Jeez, @Kardamom Stop being so namby-pamby. It would be nice if you could make a judgment once in a while!
Seriously, @Kardamom. Every time there is a question about cheating, you show up and you are about ten times more strident about the immorality of it than anyone else. It seems like half the time you accuse the OP of being a troll, too. Clearly this issue pushes your buttons. I don’t know if you’ve ever spoken to why that is, but I’d sure be interested in your story. I suspect it would help understand where you’re coming from. When you talk about it, it sounds very personal, not at all like reasoned advice.
Similarly, regarding bipolar disorder, you may have a number of relatives with the disorder, but it is clear that your observations haven’t provided you with much, if any understanding of what the disorder is like from the perspective of the person who has it. You have strong opinions about “right and reasonable,” but it doesn’t appear that you are open to any reflection upon your point of view. I get the sense that the book is closed for you. Locked up. Pound the gavel. Send them off to prison.
@fedupwitcaddys I think it’s important to understand that there are a lot of motives a person can have for finding love where they can. In my experience (and I have bipolar disorder, too), love seems like it can save your life. I know that when I was acting out the most, and I thought about how I could be “saved” from dying, love was the only thing I could think of that would make me feel worthy of being alive. If someone loved me…
It was crazy—not in the bipolar sense, but in the ordinary sense. I had maybe six internet affairs in six months. I’d fall in love and then I’d sabotage the thing. Up and down. Up and down. Each time the amplitude of the swing got larger.
I felt like something was wrong with me. I didn’t like being dishonest. I didn’t like being unhappy. Not just unhappy. Miserable to the point that I didn’t see how I could stand it any more. Eventually I confessed to my wife, and she realized I was not behaving as Wundayatta, and she got me to a psychiatrist and diagnosed.
This put me on a more even keel, but the desire for love has not gone away. My wife and I have been working on it in counseling for years now. It is like slogging through a swamp in the Everglades, sinking up to our thighs in the mud, every step we take.
In personal therapy, I have worked on finding other ways besides affairs to fill the void inside me. There are things that work to reduce the anger at myself and the anxiety, and all that stuff, but it hasn’t worked to fill me. The only thing that has worked, so far, to make me feel better about myself, is love. So we work on getting both my wife and I to get to a place where we do get enough love and enough connection.
I think maybe I could survive without it. I think I would be miserable, but alive. I think if I divorced my wife in order to try to find a better relationship that I would certainly die. I would stop taking my meds. Stop going to work. Grow depressed. Because I wouldn’t care. Because inside me, I really don’t care. The only reason why I care is for other people. I don’t make sense without other people. Frankly, I don’t think anyone does, but that’s probably just because of my own perspective on this.
I think we do what we can to find love because I think our lives are at stake. Sometimes—maybe most of the time—it does not fit in with standard morality. You can care about pleasing the public, or you can care about saving your own life. Even though I don’t care about my own life at some level, I do care about it at another. Bipolar, eh?
I encourage you to be kind with yourself. I don’t think it helps to judge yourself about things like this. In my experience, judging myself like that helped lead me towards suicide. I’m sure you remember what it’s like to hate yourself with an unbelievable passion.
It is very dangerous to ask questions like this on public forums. You will always get people who condemn you in the strongest terms. Sometimes I think it is self-hatred that makes us do these things and there are so many people willing to oblige, and they tear us down further and further.
It’s bullshit. We’re human beings. We don’t want to hurt anyone, and we are willing to hurt ourselves to avoid hurting others. Then those people we don’t want to hurt come along and help us get better. How ironic. Personally, I think it is an issue of life or death. I do not condemn you for finding love where you can. You do care about yourself and you need to nurture that, not find excuses to drive yourself back down into hell. Or worse.
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