After the discussion the other day of weird dreams chumps had while being hoodwinked, I thought it was time again to run Cosmic Signs You’re a Chump.
Was the Universe trying to tell you something?
Did you sense anything, only later, to look at the situation and think OMG, a SIGN FROM GOD I WAS BEING A CHUMP!
For me it was a truckload of cow shit. My 40th birthday was 2 months before my first D-Day and I just ordered myself a truckload of manure to spread on my new garden in the new house I’d just bought with the new (cheating) husband. I literally shoveled shit on my 40th birthday. Ankle deep in cow poop on my birthday I thought… hmmm, this is a metaphor for something.
And then my “metaphor” called me 6 weeks later — the OW informing me of her existence.
I’ve shared the cow flop story here many times — here’s one I haven’t. In my first marriage? THE CHURCH CAUGHT ON FIRE. Swear to GOD. We showed up to the rehearsal to find fire trucks. They were tarring the roof, when it had burst into flames. Fortunately (unfortunately?) the damage was in the hall, and they cleared the smoke out of the sanctuary in time for the wedding.
(Yeah God, I’m a bit slow on the uptake. Next time send Jesus personally. I might better take the hint…)
For my husband, it was searing eye pain. He used to wake up in the middle of the night with excruciating pain in his eyes, and feared he was going blind. After D-Day, it went away. Now he says it was like God saying “OPEN YOUR EYES!” Weird, huh?
My cousin once told me and Mr. Chump Lady how her ex-husband had a penchant for buying clunkers (that he couldn’t afford) at car auctions. Having decimated their finances, the car she drove was one of his crappy, unreliable purchases.
So she’s driving long-distance in this “new” clunker and she realizes all the check engine lights are on. Her husband assures her it’s fine. So she drives the thing — 40,000 miles! — but the lights keep flashing. So she gets some plumber’s tape and covers up the dashboard so she doesn’t see the light.
At that point Mr. Chump Lady exclaimed: “THAT’S A CHUMP METAPHOR!”
So today’s question is — what’s your chump metaphor? What was your chumpy sign from God you didn’t read quite right? A burning bush? A load of shit? Inexplicable blindness?
Tell CN.
TGIF!
I’ll never forget when I was rounding the corner to go into my sewing room, I audibly heard a voice in my head that said “he’s cheating on you.” I laughed out loud because I thought that was so impossible. I wasn’t laughing days later when I saw the emails. Happy Friday chumps!
I was in an airport in another state when a group of women from a certain church approached and asked to discuss my Faith. I was polite and said that I didn’t have the time, so they asked if they could leave a pamphlet with me. I left it in the waiting area, but noticed on the cover: “Beware of False Prophets.”
Four days later…..I discovered that my wife was having an affair with our minister.
We went to counselling and on the drive home we looked up at a train driving on a bridge overhead and in spray paint it had my husbands name (Brad). It said “Brad Sucks”. 🤔. What are the chances of that?
That is just funny!!!!!
You gotta love that direct message!
wow – just wow! Love that!
For the WIN!
Sorry for the late reply but Brad Sucks was (is?) a band. My favorite song is ‘Dirtbag’ which should be on Youtube.
I had a very similar inner voice situation.
We were at a friends wedding and I looked across the wedding hall at my wife who was sitting at the table by herself. I felt this enormous and inexplicable feeling that I loved her and something was horribly wrong.
When we drove home I decided that I would speak to her about my feelings, and this clearly audible internal voice shouted at me that if I say anything, she’ll leave me.
When we got home I decided to ask her if something was up. What I got back was the beginning of DDay.
I have learned to love and appreciate my inner voice because it’s always 100 percent right.
I used to have repeated dreams about tornados tearing my house down, running from them, etc…I still have weird dreams and ex shows up in way too many, but not one tornado dream, since. Makes total sense now.
Yes, tornadoes for me too! Everything being ripped apart, serial-cheating jackass nowhere to be found (though I was frantically searching while trying to protect the kids).
Side-note: Love the user name!
I’ve had tornado dreams all my life, always when I’m not taking care of business. The dream is always about getting pets and people int a shelter. And I always know in the dream how many cats and I have and which ones they are (so I’m not rescuing cats who are on the other side…).
Tornado dreams, here, too!! I would wake up in the middle of the night, terrified, out of breath, dreaming of a big tornado that leveled our entire house.
I am BRITISH and I had a tornado dream! We were having a picnic, a whirlwind went through and I was left with the debris wondering ‘what happened to my life?’
England doesn’t have tornados.
I always had these hitchcock vibe dreams of the cheater at a motel. It is at the ocean, and I am there too, but I can’t find her. I search for her, but am always a minute late, and I feel alone, and I can’t ever catch up with her.
—
All I ever really wanted was just her. I just wanted to truly be together with her. No one will ever really know that I was there, present, engaged and just wanting us. My kids won’t know; my family won’t know, my friends won’t know. But I know. Now we are just another story of a failed marriage, two selfish souls looking for something else (but I wasn’t.)
Of course later I saw the texts and emails of them meeting up at a motel.
@buddy
“…just another story of a failed marriage.”
I feel ya’
I would have loved to have a husband who loved me.
During discard, I also had a bad case of plantar fasciitis. Pills, cortisone shots, nothing helped. A month after divorce, poof, cured. It really does make me think about the mind-body connection.
Yes. I had forgotten about the painful bursitis in my shoulder until you said that. Once I was free, I relaxed enough that I was fine.
I also developed bursitis whilst affair # 2 was happening under my nose. I read something in louise Hay – what I took away was I wanted to punch someone…lol!
7 months before Dd JAMF started accusing me of messing around with a mutual friend of ours, who I’d know for 10+ years. If it was going to happen, it would have earlier. Found it incredibly odd at the time. Reassured him. Immediately started having a recurring dream that I was lost in a hostile environment at nite. Like the Bronx at 3 am in the 70s. Wouldn’t have a phone, money, i.d., keys or even be dressed properly. T shirt & shorts in 15* weather. I’d start on the 20 mile walk home and every time, someone or something would intervene and help me home. On time it was a church group coming back from an outing. Had some version of that dream numerous times a week up until the nite before Dd. After Dd, never had it again. In retrospect, I was lost and as hard and scary as it was, eventually I found my way home.
New chumps, you too will find your way back home again.
That is lovely and brave. Thank you.
WOW! The body & subconscious know. And your dreams…..so vivid
I had similar dreams, but did not include anyone helping me. When I was having those dreams, I was ‘wreakconciling’ and they all ended with me being stabbed or shot. Yeppers….Something in me or ‘someone out there’ knew how that would end!
Now divorced and cheater free! No more of those nasty dreams
Love all ya all!
Very similar recurring dreams, except the ex was there — lost in a house that wasn’t ours, at night, sometimes finding a baby that I had miscarried years before, always in the attic, and then coming down to tell ex that I found the baby and we need to take him to a doctor for a checkup. Unsurprisingly now, in my dream the ex would always be too sleepy to act and would tell me that if the baby could wait that long, he could wait some more until daybreak. I had this dream at least once a year for several years. Told a shrink I was seeing, she did not make the connection to my ex’s indifference and casual emotional abuse. Neither did I — until D-day, that is, when it hit me like a ton of bricks that my subconscious was screaming out to me. I still describe it as hearing a phone ringing through deep sleep, distantly.
I was desperate for years for a third child after a miscarriage, but although ‘saying’ he was supportive and encouraging me to go to doctors for tests, and to contact adoption agencies, I now realise now that we never seemed to have sex at the right time. One night I dreamt that he had had an affair and put the resulting baby girl in an orphanage I had volunteered at as a teenager. When I woke up I found myself punching him, not because of the affair but because he had hidden the baby I so desperately wanted.
I should have guessed then!
Callous jerk off. I’m so sorry, that’s a pain that sticks with you. It’s been 2.5 years and it still hurts. It’s a little easier when the father is there being supportive. Hopefully you are free of him, or soon to be. (((TOWMB)))
I had a dream 8 months before that my husband of nearly 30 years had an affair which resulted in a pregnancy. It was so vivid I rang my sister and told her. And then it was discovered. He had spent 12 months grooming his much younger vulnerable married stay at home married mum. At the age of 60; he blew apart of business of 36 years for 38 year old woman; whose youngest child is 5! His children are 21; 25 & 27. He totally abandoned all of us; of course most of all me! Until settlement (which is long and complex) I still have to go to our business every week and face both of them. They use our marital assets for their social life, she runs her miserable business on my land and I have no rights except to walk away. I have protected myself but it will take time to play out. I have protected my heart and my soul but I am still burned. My greatest advice to other newbies. – believe in yourself m. Sometimes life gifts you an opportunity to realise a dream that has lain sleeping! Go shine your light! In this fragile brief life; make it count! The foot note is: we are waiting for the pregnancy which will deliver karma and seal his fate. Imagine being 85 when your youngest child leaves home!
On the plus, OW will get to change 2 sets of diapers. 🤣
Thank you! That makes me laugh!
Ozziechumped,
You are SO mighty! Your attitude in the face of that monstrosity is so uplifting! I would struggle with having to be in proximity to such a scumbag. You are miraculous, indeed.
Waffles – you cracked me up!! LOL!
I do struggle enormously! He claims this is about his happiness! My glorious daughters & I just laugh. Happiness comes from gratitude and he has none of that! I simply did not understand how stupid he was!
You have to rise above this monstrosity or it claims you! You want to live like that? No way! We are all better!
They don’t accept responsibility for cheating, or breaking up their families or robbing their children of a stable foundation. The life events we treasure such as, birth of our children, first home, graduations, our children’s milestones mean nothing to them.
They’re never wrong, we were boring. They found new love who isn’t distracted with kids, laughs at all their jokes, meticulously groomed, and has nothing else to do but fuck. Perfect! They’re in love with the infatuation of the new relationship. As with all relationships, we settle into daily routines, cheaters mask will eventually slip, nothings changed. They find things to complain about blame their new love for their unhappiness. It’s inevitable, they never learned from their mistakes in their first marriage or relationship, because they’re perfect and we were the problem, In their minds they had nothing to learn. They’re the same sack of shit they’ve always been and the cycle will repeat itself.
If Ozzie is Australia, sounds like Australia is in need of divorce reform.
I apologize if I have no idea what I’m talking about
Australia has no fault divorce!
Waffles – My cheating ex did The Exact Thing… Accused me of what he was doing. For YEARS he told me that he had bad dreams about me leaving him for someone else. He would then give me the cold shoulder and be cranky with me the whole next day…. I’d have to reassure him (a grown man) that it was just a dream!!! Never made sense to me.
I, on the other hand, had nightmares where my life was in danger – strangers trying to kill me or rob me – and no one could hear my screams. I also had those terrifying dreams where I couldn’t find my children. I would wake up sobbing and filled with an overwhelming sense of despair.
Hindsight – His were projection. Mine were my mind trying to sort through the mixed messages I received from Mr Narc. Those dreams stopped after my divorce.
Wow — your ex’s projection just triggered a memory for me.
When living together (just before getting married) — the serial-cheating asshole sat bolt upright in bed one night, jarring me awake. He was freaked out. I asked what was wrong — he said that he saw the Devil … even able to describe full face features, etc.
Given that neither of us are religious, I figured he had a horror-movie-like nightmare. In hindsight, he was definitely projecting WHO he is inside.
Wow! When we were first married, mine would sit up, freaked out, and speak in some foreign weird language!! Throughout the years, he would still sit up all freaked out, and I would gently try to settle him down, it got to be a system for me and I learned the best way to calm him. He doesn’t live with his Skank and I just had the thought, what happens now when he wakes up like that alone? Damn, a part of me still feels sorry for him.
I had my first migraine on Mothers Day before D-day. What set me off was that he invited “she’s just a friend who has no family” to his family Mother’s Day meal.
I scratched through the medicine cabinet and found some medication and I made it through the meal but I was very doped up to control the pain.
It was literally my “smack on the back of the head”!
Approximately 3 weeks or so before Dday the diamond in my engagement ring fell out due to a broken prong BOOM!
The Limiteds wedding band came apart. He took it as a sign. After I threw him out he asked for it back. What wedding ring?
You know, now that I think about it, the microwave that was given to us as a wedding gift, all of a sudden quit working. No warning.
This was about 6 months prior to DDay.
Heh, it’s usually my boyfriends that quit working, right after they move in with me. Codependent care-taker mommy-maid, checking in for duty!
My prong bent and the diamond also fell out about 12 years ago. I was so upset, looking for it everywhere. Never found it. Fuckwit couldn’t understand why I was so upset. (go figure- Ha!). He bought me another one for my birthday about 5 months later. Around a year later, I took it in just to have the prongs checked and the jeweler told me the diamond had a crack. I never told fuckwit, because I didn’t want him to feel bad. Now, I think he probably got it cheap just to please me because he didn’t care.
I had my ring appraised post divorce thinking I would try to sell it. Found out the ‘perfect cut’ diamond (insert small) he’d bragged about was cracked. I didn’t even know that could happen. I think it’s a perfect metaphor.
My diamond is cracked, too – just like the cheater who gave it to me!
A few months before Dday a diamond fell out of my wedding ring. Holy cow!!
A diamond was suddenly missing from my band during reconciliation. My therapist said she’s 100% sure Satan did it on purpose. He punishes spitefully. She knew he told me the year prior after DDay if I didn’t give him my rings back he’d hunt me down forever until I did. So I went to have it checked. Jeweler said there’s no way that diamond came out. Prongs are thick and not bent or broken. He said it would have had to have been chipped out. Oh awesome.
A friend took her engagement ring to sell for money to pay her divorce attorney and discovered it was a cubic zirconia. Her “loving” husband had taken it to the jeweler’s a couple of years beforehand to have the loose setting checked. Guess who had switched out the stone ?
Holy shit. I cant believe these people exist.
In my case the wedding ring wasn’t compromised, but a valuable diamond ring my father gave me as a graduation gift disappeared. Looking back, I think he pawned it shortly after we got married when he lost his job.
Next to my wedding band I was so proud of that graduation gift ring. I thought it got misplaced when we moved and had to store our stuff for a while, but I never found it when we unpacked. He kept up the fiction by listing the graduation ring on our insurance policy. “I’m sure you just misplaced it. It’ll turn up.” But he never once tried to help me find it.
Some years later when he lost another job I caught him pawning things of mine, or selling them on Amazon, whole I was working extra hours to pay the bills. He didn’t ask me before selling any of it. He just pocketed the money for himself.
When I realized things of mine were missing he said he didn’t know anything about it (despite evidence to the contrary). He said they must have been taken by our kids’ boyfriends or girlfriends. That’s when I finally put 2+2 together.
Just goes to show how little regard he had for me from Day One.
Cheater ex did the same thing. Stole a pair of gold earrings my parents gave me and sold them. Arrogant asshole.
Oh wow. 12 years ago I had my grandmother’s wedding ring and my ex’s grandmother’s wedding ring on the dresser. They mysteriously vanished. I could never figure it out….. I bet he sold them….. I searched high and low, tore apart the vacuum…… He sold them…..
I lost my wedding ring 2 years before my ex told me he was involved with someone else. I was so upset and beat myself up over losing my ring. We didn’t have the finances to buy another at that time so I (not my husband) bought myself a fake one to wear until we could get another on. I felt that it was important to have that symbol. Then during our “wreckconciliation” I found out although he couldn’t buy me a ring he had bought the OW a ring but he said it didn’t mean anything! WHAT!?!? Divorce final 6-2017. My 50 Birthday is this year I am buying myself a nice diamond BECAUSE I AM MIGHTY AND DESERVE IT.
I bought the fake one in the meantime too!
Meanwhile, fuckwit had lost his wedding ring in the marsh while duck hunting early on in marriage and said he could go back and find it with a metal detector. Guess what- he never did. So I bought him a replacement and told him it was important to me that he wear a ring. He wore it for awhile and then surprise, he was welding and accidentally got a weld on it and stopped wearing it. I gave up but what the hell was he doing welding without gloves ?
In contrast, he was always so quick to notice women’s rings and make comments like: did you see her rock? I would never notice. Gosh, I am more of a CHUMP than I ever knew. (sigh, forehead to hand)
Why does a cheater, who refuses to buy his wife a wedding ring, make comments to his wife about other women’s rings? I don’t get it.
Good for you I bought myself a lovely white diamond and blue diamond ring in October I call it my divorce ring! It’s beautiful!
Are you 100% certain you lost the ring? I wonder if he could have taken your ring to sell it in order to buy the OW her ring?
Diamonds started falling out of my “eternity” wedding band.
I was pulling laundry out of the dryer and snagged my ring on the door. Crawled around the garage until I found the diamond. Ring languished on my dresser. After a couple months, I sold my mother’s wedding band and had the diamond reset into a stronger setting. By myself. In a fight later, spouse called me out for not wearing a wedding ring. Because… it was… broken?
A diamond was missing from my engagement ring before he even gave it to me. A sign that something was missing from the very beginning.
I have 2 of them.
A few months before D-day, Sluterella lost her engagement ring. Two weeks before D-day, we went on a 2nd honeymoon to Vegas. I had planned on surprising her with a replacement at a wedding chapel there, but every time I tried to go buy the ring, I had to deal with something pressing (family emergency, etc.) that took precedence. I finally ran out of time. As I said, D-day was a week after we got back.
Here’s the other one. While we were on that trip to Las Vegas, I bought myself a pair of nice sunglasses. I liked them super well, but a month after we got back, they started disintegrating. Though I took good care of them and kept them cool, over the course of several weeks, the paint started coming off, and then the plastic parts partially melted. I kid you not! When the paint first started to peel, I was so upset I went and bought another pair of the exact same glasses, but a different color. Why on earth I thought it was smart to buy a SECOND pair of expensive sunglasses that I knew to be faulty, I have no idea. (Maybe it was the stress and overwhelming anxiety post-D-Day). As the first pair continued to turn into a misshapen piece of plastic, the new one, bought after the ex had left, remained perfectly fine. I still wear that pair all the time.
I guess technically the second one wasn’t a sign pre-D-Day, but it was still a perfect symbol of life before and after.
Mine “lost” his ring at the time I think it got hot and heavy with Skank. I kept asking him to either replace it, or let me get him another. It never happened, yet we were “wreckonciling”? Was I a sucker.
OMG. It’s been two years and I’m still a chump, I guess. The fall before the nuclear D-Day, while I was still spackling, I lost my tiny wedding set somewhere in the house or yard — maybe playing frisbee with the dogs? I even rented a metal detector and searched the entire 3 acre property on a bitterly cold, snowy day. He didn’t give a damn. It never occurred to me that he might have simply pawned the rings for beer money.
I woke up in tears on my wedding day. That should have been the first clue. During the vows, when it came to the part “for richer or poor“ I started to laugh. The guests thought I was getting all choked up.
26 years later I was indeed richer and poor. Richer in the sense that I was finally free from the fuckwit, and poor because he was a financial mess. Always has been and always will be.
I’m now a big believer in signs and ask for them and look for them always.
On my wedding day my sister was helping me get dressed when the zipper on my dress came apart the dressmaker who altered it had melted some of the teeth. My sister sewed me into the dress so the wedding proceeded. Guess it was a sign of things to come!
I had 3-4 dreams that my stbx was cheating on me. He would be with another woman in different normal places such as at work, standing in a random line, etc and I would be there watching him knowing that he was cheating on me. The final dream, just days before DDay, was the same except I started screaming at him that I was so sick of his shit! … over and over until I woke up. But I didn’t believe the dreams until DDay.
Oh the reccurring dream/nightmare-
When I was able to sleep-mine were that the ex kept showing me multiple photos of topless girls that were on his phone which he guarded like Ft. Knox. And during the time I was with ex, I had terrible insomnia, IBS, psoriasis, etc.
Now that he’s gone-I’m able to sleep, no more nightmares or IBS & the psoriasis is more manageable.
Win-win-win!
Who knew all that time that my mind & body were screaming out against him……..
And now there is peace.
same. thing with me. I remember I would wake up all upset and then I told him why and he told me how “stupid” I was. Then I found out he is cheating on me.
2 others. A couple months before D day, a diamond in my wedding band fell out, so I gave it to my mom to have her take it to her jeweler to get it fixed (my ex had bought it from her jeweler). My mom never loses anything but she lost my wedding band. I didn’t blame her but we both thought it was strange that she would lose something because she never does anything like that. Then D Day came and now I’m divorced.
I hate to admit it but I had major doubts about my ex and his mother (entering into that family who turned out to be narcissistic assholes who deny their son is an alcoholic cheater). I remember my sister asking me if I was sure I wanted to get married. I laughed it off and said “of course”. But inside, I did but I was just so stressed and didn’t want to cancel. I hadn’t had too many signs prior to. marriage (other than 1 other) but wish at that time, I had not gone through with it.
Like you Artemis I also had planter fasciitis. My doctor said I was just getting old. When I finally filed last November, no more pain! Wondering if my hair will grow back after the D is final lol
I had (have ) a foot problem too that was followed by a hip problem. All this during the long divorce. Still not divorced after more than 2 years. Feet pain symbolizes the inability to move forward (that’s me!) and hips are where we hold all our emotions.
My health got a big hit on all this. And oh yeah, my hair has really really thinned out. That’s the saddest part for me as it is my security blank.
I developed a patch of eczema on my left hand in 1999 when I was pregnant with my third child. Over the years it would be better at times and at other times it would cause the most intense itching imaginable but it never went away despite all the cortisone, lotions, diet changes I would try. I filed for divorce in March of 2017 and the patch completely disappeared. I knock on wood every day that it doesn’t return!
I have a patch of eczema on the front of each ankle that started not long before dday and nothing is working on those. Maybe it is your foot theory and the inability to move forward. I hope maybe once the divorce is final these will heal too.
I developed eczema on my left hand that made wearing my engagement ring and wedding band painful. My EX complained when I took them off (despite the small, oozing blisters that even he could see). He was even more infuriated if I wore rings on my right hand (which did not have eczema). Ironically, he seemed to think not always wearing my rings was a sign that I wasn’t committed to the marriage, while his decision to have a “soul mate” who wasn’t me was apparently not a problem.
The eczema cleared up after my marriage ended. I had assumed it was because I wasn’t continually putting rings back on that half-healed hand. Now, I think it might have had as much to do with mental health as the physical issue!
Do you live anywhere near the ocean? Sea water helps my bf when his eczema flares up.
Hopefully the D is quick & you heal up stat!
I find this eczema topic fascinating. The child that I was pregnant with when my ex was having an affair way back in 2000; she had eczema the first year or so of her life. She also was born not liking her dad (she does now) and would cry whenever he came near her or wanted to hold her.
A few years ago her eczema came back (and this coincides with all my bad dreams I was having) and nothing we did help it go away. I moved out of the marital home with my kids and her eczema went completely away! I thought there must have been something in our home that she was allergic too. But now I’m realizing she had eczema even in our old house. We’ve now lived in two different places since moving out and her skin is still perfect. I know it sounds far-fetched, but I wonder if her skin shows her that something is wrong with her dad? My first counselor said that babies in the womb know when their mom is upset (I cried almost every single day of my pregnancy). I think I will file this one away for the future and if her eczema ever returns, I will see what’s going on in her life and see if it’s trying to warn her about something.
My son and daughter are both sensitive to nickel, usually found in jewelry etc. My son got hives on his stomach from the snap in his jeans! My daughter had pierced ear rashes due to earrings. I read that 17% of women and 3% men are nickel sensitive. Some birth control devices made of nickel have harmed women! Taking off our rings helps the area heal.
My exFIL married the OW shortly after running out on his wife. A few years later she developed an eczema patch on her arm that wouldn’t respond to treatment. I always thought it was caused by stress from exFIL! Unfortunately my sweet MIL developed an auto immune disease that has remained even though she is rid of him.
I’m not supersitious about these things; my chronic shoulder and neck pain went away after I kicked her out. I attributed it to just not having to share a bed, rather than her being a pain in the neck.
The last year of my marriage (2016), I had multiple strange health problems. I had an infection in my gums that led to 3 oral surgeries, I had a form of pink eye caused by an allergic reaction, and a horrible rash on my face thought to be bacterial, but ended up being an allergic reaction (never figured out what caused either). I have never had health problems like this before. My body was reacting to the discard (Dec 2016). My nightmares also stopped when he left for good in April 2017. The body knows…
I had near continual overactive thyroid problems for past 11 years. Kicked him out and during the most stressful period of my life, this past year, I have had the best bloods results in a long time and told to stop my medication!
Haha…i always joked that i got rid of a literal pain in the neck after KFC (king fxxg cxxt….a friend dubbed him that) decided he wanted to have his midlife crisis and kick us all to curb. It was a horrible infection that i couldnt get to the bottom of for years leading up to his sudden exit so when he did in fact leave the pain in the neck went with him. Body totally screaming at me something was up through constant nightmares involving his toxic family and i also had the diamond falling out of its setting a couple of years before. The signs were everywhere !!
Lots of tornado dreams here, too, which I’ve read are about chaos. Also often dreamed that I accidentally discovered our family home had a whole wing I didn’t know about. I passed through a hidden door and wandered through room after room. They were all dark and empty. I was amazed I could’ve missed something so consequential that was so close to me for so many years.
Yeah, wonder what that could’ve been about.
I’ve had the extra unknown rooms in house dream since leaving. That I took to mean as you have hidden reserves of strength you didn’t know of until you needed them. That dream still comes sporadically. I find it very peaceful, 5 years post D.
I like dreaming that too.
I have that dream too but in mine the hidden rooms are always filled with furniture and pictures from past generations of my family and I’m always sad when I wake up and it’s all gone.
I love the extra room dreams, which I’ve had throughout my life. I like your interpretation, too!
Same for me dreams about our house being weird with extra rooms. Many of these.
Me too. Always had dreams about houses with hidden rooms. My therapist said the house represents a person (window and doors = eyes and mouth). The hidden rooms represent the person lying to me. Have not had that dream for two years now.
Count me in on the house dreams… Mine would be of me in houses that were the same layout/floorplan of my marital home but the house would be in different locations with different furnishings…
I had lots of house dreams – often about moving to a great house that turned out to have a fatal flaw. A sheer drop on to black rocks just outside or parts of the walls/ceiling missing or leaking. The most recent had a huge garden with a lake – then it turned into a playing field that was open to the public – how literal.
While he was, unbeknownst to me, in the process of dumping OWhore#2, I woke sobbing from a dream of being in a strange apartment with him, while our DD was in one of the bedrooms. In the dream I kept asking him why we were there and where was my stuff. He just sighed and said, “when are you going to accept that we aren’t married anymore?”
When I woke and he asked me why I was crying and I told him about the dream, he was strangely un-comforting and (in hindsight) guilty.
Wow. That had to get to him— oh, he’s a cheater, never mind.
Wow. I too have had the extra room dreams reoccurring for most of my adult life.
Looking back, it just boggles my mind that these personality disordered freaks marry us.
Why the fuck did you marry me if you were just going to avoid connecting with me, and pretend to be married when you were really elsewhere, and search for “more” outside the marriage? That makes no fucking sense!!!
(well it can make sense: CAKE – I made money, I gave her a family and raised her kids, I repaired things — I gave her work, money, and time.)
My first “extra room” dream happened on March 31, 1991 when I dreamt that my cheating husband (unconfirmed to me at that time) came home (he worked on the road at that time) and entered our master bedroom. I told him to go to his “other wife” and he left the room and went down the hallway to a “second master bedroom” was (there isn’t one there) where another woman was waiting for him. My dreaming self pictured her quite like myself physically and waiting in bed for him, welcoming him back. He had been treating me like shit for months and I knew something was up. I asked myself when I woke up, “Well, what does that mean? and what should I do about it?” I heard: “check his phone bill.” I had been suspecting that he was having an affair, but he kept denying it and telling me I was crazy.
Before this I had received all his bills & sent them to him unopened for him to pay them. But I opened the phone bill and there were calls every night – right after our calls, to another woman on the other side of the country. This was how I learned of affair #1, while the physical affair (#2) was right there with him, working with him every day.
We “wreckonciled” after a separation & my filing for divorce. That was in 1991. There was no accountability or disclosure or admission to any wrongdoing on his part…just vague vagaries and a promise that it would never happen again.
Dday#3 was in June 2017. No dreams tipped me off this time, though there were little red flags that I had overlooked in the busy-ness of raising teen & young adult children, working my ass off 45-50 hours a week to keep his sick ass insured, and trying to trust that 30 years together and my love meant something. But I couldn’t ignore the mountain of information that came out (gifts of perfume, lingerie, a vibrator, sexting, etc. with a skanky MOW 20 years younger than he, who also worked with him).
I missed that my subconscious had been so keen to warn me like it did the first times. I haven’t dreamt in years and rarely sleep long enough to dream. That alone is a key that something is WAY off for me. Better, deeper sleep is a new goal of mine…now that I am 80% cheater-free! Divorce is in process and I rarely see him or even text him, unless it is for our 16 y.o. Amen & thanks to CL & all of you in CN who have helped me walk away from the wreckage of that marriage!
About a month before D-day, one night I was lying next to sleeping Cheater in bed, and I woke up suddenly with a horrific nightmare that seemed so real that to this day, I don’t know where it came from and when I woke up, I felt like I couldn’t breathe and I sat straight up, gasping — in my “dream” a gigantic hand reached down from above me and scooped my heart out of my chest. The hand was as big as me. It was so scary and it felt like real physical pain.
Cheater kept sleeping and I didn’t wake him as his back was turned to me.
It never happened again and in the weeks after D-day when I was getting my STD panel, I asked the dr to check out my heart, nothing was wrong with me physically. I’m not a very religious or spiritual person but I will always believe this indeed was a sign and a message, from somewhere, telling me I was about to have my heart ripped out by this snake sleeping next to me.
Telephone records later confirmed his many texts and phone calls to OW all during this period of time. And that was also how I busted him, by looking at my verizon account that his phone was on our family plan with, feeling so guilty all the while for spying on him. Duh. Listen to the signs…
Wised up, so funny. That’s EXACTLY how I found out about my cheater. He was on my Verizon bill. Saw the number and googled it. funny. He was texting her 50 times a day. Meanwhile he would often ignore my 1 text a day (letting him know about the gourmet dinner I had made him that was waiting for him at home) saying he was just “so busy” at work to respond. Then seeing all the texts to her hurt my heart so much.
Drsadz texted the OW thousands and thousands of texts. It was so easy to spot once I checked the phone records.
WTH – mine did exactly the same! I texted him on my birthday – day before DDay – and told him I missed him. He never replied to that one. Later I learned he was texting skank all day & arranging to meet her at our house – on MY birthday – told me he “didn’t get” my texts. What a POS.
Trust that they suck. Mentality of 13 year old boys. We are SO much better off without them!
I decided to check the phone bills. Four months of around 200 calls a month to OW. Except when they were together, there were no phone calls. I asked our daughter – guess how many times my phone number is on the bill? She said about 15? I said, yeah, about that. Lol She refuses to see him now. He cries about how she has thrown him away. Oh brother.
These stories about texting always hit home with me. After DD#2, I decided to do some digging. I’m not sure why since I already had my proof; maybe I was looking for more proof and to reveal more lies. I went through my phone bill since my wife is on my plan. A month after DD#1, we went away as a family to reconnect. During a 6-week period, WHICH INCLUDED THAT FAMILY VACATION, my wife exchanged just under 2200 text messages with AP#2 (this was 3-4 months before DD#2). Think about that; that’s an average of over 50 messages per day! I stopped looking through the phone bills after that. No more guilty feeling for spying.
A month before dd1 I had a dream. In the dream God said something like, “You’ve been released from your wedding vows. You are free to pick another husband.” So in the dream I picked a other, much nicer man I had known for years. Of course I ignored it and we reconciled. Until I found out about the next woman. Oi.
Side note: why why why why why do we try reconciling? Looking back I just facepalm. Oh well. Onward and upward.
Becaause you’re a good forgiving women who tried to save your marriage! Glad you moved on!
I won’t regret or judge myself for reconciling – it just proves my trusting, loving heart, which I wouldn’t trade in for a cheater model ever! I can honestly say “I tried” and move forward in confidence and peace knowing HE sucks and I did my BEST.
The vacuum left by cheater-man is being filled with lovely me-time and dreams of a freer tomorrow and the opportunity for a better, honest relationship someday, once I look at what in me chose to stay with such a disordered human for so long. Leaving is the most sane decision I have made in decades. Because i stayed so long, there is no doubt remaining that I am doing what is right for me. And mighty.
Last photo taken of us was on a walk with x’s family. His dad had his thumb on the lens, blocking X out.
And a mere seven months later, x takes ow on the same walk and she makes a selfie from that spot her profile pick. (Don’t worry, no more pain shopping is a resolution).
I think ow had a sign involving shit. Day after she makes herself at home in my home while I was away and started the affair, she had massive bags of dirt stolen from her allotment that upset her. I haven’t had much karmic satisfaction but I like to think she got a teeny tiny bit of the universe saying ‘yeah that was a dick move’ to her.
My dreams were about being in a dark rectangular room with no doors or windows. There was no way out.
I would often have dreams where X was berating me and when I would open my mouth to defend myself, nothing would come out. It induced profound feelings of helplessness.
I had dreams like that too. I would wake myself up trying to scream and then a thin little sound would come out. The most telling dreams for me were the overflowing toilet dreams. I would be somewhere and need the restroom. When I walked in all the toilets were overflowing with sh!t and there were no privacy walls. I had this dream frequently up until the divorce.
I have those dreams too! I can’t find a bathroom when I need one, or it’s filthy, or there are no doors on the stalls, or the walls are half-height, etc.
Usually, I wake up and realize I need to pee and get right back to sleep afterwards.
Or, it could be symbolic of nobody caring about my basic needs!
I would have dreams of X berating me or doing something cruel to hurt me.
Trying to speak with all my strength without a making a sound, the feeling of helplessness would be frightening.
I woke up one morning after having the weirdest dream that my XH was going somewhere in the universe but he wouldn’t tell me – very odd and I told him so and laughed it off………he left for good the next day.
Another bad omen was on my wedding day – my mother missed the wedding (she was ironing my lazy brother’s shirt – very long story). At the time it was shocking but funny (she came rushing in as we were leaving the chapel asking “how do I look?”) and it was the most memorable part of the day – upon reflection.
One night I was walking past my study and I noticed something on my desk – I have lots of toys, collectibles etc. There was my XH’s Chucky doll (present from someone) sat staring at me and there was a note in front of him which read “ I hate you Digbert” I laughed it off but it unnerved me that he (XH), would write it, it was obviously true but he thought he was funny – even that dolls hair started falling out, just like mine when I lived with him!
I have loads more but better stop now …….I should have listened to my gut.
That is so creepy about the Chucky doll and the horrible note, Digbert!!
I actually had dreams of him and Shrek. I had moved to a different state ahead of him and the family, something HE wanted. His argument was that if we were going to buy a house there, one of us should already have a job. Turns out he just wanted a few months to try Shrek out for size with me out of the way.
I dreamed about him cheating on me. I knew what color she was, somewhat how she looked, even her hair color and the fact that she died her hair. It was so real that I called him and asked him if he was cheating on me with a fake bleached blond. When he paused before answering, I though it was because he was so shocked. Silly me.
Wow!!! You have an incredibly powerful and mighty mind—- and an intuition you can absolutely bank on. That’s awesome.
I joke that my wedding dress tried to kill me. I was feeling weak and shakey at the wedding reception for no apparent reason. I kept thinking I was going to pass out. I sucked it up as nerves and muscled through the festivities. Well, afterwards, when we got back to the hotel, I took off my dress & undergarments (no easy feat) and I then realized that one of the thick metal bars lining the inside of the corset had come loose and worked it’s way out of the fabric. The sharp metal was literally stabbing me in the side all day, every time I moved. I was bleeding pretty badly, but the dress was pulled so tight and the fabric was so thick that the blood simply soaked an 8″ circle on the inside fabric–it didn’t quite get through the corset. The blood stain was so bad that I had to throw away the dress.
I should’ve run far and fast when I learned that my wedding dress harpoooned me. Even my dress knew I was making a colossal mistake!
When I moved out to my new apartment I took my houseplants with me. They are thriving! One of the big ones used to always lean and never grow. Now? Seriously, double their size and growing straight up. The plants knew.
My garden looks amazing in the last year, it’s thriving on the peaceful vibes🌵🌻
I had a dream on the morning of dday that the ex and I were in a hotel and the tub we were taking a shower in was surrounded by people watching us. All I wanted was to alone with him so we could have sex but people kept interupting us. Just before we got out of the shower a man was lying naked on the bed dying and had an adult diaper on. In the adult diaper was feces and bugs crawling out of it. The man had stab wounds on his body and was extremely skinny except his enormous stomach. I woke up at exactly 5:55am. 4 days after this dream I kicked him out and filed for divorce. For a year previous I kept seeing 1111, 333 and 555. Come to find out they are angel numbers guiding me to the new journey in my life. Telling me I will be ok. As for the dream, I believe the man with the adult diaper is the true self of my ex that I didn’t want to see. I still see double and triple numbers to this day.
333 is my number!! I didn’t start seeing/noticing it until after Dday!!! And one of my very close friends who went through the same thing? 555 is hers…xoxo
Xoxo back. We all deserve so much more now after the hell we went through.
That’s interesting about the numbers. I catch lots of repeating 1s…
1’s are my main numbers too. I looked up a lot of info about it before and after. Ironically the ex’s phone number had 1111 in it and I never noticed it until recently because I always just pressed his name to call.
Not as metaphor as everyone else, but at the end, I had many a dream where I caught her cheating and she laughed in my face as I confronted her. I would tell her about these when I woke up, and she would reassure me that it was just ask dream.
Well… I am here, so we all know how that turned out.
I guess my subconscious knew, but my brain was ignoring it all.
I left work early one day and came home unexpectedly. A little voice in my head said “You’re going to find her with another man”. This was 8 months before DDay and about a week after she’d suddenly laid into me over dinner in a restaurant about how unhappy she was. She wasn’t there on that occasion but in retrospect it turns out she was already 6 months into the cheating when she launched into her “I’m not happy” rant which was the first I’d been told of it. Must have been planning her escape by then.
The next 8 months were hellish with weird, unpredictable moods and distancing. I got very anxious and often had trouble sleeping. My gut knew what was up but I just couldn’t bring myself to believe it. I think the 8 months of abuse and hell ensured that it didn’t take long for me to see sense after DDay about what an utter shit she was and how I should divorce ASAP. Slept like a baby ever since I decided to divorce, no anxiety, no bad dreams.
Real Monkey…thanks for sharing.
I absolutely do not understand how somebody can suddenly just UP and shit on an invested marriage!
How and why?
It makes no sense to me, especially if you have kids.
Usually, they don’t even know the other person! And, think they are in deep enough love to throw everything in their life away. Extended family, immediate family and many deep friendships.
Somebody, please, explain to me how that can possibly happen by meeting somebody online for a month, and often not even meeting them before they leave their entire lives behind. Like a cult. Makes no sense.
And, what in the hell are 3000+ text messages in a month talking about???
This makes no sense to you because you are a good person who is projecting your own rational values on to the disordered person’s set of unbelievably crappy life skills. They don’t even know themselves, so therefore they cannot know anyone else the way the rest of us do. One month of online interactions and 3k text messages worth of new kibbles seems like a deep relationship to someone is an unhealthy, disordered person. They are just different than we are. They cannot form real and true bonds with anyone, not even their own babies.
Thanks Jo, I occasionally need the reminder of what they are. Like Shehump I’ll never understand how anyone can leave a long term marriage, 25 years of memories, throw your spouse away like a piece of garbage, abandon your children all without a conscious.
I couldn’t treat a stranger the way I’ve been treated by my X.
You’re right they don’t form real bonds or feel love for anyone other than themselves.
It’s scary to know that I married an imposter, and I my life for over 20 years was a lie.
I assumed I was married to someone I trusted with my live and who I thought loved me and our family as much as I did.
No one knows how completely devastating it is unless you lived through it.
My picker is broken. My first husband and now my stbx – they are in love with love. They love the infatuation – the kibbles. They can only do surface stuff. They had both been in rehab at one point and I got to read both of their journals.
They cannot really love people. They love the chase. The excitement. The adrenaline. People are objects to be used to make them ‘happy.’ (which they can never really be!) It’s all about them. It must be their way and manipulation is key to getting their way. So you have the 3 channels. They can’t come from a position of empathy and true caring. So they can only use manipulation.
When I stopped reacting to my first husband I watched him switch from the charm, to pity to rage thing within like a minute trying to get me to react. It was the weirdest thing. He got so flustered that I went gray rock he left the house in a tizzy. They must control you. Control and power trips. If you do not comply you will probably get the bullying and intimidation to get their way. They only know love bombing and abuse to get their way. It’s their way or the highway.
The thing that disgusts me the most is that they do the most heinous cruel things to people. When you stand up for yourself then they pull this pathetic victim role and cry how ‘mean’ you are while they go full spite and revenge on you. They are big cowards.
Brit – Yep. They throw you and your kids away without blinking an eye. Then punish you for not being ok with it.
People cannot understand unless they live it. You can try to explain it and people will not get it. I tried to explain to a friend. She always looked so perplexed – she could not understand it no matter how I explained.
They do not care about anyone but themselves. Outlived your usefulness? Out you go. I’m so sorry you had to experience this.
My Cosmic Sign happened on Jan 22,2000. The day I was married in the beautiful show covered mountains of Tennessee. We stayed in a chalet at the very top of the biggest mountain that TN offered in Gatlinburg. The morning of our chapel wedding we went down mountain for a pancake breakfast with my narcs mother and his step dad; my dad and his gf at the time. We had a wonderful time….. until we needed to head back up that mountain to gather all our wedding items for the ceremony.
COSMIC CLUE #1: While we enjoyed our breakfast an unexpected SNOW STORM hit the area closing off all access to our chalet!!!!!! My narc and his step dad went up that mountain on foot and managed to bring it all down in a TRASH CAN LID.
Fast forward Feb 2011
COSMIC CLUE #2:
We spent our 2 hour anniversary dinner in complete SILENCE. He wouldn’t even look at me and his body was positioned like he was ready to dolt out the door any second.
He told me he cheated on me with our bookkeeper 2 weeks later.
Fast forward Christmas 2016:
COSMIC CLUE #3
While bringing down tree ornaments one of the boxes I was carrying fell over the upstairs cat walk crashing to the floor below. When I investigated there were about 20 GLASS bulbs in this box and the ONLY ONE TO BREAK into a thousand pieces?? Our anniversary ornament we bought the year we were married, which had the date and our names hand painted on it.
COSMIC CLUE #4
Three weeks later…… the chapel we were married in burned to the ground in the forest fire that took all of Siever County TN in 2016.
Yup. Yup. Yup. I can’t make this shit up people. 🤦🏻♀️
Wow. The universe was abundant with clues to you.
That same forest fire burned our cabin to nothing but ashes and a charred water heater the day after my DDay.
During 7 months of wreckonciliation my back was killing me. Within days of her moving out that pain was gone.
I had back pain during wreckonciliation too! The morning he told me he had indeed been unfaithful to me again during wreckonciliation, the moment he told me, the pain went out of my back.
I used to have a dream that I was sleeping outside, alone and a little furry but mean (like a cross between a badger and opossum) animal would be nipping at me the whole night. I would be so stressed because I felt like I just had to stay and fall asleep (instead of getting up and walking inside!!!) and not pay attention and it would stop but it never would. I would always wake up when the fear of being bit would get to be too much.
Now my biggest hurdle is to get over having not left all the abusive behavior earlier instead of wasting 10 years hoping he would change but knowing deep down he wouldn’t.
For me it was unexpected illness. I was driving to a sales appointment one November morning when I had to pull over to the side of the road because I thought I was going to throw up. I found out three months later that the evening before was the first time he’d had sex with the OW.
A month later, I was away at a sales conference. All the way home, my colleagues (we’d car shared) had to stop to let me throw up. I found later that, whilst I’d been away, he’d had the OW at our house and they’d had sex in our bed.
Wow, HappilySingle — you are fined tuned to the universe! Something to be grateful for!
Oh god. You are so fine tuned to the universe, and I’m sorry you had to experience that
Wow that’s very interesting. Mine was a bit similar but the days he was having sex with her I was having massive anxiety about my job I was having issues with at the time. It was so bad I resigned at short notice. I realise my emotional reaction was to do with his cheating that I knew nothing about not the people I had issue with at my work.
Months before Cold Slab O’Meat started his affair, he started ignoring me, rejecting affection and verbal put downs. My adult son was visiting and expressing some upset over my ex’s hoarding.
For a moment of clarity, my sense of priorities returned and I said, ‘If CS keeps being a jerk, I’m going to ask him to move. You should move back in.’
‘No mom, you’re TOO Neat. It’s the opposite. I’m messy and you hate it.’
Also I just stopped doing everything for Cold Slab and SD. They never appreciated what I cooked and cleaned and paid for anyway. Stopped buying their junk food with my money. Stopped doing their laundry. Stopped being the only responsible adult making sure SD had school supplies, lunch money and vacation bags packed properly. That poor kid, two adult narcissist parents happy to let a stepparent do all the dirty work.
There were some m unfortunate scenes when I stopped fixing their lives for them. The funnies part was nobody yelled at me. They all were busy yelling at each other and not even aware I’d stopped supporting them. Anything that wasn’t part of the household at large, I’s stopped paying and doing they didn’t notice.
The affair was devastating but the verbal and financial abuse started months before. I kept asking Cold Slab O’Meat what was going on and was told I was crazy and making things up.
Well, crazy doesn’t pay your bills, make you 4 star meals and wash your knickers.
The last meal I made that I ever allowed him to eat was a pot of Green Chicken Chile that I made in the crock pot while he sat on the couch texting the Sluterus and I fixed a hole in our bathroom floor he had caused by ‘not knowing’ the sink on his side had a leak. He had the fucking nerve to eat my food while he sat on a couch I bought not helping with damage he did to the home he’d lived in free of charge for two years. Texting a whore he’d already impregnated.
That…so encapsulates his character that I don’t need to tell you he thought he was super generous to compliment my Chili while he was destroying my life. And he was shocked when I chirped, ‘Of course it’s delicious. Everything I make is. Remember that. Now instead of talking to that whore while I fix your mess, go pack some boxes so you can get the fuck out. Get off my couch and go spread your ass on hers. Hope she has Chili, it’s that last meal you’ll ever have here.’
Like! Like! Like!
Bravo Luziana, another cheater was served his Khama. 👏🏼
I should have listened on my wedding day. Married on a dock overlooking the water. I kept having this uncontrollable urge to run down the dock to safety and keep running.
I didn’t listen. When the Minister was reading the wedding vows I started crying uncontrollably. The wedding guests thought it was sweet ~ I didn’t know at the time why I was crying.
I do now.
It was a definite sign that I spackled over.
I woke up the morning after my wedding and thought what the heck have I done!? 30+ years later, I have my answer.
My two-year-old toddler threw away and lost my wedding ring. I shit ye not.
For whatever reason, my boy liked trying on my wedding & engagement rings. He threw my wedding ring across my bedroom and it amazingly not only travelled into the en-suite bathroom, but, as I later found out after many futile hours of fruitless searching, somehow disappeared down the most minute of possible gaps in the bathroom floor. This gap, it turned out, led into the internal wall cavity, all the way into the foundations of the house.
This gap was so small, I’d never noticed it before. But how a two-year-old was able to fling an object from one room into another, which not only landed right by this gap, but somehow actually managed to fall into it? To me, that’s beyond bizarre.
When I told the husband, he snapped at me that I wasn’t going to get another one. He actually seemed angry that he’d still have to wear his and I wouldn’t – he angrily told me to have his, instead!
A year later, in advance of our wedding anniversary, the committed fool I was organised and paid a joiner to rip up the floor boards in my bathroom to search for the ring. When he couldn’t find it, he ripped out the skirting boards in the hallway below. After sticking his hands in the dark rubble, he eventually found the blasted thing.
Looking back, that moment was like something out of Lord of The Rings. I think I should have left that symbol of a godforsaken marriage there, in the dark and the dirt and the dust. It probably would have lain there, in the foundations of the house for a century or two, undisturbed and undiscovered. The symbol of a domestic kind of evil best left buried…
Plus, the joiner had to make a right mess to search for it. Like I made a mess of my own life (albeit, temporarily) trying to pick-me-dance with a man utterly checked out and full of contempt.
What a great story. Love the Lord of the Rings reference. I hope once you recovered it you had it melted down.
Amazing metaphor for your commitment to your family. Mighty. Willing to tear everything down to find what was lost.
@Off the crazy train, And the award for best written comment goes to…. YOU! What a gift you have for the written word.
“It probably would have lain there, in the foundations of the house for a century or two, undisturbed and undiscovered. The symbol of a domestic kind of evil best left buried…” Genius turns of phrase.
Months before DDay an explanation of benefits came to our home from the insurance co that included a prescription for viagra. Shock and a kick to my stomach would be the only description I can render of the physiological response in my body. Spackle me pretty…NEVER would my husband step out on me…NEVER! I decided to watch him for a period of about 6 weeks with a new set of eyes…Was he having an affair? When? He’s always working or here at home. I could see something was off with him, he was withdrawn, not present. Finally worked up the nerve to ask him if he was having an affair? NO! Never! I would never do that! Why then, I asked do you have a prescription for Viagra that I, your wife am unaware of?? Bear in mind this was the one and ONLY time a drug prescription ever showed up on an explanation of benefits EVER. Mr. Smartypants got the script at the hospital pharmacy when he went for his prostate check up. I did believe him then. He said “it was just for 2 pills to try in out and it didn’t work” Righto dude! After D Day I found he’d been getting Viagra for months and cheating for at least 6 months. At least there’s plenty of money for him to be required to share! So So much happier without that oppressive man!
My ex also got Viagra at the beginning of his affair (really, the only way an affair would be remotely possible). When I noticed that some were “missing”, he told me that he sold them to the guys at the gas station. Then, he changed to Cialis and never mentioned the change to me. Refilled that prescription EVERY month… and during the divorce, I had to keep him on MY insurance!
I swear these cheaters & their dick pills seem to go hand & hand!
And of course there is always a reason that they are missing or used-and not with us.
Ex would get dick pills from the Dr. & then say that they gave him a headache & didn’t make him feel good but yet the pills were disappearing and not being used with me? He would tell me that he gave them to his friends or co-workers, etc. After ex passed away last year, his work sent his office belongings to my house & lo and behold the boxes contained MULTIPLE bottles of EMPTY Viagra prescriptions dated during the time we were together and they sure in the hell weren’t being used with me.
In hindsight, I think that was the universe showing me that I was right about him all along
My fuckwit brought home a dozen dick pills after working in the Middle East since they sell them over the counter there (of course they do). I was aware of him using 2 of them for “us.” Strangely, all of them disappeared and when I asked him about it he said he used them. Um, with whom? No one.
This was a classic “You Might Be a Chump If” moment.
Mine also had a prescription not used with me ( I would no longer have regular sex with him) and the counts were dropping. I thought he was using them for the marathon whacking off sessions in the bathroom with his private collection of sex toys? Am I being a chump to think he wasn’t cheating then? He had an exit affair and I believed that was the first…
Raising hand here. I found a sample pack of six Viagra with two missing in Cheater X husband’s bathroom drawer. (Never in the years we were married did he need them) When confronted, he said that he had used them with me. Bwahaha You think I would have remembered THAT wood !
I would find the back door of our master bedroom door unlocked (there was nothing to go to in that part of our backyard and another main door that we would use to go into the backdoor). Often, there would be leaves on the rug by that master bedroom door and I would ask, why it was always unlocked. he would shrug it off and say I was giving him the third degree. I also would notice that my medicine cabinet door was always left open after I came back into town from working in another city 1 or 2 X a week (on his insistence). In there was the lube we kept. I thought it was strange as there was nothing else that he kept in there that was his that would warrant that door to be open all the time. Come to find out after D Day that ugly horse looking tranny looking whore girl was coming over after my son went to bed to our house, they were smoking and drinking outside in the backyard and then he was bringing her through that backdoor (which was the one that I asked him about) to have sex with her on our bed while our son slept next door. My wedding photo hung in our master bedroom (as did his).
While anger at the OW is justifiable, taking it out on the trans community with hateful slurs is not. Not cool.
Oh my god. My husband worked in the Middle East a few years ago and also got a prescription for Viagra. He’s NEVER had an issue (healthy, early 40s) and he had some pithy cover story. I found out later he had been “inappropriately” texting other women while over there and hit the bars frequently but “only to flirt” because it was the ME and “nothing too untoward” could happen over there anyway (Dubai).
I’ve never ever felt this rang true. His opportunities to stray are severely limited these days but I still wonder. And I lurk on this site, so…
I am sorry you are in this situation. I always believed I had unrealistic worries and that nothing could happen while he was there. He was in Saudi so it is not the Las Vegas of the ME like Dubai is, but he developed constant “mico affairs” with women at work and I would not be surprised if they became something more than just emotional amusement parks for him. The poor sausage constantly was looking for “something else, something more” whether is was more exciting work in dangerous locations or some other woman to turn on the charm with instead of the tired old wife appliance.
I always felt like I was doing my part by being a great wife and holding down the home fort and dealing with everything there while he was on the other side of the planet. I easily could have been a cheater considering how he completely ignored me and spent so many years doing whatever the hell he pleased when it came to work travel.
Alas, I was informed that I was the problem in our marriage during the brutal discard from the initial poof abandonment and then the return for 2 days of screaming at me that I am a terrible person and was the one who destroyed the marriage. All the while he had a Schmoopie half his age cooking on the side.
He was always on the look out for some new and fresh little Miss Perfect Schmoopie and treated me like complete crap but he feels totally justified in declaring that I am 100% to blame. He will treat the next ones like that too though after the love bombing, and he won’t have kids with them to force any thread of connection. He can freely bounce from one to the next and keep them all wondering how he feels about them, and ultimately he can die alone. He deserves it.
I do trust that the sucks and he will find out just how much I put up with when the next ones simply will not. He just ain’t that great of a catch.
Early morning on DDay I had a dream of a man sitting on a stool looking at me. There was nothing and nobody else in the room. And he stared. Suddenly I felt love like no other love I ever felt before coming from him. It wasn’t a romantic love. No words were spoken. It was just a feeling. It’s really hard to explain the experience actually. Then I woke up and muttered “who was that?”. 10 hours later I got the “email” from my stbx.
My mother used to compare Dancing Dick to a snake. I thought she was being a little dramatic. She was right.
MJO, I have experienced that pure love feeling in the past: it seems to come prior to an event that is devastating in some way, almost to protect and shore me up from damage.
I had a dream like that about 3 months after abandonment. It made me realize I never once had that feeling from Fuckwit. That non-sexual, completely warming feeling of love from some faceless man, perhaps like the complete love we feel toward our new infants. It was another step forward and away from the asshole for me.
That is so weird but I had a similar dream about the warming feeling of love recently & didn’t understand it. It was a man who came to me & took my hand in his so lovingly but I couldn’t see his face and I didn’t recognize his voice. He told me not to worry, that everything was going to be alright and he was stroking my hand and arm very gently. I felt love, strength, peace and safe-all at once. Things I never felt with ex.
I believe that “Love” feeling is known as “Agape” (pronounced as “Ah-Gah-pay”) which is an all-embracing, not sexual, love. It’s a wonderful thing to have in your life. Congratulations to all whom have felt it.
Thanks SoldieringOn
Agape the Greek concept?
The year before Dday I would have these horrible nightmares of this huge snake attacking me and biting me over and over as I screamed.
They would always wake me right up with my heart racing. Little did I know that the snake was sleeping next to me. After the divorce I never had the nightmare again.
I too had dreams with snake imagry when I was married to the horror.
I was down a flight of stairs in a place unknown to me. I knew ex was upstairs in a room with a closed door with another woman, but had not seen him with my own eyes. I tried to climb the stairs to open the door to see for certain, but tripped and fell on a pack of snakes lying and writhing up and down the steps, and could not get up the stairs.
I confronted ex many times about an affair and he gaslighted me, he is a criminal defense lawyer. I felt I had to see before I trusted what I knew. I still struggle with my strong intuitions and feelings and knowing what to do when my control is limited.
I know he is not emotionally healthy to be around, and my son should not be in his care, but he acts like father of the year and has gained 40% custody. This hurts all the time.
There was more to the dream and there were so many signs. I wish that I, and all of us, have the strength to listen and act on what we feel in our beings is true.
Driving home from a “counseling” session with some lay couples counselors, my (now ex) wife and I discussed what might justify divorce biblically. She remarked that I had far more grounds to divorce her than she did I. Eight months later, I discover a man with whom she was cheating. My guess is that he wasn’t the first.
I should have listened to my instincts the first time I laid eyes on him. Instantly thought he was gay.
I should have listened when a mutual friend advised me not to get involved with him, her comment and I quote “you don’t want to mess about in that gene pool there all crazy”
I should have listened when the weirdest shit would happen and he would just act like it was just all normal.
I should have listened when our wedding day became all about him, he chose the music for the service including what I walked down the ile to and what we danced to at the reception. We had 110 guests and not one of them was biologically related to me and only 4 where longterm friends of mine.
I should have listened when he just up and moved an hour from our home six months before the wedding to a new job and tiny house claiming it would save us money, only to up and move again 8 months after we married claiming he couldn’t cope at his job because the locals would not accept him and guys kept trying to pick him up even though he had supposedly pined a copy of our marriage certificate to his work station.
The endless dodgy cars, the constant change of jobs, the random getting injured too or from work generating great concern and then needing to have time off and claim compensation.
The signs where numerous, so much so I could play this game all day……………I had a big bucket of spackle and could trowel like a champ
I also had “signs.” Being the kind, non judgmental chump I was when I first met Dancing Dick- I blew them off.
He once told me that he had urges to rape a woman on a beach when he was younger. He complimented himself for restraining himself. I wasn’t sure what to think. It troubled me. I blew it off as “youthful folly.” Or…………..that was then….this is now (Dancing Dick was in AA “helping himself”- he was no longer that “bad person”).
I should have ran….right there….right then!
Oh. the things we spackle over, That is horrendous, give the man a bitch cookie he restrained himself.
Reading your comment reminded me of something cheater did before just after we got engaged that I never spoke to him about joking it off as a bit of humor, But he actually approached my best friend at the time saying that if things don’t work out between he and I, that maybe the two of them should give it a go. She was not impressed as she was engaged at the time, and Cheater would never miss the opportunity to point out to people how big a loser her partner was or even publically humiliate him. Cheater loved to get a laugh at the expense of others
Once after sex (had to be at least 3 years into marriage) fuckwit said, I don’t see how guys can rape girls, it would be so hard to get it up like that. WTF, I have never forgotten that, just weird to even go there.
Urge to rape?? Wow. That’s really awful. I mean, sexual attraction is wonderful, and we all get sexual urges. But an urge to rape someone, that’s pretty sinister.
This is nowhere near as bad, but when we first got together, my ex would tell me he’d search for and watch videos of people being hung. He’d also seen a man being stabbed in the neck at the next table or two away from him… the man later died. While I was imagining how traumatised this would have made him, giving him lots of sympathy and understanding for what he’d witnessed, he just shrugged his shoulders… As if what he’d seen was nothing more than a building being dismantled. Of course, I spackled over his indifference, and the fact that he’d actively searched for, and chosen to watch those videos… So cold.
My serial-cheating asshole did all of this — but hid it from me exceptionally well. During my investigative days of trying to figure out who in the heck this person I was married to for two decades really is, I discovered lots of computer searches for “Nazi Porn” … and the images … OMG … so horrible. So really, really horrible. Still turns my stomach. I cried when I saw them (for the poor women).
Between the rape porn and Nazi porn, etc. — It quickly became very clear who the serial-cheating asshole is … he’s a monster.
Finding the genres of Dancing Dick’s porn tastes- was my turning point. Barely legal, and porn depicting violence toward women= I’m out of here! Now way can I “unsee” those horrible things.
I don’t know JessMom, that sounds as bad as the ‘urge to rape’ to me. Enjoying watching people getting killed. Yikes !!!
Oops…that comment was meant for Off The Crazy Train.
My first impression of fuckwit when we were introduced was that he was a snob. He barely acknowledged me and seemed aloof. An hour later, he sat down next to me and offered to buy me a drink. He was a completely different person. I thought I had misjudged him. Much later when we discussed our meeting and told him of my impression, he replied : Oh, I just wasn’t expecting you to be there and I hadn’t seen these guys (other friends of his that were there) for awhile. Now I realize, he needed to adjust his mask before he talked to me. Surprise shouldn’t preclude good manners.
Mine buggered off before the end of our wedding reception. Left me, without even telling me, to say goodbye to all our guests. Found myself alone with one or two friends, on my wedding night. Had to search the entire venue for him. Found him in one of the bedrooms, drinking with his mates. On our wedding night. What a charmer.
So glad you are Off the Crazy Train!
Your post rings so true with me. At my wedding (11 years ago now) the POS was drunk for the ceremony. he spent the majority of the reception drinking and smoking with his friends. he showed up to dance with me once.
After nearly all the guests had left, he pressured me into going to some bar with him and his friends (he needed a designated driver). At the bar, by the time only us and another couple were left, I was so strung out from his deteriorating drunken state and the fact that he was working really hard trying to get cigarettes out of a faulty machine for the wife of that couple rather than leave to be with me on our wedding night, I burst into tears.
he blew up at me and verbally abused me all the way back to the room at his parents’ country club. Then he passed out on the bed. I did not sleep that night.
I should have known then!!
I got a big mental image of your story. I am so sorry for you. He neglected you in a big way. I can’t imagine the anxiety you had about your future. He sounds really immature.
Yup. Mine got completely hammered on our wedding night. We didn’t even have sex.
Should have been a sign that he was a closet alcoholic but I just overlooked it. Now I realize I should have seen that (along w/ a bunch of other signs)
Before d-day, I used to have dreams that I was being abandoned in the woods. After d-day, I used to have nightmares about a prostitute half my age moving into my house. I was invisible to Dancing Dick (ex perv/cheater)- so he could not hear me when I protested the whore’s presence in my home.
Before d-day, Dancing Dick used to wake up from his sleep- gasping for air….sweating. Now I know why.
oh, when the cheater has insomnia and blames it on you claiming it was something you did that woke them and because they could not get back to sleep they had to go hang out on the computer…..Its all a win-win for them. They get away with their double life while you feel guilty they can’t sleep.
The whore in my house dream qualifies me as Ms. Cleo’s protege! I did not yet discover a secret online affair with a web cam hoe. When I did find out about it (after I started having the dream)……..there was Dancing Dick promising the web cam hoe MY house! For real!
Oh my God, of all the CN discussions this one is really hitting home to me when I see how many of you had the same dreams as I did. I had many, many repeated nightmares about being trapped in a maze, or a warehouse without windows or in the wilds and struggling to find my way out. The worst of those was picture, if you will, the Andes, but not all green and lush – covered in slippery, slimey mud – and I was trying to climb my way out of there but every where I turned it was another dead end. One young man on the path just ahead of me could take it no more so raising his arms in the sign of the cross just jumped – but I kept going. And I would always be running into monsters or even hordes of children who would just keep jabbing at me. Often I would be struggling to carry a small child with me who I knew was one of my sons, but I never gave up. Those dreams stopped when I got rid of the ex.
Another frequent one even know is trying to wash. I might be at a camp site and every time I try to get into one of the showers someone dashes in front of me. Or at the swimming pool trying to change into my clothes and someone always “stole” the changing cubicle as I got there. Or there was a shower but no water. My therapist said that even now I am trying to “wash” the past away – wash the filth off if you like. Haven’t succeeded so far but they are getting further apart.
And forgive me for banging on a bit, but the most wonderful dream occurred just before the divorce. My dad (in the dream) was a baby and I was taking care of him. I knew it was in England and I was never able to take care of him as he was dying because I live in France. But every time I put baby dad to bed he pooped all over himself. So I would wash and change him and start again but over and over he would mess all over himself. Finally I put baby dad down and said “dad, I can’t do this any more”. Then suddenly baby dad became a handsome young man who leaned over and whispered in my ear “if only you would realize how close I am to you right now you would know you will be ok”. Then I woke up sobbing and my ex and my sons came running into the bedroom to see what was the matter. Turns out it was July 17 – the anniversary of my dad’s death – and you now what, dad was right! Thanks dad.
💜thank you for sharing that last dream
Attie, What a beautiful last dream!
This just occurred to me – When I had gotten engaged @ 21 years old, my dad tried to talk me out of marrying. He saw something in my fiancé that he did not like, yet I was too blinded by “love” to listen… Dad was very loving and supportive throughout my marriage. Sadly, he passed away when I was 29. Toward the end of my marriage, I had numerous dreams where he was present. I would be exploring rooms in unfamiliar places filled with vividly-colored sheer curtains and find him there sleeping peacefully. I wonder what symbolization lies there?
You dad symbolized peace and real love… appearing in unknown rooms that your ex had never been in. Rooms that weren’t tainted with pain or lies. Guidance in your dreams to show you the difference.
Thats my opinion.
💜
Thanks for sharing that.
I had health issues and weird dreams, too, but my clearest sign came the day after I found out he was cheating. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve looked to cloud formations as “signs” and on this day, I looked up to see a very clear, strong vertebrate spinal column. The universe was telling me to get a spine.
I had fairly regular dreams of trying to save someone, and never getting help. Often, the ex would be in the dream, watching from the sidelines, sometimes smirking. I remember in one dream I was trying to save our child who had fallen into a deep swimming pool. I was struggling to get her up and out of the pool. Ex was just standing and watching, and yawned. I should have noted how these dreams occurred many, many times over the years.
On the flip side, I had a dream last night that I was enjoying the most delicious, passionate kiss with a handsome younger man. Maybe we can enjoy sharing our lovely dreams we’ve had since becoming cheater free? Idea for tomorrow’s post? I’ve also had dreams about finding treasure and valuable antiques I didn’t know were in my house.
Yes, FindingBliss, I have had many dreams these past years of being in love and kissing passionately with handsome strangers. I hate it when that alarm clock goes off….lol
I have another one.
On my wedding day, I was waiting for the wedding car to return to take me and my dad to church. Everyone else had already left. As we were waiting by the front door, I was distracted by something underneath my wedding shoe. I bent down to have a look at what it was. It was a picture of a frog. Somehow, the pop-out frog from a copy of Rod Campbell’s ‘Dear Zoo’ book had become detached from the book, and had attached itself to my wedding shoe.
Of course, as I was stood there in my wedding dress, veil etc, waiting to get married, I took this as a sign that, when I kissed my cheater-husband-to-be at the alter, he would transform into my Prince Charming. Oh, how lovely! A fairy tale symbol on my wedding day!
But, no. Nope, it turned out my symbolic interpretation was right off. It turned out the frog was a frog, after all.
It was probably a warning.
Just out of interest, the text that accompanies the frog page on Dear Zoo is:
“So they sent me a frog. He was too jumpy! I sent him back.”
Damn right.
I LOVE that, especially the text accompanying the picture! Thanks for sharing. <3
My friends and family did not like Dancing Dick while I was dating him. They weren’t caught up in the throes of narcissistic hooking- so they were able to see right through him. No one was happy for me on my wedding day. My friends and family attended my wedding out of decency/obligation. I thought they were just all assholes. What was I thinking?
On my wedding day, most of the bridal party looked and acted like they had front row seats at a wake.
In the lead up to the wedding and on the day the best man looked like someone had pissed in his porridge –
realization since d’day, he had a thing for my Husband and to him, I was the OW.
My now ex BIL whom I have a good relationship with because of d’day, on my wedding day could not crack a smile and since d’day I have discovered he had no desire to be at the wedding of his brother let alone be part of the wedding party and had a hip flask full of scotch in his pocket he had been sipping from at every given opportunity. OMG, I am laughing reading this back to myself. You cannot make this shit up.
I was actually married in Switzerland before my family had ever met him (circumstances – not me trying to leave anyone out). So all my family were excited to be meeting this US marine. It was in the days before the internet so no photos. When he got off the plane and walked towards them there was a pregnant pause and they all just went “Oh”! I laugh now because they were right!
My hair stopped curling. It just went…flat. Straight. I have naturally wavy/curly hair. Dday was in the month of August, in the South. If you live or have ever visited the South during our humid summer months you know wavy hair gets wavyer. Mine just wouldn’t. I even changed how I wore my hair! It was also how I felt inside. I was bone tired. Ibwas tired and mt hair was tired. 3 years out, divorced, I can stand outside on a humid day (even in October) for an hour and wavy hair appears!! I thinks it wavyer now than ever before! Funny how that works…
Each semester we would have a party for his grad student TAs. Back in 2011, a female international student brought me a gift from home — a very beautiful ethnic dress. I thought it lavish and odd because she and I were only acquaintances. She was married with two kids and outwardly observant of her conservative religion, so I bought my husband’s interpretation that she was showing her gratitude to him in a socially acceptable way, through honoring his wife. He also claimed that she admired me greatly but was too shy and intimidated to befriend me.
You can guess what’s coming. It was a sign!
Last spring during the marriage policing I discovered that that this grad student and he were having an affair. His first one. That I know of. Shoulda coulda known that wasn’t just a gilt dress. It was a guilt dress!
“(Yeah God, I’m a bit slow on the uptake. Next time send Jesus personally. I might better take the hint…)”, Yeah, me too, Chump Lady.
From now I will always take recurring dreams seriously.
I’ll say for about four years I had a recurring dream. Had it at least once a week. I’d wake up around 1:15 am in a cold sweat and my heart pounding out of my chest. My dream always had to do with being alone in the world. The dreams were so awful that I could never fall back to sleep.
Well, October 2014, God woke me up again in the same way around midnight. Only this time my gut told me something was wrong as my husband still hadn’t come home from a “work dinner.” My first thought was that they took the NY bankers to the strip clubs (not that his coworkers ever did that before, but it was my first thought). Well, guess who walks in the door around 1:20am? The lying cheater who was out on a date with a newly divorced whore.
I have not had that dream once since that night.
I also had chronic neck pain most of our marriage. My neck no longer hurts as I got rid of the cheating, lying Pain in My Neck!
He was a literal pain in the neck. Hahahahahaha. That’s a perfect sign.
Ughh, I had so many awful wake-ups of dread, peaking down to the couch just in case, realizing he still wasn’t home. I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep after. I even would go for walks sometimes near the end. Just awful, I am so glad that is over for ever.
Rain on our wedding day…for our outdoor wedding. At a place in the Catskills where guests were invited to spend the weekend, go hiking, visit Woodstock, etc.
It rained ALL weekend. Two-thirds if the entire country were soaked that weekend.
Two years later, the remains of a hurricane blasted through the area, streams swelled and washed away bridges, and the venue was literally cut off from the outside world for a few days (during someone else’s wedding).
XW regularly lamented the rainy weekend; she said we should have chosen a different date.
But you know what happened the prior weekend? It snowed. Several inches. Stripped the fall foliage from most of the trees.
Yeah, it was a sign, all right.
Yeah, it rained on my outdoor wedding ceremony day. Nice weather all the days leading up to it and the day after, nice weather again. The rain stopped so we could still have the ceremony, but it was gloomy and the grass was all spongy. They even had to put a rug of sorts in front of the gazebo so we wouldn’t step in the mud. Within an hour of the ceremony ending, it rained hard the rest of the night and our dream of our guests being able to be outside to stroll around the gardens didn’t pan out.
Also, now that I know my ex is a narc and narc’s like to keep their old supply (girlfriends) around after they break-up with them. I should have seen him inviting his ex-girlfriend to our wedding and reception as a really bad sign! Even my girlfriend freaked out when she saw his ex there. I was so conditioned by my ex that having your exes around after a break-up is totally normal. I’m sure he got lots of narc fuel on our wedding day with his ex who wanted to marry him at his wedding. Lying, cheating jerk!
That is a level of fucked up so spectacular it’s leaving me speechless. For him to invite xg is totally thoughtless; for xg to accept & actually attend YOUR wedding is beyond bad taste.
Tell me about it, but I didn’t know that this too was another big red flag!! He dated her for maybe three years and I know for sure they talked marriage, because when I was still “friends” with him, she mentioned something about how much “they’d be worth” once they got married. He broke up with her to be with me. And then after I moved 650 miles away from my family to live closer to him, he called me up and said he was going to go out with his ex for dinner. I was so upset, but he said, “Everyone does this in college.” I now realize he was triangulating me with her like he did with all the other “friends” over the years. She was an ex-girlfriend that still wanted to be “friends” with him after their break-up and he conditioned me to believe this was all normal, so when she was invited to the wedding, I didn’t think anything of it. I wrongly felt secure about secure about the man I was marrying all the while GIGANTIC red flags were waving all around! And for years she sent us a Christmas card with the (ugh) Christmas letter about how wonderful her life was, yada yada. I never sent one back. It was like, why is she sending this? Now I know she was just more kibbles to my sparkly narc turd. I’ve often thought about writing her and telling her she dodged a bullet with the lying cheater, but by now he’s told everyone I’m “crazy”, so that would just make me look crazy if he’s been in contact with her. Lesson learned. Don’t have any contact with anyone associated with the narc, because they are so sneaky that they are always two steps ahead of you scheming up something else.
For years I would dream that a bear or a lion was in my house. I would hide and could see the animals searching for me slowly. The slow, calm hunting of me made it even more terrifying. I would look out the window and see my parents and have to keep them quiet and get them in the house to hide. Basically what I was doing in real life… keeping my family safe and quiet so I could remain married to a rage filled predator that wanted to destroy me.
Another one was I’d dream that my body was decomposing. I would look down and see a huge wound and my skin breaking apart. I told my therapist. She told me my body knew that he was killing me from the inside out.
On my wedding day (although it was a perfect and awesome wedding) my husband’s family tried to ruin my wedding by bringing items from his ex gf to the reception. They planned it ahead of time together to try to upset me. They were horrible prior, during, and after so no surprise. My bridesmaids stepped in and stopped it from happening. No one would ever tell me what was in the jacket pocket that they were trying to give him. Basically was an omen to the triangulation I spackling over and the triangulation with other women to come.
During his cheating he talked in his sleep and said “i am playing with fire. Don’t worry she doesn’t know anything”. I think that happened so i would start looking. And that’s what I did. And a few weeks later was DDay. And sometimes I wonder… did he actually say that in his sleep or was he playing with me like a cat taps around a mouse. After DDay I told him he said it and he stared at me expressionless but intense. In his face was something and I think it still bothers me because what I saw was amusement.
Just from what you’ve written… it gives me the impression that he wasn’t asleep, and he knew exactly what he was saying. Horrible man. And what a horrible, horrible family too.
Good grief, a whole family of psychopaths. Glad you’re out of their nest of vipers, WhatRing!
I would dream all the time when I was still married to Cheater, often in the dreams, I would be engaging in hand to hand combat or trying to avoid, being attacked, captured, killed, Always dark, always ominous. or the other thing would be in my dreams I could not fully open my eyes like they were to heavy for me to open or stuck somehow, and I would always wake up tired after my dreams………really tired.
Yes! Me too. Someone trying to kill me, couldn’t get away. Legs wouldn’t work right. And the eye thing, too heavy for me to open or keep open. So weird, but once I moved 500 miles away 1 1/2 years ago and soon divorced, I don’t recall having those dreams anymore.
Dancing Dick undermined my instincts and intuition with gas lighting. As troubling as they were, I did not take my dreams and nightmares seriously. Looking back……my dreams/nightmares were right on the money.
I had a cheap wall clock in my garage. I called it the magic clock because for some reason it always changed the time itself during daylight savings and ran on the same battery for 8 years. On dday the clock stopped st the exact time I found out about the affair.
Wow. Magical indeed!
No way! That is wild!
There were so many signs, like God was throwing bricks at me in the end, but the funniest:
During the height of Pirates of the Caribbean craze, everyone was talking pirate, there a website that would give you a pirates name if you entered your info.
I entered my name etc and my name came up “doormat!” I knew I was a doormat, I didn’t know the rest of the world knew too. What kind of pirate name is doormat???
That made me chuckle! Sorry! At least you are no longer a doormat!
God was throwing bricks!
Love this ^^^^^
This is gold.
Wha?? Wouldn’t that be “shipmat”?
You’ve inspired me to create my own pirate name.
So far according to different name generators: Iron Morgan Vane, Gloria “Saucy Devil” Curnow or Black Heart Irene. Irene?
Ohh soo funny, your parrots name would be doorknob!
Love love love tonight’s post, thanks CL
About a month before dday we were headed out of town on vacation. The ex liked to arrive at the airport a minimum of 3 hours early all the time which had become kind of a joke. We stopped for coffee in town and I realized that I left my iPod docked on my computer at home. I figured we had plenty of time so I mentioned it as we pulled out of the coffee parking lot. He asked if I wanted to go back for it and I said yes and I conveyed that we would still get to the airport with plenty of time.
The entrance to the highway was on our left (through the lights) and our home was straight ahead. When the light turned green he gunned it left and once we got on the other side of the toll booth, he said “It’s too late now!” He smiled when he said it and when I looked over at him he appeared like a deranged cartoon character. I was really annoyed because we had plenty of time and also because he seemed to extract some sort of glee from doing the opposite of what I asked. Then he started making small talk like we just met and we weren’t married for 24 years. I’m not one for a lot of conversation in the morning and certainly not banal small talk.
So I ignored his jibber jabber which seemed to anger him. For a moment I thought that was a win but then I heard loud and clear “Don’t push it, it’s not safe.” I decided to let the whole thing go and participated in the conversation even though it felt like he was trying to bait me. I know now that he was trying to start a fight so we didn’t have to go.
After dday and the ensuing wreckconciliation that followed, I kept having recurring dreams about watching planes crash or being in my car and having it race backwards out of control. No matter how hard I stomped on the brakes I couldn’t stop it. I know now both of those dreams are often interpreted as you not having control of your life.
I had the car is running out of control dreams as well! That was several months before I start getting my ducks in a row. Once I started preparing, those dreams subsided
I’ve had those too!
I dreamed that I was flying across the country to see him, and the plane took a nosedive. This dream occurred just before D-day. We had been working on opposite sides of the country for a year.
I had another dream shortly after D-day, when I was still trying to decide whether to divorce him or not. I dreamed there was a terrible flood—lots of destruction. In the dream, he wanted us to stand as close to the flood as possible and watch it. He was fascinated and entertained by the destruction. I stood there by him for a few seconds and then said, “I’m going to higher ground” and walked away from him. I filed shortly after this. It was a very clear sign from God.
There were many, many more dreams that I had over the years before these. I could write a book!
Christmas of 2012 I was in a terrible funk, cried a lot, had unexplained hormonal issues that caused loss of blood to the nth degree, and couldn’t connect with my spouse. Saw endless doctors, alone of course. After 25 yrs together, 17 married, I developed a rash under my wedding band that cracked and itched and I took it off. It would not clear up. No lie, the rash appeared when the emotional part of the affair started, which I confirmed via the email/text Tourette’s the m/cow had. She was so dim, she wrote way too much to her boss, and he was so dim he never emptied the trash. I had only taken that ring off late in pregnancy, it was my absolute favourite piece of jewelry, and it knew before I did that I’d been discarded. Of course I was called a delusional unstable drama queen who was somehow fit enough to be mom and dad to 3 kids 24 hrs a day while he “worked” for my cushy lifestyle. Still chaps my ass. He’d lost his band a couple of years before in a snow drift and not replaced it and ran out after dday to buy himself a new one. Because loyalty. I still have my band because we designed it and it’s so beautiful. My daughter may want it later. I hate how objects get so much sentimental meaning and pain attached.
Let them have new meaning and life with her. They can mean the things you want them to- it did try to warn you after all. It will watch over her!
thank you ❤️ The worst part of the story is that no one believes me about the rash. I get a lot of side eye looks but I swear on my life that it did.
And it did warn me. Powerful little circle.
The last few times I went camping with Dancing Dick before d-day- I kept seeing a “creepy pervert” with dead eyes when I looked at him. He reminded me of something I saw in a horror movie. It made me shudder. I thought I was imagining things.
Looking back at photos from that time, I can see that I was not imagining things at all. Who he was inside…..starting showing through on the outside.
I was pregnant with my first child and ex had been drinking and lying. I was in bed and asking myself if he was good or if I had made a big mistake. The voice of my recently passed grandmother came into my head and said ‘he is no good’ clear as a bell.
I pushed shit up hill for 13 years and here I am.
Intuition and these kinds of things, feelings voices and signs are there for the taking. It’s not wowo.
Like that sense you have when you know you are being watched. 6th sense unfortunately in the west we are told to ignore it as are seen as cra cra for acknowledging something intangible.
the audible voice, carrying in firewood and I got ” you are going to remarry”. I pushed it off because for that to happen, being a good Christian wife that would mean he would have to die. Following d’day I was being triangulated into an expectation of taking a back seat in my marriage till the church deemed him restored. but then our daughter got cancer and I was determined from that point on. we were done!
Four years on I am still single but I am ok with that. Cheater hooked another woman a year after d’day despite denying my right to divorce for the first 6 months.
We had been dating a few months and one night we were going to bed I had a huge dreadful feeling come over me. He was to leave the next day for a business trip. I said to my soon to be ex “I have a terrible feeling that something bad is going to happen, if you felt you were going to stray or felt there was something wrong in our relationship would you tell me? “. Of course he said no he would never stray, yes he would talk to me if he felt like he was at risk.
A few months after that, I had a secind miscarriage which required surgery and I got an infection post surgery. Everything checked out normal yet I still had a dreadful feeling. So while he was away on a business trip, I went through his things to discover he had a stockpile of 200 Viagra tablets.
I confronted him on it and he had a reasonable explanation. I told him how it made me feel, I was quite triggered, so he threw the Viagra away. Or at least that’s what he told me.
I had the dreadful feeling when he proposed to me. I had the dreadful feeling when we went to get our marriage certificate and I was asked if I want to change my last name to my new married name. I had the dreadful feeling when we arrive to our honeymoon.
I had that dreadful feeling many times. Every now and then a Viagra pill would pop up out of nowhere. I finally acted on the dreadful feeling and dug deeper when on maternity leave. Sure enough, he was leaving a day early or extending his business trips an extra day to visit prostitutes.
Once I filed for separation last year, after 3 1/2 years of dealing with prostitutes ( at that time I was aware for 3 1/2 years), bullshit marriage counseling which I quit because I was tired of being assigned responsibility… went through his financials while getting my ducks in a row and I discovered he had been on dating sites and seeing prostitutes while we were dating . And ordering 200+ black market viagra pills a year to be delivered at his work. So basically the entire 6+ years we were together between dating and marriage had been seeing hundreds of prostitutes. I have been tested for STDs and HIV five times.
that feeling of dread when ever you have it. That’s your inner compass telling you that you’re in the wrong direction, meaning what you entering is not good for you. It is unhealthy for you.
Let’s not even get into how many times he wasn’t available when traveling, how I would call him back and he would respond with an SMS… Or he wouldn’t call when he said he would… All of those things that he did gave me that feeling of dread which I ignored. I no longer ignore that dreadful feeling, because I know that for me to dread feeling means that someone is trying to take control of my life or to do something behind my back to create a power imbalance
I just don’t understand why these type of men want a wife??? If he wants to travel, and horn dog around, what good is having a wife at home? Just stay single forever!
Dread. Such a powerful response to danger. I have experienced it exactly twice in my life.
The first time, I was walking to school with my sisters and chums from our neighborhood. It was trash pick up day, and as we walked by the trashman, we said hi. He came up from behind me and picked me up so I couldn’t move my arms, pretending he was going to put me in his truck. It was supposed to be funny, but I was terrified. I can still see the faces of my sisters and friends; a combination of fear and confusion.
The second time, X asked me to marry him. I had the exact same feeling of powerful, utter dread.
And I ignored it. To this day, I wonder what my life would have been like if I had headed that warning sign.
I just read The Gift of Fear. This is a perfect example. Your dread was probably fear. I’ve hated myself for years because of my fear response. Ignored it and believed that I’m too sensitive that fear came too easily to me. I should have listened to my fear back 8 years ago. He actually said to me “are you scared of me now?”. Yes I was. But i said no and buried it. I put fear with weakness. When now I put fear with power.
I need to get my hands on this book. I experienced so much anxiety and dread during my relationship with the Narc. If I expressed that I was feeling that way, he would, of course, ridicule and demean me. Every time one of us got on a plane, I would feel overwhelming anxiety. I thought it was fear of flying. It was fear of cheating, because whenever we were not in the same city, the lies and deception went into overdrive,
I got it on Amazon. It helped me a lot. I had the same problem. It’s because we know in our gut what’s real, but we convince ourselves that we are too sensitive and we are insecure because we are told that. He told me the reason I think it’s him is because I’ve never lived with a man before. I never had the chance to drive a man insane. But i didn’t do that. I walked on eggshells and forgave and even apologized for the things he did to me. I’ve never cried every day or worried I was being cheated on ever in my life until I married him. He’s the only man I’ve ever been afraid of. My therapist said it starts because of an abuser’s inconsist behaviour. The hot and cold behavior causes a level of fear of the unknown. You never know if he’s going to rage or put you down or if he is cheating. The book explains the fear of the unknown.
I think deep down i knew i had no control over how I would be treated. No matter what i did it was the same outcome. I tried. I said yes to everything and looked the way he wanted and he still hurt me with no conscience. He would go away and text me out of the blue some crazy thing that there’s a man at the house and I’m a whore. I knew it was so he could get angry and cheat. I’d want to discuss what happened but he would tell me to get over it… that was the bad him. Now he’s fine.
Pure insanity.
Yeah, I 100% agree with you about that feeling of dread. Had it quite a few times before getting married, but didn’t know it meant something. Lesson learned! Trust your gut!
I completely forgot about this incident.
I had actually split up with XH at this point- he’d been lying (nothing to do with infidelity) and I had asked him to move out but we were reconciling through therapy and had agreed to him returning to the family home within the month. One afternoon I was doing some laundry and I had this thought pop in my head- XH had been in contact with his ex. It was so irrational I laughed it off; he hadn’t spoken to his ex in years, she’d never been an issue in the relationship, it was such a bizarre thought. I even told him about it that evening during one of our scheduled ‘dates’, he laughed at how random it was.
Literally a week to the day later, she emailed me claiming they’d never stopped being in contact. He’d emailed her the morning of our wedding begging for another chance, saying that he wished she was the one at the end of the aisle, that he didn’t love me and it had always been her. More recently he’d been claiming that he’d left me as he wasn’t over her, and was pushing to move in with her. Her mother had recently passed away and she’d inherited a house and a good chunk of money- what a coincidence. She’d been trying to contact me from the start to warn me, but it was before the days of Facebook.
After that, it was like the flood gates opened and several mistresses came forward.
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Wow!!! Two things impress me greatly about your story— first, it’s like you were psychic and you just simply knew he was in touch his his ex. And you voiced that concern immediately and he lied. There was nothing for you to work with there. What horrible emails he sent, I’m sorry you had to experience such a sick betrayal. Secondly, I’m impressed at the character and guts his ex displayed by repeatedly trying to contact you to warn you pre-FB days, and not giving up until she finally reached you. I’m a big advocate of people telling vulnerable people who they are being preyed on, though doing so can sometimes involve some risk.
1. Two months after he proposed, a literal CHUNK broke off of the original diamond. Not the whole diamond, a CHUNK. Cheap, flawed, cracked, and fell apart with nothing to fix in the original and needing a whole new “replacement”…sign?
2. Our reception was at the country club in my hometown, which was a beautiful old building and the main reason we had it there at the end of summer when it’s green and lovely. Beautiful, sunny all day…a ten minute storm passed through…beautiful again after, but knocked out the power to the entire building for the reception. I thought it was a sign, at the time, we would WEATHER anything together, because we had a wonderful time, I was so happy and didn’t care about the power, and it was lit by beautiful candlelight the rest of the night…but it was hot, sweaty, and the toilets wouldn’t flush…a sign that there was shit I could never flush away by staying with him and his delusional, bat-shit crazy family, and that there would be darkness over us…and I now look at the candles as my guides that would eventually light the way to my new life.
3. I was lucky enough to have a close relationship with all of my great-grandparents on my dad’s side, and before Dday weekend, I started having a recurring dream about the house I spent much of my childhood and teen years at for one set of my great-grandparents. They lived along the large creek in my hometown, but I started having dreams about alligators living in the creek (I’m in Pennsylvania-no alligators by nature!) and crawling up into the lawn. When I looked up alligators? If you dream about them, it means there is treachery, deceit and hidden instincts. Well, there sure as fuck were all three. My XH had been deceiving me for the entire decade I had been with him, he was a treacherous piece of shit and I had accused him of cheating during a heated argument a good year before I found out about anything. I think I clearly knew then something was very wrong-I’m a Scorpio, my instincts have ALWAYS been right, and I’m finally NOW starting to learn to listen to them, at almost 40 years old.
Like someone said early their intuition was scrambled with the gas lighting. One positive to all this shit is I am tuning into ME. The deep me my inner wisdom.
There were so many signs that something was off in my marriage….I had numerous health problems for years, but about 3 years ago when I realized he was cheating on me and I started getting my shit together and preparing my exit, my health suddenly improved. I lost 60 pounds, several health issues just resolved. It was almost like my body was telling me something was wrong with the situation I was in. I got stronger as I planned how I was going to get out and got my finances together and documented his drinking.
My final sign it was time to leave (I kid you not!), was that a psychic in New Orleans told me….First I want to explain that I am a scientist, and I don’t necessarily believe in psychic readings, tarot cards, etc. When I am on vacation in New Orleans, I always have my cards read or such for entertainment. This time was different. This lady looked at me and asked “are you in love?” All I could say is “I don’t know.” She went on to tell me that I had married a boy not a man, it would be a miracle for him to change. She said that I needed to leave him, he may straighten up then, maybe not, but nothing was going to change as it was. She also said that I would find fulfillment and happiness soon. At the same time a song came on in the shop that had some serious meaning for me. Less than a week later I kicked Prince Charmin out. I feel at peace, and believe that lady’s words were exactly what I needed to hear.
So MANY! Once walking across my yard years before we split up I just knew without a doubt that I wouldn’t be married to him for life. Chumpy me thought that meant he was going to die so I encouraged him to get a larger life insurance policy because we had two kids (it turned out the judge ordered he must to maintain as long as he owes me any money so I suppose it was a good misunderstanding of a premonition).
Shortly before our life went off the rails I dreamed he drove us off a cliff.
The OW was our friend and a very helpless OW (damsel in distress type) and she needed a cheap place to live with her four kids after she had left her chump husband (who she lied about to us). I found a house in our neighborhood that was unaccountably cheap to rent and right before I told her about it a literal voice in my head said “you are going to regret this” I DID regret it, it X was always running back and forth to change lightbulbs and see if he smelled smoke or some pointless task. He walked our dog over there night after night to “visit”. Maybe I don’t really regret it though, now I know the truth about my life….that a lot of people weren’t really there for me. It’s good to weed those people out.
nodancing – ” now I know the truth about my life…that a lot of people weren’t really there for me. It’s good to weed those people out.”
That was a big realization I had. The people who aren’t really there for me. All of my family is in another state. Only one asked how I was once in a great while, and even she apologized for not being there for me. Another one asked how I was and I said, “Good, how are you?” They never responded. I think they were hoping for me to give them all the dirt and I didn’t. She used to tell me to move out there. I think I’m better here, alone.
Our last camping trip we went on – I look back and everyone knew he was cheating. Jerks.
The Switzerland friends we vacationed with for 10 years acted like they didn’t understand his behavior when they knew. But they are now destroying each other and their property like the War of the Roses with their cheating on each other and other issues.
Another long time friend had her husband and his friend ‘help’ me with stuff. I ended up being lied to and when I confronted it I was told I was looking for evil.
That was super crazy. My narc ex said the same thing when I confronted him on his lies and deceit – that I think everyone is out to get me and I’m looking for evil.
Interesting how this nightmare with the cheater has a side of exposing all kinds of other things.
Someone who helped me the most was on stbx’s side of the family who knows what he is.
Yes, good to weed those people out. Now we know.
I’ve been madly in love with my cheater for our 8 year marriage/10 years together. Right up until the first d-day, he still made my heart pound just like at the start. I thought it was the same for him. He certainly acted like it right up until just before D-Day 1, and I’m pretty sure that happened very shortly after the affair started. Until D-Day, I thought my life, marriage and husband were perfect.
Anyway, our entire relationship, I’ve had this recurring dream – maybe once a month or once every other month. They’re vague, so bear with me. It’s as if we’re in school together, maybe high school even. I’m so in love with him and we’ve been a couple – but the entire dream I have this confusion about whether we are actually together now. I’m pretty sure he hasn’t broken up with me, but he also hasn’t called me or made any effort to see or talk to me in I don’t know how long. I’m wondering, should I contact him? I have a sense that he’s with another girl, but I’m really not sure. I always wake up with no resolution, feeling confused, sad and angry. Even once I get my wits about me, these dreams unsettle me so much, they throw off my entire day. And it’s so weird, because we were never the on-again/off-again couple.
It’s occurred to me so many times (especially since I moved out 6 months ago, but even before then) that I am literally living my nightmare. My husband/cheater has not taken any action to “break up” with me. But I have not idea where I stand. He doesn’t put any effort into repairing our relationship, and he rarely reaches out to me on matters other than our child or finances. I’m in this limbo where I’m not free, but it seems like he is.
Also – and this is going WAY back – in fifth grade I had my first “boyfriend”. It was nothing serious, I could barely make eye contact with him. He broke up with me at the end of the school year, then I had a dream that he was “dating” this girl who lived next door to him. At my birthday party that summer, I found out he actually was, and that’s why he’d dumped me. In high school I had my first serious boyfriend, he eventually broke up with me and I had a dream he was with my good friend. I found out a couple of weeks later that he’d sent her flowers right after dumping me, because he was madly in love with her. Thankfully this friend was not interested, but seriously, WTF is up with me, because OW was my friend too. I swear I am an interesting, attractive and intelligent person. I must attract morons.
There were so so many: it got to the point that a close friend of mine, who I was telling these things too before they happened just looked at me askance but believed me if I said I knew something, even if it came across as far fetched.
I’ll share one. I was at work and listening to a song playing over the club speakers “side bitch issues” and I just felt instantly nauseous. I left before my shift started and drive back home, for once not telling him I was coming home. I had the strongest image in my head of him s d a woman in bed together. Of course he wasn’t home and it was revealed in time that he was indeed with the AP as I had my premonition.
I have had true dreams, warnings, 6th sense info since childhood. I denied my intuition with the gaslighting for a very long time until the levee broke and I knew.
God, where do I start?
1. I had an unexplained (later explained-obviously) panic attack one week before the wedding.
2. Diamonds fell out of my engagement ring constantly (like, no less than 10 times the less than three years we were married).
3. I had a horrifying nightmare two weeks before D-Day. I was running through the woods and this giant, dark figure was chasing me. It was about 12’ tall, wearing a large witch’s hat, and had these long and spindly fingers that were dragging on the ground. I shot straight up out of bed crying, sweating, and unable to breathe.
There were so many other red flags that I chose to ignore. Now, I can spot them from a mile away. I will always trust my gut and pay mind to my dreams.
My narcissistic, sociopathic ex-boyfriend once complained that since I never had any dreams about him, I must not really love him. He was always telling me that I didn’t really love him, that I could never love him as much as he loved me, blah, blah, blah.
I did have one dream about him before I found out what a narcopath he was. In the dream he was a robot, nothing but a bunch of metal parts. The robot had mechanical eyes and there was absolutely nothing inside of it; no love, no feeling…nada. It collapsed into a giant metal heap. I realized later how metaphorically spot-on that was for him.
wow
that’s it, in a nutshell, right there.
I just had a period where I grew increasingly more irrationally (or so I thought) anxious, i’d struggle getting to sleep, have to go and check all the doors and windows were locked, etc. This never happened when I lived with Ex before marriage, only after being married. Straight after D-Day I no longer felt like that and I haven’t felt like that since. I’ve got my tranquillity back.
MightyChris, you reminded me of another one! That irrational high level anxiety: hyper vigilance- knowing something was wrong but what!!!
😑
This! I had horrible anxiety my whole marriage. Since deciding to divorce it is almost gone. So nice. It feels like my brain isn’t misfiring anymore.
Another vote for horrible anxiety. It caused me to lose a lot of weight very quickly. Some twisted part of me liked the way I looked (so thin! so chic!) but it came from an unhealthy place. Now I love my little pot belly because it shows that I’m happy and at peace.
Hyper vigilant and anxious, I couldn’t relax when I’d go to bed it would take me hours fall asleep. Once I did finally fall asleep, it wasn’t a sound sleep and a couple hours later I’d be wide awake again. I could feel the tension but had no idea at the time why or what was causing my insomnia.
I now realize why and what was making me anxious and causing insomnia once he moved out of our home I could feel the tension leave my body.
I haven’t had a problem falling asleep and staying asleep since.
I’ve had dreams of X2 driving the car. I’m in the backseat (don’t say it!). X2 won’t tell me where we’re going and the doors won’t open.
I’ve noticed recently I have dreams with X1 (deceased) in them. We interact but he’s never looking at me. Usually our kids are in the dream too, at their present age. X1 died 9 years ago. In one dream I said to him “X1, you can’t be here. You’re dead! He packs up his tools and leaves”.
I’ve told my brain to stop remembering dreams because they freak me out. For the most part I don’t remember them now.
I had no overt clues that Hannibal Lecher was cheating–home every night for dinner, continued to have regular marital relations with me, accompanied me to Back-to-School nights. The only clue was the sporadic devalue (which, frankly, was only a hyped-up version of his usual treatment of me).
Two days before D-day, I asked our usual code for having sex, “Are we having drinks tonight,” and he shook his head quickly with wide eyes. What popped into my head was, “He had sex with someone today.” Not sure if it was either his last AP/current GF or one of the Craigslist skanks I think he was hooking up with at lunches.
However, D-day was based on finding his notes preparing for the sexual harassment hearing he’d had for an affair with gradwhore 8 years earlier. It wasn’t until a year after I threw him out & divorced him that I discovered all the other affairs, and my PI unearthed evidence that he had been having an affair for at least the last 7 months of the marriage.
No overt clues for me, either. Towards the end, though, he told me: “I always come home to you.”
Lucky me.
But then he started not coming home. Divorce should be final very soon.
Looking back I realize he was cheating all through our marriage – the hook ups at lunch. Yep.
I once dreamt that I was terminally ill and had decided on euthanasia. The day before that was supposed to happen I changed my mind and decided to tough it out. My husband seemed disappointed in that decision. “Oh, are you sure?” I woke up thinking how realistic that dream was.
He had a dream once too. He dreamt that I sold the house out from under him without telling him. At the time I assured him that I had no desire to move again and that I couldn’t sell the house without him anyway. Well, now the house is in my name only and I can do what I want with it. I probably will sell it when the youngest goes to college as I don’t think I will be able to afford it anymore at that point.
Other dreams: I would dream about making love to my husband and it was always better than the real thing. I dreamt that we weren’t really married. I dreamt that we were divorced. On the other hand I also had dreams where I was the one cheating although I never even considered that when I was awake. In all but the first case, I would wake up in a cold sweat wondering if the dreams were real and then being relieved when I realized it was just a dream. After DDay I was so disappointed when I never woke up from that nightmare.
We got married in front of a dramatic tree. After our wedding it fell over.
Had a dream cheater wife cheated on me with a teenage boy. About a year later she cheated with a 24 year old who looks like he’s 15.
During my discard I had a dream about being in a hospital. It was all in shades of grey. I was in a ward and saw two big beds; one had two of my kids sleeping in it, the other had my other child and my husband and his emotional affair partner sleeping in it. I walked up to the roof and stood looking over the grey roof in the pre-dawn murk, smoking a cigarette, feeling very alone.
I think it was a warning – at the time my husband, according to him, didn’t realise that he was in love with the OW. I knew, I had told him that a couple of months before. The three of us were ‘trying to be friends’. It was all out in the open, but I acknowledged.
*unacknowleged*
Oh yeah, I almost forgot another sign. When we got married someone gave us this little ceramic pot thing from New Mexico that was supposed to symbolize love and marriage. It broke a number of years ago. Ex bought a replacement.
On the day he asked me to marry him, his mother announced she was getting divorced. A few years later I learned it was because his father cheated and ran off with his secretary. 20 years later my ex cheated and ran off with the au pair.
Chompingchump – My stbx told me that his parents cheated on each other and he got over it, so his daughter can get over it. His daughter should not be throwing him away, he said.
Those cold dead eyes have a cold, dead person behind it.
My husband traveled a lot for his job and not once, but TWICE his phone butt dialed me when he was out of town. The first time he was at a bar and hitting on women. Yep, I got to hear the whole pathetic attempt – it ended with: Ill take you home…. The second time his phone butt dialed me he was at a friends who I didnt know and they were planning to go out, meet some people and come back to the friends house to soak in the hot tub. Both times I stayed on the phone to hear as much as I could but it was loud and I couldnt hear everything…suffice it to say I heard enough. Funny that at the time I believed I got those phone calls so I could intervene and stop the madness. Like I had control over that. Looking back, all I can say is WOW! I also experienced thinning hair and my dr told me to buy prenatal vitamins and that might help… they are full of everything you need! It made a difference so I just wanted to share that since some earlier posts talk about thinning hair.
One September day in 2008 I got screamed at by God. I awoke at about midnight to what I thought was our then-13 YO daughter screaming “Dad!!!” and I hopped out of bed, frozen, waiting for another sound from her room just down the hall. I said, “Fuckwit! DD is screaming!” He jumped out of bed and slid his jeans up. We waited a moment and heard nothing, not a cricket sound. I checked down the hall and all was well, I figured I must have dreamed it. We settled back into bed, my heart was racing while he instantly fell asleep. Suddenly I had an overwhelming thought that I needed to go look at Fuckwit’s Blackberry RIGHT NOW.
I did. I found dozens of e-mails between Fuckwit and young co-worker OW#1 that were just way too personal and cozy and numerous and I knew that my months of suspicions and his denials were exactly what they seemed to be, a full blown EA (not sure of PA, years later he trickle-truthed out that some second-base stuff occurred but who really knows, he is a liar).
I walked back into the bedroom, shook him awake, held out the glowing Blackberry and said, “Are you ready to admit this now?” And he did. Cue the pick me 2-step and all the usual hopium smoking and trauma before things got relatively quiet after a year or so. I have considered that September day as if really was as if God was trying to shake me awake to see the state of my marriage, and for years I was relieved that we “survived” his infidelity.
Cue the end credits: ultimately in April 2017 the man-child poofed on me, abandoned me while I was away on a work trip and sent me an e-mail to inform me he was gone. I had no clue that he had that in mind, and in fact just 6 weeks earlier he declared he wanted to be with me the rest of his life. So after 28 years married, 31 total together, I got an e-mail fuck off and he was too cowardly to face me. OW#2 is a 25 year old Schmoopie he also found at work, same bullshit as last time. She is our oldest daughter’s age.
And cosmically, it was ~EXACTLY~ 9 years to the day after the September 2008 DDay that our divorce was finalized by the judge.
Ugh, sounds like his cowardly abandonment is straight out of the book “Runaway Husbands” by Vikki Stark. Something similar happened to me, but unfortunately, I was not as perceptive as you were to discern proof of an affair, although as we all in Chump Nation know now there is always an affair happening whenever a husband suddenly walks out.
Two years into our marriage & I’m six months pregnant with our first child. I had a very vivid dream that my XH & his HS G/F were in my living room laughing and pointing their fingers at me. I woke up crying. At this point I HAD NO CLUE what was going on. About a week later, I got the ILYBINILWY speech from him & he admitted that they had been “talking”.
Fast forward 18 years & he hooked up with this same woman which resulted in me filing for the divorce. From what I gather from her husband, whom I contacted the day after my divorce, their affair had been going on for about a year. He had no idea that this was their second go-round.
My wedding ring gave me an incurable itchy flaky red rash.
The orchid he gave me for my birthday five years prior during our first separation stopped blooming. It bloomed without fail for five years straight, then just… stopped.
I recently tried to kill that orchid by leaving it outside overnight during a hard freeze, but it’s still alive. What does that mean?
May I ask what color the orchid is? I just did a quick internet search on orchids in dreams. The color of the orchid is significant. I’m hoping it’s not a blue orchid (falsehood, deception).
It was pink.
Interestingly, I saw a gorgeous blue orchid at the grocery this week, loved it, and almost bought it to replace STBX’s gift. Which likely goes to show that my instincts are still terrible.
Someone needs to make a horror movie about these deceptive, lying snakes! To date, no horror movie captures them fully. They haunt our dreams like Freddie Kruger!
OMG! I’ve been reading here, thinking about posting, but just hadn’t yet until this! I had real Freddy Kruger dream. First let me say my x was a Navy. Recruiter. His nick name was Fred. It was very near Halloween and we had watched Nightmare on Elm Street a few nights before. In the dream our family was in a park on a beautiful Spring day enjoying our selves; the Lilly’s were in bloom. Every thing was perfect! Then out of nowhere, everything changed! It got very dark and foreboding. The wind started to whip and it tore all the flowers from the trees, and the Lilly’s from their stems. It was very scarey! My x was in his dress whites, and they seemed to become very dingey. I woke up in a cold sweat, and laid there a while. When I did go back to sleep, I fell right back into the same dream! In the morning I realized that Freddy Kruger was a symbol for Fred the recruiter!
😯😯😯
Mine was a sign similar to CL, about shit.
I had moved out of our house (but we were attempting to date from afar) and had secured the apartment I was living in before we met. Very sweet, cozy basement apartment. We had 5 Ddays and this was Dd3.
He had come to my place for an overnighter, with his token change of clothes and plastic bag filled with beer.
We had spent the winter evening with my kids driving to a spot overlooking an event that was shooting fireworks over the freezing bay. It was really beautiful to watch. We dropped the kids off at my moms for a sleepover and went back to my place to snuggle.
He spent the night and I had to leave at 5:30am the next morning for work. He was welcome to sleep in and shower before leaving.
I’m at work and get a text from him asking where the plunger was (for the toilet). I was not able to check the message right away. About an hour or two later text him that I don’t have one and don’t know where the landlords keep theirs.
His reply: oh well, doesn’t matter, had to leave for work. Don’t be surprised if there is a “surprise” waiting for you when you get home.
I worked the rest of my shift alternating in disbelief and rage and when I came home found his massive shit clogging my toilet. Landlords weren’t home and I had to use the toilet myself, so I put on a work glove and literally mashed his shit with my hand so it would flush.
Called him in anger and told him I wasn’t impressed. That the reason I moved out in the first place was because I was tired of dealing with his and his sons shit. And here I was literally handling his shit.
He laughed and thought the whole thing was hilarious and he wished he was there to see my mad face cause it was so cute.
Yeah. 2 more Ddays after that. Even God was shaking his head at me. Like what more indignities do I need to out in her path? Oh there was lots of fun to come….sigh.
LOL! I’m laughing with you friend…..not at you!
Reading all of these omens has brought another (unfortunate) memory and connection to me. The EX’s best man came to our wedding without his wife (he left her home because helping to take care of their kids while he was best man would have impeded his fun), got drunk at our ceremony, and made egregious passes at my maid of honor (also married). In retrospect, I now realize that the best man showcased exactly the kind of behavior I could expect from my own new husband–thrilled to go out and entertain himself (especially if it meant escaping familial responsibility), prone to substance abuse, and eager to cheat!
At the time, I just thought the best man was a jackass. I was far too naive and trusting to wonder why my new husband had such a jackass as his “best” friend. Argh!
I had no problem with ex’s friends at the time we got married, but I didn’t think much of some of the people he came to admire later on. His favorite boss who he thought was such a great guy is the one who blew up his first marriage by banging the babysitter. I couldn’t stand the guy myself and couldn’t understand why ex thought he was the bomb (ok, he did get his highest ever bonus during those years, but that had very little to do with the boss). It all makes sense now. That same boss went on party boats and had all kinds of crazy sex before settling down again with wife #2 (I have no idea how that turned out as ex got transferred and got a new boss). I guess ex thought he was missing out on something really important by not sleeping around so he had to try it.
I too had a vision.
Years ago, stbx went on a little weekend country getaway and rented a single room cottage. She showed me pictures of the interior prior to leaving. It was small, cute and a distance from the main house.
Months later, I awoke in the middle of the night to a vision of second car pulling up a long drive to the cottage.
I got up, snooped in her email and saw something from the innkeeper; some message about making it in to the cottage safe. I told her about my vision and I asked her directly if she had a guest. She looked like a deer in headlights, but denied any wrongdoing and I felt horrible for snooping.
Ten-bucks say the drive I saw in my vision is exactly the drive in real life, though I’ve never been there.
…
I also had something more recently (post Dday) happen during that “bargaining” stage of grief. I moved out since the family-home was filled with triggers. I was out on a morning bike ride and crashed hard, broke part of my bike. I was too far from any good destination, so I had to try and solider on.
A mere-mile ahead, bloody and beaten, I see my stbx jogging with the dog. She gave me a ride to the other house. We had a horrible conversation and I knew we’d never get back together. We crashed.
just to add: I did get confirmation that OM was indeed at that cottage.
Of course he was! And you know your vision of the road up to that cottage is spot on, too. I remain in astounded awe of the mighty intuitive powers of Chumps.
It was a broken glass. My then-husband drove a Suburban. One day I opened the front passenger door to climb up into it and a lovely glass fell out onto the pavement and broke. I think we were on the way to church? I’m not really sure. That glass did NOT belong to us. He said it belonged to one of his running buddies because they had gone in his car to some race. I eventually found out that it belonged to his “running buddy” Caroline who was the OW.
I’m so glad that part of my life is over.
We jointly owned a car that was 20 years old. Our relationship was 20 years old.
In January we took the car to the mechanic and he said it was fine.
It started having problems. In April, we took the car again and he said it wasn’t worth saving.
I had a massage in late April. When the massage therapist touched me, I heard her thinking “Her partner is cheating on her and she doesn’t know it.” Weird! Message transmitted through physical contact. I just ignored it. Then when I was driving home, a voice in my head said, “The car is a symbol of your relationship.”
The car died permanently on a Monday. My partner left me that Friday.
I have had two massage therapists tell me that they can feel a lot of personal things about clients through massage. One said she cannot give massages to toxic people. She said it wearies her too much to feel their negative energy.
When Dancing Dick called my neighbor at 11:30 pm a few months before d-day to tell her that her cat Thomas was on our front porch. I knew something was up. We both knew my neighbors treated their cat like a child- Thomas would never be out at night. The “Thomas” phone call made my radar beep off the charts. Dancing Dick…..the “changed Christian man”- was back to voyeuring the neighbors.
He was posing as a “good neighbor.” Then…..he started in with the lewd texts and dirty phone calls to her house all hours of the night.
Two things.
1) For years, I’d periodically have dreams that ex was cheating on me. Obviously my subconscious was aware of something that I refused to acknowledge. And of course, I’d laughingly tell my ex about it and he’d say, “Why do you always have those dreams? If I was cheating on you, I’d have the balls to tell you.” Guess what? He didn’t have the balls.
2) My divorce was final on the real D-Day – the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. Yeah, there’s a metaphor there somewhere.
I often had dream of EX cheating on me through out the marriage of almost 20 years. He use to get so mad at me for telling him. Saying it was not fair he had to pay for something he did not do. PAY??? I just told him about my dreams, I did not get mad at him. He was having affairs the whole marriage so I was spot on.
He was always the victim. Real Covert narc.
YES! Mine used to get upset at me, too. Now I just know it was a guilty conscience!
Just remembered the funniest incident to happen months prior to D’day.
watching an Australian TV show set in the 1950’s there was a scene between two main characters, the male a closeted gay young husband is sitting in bed and as the wife (the unknowing beard) climbs in hoping for some intimacy, as she does he reaches for a book on his nightstand and ignores her. I pip up “this is like watching my life” Cheater all grumpy “what do you mean?” I had no idea at the time I had just hit the nail smack on the head. So I blunder on, that guy is like you, I can climb into bed naked and you reach for a book. Pissed off Cheater leaves the room grumbling to himself. I actually think I got to a point at the later stage of my marriage that I did not care if he found my behavior offensive, I knew there was an isssue in my marriage that I could not explain and I lost my capacity to care. The comment was never mentioned again.
I met Baron Sparkledick von Glitterballs on our first day of work in a sort of peace corps program run by our universities to assist poor communities not reached by the usual infrastructure, not even electricity.
After a very long journey we arrived at a remote campus only to be greeted by an overflowing, clogged-up septic tank. No showers, pissing or pooping.
Glitterballs (1.95m tall) asks for shovel and pickaxe, takes off his shirt and saves the day. My previous boyfriend would not know the business end of a shovel. I remember swinging in a hammock watching glitterballs dig through everyone’s shit thinking “now THAT’s a nice guy”.
I think that “nice, generous act” blinded me about his shortcomings that soon became apparent. Like, in pre-Excel days, Glitterballs throwing out the window of a third floor apartment my 1400 index cards for each of the 1400 students I tested for leprosy in that remote town because, IN THE MIDDLE of finishing transposing BY HAND one column of data to a HUGE paper spreadsheet I didn’t jump up, clear my work from the table and rush to greet him. He always denied having done such a thing, I was the liar.
I really am a chump and thought that shit-digging was a good sign.
And the week before my wedding my dad wrote me a letter asking me not to marry. My mother refused to show it to me, she told me afterwards. I thought it soooo strange because glitterballs and my dad used to have long conversations and seemed to be great pals.
I will never know what my dad saw that he wanted to protect me from. I do know my mom cheated on my dad and he knew it, but seemed resigned. Maybe he did not want me to be a chump.
Oh! Forgot another one. I lost my wedding ring in November. I was frantic because it was a vintage 1940s ring and I just loved it. So I spent a lot of time searching for a new one, found it, then bought it in December. Ex knew all about it. Guess when the affair started? December. (Though I suspect it was earlier).
In hindsight, me losing that ring meant my marriage was lost, as well.
glitterballs lost his wedding ring. I didn’t even notice because …. I’m a chump, he was the one to point it out and make a big deal of buying a new, heavier, thicker one.
He claimed to have lost it twirling it on his desk at work…
Mine NEVER wore his wedding ring except when we’d go to church or special occasions, which was rare.
Guess what he wears all the time on his left finger now since he’s been with the whore? (they’re only engaged, not married yet). I don’t get it.
Satan stopped wearing his as a punishment to me. The excuse was it’s uncomfortable but the real reason he decided to tell me was because I didn’t deserve it. If I did what he said and was a sexy wife then he would have worn it. Then I would have had him wrapped around my finger and he’d be always trying to please me. Ohh my bad! There’s whore conditions on the wedding band! And since it’s my fault he’s disappointed with my level of whorishness I’m to blame for all his actions to follow.
“Sexier” meant dressed like a hooker with a micro mini skirt, cheap, dumb and giggling, as an arm candy decoration. If I had an opinion or request I immediately became repulsive. I could be wearing a thong bikini and we are having a blast but if I said I’d rather not ____ then I’m a negative nag bitch not-his-wife who can find her own way home. What is this “man”? I’ve never heard of a guy like this. An extreme misogynist? That’s why I call him Satan. Idk if he’s human.
I just see your ex wearing an “engagement” wedding band as making some warped point because they are insane creeps. Look everyone I’m a good boy. See there’s nothing wrong with me.
They do what they need to do… to get what they want… until they are able to stop and modify the situation more to their liking. My conclusion is its all fake. Some game with moves to make. Individual people don’t matter.
Your ex does indeed sound like the devil himself. What a horrible human being. You are well rid of that trash.
Yep — mine used to take his off because it was supposedly going to mess with transference during psychotherapy, which I knew even then was horse shit. Once I filed, he started wearing it all the time. Possible explanations: 1. He wants to keep all his OW on their toes pick-me dancing, so he wants the divorce to stay secret form them (or at least some of them — his favorite knew and tried to help him hide money), 2. He doesn’t want any OW to feel like she’s now free to stake her own claim, 3. Just to piss me off (or, possibly, an OW off). Then once I caught him wearing a black wedding band where his old one used to be (he changed it out before he thought I noticed). I Googled that — black ring = polyamory. Hey, I think he should stick with that one; at least he’d be being honest.
My ex lost no less than 3 wedding bands during the time we were married and only wore a ring for church and special occasions. Now that he has found the love of his life I fully expect him to start wearing a ring (because their love is perfect and divine, like him, and as punishment for me of course).
My ex lost 3 wedding bands as well. Stopped wearing the third one because it bothered his finger. Yeah, I was gullible.
This one is REALLY wierd. During one of our so-called reconciliations it just so happened it over lapped our anniversary. I had been begging to go to Savannah, Ga. for years, but asswipe never wanted to go. He announces we are going to spend a few days there to celebrate. I was over the moon. I was all in and truly believed he had left the skank behind. During our visit we toured the Sorrell-Weed house. It’s famous for being haunted because the wife of the owner killed herself by jumping from the second floor to the street after discovering her husband in bed with her most trusted head housemaid. Apparently the wife was well known and loved in the city and when they found out a group of people pulled the mistress out of the cottage behind the house and she was never heard of again. Anyways, the tour was finished in the backyard of this house where you could view the cottage. By the time I had finished the tour I was wracked with such pain I was literally doubled over at the waist and I was in so much pain I could barely walk! I ran out of the courtyard to a park across the street and sat down. The people who accompanied me wanted to call an ambulance, but I was embarrassed and refused. I did recover after about 20 minutes, but the pain I experienced was real and excruciating. I sometimes believe that the “ghost” of the suicidal wife was sending me a message because I felt as if I had jumped from a second floor! Come to find out later that he was still deep in his affair with Schmoopie and it was her idea to finally take me to Savannah!! She even texted him later that evening after our anniversary dinner! I am not some strange person who believes every ghost story I hear, but Savannah is well known for very active paranormal activity. I have no doubt that it was some kind of “heads up stupid!” From the wife of a long dead cheater! So that’s my strange story for what it’s worth!
My recurring dream was being in a room that should have felt familiar and comfortable, like my childhood bedroom, that instead was dark or dimly lit and felt ominous. I would go around and try to turn on lights and either the lights wouldn’t come on at all or would be very dim and the bulbs would go dark within seconds. What always bothered me most was the helplessness I felt as I watched the lights go dim. Now I can see that the dream was a metaphor for the darkness that permeated my life unbeknownst to me. Porn, strippers, gambling, quite possibly drugs, all sorts of evil shit was dimming the light in my life.
Healthwise, frequent vaginal infections (sorry for the TMI) disappeared as soon as I stopped sleeping with the Edgar Suit. Although, given that we were having unprotected sex after he was with sex trade workers, I feel very lucky that I didn’t get something worse. I also had sporadic bouts of severe back spasms that disappeared as soon as the divorce was final.
Oh, yes. This. All throughout intimacy with CheaterX I kept having suspected UTI’s, that always came back negative for bacteria. I would complete the antibiotics, get better, rinse and repeat. I got fully checked out by my Gyno who couldn’t find anything at all. Ultrasound came back clear. Yet, these weird episodes kept happening until CheaterX was no more. I honestly have no idea if he was having a PA the entire time we were together and that caused the issues, or or if my body was rejecting him for being a disordered coward that he is.
Of course, there were so many other signs. Some cosmic and others very real and in my face. I speckled with gusto over every single one. As I’m writing this, i’m reminded of an incident that occurred at the very beginning. We were hiking a local park after the rain when I slipped, fell and hurt my knee. CheaterX was holding my hand the entire time but made no effort whatsoever to support me. I kid you not. He kind of just stood there, his hand still in mine. It’s like he seriously didn’t have the skills and reactions ‘normal’ people would have in this situation (and he is nearing 50). Instead of expressing his concern for me after I reluctantly confirmed i will be fine, he went on and on about how HE felt bad he couldn’t figure out what to do in this situation and failed to save me. I now understand that making it all about himself in all situation of distress was his trademark move.
This reminded me of an incident with Satan that occurred early in the relationship.
We had gone atv riding in the bush, Satan and I on one bike and his friend ahead of us on another. The trail was full of deep mud holes and water and Satan wanted his buddy to go thru each hole first because we was lighter without the extra weight of a passenger.
We rounded a corner that was angled and Rocky and covered in mud and our atv slide down sideways hit another rock and the atv completely rolled on top of Satan and I trapping us underneath and my arm was pinned on top of a branch.
We were unable to get out and eventually his friend looked back, saw us and came running over and flipped the atv off of us. Satan got up first and then helped me up. We were covered head to toe in mud and my arm was killing me. It was bleeding and I was convinced another inch and it would have been broken.
Satan looks at me, says “you Ok?” And I tell and show him my arm. Impatiently he asks “but you’re good to ride, right?” I mumble yes and off we go for another 2 hours. He never asked about my arm again.
My parents are divorced and never speak, but they independently confided to me that was the moment they hated him, that he didn’t drive safely with me and didn’t even care about my fractured arm.
OMG! Dancing Dick used to “road rage” at others right after I married him. I would plead with him to stop…….but he wouldn’t. Once I jumped out of the car at a red light and took a cab home. Looking back….his passive aggressive behavior should have been a sign to run! I think I was the most perfect chump on earth!
We were supposed to get portraits done with his family, and the color scheme was creams, browns and beiges. It was a couple weeks before Dday and I picked out cream and beige outfits for me and the kids and a brown sweater for my now XH. Then, I got a text from my SIL that said “Maybe we should go easy on the browns so we don’t look like smiling turds.” I was going to have him wear it anyway, but then Dday happened and we didn’t get the family pictures done. Still I thought how fitting it was that he was to be the smiling turd in the picture.
I had a recurring dream that I was driving my car, but I was in the back seat and couldn’t reach the wheel or pedals. I knew (in the dream) that I’d be in trouble if I got caught or into an accident. Sometimes the car would stop in a hedge or someplace else innocuous, but then I’d find myself naked, and had to run from cover to cover to get away from the car. Once the divorce was final, the dreams stopped.
Loss of control, maybe?
Hugs. Strength. Peace.
aeronaut
Wow — weird — I had the exact same first part of that dream about a week ago! I was in the back seat, driving my car, and I could sorta steer but not get to the pedals to stop or decrease speed. It was like a video game. Finally a family of cartoon moose popped up in the distance, and I knew I was going to hit them, so just hung onto the wheel as tight as I could and braced for the crash. As soon as I hit, I woke up (?in the present, my “next life”?). And this is with things going kinda well with the divorce. Maybe it means I was delivered from a bad end?
I have had that the back-seat driving part of that dream on and off for many years!
I too had a version of this dream! In it, I am driving in my car, and a black cat (I love cats ) wraps itself around my neck and then gets up around my head so I can’t see the road in front of me! Then it falls from my head, and slides down my back, leaving deep scratch marks all the way down. After that it jumps to the floor board, and gets under my feet, so I can neither brake or accelerate as I need to. When I am going to fast I can’t stop. When it’s imperative to speed up in order to get out of someone’s way and avoid an accident, that cat is under the peddles!
I repeatedly had two dreams:
(1) I am struggling to tread water in the ocean while holding up my young children (I was a lifeguard for many years.)
(2) I am trying to tear the planks off the door to a haunted house to rescue someone. I don’t want to go inside, but I must to rescue one or more people. I still wonder after decades why I try so hard to get into haunted houses (relationships in which I am repeatedly abused or severely mistreated).
Both dreams were terrifying.
I also had a recurring dream throughout our marriage that he was cheating on me, that he was a cold person who didn’t care about me at all. I would wake up relieved that it was just a dream. Of course after Dday I knew it was true after all. He is a sociopath that had me fooled. I do think our subconscious picks up these things and they come out in dreams.
After dating for a ridiculous amount of time we got married barefoot on the beach — destination wedding. It always bothered me that a really black cloud moved in as our short ceremony took place. All the pics display this black cloud. Yup. There was a black cloud over the marriage alright. Non-stop cheating throughout the entire relationship I now know . . .
The day I kicked him out (d-day), there was a horrible rain storm that caused scary flooding. Schools and offices were shut down the next day. My sister had come over that night to comfort me, and when I went to let her in the gate, there was a balloon that had tied itself around the gate that said “Te Amour.” It was almost like the universe had sent this beautiful message in the midst of a shit storm to let me know that everything was going to be OK. I did have a dream about him cheating 8 months prior to this, and the woman I envisioned in that dream looked just like the real OW. Intuition is a powerful thing. I believe that we ignore signs like this until we choose to listen to our gut.
I remember 2 vivid dreams in that last couple years when x had become mean and dismissive. In the dreams, x was having vigorous sex on our marriage bed with our pet sitter. I woke feeling relief that I wouldn’t have to service x. Our marriage had become a prison of obligation, and I was scrambling to make things better but it just kept getting worse. Sex with x was lonely. The pet sitter was around enough to make good triangle kibbles for x. Although I didn’t really believe my oddly explicit dreams or connect the dots that they were having an affair. So there was no dday or catching them in the act or looking at his phone he kept a tight grip on.
I decided to leave after x changed his entire personality for 10 days after several years of increasing verbal and psychological abuse. He was trying a last ditch effort to get me to sign onto a home equity loan so he could raid our last shared asset. I realized that x could choose to be a decent husband, but wouldn’t bother unless it paid in cash for his use. I felt like I was climbing out of a black hole when I decided to leave the marriage, bloody fingernails and toe nails, but held on and kept reaching for some light. Had to repeatedly reorient my reality of the 15 year relationship with x, and my values and very identity.
I turned our legal separation into a divorce less than a month after the shared finances were completely settled. X was furious at loosing me as plan B. The pet sitter was discarded a few months later. I have no idea how x is doing. Over 4 years divorced now. No contact. Only regret is staying until I had something “real” to divorce over.
This here, “He was trying a last ditch effort to get me to sign onto a home equity loan so he could raid our last shared asset.” This must be in the Cheater handbook as well. After Dday Fucktard tried this as well, yet only two years earlier he had already taken equity out to purchase his 33K truck, the one vehicle he kept. X also stated in a news article how he knew his affair was true love, they both had green vehicles. Barf.
I had the snake, storm, loss of car control, pushing sewer drain caps down, his fathering another child dreams repeatedly. You know how it goes when you tell them the dream and point blank ask if there is something he needs to say. However, I continued to need a physical sign.
So in March he brought home a camper we owned that he had been keeping somewhere else. I was cleaning and decided to put a picnic basket in there. It was on older airstream with a quirky handle and lock. I walked inside and a strong wind slammed the door leaving me trapped without a phone. I saw him leaving the drive and at that time he rarely came home before 3am if then and it was around 1:00. My kids were engrossed in TV and games so I knew they wouldn’t notice until they needed me or felt something was off. I found I had the key fob in my pocket and began setting off my truck alarm periodically. While I was in there I decided to see if there were items I could get and use in the house such as toothpaste etc since I knew it was rarely used. In the cabinet, was a box of condoms. I was so shaky and really began to search finding porno and a book on sexual positions. My kids finally heard the alarm and got the door open quite easily. I took the items and placed them in the bathroom with a note stating, “I guess I should thank you for using condoms.” (I got multiple STDs and infections from him) he was furious and I was gaslighted like a pro. I wasted around 7 more years after I got the sign I asked for. I also found a condom in a coat he wore that belonged to his brother who was in prison. He said it was his brothers who had been there 5 years at that point. I didn’t even ask why didn’t he just throw it away. Palm to forehead! Technically I guess would each incident be considered a Dday.
I kept having dreams about fucktard and his bimbo girlfriend, ( the one he left his first wife for !). He made me sit in the backseat of the car while she was sitting in the front seat with him, laughing and chatting. I told him this, and how upset I’d been, and he said ”I don’t blame you.”
But the bimbo wasn’t the one he was having the affair with, that was his fuckbuddy ‘fishing buddy we’re just good friends whore’.
D day – I was at his flat (long story) and he was asleep as he works nights. He had left his phone charging. Suddenly a voice in my head said, very clearly, ”look in his phone”. He had password protected it, but the voice actually **said the password** !! I did, and read the texts to his mate boasting about fucking his ‘fishing buddy just a good friend whore’ I wrote out the texts twice, left one copy for him, walked out, and on the next working day instructed a solicitor.
Yep, always trust your gut.
About a month before DDay, I got a call on the home land line from the local mall jewelry store. Sweet young lady informed me that since it had been a year since I bought my ring there, I should bring it in for a complimentary cleaning. Trouble was, Big Chief Dumb Fuck had never bought me a ring anywhere. But I was dumb enough to think the store had made an error – until DDay!
For years I would wake up in the middle of the night with awful dread, like my skin was coming off.
Stopped after cheater left.
When I married my husband at age 30, I truly believed I had found my soul mate. I had spent my 20’s dating a lot of losers and had gotten to a place of self acceptance, when boom! I found my STBX. I know now that he was love bombing me, as only covert narcs can do. One night early in our marriage before kids, I had a nightmare that I awoke from in hysterical sobbing and screaming. That had never happened to me before or since, although I have very vivid dreams. In the dream, I was driving up and down a road in the country, and wanting to talk to my hub about the scenery, wanting to sing with the radio, and realizing I was totally alone and he was never coming back. I was driving along alone, and it was like he was a huge void in my life, a deep black hole. I thought it was a premonition of him dying, but now I think it was something else?
Cut to 21 years later, and me suspecting him of having an affair – but not really, not HIM – questioning him about various things, and him telling me I was crazy, he loved me and would never ever hurt me like that. Told me that if I was more physically fit that I’d have more confidence, and my lack of confidence was unattractive. (I was losing weight at the time… but I’m short, hourglass shape, and have always felt confident and sexy until I suspected something was up). I developed shingles the winter before Dday1, and right after Christmas he was on a tirade (the day after my surprise 50th birthday party that he threw me but invited my friend, the OW, who he’d been having an affair with a year at that point), and he was ranting about a DVD not being in it’s box, and the house was sort of messy bc it was three days post Christmas. He raved so much about how he couldn’t live in this mess anymore, so much so that the kids went to their rooms and shut the doors, and I’m sick with shingles, exhausted from he party the night before, and screamed back at him that HE was the reason I had shingles because living with him was so stressful.
The biggest sign, though, is the cardinal that flies into my big picture window in my kitchen. It started three months before Dday 1, every morning at 6:30 am, it would start and last for about 30 minutes. Every day. Peck, peck, bam, bang, and even left bloody spots on the glass. After Dday 1, and he left the first time. the bird stopped the very next morning. He came back and left three more times before leaving the final time last May for the OW, and EVERY SINGLE TIME he was home, the bird came back, and when he left again it stopped. And it was the same bird.
Now the bird is back, and it’s just me and the kids in the house, and my hub is actively seeing the OW but has been coming around the house more, seeing the kids, image management. I’m trying to read this and sense it’s not over yet. Working with a lawyer toward legal separation and he thinks it’s going to get ugly.
I was walking my dogs around the park on a beautiful sunny day when the voice came in my head: “I’m going to divorce CheaterX.”
I was shocked. I’d never considered it.
A couple of months later, I discovered he was cheating on me.
There was a rat in our kitchen! My ex was a chef/cook! Had to pay trips to get it, even then it evaded and escaped but chewed threw the washing machine hose so it flooded our brand new kitchen, 1 month after we’d moved in!
I never seen the rat he did. He was the rat. Now he has escaped and is being a rat towards his children too. No presents, no contact, no feelings.
Lay traps
I meditate, and have for many years. The last six months with cheater ex, every time I would meditate, there was a voice nagging me….You have to leave….You have to take your children and leave…. If you don’t, he will kill you, he will kill your children……You have to be gone by the 5th of September…. What are you doing to prepare? ….. I believe it was my guide.
It was less than a month later cheater ex looked at me one night and told me that when he felt depressed, he felt like getting a gun and killing me, the boys, and then himself. I had very little money at the time, I was in the final months of nursing school, and working full-time nights. I picked up extra shifts and told him it was extra money for Xmas, and started squirreling money away to rent an apartment.
My kids and I made it out a few day before the deadline. That weekend we were due to go as a family to cheater ex’s parents house, where I had made him keep his gun. When I and friends were packing up, I found a brand new box of shells cheater ex had bought after I had destroyed the ones he had previously. I believe he was going to get his gun back that weekend.
In the long run it saved my oldest son’s and my life, and gave my youngest son and extra two years.
What I couldn’t do was convince the judge in the divorce to grant supervised visitation. The night before cheater ex kidnapped him, my youngest son asked me what it felt like to die. We talked about the white light, and the comforting presence of Spirit, and that we are always met by loved ones when we get to the other side. Within 24 hours, cheater ex had murdered my child. The only feeling I had at the time of our talk, was I should be prayerful and hope for the best.
I don’t know why I was not aware of the warning. I will always wonder if I could have been more discerning, maybe I could have saved my child. I always have to come back to it’s in the past, I can’t change it, I have to accept it and move on with life and make that life the best it can be in memory of my boy.
My heart just breaks for you! HUGS! I wish you peace.
My heart breaks for you every time I read this. So much “what if”, right? I don’t know what your faith tradition is, but what you told your son is LOVELY, and what if, after our time here ends, the way time works “after” is different? What if YOU are the loved one that greets him? I have to think that the words of his mother were of comfort to him.
I am so sorry to hear this. I love how you are honoring the memory of your son by living the best life you can. Peace be with you.
Tessie,
My heart is filled with such love and caring for you for how you have turned your tragic loss of your son into helping others become stronger and improve their life.
I know CN shares this feeling. Everyone respects you Tessie. Your sweet Son’s memory lives on in the hearts of many.
Bless you Tessie!
❤️
It is the judicial system that failed you and your son, not you! Its refusal to hire competent evaluators and undertake affirmative steps to ensure that a clearly dangerous parent was not given unfettered access to a helpless child, set in motion a series of events that tragically led to your son’s murder. I am angry for you, and I am angry for every child whose well-being is placed in the hands of malignant narcissists. While parents certainly should have basic rights, the paramount concern should be for the well-being of the innocent child. Why is what is best for them so routinely dismissed? Your experience has certainly shaped my views of the need for supervised visitation in some cases. You are performing a true public service in warning others why it is so important to protect our children. Thank you.
This. I, too, believe the judicial system fails families. Placing your head in the sand when circumstances dictate that things aren’t okay is definitely NOT what needs to be done. Family courts and lawyers “see” infidelity all the time yet discount the seriousness of what may go wrong. When X fell in love with his racquetball partner, he became somebody else…and one who wanted to destroy me. I was in fight or flight mode for three years. Statistics even support that when one partner leaves and there is another involved many things can go wrong. We see it on the news and we know examples here…and there is probably more. For many, no fault is a joke. It doesn’t protect us or even recognize that along with infidelity much more is being handled under the surface. It sure as hell doesn’t protect us financially either. Like someone willing to fuck us over, in small and big ways, someone who’s been lying to us day in and day out, who is living a double life, won’t harm us in other ways…. Fucktard went scorched earth and my overriding feeling those first two years out was that I needed to protect myself. He was a master con. I threw up for six months from the stress and was a mess. I made sure to communicate my fear in writing to X because that placed him on notice but I also should have been paying closer attention to the finances. My lawyer should have been looking out for us too. Two years after he moved out he vandalized our home. Who, in their right mind, does this?! Also when there is a pattern of abuse and verbal threats (especially those like Tessie’s) made against the family, courts need to do a better job of protecting everyone. I believe no contact saves us as well.
Tess, your story guts me every time and I wish for you the best and all that your higher power wants for you x
Tessie,
Your story breaks my heart and I’m so proud of how you have vowed to life a good life in honor of your murdered child.
I’m thankful you continue to share your story to help and warn all of us.
Much live and hugs!!!
When my ex’s affair started we were in the middle of making our marital home over. We basically tore it down to the outside walls and went from a ranch to a two story. We had been planning it since we first got married and moved in. It took us 15 years to finally afford it, having paid off our mortgage by paying ahead. I remember waking up in the middle of the night (we were staying at my in-laws home while our house was being transformed) from a bad dream and I told my husband that I felt like everything was going so good in our lives that it felt almost too good to be true. That I felt something horrible might happen. He reassured me over and over that everything was going to be fine and that we deserved all of our happiness!!!! Yeah…………….he was already involved with OW. Ugh. It went all down hill from there. NOT ONE PEACEFUL DAY IN OUR NEW HOME!!!!
THEN…….once the divorce was over, I purchased my new home and my daughters and I moved, I had another terrible nightmare! So many people had been commenting me on how happy I looked now that the dust had settled. I really was beaming! I was finally safe from the BS and could relax. In my dream I lost all of my teeth and I couldn’t smile anymore!!!!!! OMG! I woke up crying! I guess I was just so afraid of being miserable again.
Dreams are crazy!
We were together for five years, and it became a running joke that places we had visited early in our relationship – bars, restaurants, clubs, stores – all ended up going out of business, including the bar and restaurants we went to on our first date.
Apparently it was just a preview of what was to come for us.
The good news is that there aren’t so many reminders now of the love bombing days to contend with and, in most cases, those places have been replaced with newer, better ones.
Hopefully, that’s a preview of things to come for ME!
OMG. The restaurant that STXH and I had our first date at went out of business. However, more poignantly, the event space where we were MARRIED went out of business a year after our marriage! I used to joke that we’d have to pick a restaurant we don’t like for our 10 year anniversary because it’d likely close too. I had no idea it was our marriage that would be the next thing to end.
I always believed my former boss was a cheater, with an unpleasant female who was his ‘work wife’.
Every hospital where his actual wife worked, closed down. She also developed serious breast cancer twice.
He lost his wedding ring as well, and I remember him telling me he was going to replace it, but somehow he never did. I asked him a couple of years later why not, and he wouldn’t talk about it.
Kind of telling.
This is an uncanny post due to the timing of my dream last night. Over the years, I’ve had a number of dreams where I am watching a plane lose control in the sky and crash into the earth. Last night, I dreamed that I was on a plane that nosedived and I could see straight through the front window of the plane to the ground. The plane fell down, down, down and we hit the ground. I watched it all happen. But I immediately realized that I was physically unharmed.
My interpretation: I see now that my previous life, and all the dreams for the future, have all been crashed and decimated. BUT, I am and will be, FINE!! Now I have new dreams, new hope and a new future. And I will be just fine.
I had this dream too only in my dream, the plane was nosediving and I walk over to the controls and righted it.
Amazing what our subconscious is capable of communicating to us!
About a year or so after my ex-husband started participating in sweat lodge ceremonies at the invitation of the Spiritual Slut, we were standing in our kitchen, planning out a day trip with our two young sons to his cousin’s wedding, about three hours away from where we lived. Everyone else in his extended family was staying the night in a local hotel, and it would have been fun for our sons to spend some more time with their cousins, but in those days it was all about ex-husband, so he talked me into driving up and back in one day so that he could be in the sweat lodge the following day. I had bad feelings about the relationship he was building with the Spiritual Slut from the get-go, but I also wanted to be a supportive spouse, not a hostile and jealous one who would stand in the way of his… “spiritual” life. (Gag.)
So, anyway, we’re standing in the kitchen, working out the plan, when I look at then-husband and see an image of a snake with fangs where his face should be. It came totally unbidden. It took a couple of blinks for the image to go away, but I didn’t deny to myself that I had seen it, and I never forgot it.
In the year leading to Dday1…
-a diamond fell out of my wedding ring.
-I kept having dreams (nightmares) that would wake me up at 3:45 each night. (Looking back, I think I was waking up because he was checking his phone.)
-I began to have this horrible acne on my hairline near my eyes. Never had that before and haven’t had it since the divorce.
-I constantly felt lethargic and just wanted to sleep. (Probably a sign of depression since my body knew something was off but that my mind didn’t want to acknowledge.)
-xhole was treating me horribly on my 50th birthday. I was in backseat with daughter on the way to dinner…he looked at me in rear view mirror with a look of such contempt that it sent chills down my spine. (He later told me that was the day he decided he was “done with me.”
I am sure there are many more that I have blocked out or didn’t notice…I wore the chump badge well!!
God sent him several portents – his most recent “business” trips were full of emergency root canals, food poisoning, outbreaks of dermatitis, trips to the ER. The relapsed alcoholism helped with those, I’m sure.
He blew past all those red flags, even a “spiritual experience” he claimed to have had on a hiking trip to the mountains (that I now realize was with her). He came back from that with renewed commitment to his own recovery, individual therapy, personal coaching, self-care, and marriage counseling. Somehow he forgot to disclose to any of us that he was sleeping with another woman just hours before God spoke to him directly. Or that part of her allure was that she was happy to binge-drink with him.
My divine communication occurred when he was in Europe for three weeks on a business trip and I realized I didn’t miss him at all, in fact I didn’t want him to come back. My life had all the outward appearance of happiness, but it was deeply lacking in joy. I had a morning where I prayed very deeply for God to bring my joy back. Two days later, my STBX “accidentally” cc’ed me on emails between himself and his married/mistress/coworker, describing their week in Italy together in gory detail.
I wished that 2×4 hadn’t been so painful, but I realize in retrospect that I had been inured to such flagrant mistreatment from him over the years that there was no other way. Seven months later, and I’m still waiting for the joy to come back…
Oh, geez! YES. I had been with the dbag since we were 16 & 17 and even became teen parents, but, hmm… only after more than 20 years together – I start getting infections “down there” within two days after sleeping with him. Every. Time. I should have questioned it all when one day everything of his was completely shaved bare. Did not ever cross my mind that he was being a whore.
Separately, in my living room there was a large b&w portrait of us hanging on a very high wall behind the TV, so I looked at it all the time. There had been a handful of small earthquakes over the last 6 years before DDay. Because of those earthquakes, a super tiny vertical line/split started at a high point on the wall (like 25’ high), and over those 6 years slowly made its way down, down, d o w n, until it was (not joking) dead CENTER of us in that hanging portrait. I wondered every time I watched a show why that line was headed directly for the center of us in that pic. I wondered for a minute if it was telling me something because he was growing more and more distant and disengaged, and the very FEW times we’d be together I never felt loved and would get those infections.
I should have listened to the line and “split” sooner. What a douche.
This whole thing blows my mind. I thought I was the only one. I had a dream she was having an affair. I woke up drenched in sweat and told her about it, first time I ever told her about a dream. She smiled like I was talking nonsense and I felt it was she said she would never. Reading all this, it must have already begun. I don’t trust her timeline but the dream was a couple months after they met and maybe weeks before a friend confronted her about her texting. It’s devastating to think I told her “If you ever want to leave, just leave, don’t have an affair” and she just did. Too cold. Realizing how much she sucks is the worst part of all this. I’m 13 months past D-Day, 9’months since I filed for divorce.
Thinking about this makes me really angry.
Around the beginnig of Cheater’s affair, we were having sex and there came a moment when Cheater was going to say my name. You know, those moments happen. When the time came, he said someting, but I was very aware that he stopped short of sayng a name – and I instinctively knew the name he was going to say was not mine.
It took all I had not to stop and ask if he was sleeping with someone else.
Shamefully, this same feeling crept over me repesatedly for over two years. It would go away some times.I later learned that the affair was on hiatus at these times. Spackle and hopium are powerful.
Later, during wreckociliation, I had repeated dreams about the AP in which she told me she didn’t care what had happened to me or my kids or my family. And said, “It never would have happened if Cheater didn’t want it.”
How come that had to be my fucking light bulb?
It was him. She’s a skank. It was him. I really had to work to get over my shame from all this.
He fucking sucks.
Sorry if this is TMI.
There’s no such thing as TMI in this forum. Whatever you need to say, bring it on!
Yeah. It just really, really galls me that I felt that awful feeling and I kept participating in intimacy. Like Tempest, except for a handful of texts, and that voice in my head, Cheater was home every night, participated in family stuff, went to school activity nights and our level of physical intimacy never diminished- for the most part.
I need to stop the “woulda, coulda, shoulda” thing…
My sign with Jackass? Before he left, he told me about half a dozen dire problems with my property that would add up to tens of thousands of dollars. He essentially told me that the house was falling down. As it metaphorically turned out to be. I was living in a “house” with no foundation.
After D-Day, I had a contractor come in and he told me that none of these problems was real. Jackass was wrong about everything. Either a liar or someone whose whole persona (as the great master craftsman who knows everything) was a fake.
Or he was gaslighting me. Some combination of the above.
And finally, he told me early on he was an asshole.
Now THAT was a sign.
Ah, your story totally tripped a light bulb for me …
On our second date, serial-cheating asshole held the car door open for me and said, “I normally don’t open doors for anyone.”
My very young, naive (*stupid) self thought it was a compliment: “I’m the exception!” Really?!?! WTF self? He was already setting the bar exceedingly low. Like opening a car door for your date in basic politeness is somehow a major compliment …. talk about having low expectations for myself.
Argh … if I could only drop-kick my past self.
Summer’s Eve, said to me after a few dates, “had you known me before you would not have liked me.” I wished I had listened then and not 16 years later.
At the end of our first date *where I realize he had love bombed the shit out of me*, POP (Predatory Opportunistic Parasite) said “I just want to set the expectation that if we become a couple, my former crazy girlfriend will insert herself because she is extremely jealous”. (NINE years later I still recall those exact words.)
I overlooked the odd phrasing due to English being his second language (and the internal question of “how/why would she know if we did start seeing each other?”) and honestly I don’t remember my response but knowing my personality, I imagine I said ‘We would deal with it if it happened’ accompanied with a confident smile.
In bed that night I kept waking, smelling his cologne on my skin but feeling great turmoil as though ‘I had been put through a food blender’ as I described it to my friend.
He contacted me the next morning, asking to meet for lunch. I demurred, something nagging at me that I should not get involved with him. He was so opposite from my ex husband—so attentive and understanding, always smiling a beautiful smile, so handsome with a sexy accent, very fit, excellent dresser, he loved to dance…… And DAMN! He kissed me the way I had always wanted to be kissed.
Needless so say, I gave in to the call of the above ^^ and did see him a few days later.
And the ‘set expectation of the crazy jealous girlfriend inserting herself’?—yeah, I am sure you can figure out the rest.
Even though I was totally new to the dating scene after a 24 yr marriage and unaware of the pitfalls abounding out there, something in my gut told me he was bad news even though at the time he looked like good news.
This just came to me and I’ve never put it together until now.
Foolish me asked POP to move in with me…..he didn’t just move in, he lived off of me. He was not the ‘wealthy professional’ he said he was. I supplied a means to his cheating, shall we say.
There was a beautiful gloriously red male cardinal that would come to one of my bedroom windows and seeing his reflection, would strike the window repeatedly. This happened every morning to the point I no longer noticed it.
Once I finally got POP out of my home and life, the beautiful narcissistic bird was gone too. It never returned to see its reflection and attempt to destroy itself again.
Now, how’s THAT for a metaphor?
They say if a cardinal comes to visit, it is someone in heaven trying to contact you!
The POS told me in 2013 that it would be a great idea for the children to spend the summer with my parents so they could have more time with grandma and grandpa and go to French camp.
I could travel back and forth on weekends and he would move in with his mommy in his home town so he could have more face time at the office and with the clients (he “works” for his daddy).
This went on for the summers of 2014 and 2015 as well.
Little did I know that he had met his very wealthy sow/girlfriend earlier in 2013 and was taking her to $200 dinners, scuba diving in Bermuda, on a getaway to Rhode Island etc etc etc. and playing step-father to her four children.
It NEVER occurred to me that he was cheating the whole time. How completely chumped was I??
D-Day came in October 2015 when I had a bad feeling and checked his phone while he was drunk and passed out on the couch.
My DDay was also October 2015, and she was also drunk. But, not passed out. Instead, frantically trying to erase texts when I unexpectedly came home early from work. I then grabbed her phone and saw one message that popped up subsequent to the frantic deletion from her co-worker asking if he could “take her from the back.” My stomach didn’t un-knot for at least three months after that.
I’m late 2015 alumni too
My cheater started spending long periods of time in the bathroom, day and night. His explanation…stomach/bowel troubles. When encouraged to,see the doctor about it, he took no action. In addition, I now recall he always had a container of baby wipes that he took to,work…in his briefcase, supposedly because the toilet paper at the office was useless.
Here was me concerned about his health while in fact he was stopping by schmoopie’ apartment after work for a portion, then cleaning up,and coming home. He did used to come in the door and go straight to the bathroom to shower. I was so blind. I recall being so used to his habits that I used to purchase baby wipes on sale! Hahaha. I thank the lord every day he’s gone.
Well, as i look back on 28 years of marriage..it always seemed that after some feelings of there being something wrong but never knowing what (he was cheating, lack of intimacy, silent treatment)..one of my exboyfriends would show up out of the blue to check on me. Should have run..anyone of them would have been an improvement. It was like God sent them. And this way before fb so they had to actually track me down. Lol. Prior to discovery I prayed specifically for God to open my eyes to what was happening to me. I am certain if I had stayed, it would have killed me. I was so depressed and physically ill I could barely function. He told me I needed a shrink. Miraculously within weeks, everything went away all the suffering when it was finally revealed to me he was cheating and lying and gaslighting me. I cannot prove it but I also think he was poisoning me with his high blood pressure pills in my coffee. So glad to be rid of him! Two years later, I have a great education, career, rental home and car. Thanks CN and CL for giving me hope!
I could never put my finger on what was wrong. Dancing Dick was a master at gas lighting. I only knew that I felt horrible. Depressed, full of anxiety…….and I didn’t know why. I kept crying out to God to help me. Not asking for any kind of specific help- because I did not know what to ask for. I was blaming myself for the horrible, cold, distance in my marriage.
Then one night….November, 11, 2016- God threw a brick at my head! Boom! Smack! There was no way I could have missed that answer to my prayers! I caught Dancing Dick masturbating at / dirty texting the neighbor- red handed! That was only beginning of what I found. Out of that marriage I went- like a bat out of hell!
Mine isn’t supernatural, just me ignoring fields of red flags. We had fought several times about how I always felt like his dirty secret, having to fight to be part of his life, how we lived together six months before I finally insisted on meeting his adult son and father, and how I didn’t want a dog and pony show wedding but I wanted to celebrate our love. We went to Tiffany to pick out our wedding bands. As we were heading to the register to make the purchase, he got a call. “Hey, can you finish up? I gotta take this.” and he turned and left. I might as well have been washing the dinner dishes or buying hamburger. I stood there with my card in hand, shocked, and started to crumble. I knew he didn’t love me. I left without buying the rings and should have broken up with him then, but I felt guilty that he moved out of state with me for my work.
A few days later he told me that he ordered our rings online, and bragged that he found “the exact same rings” on Etsy for a fraction of the cost and that he bought them while playing poker. Isn’t that lovely and romantic?
Before D day the alien, who claimed never to dream, would wake sweating, anxious. He had bad dreams but couldn’t describe it except to say that he was trying to get out of somewhere but couldn’t find the way. Probably our marriage as he later left one morning when I was out.
The most strange thing that made me think he was an alien was that he no longer snored. Not even the odd snuffle. Throughout our nearly 40 years together he had snored like an ocean liner leaving port. When he stopped I felt that there was a stranger in his body.
Oddly that ‘stranger’ took his new love to old (now ex) friends for supper and afterwards the wife asked her husband ‘just who was that’, he was so changed in his manner and personality. Weird.
Yup. Alien.
I figure I must have been making love to a clone for the last few years of our marriage because he was acting like we had no sex life. I don’t see why he couldn’t have at least left me the clone when he left.
Cosmic Clue: sister’s wedding gift of 2 matching handmade pottery coffee mugs ended up being 1 mug a few years later when one broke.
Cosmic Clue: few years later my mother’s fun gift of 2 ceramic mugs, one with a green happy face and the other with a yellow one, also ended up being one mug before even being used when the suitcase they were packed in toppled over. Cheater narc’s mother gave us a suitcase that had a wheel broken and was not stable and I had to use it.
Cosmic Clue: after 2 kids in diapers at the same time were both potty trained, cheater embezzler wondered where all the extra money came from and accused me of previously hoarding money. I informed him that diapers were $ and now we had extra cash
Cosmic Clue: lost Claddaugh ring symbolizing love, loyalty, friendship given by cheater
Cosmic Clue: violent night terrors ended abruptly after DDay.
Cosmic Clue: continual accusations of cheating by cheater himself. Never occurred to me this was projection.
This is the absolute truth! Two days before DDay, I had a dream. In it, my family was camping (which we never do), and there was no food. We were all hungry. My then husband was sitting in a chair with two plates of food. I asked him where he got it. He said, from his girlfriend. He wasn’t going to share it either. At that point, I had no conscious clue that he was cheating.
These weren’t omens of cheating, but should have been listened to when they occurred;
Warning #1–The morning we were supposed to go to Reno to be married, he came downstairs after dressing and I saw that he’d shaved off his dashing “Fu Manchu” facial hair. He had no chin.
Warning #2– We were driving in his car behind our parents in their cars; they were far ahead of us and suddenly the car stopped working. We spent an hour in a roadside rest stop until we got a ride back into town to get my car.
Warning #3– The licensing bureau was within 15 minutes of closing when we got to Reno; you can get married 24 hrs a day, but the licensing bureau was only open until 5 PM. We got our license right at the end of the day.
Three omens and warnings and I told myself “If we can fight our way through all of this, we can make the next 50 years work!”
I was pregnant within days of the wedding (lucky me!), and he quit providing me with support when he went to sea. I had a 3 y.o. child and an eight month old baby, and almost got evicted because he refused to provide an allotment for us. When he came home from his boat’s sea trials he came home for Christmas, gave me some money to pay for his fancy tires for his car (which he’d conveniently neglected to pay for) and I paid part of the rent (to assuage the landlord) and took the rest to give an attorney a retainer for the divorce proceedings. Start to finish: 22 months until I filed in self-defense. What a tool. I dodged a bullet there.
Had several recurring dreams that played out almost exactly as dreamed. X and exact person I dreamed I caught cheating were same in real life. Had the dream at least 3 times leading up to Dday. Should have clued me in and I should’ve at least started lining up everything for the end. Live and learn. Never again will I doubt my instincts!
I’m with you friend! Never again will I doubt my instincts!
2 months before D-day we went to a 4th of July BBQ at a friends house, where my then-husband became very drunk. As I drove us (and the kids) home he became oddly belligerent with me, saying things to me that reminded me at the time of his father, a crazy drunk who cheated on his mom constantly through their marriage, actually divorcing and REMARRYING each other.
I got angry with him and told him he was acting like his father. He became enraged and went over his buddy’s house across the street when we got home, no doubt to vent about his terrible wife. He apologized the next morning and admitted that yes, he was turning into his father, even more than I realized.
Later when I looked back, that was the moment I should have recognized what was happening. He truly did turn into his father…even to the point of hovering now, over a year post-divorce, wanting back into the family fold, and grabbing at religion for his new kibble-source.
Well, he might be his father, but I am NOT his mother. He is NOT coming back.
I had the weirdest one ever. I discovered my boyfriend’s infidelity on a holiday in the Caribbean.
A few months before this I kept having some dreams where I would catch him kissing a hotel guest. Very uncomfortable but in hindsight, it was my intuition trying to tell me what was going on.
On the way to the holiday, I transited in the States. I explored the city of transit, and for some inexplicable reason my friend drew me to do a psychic reading. I am normally sceptical of these but I was in such a good mood, so in love, feeling invincible etc so I thought let me give this a go for fun.
It’s the first time this has happened but 15 minutes into the reading, the woman paused, held my hand, and told me she would get me a refund because the reading was too painful for her. She told me three things:
(1) To ‘love myself first’;
(2) If it doesn’t feel right I shouldn’t do it; and
(3) To trust my intuition and myself.
Then, face white as a ghost, she returned my money and fled. I was shocked: I thought psychics were charlatans out to make money, whoever heard of a psychic RETURNING money? Now I wonder if the pain she channeled was the pain post-D-Day. The three things she said certainly make sense in the context of D-Day.
Finally, the biggest clue the universe had given me was four years back; when he announced he had a girlfriend even as I was trying to save our long distance relationship. I initially assumed she was fictional and went ALL NC on him. As I bumped into him a year later and rekindled the flame with him, I should have known that if he’d done it once, he’d do it again.
One of many signs I missed – I adopted a dog from the local shelter – he was herding dog mix. Any time my then husband would get near me, the dog would physically force his way in between us. The dog didn’t do that with anyone else. The dog recognized a wolf in sheep’s clothing…
This! Except my dog got between OW#2 and my XH!
My dog hated Dancing Dick. Sometimes, he would randomly snarl at him. We thought it was funny because he didn’t snarl at anyone else. The dog must have known something I did not yet know.
I had the reoccurring “dark man” dreams, you know – someone (somehow I always knew that it was a male with bad intentions) was trying to break in or was in the house.
I never felt safe with Fatso. But after DDay, I have never had another dark man dream. Not once. I live alone in the mountains – well, alone as you can be with two dogs. But I think the bad man in my dreams……was him.
Subconscious trying to wake me up. Too bad I didn’t heed that warning years ago.
So many signs, if only there had been a burning bush in front of me and Jesus himself:
He was late to the wedding location on our wedding day
Earlier in the day he asked me why I was being a bitch (my gut was not excited about getting married)
He left my motorcycle helmet so he had to go back and get it so we could actually leave together
After trying wreckonciliation, he told me about a dream he had where we were on a ship and drowned. I told him that his dream was spot on…. we’re dead.
I was wife #3…… now he’s getting ready to marry homeslice for wife #4. 4 marriages in 25 years…. 1 year, 5 years and 12 years. At least the length of time is increasing. I’m sure it’ll be bliss.
I could not understand why sex with him started to feel like it did with my 1st husband who abused me. In the beginning, Mr Twatwaffles and I had great sex. After we lost our son and after I birthed our daugher 18 months later, I shied away from sex with him because it made me feel bad. I attributed it to the loss of our son, the trauma of having a daughter with a rare birth defect, the baggage from a previous marriage…I took responsibility for this sexual dysfunction… and he let me.
And then I grabbed a man’s ass during our annual Town wing ding and I could not believe I did that. I have no idea what in the world ever possessed me, it was completely out of character. I confessed a couple of days later to my husband and apologized profusely, asking his forgiveness and saying I would distance myself from that man and be totally accountable for my whereabouts and whatever he wanted.
My husband shrugged and clearly didn’t give a shit. A month later, on our daughters birthday, he informed me of his infidelity.
…about a month later.
Hi all. I’ve been reading this site for about a year, and finally wanted to come out from the anonymous shadows and introduce myself.
My wife cheated on me with a co-worker one month after we just bought our (my?) dream home. I caught her by coming home early one day after she sent me a sexy pic via text, which was uncharacteristic of her. When I got home thinking we were going to make love, I found her drunk and desperately trying to erase a text thread. When I grabbed her phone, I saw one text asking if her co-worker could “take her from the back” the next week. Queue almost two years of hysterical bonding, pick-me dancing, and marriage policing until I finally couldn’t take the loss of trust anymore and separated last summer.
There is much more to my story, but I mostly wanted to just introduce myself. I come here daily to get a real dose of reality for when I’m lonely and get wobbly.
Chump-pin, I’m so sorry. I know of the 2 years that you speak. Mine went on for 3. I hope life is better without your wife around (hopefully soon-to-be-X?). Getting the crazy out of the daily equation can do wonders for your clarity, notwithstanding, it still hurts. I don’t know that the hurt gets any better, we just learn to cope with it better. Hugs! We’re cheering for you!
Thank you, MD. I filed this September. That put her into the last binge and she ended up in her fourth rehab. I’m working really hard at NC and the kids are safely with me. The two homes are going up for sale and I am seeing an incredible and kind woman. I daydream about my own place without the ghosts, and I come here to reaffirm she is really an entitled cake eater when I mourn the idea of the future I thought we would have.
Going to suck for her. I was the breadwinner, planner, cook, maid, and babysitter while she lost jobs and hid in the bedroom hiding booze and frittering away on her iPad. It’s going to be a real shock for her when he now has to actually be an adult.
Welcome, chump-pin. You’re very handsome, by the way! So glad you’ve spoken up and introduced yourself. I’m relatively new here… feels good to be able to complain day after day with people who “get it.” Xox
Thank you! Blush. You should have seen the affair partner. They really do trade down.
I also recently saw her Tinder profile that my friend screen capped where she plays herself off as some really spiritual creature that is a “sapiosexual” that practices “meditation” and is interested in “nonduality.” She’s such a pretentious ass…
Chump-pin so sorry that you are a member of a club that no one really wanted to be in. But welcome, and please know that there is an end to this madness. It’s called Meh and it happens on a Tuesday. God Speed.
Thank you very much! The madness is currently practicing nonduality (whatever the hell that is) and loving ugly dudes with, I guess, meditative and big brains.
Hahaha ‘nonduality’ I have no idea either. These people are so ridiculous. Out there thinking they’re so brilliant… with their cow thoughts.
Pretty sure dudes on tinder are all so …. grand. Wtf?!?
Chump-pin, you are well rid of her.
Pretentious is right.
You’ve got nothing to work with, best to move along.
“plays herself off as some really spiritual creature that is a “sapiosexual” that practices “meditation” and is interested in “nonduality.” She’s such a pretentious ass…”
That is funny! These people think they are the be all end all—-
Now for the topic at hand. I think the biggest sign was that we both didn’t kiss the same way. I love deep, slow French kissing while she seems to want to keep her mouth closed and just sort of press her lips against the other person’s lips.
I also like to be slow and deliberate in foreplay and she just strips down and jumps in the bed.
I forgave both these things because I loved her and I adjusted my style to accommodate hers.
Going forward, if the kiss isn’t right, I’m not even going to find out if the rest is compatible.
Welcome Chump-pin. I’ve done more than my share of research since my marriage ran aground. At the risk of sounding like I’m spewing psycho-babble, your wife sounds like a Cluster B “love avoidant.” Love Avoidants typically experience severe emotional neglect, isolation or outright abuse as children. They may have had a withdrawn, alcoholic parent and almost certainly had a Cluster B / Narcissist parent. They lack the emotional tools to develop deep bonds. They display uneasiness during moments of attempted emotional intimacy and their partners feel pushed away or shut down.
Real love to a love avoidant is of the shallow, infatuation, love-bombing variety. They respond to initial butterflies and the excitement of seduction.
As with all Cluster B / Narcs, there’s no cure. As the discovering spouse it’s best to identify what they are, cut your losses, GTFO and go NC. There’s no fixing them. Save yourself. Move on. Surviving is winning. Life gets better the smaller they get in the rear view.
GDD, you nailed it. This is exactly correct. Every bit of it, including how your life gets better after NC. I shed my tears when I was with the fuckwit. I’ve never cried one tear after. That is how profoundly and immediately better life can become after deciding you are done and moving on. I wouldn’t want to live one second of his life for one second. He is defective and lives in a swamp/landfill of his own creation. Meanwhile I am more than a year out and am stunned how my happiness keeps growing. You just need to decide, really decide, to MOVE ON.
This is really interesting. She was sexually abused for years by an adult neighbor. He kept a “harem” of preteens from the neighborhoods and controlled them through manipulation. I didn’t even know about him until about 10 years into the marriage when I wanted to name our second child by my Dad’s name and she said she hated that name. Turns out the neighbor had the same name as my Dad.
She was so frightened of this guy that she prayed to not have girls for fear he would do the same to them.
Cheating is still a choice, but this trauma and the possible resultant personality disorder may explains her hypersexuality and yet withdrawn nature.
I’m sorry for what you’ve had to go through. And, of course, I’m sorry for what your ex went through as a child.
But there are ways to heal that don’t involve hurting others. You are absolutely right – she chose to act out and cheat despite knowing how much it would hurt you and destroy your relationship. In the end you were acceptable collateral damage to her.
As with my ex, this is her character. It cannot be fixed by anyone but her. It’s not that she lacks awareness that what she’s doing is wrong. She simply lacks the ability to care. The concept of deep abiding love is incomprehensible to them. Either GTFO and move on, or stay and choose to be perpetually victimized.
There are plenty of people who have experienced horrific, traumatic things as children who choose NOT to inflict pain and trauma on others. Every human being has a soul and free will. As JK Rowling so succinctly put it – “It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
Wow.
As a Chump (had to go back via autocorrect and capitalise Chump and that’s very telling on how much I value my power as a Chump) facing last ditch MC not perhaps to reconcile but to try and untangle the skein, this is v important. Thanks, Dad. Xxx
Thanks. It’s gratifying to know I’ve made even a bit of difference, that my painful experience can be turned positive by potentially preventing pain to others.
Our Chump Nation is an international community for good. We are comrades in the defense of truth and doing the right thing. I’m so thankful to Tracy for planting a seed that grew a forest.
A freak wind storm blew a tree down, and it literally split our family cabin in 2; Just like a knife through butter. We had great memories there, and spent every Christmas holiday there, and New Year’s Eve. This happened just as his cheating and various family crisis were coming to a head. This was bar-none the most challenging year of my life. Even after the cabin was repaired, the kids refused to go back, as it had split their sleeping area in two, and the visual image of a tree having cut through their beds, bedding hanging out of the house, was just too haunting.
Once I decided to leave, it took me another year and a half to figure out how to handle it, and make arrangements. During that time I saw 1’s and 11’s everywhere. It seemed every time I looked at my clock or phone it was 1:11, or 11:11. Receipts, lists, whatever… 1’s and 11’s. I Googled this phenomenon, and it turns out it’s supposed to be angels guiding you, or affirmation that you are on the right path, or something is about to happen.
My stomach hurt most of the 12 years I was with SHitler. I was diagnosed with h. pylori and I did the treatments twice which did result in relief for a time. However, it would always come back. Until the day X left, and then it was gone. Literally GONE and I’ve not had that kind of pain again.
Sometimes I feel like I careened through my marriage just trying to get by and survive it daily. I was so busy doing all the work for the marriage that I didn’t ever really stop to think about what was really going on. I was the breadwinner, I cooked most of the food, cleaned, did the laundry, sewed his clothing, tried to be everything he wanted in the bedroom, etc. I was on overdrive the entire time. So it surprises me that I even found out about the affair. But I woke up in the middle of a dead sleep, middle of the night and sat right up in bed and whispered, “There’s something going on that I don’t know about.” I NEVER do stuff like this, I have a hard time believing in anything that doesn’t have a logical explanation and I’m terribly pragmatic. So it was weird. I listened to my gut and started digging.
There it all was. Nothing was ever the same after that. After I viewed our marriage through the lens of infidelity, I saw that the whole thing had been a lie. I was basically convenient and paid the bills. It’s scary to think that this time frame of 12 years even happened to me. Ugh. Once you “wake up” you never go back.
This is a good topic to discuss CL. All of us chumps need to listen to the “inner voice” that quietly nags – “hey – something is not right here”
Whether the evidence comes out in a dream and / or followed by detective work, chumps need to learn to be true to themselves and trust what they’re feeling.
It’s a 50 / 50 to believe in Spackle (I want to save this marriage) or believe the Gaslighting (Yes, I am crazy)
I played “dumb” with my cheater. She couldn’t lie to save herself and I just let her sink deeper into her own betrayal. (she couldn’t keep track of what tales / lies she had told me)
She eventually confessed to having sex with another guy.
Dumped her on the spot – yeah – he’s all yours – Bah Bye
I had a dream that I was walking up a hill on a trail with husband and son. On the cliffside, etched in the dirt was the word;”INFIDELITY”
As we got to the top of the hillside, we were walking along a narrow trail, with a steep drop off to one side and pear trees lining the other side. The pears were black and my husband was eating them voraciously. I remember the blackness of the pear juice covering his face, like ash. I was trying to keep my son from running off the cliff side, while he was indulging in the “forbidden fruit”.
Less than a week later, he left me for his affair partner. (I didn’t know he had someone waiting I’m the wings when he left but when I found out, I immediately thought about this dream).
You can’t make this stuff up. Talk about the burning bush. We had decided to get married in Las Vegas. Everything was a disaster from the get go. When we got to the airport they had overbooked our flight so we had to take a later one. After we picked up our rental car, we were barreling down the freeway and I turned the AC on and the motor died ! Right on the freeway and cars were careening all over the place trying to miss us. We had to get towed back to the car rental place and get a different one. When we got to our hotel they had overbooked the room and sent us across town to a different place. I called the wedding chapel I had booked online and moved the wedding up three hours because of all the mess ups. When I went to get dressed I discovered I had left half my outfit hanging in the laundry room at home and had to improvise. On the way down in the elevator I had some kind of panic attack (never had one before) I couldn’t breathe and fell to my knees when the door opened…security came running to help me up. When we finally made it to the wedding chapel it had burned to the ground and was wrapped in yellow police tape. My mom had been dead for several years and honest to god I thought..’Mom…are you trying to tell me something?’ I KNEW right then. But of course we found another wedding joint and went through with it so I guess I only have myself to blame. lol
Wowzers! That’s incredible!
Nice profile pic, btw. Is that a lilac?
In the 6 months prior to DD#2…
1. While as an invited guest at our summer cabin one weekend, OW#2 commented to me that our dog didn’t like her very much.
2. I started to feel ill every time my XH cooked dinner and wondered if I was losing my mind.
3. I had excruciating shoulder pain during the night, that would often wake me out of a deep sleep. On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d rate the pain at 11.
Lesson learned. Always trust your dog and your gut!
Remembered another weird inner voice moment. It was June 2014 and we are looking to buy a house, finally at me 40. He is shit with money so saving a deposit was difficult. I did everything involved in the purchase, anyways we had looked at many houses and I was looking on line while at work and A voice said ‘you need to buy a house by September’. We moved in, in July, he was started EM in September. Glad we didn’t build a house, would probably never have moved in and glad within days of that voice I found the house I’m in now, struggling to pay for mind you, but I love this place and knew as soon as I saw it on line It was the one.
I had a strong dream also that I was a carefree old lady in the house also, hoping that comes to fruition.
I had literally no dreams or signs whatsoever. I think I have zero intuition.
A lot of these things are down to interpretation.
Let me ask you one thing, though. Could you envisage you & your cheater as old people, growing old together? I ask as I never could visualise that. It isn’t so much of an in-your-face sign, but more something that was missing. It was inconspicuous by its absence. I never questioned it, however, as old age was a long way off.
Did you have any so-called positive or affirming signs, that were actually missing?
Interesting you mention this. I never, never could see us both as old people, growing old together. I always saw myself alone. Old surrounded by children and grandchildren, but never with him.
About 6 years into the marriage I found I was exhausted all the time. No kids even. I would sleep 10 hours a night and still need a nap. I was DRAINED. Thought maybe it was work ( burnout common) so I went part time. Thought it was needing more excercise but sometimes I would need to nap after working out. Started sweating whenever wherever. I’d be sitting at the kitchen table doing nothing and sweat. I went to MD in tears thinking I was dying ( bit melodramatic). I did get put on thyroid medicine for a bit and that helped tremendously. Funny thing is after divorce and I got my first place on my own I found I had energy. Now mind you I still struggle with low energy but I realized all my extra precious energy was used on him. Listening to him, validating him, praising him and getting nothing in return. Turning point for me was that he blamed my “being tired” all the time as one of the reasons he cheated. He wasn’t concerned I wasn’t feeling well or that something could be wrong. Just that I couldn’t alsways ne the “fun” partner he wanted. I could do fun and activities but I usually needed to recoup. One of the final straws for me was saying “Wow, if I get cancer or sick all you are going to think about is how I’m not there to DO FOR YOU”. He didn’t argue. My Mom died 3 weeks before DDay. It was doing paperwork for her death that led me to cheaters emails. I thank Mom for my new lease in life. I felt she was showing me what needed to be shown.
I developed hypothyroidism during the last 3 years of the marriage, when I wanted OUT due to his emotional abuse (but he would beg me to stay and give him another chance). I think the stress of living with him triggered the autoimmune problem.
And during those last 3 years, the dog also had copious amounts of fleas. Shortly after the X left, while living in the same location, the flea problem cleared up. Even the canines were stressed by him, I think.
Great story. Narcs drain our life force. Over the years I was constantly sick, flu, shingles, hair loss, weight gain, excessive drinking, adrenal burnout. 1 year oot I have loads of energy, not sick and have lost 8 kg and look better than I did 15 years ago. Stress makes you ill. He was never sick but so so needy and constant chaos and bs. I used to think that the stress and cancer thing was rubbish but I now believe stress is toxic. I enjoy sleeping alone now. I never liked sharing a bed woke up tired and shitty, think he was draining my soul in my sleep!
In my case, one thing that sticks out:
Within weeks of us together, we were living together (#lessonlearned), and I got the cable bill — with porn charges! He denied, denied, denied doing it, I knew better than to ignore the burning truth, but I let it go.
Money left on my door for my car payment disappeared- I couldn’t believe he would do it, but he claimed he was blackmailed by my ex to give him that money. Yep, believed him.
I’m not exactly sure when or how it exactly it happened, but after a few years with TEO, he started going out with one or two guys that we were friends with, leaving me home either alone or with my two DSs on my weekends.
I was actually grateful that he was finally making friends with guys and not leeching himself onto my friends. Stupid me.
We were tight with another couple in those early years, A(F.). & B.(M.) who ended up divorcing, mostly due to B’s rampant cheating, though he claimed A was a cheater too. At one point, B claimed some of the times that he was out cheating, TEO was right alongside him cheating too, UGH!!! Why didn’t I listen to my gut?!?!! I knew it was true, but I sucked down my instincts.
Oh!!! I just remembered another one— the MySpace page!!!
We had been together about 4, maybe 5 years at this point, and we allowed my DS1 to make a MySpace page, thus we did too. On a whim, I typed in his name and whaddya know? He had cut me out of a picture of us that he always loved how he looked in it (of course) and on it he said he was “single, and looking ;)” . When I confronted him about it, again, he claimed my exh1 had done it to “set him up”. Again, I believed him.
Fast forward to the last couple of years, and I started having friends over for wine, or I would be “allowed” to go over to their houses for a little while, then he started suggesting I could go out with friends and “if you find a guy you want to f*ck”, you have my permission”
It got to the point to where he even suggested that I “help a brother out” and f*ck a friend of his going through a break-up.
Despite all of those nudges and suggestions, I never caved. Never, though he would tell OWs that he had videos and pictures of me having sex with multiple men. Lies.
About 3-4 months before D-Day, I said to him that it felt that he was trying to set me up for committing adultery so that he could file for divorce and get sole custody of our Autistic DD. He became enraged and defensive, saying he had “too much respect” for me to cheat on me, but felt that I wanted to “explore”… Hhhhhmmmmm, kkkkaaayyyyy…
Three months later, D-Day.
I’m in the forgive-myself attitude about it all now, but damn, I feel dumb about it all.
I’m sure there are other examples and incidents, but those are the ones that stick out most.
Oh!!!
Our wedding day!
I REALLY did NOT want to get married again, especially so soon after exh1 and I divorced (16 months), he was more or less bargaining and negotiating with me, saying he’d do better about keeping a job, among other things.
The only part I remember to this day is looking into his face receiving my vows to him and thinking in my brain, “NO! Don’t do this!!!” I did.
I was late for my third date with my ex, as a result of not one, but two suicides.
I had to take a train then a tube to get there, and on each journey, someone had thrown themselves under a train. So sad.
Thinking about it from this perspective, jeez…
The camera broke at the wedding so that there were no wedding pictures.
Dday. Things had been happening that weren’t adding up but I honestly didn’t think he would ever cheat on me and thought he was crazy about me. We had just gotten home from some friends house after watching the Daytona 500. I went into the kitchen to check on dinner and he slipped into the office where the computer was. As I was lifting the roast out of the oven something/someone said to me ‘GO see what he is doing !!’ I whipped in there and before he could close the window I saw him typing an email that said ‘I can’t wait until I can hold and kiss you again.’ The rest is history…
FAVOURITE. POST. OF. ALL. TIME. I have been longing for this one to come round again. I remember reading it for the first time and getting goosebumps.
Thank you Tracy!
I had to stop wearing my wedding ring after having my son as it gave me a rash! Stupidly saved up and we bought me a new one round about the same time my STXH started his affair. I sold them plus my custom made engagement ring recently- had a lovely weekend away with my girlfriends on that!
I’d completely forgotten that after 12 years of constantly wearing an eternity ring i started to have an allergic reaction to white gold so had to stop wearing it. That was last christmas, he had been working for OW since august and was going to back after the christmas break working alongside her building her new house, this is when their relationship hotted up, dday July 2017 🤢
When first dating X, I clearly remember watching him walk out to his car when he was leaving my apartment one day. I can still remember even 13 yrs later thinking “my God, he looks just like an ex convict from behind”. His walk, the ever so slight uneven shuffle in his step, the cocky way he carried his shoulders, the way he “scoped” his surroundings, how his eyes quickly shifted left to right as if he were looking for something/someone, the denim blue pants and shirts he always wore, something and everything about him signified that this man had a hidden dark inner side that had not yet been exposed.
I married him anyway…because you know…chump and projecting my own virtues onto him ect. I also had the erroneous belief that if I slept with a man, I was morally obligated to marry him (rather than just repent). God then rolled up His sleeves and got to work showing me so MANY times and in various ways the nature of the cold snake that I married…I kept all those discoveries and revelations to myself while making long term plans for the day I would escape, given the fact that X took everything I had the first year we were married, including dragging us both through Bankruptcy, and would have happily left me and my son totally destitute since he was in a position to do so. Ten years later, the day of my escape came and I had a very soft landing thanks to playing it exactly the way the Lord instructed me to do…step by step. I could fill a book with all the incidents, dreams, visions, discoveries, and ways that God guided me out of the “Land of Egypt”, but suffice to say that I am so happy to be free and alone.
He gave me a “broken” 15th anniversary ring. By broken I mean the diamond literally fell out of it within days of him giving it to me. I was too afraid to tell him about it, so returned it to the store myself, then told him after I realized it wasn’t my fault. Because it was a very nice ring and was only day’s old, the jeweler replaced the stone (*almost* a carat). Kind of like it was *almost* a good marriage — except for that pesky habit he had of cheating, raging, lying, etc.
Another sign: One of the affair partner’s died days after I filed for divorce, and the day before what would have been our 20th anniversary. This was the AP that we didn’t go to marriage counseling for. We were in marriage counseling 11 years prior for a different AP, but at the time he said one was “just a friend”. Fast forward 11 years later, he’s still in contact with her, only as a friend of course. Hope literally died. It was confirmation of the divorce filing and kind of like the universe was telling me that this is the only way this guy will ever stop cheating.
I’ve been on the fence about leaving my husband for years now. I had this dream just a few months ago, after finding out he was continuing to engage in his favorite sex fetish (solo this time, as far as I know) for the past year & half, after promising to stop. This dream was SO vivid, and SO disturbing, I wrote it all down as soon as I woke, which is why I have so much detail. No interpretation necessary, as it is painfully obvious to me what it all means. My marriage is killing me, I have no voice, and my kids are just watching it all happen from a short distance.
Anthony Hopkins, as Hannibal Lechter, was trying to kill me. It was like a psychological thriller movie or something. He was playing games with me. We were all in a hotel room, me, my husband, our 3 kids, and Anthony Hopkins. It was a huge room. The kids were way on the other side. Hannibal kept choking me and cutting me with a knife when no one was looking. It was so weird. I sensed the kids were a little frightened, but for whatever reason they couldn’t tell exactly what was going on from where they were. My husband was right there, on our side of the room, but he didn’t notice. Hannibal took great joy in the fact that he could do this to me, right in front of my husband, and he didn’t notice. That was his game. I couldn’t move & I couldn’t speak. It was like he had choked my voice gone. Husband was completely oblivious, then he left. This pissed Hannibal off, his audience was gone, so he decided to just kill me & get it over with. I didn’t want the kids to see, I didn’t want to die in front of the kids. Hannibal choked me again and I passed out. I woke up & realized I’m still alive. I wondered if Hannibal knew I was alive. I was worried about the kids. If he thought I was dead, would he turn on them? Then Husband came back. A woman was with him, she was his girlfriend. Hannibal had realized that I was still alive, and he thought it was absolutely hilarious that Husband had come back with his girlfriend. So he continued his game of choking & stabbing me. I was covered with blood, unable to move or speak, even closer to dying than I was before. For some reason I wasn’t aware of, there were police or paramedics in the room, way on the other side (this was a bizarrely huge hotel room), so they didn’t know either what was going on. They weren’t there for us, but for some other reason. I knew if I could just let them know somehow what was going on, they could help me. Husband was near me, I couldn’t move or speak. I pleaded with him with my eyes. He looked at all the blood on me, and looked at the police on the other side of the room. He covered his hands in my blood & stuck them in his pockets. He was going to show the police what was going on, by showing them the blood on his hands. But he did this right in front of Hannibal, who took Husband’s hands out of his pockets & wiped them off, and shook his head at him as if to say “no, you’re not telling anyone anything”. Husband kept trying one thing or another, but he wasn’t very careful and would always get caught by Hannibal. Everything he tried was ineffective and he didn’t seem particularly upset by anything that was happening, no real sense of urgency at all. He kept trying to help me, because he knew he should, but he didn’t seem very concerned about whether what he tried was actually going to work or not. It felt to me like if he cared more about the outcome, he would be more effective. I remember being choked one last time, really hard. I tried really hard to scream, and finally got out a sound. I knew the police had heard me. Then I woke up. I think I made a scream sound out loud in my sleep, which woke me up.
What a horrible dream Jeannie! Please leave as soon as you can, you can’t go on like this.
I had a lot of nightmares during wreckonciliation, but the recurring one was that I was swimming in the ocean (I am a very good swimmer) and the Whore was trying to drown me by dragging me under water. Whenever I managed to come up for air, the Traitor was there pushing my head under.
Night after night, the same dream, even though he was supposed to have stopped the affair. I got the truth in my dreams.
Oh, and the day after our wedding…when he could have easily planned to take a week off for a honeymoon getaway, let alone just ONE day, he flat refused saying “what for”? He is self employed in a very lax business, and would not take off an hour even to just have lunch with me…his new bride. Just went to work as if nothing in his life had changed with his own wedding taking place just the day before. I stayed home and did 13 loads of laundry because it piled up since I had to do the entire wedding prep by myself which took weeks. I even made all the flowers myself…everything.
He came home angrily expecting dinner rather than seeing the mountain of mess I was dealing with, and then promptly went to a video store and liquor store to get movies and booze for himself. This was the beginning of the next ten years of everyday life with him. I did not know about the prostitutes at that point…he never gave them up.
What a dick you were married to. Just what an absolutely creepy dick. Good riddance!
A month before the “I’m unhappy” talk, my ex came down with shingles. This was a surprise because he never has chicken pox as a child, and shingles only occurs from the residual chicken pox virus that lingers in the body. Being curious, I did all sorts of research. I found that it is triggered by extreme stress.
I remember jokingly saying to him, “Stress, huh? I wonder what’s making you so stressed. And I guess you had chicken pox after all. You’re keeping secrets from me!”
If only I knew that the source of his stress was an extramarital affair and that, yes, he was indeed keeping secrets from me!
Ex also got shingles a couple of weeks before my DDay.
Singles here, too. Weird huh?
I had ants in my bathroom. I killed them, but for months I would go to take a bath and there would be 1 ant, every single day, on the side of the tub. I would kill it, then the next day there would be 1 ant again. This happened for months. I started to view it as a sign of pestilence in my life. I really do know it was from God.
It continued to happen after I discovered the affair and he was claiming he was not doing it anymore, which was a lie.
One night I prayed fervently for God to tell me for real if the affair was still going on. That day I went to get the mail and there were thousands of ants in and on the mailbox. No food anywhere in the mailbox. So I knew.
We have been divorced since 2015, but my children had not seen the ow. Just after Thanksgiving, this year, I had ants in my bathtub for the first time in a long time. I knew immediately they were up to something. Sure enough, about a week later I was informed that my children would spend a week with their dad and OWife at Christmas.
So, ants. They are a sign from God. I am thankful for them.
Also, my thumbs twitched while I was being actively deceived. Hence my name.
During the last 3 or 4 years on our anniversary trips, I would get really bad stomach aches always resulting in diarrhea. No matter where we went or what I ate.
Now I think my body was trying to tell me something…
Found some photos online of Skanks and my husband out with her friends that looked very recent. He insisted they were over a year old. A few days later, I walked into a fast fashion store and pretty much walked into the dress that she was wearing in the photos.
Thank you, Universe!
If it wasn’t for the frequent break ups while dating over 7 years I still didn’t clue in.
A day before our wedding day our priest called to say he had to travel and a priest from Montreal would marry us instead.
This priest told ua he didn’t approve of a wedding kiss in the church. So we never had a wedding I do kiss. The priest never even signed our papers. The other one did that wasn’t present
We were married 18 years. Over the last 6 months before my ex left me. I was having horrible dreams. Vivid ones. That he was cheating. They were so real. He did tell me he was indeed cheating many months later.
I also had severe eye twitches during the 6 month period that ended after the truth came out
During the wreckonciliation fiasco one of my cats would bite the crap out of the cheater whenever he came over. She’d get in my lap and put her body between us while we were sitting and talking and if he got too close she’d strike like a snake.
My old dog did the same thing during wreckonciliation, She’d spread herself on top of me as if to protect me with her entire body and growl at him. She’d never done that before.
Love this
During the first few dates, I kept getting bug bites that would swell up huge – hot, itchy and painful! I complained to him about it because this was not how I usually reacted to insect bites. The bug bites occurred at different venues, a different park or trail, and only when I was spending time with him. I just thought the whole thing was so strange.
Later, when I found out about his history with women, the longstanding infidelity and other headaches he presented them, I thought perhaps the recurring bug bites were a sign that I needed to get away from him before he gives me the biggest bite of all; one that will take much, much longer to recover from.
I had dreams on and off every couple of years that my Cheater didn’t love me anymore and in the dream I had the same gut wrenched feeling that I ended up having in reality when I found out he was cheating for real, only the dream version wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the real one.
I also prayed at church that I would prefer Cheater to stay but if God thought it was better for Cheater to be out of my life, I will accept what is best but please just let me know what to do. This was hard to pray for at a time I desperately wanted Cheater to stay, and would have rather begged God for Cheater to make the big Cheater turn around, but it was a faith in God knows better kind of thing. Shortly after things became clear (good snooping on my part;), and I found help online and in other places, that started this journey (before finding CL, which would have shocked my butt big time at that stage!).
In retrospect, each of these signs even in isolation should have been enough to open my eyes:
1.) Marriage proposal occurred on Christmas next to our nicely decorated tree which tipped over moments later! A few glass bulb ornaments shattered, including ones with our names on them.
2.) Computer isssues occurred while our marriage license was being processed so they rescheduled our appointment to September 11 (far from an ideal day for two native New Yorkers).
3.) Huge wildfires caused roads between our home and our destination wedding venue to be closed for days (we made it through right before the main freeway was deemed unsafe for travel due to impenetrable smoke and flames which at the time, we viewed as a positive sign that in spite of the chaos and destruction, our marriage was meant to be since we were able to make it to the location).
4.) Even after the aforementioned disaster which we barely avoided, our wedding still almost didn’t take place. My husband was hospitalized the night before and wasn’t released until just two hours before the ceremony due to what we believed was something being slipped into his drink at a bar (which is a story in itself). My brother (a fan of dark humor) joked that he had worried that my husband’s corpse was going to have to be propped up a la the movie “Weekend at Bernie’s” in order to proceed with the plans.
4.) Accent diamond in my wedding band fell out precisely one year prior to DDay!
5.) Nearly every pet we’ve had throughout he years have been rescues. Two of our dogs came from abusive environments. Neither of these dogs ever warmed up to my husband although they interacted wonderfully with all other humans (Pets are extremely intuitive, aren’t they?)
I used to have dreams where I was physically attacking him. I’m not a violent person, but something about him made me deeply angry and I guess I processed this at night. He’s passive-aggressive, and I think he might be a covert narc. Those dreams were telling me that I was very unsettled with him.
All the actual signs were there in front of me, and I never figured out that he was cheating, perhaps throughout the marriage–I hope I never learn that truth. I don’t want to know. I don’t need to know.
But the dreams were the subconscious warning scream, I think.
Two come to mind immediately. About 5 years before stumbling across his Ashley Madison page, I was deeply unhappy in the marriage, constantly trying to impress upon him that his treatment of me was unacceptable. We lived overseas at the time and did a lot of traveling. Literally every trip was punctuated by at least one tantrum. Everything looked great on Facebook. The reality wasn’t so rosy. One night I had a dream that he and I were taking a trip somewhere via rail. While on the train platform, we got separated in a massive crowd. He ran into a couple that he knew and proceeded to talk and wait with them, oblivious of my absence. I could see them at a distance but couldn’t get to them. As the train’s departure neared, the trio walked onto the train, my STBX looking much happier than he normally did, and seemingly entirely unaware that I wasn’t with him. I watched with panic as they boarded and the train left the station, realizing that he was completely forgetting my existence and I was stranded in an unfamiliar place. I woke up so sad and upset. And in that moment, I realized that the dream was a metaphor for my life. He constantly ignored me in public, ignored my wishes, and was a generally awful person to live with. I should have left then.
Five’ish years later, I stumbled across his Ashley Madison page. In the interim between when I found it and confronted him about it, my TMJ was out of control. Jaw pain is something I’ve experienced since my teens, but it had never been anything like what I felt when I was choking back all of the words I wanted to say, feigning normality. The pain radiated around my face, down my neck, across my shoulders, and the length of my arms. Once I finally told him what I knew and that it was a deal breaker, the agony went away. I think that the difficulty of keeping those thoughts and words from exploding out of me caused all of that pain.
The brilliant symbolic truth of your own dreams can be so jaw-dropping, right? I never had an official D-Day, but I had several months of him acting like he would see me whenever he wanted and never commit to seeing each other at any time even though we lived together.
I had repeated dreams of being inside a jail and asking to call my family because I didn’t deserve to be there. I had no idea why I was there. But the jail guards just kept on telling me to not worry, be calm and enjoy myself instead. They would urge me to sit down and play because it would be fun. I would try playing for a while, and then begin asking again why I was there and how I could get out. And then they would give me blue apples. BLUE APPLES. I would ask how the hell they were blue and instead of the guards answering they would just comment on how amazing the blue apples were and urge me to eat it. Pretty as they were, I didn’t want to eat it because it looked fake and maybe toxic. I wanted to know what it was made of and where it came from before I ate it.
I dreamt of tsunamis for decades with both cheater n.1 and cheater number n.2, I felt really uncomfortable and lost when I woke up.
In the weeks before D-day I dreamt of nuclear bomb being announced on an old Tv talk show and closing the windows to keep out the orange/purple toxic fog. And another scary dream in those days before finding evidence was walking in my house through the rooms and the halls looking as a beautiful madonna in those paintings by Raphael, without doing anything just walking in the dark, only that I was dead.
That’s how being chumped feels, it feels like being killed. They kill you but they leave you alive to feel the pain until you die physically. Cheaters enjoy doing this more than sex, their true thrill is knowing that they have the power to crush another person’s soul, eliminate the meaning of love, replace your love with a “better” option and leave you there to watch and hurt.
Agreed. It’s a cold, sick power play for many of them. And we chumps can’t believe it until we’ve been through enough pain.
-morning of my wedding I had flu, could barely speak my vows. Friends thought I was choked by emotion.
-I had asked my ex not to appear looking hung-over at the wedding. He looked hungover.
-Had a dream just before affairs discovered of being at a party and searching for him , only to find him in a room under coats having sex with someone. He then laughed at me. ( in my dream).
-Early in our marriage he ” lost” his wedding ring playing squash. Never replaced.
– a recurring dream of having to run under 4 giant cylinders moving up and down to put a ball in a basket, always running the risk of being squashed and killed by a cylinder, always just surviving.
In 2005 my then husband came from Australia to live with me in Europe. We were married then for 7 years and there were many warning signs like him contacting his ex against my wishes (I didn’t know then that of course as soon as I left Australia in 2004, he has cheated on me with her and others). When he finally came to Europe (only because they fired him from his job in Australia and my dad helped him to find him the job of his life in Europe), I had a dream one night that I caught him in bed with another woman, he told me that she was a professor at the university and I served him divorce papers in this dream. And now fast forward to 2014: after few DDAYS (he never admitted to anything and gaslighted me and abused me viciously but I was finding naked pics of women in his phone or hair on his coat or strange bills – but he was deep in hiding!!! ), I have found by coincidence his old work phone that he just exchanged. There were few sms between him and a woman whose name I recognized from his work – a 65 year old PROFESSOR AT THE UNI Ewa X. I wondered: WTF??? I investigated and it turned out that the number belonged of course to another woman, a translator named Olga X. He just put a name of this older professor’s name in his phone to hide it! I gathered my evidence and filed for divorce. I am a clairvoyant! ☺
CL, why didn’t your cheater just marry the OW? Their affair lasted decades, they had a child… not getting it.
There is no reason to untangle that mess and figure it out.
That fact is that disordered, amoral people frequently opt for these kinds of lifetime arrangements.
When I was a grade school child, I had a very good friend. It turns out she was an innocent child of a disgusting bigamous man and a long-time OW (she knew from the get-go that he was married).
His legal wife was wealthy and they had many children. I met all of them at one point or another, but was told they were from his “first” marriage. At the same time, he had 5 children with the OW (some the exact same age as his other family). As a young child, I was too innocent to figure this disaster out.
The OW went by “Mrs. his last name”, as if she was his real wife. He bought her a little house and showed up occasionally to hang out (I was there sometimes). He was also a pervert, exposed his private parts to me and pinched me hard a few times. Sick!
My poor young mom had no idea about this. She thought they were a regular family, because we were new in town. But a lot of people in the community knew about their creepy arrangement. The teachers knew, the bank knew…it all came out later.
The legal wife also knew, and blamed the OW exclusively. Did not blame her pervert husband. Stayed married. And eventually died in a house fire (alone). Scary stuff. You wouldn’t believe the strange, creepy life that this man and his “women” and his children lived. I was traumatized in a number of ways because I was exposed to these horrid adults.
A lot more sordid, abusive, frankly unbelievable stuff happened than what I’m telling, seriously that situation could have been a series on A&E…but finally we (my family) were able to put the entire picture together and it was a doozey.
That was decades ago, but nothing has changed. Some people are simply sordid, amoral human beings who reject normalcy and morality, you can’t expect to figure it out.
For my first marriage, I couldn’t find the church, Get to the Church on Time was on the radio and we got there late.
Second marriage, he kept arriving in a different expensive vehicle acting less je he owned them. I should have deduced he had a big ego and was deceptive.
My dday was on holiday. On the flight out we had the roughest landing I’d ever experienced – i actually turned and jokingly said to my cheater husband “i hope that isnt a sign this is going to be a bumpy holiday!” Wow! Look at me now. Divorce filed, life upsidedown, dont know my arse from my elbow!!!
Also recurring dream i lived happily alone in a tiny, beautiful, little terraced house but was always afraid of something/someone and had to run out and lock the gate then couldnt find my front door again.
Isnt your house yourself in a dream? I was already losing myself because of his very clever detachment maybe??
And as many have said he used to have the dream that i was unfaithful and now its obvious its because it was possible for him to do it with his disordered personality, he just projected his own standards on me AND knew he wouldnt like it if i did it!! 🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️
So you know how facebook personalizes it’s advertising based information it gathers about you? Before DD, I repeatedly saw ads that said things like “Is your husband cheating? ” and the like. How in the world facebook knew my husband was having an affair months before I did is beyond me. Pretty damn creepy
My supernatural warning came about 2 month prior to D day. I had a vivid dream that we were in our home, there was no furniture and there was a bright white light. He was standing in front of a wall and there was red writing all over the wall. I do not recall what was written on the wall. My focus was on him. In the dream, I asked him what was wrong, he looked at me shaking, his eyes were bloodshot red, he was crying. He looked like he had lost his mind and was crying incessantly. I was worried for him but felt peace for myself in the dream. I immediately woke up, told him about the dream. At that moment I said “ I think you should start cutting down on work” . He was working crazy hours at the time. I thought the dream meant he was going to lose his mind- I thought it would be due to stress from work.
D day came 2 months later. Now the dream makes sense.
Red writing – warning
The Writing on the wall- a premonition of a failure or disaster to come.
My life has made a turn for the better. I have my sad days, some days. The trauma of what he has done to our family still weighs heavy, but I am pushing forward. His life on the other hand is a huge mess. He now lives with the OW and her kids but you can tell in his eyes there is no happiness there.
Blessings to all on this journey. We are mighty!
For me, after 25 years of marriage and 3 kids, (he never wore a ring, but was upset if I didn’t – I’m in healthcare), I started suspecting *something* was going on but couldn’t point to anything definitive, but I never really thought he had a she-troll on the side. He “worked out” a ton. 8 hours away from the house every Saturday “working out”. He’d come home from work hours after he got off because he was “working out”. One day it occurred to me that if he was working out THAT much, why does he still have a gut? The ass should look like an Ironman with that much “working out”!
DD was she-troll’s husband finding me on Facebook and sending me pictures of them having sex that he found the night before on her old phone. It was jarring. They had been cheating for around 3 years. I was shocked and devastated. I don’t know why I thought that would never happen to me. So much made sense and so much didn’t make sense.
It has been such a gong-show ever since.
Jenga,
My STBXH “worked out a ton” too. For 17 years. He should be in fantastic shape after all those years…but instead has gained 40-50 pounds in that timeframe. A few years ago I asked him “where are the results?” He just started at me.
I’m sorry you had to go through this too.
I had several.
1. I woke up to a voice. God I guess and I heard very clearly X(his name) is having an affair with whore(her name). I remember feeling a bit freaked out but laughed and called him and told him and my best friend and we laughed. Turns out this whore who I thought was helpful to my X at work was the AP.
2. I would lay in bed at night next to him with extreme anxiety and have no idea why? I would think about his mom who died and we were there at her death.
3. I was depressed and suicidal and could not figure out why. I had everything – material.
The soul, inner self often knows more than the reality we are living.
Yes, an affair, he was slowly removing me from his life, present but not. It was death by a thousand small cuts.
So now divorced, NC, not depressed and more peace in my life. Less money and financial security but still ok.
That voice that told me the truth – just wow as I had NO IDEA he was cheating. I figured it out a few months later.
I totally understand the lonely death by 1000 small cuts feeling. Thank you for your story.
Me too. Part of what kept me in denial is thinking, if you don’t want to be with someone, why wouldn’t you break up or work it out? That’s all that made sense to me. But no matter how much I knew something was up and tried to address it, he drug this stupid relationship out until I finally broke it off. I’m still not sure if he actually cheated on me or wanted me to think I was being cheated on. He definitely wanted constant pick me dances, and when I didn’t comply, he would do whatever he could do try to break down my self worth a bit more to see how much he could get out me.
Kind of related: I just watched Dave Chappelle’s last stand up shows on Neflix last night and he had some thought-provoking comments on how men use women. He told the story of a pimp in an influential book he read. It comes with a pimp glossary and one of the terms is something like “mileage on a ho.” That’s how long you can use/control a woman before she goes nuts. A fair amount of us have met cold men like that on here.
I would fanticize about winning the lottery and then my thoughts would wander to how I could keep my husband from getting half of it. And then Id wonder why I thought that.
Girrrrrrrrlllllll,
I had that very same fantasy, all the time! !!!
I would plan for winning, sneaking of to the claims office, or having a friend claim it for me. The lady couple of years we were together, I would plan on just splitting the winnings with him just to get rid of him.
Oh, i just thought of one day dream I’d have a lot :
I would daydream that I had won, claimed money, and he found out,. He wrote himself a check for most of the winnings out of my checkbook, forged my signature, but i had been proactive and warned the bank about such a situation, and that they were to call me and tge cops immediately. He would try to run away, only to kill himself or die accidentally trying to run away.
Good grief, we wre thinkers.
I had a lost of frightening and restless dreams, mostly involving my desire to scream but not being able to find my voice. After the second DDay, amid wreckonciliation and deep gaslighting, I had another. I don’t remember all the details, but I was fighting with the Narc in the dream and started yelling: “F**k you! F**k you! I hate you!” and this time I was yelling not only in the dream, but also out loud. Narc woke me from the dream and asked me who I was yelling at. I made up a story about the content of the dream, but knew, in that moment, that wreckonciliation was over and we were done. My voice wouldn’t be silenced any longer.
I watched the story of my marriage play out through the relationship the STBX had with his Parrot. STBX, Who was always in a phase of collecting one thing or another, ( snakes, exotic fish, antiques, artifacts, etc., etc.) Had to have a Parrot, bought a baby, he took care ,hand fed and spent time bonding with the bird. A commitment to a Parrot is approximately 50 years. Over the course of about 15 years, the bird spoke the names of our children, mocked household sounds, and talked as if on the phone , just like him. The bird was treasured for a few years, then slowly devalued , for the time and trouble of feeding and care required. Finally after a few years of near neglect he agreed to give it away.. I was sad , but agreed that he needed to go to a home that wanted him. I was the only one home when the new family came to get him. I will never forget the feeling that I just witnessed the story of my marriage. Love bombing, devalue , and discard. He never looked back. 39 years lost. I hope to recover some day.
Omg, that is so awful.
I have a little parrot and I could never imagine making the little guy feel so unloved… I’m so sorry you had to watch that happen, just because the primary owner didn’t love that part of your family anymore.
My cheating ex was similar in that he would devalue and discard things in his life that he’d previously wanted (me included). But to do that to a defencelessness little animal, capable of feeling so much and binding to its owners… they’re just monsters.
Thank you, Janet, I’ll add another story, STBX also had hunting dogs during our marriage. The last one grew old , hard of hearing and ultimately very frail. At the very end , she must have had a stroke, was lying outside in the flower bed and STBX left , to go to work. I called him back and insisted he take her to the vet for euthanasia. He did, but only at my pleading. This man whom I have known for over 40 years and have been married to for 39 years appears to all who know him as normal and kind. I thought the same, until the mask came off. We had a family and grandchildren, and a year just over a year ago I learned of prostitute use over the last 20 years. He ghosted me when I expressed my rage one time.
I was having dreams he was cheating on me. I’d wake up super upset and he’d assure me that would never happen. My dreams got worse, even became night terrors. He was there to ‘assure’ me he shouldn’t be punished for my ‘dreams’. Then off course I find out or rather confirm at the last part of our relationship, he’d been cheating heavily and often with multiple women.
There were other signs that I dismissed or wanted not to believe. One time a good friend of his told him why the guys group didn’t invite him to things anymore. Because he had hit one of their wives the friend told him. ( I was at the party with my ex that this accusation had been made.)
I didn’t ‘see’ it, so I defended my ex. Of course, now I realize I must have looked like a fool so many times standing by his side while he hit on every living creature behind my back.
I woke up in tears following a dream that my husband was cheating on me. I had no reason to think this was the case, I thought we were soulmates. He told me daily that he loved me.
Six weeks later, totally out of the blue, he announced he hadn’t been happy for years and was leaving. Three days after that I discovered the 500+ text messages he’d sent to OW.
Interestingly the affair had only been going on for 3-4 weeks before he left, so effectively I knew he was going to cheat even before he did. Weird.
Prior to him even considering an affair I was at an estate sale. Something drew me to this painting of a dark female angle with wings. It compelled me, so I bought it. Low and behold he starts an affair with a women who has “Saint” in her name and is the spitting image of this now monstrosity I hauled home with me. I got rid of that sucker fast.
This has been an amazing comments section… I can’t believe how many of us had the same exact dreams!
The first time my STBX slept at my place after we got engaged, I had the most vivid nightmare that a pig was crawling into bed between us. I can still feel its skin when I think about it! The dream itself felt so perverse and violating.
The thing that stands out most to me is not so much a “sign”, but the way in which I feel like my “escape” was orchestrated. I wont go into detail, but the main thing that stopped me from reconciling was that I felt it would be disrespectful to the master plan that God had to set me free (it became so clear in hindsight). I too had the audible “ask him if he’s cheating NOW” voice, which I did, and it was perfect timing- he couldn’t deny it because his loon of a summer camp girlfriend had told him she was pregnant (she wasn’t)! If I had asked just a week later, I’m convinced he would have lied and I would still be in a marriage where I was used and unloved.
The weirdest part of my “orchestrated escape” was that I actually found Chump Lady about a year before DDay! After watching Bridges of Madison County for the first time and hating it, I casually googled “why is BOMC such a horrible movie” and up came Tracy’s post about it! I read it, became hooked, and spent the next few days pouring over the archives. I had no reason (or so I thought) to be reading an infidelity support blog, but here I was! Fast forward to about a week after DDay, and I recalled the blog- it was still open on my phone. This site and its community saved my life, and somehow I was lead to it before I even knew I would need it!
Asshat purchased a copy of BOMC when in the middle of his affair when I was a mushroom in the dark. He would read it in bed and I believe he was reading it at the same time as her and swapping quotes. Thought it was strange as he hasn’t read a book in 20 years and I think most he never finished. He fancied himself as a Clint Eastwood type.😐
“When you roll around with pigs, all you get is dirty and they enjoy it”
Hah! Swapping BOMC quotes with the AP??? I mean, he could get more pedestrian, but he’d have to really try hard…
Dreams, dreams, dreams. Anytime he was in my dreams he was such a cruel, mean person. Making fun of me, cheating on me, once I dreamt that he had been engaged to another woman and told me he wasn’t going to break up with her for me. We joked about it a lot because dream-him was the exact opposite of who I knew him to be in real life…