Women’s lives might depend on this
Women are sometimes killed when they don’t meet their partner’s expectations.
To say cheating fails to meet most marital expectations is an understatement. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that an intimate partner kills up to half of all women murdered in the US.
Of the 10,000 murders examined in the study, 55% of the women were killed by a current or former partner or the partner’s family or friends. A third were killed following an argument. Twelve percent of the approximately 5500 victims of domestic violence died because of jealousy. About 54% of the 5500 were killed with a firearm. Worldwide, the UN estimates 50,000 women are murdered by intimate partners and family annually.
If you believe one is too many, these numbers give a more sobering picture of women’s relationships. Add a gun into her home, and her risk of murder increases by a factor of five.
This is not to say a killer wouldn’t choose some other weapon to kill her, but that it’s less likely. Domestic violence is a crime of passion, and when you’re mad, guns make it easier to kill.
So, no gun does not equal no murder, but no gun equals less likelihood of murder. See the difference? Her chances of being murdered go down when there’s no gun…
Women with a gun in the family home should be aware of this before they cheat.
The numbers are sobering but evident in hindsight. You don’t need to work at the CDC to know women are at a far higher risk of murder by an intimate partner than they are from strangers in dark alleys.
Men die from domestic violence too, but when you consider 94% of the victims of murder-suicides are women, this suggests it’s a female risk area. In cheating, I discovered men are more vulnerable to scams and blackmail than violence on their dates or from being caught.
I was four months into my adulterous journey when I thought about turning my notes into a book. My need was to maintain my relationship with anything else, which is why I was studying cheating. As I researched, though, it occurred to me, women’s lives might depend on the information I was collecting.
I’d searched the net looking for stories and resources on cheating and kept them in a Word document. The document became fairly large, so I began loosely organizing the notes into subtopics. As I was doing that, it occurred to me over Christmas that if I was looking for adultery resources and finding so few, other people might be too.
The book idea came at an opportune time. The previous summer, I’d started writing erotica to see if that was something I could do in my retirement. This was to both supplement my income and exercise my mind.
I thought writing sexy stories would be easy, so I bought a ‘how-to’ book and went from there. By December, I began turning out a 5000-word short story a week on Amazon.
That experience and my collected notes inspired me to write and self-publish a book.
As a practically minded person, I focused on the nuts and bolts. Having a background in personal and physical security helped too. From the outset, I knew I was missing an understanding of the operating environment. Which I needed before developing effective security measures and countermeasures.
Yes, this is more or less how I actually approached it.
And to gain the knowledge I needed, it’s why I started researching adultery.
I did that because what works in one context won’t always apply in another. The key to success is understanding the conditions and adapting to them.
That’s when the link between my research and its potential to increase women’s safety emerged. First, focusing on dating safety, I expanded into personal security. I figured if they thought about their security differently, it would keep them safe at home too.
Think of this simple tip I found and added to my book —
“Use a condom when you have sex with your affair partner so when you get home, and your spouse wants to have sex, they won’t know you’d been with someone.”
That would never have occurred to me because I don’t have sex with my spouse, but that one sentence could save a woman’s life.
From research, and living what I teach, I instinctively knew to do this —
I said I was meeting a friend at restaurant X but was meeting my lover elsewhere. Lockdowns were justlifting, and X was a little out of the way, but we went past anyway to see what was going on. It was closed. My spouse told me the next morning he wondered why we were going there because he knew it was closed.
Imagine the trouble I’d be in if I’d told him I had nachos and a good catch up with my girlfriend there. (And no, it wasn’t a setup, he has memory problems)
My only regret in my book is I didn’t write a section explaining why women needed to be cautious. At the time I figured most women knew their lives could be in danger if they cheated, so didn’t.
Personal safety and security are all about the small details. When you think about your safety and security in a detailed way, you protect yourself. And that’s why I packed my book full of the tips and tricks I found. Why?
More often than not, women live with the most dangerous man they will ever meet.
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Why I wrote a book on cheating.medium.com
© Teresa J. Conway, 2020
By Teresa J Conway on .
Exported from Medium on April 8, 2021.
