Cheaters Who Google
Imagine a world where websites can see the Google search terms you used to find their site. *Gasp!* *Shock!*
Who knew?! Who gave them permission to know why I am on their site, using their resources? That’s damned unconstitutional! I don’t care about SEO and all that fancy website talk. I demand an incognito button! Oh wait …
Okay, so I may have -on occasion (*cough*)- not bothered/cared enough to hide my internet search activity. As a result, I apologize to any webmasters out there who might be rolling their eyes at:
- How many people have dropped their cell phone in the toilet?
- Is there really a Sriracha shortage?
- Questions to ask Siri.
- How to delete <ducking> from my cell phone dictionary.
These searches might not have been my most stellar Google moments, I admit, but it could have been worse. I say that with confidence because I regularly see some of the most ridiculous, revoltingly hideous nonsense Googled by:
- Cheaters
- The other woman
I’ve often considered writing a post about some of the worst of these searches, but a couple of days ago one particular Google search caught my eye - it was a cheater’s search.
Yes dude, I mean you. You know I mean you because you’re the cheater who typed this into your Google search bar and landed here on Monday:
I can only imagine how relieved you were to FINALLY see an article title like this: Yes, Their Affair Was Your Fault. Phew! At last huh?
My Affair is Your Fault
Bro, I relate!
- I cheated at tiddlywinks as a kid. It was the other kids’ faults really because they always won - I had to cheat to make it fairer because I wanted to win too.
- I stole cigarettes from a 7-11 once. I blame British American Tabacco PLC because if they had made their cigarettes less addictive, I wouldn’t have been forced to steal them.
- I hit a stationary car at a junction but anyone could see that it was their fault - they didn’t go when I expected them to!
- I wouldn’t be a racist if those kinds of people didn’t give me cause.
- I was prosecuted unfairly for embezzlement. If they had paid me more I wouldn’t have needed to steal the extra money.
- I lied on my hospital job application about my drug conviction. The job had great benefits, so what choice did I have? If they hadn’t asked the question, I wouldn’t have needed to lie.
- Yeah, I stole that iPad. I wanted it, I didn’t have one, and they wouldn’t just give it to me, damn them!
You can see that all of that is totally not my fault, right? None of it was my doing. Blame the economy! Blame the dog! Blame the internet! Blame the people who write things we don’t like on the internet! It’s about time that people took the blame for their part in my misadventures because blaming me is just downright unfair. Right??!
No! Of Course it’s Not Right! Are You Missing a Brain??
It’s so NOT right that it’s not even in the same zip code as the Ballpark of Wrong! It’s nothing more than the Bart Simpson Defense:
In the real world where logic and accountability for your own actions preside, my real response to your Google search is this: Doesn’t the fact that you can’t form a convincing argument for it on your own tell you a monumental something?
*Sigh* No, of course it doesn’t.
Let’s play the ‘You Had Choices!’ Game
- She doesn’t understand me.
- You’re a walking cliché who felt unloved and unappreciated? You Had Choices! You could have chosen an honorable, respectful, and ethical divorce, for one.
- She’s a nag and a harpy and never listens to me - she made me do it!
- She’s a hideous, angry, demanding witch and you felt badly about yourself around her? You Had Choices! You could have taken your fine self out of range and thrown divorce papers in her general direction.
- She’s cold and distant and doesn’t have sex with me enough - she drove me to it!
- You felt isolated, unattractive, and rejected? You Had Choices! You could have found ways to reconnect, re-energize, and engage with her, or decided that it wasn’t worth the effort and filed.
You. Had. Choices. And your choices are all on you, not her. We cannot reasonably hold others responsible for the choices we make. She is not to blame for the decisions you make in your life - you are.
If you didn’t have the capacity to effect positive change in your relationship, you did have the capacity to wiggle on down to the lawyer’s office. You could have responded to your dissatisfaction in any number of ways from the Choices Smorgasbord - but the selection you made ignored all the ethical, honorable options and you instead chose your retributive, manipulative, and harmful affair.
Blame-shifting: another unethical strategy
What you’re doing is indulging in a cheater’s all-time favorite pastime of affair rationalizations and excuses. You’re carefully protecting your view of yourself against the fact that you deliberately chose an unethical and damaging punishment for the crimes you perceive she committed against you.
You cheated because you felt in some way aggrieved and/or disadvantaged by your relationship not meeting your Hollywood-esque idealizations, feeling insufficiently worshipped by her (though you might have experienced that as being ‘badly treated’), and because it gave you your jollies. (Mostly because it gave you your jollies, let’s be honest.)
“I cheated because she was <insert complaints>” isn’t a valid excuse or robust justification. Even if she were the most hideous wife that ever lived you were neither compelled to such an unethical and abusive act, nor were you justified in choosing it. Your dissatisfaction with your marriage didn’t entitle you to cheat - it entitled you to leave. (Newsflash: You’re still married - it can’t be that terrible.)
Blaming her for your gutless and likely sadistic choice to have an affair is asinine. It’s cowardly. It’s lazy. It’s weak. It’s transparent. Blaming her for your choices puts you in the company of others who also blamed their choices on their victims:
- Wife Beater?
- “[…] saying that I was a wife beater; that is wrong. It happened because I couldn’t get her to quiet down” ~ Ariel Castro
- Raped?
- Well, she was almost passed out but she didn’t “affirmatively say no”. ~ Defense argument in Steubenville rape trial
- Abducted and imprisoned?
- “They are here against their will because they made a mistake of getting in a car with a total stranger.” ~ Ariel Castro
- Assassination attempt?
- If she had given me her respect and love I wouldn’t have been forced to shoot Reagan. ~ John Hinckley Jr about Jodie Foster
Bludgeoning Your Wife With Blame
You Googled: “after my affair my wife still doesn’t understand why it was her fault”
Still? You mean after countless hours of further emotional abuse, fighting, and therapy, you’re frustrated that she STILL doesn’t understand how it’s all her fault? But you keep trying, right?
After you’ve bludgeoned her bloody with all her faults and failings as a wife, she STILL refuses to understand that your affair was entirely in her control? How unreasonable and uncooperative of her. Have you tried waterboarding? I hear that can be quite effective.
If you think her ‘lack of understanding’ is evidence of her wonky thinking and her refusal to admit her faults, you’re wrong. It’s evidence of yours. It’s further evidence that you are happy to continue your emotional abuse until you get what you want.
I doubt that your wife ‘doesn’t understand’. I suspect she understands all too well that this was not her doing, and that you are ducking responsibility for it. You are trying to sell her this rather ugly manipulation of ‘my affair was your fault’ - one that also conveniently builds-in her fault for your future affairs*:
“My fidelity is in your control not mine: If you do not behave as I expect, you force me to go elsewhere to have my desires met. If you behave as I stipulate then I shall not cheat, until such time that you again fail to please me.“
Faithful Partners Who Google:
Your Google search brought you here on Monday. Coincidentally maybe, a different Google search brought a cheater’s wife here on Sunday:
I don’t know if this was your wife, but I hope that it was and I hope that she found the following answers:
- Blame for your husband’s affair rests entirely with your husband and his choices, not with you.
- Reconciliation with someone who thinks this way is a Really Bad Move.
- File.
Gangsta Rap Made Me Do It.
We get it. Gangsta rap made you do it, addiction made you do it, your patriotism made you do it. *yawn*
If you are determined to deny your own agency in your affair in a misguided and craven attempt to preserve your self-view, there’s a psychiatric treatment for that disorder.
If you’re unhappy, leave. But since you think that she is to blame for your affair you probably also blame her for making you stay. You’re such a peach.
When you have your next affair (*and I suspect you are a serial cheater, through and through) are you planning to use this defense?:
I cheated on my wife: She admitted it was her fault, as I had cheated on her before. Music to your ears.
“You can’t blame anyone else, … , no one but yourself. You have to make your own choices and live every agonizing day with the consequences of those choices.”
~ Max Brooks, World War Z
(This post is a comment-disabled duplicate: comments may be posted to the live article: My Affair Was Your Fault)
