Having a phone ring, then watching the Love Fraud get themselves ready to go out… is heartbreaking. Watching them pick a fight to excuse walking out of the house or for doing things like turning their ringer off when they are out of town for business in order to prevent you, as their spouse, from reaching or contacting them in a crisis or in an emergency as well as to deliberately withhold affection and social contact with them to heighten their anxiety and to teach them (us) a lesson about our importance to them is a serial cheater’s most common game.
If there is no girlfriend or boyfriend on the side on any given day offering to take their attention away from their primary romantic relationship and the family, expect the serial cheater to appear to be very involved with the relationship and family.
Once someone presents them with the opportunity to cheat, if they are Cluster B and interested at all in sex or in gaining some form of social prestige within their peer group from actively engaging in the act of cheating to somehow impress their buddies and people romantically interested in taking a turn with them, chances are that they will.
They stop talking to you and start talking at you.
They stop telling you that you matter to them and that your feelings, life experience, and emotions matter. They start telling you how lucky you are to have them and that no one will ever love you or treat you as well as they do if you continue to complain about how they are acting and you make the healthy decision to end all forms of romantic and social entanglement with them.
They tell you all the reasons it’s your fault they betrayed you if and when they get caught. Then, they use the gaslighting spins you believe to force you, as their victim and social abuse target, to jump through hoops to make them somehow still love or to desire you.
The serial cheater wants you to believe if they cheat that it was your fault so that it’s never perceived by you as their own. They like degrading, insulting, and sabotaging your self-esteem not only because it gives them a sense of sadistic emotional satisfaction to control your impression of reality but because having you question yourself and your responses to their behavior rather than their character or motives leaves them in complete control of you mentally, emotionally, and likely physically with regard to how they want you to behave socially.
By seeking only quantity relationships with Sycophants, the Love Fraud predator makes sure every quality relationship they have been gifted with suffers. Becoming angry at a person who was cheated on after cheating on them is ludicrous, socially deplorable, grossly illogical, and arguably morally insane behavior.
A person who has the presence of mind to lie about things like who they do and do not spend romantic time with shows an awareness of immorality and social guilt. They also reveal a deep-seated psychological and profoundly anti-social flaw to their character when and if they take pleasure from duping or conning another into believing things like they are being faithful to a spouse… or when tricking a Love Fraud target into believing nonsense like it’s okay that they are cheating because they and their spouse are “having problems anyway”.
