Sexual Arousal? Only When Cheating on the Spouse
Some people only enjoy sex when they cheat on their spouses. These individuals were conditioned in their formative years to associate intimacy with risk, deception, and adrenaline. They require a narrative or script to become sexually aroused and often assume the role of a promiscuous and treacherous prostitute. Ironically, they are inordinately attached to their emotionally thwarted, co-dependent, and enabling spouses and need them to remain married to fully enjoy sex.
Missing Persons: Psychopathic Narcissist and Borderline Histrionic
Psychopathic narcissists and histrionic and borderline women are driven by primitive urges, raw negative impulses, and psychological defense mechanisms. They are not sadists, but they will not hesitate to hurt you fatally if it gratifies the triflest of their wishes. These people have no real spouses, know no children, maintain no friendships, and keep no families. They swing apathetically between compulsions and obsessions, and they have an ever more dimming awareness of the stirrings that pass for their consciousness.
Loser Narcissist: Failure as Success
Narcissists are often anxious about their performance and feel like frauds, which leads them to be comfortable in their failures. They become experts at floundering and are adept at the art of blundering. They use projective identification to coerce people around them to help them fail and recreate their spectacular downfalls. Being a loser becomes an identity, and they are proud of their mishaps with fortune and institutions.
Narcissist No Toilet Paper: Aggressive and Brittle, Not Soft and Strong
Narcissists have restricted access to positive emotions and rampant negative emotions, leading them to compensate with dominance and abuse. They often call themselves alpha males but are actually bullies. Their mistreatment of others does not make them strong, but rather obnoxious and clownish. They are not capable of true intimacy or emoting, as they are empty inside.
Why Do We Stay in Abusive Relationships? The Sunk Cost Fallacy or Bias
The sunk-cost bias or sunk-cost fallacy or the concord fallacy is the tendency to remain in bad relationships, even if they are abusive, sexless, loveless, or doomed. This bias is motivated by malignant optimism, an over-estimation of the probabilities of positive outcomes if we just keep going or keep doing something differently. It is a particularly pernicious brand of loss aversion, the proclivity to avoid waste. The rational thing to do is to cut your losses and abandon the dysfunctional relationship, but surprisingly few people do so in time, resulting in wrecked marriages, hateful exes, bruised children, and crumbling enterprises.
The Mentally Ill Form Couples
Mentally ill individuals often form couples or dyads, which can lead to fused relationships and trauma bonding. Coping strategies include active denial, enabling, and avoidance. Avoidance can lead to extreme estrangement and cruel disengagement, causing the mentally ill partner to act out in provocative or reckless ways. In extreme cases, the significant other can become a superego replacement, leading to major depressive attitudes, psychotic disorders, and even suicide.
The Intimate Partner as a Persecutory Object: Love is a Battlefield
The persecutory object is a tormenting, devaluing, and sadistic inner voice that informs patients with certain personality disorders that they are bad, worthless, weak, immoral, and generally a disappointment. Patients project this voice onto their intimate partners, who become the outer embodiment of the internal construct. This defense mechanism is known as projective identification. The patient tries to force the partner to behave in ways that support their view of them as a persecutory object. The patient then rebels against their externalized persecutory object, punishing their partner in myriad ways, leading to a sick dynamic that is unfortunately very common.
Bullies: Intermittent Reinforcement and Sex Withholding
Intermittent reinforcement is a tool used by bullies, which is rarely conscious and often unintentional. Most bullies are not self-aware and deny that they are bullies, instead claiming to be victims. Withholding sex is a strategy used by bullies, who often make excuses for their behaviour and refuse to acknowledge the problem. The bully rejects their partner, humiliates them, and isolates them to render them incapable of finding an alternative.
Sadistic Women-lover, Sadistic Women-hater
Narcissists either love or hate women, but both types end up torturing them. The sadistic women lover, or philogenist, is drawn to women but is terrified by his own obsession with them. He adopts avoidant behaviors to restore his sense of control and superiority over women. The sadistic women-hater, or misogynist, holds women in contempt and seeks to punish them. He fears women and punishes them for bringing forth his own shortcomings. The narcissist regards women as mirrors of his own deficiencies and hates them.
Fear of Intimacy Rationalized
People who fear intimacy have a phobia of exposing their vulnerabilities and committing to a long-term relationship. This fear is rooted in a deep distrust of the world and other people. They tend to devalue their intimate partner and imagine negative scenarios for the future. Fear of intimacy is a form of diffuse anxiety that causes people to withdraw and avoid intimate relationships. It is a cycle that can never be broken or interrupted, leading to a never-ending chase that never culminates in a happy ending.