Dear lostcloud:

I suppose the possibility I brought up regarding what motivates him was not correct. Looking for another then.. you wrote that his mother wore the trousers in the family and “His dad was a figure in the background- present but with no real influence over him or his brother”-

-maybe he empathized with his father and was angry at his mother for demasculating his father, for taking center stage and pushing his father to the background. So he did purposefully do what he could do to help out his father, sending a message to his father: see, she doesn’t control me! I don’t do what she wants me to do! And you can too can stop allowing her to control you!

It is amazing to see how children adopt behaviors that look despicable but those very behaviors are born out of love. In this case, if I am correct this time, it is his love for his father that motivates him to be the cheat that he is.

If this possibility is correct, how sad it is that he is stuck in a behavior that harms him long term and brings misery to the women involved as well as to the children he may have in the future.

You wrote about his current girlfriend (one of a few girlfriends perhaps), “She has dismissed me and seems ‘smug’ with her ‘prize'”- soon enough, sadly, she will see herself the quotation marks in the sentence you wrote, she will find out the prize is a “prize”.

Likely she already knows.

Where are you going from here?

anita