I've been thinking recently about the role that self-pity plays in infidelity, and I'd be interested in hearing your views.
I've come to believe that 100% of affairs involve a sense of
entitlement. As in "I'm owed something that I haven't been given and therefore I'm entitled to <fill in activity of choice>". I think this is even in someone's sig line - is it Gimble's?
So where, I wonder, does this sense of entitlement come from? How much of it arises as a natural extension of self-pity? I've noticed how often WS's rationalisations drip with self-pity, and sometimes BS too seem to drift towards the self-pity pit. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/mad.gif" alt="" /> So at what point does 'healthy selfishness' become dangerous self-pity, and how do we recognise the border?
I may be biased here. In my own sitch, I had access to hundreds of H's emails to his various OWs (and their emails to him), and what knocked me out about them was the constant self-pity, expressed in pseudo-heroic language of the form "I am so stressed and pressured, and TogetherAlone keeps expecting more and more of me, and I'm coping but she doesn't appreciate how hard it is..." Over the course of years, he had clearly sought the company of others who felt that life was unfair to them - a kind of community of selp-pity. Eventually he ended up with the Queen of Entitlement, who fed his self-pity so assiduously that he eventually came to feel that it was deeply unfair that he should have to support a wife and children at all! <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/rolleyes.gif" alt="" />It was only when he found himself on the verge of leaving me for the New Paradise that he came to his senses.
It was hard to make sense of any of this, as I had been under the impression that I had been hugely supportive of H - in fact he told me this many times. I listened to his work problems for hours every night, I worked to relieve him of domestic pressures, I went out to work in order to relieve him of the bearing the financial burden alone. What more could a wife do? Recently, I've become aware that when he feels under pressure, he feels that it's unfair in some way, and wants me to 'share' it with him, essentially to find some magical way to make things alright. Specifically, he wants me to agree that the pressure is unfair.
But the fact is that pressure is a part of adult life. we all get burdened with problems and worries - no-one is exempt. When we marry and become parents, we sign up to be adults, accepting the burdens of our role. So why should H - and all his OWs - feel so convinced that it's not fair that they should have to be burdened?
It seems to me that self-pity is what forms when a person feels discomfort in a life situation, and for some reason feels that they should not have to tolerate discomfort. So they develop a sense of injustice and injury, and project this onto their intimate partners. It's only a short step from here to that fatal sense of entitlement - the conviction that they're 'owed' something to balance the scales.
(As an aside, I wondered if MB could be considered a 'community of self-pity'? There's clearly a danger of that - all of us BSs have been genuinely injured and enjoy the consolation of others in the same way that my H found his community of whingers (one of them online, so obvious similarities). But I think that the difference is that MB does not allow participants - WS
or BS - to see themselves as victims, and
does urge posters away from a sense of entitlement (people are strongly dissuaded from pursuing revenge affairs, or even from retaliating against those who have hurt them). So I think we're safe. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/tongue.gif" alt="" /> )
How do you deal with someone who has been marinating in self-pity - perhaps for much of their life? How do you stand firm on a world view that cuts across their strong sense of entitlement? How do you disabuse someone of the idea that the world owes them a special deal?
Hmmm. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/crazy.gif" alt="" />
TogetherAlone
