My name is Sam Vaknin and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
I am a psychopathic narcissist.
Sometimes the behaviors are the same, but motivation in the psychodynamic background is never the same.
So let's start with my favorite, the psychopathic narcissist.
Psychopathic narcissism is a constant state of tension, a tug of war between ferocious self-sufficiency and devout personal autonomy.
The psychopathic narcissist is a lone wolf, but at the same time he suffers from a prostrate addiction to narcissistic supply.
He needs attention, adulation, admiration, or absent these, he wants to be feared. He is dependent on the people who provide narcissistic supply, the sources.
Even the most rabid antisocial and the most grandiose fool end up succumbing to social pressures. They end up pairing up, creating couples.
In the case of the psychopathic narcissist, he becomes a member of a dyad, he teams up with another person, usually of the opposite sex, to secure any two of the three S's.
And the three S's are sex, supply, services.
Often the malignant narcissist, that's the early name for the psychopathic narcissist, often the malignant narcissist strikes a compromise with his insignificant other or intimate partner.
And this is the compromise.
To keep these unfortunate partners in his life, the malignant narcissist turns a blind eye. He allows his partners to engage in casual sex with other people. He allows them even to have love affairs.
The rule is, don't ask, don't tell, very military.
This way, the malignant narcissist also maintains his leeway to act in any way he sees fit.
And he prevents the partner from making demands and from becoming a burden and a nuisance.
He says to the partner, just leave me be, leave me alone. If you want to have sex with someone, go ahead. If you want to have a love affair with someone, please do.
I need my time. I need my space. I need my creativity. I need to be invested in myself. I don't have energy for you.
If you do your job, you give me sex when I need it, you supply, give me attention when it's missing and you serve me, you provide me with services.
All the rest, go find your way.
As long as two of the three S's are forthcoming, the partner is encouraged actually, sometimes pushed actively to outsource her emotional and physical sexual needs to pair or to team up with others.
The malignant narcissist is never romantically jealous. The narcissist is the overt classic narcissist, but not the psychopathic narcissist.
He does react badly. The malignant narcissist does react badly to cheating that may or does lead to abandonment.
But he reacts badly to rejection and abandonment, not because he's in love, not because he has bonded with his partner, not because, I don't know, he's attached.
He reacts badly for practical reasons.
Now that he has lost his previous source of supply, he has to groom a new source. He is grooming a new source of supply, nurturing and cultivating.
A new found of the three S's is an onerous and an uncertain task.
Losing the source of mental sustenance, losing the source of narcissistic supply, losing his intimate partner to another man, let's say, is akin to losing your job, or to losing your neighborhood, trustworthy pusher.
But you say, even a psychopathic narcissist is still a human being, well, to some extent, doesn't he feel anything? Isn't he moved by the fact that his partner is out there spending all day with another man and all night with another man? Isn't she devastated that her husband is away on a vacation with another woman?
Both men and women are devastated when their intimate partner's significant other or spouse cheats. Men react badly as they keep replaying the lurid visualsact with another person, another man.
Women are heartbroken by the intimacy that is involved even in casual sex.
And both men and women mourn the trust lost as a result of cheating. The friendship abandoned in adultery, the betrayal, the callous indifference to the partner's hurt, to the inevitable deception, the egregious lies, all that goes with cheating.
Cheating is not an isolated incident or process. It affects every corner, nook and cranny of the relationship.
Somehow, somewhere along the line, the other men or women, the third parties, the long-term lover, even the one-night stand partner, at some point they became the locus and focus of affection, of attention, of gratitude, of loyalty.
They become implicitly and very often explicitly rescuers, co-conspirators against the ostensibly loved one. They become the providers of intimacy and sex and all these used to be the exclusive domains of the couple.
It's like opening the couple up and bringing in an invader and occupying army. It's acting like a fifth column or a Trojan horse.
Sexual and emotional exclusivity are not only about sex. They constitute a statement. Exclusivity constitutes a statement regarding the uniqueness and importance of the relationship and regarding one's mate.
To share oneself with another, with someone outside the couple, is to inform your partner in no uncertain terms that she or he had lost their privileged position in one's life. That they are now interchangeable, replaceable, substitutable.
And add to this the sense of failure and inadequacy and impotent fury at having so badly misjudged one's partner.
Add to this hating yourself for having so thoroughly deceived yourself and having been led astray.
Add to this the sense of terror, horror, that you had granted your intimate partner unfettered access to the most vulnerable parts of your life. You gave away the power to reduce your heart to smithereens, to break your heart.
Put all this together, these are common reactions to cheating.
So it's understandable that there is never a real and full recovery from such perfidy, from such treason and betrayal.
Some codependent couples, of course, survive. But they're still hobbled by the terrible memories.
The majority of unions disintegrate under the relentless pressure of the revelations about the true nature of one's partner and his or her species misconduct.
When it comes to relationships, cheating is the equivalent of a first degree murder. There is no statute of limitations. There's no way to undo the ubiquitous ruination.
So how does the psychopathic narcissist survive all this? How come the couple doesn't experience any of this?
Well, all the above impacts of cheating assume an existence of a bond, emotions, attachments, functional attachments. It's questionable with a couple whether these exist, whether there's true love, whether there's a true couple and a true attachment.
And it's definitely, definitely doesn't exist with the psychopathic narcissist.
Psychopathic narcissist has a transactional bond with his partner. It's like a business deal. You give me ABC, I give you EDF, and that's it. All the rest, go out, find your own way, get your own satisfaction, leave me alone. It's a deal. It's a deal with very few deal-breakers.
There are four cardinal ways to regulate sex within a committed relationship.
Each of these ways has its own explicit or implicit contract.
The most common way of regulating sex in a relationship is known as sexual exclusivity. The contract says that intimate partners engage in all forms of sex acts as well as flirting and dating only with each other, never with someone outside.
Any sexual, any romantic or emotional interaction with someone outside the relationship is considered cheating and a betrayal of the intimate partner.
That is the most common form of contract still to this very day.
The next step up or down, depending on your point of view about life and sex and couplehood.
Next step is known as don't ask, don't tell. It's becoming more and more common among long term couples, couples who have lived together for 20 or 30 years.
DAT, don't ask, don't tell. The intimate partner in a DAT relationship turns a blind eye to, ignores, denies the facts about his or her partner's infidelity.
He or she implicitly allows his or her partner to date others, to flirt with them and to have all manner of sex acts outside the relationship.
But they have to be the strained partners, the ones who go outside the couple for satisfaction, emotional or sexual or both.
They have to be discreet about their fears. They have to eliminate all the evidence. They have to continue to love their primary partners and to share a life with them exclusively.
Falling in love outside the relationship or setting up a parallel life, second life, is considered not only cheating but a betrayal of the intimate partner.
The next type of sexual regulation within relationships is known as open marriage or open relationship.
It's exactly the same like DAT. Only the partners know about each other's sexual involvement with others and they approve of such escapades.
Falling in love outside the relationship or setting up a parallel life are still considered cheating and also a betrayal of the intimate partner.
Even in open marriage, in open relationships, you're supposed just to have sex or just to have fun or just to have a certain type of emotions like affection or gratitude.
But you're not supposed to fall in love and you're not supposed to abandon your primary partner with the third party.
And then there's, of course, polyamory. The partners in a couple, both partners, are allowed to date, to flirt, to fall in love and to maintain full-fledged relationships. And of course, to have sex with others.
There is no concept of cheating, no concept of betrayal, although the partners are expected to not neglect and not abandon each other in favor of their other lovers.
So these are multiple relationships, multiple co-extant, contemporaneous relationships.
Cuckoldry has a lot to do with sexual fantasy.
And the second half of this video, we're going to analyze the psychology of cuckoldry and swinging.
But before we go there, I would like to discuss the sexual fantasy life of narcissists and psychopaths, because there's a lot of confusion.
Narcissists and psychopaths behave exactly in the same way as swingers and cuckolds.
But not all swingers and cuckolds are narcissists and psychopaths. Actually, I would say small minority are.
Still, it's instructive to have a look at the sexual fantasy life of narcissists and psychopaths.
It reflects, of course, the psychodynamic landscape, their fear of intimacy, their misogyny, their control freakishness or eroticism, latent sadism and masochism, problems of gender identity and various sexual paraphilias deviance. Fantasies which reflect the fear of intimacy involve the aggressive or violent objectification of a faceless, nameless, anonymous, sometimes sexless person, often in impersonal, alien or foreign settings.
So these fantasies, for example, would involve rape or coercion. These usually coalesce with misogynistic erotic storylines in which females are humiliated, coerced into hurtful submission and subjected to violation and degradation by one or by many people in gang banks.
Where sadism, masochism, homosexuality or sexual paraphilias such as pedophilia are present in the fantasies of narcissists and psychopaths. They are injected into the fantasy and color its composition and progression, but they are not the core of the fantasy.
In his fantasies, the narcissist or psychopath is always in unmitigated control of the environment, of course. The assemblages of bodies and limbs which populate his daydreams, his body included, are minutely choreographed to yield maximum titillation.
It's like modern ballet. He is like an exhibitionistic and voyeuristic porn director with an endless supply of well endowed actors, either cowed into compliance or actually craving it.
Naturally, the narcissist fantasies are devoid of any performance anxiety or of the need to reciprocate in the sex act by pleasing his anonymous and robotic partners.
Such imaginarium invariably leads to acts of self-stimulation, the ultimate manifestations of autoeroticism.
Even when the narcissist incorporates his real life partner in his fantasies, he is bound to treat her as a mere prop, a body to masturbate with, in or on. An object to be defiled in acts such as group sex, swinging, wife sharing, wife swapping, outright sexual deviance, urophilia, coprophilia, water sports, golden showers.
This crude and overt denigration serves to render the partner, the intimate partner, a slut or a whore in the narcissist and psychopath's mind, the kind of woman with whom he can have lustful, emotion-free sex.
He reserves love, involvement and intimacy to sexless, Madonna type, sexually inaccessible or unattainable women such as his mother.
The somatic narcissist and psychopath's sexual promiscuity emerges from underlying problems in gender identity.
Many of them are closet bisexuals, cross-dresses and prone to paraphilias such as pedophilia, fetishism and sexual sadism or masochism.
Some narcissists and psychopaths try to act out their fantasies and get their partners to assume roles commendurate with their propensities and predilections and proclivities, however outlandish, illegal or extreme.
A useful test to tell apart healthy sexual fantasies from narcissistic and psychopathic ones is to pose the question, would you be equally satisfied having sex with a sophisticated, inflatable robotic sex doll as with a flesh and blood partner?
And if the answer is yes, the doll would do, the doll would satisfy me as much as a flesh and blood partner, then in all likelihood we are dealing with a narcissist or the psychopath.
They don't really care that you are alive, they care that you perform.
Yet these glimpses into the thwarted and demented rarely go down well with the significant others of psychopaths and narcissists.
The narcissist's self-exposure often elicits reactions of horror, repulsion and estrangement.
And so most narcissists don't even bother to share their fantasies with their so-called intimate others, loved ones, nearest and dearest and insignificant others.
The cerebral narcissist merely retreats to sexual abstinence and celibacy punctuated by compulsive porn-fueled masturbation.
The somatic narcissist compulsively hunts for new feminine prey to sacrifice on the insatiable altar of his former self.
And now we come to cuckolds and swingers.
Cuckolds and swingers also try to convince their partners to participate in threesomes, in group sex, to go to sex clubs.
They want to observe their partners with other people as well. They convert their partners into kind of porn stars.
But the motivation is totally different. The psychology of a typical cuckold or a typical swinger has very little to do with the psychology of a narcissist or a psychopath.
First of all, swingers don't call themselves swingers. They are part of the lifestyle.
The lifestyle includes sexual acts performed by more than two participants, whether in the same space or separately.
It is colloquially known as swinging or wife or spouse swapping, wife or spouse sharing, group sex, and where multiple people interact with a single person, gang banging.
Swinging can be soft, that is engaging in sexual activity with one's own intimate partner, but in the presence of others.
And it also includes acts of kindleism. Candleism is like watching, having other people watch your partner naked.
But most swinging is hard. It's having sex not with one's spouse or mate. And having your spouse and mate have sex with others.
Three sums, there are two types, male-male-female and female-female-male, MMF and FFM. Three sums usually involve male-male-female in the case of cuckolds.
And they're the most common configuration for cuckolds.
For some people, love and pain are flip sides of the same tortured coin.
And so there is pain involved. The cuckold experiences pain.
And some of this pain is sometimes outwardly expressed and sometimes with objects.
There's a whole paraphernalia of objects, which are used in cuckoldry. We'll come to all this.
But before we come to the psychology of cuckolds and swingers, I would like to discuss the concept of intimacy.
Because the initial instinctive reaction of people when they hear about cuckoldry is how do these people manage intimacy?
With so many other people invading the intimate space, the most intimate space, sex, how is intimacy managed?
So intimacy, for some people, is an agony that leads to lustful ecstasy and to an orgy of self-annihilation. The woman in such couples loves with all her being, her quiddity and essence.
When she is rebuffed, she turns into an untouchable stone-faced and cruel Madonna mistress, an unspeakable whore.
The man prostitutes her. He shares her with other men because his arousal crucially subsists on her humiliation and degradation.
And so in these couples, they punish each other via sadistic sex and desired betrayal in a futile attempt to restore justice and sanity to an escalating spiral of obsession and abandonment anxiety.
This is the pathological end of cuckoldry. These are couples who use cuckoldry to torture and punish each other.
Their love becomes a dungeon, their bodies tools of mutual execution.
The people involved in such pathology, and I recommend to you to see the movie Paper Moon, where such a relationship is described.
The people involved in these pathological cuckoldry relationships, they describe these diets, these cuckoldhood, as there's nothing that comes close to them in intensity and color.
I felt exuberantly alive and profoundly entombed.
Such affairs are exhilarating, but not for the faint-hearted.
The psychological background to such unusual pursuits is not clear and has never been studied in depth.
And still, thousands of online chats between active and wannabe adherents and fans in various forums reveal ten psychodynamic principles and strands which underline and are the foundation of cuckoldry.
Now, let it be clear before I proceed. Most cuckoldry in swinging does not involve any mental health issues.
It is the pathological relationship that I described before of couples punishing each other, humiliating.
This is not the typical swinger and not the typical cuckold.
Most of these couples actually in studies show a higher level of satisfaction and happiness with each other than normal couples.
And that goes for couples who exercise BDSM as well.
So the background, the reasons for cuckolding are different.
Let's review them.
The first one is latent and overt bisexuality, bisexuality and homosexuality. Both men and women, but especially women, adopt swinging as a way to sample same-sex experiences in a tolerant, at times, anonymous and permissive environment.
In some reasons, the man ends up having homosexual relationship with the third party, with the third party male, with the lover or the bull.
The woman ends up having sex with the woman in a female-female male relationship.
So it's a way to sample and experience bisexuality and your own homosexuality in an environment where anything goes.
And sex is totally permissive, no one is judging, you can do anything you want.
The second reason is the aforementioned slut Madonna complex.
To be sexually attracted to their spouses, some men need to debase and humiliate them by witnessing their sluttish conduct with others.
These men find it difficult to have regular intimate sex with women to whom they are emotionally attached and whose property is beyond doubt.
Sex is dirty, sex is demeaning, such defiling and debasing, so it should be mechanical, the preserve of whorish and promiscuous partners.
And the more whorish and promiscuous the partner is with another man, the more attractive she becomes.
And vice versa for co-queens.
The third reason is voyeurism and exhibitionism.
They're both rampant in and satisfied by swinging and cuckoldry.
Oftentimes those who partake in the lifestyle document their exploits on video and share photos and saucy verbal descriptions.
Sometimes very publicly just go to Pornhub and you will see their own categories.
Amateur porn and public sex, dogging, are fixtures of swinging.
Cuckoldry often takes place in public spaces, for example, in sex clubs.
The next reason is vicarious gratification.
Couples are typically male swingers who masturbate to the site of their partner having sex with another, usually without actually joining the fray.
So they observe the scene of their partner having sex with another and they masturbate, but they very rarely join the scene while it's taking place.
After the sex is finished, they may have sex with their partners separately. They may also clean up and so on.
So they may then get involved.
But only after the initial activity is terminated.
So their partner has sex with another man, let's say.
They would wait until the sex is over.
And then aroused by the visuals, aroused by the porn movie they've just witnessed and aroused by the fact by the other man's arousal.
They would then have sex with their partners.
There is an issue called sperm competition where men compete with each other whose sperm were fertilized the female.
And so watching another man having sex with your partner raises the levels of and quantity of sperm you produce.
That's a medical scientific fact.
When you watch another man having sex with your partner, there's an increase of 40 percent in sperm production.
These men derive gratification from and are sexually aroused by the evident pleasure experienced by their significant other.
Her vocalizations, body language, body fluids, enraptured movements, orgasm and abandon.
Masochism is a prime motive for a minority of swingers and couples.
They relish in their own agony as they watch their spouse hooking up with others.
They experience envy, pain, anxiety, a sense of humiliation, an overpowering feeling of worthlessness and inadequacy, sinfulness, debauchery, depravity and decadence.
They all conspire to thrill the masochist and delight him as actually a subgenre of cuckoldry, where the cuckold is humiliated by the woman and her lover, literally physically humiliated.
Swinging is also a form of legitimized cheating. It spices up the stale sex lives of the players and neutralizes the emotional and financial risks and threats associated with furtive extramarital escapades.
Many swingers adopt the lifestyle in order to alleviate boredom, counter-routine, realize sexual fantasies, learn new techniques, feel desirable and attractive once more and cope with discrepancies in sex drive.
They insist, swinging saved my marriage.
Some swingers, and especially cakold swingers, use the lifestyle to display or exhibit their partners, casting their partners as desired and desirable trophies or status symbols.
Hot wife, my wife is a hot wife.
Others present may sexually sample the wife, but they never own the wife.
It's a form of restricted access, which causes her suitors much envy and frustrations.
I am the one, the cakold says, I am the one who ends up going home with her.
The swinger brags this way. Swingers brag this way.
They say, well, you've had sex with her once, but I'm the one who gets to take her home and have sex with her as many times as I like.
In this way, they reaffirm their own irresistibility and attractiveness.
It's like a choice is made. She has two men and she chooses the swinger.
The lifestyle is a rollercoaster of serial relationships, mostly with strangers. It is therefore thrilling, risky and exciting, and provokes anxiety, romantic jealousy and guilt for having dragged the partner into the lifestyle, or for not having restrained her or him.
There is also a recurrent fear of losing the partner owing to a growing emotional or sexual bond with one of her casual F bodies or friends with benefits.
Swinging results in an adrenaline rush. It's a high and addictive period of calm after these self-inflicted psycho sexual storms.
Actually, the fact is men push women to participate in three sums, swinging and group sex, but it is women who then persist and insist to continue.
They feel liberated. They feel empowered. They feel they're in control and they make the choices.
In the vast majority of cases, the woman decides who would be the third party sexual partner.
There's a tiny minority of cases where swingers compel or coerce or threaten each other and force upon them total strangers.
Swinging calls for the objectification of sexual partners.
Many swingers prefer to remain anonymous in settings like lifestyle retreats or group sex and orgies.
These people are reduced to genitalia and erogenous zones and meshed in autoerotic and narcissistic acts of masturbatory gratification with other people's bodies as mere props.
Women reported experiencing a new sense of empowerment and mastery, as I mentioned, as they can finally dictate the terms and conditions of sexual encounters.
They peek and choose partners and they realize hitherto suppressed sexual fantasies.
Other practitioners actually prefer to swing only with close friends, using sex as a form of intimacy enhancing recreation and cohesion.
So the sex forces them together. It reminds me that, for example, in ancient Greece and in ancient Macedonia, homosexuality was encouraged among soldiers because it bonded them together. It created unit cohesion. Nudity has a pronounced static damage, and when multiple naked bodies intertwine, the combination can amount to a work of art, a flesh and blood, throbbing sculpture, a tableau vivant.
Many swingers find sex to be the most supreme form of artistic experience, an interconnectedness that enhances empathy and communication and provides extreme sensual pleasure.
Frankly, swinging and so on is great fun. The ultimate in entertainment, when novelty and familiarity merge to give the unique journey with each new entrant.
But you say, what's the connection between cuckold, cheating? Isn't, when the cuckold witnesses his intimate partner with another, isn't he cheating? Doesn't he feel cheated upon?
Is it possible to cheat on a cuckold, a man who gets off of watching his woman make out or copulate with other men?
Well, of course it's possible to cheat on a cuckold.
When the cuckold is not informed of his partner's dalliance with another man, or when, having been informed, he withholds his consent, he says no. Anything his partner does amounts to cheating, and the emotional reaction is the same.
You, I mean, there are even absurd situations where a woman has sex with another man, and there's no problem with that, because it's with consent, and the cuckold is there, and he's watching, and he's aroused, and he gets something out of it.
And then the next day, she kisses that man. No sex, just kissing.
And there's an almighty row, where the cuckold feels cheated upon. He feels that she betrayed his trust. He feels that, you know, it's horrible what she had done.
He reacts exactly like a normal person would react to, to cheating.
Many cuckolds insist on being present during the sex, actively participating in it, directing the scene, placing strict boundaries on permissible behaviors, what you can and cannot do to my wife, and controlling a lot of what goes on.
There is no cheating only if the partner's sex with others elicits positive emotions all around, and overall.
A little jealousy is inevitable, but if the act produces seriously negative emotions, then it's cheating. The act has to be negotiated, has to be agreed to well in advance, has to be, the consent has to be detailed, what can and cannot be done.
There are cues, there are keywords, there are safe words which terminate the process. It is voluntary on both sides. It's not presented as a shocking, shocking and humiliated, fait accompli.
There's very little in common between cuckoldry and cheating. Cheating involves the heartbreaking and disorientating loss of trust, owing to deception and betrayal. The cheating party also mourns the intimacy his partner seemed to have found with another person, and none of these happen in well-regulated lifestyle of swinging and cuckoldry.
There are many non-cuckoldry, non-swinging relationships where cheating is incorporated into the fabric of the relationship.
Some relationships are characterized by a degree of laissez-faire and freedom that border on emotional absenteeism, neglect and abandon. Both members of such couples lead separate lives. They mind their own business. They rarely inquire about the other's whereabouts. Don't ask, don't tell is the ruling regulating principle.
And the reason the members of such couples grant each other such latitude is because one of them is a co-dependent with extreme abandonment anxiety, and the other is a histrionic, a compensatory narcissist, or more rarely, a borderline who wants to be dumped by her intimate partner and preemptively abandons him.
I discussed this in my recent series about borderline women.
And so when such a partner is dumped, she feels good and relieved, even elated, for two reasons.
First of all, it validates her view of herself as a bad and worthless object, usually the main message of introjects, inner voices, inside her.
This partner has been told in childhood that she's bad, she's corrupt, she's no good.
And being dumped by the intimate partner validates that, tells her that it's true.
Her inner voice is a sadistic narcissistic. Her mother probably was sadistic narcissistic. Her role models, her teachers, her peers, I know.
But she seeks, her entire life is an attempt to validate and confirm what these voices are saying.
And the second reason she feels relief is because being dumped prevents intimacy.
Such partners hate intimacy. They fear intimacy. Intimacy suffocates them.
They feel imprisoned, incarcerated, dead, strangled. Being dumped puts an end to this threat.
So they push their partners to dump them by being avoidant, passive aggressive, plain aggressive and verbally abusive.
If, no matter what they do, no matter what they try, their partners keep loving them, they actually feel deeply frustrated.
They begin to hate the patient, loyal and loving part. They begin to hate him viscerally and all heartedly.
People with certain personality disorders, mainly borderline narcissistic, compulsive, obsessive, schizoid people, paranoid, these people have what we call a persecretary object.
It is a tormenting, devaluing and sadistic inner voice interject. It repeatedly and authoritatively informs them that they are bad, worthless, weak, immoral and a disappointment degenerate.
Such an inner critic, a relentless, integrated prosecutor and judge is, of course, intolerable.
In an attempt to exercise it, the patient projects it, usually onto an intimate partner.
The spouse, mate or lover, then become the outer embodiment or reification of the internal agonizing construct.
The patient tries to coerce and shoehorn the intimate partner into behaving in a way that upholds his newfound status as an enemy and a threat.
And this defense mechanism is known as projective identification.
If the intimate partner has his own issues, he will comply in his newly assigned role. He will transform himself into an abuser, and this is known as interjective identification.
The patient then proceeds to rebel against her externalized persecutory object, her intimate partner. She starts to punish him. She starts to defy him by behaving, for example, promiscuously, by cheating, being a slut or a whore. By envying and sabotaging her partner's career, by possibly aggressively challenging and provoking him, humiliating, rejecting and undermining his well-being, his self-esteem, compromising his public image, standing in society, penalizing him in a myriad other ways.
But what matters to our conversation is that sometimes the lifestyle, swinging, threesome, cuckoldry, they are integrated into this dynamic.
The borderline spouse or mate or partner pushes her intimate partner to force her to become a slut. She wants him to coerce her into orgies or threesomes or swinging. She pushes his buttons so that he becomes the abuser that she wants him to become.
Naturally, such a person then expects some kind of penalty. She understands that she had misbehaved. For example, if she pushed her partner and they ended up having a threesome, and her partner is devastated by the threesome, he's not an inbred, he's not a built-in or a natural cuckold, but he was pushed into cuckoldry or he was pushed into a threesome by his borderline partner.
And so he's devastated.
In the patient field, the borderline partner, the spouse, feels that she had misbehaved. And she expects a penalty commensurate with her egregious misbehaving. She becomes paranoid, hypervigilant and exceedingly anxious.
And these dissonant emotions only augment her perception of the intimate partner as a source of unmitigated sadistic control and judgment.
An imminent and omnipresent threat, the fount of ambivalence, love-hate relationship.
You see, if you are afraid of intimacy, you will choose a partner who is equally afraid of intimacy.
We all seek love or at least companionship, but some of us dread these things even as they look for them. Even as we look for them, we dread them. And this is called ambivalence.
The intimacy-averse members of a dyad will both make sure to travel alone a lot, keep exhaustively, exhaustingly busy, be absent from home, withhold sex or abstain from it, cheat on their mates, have emotional and sexual affairs with others and so on.
All this to destroy any possibility for intimacy and any nascent intimacy.
Living together creates intimacy and genders intimacy automatically.
But most importantly, they abuse and statistically torment each other and very often cuckoldry and the lifestyle swinging are used for these purposes as a weapon.
But why the compelling need to hurt a partner? The obvious answer is that abuse and intimacy are mutually exclusive.
In an abusive relationship, there is little risk of intimacy and lots of risk of avoidance.
But there are two additional reasons.
One, people with fear of intimacy have intense and overpowering emotions of shame and guilt. They choose abusers as their partners because being abused is their comfort zone and affirms their self-perception as bad, worthless, orish, dumb and deserving of punishment. They force their mates to abuse them.
I mentioned before, projective and introjective identification.
And the second reason is that abuse legitimizes and justifies cheating. Simply, if you're abused, it's okay for you to cheat. It legitimizes adultery and infidelity and extramarital dalliances.
He's abusing me so he deserves what I'm doing to you.
Sex addicts, adrenaline junkies like psychopaths, labile people with emotional dysregulation, borderline and histrionic personality disorder and somatic gnosis. They're all in need of sexual novelty and constant coquests to regulate and stabilize their sense of self-worth, self-confidence and self-esteem.
So these kinds of partners need abuse as an excuse. Of course, I'm promiscuous and I'm cheating on my partner all the time with many others, but it is all his fault.
He's abusing, rejecting, mistreating and humiliating. She deserves her punishment and I need to feel desired, wanted, loved and careful again.
This is especially bad when a male narcissist targets a female psychopath.
Before I continue, today we increasingly reconceive of borderline personality disorder as a form of secondary psychopathy in females, in women.
Women borderline is most probably a female variant of psychopathy, secondary psychopathy.
I have a whole video dedicated to this.
So what happens when a male narcissist targets a borderline or a now trite female psychopath as his source of secondary narcissistic supply, as his so-called intimate partner.
He ends up being traumatized by her, but why and how?
The psychopath challenges and obliterates the narcissist's grandiose self-perceptions and assumptions. She challenges and obliterates his fantasy of being unique, being special to her.
The psychopath's promiscuity, risk seeking reckless behaviors and addictions to novelty and thrills, render the narcissist just one of her many sexual conquests. She's an adrenaline junkie. She needs him and she needs many others.
He's nobody, he's a member, he's a statistic. She never gets emotionally attached to him. She never misses him.
To her, he's just another notch in her belt, a mere mere casualty of her teasing power plays with men. A roadkill or, at best, a preferred option that failed.
He is soon forgotten as she moves on. She literally raises him within minutes. She cheats on him as she had done to all her previous men.
The narcissist believes in his unique ability to detect lying and he takes pride in his intelligence and resistance to being duped.
But narcissists are very gullible. The psychopathic female uses the narcissist's thirst for narcissistic supply. She manipulates the narcissist with half-truths and outright lies. She tells the narcissist what he wants to hear. She flatters the narcissist, rewrites her own history to render the narcissist a unique rescuer.
She deceives the narcissist repeatedly. She appeals to his grandiosity. She fakes everything from emotions through tears to orgasms. And the narcissist laps it up, locks, token, barrel. He gets taken in.
And when he discovers the truth, his grandiosity is shattered beyond reconstruction.
And finally, the narcissist holds himself to be irresistible.
But the psychopath is not interested in him. She's goal-oriented. She wants his money, his contacts, his protection, his prestige, something. She's a gold digger or social climber. He's a sugar daddy. She slips her way to the top.
When the narcissist finds out that he had been merely used and abused as an instrument, he is wounded to the quick.
And all these narcissistic injuries often evolve into a form of ruminative obsession or stalking as the narcissist tries in vain to integrate the painful experiences into his view of himself, his grandiose view of himself, as godlike, omniscient and desirable.
The psychopathic woman, borderline in most cases, gives the narcissist a taste of his own medicine. And it is bitter, sometimes threatens what is left of his sanity and even life.
Enter cuckoldry and swinging.
The narcissist uses cuckoldry, swinging, group sex and other forms of objectifying sex to distance his intimate partner.
It's like she is not my intimate partner. I'm merely an observer, an inspector. She is a porn star.
By distancing her, he takes away her weapons. She has no power over him. He proves to her, and more importantly to himself, that he is not attached to her, that there's no bond, and therefore she cannot hurt him, never mind what she does. Actually, he preempts her inevitable cheating and ineluctable transition to other partners. He preempts it by introducing these other partners into the relationship, ab initio from the beginning. It's his way of co-opting, compromising and preempting her weapons in this eternal power play and war that is a relationship between narcissists and psychopaths or narcissists and borderlines. And so lifestyle, swinging, cuckoldry in these relationships has a function of estrangement, of alienation, of rendering the partners each other's gratification objects.
Let's clear up some misconceptions.
Even members of a couple are having sex only with others. It is not an open marriage or an open relationship. It's legitimized cheating.
One of the partners is usually co-dependent and gives in to the other's blackmail, allows her to cheat on him.
Such a so-called open relationship is about clinging, control, intercouple, power matrix and power play.
In swinging, if one of the parties is passive and just observes his partner having sex with others, she or he is a cuckooing or cuckold, not a lifestyle swinger.
Swinging requires the full participation and interaction of everyone involved.
Spouse swapping is a form of swinging that involves actually cuckoldry.
If the parties lie and deceive each other about their whereabouts and their activities, they are being unfaithful, end of story, even if they have an open marriage in a relationship.
Don't ask, don't tell means, no questions asked, but also no lies told.
The problem with cuckoldry in swinging is that sometimes it devolves into cheating.
Sometimes the intimate partner gets attached to her bull or lover or third party that she had met.
It's very rare to jump into bed straight away.
You have a few coffees, you have a few dinners and you have a few meals, you eat, you talk, you get intimate. There's intimacy generated.
And so there's a risk where there's intimacy, there's a risk of abandonment and loss and rejection.
And the problem is that it gets easier with time.
First-time transgressions, cheating on your spouse, doing drugs, whatever, involve emotional preparedness, being bored or frustrated, possessing a lower arousal or no boredom threshold, in psychopaths, for example.
So you need to be emotionally prepared to cheat, you need to be disinhibited, you need to overcome your guilt and shame owing to peer pressure, socialization, environment.
So you go into a foreign city, you drink alcohol, you change the setting, change the ambience somehow, trying to overcome, trying to disinhibit.
Another thing you need in first-time transgressions.
So first-time transgressions, you need to be emotionally prepared, you need to disinhibit, overcome guilt and shame, you need to lose your impulse control, you need to be impulsive, and you need to make a cognitive choice, go for it or go and get it.
This is the first time. The second time is totally different.
After the first time, cheating became a habit with practice moves. Habituation often leads to addiction, a form of compulsion.
A confluence of physiological and psychological factors conspire to render the newly formed behavior a pattern, the thrill of the illicit or the dangerously risky and reckless.
So destructiveness or masochism, cheating is often used to achieve self-trashing, self-punishment. Affirmation of oneself as bad and worthy object, as a whore, as a slut.
And of course, the bodily effects of such actions, they all conspire to habituate cheating.
The more one engages in swinging, three sons, group six, orgies, cuckoldry, the more your intimate partner is habituated to being with other men or being with other women.
And this habituation is very dangerous because it easily exits the agreed framework.
There are two types of habits, intensive and extensive.
Intensive habits like smoking or binging or food or libation. Intensive habits cater to and satisfy a limited array of needs and cravings, predilections and proclivities, pathologies and wishes. They're easier to dispense with.
But extensive habits like cheating or antisocial conduct, they're very difficult to get rid of because they gratify and satisfy and reflect the totality of the personality, its quirks, its idiosyncrasies, its deepest needs.
The serial cheater, the serial adulterer brings into play every aspect and dimension of who she or he is.
Only a miracle can slow her down. Same goes for the drug addict, pathological gambler, alcoholic, shopaholic, I mean anyholic. These are deep set entrenched behaviors.
Finally, we come to the question of cuckolds, swingers and in the pathological end of the spectrum, psychopathic narcissists.
Why do these people need to be in a couple? Why do they need at all to have intimate partners?
Why do, for example, narcissists seek intimacy if they find it so startling and reprehensible? Why do they get married if the marital bond feels more like a prison? Why do they commit?
Love-bomb court propose if all the time they experience themselves as hostages within a growing attachment.
Typically they end up ghosting, undermining the intimacy, cheating, deceiving, lying and becoming passive-aggressible, even aggressive outright.
But why go through this cycle countless times?
It also happens a lot with swingers and cuckolds.
People pursue intimacy because it feels wonderful to be unshackled and freed from the demands of an intimate relationship.
Breaking up induces in the narcissist an intoxicating and addictive manic euphoria.
The narcissist seeks closeness and commitment in order to renege, withdraw and undermine.
When he cheats on his spouse, when he absents himself from her life, when he dumps her, he feels omnipotent, he feels thrilled, he feels elated and liberated.
Suddenly even the sky is not the limit.
The narcissist's ideal romantic partner is someone who colludes in this approach of witness repetition compulsion by embracing him and restoring the form intimacy every time he returns from his forays of destructive or obstructive independence.
She herself may engage in the very same behaviors, out of the very same reasons. She may have an oppressive dread of true love, companionship and togetherness.
These couples are like two magnets, sometimes with the opposite poles, so they attract, sometimes with the same poles, so they reject each other.
Relationships between men and women are at an all-time nadir, and they begin to border on open hostility and hatred.
But people remain married to cheating spouses. That's a fact. Adultery is rarely given as a cause, in divorce cases, for example.
And they keep bringing children to the world. Children is the ultimate manifestation of intimacy.
Majority of swinging couples and majority of couples have children together. That's a fact.
How come?
If you don't want to go single, it is rational to choose to stay with your current cheating partner. There is a 56% chance that your next partner will also cheat on you, and there's a 73% chance that your second marriage will end up in a divorce.
Cheating and deception are the new normal. Trust, a thing of the distant past.
Marriages have become zero-sum wrestling matches. Hence, prenups and the bargaining industries of couple therapists, divorce attorneys and mediators.
Intimacy is such a primordial and basic need that when deprived of it for prolonged periods of time, people are driven to despotence.
And these six substitutes, even in small doses, they can't tolerate a loneliness.
Many people can tolerate loneliness and even like it, but there are precious few who can tolerate a loneliness.
Actually, the precious few who can tolerate a loneliness, they are considered to be a mental health pathology, schizoid personality.
But people can't find real intimacy. They can't.
But swinging and the lifestyle of cuckoldry imitate real intimacy. They combine total tolerance and openness.
Like, I'll give you the gift of another person. I'll give you the gift of another man or another woman.
Indeed, many cases of cuckoldry and swinging are presented as birthday gifts. I'm giving a birthday gift to my husband. I brought him a beautiful woman.
So combination of openness, tolerance and love on the one hand and extreme intimacy of the other.
Because truly, there are very few experiences which generate such deep abiding intimacy as watching your intimate partner with another man. That's her. That's her ultimate and total profound intimacy. And she had invited you as a privileged witness. There's nothing more intimate than this.
So instant intimacy, fake intimacy, simulated intimacy and transient intimacy are all nowadays preferred to no intimacy at all.
And hence the skyrocketing incidents of casual sex and the pervasiveness of dating and cheating apps.
Intimacy with anyone whosoever is vastly better, vastly preferable to no intimacy whatsoever.
When starved for intimacy, people comb themselves into shared psychosis with others, abuse substances, to doubt their senses and remove inhibitions.
They somatize intimacy. They use sex to feel intimate. They reframe intimacy, for example, by joining cults or by becoming members of reference groups.
In extreme cases of recurrent failures to generate intimacy, people resort to self intimacy, a solipsistic and schizoid attempt to become their own best friends and companions in lieu of frustrating objects out there.
The self intimate glorify aloneness within an ideology of personal autonomy, agency and self sufficiency.
They purport to be totally self efficacious. They interpret feeling lonely and the need for significant others as weaknesses of character.
And they zealously castigate both the forms, both as forms of social control.
They say that feeling lonely and the need for significant others are weaknesses and they are forms of social control.
They are chauvinism, patriarchy, feminism, pathological self delusion.
You have whole movements like MGTOW and so on that essentially glorify aloneness or independence from the other sex.
Narcissistic self intimates conflate separateness with uniqueness and accomplishment.
So they would say, I am totally self sufficient. That makes me unique. That is my accomplishment.
To some people intimacy is like cryptolite, both sought after and feared.
And the result is an intricate and crazy making dance dubbed approach avoidance repetition compulsion.
And another aspect of this ambivalence is what I call the menu scraps dichotomy.
Those who truly seek intimacy won the entire menu of interpersonal togetherness from intensive talking to romanticized sex.
The intimacy challenge make do and are fully satisfied with scraps. They feel threatened and overwhelmed by the totality of the intimacy menu.
They get by on occasional snippets of talk, on rare sex and swaths of personal space and time apart.
So there are people who regard intimacy as a five course sumptuous French dinner and people who regard intimacy as a fast food hamburger.
The two types are utterly incompatible. They make each other profoundly unhappy, yet oddly they are inexorably attracted to each other.
The menu types, the French dinner types, are parental fixes by nature. And the scraps people, the people who regard intimacy as a fast food in and out thing, they crave the unbridled and unconditional intimacy preferred by their antithesis.
And they dread it.
So mixed couples, mixed couples, those who need lots of intimacy in all its forms and those who need hints of intimacy and snippets of intimacy, they invariably end up in a mushroom cloud of agonizing mayhem and unmitigated catastrophe.
They may drive each other to insanity and suicide and at the very least subject one another to excruciating pain as the menu person tries to alter and modify the scraps or the fast food person.
And the fast food person withdraws further and further and resorts to desperate measures such as cheating or reckless behaviors in order to undo the bone and revert to pristine loneliness.
It is the fast food person in the couple who would push for this intimacy.
And one of the major ways to this intimate is swinging or caudry. Force your partner to watch you with other people. Force your partner to watch you with other people. Something gets broken. Something irreversible and irrevocable gets broken in the French dinner people, in those who adore love and are immersed in intimacy.
Coming back to the issue of kids. I mentioned that everyone in, most people in swinging, most wingers and couples have children. That includes psychopathic gnosis.
Why have kids with someone you cannot stand? The opposite sex.
Because of the signaling value of having kids. Parenthood is used to send a series of messages to oneself and to one's social milieu. And the messages are, I'm a proper man. I'm a proper woman. I am not a psychosexual or social deviant. I'm not a pervert. I'm normal. I conform to the values and morals of my society.
And so many closet gays, closet homosexuals, they get married. As a cover, kind of. You see, I'm married. I'm not homosexual. In homophobic societies and cultures, it's very common.
Another message is, I'm accomplished. I have a family. I'm leaving something behind me to prove that I had existed. I'm not immature. I'm not selfish. I'm responsible, functional, adult.
Kids are used as a currency in transactional marriages, as a way for the men to exert control over the woman and inhibit her behaviors. And as a way for the woman to bind her and to her offspring as a form of financial annuity.
Last issue is the issue of our visceral reaction to emotionless sex.
When people are forced to watch or asked to watch swinging videos, videos with cuckolds, videos of casual sex, gangbanging, dogging, glory holds. I mean, when they're forced to watch this intimate objectifying sex, they react. I mean, they become nauseous. They're on the verge of puking.
Why this visceral reaction? Why the?
Because, you see, all animal species practice sex without intimacy or emotions. Human beings are a very advanced animal, but still an animal. I mean, why not human beings? What's the problem? Why this linkage between sex and emotion? Where did it come from? Is it a biological, psychological reality, physiological reality, or is it an invention, for example, of the Victorian era or the age when we created monogamy in order to secure property rights, in order to secure the paternity?
Maybe we came up with the invention of monogamy, one man, one woman, to make sure the woman doesn't cheat and have children with others and to make sure that our property and wealth go to the right successors, heirs and recipients.
Maybe this whole story of sex should only go with emotions. Maybe it was invented by men to subjugate women exactly as radical feminists are suggesting. Maybe sex has died to do with emotions.
Yes, sex creates hormonal cascades. That's very true.
And some of these hormones are also involved in attachment and bonding, oxytocin, others. That's also true. All this is true. But so what? The same hormones are involved in numerous other reactions, for example, breastfeeding. So the hormonal evidence is not very convincing. It looks a lot more like a societal edict. You should not have sex without emotions. And a lot more like something that benefits men, because men allow themselves for millennia to have sex without emotions. Prostitutes cater to men, mostly.
So why the righteous brook how about it?
First of all, there's the issue of species. Humans are supposed to be superior to animals. We should never give in to our animal nature. We should transcend it.
It is a form of grandiosity. It's fostered originally by religious teaching, starting with Genesis.
Then there's the issue of conflating and confusing lust and love, emotional intimacy with physical intimacy. Casual sex amounts to masturbating with the body of a nearly anonymous partner, an animated dildo, a sophisticated and unpredictable sex door replete with smells and taste.
Casual sex, one might stand, has nothing whatsoever to do with sex in committed loving relationships. It involves intimacy, of course. There's no such thing as sex without intimacy. The minute you smell another person, there's intimacy. But it involves a highly restrictive type of intimacy.
Being in love is very glorified in Western culture. And so we are in love with infatuation itself. We're addicted to falling in love.
Some people fall in love with their sexual partners, even after one night's ten.
This complicates matters. It leads to heartbreak that is best avoided altogether.
And so that's why we frown upon casual sex, because it can lead to a mismatch of expectations and heartbreak.
But I personally, the only thing that seriously bothers and worries me about casual sex, and I've had my share, of course, the only thing that bothers me is that it has become the norm.
It's a standard practice now, hookup culture.
Among those born after 1995, it's the primary and sometimes exclusive sexual activity. That's bad news. It's extremely bad news.
It may affect their ability to form meaningful intimate relationships. The jury is still out of this one, but it stands to reason. It definitely predisposes the members of these generations to regard sex as nothing more significant than any other bodily function and renders them way more prone to cheating. Cheating is indeed dramatically up among both genders. Reckless sexual behaviors are also linked to substance abuse in such settings.
But if having sex is no different to eating food and you allow yourself to have food with men who are not your husband and with women who are not your wife, why not have sex with them? If eating with another woman is okay and sex is like eating, why not have sex with them?
The very concept of cheating is diluted by casual sex to nothingness. It was meaningless, is the common phrase.
The preponderance of emotional sex is a problem, not the act itself.
And this is equally true in swinging and in cuckoldry. There's no value judgment of swinging and cuckoldry. There's only the worry that the spreading of these practices and they are up dramatically.
It's been published, I think, two years ago. A billion wicked thoughts, stunning, amazing masterpiece.
They analyzed one billion search terms on Google, search words, keywords on Google. They discovered that cuckoldry is one of the most popular actually search terms in Google. Cuckoldry is becoming very normative and very, very widespread. As is swinging, it is estimated today that anywhere between three to five percent, three to five percent of all couples exercise swinging.
There are no statistics about cuckoldry and cuckoldry and swinging are not coterminous. Very few swingers are actually cuckolds. And very few, although all cuckolds technically swing, but very few swingers are cuckolds.
So you have to add it's additive. I would say that about 10 percent of couples are in open marriage, open relationship, exercise cuckoldry and exercise swinging.
And there's nothing wrong with these activities per se, but the fact that they're spreading their preponderance, their prevalence, is becoming a serious problem, a hindrance and an obstacle and a blockage to meaningful relationships.
And without meaningful relationships, we are all atoms, atoms in the wind. We are bereft. We are in a constant state of mourning without the other. We are not self sufficient animals. We are zoned political as of historical social animals.
And in the absence of intimacy, in the absence of meaningful others, significant others, we find no solace. We grieve. We grieve until we die.