The Serial Cheaters article has been put up:

What to Do with a Serial Cheater

Katrina writes she fears her husband may be a serial cheater. He can't seem to help himself from having sex with every available woman.
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Radio show of Serial Cheaters
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Matt writes he has been married 20 years but will soon be divorcing his wife who is a serial cheater. They are still living together but in separate rooms. They are working towards an amicable divorce and she plans to go with the other man. He has proof of her affair but she denies it, he asks if he should expose the affair or not.

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CAUTION: Serial cheaters may welcome extraordinary precautions they think will give YOU the security to safely ignore their SSL.

I keep coming across theads by BSs with serial cheating WSs that seem reluctant to get their heads around how difficult it is to create real security in a relationship after multiple episodes of cheating. Since I now have some experience on the topic, I thought I would share a few thoughts.

The main thing to remember is this: there is nothing more devious than a cheater � except an experienced cheater. If you take the standard approach of asking him/her to give you access to email and social media accounts, agreeing to remove passwords/codes from smart phones, spending most time together but leaving big gaping holes during the working day, ignoring work-related computer and phone stuff, or allowing your partner to keep one night a week (or something like that) for socialising without you with same-sex friends, you are not recovering your relationship � even though it might feel like it to you. What you are actually doing is giving your WS a checkbox list of things they need to show to you to ensure that you don�t bother them with your anxieties, and essentially telling them that as long as they conduct their infidelities during the working day, using email or instant messaging accounts you can�t see on their phone, and meet up with people during times they usually tell you they are with their friends, you will not suspect anything.

Think of it like this. If your house was burgled and the robbers got in through a window that you left unlocked, would you immediately change your behaviour to ensure that ALL windows and doors were locked, or would you only lock the one the robbers came in through? If you leave half of your windows and doors unlocked, the robbers will have no problem finding their way in again.

With a serial cheater, everything is the opposite way round from a non-serial. Remorse is not a sign that they value the marriage above their SSL. It is a sign they are sorry they were caught again. Putting in effort to win you back is not a sign they want to be in a faithful committed marriage. It is a sign that they want to go back to having a marriage and a secret life of cheating. They will work extremely hard to get back to a situation where they have a marriage AND an SSL � and it is really easy to kid yourself into thinking that they are making the effort because they want the same thing as you: a committed and secure exclusive marriage. Don�t be fooled!

So how do you deal with this situation? You have to switch your mind around. You can�t �verify� that they are not cheating � unless you watch them 24/7. You just can�t. Their aim is not to protect the marriage � their aim is to keep the marriage AND their SSL. So they will put all their energies into tricking you into believing that they are not cheating. And they will fight tooth and nail for that. You need to keep in your head that they will cheat if they have opportunity. And if they do normal things like go to work, run errands to shops, go and wash the car at weekends, etc, that gives them plenty of opportunity to be conducting an affair. Remember also that serial cheaters like the chase. So they may not even need that much time for physical meetings (how long does sex really take?! 10 mins?) if they have spent a few days working themselves up with steamy whatsapps. Trying to stop a serial cheater cheating is like trying to keep water in a sieve.

The only thing you can do is try to turn it around so that the onus is on them to PROVE they are faithful, while having your doubt-o-meter set to supersensitive so that you recognise that if it takes an hour and a half to go buy bread and milk from the supermarket there is something you need to worry about there. If they are cheating, they won�t be able to reassure you as long as your eyes are open. And don�t think you can be reassured by GPS in that situation � he could just be sitting in his car in the car park of the supermarket, talking on his phone to one or several of the random attractive women he bumped into during the course of his working day in the previous week.

I spent way too long being falsely reassured by GPS data, by no suspicious texts or calls during the evenings, by innocent looking-phone records, by having passwords for email and facebook, by doing random checks on whatsapp, and seeing my WH home at 7pm every night to have a family dinner with me and the kids. All the while my WH was carefully cleaning up all his devices before coming home, restricting flirting to working hours and evenings when he was out with his male friends, and conducting his affair meetings while the car was being washed or he was picking up some things from the supermarket.

After my experience (8 years of marriage, WH�s many many affairs plus an OC, with him seeming to become a better and better husband and father along the way), I am now convinced that there is NO WAY you can have a secure and loving marriage with a serial cheater unless they go through some kind of dramatic crash and epiphany to change their behaviour. If they don�t reach rock bottom and reconsider their philosophy of life, your marriage � and your mental health in it - does not stand a chance.

Can you help engineer a crash to rock bottom? I think you can....but so far I am only half way through my plan so will post more on this later.

Any update on your plan? I was going to PM you but I think because I am new, I cant.

Some useful threads/posters for BSs struggling with serial cheating spouses:

Green Mile - repentant WS - 25 years of cheating
DanceswithGoats - GM's wife
These stories are quite eye opening about the enormity of the challenge of recovering/creating a marriage with someone who has been only thinking of themselves for their entire adult life and makes you think about what kind of future you can expect in a "recovered" marriage with a serial cheating spouse.

BrainHurts and Chickadee - a couple of happy-ending stories of serial cheating husbands.

Living Well, SusieQ and Black_raven - lots of great advice from people who have been there. Read their posts to others as well as threads created.

NB28 - wife of a serial online cheater. Shows how difficult it is to implement EPs (or how extreme the EPs need to be) in order to recover with a serial cheater.

Everafter2010 - I learnt a lot from her posts, especially the importance of gathering evidence on OWs for court cases.

My Wife tried to justify her one night stand with a "I considered myself single".

Hey chalk
Yup it was very hard to implement anything with my situation as to everyone (a part from people on this forum) he appeared to be a charming loving husband no matter how many affairs he had. He would agree to everything and even had a list of boundaries printed that he carried with him. Didn�t stop the further 6 affairs that happened.

I am here still reading and learning even though my marriage ended 2 years ago.

I can�t find nor can I stomach reading my thread as it hurts to see how stupidly hard I tried working at something that had no hope.

Hi NB28,

I learned so much from your experience. It helped me really understand what SusieQ, Melody and others were all saying about looking at people's actions not their words. I'm sorry for everything you went though but hope you are in a better place now.

I know the feeling of not wanting to look back at your thread! I can't believe how deluded I was when I first came here. I had no understanding at all of the mentality of cheaters, the way they live their lives and how liars trick people. It's still hard to believe that I thought I was sharing my life with this person for 10 years, when all the time he was living a totally different life.

Hey chalk

Yes. Actions vs words is an absolute must, anyone can promise anything but if they don�t follow it with behaviour that shows they mean it, it�s absolutely pointless.

I wanted to believe it, I wanted to believe my babies wouldn�t have a broken family... little did I see or understand that what we had even by not divorcing was still a type of broken family, the behaviour the kids saw was not healthy, the impact it had on me and the state the children saw me was not healthy.

I struggled to understand that the good husband I fell in love with and married was capable of being who he became. I didn�t marry the monster he became. I married a gentle, shy and loving man.... the WS he became was a complete stranger to me.

Today I wouldn�t have a friendship nor would I have anyone that behaves like that in my life so why did I accept it from him?
Plan B for me is not saving a marriage, for someone like me with a serial cheater it means accepting the man I married is gone.

Oddly enough I am not angry at him, I don�t know him, I�m angry at myself for enabling someone like that for so long, for not standing up for myself and feeling I deserved to be treated better. This has cost me, the delay in walking away from him has completely messed up my life but I�m still much happier I am away from him.

As of today, he has the kids, the house and people still believe he�s a charming single father in need of love and support.

Had I gone into plan B in 2008 I can guarantee this would not be happening. I really do hope that people listen and understand the consequences of not following plan B or continuously braking it.

It would be great if you could update your last thread - it would be helpful to people who refuse to implement a dark Plan B. Sadly, that is a problem we see often here on the forum.

Update done...
I�ve kept up with MB and the forum I just don�t post... I don�t feel I can advise anyone when my own thread was so horrible..
I see people resisting plan B and I just want to drag the. 2/3/4 years down the line and show them how much more pain is yet to come if they don�t.

Yes! This is what I have learned too. You think by separating you are "breaking" the family unit. But you are not. Your WS already broke the family. Your only choices after you realise what he has done (and who he really is) are to how to protect yourself and the children from the consequences of HIS decisions and actions. But it takes a long time for us BSs to understand that when we first come here....

I know that by throwing WH out, moving the kids to another country, and going through the courts to make sure he can't take them again, I have preserved our family. Sure, it's a one-parent family with very little input from the absent parent. And i do have to deal with fighting off the pressure to "compromise" or collaborate with WH, and looking like the bad guy as I stick to my guns about not communicating or interacting with him unless via lawyers. But I feel proud that I can say the children still have a family with structure and routines and stability and love. If WH had got his way - or if I had listened to "advice" from other people telling me "he's still their father", "you can't stay angry at him forever", "so it didn't work out, but you still have to work together for the children's sake", etc etc - everything would have been torn apart. It is so important for BSs with serial cheating partners to understand that the WS will destroy the family if you do not separate and cut contact. There is no other option that is good for you and your children.

Just think what you'd be doing to those beautiful kiddos of yours though if he'd been allowed unrestricted input though once you knew what that input might actually be. Serial cheaters are as charming as free snacks on the outside but the inside is full of heartfelt, strongly held beliefs that everyone cheats, it's just polite to cover it up well (their version of nose picking?) and that only the schmuck parent does the actual work. The star of the show just does a lot of showboating which encourages the child to admire and encourage the parent, rather than the other way about.

As we say in the north of England they're all fur coat and no knickers.

Can you think of a more damaging person to tell your child to trust? Look honey it's the snake oil salesman! He's our friend!

I think kids like yours actually have an advantage on kids who grew up in uneventful families like mine. They know what snake oil looks like and they know not to buy it.

I've just read a book that really enlightened me about the serial cheating mindset. It is called "Character Disturbance: The Phenomenon of our Age" by Dr George Simon. I found that it echoed all the observations on this forum about the wayward charater and helped me go back through correspondence from WH to identify all the manipulation tactics he was using against me for years. Doing that exercise helped open my eyes to just how calculating and deliberate his manipulation was - and how it follows the clear pattern of other disturbed characters. The book also gives you techniques for if you have to engage in a conversation and/or relationship with a disturbed character, so that you can identify manipulations at the point they are happening, call the manipulator out on them, and set boundaries for your interactions so that you can prevent yourself being the victim of their self-serving games. I thought others might find it useful like i have.

Some wisdom from Living Well on the reality of serial cheaters: