Dear Prudence: Help! My Husband Told an Internet Forum That I Cheated On Him. I Didn’t.

[fairestcat]

Q. My husband’s fantasy life: I discovered this weekend that my husband belongs to a website for people whose spouses or partners cheated on them. He posts there frequently, and he’s talked about our children, our financial struggles, and my infidelity with my boss. The thing is: I’ve never cheated on my husband. It’d be one thing if he’d created a fictional persona for this website. It’d still be misleading and a cause for concern, but the things he writes about our marriage are lies. A few times he takes an argument we had in real life and filters it through the prism of a man whose wife cheated on him.

I’m so upset. I haven’t talked to him yet, and part of me wonders if there’s a reasonable explanation. Why would he invest time creating this false portrait of our marriage? He’s never expressed concerns about my boss to me, and I’m not even that close to the other man. I could use some perspective: How concerning is this discovery?

A: It’s very concerning! It may be common to, say, rehearse arguments in the shower, or to fantasize that we’re more aggrieved than we really are in the midst of a disagreement, or generally to indulge in the occasional Secret Life of Walter Mitty–style fantasy, but this goes way beyond passive imagining and well into questionable territory. He’s presenting a false version of you to strangers in order to feel victimized and heroic at the same time. That takes away time and energy he could have been putting into your actual marriage! Whatever justification your husband tries to offer you—my guess is that his first response will be something along the lines of “I don’t really know why I do this,” followed by “It’s just blowing off steam, I guess” or “It doesn’t mean anything”—know that you have every right to be hurt, that your trust and intimacy have been violated, that your husband needs to find a better strategy for coping with disappointment and insecurity, and that you don’t have to just “get over it.”

Comments

[neotoma]

I think this is a job for a couples therapist, and maybe a divorce lawyer.

[cereta]

I was going to say, unless he immediately expressed both remorse and a willingness to work on this very hard with both a couples therapist and an individual therapist, I might be at the divorce lawyer already. Fabulism is one thing. I went through a phase of that as a kid. But my lies weren't damaging to anyone else; they were just about making me look cooler. I have very strong Feelings about adultery (the lying and breaking promises part more than the sex part), and if I found out that anyone, but especially the person I trust most in the world, was portraying me as an adulterer, I don't know if our relationship could come back from that.

[la_dissonance]

This one was SO WEIRD. I totally get the impulse to fantasize about alternate versions of how your life and relationships might play out, but like. Publicly? And with the real spouse and kids who are part of your real life?? What the fuck, my dude.

[cereta]

I get fabulism. I went through a period of it in my middle school years, and I still kind of fight what Stephen King calls the writer's impulse to make true stories more interesting and dramatic. If I found out my spouse had created a persona online, or told a few tall tales, well, I'd be concerned, but I could work that out.

But to pull another real person (several real people, when you count the kids) into that lie, to actively defame her under her real name...That's every close to unforgivable in my book.

[minoanmiss]

We used to have a member here who defended men very often, and sometimes when a letter comes in about a man doing something egregious I wonder how that commenter would find a justification for the man's actions, just for fun. This is a pretty spectacular one: if the LW is telling the truth I not only can't come up with any reason for the husband to do this but can't come up with any reason I would disagree with that I think someone else might agree with either. I have, as they say, got nothing.

[linbot]

It sounds to me like his website lies might be part of a cuckoldry fetish for the LW's husband. Some people find the idea of being found unworthy by their spouse exciting, and I can see how this is only a skip and jump from "Dear Penthouse, I never imagined this could happen to me, but..." stories.

I think using the real names could be really confronting and disturbing for the LW, but in principle, the huband is just writing RPF and to me, that impulse is not immediate cause for involving lawyers. Couples therapy and honest conversation, definitely.