Something my ex-wife would do (or not do) when I was breaking down with emotion. I’ll remember Halloween night after the kids went to bed. I was there breaking down while my ex-wife just sat there in a rocking chair in my son’s room.
Last week we had another incident where my wife induced a trigger for her affair, and when I called her out on it (as well as being 15 minutes late with no notification) I received this from someone in explaining her behavior.
Your ex-wife will always trying to “find” herself. She will always be looking for validation and looking for the next thing to satisfy whatever wants she had. She never really knew what she wanted out of life, and still doesn’t, because in order for her to really do that, she’d have to start acknowledging herself. Your ex-wife didn’t like doing that, because that meant accepting the truth about herself and the negative aspects of her personality, and that just wasn’t going to happen.
Granted, your ex-wife wasn’t exactly emotionless, far from it. She certainly could become passionate and expressive when it came to getting what she wanted, especially if she thought something was keeping her from it. But when it came time to accept blame for actions, she shut down immediately. There were always excuses for crappy behavior on her part, and it was always something else at fault, someone else at fault, or both. But her? Nah, it couldn’t be her. After all, she was the victim at the end. Always. And with regards to the affair, it was always a whole lot easier to just say “I don’t know,” and “things just developed” instead of admitting that she actively pushed things along.
Cheaters from my experience are empty, hollow people, but not necessarily because they don’t feel emotion. They are hollow because they deny the sources of the negative emotions within themselves, and chase after fleeting happiness outside of themselves. They keep trying to feed the hole in themselves with ephemeral events, with fantasies, with encounters of little real substance, all in an attempt to escape the feeling of emptiness that dogs them in every silent moment. It may seem that we get the short end of the stick now, and that they don’t feel the consequences and weight of their actions, but it’s all cumulative. You can’t ignore the void in your soul before it swallows you completely, and by then, those that were already hurt are already far past the point of being able to soothe that sort of pain. We would have moved on. They however, have years long ignored, empty living to deal with.