The past has consequences

Rollo astutely juxstaposes Sheryl Sandberg's advice for women to sow their wild oats with Alphas, then settle down with Deltas and Gammas afterwards with one woman's actual experience of having her past unexpectedly disclosed to her husband:

As of this morning, we still hadn’t slept in the same bed or spoken more than 10 words to each other in passing. As I was waking up, he was walking in the front door with two coffees. He sat me down at our kitchen table and finally opened up to me.

Basically he feels that he was “conned” (his word) into the marriage, saying that he wouldn’t have even dated me, let alone married me, if he’d known what he knows now. His view of me has been irreparably changed and he no longer sees me “as someone worthy of being [his] wife”. (quoting him here… fucking prick) Beyond the sexual aspect, he says he no longer trusts me because I “kept something this big” from him our whole relationship. Nothing I could do or say could convince him that these were past mistakes and not reflective of who I am today. He wasn’t angry with me, didn’t call me a slut or anything like that. Never once raised his voice. Part of me wishes he did, although I can’t exactly say why right now. It felt like I was being laid off from a job.

So that’s it. We are getting divorced. My supposed life-partner turning his back on me without a second thought. He didn’t even have the decency to discuss it with me first – apparently he visited his lawyer during the week and “the process is in motion” (his words). Knowing him, there is absolutely no changing his mind.

My husband owns multiple businesses and wouldn’t get married without a prenup. I signed it, honest-to-god thinking we’d never, EVER have to use it. Well, he had the fucking document with him this morning. He said he’d pay off the remainder of my student loans, which he isn’t “legally obligated” to do. While I appreciate that, I am going to meet with my lawyer this week and see if the agreement can be challenged in court. We have built a life together, I gave him 5 of the best years of my life and I’ve been 100% faithful to him – I don’t fucking deserve to be tossed out like a piece of trash.

So that’s it. My life turned upside-down in the span of a week, over something I did 10+ YEARS AGO BEFORE I EVEN KNEW HIM. It’s fucking asinine. The thing is, even as I wrote the original post, in the back of my mind I knew he was through with me. He’s ended friendships and business partnerships over less.

As Rollo points out: "One of the primary disconnects women are conditioned to believe during their Epiphany Phase is that a “good man” will be willing to forgive and forget her past indiscretions. On their journey of self-exploration and discovery women are encouraged to adopt a finely tuned cognitive dissonance with who they conveniently become and what should be the consequences of their pasts. While men are expected to live up to their responsibilities as men, and are expected to own up to the consequences of their failures, at the Epiphany Phase women are encouraged to convince themselves that they become someone else – someone who was “so different” from who she was in her Party Years. Her husband feels “conned” because he was conned; conned after discovering the dual personality of his pre and post Epiphany Phase wife."

It seems to me this gentleman was absolutely, if belatedly, correct about his wife's complete lack of character and he's doing the right thing by kicking her to the curb as quickly and cleanly as possible. Not only did she conceal her past from him, but now that she's been caught out, she's trying to figure out how to escape an arrangement she agreed to even though he's going beyond his legal obligations by paying off her student loans. (Is anyone even remotely surprised that a woman like this has debt?) Her Female Imperative of the right to historical revisionism and the lifestyle to which she has become accustomed has been violated, and rather than regretting her mistakes, she is enraged by the consequences of them.

Women always want to believe the past is irrelevant, which is remarkably stupid because the past informs who and what we are today. And those pasts can only be fully understood and accepted if they are admitted; lying about them is foolish because most lies are eventually exposed sooner or later over time. Not everyone is short-sighted enough to live only for today; most women don't want to be married to such men anyway since they tend to be unreliable and unable to support women and children.

Expecting any man who is sufficiently far-sighted to successfully launch multiple businesses and insist on a pre-nup to react like some drug-addled musician who can't remember yesterday or think past tomorrow is cognitive dissonance of the sort that gets Epiphany Phase women in trouble. If a woman is a slut in college, she's still a slut even when she cleans up her act, she's a reformed slut. Epiphany equals reform, not erasing history. A reformed slut is not the same thing as a woman who is not a slut. That doesn't mean the reformed slut can't be a lovely individual, or that she is a woman no man will marry, it simply means she can't marry any man who isn't willing to marry a slut. This isn't rocket science.

Once a gambler, always a gambler. Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. Once a player, always a player. Once a slut, always a slut. It's about the internal wiring, not the external actions. Even when one gets one's behavior under control, the wiring is still there.

And if the reformed slut does marry under false pretenses, she's a con artist, and she should be no more surprised when the man she conned no more wants to continue the marriage than Bernie Madoff's victims wanted to continue their investments with him.