Love, Trust, Sexual Cheating, Lust, and Betrayal

The late radical libertarian-socialist psychiatrist and critic of medical and biological psychiatry, R. D. Laing, had some very good views on the subject matters of the title of this article, but his views on these things in his book The Facts of Life, and in a lecture he gave just before he died, are quite incomplete, and I intend here in this article to shed just a glimpse of light on what I know about the whole highly complex and detailed deconstructed picture and reality of all these matters.

What Laing said on these matters, is that lot of people are caught in a trap, that if you love someone, or if you think you love someone or want to love someone, they also feel that they ought to trust or believe the person they love, because they love them, but he didn't see that this follows at all.

The example Laing then gave of his views on these matters, is that there was a married couple he once knew who were married for quite a few years, and one afternoon after the wife had been sleeping upstairs in the bedroom alone, whilst her husband was downstairs, she came downstairs, and there was her husband lying naked on the living-room sofa with a naked woman. So she said "What is that naked woman doing in my house on my sofa!?", to which her husband without missing a beat, turned round to her and said "That isn't a woman, that's a waterfall!", and she felt that she was spinning around and might faint, and she had to hang on to her sense of reality, because she had developed the ingrained habit of trusting him and believing him. When her husband said "That is a waterfall!" she believed him, on the other hand this waterfall had all the appearance and shape of a naked woman on the sofa, but that was impossible, it couldn't be, so was she dreaming?, was she in the middle of a dream?, is this real?

Laing then said, that some people in that moment of a tidal, lose themselves by believing what they're told, at the expense of then you can't believe your eyes, you can't believe your ears, and that crisis when a person discovers that the person that they trusted is deceiving them, hasn't actually got a name for it, and that crisis is sometimes mistaken for jealousy - that there's a possibility of jealousy in discovering that deception in love, but there's also the pain of the discovery that the person that one hoped or felt loved oneself, has betrayed one, has deceived one, and that may entail a revision of innumerable events in one's own life.

Laing then said, that it's the truth and love deprivation that really hurts (taking away certain choices from the other person) - deprivation of reality - that one is being deprived of access to what is going on, and very often that sets-up a real literally mind-boggling conflict, of are you to believe the evidence of your own intuition or your own senses?, or are you to believe what the other person says? Laing says that the two things are often mistakenly seen as the same thing, but that love (charity, or compassion) - and desire and lust - are two very different things, but that real love is the very opposite of any kind of illusory, any kind of simulation of some kind of modicum of love and/or desire that they don't feel, and that any illusion, any idealisation, and any despising, in any way that we have of projecting or denying the existence of the other person as he or she is in his or her own is-ness, is not loving them.

Laing concludes on these matters by saying, that really to be with another person in a completely open-hearted and unguarded way, where one is not in one's own part somehow or other cancelling, or changing, or altering, or modifying who that other person really is to suit one's own book - but that co-presence, being actually present to each other without reservation and pre-condition of what someone might call "communion", is the perfection of what and how we're ordinary meant to be together, and that this is the only peace there can possibly be.

To now give my own example on all these matters, I was very interested in the fact, that when a Russian woman told me that a man who she loved and was a relationship with as her partner at the time cheated on her with affairs, that she very cleverly, creatively, and intuitively said that she was "madly enamoured in him". This means, reveals, explains, and very strongly and heavily suggests, that a big part of the reason why he cheated and had affairs against her, is that despite his own enamoured being, ideas, and behaviours against her, that he also sees her in the same way as exactly the same as he is, but that she is very accurately and ethically refusing to negatively conform or retaliate to this.

I then told this Russian woman, that this cheating man's main problem, is that he doesn't and can't see her as the very loving and loyal person that she actually is, that his vision and feelings are very limited and distorted, and that he was cheating on her by having affairs, because he wants her to negatively conform to the inaccurate and stereotyped image of her that he has, and what's more, he expects and wants her to cheat back on him in retaliation; but again she is very ethically not negatively conforming to him in this way, and she has broken off the very unhealthy and bad kind of relationship with her that he seems to want.

He essentially and basically wants her to enter into a very bad, negative, and limited mutual game with him, where both he and she cheat on each other, but as she said to me, this is not healthy, ethical, or wise to play with people's feelings and emotions in this way, he is over-focusing on lust and not love, and he is not wanting to integrate, progress, and transform love and lust into something more enlightened, socially and interpersonally useful, productive, creative, and greater.

If he cheated on her by having affairs, and kept this a secret and didn't tell her, then that might be different, as she simply may not know he is doing this, although she saw him in the street kissing other women, but as he told her that he is cheating on her, it does seem that again, in actual fact he is expecting and wanting her to do this back to him in retaliation. So whilst it seems that he is simply being sadistic by hating on her, there is also a negative, limited, and fragmented element of masochism in his intentions and feelings, and in this case he has a limited and distorted notion and idea of sexual-love relationships.

If he wants to mutually cheat on women he pretends or says he loves, I told her that I'm sure he can find some other woman who is willing to allow her to do this to him, and who will cheat on him back in retaliation and mistreat him in this way, but I then said to her, that as she said, it is very wrong and counter-productive for him to try to impose or force this false idea of sexual-love relationships upon her, when this is not what she wants, and not what she freely and equally chooses and wishes to do.

It also seems that this cheating guy, also very falsely and inaccurately thinks that by cheating on her and telling her that he is doing this, that this will make her love him, and I don't know where he has learnt this bad behaviour and false or limited emotional mind-set and pattern from, but he simply has a misconception, misperception, and wrong expectation, and he is simply wrong that cheating by having affairs in this way makes people love each other.

If a person cheats and has affairs, this is lust and doesn't necessarily mean that this person doesn't love the woman or man they are cheating and having affairs against (indeed it can often mean, that they are very inaccurately, unwisely, and inadequately trying to socially and psychologically integrate their lust and love for the person they are cheating against, in order to love them and others even more), but it is also true and a fact that this cheating and affairs behaviour, does not make the person being cheated against, controlled, and victimised in this way want to love them back, nor make them want to love them nor other people back any more, and by itself this doesn't increase love nor make it genuine, nourishing, nurturing, and holistically and potentially mutual, individual, entrusting, frank, true, real, and sincere.