“It all starts out from insecurity. If she was happy with who she was she would not want to take on another persona. It has evolved into a major obsession to personify Maria, which is awfully creepy. There’s a difference between wanting to identify with someone and wanting to be them,” according to Dr. Gilda Carle, relationship expert and author of the book How to Win When Your Mate Cheats.
It sounds like Patty was getting way too comfortable with the terms of the affair, even bragging to a confidante that she was more of a wife to Arnold than Maria — and this was after she had done the deed with Arnold in his marital bed!
Relationship expert Rhonda Findling, author of Don’t Call That Man: A Survival Guide to Letting Go, believes that while Arnold is “twisted and misogynistic if [the details of their affair are] true,” she took a different point of view on Patty’s motivation for her bizarre actions. “She probably admired [Maria] and looked up to her and wanted to be like her. It’s this housekeeper and this super-duper famous woman — one of the Kennedys. Why wouldn’t she want to be like her? If you’re successful on your own you wouldn’t want to copy someone else. It’s natural that she would admire her boss, but I don’t think she’s obsessed with her. She’s a world-famous, powerful woman. ”
One of Patty’s exceptionally awkward moves was asking Maria for advice on her pregnancy and love life, which Maria was nice enough to give her. How she could look her employer in the eye and ask this is beyond difficult to understand. Liz Langley, columnist and author of Crazy Little Thing: Why Love and Sex Drive Us Mad, explains it could possibly be a way for Patty to assert her dominance over Maria in a situation where she is normally the subordinate. “It’s like saying, ‘I’m doing this right under your nose and you don’t even know it, so I have one up on you.'”
Patty’s behavior was disturbing at best, and unstable at worst. Hopefully now that everything is out in the open, a semblance of normalcy will return to the Schwarzenegger-Shriver family, and Patty can return to being herself, and not an imitation of her lover’s wife.