SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I'm fully ready to get my heart broken again. No way it'll feel any worse than DDay and the subsequent aftermath and discard. I'm just not programmed for mindless sex, I'm greedy, I want the whole shebang.

Nothing wrong with being Greedy, Why can't you have it all?

Everyone deserves the whole shebang!!

Cantbeme, what I learned during that "wilding" period was that broken people find each other. The women I was having casual sex with were all broken in some way. Most of them came from broken families, things like parents with alcoholism/drug abuse, physical abuse by the father, sexual abuse, etc. Many were living lives at or below the poverty line with the accompanying stresses. Or had very severe neuroses. One in particular would slash the tires of a guy if she let him pick her up at a bar and have sex, but didn't call her afterwards. Or stalk him.

I think of that time in my life when I think of your WW. She herself was confronting some inner demons. Therefore, the dude she hooked up with is exactly the kind of dude a person like her, fighting that kind of inner battle, would hook up with. Unreliable, unlikable, a loser. There was zero chance she would ever have feelings for him. He was merely a drug to her.

The other point about that is this: for a woman, finding that sort of casual hook-up is as easy as breathing air. For a man, it's the opposite. You have to be constantly on the prowl, lurking in bars and parties and places where people are getting fucked up on alcohol and drugs, peacocking around other men who are also peacocking, getting rejected and ignored multiple times, because your odds of finding the broken woman looking for the anesthetic casual are rather low. You have to humiliate yourself again and again, and when you do find the hook-up, you are very aware that you are not a man to her. Rather, you are a proxy, a place-holder, something to take her mind off of her problems temporarily.

In my case, my brokenness really hit home when I hurt a woman whom I actually did like, a lot. This woman was somebody I could have built a long term relationship with. She thought I was exclusive with her and I never disabused her of that belief, even though I was sleeping around a lot. When she saw me for what I really was, I'll never forget the look in her eyes. She was hurt and in pain, but in addition to that, I didn't see hatred, or rage, or anything like that. I saw revulsion, mixed with pity. She no longer saw me as a man, because I wasn't a whole man. I was a broken person.

Had a weird epiphany, very germane to this whole idea of risk-taking following affair recovery and would love to hear opinions.

I was listening to a song that put me right back inside those weeks following DDay+42, right after I signed my asset agreement, saw the doodoo head for the last time, and began very quickly rebuilding my life as I shamefully lived at my mom's house, back in my hometown, drinking regularly with the rest of the drunks there, and feeling very sorry for myself. I was teleported to those days where I was still an emotional wreck but, upon getting my divorce buyout and cutting all ties with her, felt like I had won a sort of victory, like I'd taken a giant step up out of the hole she put me in, one which I'd allowed myself to make so deep in the first place with my depression and financial vulnerability. I was still an emotional wreck, but I had so much hope in me, and I was flush with ambition and determination. The future didn't seem so bleak anymore, and I felt like a free agent in the world. I continued running as much as I could before the weather changed. I joined the local gym to get some lifting days in when I could. I saw an IC a couple of times just to vent.

I worked my butt off to rebuild and in just 6 weeks I was moved into my *own place* for the very first time, set to start my new job the following Monday. Plus work sent me overseas my second week and I got to see Europe for the first time. And so I was thinking just now, and had thought about a few times before, that the disparity between the lowest low and the highest high during this period is incredible. The range is so huge that it boggles my mind. I was jobless, betrayed, devalued, broke, depressed, devoid of intimacy, and all-around broken. 3 months later, I was employed, valued, more financially sound than ever in my life, debt-free, a global traveler, a better friend, son, and brother to my loved ones, 25 lb lighter, and actually *excited* about my future--and the best part was I didn't even really miss that creep anymore. I hit rock bottom and then one of the tippiest tops that I'd ever experienced in THREE MONTHS! That seems like such a short time for a person to handle these events in the usual healthy way. Like filing for bankruptcy and then winning the lottery within Q4. How does the human brain even begin to process this kind of thing?

So my point...I wonder if sucking up all of the happiness from my brain then flooding it with a dopamine hit to rival the hardest-hitting stuff in a pharmacy's deepest vault affected me in some heretofore unknown way, like my ambition or risk-taking or hedonism or whatever it is I'm feeling (a mixture of all of them, probably) is a side effect of the drastic short term chemical changes that occurred in my brain from Labor Day to December. I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just spitballing the motivations and machinations here I guess. Does anyone have any experience with these kinds of short term spectacular emotional fluctuations and how you coped afterward?