Do cheaters still see their AP in the same positive light?
Madhatter here, and I can only speak for two people (mi esposo y yo), but the answer is no.
Do they still feel and believe AP is this amazing lover, partner, human being? Does that fantasy ever lift?
No. But then again, I was in an EA only, so I didn't experience the lover or partner thing in those sense. Then again, neither did my mad hatter wife.
How does one go from believing something so firmly that he was willing to risk everything to now thinking AP was not special after all?
Fascinating question, I think it really boils down to the fact that at some point, the wayward, or cheater as you described, faces the reality of what they have done. Not all of them of course, but those wayward who truly want to change for the better, at some point, they have to face exactly what they've done and realize at a deep level that they do not ever want to do that to the person they truly love and cherish. I know that may sound Hallmark-ish, but I truly mean that one of the first things a wayward shuts off is their empathy. Speaking personally, I've always tested high on the personality charts for empathy and once I got back to that, I began to see just how horrible my actions were and there was a person, the AP, who was just as involved in all that as I was.
Additionally, in both of our cases, but I will speak to mine, the AP let her mask slip. What she didn't know is that my wife knew everything, literally everything that there was, my wife had possession of it and she knew it all. It was an EA, done through WhatApp and Facebook Messenger that I never deleted, so she had everything. My EA AP reached out to my wife to tell her things that she already knew. But then, when she didn't get a rise out of either of us, she created new fake Facebook accounts and even went and got a different phone number to text me. But the men crazier part for me, and the thing that truly turned us agains our APs, was...and this is going to sound hilariously ironic coming from a cheater...was that the APs deceived us. In the case of my AP, after hiring a PI, in Mexico, we discovered where my AP lived didn't match where she said he was from, that her husband was abusive and they had nothing, let's just say her husband's family was made very wealthy in Mexico off the oil and gas business. I mean, she lied about so many things it is crazy. In the case of my wife's AP, a private investigator revealed that he was in fact married with young kids, but had for all the time they'd known each other (about 4 years) successfully convinced her that he was single I'll never forget the look on her eyes as she read the report about her AP from the PI that we hired. I mean, there are a lot of reasons, but I think knowing the truth about the AP and not the fantasy, well, frankly, completely deflates the fantasy and pretty quick I might add.
I mean, the part I said about the cheater being upset that their AP is lying to them...whilst one or both parties is gleefully lying to their partner/spouse about the affair that they are both having. Yeah, it sounds like something crazy, sort of a cognitive dissonance if you will, but I think it runs deeper at the subconscious level. See, as highly intelligent mammals, the development of our consciousness has gone in stages and it is only in the relatively recent past that homo sapiens developed and were able to develop fairly sophisticated languages and forms of communication. That is to say that the part of our brains that we associate with language and the cognition we recognize as human today, well that developed far later in the evolutionary scale than the part of our brain that knew being deceived, even if we didn't have the language to describe it was "deceit", was harmful to us. In the wild, being able to discern who was lying to you and who wasn't, an absolute necessity for survival, so that is why when we talk on here about the lizard brain, that is describing how the body knows it is being deceived sometimes well before we know that we are being cheated on. Because, again, the part of the brain that recognizes infidelity, developed before we had the cognition capable of language, which is why those gut feelings are just feelings and something we struggle with to find a way to put words to, since it developed so far before we had language to describe it.