That "Homewrecker's" Own Story
Why do "Other Women" go to war with the women who should be their sisters?
It’s been said a lot. Women who have affairs with other women’s husbands are turning against their own sisterhood. Women should support one another and think of one another’s homes and children.
Therefore, it isn’t surprising that the Other Woman earns cultural scorn. She is an interloper, someone intent on destroying the family and life of someone else. She’s young, she’s single. Why doesn’t she just find an unattached, single man?
Then there’s, Oh, it’s a power trip. She wants to “compete” with other women.
Having run a pub on infidelity on Medium for over five years, I’ve heard from a lot of mistresses. I’ve also heard from mistresses who’ve heard from even more mistresses.
I have never heard of a mistress who had a healthy emotional upbringing as a child.
Why Don’t These Women Just Pursue a Normal Relationship?
Because they don’t feel normal.
Jonice Webb, Ph.D. has written reams about how a family can look functional and “normal” from the outside and yet the children’s emotional needs aren’t being met on the inside. (How to tell if you might come from such a family here.)
When a family pushes away the emotions of the children, either because the parents are addicted, poor, consumed with their own problems, or mentally ill, the child isn’t taught and shown how to fit in with other people and what normative behavior is in the society. The child grows up feeling as if something is wrong with him or her because he or she doesn’t feel loved by the parent; because the child lives his or her whole life trying to hit the moving target of the parent’s approval.
Some kids don’t fit in with peers because the parent doesn’t have the bandwidth or the money to provide clothes, experiences, or help that would fit the child in with peers and assist peer acceptance. Some kids come to school with eccentric behaviors that set them up as targets for bullies because of parental behavior at home. Some kids are afraid to have friends over (if they have any) because they know something in the home would be “off” if others came over, and they are embarrassed or ashamed.
Samantha Rodman Whiten, Ph.D., writes that in many dysfunctional homes, children do not have the emotional learning experiences that prepare them to join in and know how to act in social spaces. They don’t feel the same joyful abandon in living life that their healthier peers do. Their entire life feels like a game of catch-up, where instead of comfortably joining in and experiencing the happiness that comes with middle school sleepovers, high school football games with friends, dating, and the school prom, for example, the child is always standing aside, studying how other people act and trying to piece together social norms that would allow them to fit in.
They see family comedies on TV and know that isn’t their family. They see other kids just naturally happy and outgoing, and they don’t feel naturally happy and outgoing. They have a ton anvil on their shoulders, and they are just in their teens.
As a result, the child who was emotionally neglected or from an otherwise dysfunctional home never felt “normal” to begin with, nor do they know how to interact with “normal.” Whiten writes:
There are many sad consequences of growing up in a family that didn’t teach you how to behave in healthy, normative ways. One is that you don’t feel that you can date or marry “normal” people. On a subconscious or even conscious level, you don’t want to embarrass yourself in front of someone who had a healthy upbringing with a close, happy family. You feel you won’t know how to act or you will be sniffed out as a weirdo and rejected. Therefore, people who feel inferior gravitate towards other people who grew up in unhealthy families. [bolding is mine.]
Then there’s the child who grew up depressed, as I’m pretty sure I did. With a screaming banshee of a mother who fits most of the criteria for borderline personality disorder, I remember reading with my one childhood friend, a profile in the daily paper one summer of an elderly lady in a nursing home who just wanted to die.
My nine-year-old friend couldn’t make sense of it. Why would anyone just want to die? What I couldn’t say was that I had been feeling like that for an awfully long time. Five years of bullying at school sure didn’t help.
When you grow up like that, there’s a glass wall between you and other people about six inches thick. Even today, I still don’t know how to sit down and enjoy conversation with other people. It feels like hard work. Other people are like two-headed aliens. I have never sat down and fit right in, except in very narrow interest groups only a few times in my life.
Now, Who Is It Who Normally Cheats?
Guess what? It’s: Other people who had a bad childhood!
The late great therapist Mark Smith used to say that “midlife crises” actually begin in childhood, and that marriage breaks down around years 14–20 because we weren’t raised with the emotional health to have a fifty-year connected marriage.
People love to blame menopause and the quintessential male-female sex drive disparity, but the fact is that people who were raised around emotionally healthy, open parents who modeled emotional honesty and respectful, adult problem-solving have a huge leg up on these problems and are more likely to work them out to the satisfaction of both partners. Those kinds of people tend to choose one another in early dating … while those who didn’t have that kind of upbringing … also tend to choose one another in early dating.
Fourteen to twenty years later, those marriages the unhealthy couples made are starting to break down, and that’s when the higher-libido partner — usually the guy — starts registering dissatisfaction within the marriage and broadcasting it in some kind of way, since the person doesn’t feel comfortable handling it within the home. Either somebody’s interacting with sex writers online, or they’re complaining about their marriage in public, or they’re on Ashley Madison fishing for someone openly.
And here we have all these women raised in emotionally unhealthy homes, who are newly single because their first unhealthy marriage broke down, or they’re looking because their first unhealthy marriage turned cold or abusive, or they’re late bloomers who never got married in the first place because they’re generally uncomfortable with other people and themselves and couldn’t pair bond appropriately to begin with.
These women are sitting ducks when a guy who is otherwise successful in life starts broadcasting unhappiness in his marriage.
Why? They aren’t comfortable with healthy people, but they understand the pain of emotional disconnection very well. And the guy doesn’t look as dysfunctional as he is, because he’s successful in a career and has money and financial stability. She doesn’t know he’s going to get caught up in an affair with her and then dither and flipflop and flipflop and dither.
He doesn’t do that in his career, does he? Why would she expect that? She believes all she has to do is roll out the red carpet, and he will leave that emotionally constipated marriage and be just fine with her, because all she’s done is long for emotional connection her whole life (just not with healthy, socially adroit people she feels inferior to). But now here’s someone who speaks her language and she speaks his language and it’s just gonna be a marriage made in heaven.
Until it’s not. Which is what happens ninety-five percent of the time.
It’s just that neither of them knows that yet.
Being ugly, hateful, mean, and having evil intent toward other, married women really doesn’t figure into it. (Although, once she hears the married man’s sob story, the Other Woman often becomes prejudiced against the wife and may become competitive with her.)
It’s the smoke signals of two unhealthy childhoods calling to one another, after previous relationships have already formed and are in the slow process of breakdown.
Sadly, nobody researches and discovers this until the train wreck has already hit them and they’re in the middle of betrayal, heartbreak, and an affair mess that plays out mostly the same in every case as if it’s been scripted.
If we taught more about relationships up front, a lot of this could be avoided.