What I would tell Edwards if I knew him well...

[MonteLukast]

Dear John:

I don't get you right now. I can't pin down how you're acting.
In spite of everything that's about to be revealed by your ex-aide, you seem confident as ever that your version of events is true and his is false. I happen to agree with you, and passionately hope you're right.

Reading between the lines, you're a man who's, without saying it outright, making the case that your liaison ended in 2006. No significant campaign damage... no, really. You'd just barely announced. There wasn't much, at that time, to damage. If this is the case, your focusing on helping people and avoiding the ghosts of the past makes much more sense.
No baby either. You're letting nothing get out about how you felt about either baby or mother. That suggests strongly to me, that you have very little emotional connection to either one.
I've seen how you act around those you feel love and connection to. I've seen the joy in your eyes whenever you embraced your wife or your children. I've seen you remain just as loving to them even right in the middle of the affair. It even fooled your wife, to the point where she never even realized your videographer was female.
That's actually in your favor. You don't act like a man who feels such passion for this other woman, that you were willing to sacrifice everything dear to you. That's making me feel like the baby can't possibly be yours... because I'd expect to see a bit more tension or longing in your expression, if it were.

I bring up passion, because that's what's behind the Sanford affair-- you can go along in a marriage you believe to be happy, and out of the blue be hit with "lightening strikes", and realize just how much you really were missing passion and romance.
What kind of woman would seize you with such passion, that you could forget your 30-year very loving and passionate marriage and put your every professional ambition at risk? That's not the same kind of woman you seem to have very little affect for afterwards. Even if at one time you felt something very intense for her, you show no sign of it now.
Unless I were missing my guess, you're acting like a man who wants the hell out of this affair, and wishes he could forget it ever happened.
You're acting like a man who never truly felt love or passion for her. As well you shouldn't. You already know what real love and passion feel like-- from your wife!

Too bad you had to pick the worst possible person with whom to have an affair.

Apparently, what made you think you needed her was her skill with a compliment. Don't you realize that compliments are one of the major ways sociopaths reel people in?
Probably not. The main media image of a sociopath is a violent serial killer... which greatly misleads people, because in reality, the vast majority of SPs are NOT violent. In fact, they are perhaps even better than normal people at blending in and making themselves presentable.

Did she spice up her compliments so they weren't just any OLD compliments, they were specifically tailored to your life, your wants and needs? And therefore, you were more likely to appreciate them and find them especially thoughtful? There's a name for that technique. It's called "mirroring". Which goes to show you that sociopaths turn everything they touch to shit, even empathy.
link: (http://www.appletreeblog.com/?p=210)

And don't underestimate just how big a part love and sex plays in the SP's scheme to earn your trust and make you need them:

Sociopaths convincingly proclaim their enduring love and their sexual desire for us. Not realizing the pervasive deceit of these predators, we believe that they love us. We have sex with them, and the sex is great. Many Lovefraud readers have been amazed at the sociopath’s sexual appetite and prowess.
Therefore, sociopaths hijack our brain through our feelings of love and the bonds of sex. In their seductions, they turn the natural psychological and chemical functions of our brains against us.
--From Lovefraud.com

Do not marry this woman. EVER. Not even if EE has been gone for decades. Not even if she's the last woman on earth.
She's no more capable of being a life partner than a dishrag is. Her supposed love and sexual attraction was all a tactic, to get you to trust her, believe in her, and depend on her.
Constructive, life-giving passion is not supposed to make you lose your good judgment, your standing, even your sense of self.

A final note: do you think your children would respect you if you allowed this woman to become their stepmother? How do you think Wade would have reacted?

[cherokeeprogressive]

1. "What WERE you thinking, you STUPID FUCK?" n/t

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

2. I would tell him to keep his damn pants zipped,

and don't blame the girlfriend. She may be a sleaze, or even a sociopath, but he chose to do the horizontal tango with her; nobody made him do it. He didn't just trip and fall into her accidentally. He's responsible and he's a damn hound dog. No excuses.

[emilyg]

6. +10

[beachmom]

3. Why do you keep blaming the affair on the mistress? I mean, it was JRE who took an oath, not her.

You need to get over John Edwards. Completely. Quit him, 100%, so that you can move on with your life.

[MonteLukast]

7. I keep placing the blame where I do...

... because most people indeed do not understand sociopaths. Not even many of those trained in psychology. It's precisely because JE acted so out-of-character-- like watching your car turn into an elephant before your eyes-- that I suspect the mistress is one.
Now, I probably don't understand them, either; as well as I should, but I'm trying to; and indeed if we're missing a crucial lesson about this affair because we're too focused on the usual condemnations, we're doing ourselves a grave disservice.

I'd post in the candidate page so I wouldn't have to do it here, but I have no donor star. That's also why I haven't been hanging out at the Kerry page either.
I'm glad people are lightening up about his latest joke, instead of acting like they did with "stuck in Iraq".

[cali]

9. how do you know that the he acted out of character? You don't.

johny hedgefund was a sleaze even without the rielle hunter affair. Some of us knew that years ago.

[Tangerine LaBamba]

4. He's a guy who cheats on his wife,

who probably has done it before - let's be realistic here.

He's not the first, won't be the last.

But, what is this post about? I mean, do you think JE is going to read it, looking for life advice?

He's history. Time to move on to things that matter.

Like Michael Jackson..........

:sarcasm:

[virgogal]

5. Are you obsessed? Move on.

[cali]

8. sure, a man with no connection to ex-mistress and her kid, meets up with her and the kid

at a hotel in the middle of the night. uh huh.

My letter to johny hedgefund? I hope you make things right with your family and please stay the fuck away from politics. we don't want your phony crap.

[checks-n-balances]

10. I don't know if she's a SP, but I think he's a Narcissist of some kind

I agree with the others that he probably won't ever read this, but it's too bad he can't take your advice, especially for his wife & children's sake.

"How do you think Wade would have reacted?" is a good question.

[MonteLukast]

11. If I can send it to the right place, he might read it.

And yes... I do have my reasons for harping on this. The affair is a sort of proxy. It has stirred up a whole slew of questions I've wrestled with for years-- for one, how to make your life extraordinary without violating boundaries.
RH is, for me, very illustrative of this. One the one hand, I consider her an SP; on the other hand, she's simply a woman incredibly driven to make her life as full and exciting as possible. She simply went about it the wrong way.

There are serious social sanctions if you go about "making your life extraordinary" in the wrong way. Starting with being thought of as disruptive. Your empathy is questioned; your outgoingness and vivacity become liabilities instead of assets; and in an attempt to correct the problem you become obsessively focused on other people's reactions, thinking about how to "game" their feelings and handling emotions in an overly calculated way.
In short, you may not be a sociopath, but you definitely come across as one.

The scary question is: what if, despite everything we're told, self-love just isn't enough? Are you doomed if you don't get the right relationships? Or, if you didn't get the right relationships at a critical time in your youth, so you'll forever be playing catch-up with more fortunate people your own age? These have been especially burning questions for me as I navigate the job market!

We become who we are to a large extent through our relationships. It's not a stretch at all to believe that a lack of relationship with quality people, will result in us living a less than quality life, and a lost opportunity to become "quality" ourselves. (JRE, certainly, wouldn't be political without being married to EE-- she was the one who sparked his consciousness, after all.)
We all want to become the best we can be; and yet whether we're in the relationship that makes that possible is largely out of our control. But, of course, we're still held responsible if we don't attract these relationships. Our likeability, our self-presentation, even our sense of timing must be why people didn't make choices that favored us; as there must be a reason, so that cognitive dissonance is averted.
And "we can't change others, we can only change ourselves"... so we spend millions of dollars and even more millions of days on appearance and personality enhancements, all for the hope that quality people will favor us. And here's the kicker: they have free choice, so they may not choose us, thereby rendering all our efforts and monies fruitless. And all we're counseled to do is to pick ourselves up and move on, hoping our effort will score next time.

It's also understandable to want deep relationships... because what does our culture and our human nature teach? That deep, intimate relationships are the best kind to have. You get a lot of permission to do things in a close relationship, that you don't get anywhere else. There's also the health media constantly saying how important intimacy is to your health... which, in my opinion, is exactly the kind of next step you would take if you were trying to guilt women into marriage, and the old lines about being more likely to suffer a lightning strike than get married after 40 just don't work anymore.

There have been a number of articles questioning the purpose of marriage itself, and indeed, whether it's even realistic to expect lifelong partnerships.
I lay the blame squarely on the pressure from many different arenas, to couple up and make it deep. What person wouldn't feel pressure to rush a relationship process, under this pressure? Why sit back and take your time to get to know the person, to get them comfortable with you... they could have a change of heart, and all your effort into securing your social support system; nay, secure your very better self and life prospects, could be wasted! Your very health could be at stake! Must. Close. The. Deal.

It's but a short step from this understandable loneliness and pressure to neediness, even narcissism-- though it takes adding exploitativeness to the mix to make one a full-blown sociopath. We see the love, intimacy and richness of other people's lives, and we yearn to capture it; and we believe adhering to the normal process of relationship building just doesn't cut it, because interpersonal emotions are too capricious and the consequences of not being favored are too dear.
Hearing that our characters, our emotional balance and even our physical health are on the line only makes it more likely that we'll go to greater, more disruptive lengths to get those deep relationships.

This is just one of the unspoken themes I feel this affair has unearthed for me, and I'm disappointed that more progressives don't want to talk about it, just like I'm disappointed that not one of those case-against-marriage articles mentioned the coupling pressure from the health community... though they did mention cultural pressure.

[checks-n-balances]

12. I can really appreciate your sentiments and thoughts about this (but)

in this case as well as the Sanford situation, this kind of thing takes on a different meaning when the people involved are also involved, however indirectly or potentially, in our own lives. It's one thing when these situations happen to "average" people, but it grows in such magnitude when these people have a responsibility to so many people. When they behave that recklessly and the consequences of their actions not only adversely affect those in their family but public policy, then it's hard for me to see their situations in isolation from the rest of the public. All of that clouds my ability to spend any more time than I have in thinking about how they have affected their own situations in a personal way.

That said, I think I do understand what you're saying about pressures for marriage within our society today, especially as so many things have changed even within my lifetime with regard to expectations, especially for women. It's too bad that Edwards and Hunter are/were, apparently, too unaware of the context in which they have carried on with their destructive decisions and actions. If he were that callous toward people he was supposed to love and respect, I have my doubts as to how receptive/respectful he would be to the thoughts of someone he doesn't even know.

However, thanks for the links and I hope you will be able to channel your questions and thoughts somewhere that will be well-received and productive.