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fairestcatQ. 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.”
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.”