I was once approached online by a nice man Trevor, who sent a complimentary email introducing himself and his website, thinking we had much in common. He wanted to inform me and my readers of his services. His website was a commercial sales site for catching cheaters and other miscreants — including lazy employees and errant babysitters. (How does that go down? “BUSTED! I TOLD you Harrison gets his toast WITHOUT crusts!”)
It was all surveillance equipment — GPSs, voice activated recorders, keyloggers, tiny cameras — and probably a shoe phone. (Anyone remember “Get Smart”?) The site had all sorts of ominous warnings and frightening statistics like: 80 PERCENT OF ALL MEN CHEAT! Does he hide his cell phone? Does he suddenly smell good? CONSIDER HE MAY BE A CHEATER! The stats were only slightly less scary for cheater women. What followed was a large array of colorful gizmos.
I’m sure Trevor does a big business in spy ware. And he may be more savvy about the readers of Chump Lady than I am. (Anyone out there in the market for a keylogger?) But I thanked him for his compliments and sent him on his way.
Look, I’m not above shilling something, (I’m told that is the path to blogging fame and fortune), but I’d have to believe in it. And I do NOT believe in the lifestyle of “trust but verify.” What makes that Ronald Reagan line so memorable is that it’s funny. It’s a nice way of saying — I don’t trust you at all.
If you feel the need to behave like a Soviet spy in a John le Carré novel? Face it — it’s OVER. Your marriage is DONE.
I understand that a lot of people need these tools in the gaslighting days, where there is a lot of denial and no proof. I’m certainly not above using whatever means necessary to get the evidence you need to divorce a cheater. Especially if you live in a fault state. I also understand needing the proof for yourself. What I do NOT understand is voluntarily staying in a marriage police state.
I once knew a guy who couldn’t leave his cheater because she was “trying,” and he couldn’t break up his children’s home. Then I noticed months later on a RIC board, that the only thing the guy posts anymore are Investigative Tips, offering fellow chumps handy how-tos on recovering deleted Skype files. My heart just sunk for the poor idiot. Really, dude? Is this what you’ve been reduced to? Obsessively monitoring your wife’s Skype chats? Just let it GO! You’re dying by inches. It’s undignified.
Espionage and love are incompatible. If you need to spy on someone, you don’t trust them. Your actions are saying you believe they are the sort of person who would stab you in the back (because… oh hey… they actually did that…) We don’t spy on people we like or RESPECT. We spy on enemies. It’s sneaky and underhanded… kind of like cheating.
So Trevor, thanks for the offer. I’m sure you provide a good service to those in need of it, but my message here to betrayed people is GET OUT. Hop the Berlin War… run past the snipers… and make your way towards freedom.
And to anyone looking for a Fun Friday challenge today, tell me all the ways how time served on the Marriage Police Force sucks.
TGIF!
It is easy for some of us to get stuck down this rabbit hole. It can become obsessive – always looking for a “gotcha” ….
CL is spot on, though, once you’re in this space it is over.
My idiot gave me access to some (but not all) of her devices. One of them was her iPhone. The game of looking at where she went on “find my iPhone” and where she said went were particularly soul destroying moments.
And then I found her work phone unlocked with all the “God I want to f#ck you” messages from the guy she claimed she’d been nc with for 6 months
2×4 meet head…..
They are professional LIARS
Yep. A certain amount of checking makes sense. It’s both stronger and sure when you confront instead of accuse. It’s easier to sidestep the gaslighting when what you’ve seen is crystal clear.
After that, though, it’s self-harm to stay and check. Yet I still understand why people do it — I did, so I, personally, shy away from telling them to stop. We are all ready when we are ready, and not before. Yet we also all need all the messages, so I’m not saying others shouldn’t tell those folks to stop.
You and CL are both spot on. It can take over your thinking, which steals precious bandwidth from the other thinking your soul needs you to do.
I had the opposite scenario. My cheater had spyware on my phone so she could keep tabs on me while our minister was with her “planting the seeds of Christianity.”
Now that’s an interesting twist. LOL
SuoerDuper,
My cheating ex-husband spied on me although so never spied on him.
Super, hope you have a nice, boring Friday full of chick flicks, a warm meal, and oh my god, I hadn’t known about the reverse spyware thing in your story. Lordy.
Ahhh…yes. I shall be buying a Field & Stream mag today to read while being tortured tomorrow morning in the waiting room of a nail salon.
But, no worries. I shall be accompanied to a junkyard later in search of a front grill for a ’68 Chevy I am restoring.
Hope you are doing well.
Super, what’s the car?
My exh2 did that too, had all kinds of spyware crap on me, but he was the one cheating, running around, etc.
Crazy doesn’t even begin to cover it.
“while our minister was with her “planting the seeds of Christianity.”
Eeeeewwwwww! That makes my skin crawl!
I also had a Jesus cheater who used prostitutes. I’m sure you were told the problem was your lack of Christian forgiveness. A Jesus cheater favorite!
Plus one for the Jesus Cheater.
I guess he had all the God Points which gave him a”free pass” to be with MOW who was also ordained.
No need for spy ware – embarrassingly public…..
Mine used to make random calls to me at work for no real reason. If she could not reach me on my direct line, she’d call my cell, then my assistant, and then my boss. She was making sure I was where I was supposed to be so she could be sure she was safe meeting her affair partners. This was always a mystery to me until years later when I reviewed her cell phone bills. The pattern was obvious.
Lovely that not only were you subjected to that shit show, but she subjected your assistant and boss to it as well.
I was a bedside nurse for years but was promoted to a job where I had my own office and phone. The hospital (unknown to me) blocked all outgoing numbers from caller ID.
I called nowdeadcheater from my work phone and started talking to him in the normal familiar way spouses speak to each other and he yelled (very nervously)”who is this?”
Do you know, I was too obtuse to recognize that it was signs of cheating (facepalm)
A few months later when I was getting the laundry list of my failings, he said “For God sake, you were calling me on blocked numbers!!” yes, I suppose that is a problem if you are a cheater
This sounds like projection. I’m cheating, so they must be too. I’d better keep an eye on them.
That would destroy the uneven power balance they love so much, wouldn’t it? And, they aren’t receiving all the kibbles?! We can’t have that!
My wife was constantly accusing me of cheating and not being transparent. And she accused me of planting a keylogger on her phone. No, you’re just really bad at knowing what’s uploading from your phone onto the family computer.
My X was hoping to catch me cheating so he could blame me and get to bail. Ah impression management. It never even occurred to me that he might be tracking my phone or web-browsing. I hope it frustrated the hell out of him that I was totally on the level with my actions and movements 😀
Oh my… what about “ well yes, I have pics of naked women on my laptop, but you are the one at home, alone and I don’t know if you are cheating on me or not”
Right.
I had opposite scenario as well. X installed small cameras in the garage so he would get an email alert when I drove into the garage. He didn’t want to be caught doing his Live Cam or Skype sessions with various men and women.
I think fondly of that naive woman walking in, “Hi honey I’m home!” She was a chump and that’s all over now and I am glad.
It’s so hard to stop your ex from renting your headspace during the gaslighting; deceit and dishonesty. I used my best lady detective skills to bust them so there were no more lies; no more games. I busted them in our food van parked in the local swamp; she was naked! She has a few monikers – LOL Legs Open Lucy, Swamp Slut or Pond Scum. My adult children call her the Swamp Fanny Flasher. She was the MOW! The trophy wife with the trophy life & the trophy house. The house has been sold and she has lost family friends and the respect of her children. All for some manual manoeuvres and horizontal fun with a washed up workaholic viagra risen limp dicked old man 23 years older than her. Yes I know I will never understand stupidity on a grand scale! Thank you for my freedom!
Ozziechump that’s awful but you paint such a beautifully squalid scene – trophy MOW naked in the food van at the swamp!
After D-day (found out having bugged his car … oops – didn’t realise bugging was illegal) he wanted me to sign a ‘gagging order’ that I wouldn’t tell anyone, so he could sue me if I did … threatened libel/slander action in the courts …. everything he could think of to save his ‘I’m-a-decent-chap’ face!!
Note to cheaters – never corner a chump! I found determination I didn’t know I had and hired a PI to follow him, got the evidence (legally this time) and then filed for divorce … all within 3 weeks of D-day. Knowing I could honestly tell anyone I wanted about his affair and he could no longer control me was the first step on my new life.
I recommend doing what you need to stop the cheater being able to control your life and then move on ????
Oh ha a “gagging order” sounds more appropriate for the AP .. no?
I wonder if it’s illegal to bug your own car, when STBX is the primary driver.
My cheater used my old pickup truck as his work truck. The truck was always in my name, and I paid for it myself. But when I bought a new car I let him use the truck instead of selling it.
It sure would have brought things to light sooner if I’d put a GPS and a bug in that truck.
It’s creepy how they lie with a straight face. I realize now 10 months out that it’s kind of serial killer kind of stuff. Creeps the hell out of me now.
YES Zell, mine could look me right in the eye and not blink, “no, I am not seeing that women anymore” two minutes later, texting her about getting a BJ!
Wuhl geez, he said he wasn’t *seeing* her. As in, I don’t see her with my eyeballs when I text her!
Word parsing, paltering, trickle-truthing. Blech.
Zell,
Same here. The creepiest times were when I KNEW she was lying and I was pretty certain she knew that I knew. I just remember those blank eyes. Psychopathic.
Yup ex is most certainly a sociopath. Not all cheaters are sociopaths and not all sociopaths are serial killers. But now that I have space and can reflect on some of the shit he did, he definitely is in my book. I wonder sometimes if we as a society are dealing with an epidemic of narcissists and phycos?
I guess I am fortunate in that I only experienced one day of discovery. (Whether or not there was only ONE affair during the course of our 12 and 1/2-year relationship (married 8 and 1/2 years) is unknown and also unimportant.) So, while it took me a few weeks to pick myself up off of the floor and get my head together and move forward with the divorce, the continued communication between my former spouse and his MOW (and co-worker) reaffirmed my decision to file. They are now married so I clearly made the right decision to skip the “pick me dance.”
I’m willing to bet good money there is no way it was only one incident of cheating…. unless X barely started puberty when DDay hit. These personality and character disorders are set during the preschool years????????????
Really? Set during preschool years? Is that a fact?!!!!
That stunned me.
It made me wonder if he was cheating when he married me!
Annnd….I think SO!
bleh
Specific Age and Gender Features
Narcissistic traits may be particularly common in adolescents and do not necessarily indicate that the individual till go on to have Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Individuals with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Individuals with Narcissistic Personality Disorder may have special difficulties adjusting to the onset of physical and occupational limitations that are inherant in the aging process. Of those diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, 50%-75% are male.
Translated, that means that while kids will exhibit narcissism, they aren’t necessarily mentally ill.
Most shrinks try not to diagnose until the age 18, as a general rule, as that provides enough time to track a “pattern of relevance” as evidence of diagnosis.
The DSM criteria don’t allow a personality disorder diagnosis until 18. There’s lots of room for people to mature and mellow throughout life through numerous influences including parents, teachers, school etc. I’d be wary of saying these disorders are destined from early years, unless you’re dealing with extreme behaviour eg significant cruelty to animals
I figure if they are happy to allow you to go through their phone/computer/iPad, etc. It’s because they’ve gotten rid of all evidence or have moved it to an unknown secure device. Maybe they’re honestly being transparent, but knowing their potential for deception, we’ll drive ourselves nuts trying to figure out of it’s transparency or a deeper plunge into chumpland. My cheater continued to hide his devices after D day until he was certain his affair partner would no longer try to contact him, and all incriminating evidence was trashed/deleted . Only then did he offer to let me go through his phone and email. Even still, I managed to find a deleted email reservation confirmation for a fuck fest getaway to a resort I’ve always wanted to go. (Of course I’d rather burn the place down than step inside now). The affair was since long over but the date of the reservation, including the date he made it proved that the affair didn’t end when he said it did, thus sparking an even greater distrust. So yeah. Even if they were being honest and transparent, they probably went to great lengths of hiding and further deceiving the chump to get there. Which isn’t really honesty. It’s just covering the shit, hoping the stench isn’t detected by the chump.
My denial was so strong – I spackled right through some pretty astounding discoveries on his phone, which he had begun treating like gold bullion. In hindsight I realized that I was so desperate to reconcile that I perceived my policing would provide the clues I needed to get back to the marriage I thought I had had for the past 30 years.
Clearly, the hopium pipe was blazing! And my OCD/control freakery/ “i can fix this” persona was in high gear.
Recently, when I was reminiscing about some past family times, and wistful for what “could have been,” my friend reminded me of my policing and how i really was crazy for a few months.
If we could all remember the sweaty-palms, feeling like a guilty criminal, pit in our stomach, shaking and crying peek into their world, we should never want them back.
It was like coming face to face with the Devil – and he was laying in the bed right next to me.
Perfectly said, “If we could all remember the sweaty-palms, feeling like a guilty criminal, pit in our stomach, shaking and crying peek into their world, we should never want them back.
It was like coming face to face with the Devil – and he was laying in the bed right next to me”. There isn’t a feeling like the nausea you get when you are policing. I will never miss those days!!
I did the keylogger thing. It helped me to figure out that I wasn’t going crazy (gaslighting is the worst ever). It also helped me protect my son as the ex and his “just a work friend” had plans to sneak him away.
I constantly checked his phone. Off course he got a new touch tone and had it locked. Can’t remember how but I got the password. In the early stages I was checking and accidentally dialed – his boss. Twice!!! I mean within minutes. Imagine his puzzlement when the boss questioned him! And then him questioning me. It was stupid because I did not master the use of his phone yet. ok spying makes us do crazy things. It makes us look like the crazy one. I have to laugh at all the effort it took calling the office to see if he is really there, listening on the phone for background noises or hearing a woman’s voice when I call him and he says he was on the road.
What kind of life is that constantly having to check up. I am eight months cheater free (actually living apart) and my BP has gone down quite a bit. Live and improve your life- just for you!
Love and hugs to all.
It makes it easier for the gaslighter to make you look crazy. Actually, though, it makes you look like exactly what you are — a person who is moving from chump to threat — from passivity to strength. After that, it’s what you do with what you learn that really counts.
I regret waiting a couple of months before i went full NSA on my ex, I had worried that I was being a terrible paranoid husband. Paranoia turned out to be correct I am a tech geek, I wrote a key logging program, got her email password and discovered years of affair correspondence.
Thank goodness I did it, she knew I had copies of all those emails, I could stop her half truthing by quoting parts of emails.
Are you for hire? As a chump looking for the proof so I can file, I’d love to have a key logger, but no way I’d ever get access to his phone or computer…..
Wow, that is pretty hurtful.
I guess, as they say about hiring a PI, be prepared for what you WILL find out.
Years is a long time for deceit.
No doubt you scared her with what you knew.
I got quite a few up on the X and I heard him fall over on the phone when I told him I’d been tracking him for 2 yrs. (we had just divorced)
:::Sweet:::
Looking for a side job? Lol
Gaslighting and lies delivered with a straight face and look of hurt/ innocence… ????
Its so unbelievable how many cheaters and “friends” plot to steal children away. Its funny because my cheater has had little to no contact with his child since d-day. I wonder what these cheaters would do once they managed to sneak their children off. My guess is call their mom to come get them after an hour or two.
I never did the marriage police but those gadgets would have been very helpful during the divorce!
The effort it took in trying to determine where each of them was living or what cars, homes or businesses were owned was exhausting (and I’m really good at finding things!). That was time and effort I could have invested in me.
Lots of detective work and digging got me a great deal but I walked away from SO much. A keylogger could have translated into ???? and financial security in my old age.
In the pre-gadget era, I busted my ex-husband with a very simple *69 redial on our cordless phone. I strongly suspected he had something going on with an opera-singing mountain bike chick with fake boobs; they went riding together all the time (and hung out at our pool when I wasn’t home). So I asked him to stop riding with her. One morning the phone rang and I heard him speaking in a soft, tender voice; he hung up when I came in the room. ‘Who was that?’ I asked. ‘My friend Rich.’ I did the redial and, of course, she answered the phone. So low tech, but so effective.
A detective said “not one client who suspected cheating was wrong, if u suspect it -they’re probably doing it.”
how it sucks? money spent, first on surveillance stuff then the PI. time spent- late for work every morning because I’m going through files and setting stuff up after he leaves for work. feeling stressed all th time wondering if it’s working, will he discover it? will it capture what I need to know? what will I miss on the day I have to charge batteries ? and then the adrenaline rush and anxiety as I look to see what was recorded- Im sure wrecked havoc on my body. best thing I did was hire the PI and get the pictures of actual physical contact once and for all, so I could finally leave knowing I wasn’t imagining things.
This. If you suspect it, they are. Your spouse shouldn’t be doing anything that makes you feel that way…and they shouldn’t be defensive if you confront on the weird behavior.
I never spied with keyloggers, trackers etc. But I did have a time when I checked incessantly. It was not a good thing for my psyche. Even when I didn’t see anything, it didn’t make me feel better. The damage was done, even if he was clean as a whistle afterwards.
PS, love the name 🙂
So true! I had that “gut feeling.” Obviously my wife denied it. But things just didn’t feel or sit right.
Here’s the thing, though… I have a really wonderful ex-boyfriend who ~ unfortunately ~ now has a fiancee who used to be “the other woman” for a married man with two tiny children, eventually got “accidentally pregnant;” the married man left his wife and married her (then cheated on her: total shocker, right?). Having been the other woman, herself, she has had all kinds of experience with sneaking around and constantly accuses my lovely ex-boyfriend (I am absolutely positive he is faithful to her: he’s a good guy with strong values) of cheating, himself. He is totally transparent, excuses all her accusations and suspicions bc she was chumped, accepts her going through his phone etc. So, not all who believe they’re being cheated on are correct… sometimes, they just have enough personal history of being sneaky and dishonest, they imagine everyone else must be, too.
Tell your boyfriend to look up “narcissistic projection”… she may be projecting on to him what she is doing… my X accused me of cheating because he knew he was…
Yup, that was also about the time that he said I was. “Liar”, huh? He found some stupid bill that I had rounded up on for the purchase of 4 tires from Costco as the example(I had paid the bill, by the way).
I was so blindsided, hurt and mostly perplexed.
Never figured that out till much later.
He was the one that was lying.
Listen to what they say, listen, and talk less.
Saw him last month after 1 year, and I blatantly recognized 5 lies. So slick.
Never could catch them back then.
Wish I had my Nardar better back then!
Exactly. I know that we innocent chumps shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss our gut feelings that alert us to our partners cheating. But… I also hesitate to say that all who accuse of cheating are correct: sometimes it’s paranoia born of having been a cheater, oneself; sometimes it’s a control issue; etc.
I often think about this as well. How does my ExWhore’s AP deal with the fact she’s a known cheater. With him. I mean she knows what she did right? So does he so they must be suspicious of each other.
Your ex boyfriend is of course different as he’s an honest chap but a cheater and a cheatee? Every time their phone goes they must be like a cat on a hot time roof. Or a night out with the Girls,lads, co workers. How can you sleep knowing what you did?
And my exwhore’s AP is deft at hiding his digital signal. That itself is a red flag.
Bugger living like that.
What is hiding a digital signal?
Removing your online presence. Social media etc so that there is very little of your personal life online. That’s a red flag of someone with something g to hide.
I noticed the signs of glitter on his collar, the missed phone calls, the password changes, singing “Gotta Have Faith” on his guitar and manscaping (all of a sudden). I didn’t need spyware to know this wasn’t my husband anymore. 4 days after dday and kicking him out I filed. Best investment I ever did for myself! Xo sweet
Yes! You are mighty! Mine was an imposter, too. Very lazy and unmotivated, he started working out, eating right, had a spring in his step and energy in the bedroom. Totally. Not. My. Husband. Such a cheater. He loved living a double life. Not anymore. Well, at least not with me!
NWHI; oh yes, the imposter; fake and fraud.
Teeth whitening, losing weight, no interest in family:
So very very true to form..
I still hope the “fuck” has another heart attack at croaks..
Cause he sucks. I dont need the trust its a fact…????
OMG the teeth whitening, you triggered me! Ugh
Teeth whitening, manscaping and spending hours in the magnified mirror trimming his eyebrows, sideburns and mustache, more time at the gym.
Quite the change from before when I’d plead with him to trim his out of control eyebrows and nasal hair.
He hated shopping and would laugh at people at the gym who dressed in name brand gym clothes. When he suddenly came home with bags of trendy new gym clothes I thought it was odd. Definitely out of character. I had read that this was something Cheaters do, but being the Chump I am, thought he wasn’t that kind of guy.
same here, + my then-H started buying Diesel jeans in his 50s.
Douchebag
That is sad. Did he also start wearing hats backwards like a basic bro? Pathetic.
OMG, the manscaping…. Mine did that too, out of the blue, without any prompt from me… And would leave me the clean-up… Barf 🙁
“You gotta have faith.” Yep. I heard that too whenever the alcoholic launched another get-rich-quick scheme.
Then he blamed me for not supporting him as he charged full steam ahead, damn the expenses.
Ditto…manscaping!! Never before then suddenly i was disgusting because i wouldn’t go brasilian. Then the pompous attitude at my daily failings like i didnt read a book every week or horror of horrors liked to wear pjs watching tv in the evening. … now i feel doubly betrayed that i was confusedly trying to impress him with mending my non existent faults because it was all about devaluation and no one can ever win by then.
Also heard that manscaping is a pathetic effort to make it look longer. Instant ego kibbles.
I had come to possess my husbands phone ( long story, very funny, but incriminating still).
Once I opened his phone…it was a Licking, chasing me around the house naked buffet of text messages.
It also had his email…which while divorcing provided me with every plot he and ghetto whore were plotting. It came in handy when thwarting his attempts to file full custody of our 17 year old daughter, showing her future Ex husband their plans to move his sons out of state….the list goes on.
My Ex installed cameras in our house ( he had me evicted to more in his ghetto whore…another long story) which found me on tape taking my Dyson vacuum…also moving 7 car loads of my belongings…sipping coffee watching the sun rise on our beautiful front porch overlooking our 70 acre farm.
I’m not above using any and all devices to document cheating and use it to your advantage to take every dime you can from the Lickalotta. Or perhaps putting those text messages on a Pinterest page with his name attached so when you Google his name….his cheating is there for all to read.
The Dyson … LOL! I took mine, too, during one of the two opportunities I had to get my things, and he called the police on me for taking it!
I, too, played marriage police and it was exhausting. In hindsight I’d do things very differently; it’s just not worth the emotional toll.
So glad to be free from the drama, and happily vacuuming! ????
Kidnapping a Dyson is a serious offence. Especially if you cross State lines. Shame on you!
A Dyson is more dependable and productive than a cheating spouse.
Sucks less too!
He really wants you to appreciate his hoovering, and leave the dyson for him to use.
And that is one thing we always can trust “sucks”
@TRACY
God bless you ,dear , such a funny post .
The Dyson is also mine! And you look very attractive, Tracy. Your husband is an idiot.
I checked everything… but unfortunately I was married to an IT guy. An IT guy who wanted to get caught because DDay #1 was upon discovery of a receipt in his wallet. I checked his phone,back pack, his work notebooks, pants pockets, jacket pockets, wallet, through books he had on his shelves, medicine cabinet, car, scraps of paper in the garbage. DDay #2 was through his phone and DDay # 3 was in person. I will never forget the relief I felt the moment I made the decision to stop being the marriage police or the marriage anything for that matter. As cliche as it sounds, I really and truly felt a huge weight lifted off my shoulder. I was slowly killing myself everyday by frantically searching through his stuff. It was like I was having an out of body experience because I knew everything he had was either on his phone, his tablet or his computer- all of which were password protected despite my many pleas for transparency- chumpy much? Thank you CL you made me see the light.
Pret, SAME. I knew there was something, and drove myself nuts checking, and like you, knew it was all on his phone. The day I got his phones, it revealed everything I knew was there and more. What I learned was that if I get to that point again, I just need to go. Locked in that death grip of having to prove it felt so awful. I also felt that sense of relief…retired from the marriage police.
Began being the marriage police in 2012, when I thought he was having a mid life crisis and my therapist suggested an affair. Of course I believed that he would never do that! His phone (a Blackberry at the time) was always locked. Unfortunately learned that entering in the wrong password too many times will wipe out the phone, and I was much too nice to do that! Fast forward to September 2015 and I became the divorce police as he filed. Will take forever to come to terms with the extent of his deception, cheating, stealing and life of lies. I do understand that he sucks and HE will continue with his life that sucks. I’m not “meh” yet, just “eww” and yuck.
Omg.., the blackberry bloody phones. Could never work the damn thing out.
The OW made him get an iPhone….????
Same here! Ooooh, can’t touch the Blackberry (I was his assistant at work). Now, I used to send messages for him while we were driving, but oooh, suddenly, no – it was password protected . This has got to be the biggest Red Flag for cheating that I know of. He used to HATE the phone and I was the one who got him up to speed with technology as I knew it would really help him with work. We could be driving down the road and I’d text messages to his clients. So, Silly me, insisting he learn a little more about communicating…
Asshole.
I erased his phone. He was so pissed.
Agent 99 here. Being a spy is a lonely way of life. I have boxes of data sealed as evidence.
It was a relief when my therapist told me I could stop and believe. I had all the evidence I needed. He actually said I like being single and it was always about the thrill of the chase.
That’s what I was hanging onto-as serial cheater, pathological liar, sociopath. The std testing for HIV and his getting treatment for an STD was the dropping off point. He was dating multiple women according to his phone records. There were hotel receipts and I tracked down the winner.
Filing for divorce took half an hour and a final year of hell. It was well worth it to get him out of my life.
Yes! I knew for sure but couldn’t actually process my next step once all of my spying culminated in busting them IRL (which I do NOT recommend)!
I read CL’s book Leave a Cheater Gain a Life. Yeah, umm, filing for divorce is the next step. Duh. I did NOT want to do that but forged ahead anyway. It was the only option. Also, sought therapy – I was in shock from all that evidence my superb snooping yielded. Yikes!
He said “I like being single and the thrill of the chase”? What a heartless bastard.
I had to get extra crafty as my ex was so tech savvy he could erase nearly everything I could’ve used. So my friends and I went full on George Smiley and Control level with the collecting evidence and turning observers into assets. Honestly, I was shocked at the number of people willing to spill. He wasn’t perfect, when I seemed pacified and looked to be working towards reconciliation he got a little sloppy and I was able to copy and save text messages and emails he hadn’t had a chance to delete.
Weird thing is, now apparently his affair partner is employing the same Spy techniques to try and catch him behaving badly on her watch. When he picks up the kids I get an earful about how off kilter he’s keeping her by not answering her “crazy” questions . And how I should tighten my privacy settings on the few social media accounts I have because according to him she’s “obsessed with his old life and how she thinks he can’t leave it behind”
Sadly, he just likes to play the game, no matter who he has in the primary manipulation seat.
Thank god I can at least nod, smile, and say “ok” while I pack our suitcases for the next fun adventure the kids and I will be enjoying without his killjoy ass next week.
Such a pleasure to hand in my Marital FBI investigative badge, but shaking my head that the games continue with new players.
Love the Smiley reference!
I played marriage police too long. They just get smarter and find alternative methods. They have shitty character at the end of the day.
Check their phone log, they get a burner phone. Bank statement, they use cash. Check the mail, they put a stop mail on delivery.. and on and on.
One day I just flipped the switch after yet another slip up and said, “you know, at this point I really don’t care what you do. You can bring home Betsy Lou or Silly Sandra and fuck them on the dining room table at noon. I no longer wish to be your wife.”
I started making actions towards separations on that day. My world started improving immediately.
Yep. There’s always a way to chump a chump.
I read another blog where the man was disinterested and dangling divorce and his wife was always working on improving herself and I was like ‘dude… get his phone. Somethings weird’ and sure enough he’s been having an affair with some Thai tour guide they met years ago, looking into the fiancé visa thing, sending this woman thousands of dollars. The blog writer had mentioned reasons she never thought he could have been cheating- where was the time where was the opportunity ? Oh… that time he went to China without her, that time he muddled some money info to make assets disappear… she’s at home raising their two autistic sons and a daughter and two grown kids are already done, and he keeps her on a leash for years telling her she’s the reason he’s unhappy. I’m all for spying for discovery. But he’s always going to find a way to hide what he wants.
It was a burner phone on the seat of X’s car (after DDay when X was swearing “it” was over) that told me everything I needed to know. I didn’t even need to see the call log to know why that phone was there. Done and done. I will say X was horrible at hiding his cheating, and OW definitely wanted me to know about their cheating, as she believed it was X was her golden ticket. I do not believe it is unusual for APs to “make sure” we find out.
I knew a woman who cheated with a high-dollar Dickhead, a urologist to be exact, and he left his wife and kids and married her, then died of prostate cancer (#KarmaYes). She then started dating another married doctor and … a couple of years later …. called and told his wife about the affair. Wife said: “Meh.” No divorce.
Hilarious.
“You’re screwing my husband? Whatever for … he’s such a bore in bed. Well enjoy!”
Born Free and Violet – perfect!
I always thought that anybody who had an affair with my husband would be a fool. He was never interested in pleasing a woman in any way. But, there’s always a sucker out there for his money, as it turns out. He also got cancer and had his prostate removed right when they moved in together…(during our divorce).
And yes, same experience here, the more stealthy I got with being a detective, the better the cheater got at spinning the lies and deception.
I looked at phone records, found hundreds of calls and texts to and from the AP #1, I never had the password on his phone, but looked at google searches on our computer and saw the usual porn related things, but also, “how to beat the ‘Find My Iphone’ App.”
I was putting some clothes in the dryer and a fitness club key card dropped out with AP’s name on it. I was putting something away in his closet and a lavender colored card in a clear storage box caught my eye. He kept love letters from other AP’s in our home. He lied about every “business” trip he made for two years. One time, I even called his room at the hotel at 1am – and of course there was no answer.
I agree with an earlier post. You can be a detective for awhile as you gather proof, but then once you have it, you need to stop. It only makes you crazy in the end. Spend your energies getting your ducks in a row and getting out.
Beware the cheater who complains about the complications of technologh, especially their own devices. The cheater was great at playing “dumb” when in fact he was a master.
Ha! I loved your post. I want to get to that point of no longer caring. I need to get to that point…
“Espionage and love are incompatible. If you need to spy on someone, you don’t trust them. Your actions are saying you believe they are the sort of person who would stab you in the back (because… oh hey… they actually did that…) We don’t spy on people we like or RESPECT. We spy on enemies. It’s sneaky and underhanded… kind of like cheating.”
BINGO X 1000000000000
I think my lowest point was when he was having minor surgery – scanning his phone the entire time for messages from the skank and then as he’s coming off the anesthesia, trying to catch him saying her name instead of mine.
Of course, chumpyass me cried all the way into his surgery, professing my love for him and then waiting on his ass hand and foot two weeks after that.
Hindsight has a way of revealing how twisted they are…and how manipulated we were. Never again.
My ex had had a heart attack and was on the hospital phone to his OW between my visits to him. Meanwhile he had told me he had been a jerk in life and was now a new man. Not. I hardly knew my own name the confusion was so bad.
Last year, between January 1st and April 6th (Abandonment Day) my fuckwit went on a healthcare tornado. Full physical, bloodwork, knee surgery with me playing nursemaid, and physical therapy for same. I thought he was on a nearing-50 health conscious kick, but he was simply using my work-provided healthcare to the maximum while he was still in the house, and using ME to take care of his nursing needs. All planned as the way to squeeze all he could out of me while still around the house. I was of use to him. Until I wasn’t.
And he also got a pile of percosets with that knee surgery as well as some muscle relaxant thing prescribed for a strange bought of hiccups brought on by the anesthesia. He liked to take all of those fun drugs with booze and kept asking me to take them “for fun” too; I never did, add that to the long long list of why I was such a drag to be married to. I asked him what the hell was wrong with him but he just gaslighted and said it was “not a thing, no big deal” like I was just a square old wet blanket.
Months later, post-poofing, he offered a perc to our youngest daughter’s college friend while at a house party RIGHT IN FRONT OF HER (playing Cool Dad, it totally backfired). That was one of those moments where my daughter figured out she was smarter than her dad. By a lot. Both daughters have now stood up to their father and made sure he knows they are disgusted by him and do not want a relationship based on his lies.
The guy lost his fucking mind. And he lost his family, too.
I.C. I’m incredibly sorry. A father trying to ruin his daughter’s life and futures by introducing them to opiods….as a ‘fun’ tool? He should be locked up.
Now I.C., my cheater used to do the same thing with the pain killers and alcohol, almost every weekend. He continued to get the prescription refilled long after his pain was gone so he could “have a little fun on the weekend.” Which meant sitting on the couch watching TV at a loud volume until 2 a.m., and then sleeping most of the next day. Ugh.
Strangely (rationally?) or kismet, or because my brain knew before I really knew, I already read chump lady before I discovered the panties. I found it delightful and inspiring and strong. But that would never be me, I was adored…. Facepalm.
Once I had found said panties, I looked at credit card bills, and cell phone bills. The cell phone had records for years, calling and messaging everyone in the city on ‘backpage’ and other escort sites. I created a masterful colour coded spreadsheet of when I was gone (on business paying for his retail/school going ass) (or taking his sisters kids camping) and when he was just blatantly sitting across from me looking at other women’s tits and ass and telling me he was just too tired for sex…. the one that really fucked me up, confirming it wasn’t just pictures and fantasy was the STD clinic call. I was such a fool.
I had read about being the marriage police. I have a panic disorder and I am already a basket case. I had no desire to look at his bills and his phone and his computer post discovery with the intent of checking up on him. And after years and years of fooling me, what are the chances that I- the Luddite who can’t be bothered to learn to download and doesn’t give a crap about technology- would be able to surpass all the tricks available. During this ‘lining up ducks’ phase it was the only way to convince myself that he was terrible. And to realize that wasn’t what I always wanted to be thinking about.
I never had to play the marriage police. I was too busy trying to be the good wife and give him the space he had asked for. After so many years of his drinking and me trying to ‘fix’ him, one day he announced he was quitting drinking and joining AA. I was so happy for him. Then the AA meetings he was going to got weird. He would leave early and arrive home late. I never felt so alone ~ he was changing big time and I was ostracized from his life.
Months after his joining AA he suddenly announced he was moving out to a small cottage that an AA member owned so he could get his head together and embrace the ‘sober’ life. Said he couldn’t work on us until he ‘fixed’ him. Still I was supportive.
Months went by with me never hearing a word from him. No phone calls saying I miss you or I love you, why don’t you come over for a bit? Nothing. One day I saw his truck at a strange house. The truck was there all weekend long. I called him asking if he had moved there. The reply was that he was fixing a fence for his landlord who was out of town and was staying there while mending the fence and I was a jealous bitch. Uh huh. But I told him I would give him the benefit of the doubt by trusting him as I always had done. He replied, thank you.
The next day I was in a rental car and he did not see me. I saw him ~ and the blonde in the front seat next to him sprawled all over him. I called asking who the blonde was. Finally he told me it was the landlord. When I pressed for answers I was told they were having an affair and had been for some time. I asked for the keys to the house and garage door opener as I didn’t feel as I could trust him anymore. I still wanted him to realize he was going thru something and I would help him. We had been friends for 30 years.
No, I was discarded like a bag of trash at the curb. He filed for divorce the next day. We were divorced on Halloween about 9 months later.
Now he is living with his landlord in her house. They run the local AA meetings together here. I still don’t have any answers from him. I don’t need them anymore. He is a liar and a cheat and she is welcome to him.
This makes me think of the song ‘Crutch’ by matchbox twenty. The discard sounds gut wrenching but it sounds like he is probably insane co-dependant and they are using each other as their new drug of choice. Gross.
Sadly, nearly every person I know whose spouse entered such treatment ended up with that spouse cheating with someone they met in group, often the leader.
One particularly juicy example: A therapist I stopped seeing years ago because she wasn’t a good match for me later ended up losing her LCSW license because she dated, then married, someone who attended the AA group she ran. When the marriage broke down, he reported her for having a relationship with a patient — which, of course, she had, and that’s a no-no. In that case I wasn’t friends with either of them, but it made it clear why I was so uncomfortable with her in the first place.
I am not unsupportive of people seeking treatment. I am clear, though, that affars are common in the treatment model – addicts are attracted to other addicts because they understand and easily accept one another’s most destructive traits, the model is designed to provide them lots of time together that nobody else is allowed to ask about, and they tend to be programmed to deceive their families and friends to protect the supply of instant gratification.
It’s easy math, really.
Glad to read what chumpiness looks like.
I can’t see my own story but I can sure see it in others’ stories.
Yep, that’s where cheater ex found his schmoopie. She was screwing her way through the group trying to get to the most solvent guy she could hook. She dumped cheater ex after she sucked as much money as she could get from him. After the kids and I left, he quit his well paying job to work as a janitor so he could pay the minimum child support possible. She told him he didn’t make enough money to keep her.
Definitely tru luv.
Warning: you may want to not be eating as you read the following:
After another weekend spent “mowing the lawn” (alone) at the home his parents left us and his sister on Cape Cod, he brought a bag of trash home and put it in our garage. As soon as he left, I took that bag and brought it to the local park, where I “inspected” it item by item.
They had a party. There were receipts from grocery and liquor stores, dirty paper plates and napkins, and empty chip bags. And dirty tampons. And condoms.
My epiphany moment came to me as a hard slap across my shocked and grossed-out being: “WHAT THE FUCK AM I DOING?!”
Marriage police/garbage inspector was my low point. After that, I worked hard to rid my house of the toxic waste that was my husband.
I actually understand this. I will do anything to get the truth when I know it’s being withheld from me.
One day after DDay, my ex said he was going for a hike. He then put on a nice shirt and took the new puppy, who he never exercised.
I knew where he was going and I went to the newlywed coworkers house 15 minutes later. Guess what?
His response, “ I wasn’t going there for sex – I just wanted to show her the puppy that we talk about all the time at work”
What they don’t realize is that this is our lives they are fucking around with.
Made him take the puppy with him when he moved out.
Having a midlife crisis is not permission to be a complete fuckwit. And most of these tossers start well before and never stop, so where’s the mid. They just have life crisis. As in they’re doing it wrong. As in they’re idiots.
Creativerational i totally agree!!!
They ARE the crisis. 🙂
I’ll fully admit to serving a stint in the Marriage Police Force. No regrets. It helped me to get past my own tendency toward disbelief at that time and see through the lies and misinformation. It gave me concrete evidence of exactly the kind of disordered fuckwit I was dealing with. Rather than waste my time in false reconciliation, it forced me to conclude I was dealing with someone with a deep character disorder, incapable of change. Done and done.
This.
The sad irony was that each time I thought of a new way to check up on him, I was hopeful I would NOT find something and thus learn that he had finally stopped his shitty behavior. Even though I knew that it might just mean he was lying in a different way. But each and every time, I actually found MORE evidence that he was a shit. Heavy sigh.
DixieChump- I sat on a train with a girlfriend going into Manhattan on March 21st 2017. I swore up and down to my friend there was no way this guy was still cheating on me. For crying out loud, we went to MC yesterday and paid $200.00 in cash. Why would he do that if he was still cheating? That’s crazy! I said, at the most I’ll see that he’s indeed having dinner with his male coworker like he said and I can finally put all of this behind me and try to start trusting him again. Lo and behold he comes out of his work building hand in hand with his mistress. I swear I stopped breathing for a second. So much for hoping and swearing that I would not find anything…. the joke was on me that day.
Pret
YOU were Gutsy to go and find out the truth, even though the worst fear presented itself.
You faced your fear, You are strong and mighty! Look what he lost!
Thank you!
Me too, Dixie Chump, me too! Exactly the same – I SO wanted to believe the ex and blame myself for being paranoid!
“get past my own tendency ”
Correct! We chumps don’t initially fully realize what we are dealing with because our brains and morals can’t go into the deep dark depths that the disordered live in and think are totally normal.
The police work helped me to realize “oh my god I’ve been with a psycho for 17 years I need to get out for my own safety”
Yes, this. I was so beyond my thought process to believe in the double life the cheater was living.
I’m with you, Gratefully. I’m actually a big proponent of spying on the cheater.
There is all too often a major gap, both psychological and temporal, between KNOWING that they suck and TRUSTING they suck. The gap is filled with swirling doubts, fears, hope, self-doubt, and denial that make it difficult to move on, dump a cheater, and get a life.
Uncovering the facts as much as I could greatly assisted in gaining the strength and resolve I needed as a foundation for recovery from abandonment and betrayal.
Sometimes the detective work just HAS to be done. It makes you crazy, yes, but that’s only temporary. It also can be a valuable part of setting a chump on the road to meh.
I agree. I was moving toward asking for a separation because my EX had huge anger problems, had grown verbally abusive, and I had stumbled upon some financial problems he’d been hiding. But I kept hanging on for a variety of dumb reasons. Digging for more evidence of what he was doing with money behind my back showed me involvement with other women. For me his cheating was the last straw, but who cares which straw it was–as long as I finally got smart enough to leave! I think different people need different levels of evidence to justify their decision to themselves. I thought I was policing our finances, but that’s often the case–a chump can forgive one “mistake” but policing reveals that the partner is lying, cheating, stealing and masterminding a whole network of marital crimes (none of it was a “mistake). The trick isn’t to avoid policing but to know when to stop watching and start acting.
I actually believed that my cheater would be touched by my offer of trust after I found out about his affair last spring. When he appeared to be wanting to work things out with me and we were attending marriage counselling, I told him that I wouldn’t be checking up on him as an act of faith in him. I told him that checking on him is not the kind of life I wanted to live. Well, I might as well have given him a signed blank cheque. He continued to keep contact with the OW, and he finally left me for her just after Christmas to live out his fantasy of bringing in the new year with her as he should have done already the year before.
My investigative work has yielded a binder full of emails. I was able to print emails that confirmed that his relationship was physical when he always claimed that it was just an emotional affair. There is proof of the number of dates they went on in which money was spent (including hotel rooms out of town). But, most interesting about the emails is what it reveals about his character and state of mind – the immaturity of this infatuation, the obsessiveness he feels about her, his changed interests to reflect hers. I’ve shared some of these emails with his family members and a couple of key friends so that they know the truth. He is currently doing image control with his family and friends to ease the way to introducing her after some buffer time.
My investigative work has also revealed that this woman had an affair on her husband two and a half years ago that resulted in the girlfriend posting warnings about this woman on a variety of “cheater” and “homewrecker” websites. This woman attacked her husband drunk in front of their children and she was arrested. The charges were dropped and a peace bond issued against her to keep the peace with her husband for a year (the peace bond just ended this past November). She does not have custody of her children, she sees them on Thursday evenings and gets them every other weekend. How does a woman lose her kids?
I’ve stopped looking at my husband’s accounts after about a month of investigative work in late December/early January. I know enough to know that I was gaslighted and now I know the truth. Key people in our lives know the truth and are seeing him for the liar he is. He is not aware that I have this information and that others know, so he feels confident that he’s paving the way to introducing this woman “respectably” to family and friends. Good luck with that.
I do find myself unsure about one more matter I could investigate further. Is it worthwhile? I recently found a connection to the OW ex-husband’s family through a colleague at work. This connection is married to the ex-husband’s brother. My colleague said that she described the ex-wife as “bat-shit crazy” who lost custody of the kids and is now spewing venom about the ex. She’ll try to make herself the victim. I’m debating if I should have a conversation with the ex to figure out what she’s lying about. My husband sees himself as the OW’s knight in shining armor who thinks that she’s been abused and that she is really a good person who has simply “made some bad decisions” in her life. Do I bother finding out more about her story? Will it make a difference? My lawyer says that information about her parenting or past record (eg: competency in looking after the well-being of children, history of violence or substance abuse) might be able to allow me to include conditions in the legal separation agreement that would limit her access to my own children when my husband decides to “introduce” her.
Yes, protect your kids from her at all costs and measures! You can’t do this later effectively.
When it comes to protecting our kids (especially from people who are unhinged), is there anything we wouldn’t do?
Tread with caution, though, I think. It’s risky. Keep it simple enough that you don’t ride the edge of harassment, etc.
Option, I don’t believe that a single second of your time is wasted finding out every detail you can if it leads to being able to protect your children from the disordered freak your ex has hitched his wagon to. Better safe than sorry!
I wouldn’t bother having a conversation about OW with your husband…….it won’t matter to him one bit but I do urge you to find out everything you can about her dysfunctional lifestyle, losing her kids, etc. Keep that woman away from your children.
“Surely the craziest and most destructive form of infidelity is the temporary insanity of falling in love. You do this, not when you meet somebody wonderful (wonderful people don’t screw around with married people) but when you are going through a crisis in your own life, can’t continue living your life, and aren’t quite ready for suicide yet. An affair with someone grossly inappropriate—someone decades younger or older, someone dependent or dominating, someone with problems even bigger than your own—is so crazily stimulating that it’s like a drug that can lift you out of your depression and enable you to feel things again. Of course, between moments of ecstasy, you are more depressed, increasingly alone and alienated in your life, and increasingly hooked on the affair partner. Ideal romance partners are damsels or “dumsels” in distress, people without a life but with a lot of problems, people with bad reality testing and little concern with understanding reality better.” – Dr Frank Pittman
In preparation for Thanksgiving 2016 , I threw everything on our counters in a box. Had Thanksgiving, everything was fine. 2 days later, he informed me he wanted a divorce, no longer loved me, etc etc. I was shocked.
His narrative never made sense (he conveniently left out he had a gf), so i looked thru the box for his Kindle. Found it. He was still logged into FB. I sat and watched their FB messenger chat in real time!
I texted him a screenshot of their convo, called him and kicked him out, and filed for divorce.
Iowa, you’re awesome!
I didn’t know I was on the force. I was so gaslighted, I thought I had a problem.
I’d wait up well past midnight to check her purse, her phone (I knew the code), her laptop.
SOMETHING wasn’t right, but I found no proof. So then I’d feel horrible.
Somehow she hid it from me. Until she got sloppy and used the landline…then it was D-day.
It is always surprising to me how far a cheater goes to hide their wrongdoing, only to tell you afterwards that they haven’t loved you for a long time and that you didn’t meet their needs. OK, then why didn’t you just break up? I know, I know…ego kibbles and cake eating. It’s just so soul destroying. It’s such an act of cowardice to carry on an affair – too weak to stick to a decision, too weak to try to work through relationship problems, too weak to walk away on their own without having a piece on the side waiting for them. Pathetic.
They only say those things because they got caught.
I.C. I’m incredibly sorry. A father trying to ruin his daughter’s life and futures by introducing them to opiods….as a ‘fun’ tool? He should be locked up.
Yep I did the marriage police thing, until it put me in the hospital. What a waste of time, effort, and resources. And spent in what? An a-hole that wanted to put “wayward” on his motorcycle license plate. Yup. ???? Speaking of trust and Ronald Reagan, it’s interesting to me that a certain RIC “discussion forum” that will remain nameless asserts that you *should not* trust your spouse, and that “too much” trust can contribute to affairs. Wha?? So if you, the chump, are not vigilant enough from the second you say I Do, you probably deserve to be cheated on. How fucked up is that. #metoo
Wanted to also add that the same RIC site I mentioned also strongly encourages spying on your spouse because every time you don’t find evidence of malfeasance, it “builds trust.” But I thought we weren’t supposed to trust our spouse… ???? And around and around the solipsism we go. ????
God how I hated that. I was probably a member of the same RIC website. Each and every militant reconciler told all of us chumps that ‘our blind trust’ was no good anyway so it was good that we lost it. What complete and utter bullshit! I don’t know what the hell blind trust is, but I can tell you that I didn’t have it. I had the normal amount of trust that you give your spouse until they do something that is completely untrustworthy.
I trusted my ex until the day that I didn’t. It was a struggle to keep from “snooping” through his things because doing that felt like an invasion of privacy and something I shouldn’t do if I trusted him. I didn’t trust him though and with good reason.
Part of this tactic is to scare chumps into believing that they’re better off dancing with the devil that we know but it’s bullshit. You need to be able to trust someone to be in an intimate relationship again. If I ever enter into one again, it will be because I feel I’ve fixed my picker and found the right mate and I will have to have trust in that person, blind or otherwise.
I would text him every hour to make sure he wasn’t cheating- checking in, he called it. Really it was a lot of work and I shouldn’t have had to do so much work to ensure fidelity. Lesson learned.
I did some sleuthing after D-Day/GTFO day because I was really struggling with the words coming out of his mouth vs. what appeared to actually be happening. There was a lot of cognitive dissonance. I discovered the cheating by following my gut feeling and logging into our family phone account paid for by me, and trying to see what numbers he’d been calling. When I confronted him he at first gaslighted and lied but after he admitted it, he went into full-on gaslighting mode. Except I didn’t know what gaslighting was. I didn’t know what NPD or sociopathy was. Another 8 months of cognitive dissonance while he continued to lie saying he was “no longer with” her and I hired a P.I. who confirmed he was living with her.
While it probably was obsessive and mentally unhealthy for me, it really was a gigantic 2 x 4 that disabused me of my prior 15 year long belief in this man as a trustworthy human who loved me and my kids.
When I eventually gave up on sleuthing, it was after speaking to his “ex” girlfriends who revealed they never stopped being involved with him years after he moved in with me and bought a house with me. More evidence came out in innocuous ways with no effort on my part. A fourth affair five years earlier. Slimy business practices revealed in documents that surfaced when I was looking for something else on an old shared computer. A woman from some other country calling my house, asking for him, 2 years after he moved in with OW; a name I recognized from his supposed former history. And even recently, over 4 years from D-Day and GTFO Day, without looking for it, I stumbled on a note he wrote to himself on a “to do” list he’d kept, that revealed he had secret motion activated cameras somewhere in my house and had a note reminding himself to delete some unmentioned thing on the computer “because WisedUp uses that computer sometimes, too.”
So in the end, I don’t regret spending about $5000-6000 on private investigators and forensic computer services because I was SO tricked, conned, fooled, deceived and exploited by this sociopathic creep, that I needed to see the cold hard evidence to believe it.
So do as much as you need to do, and then stop and re-focus your money and efforts on saving yourself. Go 100% NC if you can. That is what I did three years ago and am just starting to feel like I can breathe again.
I ???? GTFO day so much. ????
This is exactly how I feel. Do as much investigating as you need to do to cut through the veil of gaslighting, discover what you need for divorce (especially financial) strategies, and then get out. The lying is never just about the sexual stuff. Your keylogger may show him electronically draining or moving assets. Your “find my i-phone” may show him at a bank where he has a secret safe deposit box, your steaming open his mail may show that the state pension or 401 k suddenly has so much less money than it should.
I absolutely hated being the marriage police. So exhausting, so very, very, exhausting. You’ve got to keep track of them, keep track of money, watch your cell phone bill, watch social media……why can’t she put her phone down, why does she crop me out of every picture on social media, why does she only wear her wedding ring around the house, why is she working out 3 times a day, why does she need to wear so much makeup and perfume to her 5 am workout, why is she the only county worker in history to stay late after work 2 hours every night (and on Fridays)?
Actually reading all of this in hindsight makes me feel like a total idiot.
Anyway, I still “needed to know for sure” so I bought a VAR. It was something I don’t regret simply because I found out for sure within 2 weeks of buying the thing. All it took was finding CL a few months after that and I was set on my path. Got out of that life and today I couldn’t give 2 shits anymore who she’s with or where she’s at.
Added plus: no more experiencing energy (and sanity) drain of playing the marriage police.
I was a super spy….. which thankfully made it very easy during mediation for assets and spousal support. But during the time I was Detective 2.0, I was thinking about how I was going to save our marriage once I had all the facts. The only facts I really needed was 1. He’s cheating 2. He’s a cheating narcissist
Things I did: went into the bathroom after he got out of the shower to discreetly check his body ( he had hickies on his chest), I drove by her house on two occasions to confirm if he was cheating (first time I got stopped by the police because I looked suspicious, second time while on the 45 minute drive back to my house I thought ‘this is what unstable ppl to….. don’t be one’), I checked his tablet (his email was synced to it) and that is where I found him asking her if she was interested in making a Mold-A-Willie Vibrating Kit with his penis. Last thing (along with his text messages admitting his affair) was what most likely sealed the deal with me doing more than fair during mediation. No one wants to show piece of evidence #1: “your Honor, I’d like to place the Mold A Willie Vibrating Kit into evidence”. The irony is that he was always concerned about his penis size…… so make a mold of it? Weird
Oh good Lord, I think I would have asked for something TOTALLY unreasonable just so I could go to Court and ask for Exhibit A – Mold a Willie – to be admitted into evidence. That is SOOOO funny!
I was thinking the same thing Attie! Lost 220# Deadweight, I’m not sure where you are in your journey, but your Mold-A-Willie story is comic gold. Thanks for sharing!
Resigning as marriage police and booting your cheater’s ass to the curb allows you to get far enough away from the cheating madness, so you can eventually begin to laugh about the absurd affair details. I knew Meh Tuesday was around the corner when I could tell friends a sordid detail about the Captain and Schmoopie and get them howling. When the laughter begins, so does the true healing.
Dee- I’m 2 years out from separating, 1 1/2 years since I finished the Pick Me Polka, 6 months out from divorce. Property and spousal support was settled a month ago; I am selling the house we owned together (but get 100% of the profit). He got married in Vegas in January, still sends nasty emails about me being the worst mother, wish he’d never met me….. blah, blah, blah. So I blocked that motherfucker and he can write his nonsense without me even reading his sappy “I’m the victim” stories. His attempts at degrading me and deflection have no room in my life. I am no longer accepting any pain from him. He wants to whine to someone, he can pay a $30- co pay and tell his therapist, or tell homeslice. Boundaries are a beautiful thing- you take back your power!
@Lost220#Deadweight Well clearly your ex’s life is the shits. Truly happy people don’t continue to heap toxicity on those they have left behind. My lawyer has a name for people like your ex and mine: REPEAT BUSINESS. Keep on rocking your new life!
Just when you think you’ve heard it all – along comes the Mold A Willie. Hahahahahahaha. I’m trying hard to contain myself but damn, that is funny. It reminds of a running joke in another support group I belonged to back in the day. Someone posted a picture of a fruit and veggie slicer that looked like a mini guillotine – the fruit being sliced in the picture was a banana. We renamed it the Wee Willie Wanker Wacker and had a lot of fun imagining it’s use. That product has since disappeared. I’m guessing we weren’t the only ones who saw the potential (or flaw depending on your perspective) in it’s design. Thanks for making my day, Lost220#!!
I answered an add on Craiglist I thought was his and said I’d meet him in a hotel lobby at a certain time. Sure enough, he was there. And he still denied it. OMG! Later, he went to the same sex addict rehab all the big wigs are going to in Arizona. Here’s a line from CL’s book that sticks with me and rings true – “I don’t care what flavor of fucked up it is, get away from it.” Let him go to the rehab, wish him well and pack while he is gone!
I’m shaking and gagging. Mold a Willie. Wow. I think I would have renounced all assets just to show this evidence in court. I’m cracking up. This would make a great parting gift for Sparkledick von Glitterballs.
ClearWaters- only $44.95
https://www.adameve.com/adult-sex-toys/dildo-sex-toys/clone-a-willy-c-1508.aspx?&pnt1=sbYv1LZRN&pcrid=252266388603&pkw=cloneawilly&pmt=e&dvc=m&productid=&pnt3=&pgrid=28658179605&ptaid=kwd-2004690098&sc=SEMGLSEX&cm_mmc=GGL-_-Product_Brands_US_NB_Google_Exact-_-Clone-A-Willy_Exact-_-Clone-A-Willy_Exact&channel=ppc&gclid=EAIaIQobChMInaKH3JTx2QIVwVYNCh1D1gA2EAAYAiAAEgIkcfD_BwE
I’m afraid of the spam I’ll get from Willy, but i’ll glue it to the hood of his fancy car
Mold a Willie is a thing? That should not be a thing.
I’m sorry for your experience. And equally sorry about Mold a Willie, but it is funny! My cheater is completely obsessed with his Willy, like it’s THE most special thing ever. I guess it is, to HIM.
How nice. He can literally go fuck himself.
He wanted to clone his weenie to get pegged in the butt, that’s why ! Dipsh*t !
He’s the dipsh*t…
–Checking her phone? Yes.
–Keylogger on the computer? Yes.
–A noise-activated audio recorder hidden inside a binder on our living room bookshelf? Yes.
–Leaving a movie theater early because I suddenly thought she was using that 2-hour window to bang her OM in our home, and I’d catch them in the act? Yes.
But only that audio recorder revealed any new evidence, and what it revealed was that my wife was lying to her friend and her sister on phone calls about the situation–they were getting a different version of events, also with only pieces of truth.
And that was enough for me. It confirmed that my wife had no interest in reconciliation, but was instead continuing to build her house of cards, lying to everyone. I went to a divorce workshop that weekend, signed a lease on an apartment, and told her the following Thursday that I was leaving her and filing for divorce.
I’m a trusting person, but my wife’s affair turned me into someone else. I hated being the marriage police, and I recommend you do it only until you’ve verified what you need to know to make a decision. And really, what you need to know is very little. Get it, and then get out!
I am the self proclaimed Captain of the Marriage Police Force. I have rented wigs and rental cars to catch him and the OW.
I knew every password to every account he had online and if I didn’t know it then it usually took only 3 guesses to figure it out. (most passwords to the affair websites had my name in them). I kept track of phone records and called random numbers pretending to be a wrong number just to see if a woman would answer the phone on the other end. I kept track of email accounts and intercepted mail regularly.
I even stumbled on to his google account which allowed me to track his google searches in real time as he was thousands of miles away working overseas. I was able to see him search “romantic restaurants” and ‘romantic dates” in our City. Silly me thought he was setting things up for our 9 year anniversary but a little part of me knew there was someone else.
One thing is for sure, I will never fully trust another companion ever again.
The passwords with your name, tho! Yuck.
Hah. My narc’s passwords to the porn sites? Nickname for our daughter. No kidding.
So sick and gross.
Vomitous.
Hey, that’s a good Cheater Name! Hope someone uses it!
My nickname for mine cheater is MISERABLE VOMITUS MASS, from Harry Potter, lol!
Yep, Edgar Suit used my kids’ initials/birthdates for his porn passwords. Well into Meh but when I think of that, I can still feel the rage rising.
In the end it is that long term damage of not being able to trust a future companion. Its just so unfair what they did to us.
tell me about it. 🙁
I meant…you’re telling me.
The password for most of this things including the laptop where I found the emails to the slams on dd1 was my name
I did what the RIC said to do in order to “trust, but verify” and even though the cheater willingly agreed to subject himself to the monitoring, he went behind my back and used it to claim victimhood. He found a woman online to cry to who was so horrified by his sob story that she contacted a domestic violence advocacy group on his behalf and they agreed that he was being abused and controlled.
And the more I thought about it, I realized that it is abusive and it’s not justified. If you feel you have to monitor, track, demand passwords, comb through devices, deny privacy, demand polygraphs, require constant check ins, and otherwise keep another person under your thumb in order to stay in a relationship with them, then you need to leave.
It’s just as toxic and psychologically damaging to be the police as the suspect. I felt gross and guilty for doing it. It isn’t a relationship, it’s a power play.
He said he wanted a divorce, I did minimum amount of investigated to confirm my suspicions. He admitted only when confronted with “ I know”. He thinks someone has been in touch, I’ve given away no specifics. He said “ whoever is feeding you lies about my past is being vindictive as it’s just not true” ha ha, what’s not true, how can you deny what you don’t know!
While I agree that it can be more than useful to monitor their emails and so on to see what plans they are making and how they are planning to screw you over, from a purely personal point of view, if a man doesn’t want to be with me I ain’t gonna play the marriage police. Screw him, I don’t want him. When my ex just stopped coming home in January 2010 (for about 6 weeks before he admitted to the Skank) I one time parked my car around the corner to make it look like I had gone to work, then went back into the house and sat on the sofa and waited for him. When he showed up to shower and get clean clothes I just said “oh so you remembered where you live do you” – then walked out and went to work. F…. him! I filed shortly after.
After 20-yrs and DD #3, I found a RIC site that said you should get a post-nup and have the wayward spouse sign it. I gave it some thought and decided I was done playing marriage police.
The X had so many ways to communicate with his lovers that I couldn’t keep up with them all. I figured even if he did agree to a post-nup, he would sink his extramarital dalliances even further down the rabbit hole, or he would get so desperate not to be found out he would kill me.
Either way, I was too tired, too broken, too done to even try anymore. It takes great strength to hold on so tightly to something you need to let go. I used what was left of my strength to get away.
Nah, I was oblivious. No time for even suspicion. I was going to nursing school, working full-time nights, doing all the house work, laundry, cooking, grocery shopping, and most of the parenting of our two teenagers.
Found out about the affair when he gave me the ILYBINILWY speech. Then he proceeded to rub the OW in my face.
At that point, I was done. Took me a while to extricate my kids and I, but I didn’t care about him after that. Just wanted to get as far away from him as possible.
“You’re dying by inches.”
That line wins the internet today. It applies to so many of our marriages even before infidelity was confirmed, because of the devalue most of us suffered for months or years.
Although I divorced Hannibal Lecher based on an affair with a graduate student from 8 years prior (found his notes when he was finally called before the sexual harassment officer), it turns out his poor treatment of me for all of 2014 was due to a very intense affair he was having with an accountant. Each time I would try to exit the marriage those 8 months, he would threaten that my oldest daughter couldn’t attend an out-of-state school to which she had been accepted. The emotional pain was so intense & chronic that I hoped I had cancer and could refuse treatment so that I would die without having to kill myself.
THAT is dying by inches. Three years post-divorce, I am now LIVING by yards.
Oh God yes, “dying by inches” and the great devalue. That was the worst. The contempt in his eyes and his voice (when he bothered to speak to me which wasn’t often) was so bewildering to me. It took me a long time to connect the dots to cheating – I was so sure it was my fault for being inadequate which of course is exactly what happens when you are subtly devalued for the entirety of your relationship. It was only when the affair made him feel empowered that he went from subtle to overt emotional abuse. I had the exact same same thought about cancer (or ANYTHING that would allow me to die without killing myself), Tempest. And I’m right there with you too, in living by yards post divorce. I truly believe that if I had stayed I would be dead or dying by now, one way or the other.
I did have cancer. Stone face from ex-cheater-troll. I played the marriage police. Ex-cheater-troll was the police. My dad was the police and also a cheater. “But, but, my dad reconciled, certainly ex-cheater-troll will see the error of his ways too and reconcile, and I have cancer, me, his 25 year wife and mother to his darling children….” Nope, nothing, nada, zip, zilch, zero Marriage policing made me crazy, ex-cheater-troll was already crazy, what did I expect to find, less crazy?? Another two biopsies yesterday, certainly I am dying by 1 inch slices every 3 months…but I am no longer in the marriage police business since I am no longer married and I really am not crazy, because we chumps are Mighty!!
We are mighty Kibble-less! And I hope you are cancer free and enjoying your cheater free life!
Thank you Beth. Fingers crossed.
Kibble-less: Our collective fingers are crossed that your body is as free of the cancer as you are of a fuckwit. Hugs (and let us know your results?).
Thank you Tempest, will do, results take about a week. Virtual hugs back to everyone!!
Keeping you in my prayers Kibble-less.
Keeping good thoughts for you Kibble-less. As you have removed the 2-legged cancer from your life, praying the other cancer followed him out of the door. (((HUGS)))
Being the cheater police sucks in every way. Waiting for the chance to check the heavily guarded iPhone. Heart racing as I hurriedly look for evidence that I am terrified of finding.
Having my son say, what are you in full detective mode? as I quickly shuffle through my partner’s vehicle after work…checking every receipt for proof of my growing feeling of being forgotten…Being invisible.
The list goes on and on. So does the misery…and guilt over being a marriage detective, for twenty five years, who rarely finds any evidence at all.
I got the anonymous email from Schmoopie’s sister. Saying that OW had been having sex with my STBXH for 2 years and that he had been wiring her money and traveling with her. Sis said that OW was laughing at X behind his back, calling him a “fat ass and a limp dick.” Not surprisingly, X claimed this email was spam. Which as we know, looks different: “Yer spouse is having affair. Send $100 I tell you more.” Fortunately X had been foolish enough to give me a general power of attorney. In a few days I had PayPal records of X sending money to OW nearly every other day. Fools all around. As within a few days I fell for the Faux Reconciliation timeline. Complete with chronologies and spreadsheets. Meant absolutely nothing, I can tell you. He went right back to wiring OW money from a foreign account.
CL really does a service trying to push chumps to where they need to go at faster than the natural rate, so that they minimize the amount of lingering pain. Rip that Band-Aid off. Anyone that would set up elaborate schemes like pretending to have an eBay business so they can funnel money to a lowlife in the UK actually hates their spouse. They blame us for limiting their fabulous freedom with vows they voluntarily took and mortgages and joint bank accounts.
I needed my time on the MP force to convince myself I was not imagining things, and that he was a liar. I found out much more than I needed to, because it is a type of horrific addiction — like not being able to take your eyes off a wreck or weather damage footage on the news. I also became really angry that someone I had been so good to could do the things he did, and actually enjoy the things I found totally disgusting! I wondered how he could act so loving and intimate with me, and then view the awful porn I found. Some of the information educated me about the level of despicable behavior and actions he would sink to, and then compartmentalize. How do you meet for a clandestine fuck-fest and then stop on the way “home” for groceries and cook a nice meal for the wife and kids? What kind of a person does those things? How was I so gullible? It was a complete course in Deviant Behavior, and one I evidently needed to get me to wise up and toughen up. I think Chumps don’t want to believe the one’s they love would ever do those sort of things. We want to think that somehow the spouse got into an awful situation– made a mistake — but still is basically a good person. It is heart breaking to realize you are intimately involved with a deeply dysfunctional person — and that he has been carrying on this behavior for years. Living a dual life would be exhausting for me. I really don’t have the time, energy or inclination to do all the things I need to do every day — am supposed to do every day. When my children were young, I could barely get the essentials done before falling into exhausted sleep at night. I cannot imagine also carrying on a sordid affair, or wasting money that way, and I really resent time and resources being spent that way when I could have used a little help. That entitled behavior is what finally sunk in to me — the waste of time, money, and the rejection of all the things that he professed to want (wife, home, family, future plans). I finally realized he didn’t deserve any consideration, and he was not acquainted with the truth. I also knew that he had actually proved he was not smarter than I was, because I was able to figure it out. That was insulting, too. The attitude of “I can do this, and you won’t ever get it, I have you completely fooled, you are stupid enough to love me” — that put me over the edge and on the road to recovery. When I realized he didn’t value anything he had with me I was done. It was easy to walk away then.
I guess the Marriage Police is instructive, and the information can free you from a bad situation. But staying on the force is no way to live your life. I am so much happier living my peaceful existence alone. The authentic life satisfies the soul.
Ironic, in light of the fact that I spent all day yesterday wiping my cell phone and reinstalling everything, because the possibility that asshat installed monitoring software was brought to my attention. I never locked my phone when he lived here. People who have nothing to hide, hide nothing.
Let’s not forget to point out surveillance’s devious side (not a normal motivation for chumps). To gather dirt to be used as blackmail, threat, etc.
Basically an old friend of mine, who is also in the middle of a nasty divorce (her ex is not a manipulative asshole, he’s a blatant asshole) texted me on Wednesday. I had not talked to her in about a year. We exchanged updates and unpleasantries about one another’s STBX’s.
Later that night I received a Facebook message from him; he sent an attachment that said unavailable. I haven’t talked to that man in 3 years. Coincidence??????????
He also happens to be buddy buddy with my ex, and has “shown him the way” of dirty divorce tricks. I know his character (bully, power and control, intimidation, etc.) and “IF” my ex had told him I was talking bad about him, I know that isn’t something he’d have the self control to keep to himself.
I know he had previously been monitoring his wife’s texts by hacking into iMessage, and sending screenshots of her conversations to people, so as soon as I got that message from him my red flags stood on end. I immediately called her and told her she might want to consider changing her passwords. That is when she informed me that after the last incident, she took her phone to a tech guy, and she honestly did not think it was her phone… but based on rumors she’s heard, believed it could be mine.
I’d be lying if I said I have not previously considered the idea that STBX did this, but I chalked it up to paranoia and moved on. There have been a lot of little things these past three years (wish I had documented them) to indicate someone was telling him what I was doing, and I thought it was just that.
The moral of the story here is, wipe your phone or get a new one when you separate. There are a lot of child monitoring softwares that are undetectable on none jail broken phones, as long as the person has free access to your phone at some point.
So creepy!
Husband’s best friend had cheated on his wife and was living with the OW. He complained to me about how the OW didn’t trust him at all (because she knew exactly what he was like) and insisted on accompanying him everywhere he went. Everywhere. She went with him in the car in the day – he was a self-employed salesman. She didn’t have a job. He wasn’t even allowed to go out briefly to the pub with his mates in the evening. She would always go too, and be there, watching. I remember thinking at the time what an awful life she must have: having to sit in the pub hour after hour, bored and tired, while he drank with his pals. Perfect karma, really. She had the most miserable expression.
I didn’t do much, because I didn’t suspect anything until DDay when he filed for divorce. I only questioned him for a day when he caved and spilled the beans.
He moved out shortly and gave me the whole “I know you think I have my mind made up, but I’m going to really be using this time to think about what I want.” I bought the line, like a chump, and believed him. Only took about 10 days or so when I couldn’t live in limbo any longer and I called the call phone company for the records and found that he was having long drawn out phone calls with her every single day, meanwhile not talking to me at all. The lady at the phone company and I had a really nice chat and she totally understood the situation.
“I once knew a guy who couldn’t leave his cheater because she was “trying,” and he couldn’t break up his children’s home.”
^^^ Oh, dear God, THIS IS ME. Word for word. Sounds so stupid when I read it about someone else. But when you are living it, it’s so hard to see.
I too was on the Force for a while. It was exhausting and looking back, is a terrible thing for a spouse. If you need to secretly spy on your spouse, your feelings for them and your view of them are now changed. There’s no coming back from needing to spy on them to obtain proof because deep down inside you know they are deliberately hurting and lying to you. There’s no happy ending there. DDay#2 was in a way a relief for me. It hurt like hell, but I suspected another affair for a few months, and DDay#2 gave me a reason to stop spying and some relief from the suspicions and gaslighting. And then changed passcodes again after confronting her…what more proof do I need? Time to stop.
I have two contributions to today’s discussion.
First the sad, pathetic one. I used my husband’s ipad “find-my-iphone” app to watch him each afternoon. Like clockwork, he drove home (yes, I refreshed the screen often to watch him move along the highway … creepy yet irresistible), parked at a baseball park around the corner from our house, and walked into the woods located in the far corner of the park. He stood there among the trees for about 15 minutes, then walked back to his car and drove home. Totally weird behavior (his … not mine!! ha ha) even for a cheater. What on earth was he doing in the woods? Drinking? Smoking? I later figured out he was having sex with himself while talking long distance with his boyfriend. But my inability to look away was just grinding my depression and numbness to new lows.
On a brighter note, I purchased a very inexpensive ($15?) simple downloadable key tracker onto our home computer with the full knowledge and agreement of my cheater in order to help monitor my 6th grader’s new interest in googling porn. The simple program stopped the behavior once he understood that I really would know if he did it. I used it only a handful of times and then the program lay dormant and forgotten. Maybe a month later, it occurred to me to just take a quick look to make sure my son was still following house rules. Cheater had worked from home the day before and WHAM … unintentionally busted. I am grateful for that key tracker … odds are that BAM would still be cheating away and abusing me right now. I am free thanks to a $15 cheapo key tracker.
I marriage policed hard and most of it was pretty silly and drove me crazy, I mean really cray-cray, but some of it was very beneficial.
Looking back on it, I get CL’s point. If I was suspicious enough to police, the marriage was over. My policing started because he would never tell me when he was going to be late. I was just supposed to accept that some nights he would go to happy hour and walk through the door after dinner was served. I understand why he thought it was okay and why he got angry when I started calling him on it. I started tracking him on his iPhone. Often when he was out I would text him and ask where he was and when he was coming home. Often he would not respond. So I would ping he phone. He hated that. Both of our behaviors were disrespectful.
Now there would be time I would go without tracking his phone. Months where I would hear understand his complaint about invasion of privacy. But then there was always something that happened that would make me start checking again.
When things really ramped up is when I put cameras in the home. I didn’t do it to spy on him. I did it because we were going on vacation for a week and wanted to make sure the pet sitter was coming over when she said she was and that our cats were ok. But there was also a part of me that thought maybe I would figure our what was happening when he came home at 3:30 and apparently did nothing until I got home. I never got to find that out because my daughter spotted the camera right away and he flipped out. But interestingly enough, his early home arrivals stopped too. While I was trying to figure out the camera settings I also caught him moving the curtains late one night. Something he had sworn for years that he did not do. And I also caught his brother in our house one afternoon to change his clothes. Which is weird and gross. He lives 5 miles from us and could have drove there to change. It felt like an invasion of privacy but when I brought that up, it was me that had the problem.
After cheater ex left I put a tracker on the car, mostly so I could keep track of how often he was at the bar. That tracker was a blessing and a curse. I knew when he spent weekends with the OW. My blood would boil. I became obsessed with tracking him. It was unhealthy and yet at the same time eventually gave me the info I needed to move on. I caught him in lies with that tracker. I also caught him at the bar once before he was supposed to pick up our daughter. So it was good for somethings. But mostly it was unhealthy and prevented me from moving on. I turned it off. The tracker is still in his car. It’s been there for months. Somehow I need to get it out of there before he finds it…
Everyone is absolutely correct, if you feel the need to spy and you aren’t normally a creeper then the relationship is already over. Six months after I moved in with The Worm I started to get that uneasy feeling that something wasn’t right. I stuck around for 26 years “gathering evidence”. Here’s the thing about the evidence, it becomes proof for the cheater that you’re crazy. They will lie and twist things around rather than admit anything. So you could have 8×10 photos of your husband in bed with triplets and he will lie, equivocate and obfuscate until you believe you’re somehow responsible.
If someone makes you feel that unsettled just get out! Don’t stick around for the mind fuck!
I served zero time as MP because I trusted Glitterballs blindly.
But I did spend a lot of time trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. At least 30 years.
Turns out I was being gaslighted and supplying cake and ego kibbles for years for a cold and calculating cheater.
But I wish I had policed cheater: I would have busted his ass before my country became no fault in 2010 and before my father died so cheater would not see a penny of his inheritance. As it is he got my father’s house! Shit.
Got a text from the phone company: “you’re almost out of minutes!” Confused and not at all suspicious, I logged into the phone account- thousands of texts to an unknown number; hours of calls to the same number (during a weeklong trip he was away, 11 HOURS of calls with that number and 6 MINUTES with me).
He had left early that day. With cell phone in left hand and landline phone on the right, I called his cell phone. When he answered, I called the unknown number. I could hear it ring in the background: bingo!
“You’re at her house, aren’t you?- that’s me calling her phone number, so don’t bother denying.” “Uh, yeah”
Before he got home, I had searched the number on our shared computer, found her name, email address and all their emails. After vomiting, I pulled myself together and when he arrived told him to GTFO.
I admire your decisiveness
You give me too much credit.
It was DDay #3, and I STILL attempted wreckonciliation after this.
[headslap]
I spent five years being a detective. I literally feel as tho I could make a career out of this now. However, I am so glad it’s over. I searched coat pockets, wallets, bedside tables, his vehicles, etc. The final (and for me, over the top) discovery was the voice activated recorded I put in his truck. The lengths you go thru as a chump are staggering.
Here is the laughable part!!! After I kicked out my husband and told him I was officially done, he thought himself to be a detective too and started following ME!!!!!! Seriously!!!!!! He had been lying and cheating for at least five years that I know of and I never once stepped outside of the marriage or gave him ANY reason to doubt me. And……during that time he never followed me or questioned my whereabouts.
6 years of my life policing. I won’t go into details yet- maybe one day. But in the end it turned out cheater wife sucked even more than I could imagine. Coldblooded scumbag con artist scammer. In the end I had the proof I needed to start me down the proper road (first came the heartbreak and mental emotional chaos). Eventually I got out of that storm. But CL is right- you die a little each day by policing. Life without policing is so much more peaceful. As I posted the other day- now I just assume the worst about her and that helps me to let go and try to bring an end to the bond. She gave up a loyal faithful husband. I gave up a bad person. I’m better off in the end.
I hear you about assuming the worst.
I moved 400 miles when we married. A few weeks after we married he left his email open on his laptop. OMG the huge number of women he had been dating and was still seeing after our engagement and marriage was staggering.
I still remember the cold numbness as I printed out each email. One by one.
I then taped them all along our long hallway of our shiny brand new house and our new marriage license.
I moved to a motel for several weeks.
We finally reconciled. A few years later, at the first sign of cheating again I didn’t bother to investigate. I knew. I wasn’t going to save this marriage if he couldn’t be trusted.
Once you know, you can’t unknow.
I did a fair amount of on line policing for a year (he was into Porn and our sex life had always reflected his emotionless perverted acting out which I found very insulting). I would catch him from time to time using chat rooms to flirt with women when he played Scrabble or Party Poker on line. But it was after I installed a VAR in his store, that I realized that this act alone would make me look like the crazy one if it was discovered. So I removed it…did not find much except for X drilling his grown son with a lot of very personal questions about X’s former wife (son’s mom) on Valentines Day during our tenth year of marriage when he should have been thinking about ME. That hurt…but only a little. I also found emails between he and his X wife of a very intimate nature during the first three years of our marriage…X was trying to get back together with her, but she was not having it. That hurt a little too. I always knew that he still carried a torch for her in spite of their divorce (she filed due to his abuse but she never knew that he was a serial cheater on top of that…that was soon to be my own personal discovery), but even so, I was no longer willing to live the rest of my life looking over my shoulder for her ever present shadow that took up so much space (if only in HIS mind). Clearly, I did not measure up to her or any other woman “out there”.
I also accidently discovered 7 months of phone calls on his cell phone bills totaling an average of 2500 minutes per month during the wee hours when I was fast asleep…all numbers to “massage therapists”. This took place during the first year that we were married, but I did not find them until just after he left. I was sorting through boxes of his rain sogged business paperwork to see what I should salvage when I ran across some very thick phone bills…the rest is history. Seeing the obvious handwriting on the wall early on (just from the Porn/chat rooms/flirting with customers alone), I then began the slow process of getting my ducks in a row. I opened my own business from scratch and got it well off the ground. I was able to buy him out of the house we bought when he was caught with a woman in the back room of his store during our tenth and final year of marriage. This took years of strategic planning and a cool calm that I did not know that I possessed.
Thanks for the comment on strategic planning and cool calm.
I know now that the stbx has been using the sadz to keep me stuck. And non-communication to keep things status quo.
Working the adult kids to buy the sadz.
He’s also using the drinking while driving and abusing the prescription meds.
We’re living apart for four years now and he’s living in what is also my house.
I made the initial appointment with the lawyer today. Need to move this into position to extricate myself from being used.
Maybe also the stuff about narcissists on here and the forum may be relevant – sadz works on empathetic chumps because we attribute feelings like we would have but it may just be pushing buttons to manipulate…
Ps congrats on the appt it sounds like good progress and I recall how my heart pounded taking that first step. (It was worth it!)
The thing about being the marriage police is, to me, don’t do it if you’re not willing to take ACTION based on what you find.
I discovered, through a spyware I installed on Mr. Sparkles computer, that he was cheating and that he was bisexual and trolling for couples/group sex. I confronted him and off to counseling we went. And the policing with punitive outcomes commenced. I stayed for 5 more years of sleuthing of mindfucking while my self-esteem, finances, and sex life dwindled to nothing.
Don’t become the marriage police unless you are ready to GET OUT as CL says… you’ll only go down a new rabbit hole of mindfucking yourself and feeding a whole new level of abusive kibbles to your cheater.
This brought up a memory: many years before eventual split, I discovered my ex was emailing (I assume they did a lot more than email, but never had any proof or admission of that) a married bisexual guy who lived in a nearby town. When I confronted ex, he claimed he was only communicating with the guy to “convince him that having sex with other men was a sin” and he only wanted the guy to understand it was wrong to cheat on his wife. Can you believe I spackled that shit over and stayed with him for several more years? ICanSee is right….. unless you plan on taking action, don’t even bother torturing yourself by snooping.
I never did any policing of my husband.
I never installed keylogggers etc. to try to figure out whether my boyfriend was cheating. However, he did do things toward the end of our relationship that seemed ‘off.’ I once went over to his house on impulse after a traumatic day (my stuff was still there) ,wanted to talk for a few minutes, and lean on his shoulder, and discovered that he was lying. The next day, I asked him to drop off the remainder of my stuff. He lied again–without provocation. I don’t think that I should have gone over to his house without warning. I was not trying to spy then. (He had recently told me that there was no other woman in his life, and I had believed him.) I knew that our intimate relationship was over. Later, I wanted to confirm that he was NOT lying to me (because I wanted to believe that he was still my friend but discovered that the person I nelieved would never lie to me would readily lie. However, part of me is glad that I discovered that he was very prone to lying. I guess that I owe him an apology now that I went over unannounced. Sad state of affairs.
Owe him an apology?
You made a very reasonable move and you saw him being shitty.
No apology needed.
Except to yourself.
Thanks for your support, Langele. Due to issues of anonymity, I left out some details that might bring in to question my culpability. (I did not break the law, but we were in the ‘phase out’ stage of our relationship and I was still in denial Pick Me mode.) The relationship turned out quite dysfunctional although I imagine that on the surface it looked fine to most people–we never fought; he talked to me twice a day every day for years. I frequently told people that he was a wonderful partner and I was tremendously lucky. Main problem–he neither truly loved me nor respected me.
I should forget about my ex-boyfriend the way he has me months ago. He might already even be married to my replacement.
I think it’s hard not to become a member of the Marriage Police. I think I started out looking for confirmation that I really wasn’t as crazy as the cheater tried to make me believe. As a career auditor, I spent my time looking for ways people could beat the system. So when he all of a sudden starting getting up early to head to the gym, I knew something was off and followed him. No surprise, he was meeting schmoopie even though I had been promised that everything was over. I have since were married also handled all of our finances. When paying the cell phone bill and seeing that the texts and minutes soared, I checked the detail and no surprise, hours spent on the phone and hundreds of texts after I had been told again that it was over. In reality it just made me exhausted, sad and disappointed.
If I were ever in that position again I wouldn’t do it. If when confronting someone with my suspicions they couldn’t be honest, I know now they are not worth my time. It wasn’t an easy lesson to learn and took a lot of heart ache to get there. I always try to remember that if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck….it’s not a unicorn.
I spent a few months as a data collector-spy after he left, but before he filed for divorce.
I wanted as much leverage as I could, and thanks to me setting up an anonymous Facebook profile, I was able to stalk his Facebook profile, print out pics of him and OWhore, his claim to fame as being “number 1100 of our fans” to a Strip Club, his OWhore’s pics, etc.
After a couple months of that, he filed for divorce according to my terms, so I tucked all of my documents into a large shoebox and moved on.
I used to periodically snoop through my ex’s closet and dresser drawers looking for evidence of his gay activities. Occasionally found hidden gay porn. But really, there was no proof of his actual cheating because he would generally go to a gay bathhouse, get it on with some anonymous man, then leave. It wasn’t like he was carrying on a long-term affair, with hotel receipts, gifts, phone calls, etc. Although eventually he DID start cheating with married women as well., and at that point, my snooping did occasionally turn up emails, texts, etc.
Anyway, what I’m saying is that some cheaters don’t leave any evidence. They hit it and quit it. And if you feel the need to play marriage police, you have no real marriage.
I’m now married to Nice Guy, and not one single time have I felt the need to snoop through his dresser, peak at his phone, look at his emails, or any other type of “police work.”
I strongly suspect that ex was/is bisexual, and that I have no proof of that, other than a bit of circumstantial evidence, just eats at me. 🙁
I wasn’t married to the cheater—-he was my ‘boyfriend’ who I foolishly invited to live with me and I did ALL the heavy lifting.
The initial pop of POP (Parasitic Opportunistic Predator) happened when I had let him use my laptop (mid move in–cute, huh?) and he failed to close the email between him and the previous night’s Match ‘date’. OMG> his explanation was epic! It boiled down to the wording “I can’t wait to have you in my arms again’ as English being his second language and really meaning “It was so good to unexpected see you, my old friend, and I hope I get to hug you hello again in the future”…..
Then there were the VERY rare times he failed to keep his phone glued to him and had not deleted texts. He had a harem.
But the most memorable ‘got him’ was the time he butt dialed me on my land line and I was able to record 58 minutes of conversation with his main whore–she knew ALL about me but didn’t care about the pain she encouraged him to inflict. You see, he had borrowed my car to drive 500 miles away to ‘see his Marine son who was on leave from Japan’ but in actuality he was about 15 miles away at her hovel. He’d been gone four days.
I got to actually hear her ask ‘what about HATC?’ and his reply of ‘fuck her, she doesn’t matter’.
Finally she noticed his phone line was open with my number on it and with her “OH MY GOD!” it was hung up.
I cannot even recall the BS that ensued following that incident. That’s what PTSD will do to you.
One thing he said to me early on was that he had cheated on all his girlfriend of yesterday, but that he was a changed man. Red flag?? I just brushed it off and continued thinking everything was butterflies and rainbows and I was finally going to get the happy ever after I so desired. I never cared to spy on him, after all three years in jail, he was a changed and saved man. But then that gut feeling that something was not right. First he needed space because we were fighting so much (had nothing to do with his drinking and staying out all night). One day he was in the shower and his phone went off, I looked at the text and it was someone by initials only saying that they knew someone with a puppy for my stepdaughter. I confronted him about it but not because I thought he was cheating but about not consulting with me about getting a dog. Then one night he forgot his phone and I looked at the texts and this finder of dogs was also sending selfies and sweet emojis. I threw him out that night.
The really crazy thing is that I later found out that he saw stalking me, from a coworker. Parking outside my work for hours at a time. When my coworker told me this, I asked them didn’t they think that was strange and why didn’t they tell me. Coworkers responce was they thought I knew about it and maybe I liked that he was possessive.?????
Let’s see, after I had all the evidence I needed (and she fessed up, to boot), I went full-bore MPD. Tracked all her text messages and phone calls, watched her FB messaging…she realized this was how I became suspicious about what was going on in the first place, so they just switched to different phone apps (Instagram, etc.). Finally found those out, then did the GPS tracker thing. After listening to her lie to me for 20 minutes with a straight face about where she’d been, I realized how stupid all this was. You can’t make someone be true.
I handed in my badge the next day. I sure as heck don’t miss it.
I do not know how far back it goes, to be honest. But I always tried to believe Douchebag’s stories even though they didn’t quite add up. For over a decade. I thought, I must be crazy to doubt my spouse. What is wrong with me. Why am I such a suspicious hag. Never took action. Always tried hard to believe DB and lock those suspicions away. Focused on what was good in our lives. Never tried to look at DB’s phone or devices. I wouldn’t have known how anyway as I didn’t have the code and never asked for it. Need to trust! My mental and physical health suffered. Then one day I used our credit card to buy a gift card. I used that gift card to buy a GPS device on the internet. The kind that transmits real-time information to your phone. I researched. In some states it is a misdemeanor to put a GPS device in a car that is not titled to you. Lesson for chumps – make sure all cars are titled in both of your names. I thought – screw it, I have to know. If I get charged with a misdemeanor, I get charged with a misdemeanor. Snuck into the garage and hid it in the back of his car at night after he went to bed. I almost passed out from the stress. I felt like the world’s crappiest spouse. What if he woke up and caught me? Ugh. Dday was the VERY NEXT MORNING. I was devastated but also immensely relieved. I KNEW it. I am NOT crazy. The validation was freeing. I tell everyone but my lawyer that I just followed his car and that’s how I found out. Started seeing a therapist, who said, “Have you checked detailed phone records?” Tried to get into the detailed phone records and found out I had never been an authorized user on our account. Eventually fixed that problem and discovered an astonishing volume of texts. Used reverse phone look-up to figure out who those texts were to. Used the address on the GPS to figure out who Schmoopie was. Researched Schmoopie on the internet and contacted her ex-husband. Yes they had been divorced years earlier because of DB, and no one had thought to ring me up and let me know. [WHAT?] But then the dominos started to fall. Found out about other Schmoopies over time. I had the critical mass of information that I needed. BOOM. Bye DB.
Oh, how I wish I didn’t blindly trust him. My first Dday was discovering a Facebook message from the OW husband that had been sitting in my Facebook for over a year. (I don’t remember the specifics but it went some strange place because we were friends.) It was supposedly an emotional affair that has been over for more than a year.
He thought I’d immediately kick him out, but I said our 10yo daughter needed her dad. (I’m a child of divorce so I could relate.) And, of course, I naively believed him. So did the marriage councelor. He watched the devastating pain I went through.
I read the Shirley Glass book and made him read it too. And even though it said to have full transparency to cell phone records and email so the injured spouse can regain trust, I didn’t want to play the marriage police.
But when I accidentally ran into something suspicious, my heart would drop. For example, when I sent the dogs in for grooming, they asked about a third dog. When I asked him about it he just pushed it aside and said that they have lousy records and are always making mistakes.
I finally had a feeling. His charmer and doting act finally wore thin and he was being condescending and contemptuous. I discovered his affair by accident while putting instructions together for a house sitter while I was taking my daughter to Hawaii to meet a friend and he was going off with the OW. (I had asked him to with me. That we hadn’t been on vacation just the two of us forever.)
Anyway, months later I heard the dog’s name in reference to a former friend that and realized it was her dog.
Sorry for the long post — but my point is that I wish I had been more on alert and less trusting so I could have gotten out sooner. And perhaps I would have had the opportunity to have a loving relationship and a good male role model for my daughter. And not invested another 5 yeses in the marriage. Sigh.
Sorry. I need to reread to catch all of the mistakes that Siri introduces. The OW’s husband was NOT a FB friend, which is why the message went in some strange place.
I have a different perspective. I went the keylogger route because we were supposed to be giving reconciliation a shot. He kept up no contact until he went back to Afghanistan. As I had his passwords, i saw IRT when she first started contacting him. It went from her contacting him and him not responding (at first) to her pleasing, to him responding, to increased emails. I was done as soon as he responded the first time and made an appointment for an attorney. I had him served in less than 1 day after he returned from Afghanistan. I was originally going to have him served at the airport, but I was talked out of that. ???? But I had no intentions of staying and just observing secretly while he continued to cheat. I was in a covenant marriage and would need proof of an affair in order to divorce him. That keylogger saved me from being stuck in a marriage I no longer wanted and saved me from any of his attempts to gaslight.
I didn’t need much actual proof. His actions were enough. Hiding phone new body spray not coming home. Same ole unimaginative bull shit. I aproached him and he admitted it. After that we were going to “work on the marriage “. He said he wanted to try. I kept getting after him about counceling but he didn’t change any of his habits. I never tried to check anything even though I wanted to. He worked for a family owned business and he and schmoopie spent a lot of time there at night. He always came home but sometimes 5 hrs after he got off work. I never drove by his work or anything. About 10 days later he moved onto a motel to “think things through “ yeah right !!!!! The only physical proof i got then for my attorney was phone records. Lots and lots of phone records. Don’t know how either of them actually worked they were so busy texting! Illinois ecame a no fault state a month after i filed so it didn’t matter
I acquired a keylogger the first time my spidey sense told me something was amiss. Within two,weeks, I had all the proof I needed to dump Assclown. He had the audacity to contact Slunt on my laptop where it was so simple to have the keylogger installed, with realtime emails coming to me n another device. I could actually see what he was doing in real time, whether sitting across the room from him, or across town at work. He didn’t have a chance.
So, once Assclown was gone, I continued to put the keylogger laptop to use with a couple of subsequent casual boyfriends, both of whom were cheatin trawlers.
When I met my current partner, I admit to having left the software active, but finally got bored because he was so straight. I deleted the keylogger after a year or so, but there actually was one incident I caught with an old girlfriend contacting him. He agreed to meet her for a drink, innocent enough, but I couldn’t resist going to the bar at the agreed time, a friend in tow (she knew why we were going) and sitting there to catch the action. When boyfriend turned around and spotted me, well, let’s say I finally knew what the term “shit faced” means. Lol. He was falling over himself to try to explain and apologise….I simply said, you ever do that again behind my back and you are toast.
No sign of sneakiness since then. I don’t recommend being a detective. It takes a toll in stress.
I never did the Marriage Police thing, but I did do some sleuthing. I managed to twice gain access to his phone, when he was still using 4-digit passcodes. I couldn’t keep up with the passphrase change. I was interested in learning about his checking account, since I was convinced that he was paying out substantial sums to Schmoopie. In the end, I decided that I’d have to hire a forensic accountant, and the sum of money I’d recover probably wouldn’t be worth the expense. At that time, he was taking classes, but his employer was reimbursing him 50% of tuition. He had loans taken out, too, and was using the reimbursement checks to float his lifestyle with Schmoopie. I remember telling him at the beginning of his studies that the smartest thing to do would be to use those checks to pay off his loans, but nope, Schmoopie had told him you could use the checks for whatever. That accounts for close to $30K in funds wasted.
Anyway, I did some vehicle tracking when I was out of town for the weekend. I expected to find cheating, but I didn’t expect to find the extent of the cheating. He took Schmoopie’s grandchild to day care, took someone to the doctor’s office, and then spent a romantic night at a nearby scenic area before returning to our home, just in time for me to return.
I didn’t do the marriage police thing because I never confronted him. I found Chump Lady within days of Dday, and the first site I found also recommended against confrontation. I also realized that once I confronted him, I had limited options. I wanted to be able to plan things out. I did realize that I would have to divorce him. Before I discovered his cheating, I would have trusted him as a man of impeccable honor. After I discovered his cheating, I realized that no matter what happened, I would always know he was capable of lying and cheating.
I wasn’t going to live that way.
Trust in others is something we depend on every day of our lives. We trust that the unseen airline pilot will get us to our destination safely. We trust that the food in our grocery store is uncontaminated. We trust other motorists to stop at red traffic lights. We trust bridge engineers to follow building codes and procedures with integrity. We trust our significant other to be the person they claim or vowed to be.
Trust (and sometimes lives) are destroyed when people we depend on don’t live up to their own stated commitments. Especially if they are secretly flouting those commitments deliberately for selfish, greedy, diabolical reasons, without thought to how it would harm others.
After trust is gone, why bother? Nothing will ever be dependable again with them.
This!!!
I could seriously start another job as a PI… magnetic trackers, recording devices, pictures, phone logs, bank logs…I could go on and on! After about 7 months of it and he kept swearing he wasn’t with her and I kept finding evidence he was I said enough and stopped. After a while seeing him pulling into that hotel and knowing what he was going to do was too painful. He actually acted like he wanted me to track him again when I stopped… like it was exciting.
I live in a fault state so most of it was necessary and I got what I needed. Now I can honestly say I am going to take him to the cleaners and oops….work had a clause about affairs…so I get to see the Karma bus come around….alimony, child support and half his military retirement are going to feel so good every month!
My one advice is to only do it to validate the affair and then stop. I kept on and it was so painful and really delayed my healing process. After I stopped and couldn’t see him and whore meeting up I felt so much better.
What’s astounding is that when I went through his notebooks, I found nothing. I combed through years worth of notes and not one date, her name, a place to show anything. Not. One. Single. Thing. Most people doodle something. I thought this is one crazy ass fucker I’m dealing with. To compartmentalize this affair, his home life and his work life…. masterful! He is one sick bastard… so happy I’m away from that shit.
I learned that my nowdeadcheater likely hid an entire lifetime of cheating with me never finding ANY proof…he was pretty slick and I was so devoted to my “he would never cheat” goggles that I really never suspected. Its amazing that he never tempted a bunny boiler or sparked someone to clue me in. I think he stayed way under the radar and chose APs carefully.
He told me once that he was often propositioned my married women “who have a to to lose”…but of course I assumed since he told me that that he never took advantage of it.
He apparently hid things well until Susan who was his AP he was ready to leave me for. After the whole affair, life blown up, blah blah, he died, buried him…I was using a notebook he got at a work conference and it had a name written on the corner of an obscure page…her name and number
Lord have mercy….can you IMAGINE…when he wrote that name down thinking it was his secret I would never ever know of…if he could see in the future…affair, destruction, pain, shame, death…he is in the ground in a box and I find THAT.
I spent some time on the Marriage Police Task Force, oh yes. For two weeks after D-Day #1, I combed through every possible avenue I could looking for the truth, and I’m glad I did because it helped me piece together what was really going on. Unfortunately I was chumpy enough to really need *convincing* that my husband didn’t give a shit about me and what the real deal was. After D-Day #2, I was able to immediately begin a separation and pursue divorce. While our custody agreement languished in court, I continued surveilling him and gathering evidence (screenshots, PDF exports, etc. etc.) in case it would be needed by my lawyer, but I was very grateful to abandon that time-sucking enterprise when court was done. I think some amount of digging in is necessary to build your case as well as you can, but after that, the freedom from having to spend any time on him whatsoever is amazing.
P.S. If you have kids with the cheater, as I do, you will want to still keep tabs on him regularly (or outsource this to a trusted friend) and save any screenshots of gross or dangerous behavior because if you have to go *back* to court for him endangering your children, the more proof the better. But it’s not fun. It’s definitely not fun.
One night shortly after DDay when we were supposed to be trying to reconcile through MC and he was supposed to be no contact with Schmoopie, I saw him texting her from across the room. By the time I got over to him he had switched to a webpage screen and was trying to pretend like he was looking something up. I told him that if he tried to pull that stunt again I would grab his phone out of his hands and throw it in the toilet (wish I had now). He said “it makes me smile to hear you say that” (i.e. kibbles). When I actually tried to do something constructive, however he changed his tune. I tried to make him give me all of his electronic devices when we got home from work each night so he couldn’t spend all night texting her, but he got all “you’re not the boss of me” so that only lasted a night or two. He also said it would be more meaningful if he resisted on his own without help and well, I was a chump so….
Sadly after 34 year marriage & 21/2 year affair with Whore I finally caught him at her home. There were many red flags but I was so desperate to keep my family together that I ignored them. I now have Irritable Bowel Syndrome from the stress.
I was the marriage police for 2 years & so many things happened that it was right in my face. I look back now being divorced 2 years & try not to ruminate about those times. It was almost worse than my cancer discovery & treatment.
The Whore died few months ago & he quickly moved onto another woman. I quess Karma is sometimes a reality. I hope my Tuesday is in sight soon.
But glad to be retired from policing a cruel sociopath.
Hugs to all my fellow chumps! ????
Hope you continue to recover and move towards excellent health Kathleen. The stress cheaters cause is another aspect of their abuse. In case it is helpful I found probiotics helped settle IBS symptoms after the unsettling DD2, separation etc. after nearly but not quite as long marriage. Also looking forward to that Tuesday. Meanwhile focusing on being mighty one day at a time.
Onwards
Thank you for your kind words. I’m sorry you had to go through this horrible experience.
I have started probiotics also. It does help. It’s a shame the stress that we’re left with effects us.
But one day at a time is all we can do. Stay strong & take care if yourself
HUGS to you….????
????thank you for your kind words Kathleen and hugs to you too.
Reading inspiring CL posts and CN replies posts brightens each day. It is not a journey I chose but this is one of the silver linings (as is as gaining a life)
Agreed, CL! As you say useful for the gaslighting days but no way to live your life. I felt I was being lied to but I wanted to believe her – in the gaslighting days I was looking for evidence that she was telling the truth. It was her phone bills (which were in my name) that proved she was lying. I was looking at frequency of texts – months later I started looking at the time they were sent and this proved the affair had been going on much longer than she had been prepared to admit. So it was useful in a way to let me know of just how hopeless the situation was at that time.
I accidently caught him texting at 11:30 on a Saturday night. Of course he denied everything and wouldn’t give me access to his IPad or cell phone. He wouldn’t admit to who he was texting. The next morning, I told him he needed to leave. He left that Sunday and by Monday morning, I had changed the locks and put all his clothes in the garage. He took his Ipad and laptop but the stupid idiot left behind a family computer that I also used. Got a keylogger on that sucker, also was able to access his ICloud account, his emails, his calander, and our Verizon phone bills. Took a couple of weeks to connect the dots, they were using assumed names on their texts, her name changed from Joy to Joe to Jo and showed up in texts as Sue. Looking at the Verizon bill, it was hard to figure out, she was using her cell phone in her husband’s name and they didn’t have the same last name. Put 2 and 2 together and googled her and her husband’s name and found an obituary for her Dad mentioning both her and her husband. Once I had that info, I contacted her husband on Facebook messenger and confirmed that something wasn’t right (He was in total denial). Once my now ex found out I knew about his affair with a coworker( he is a CFO/COO of a SC state agency), he slapped me with a restraining order to keep me from contacting his work. That didn’t stop me but unfortunately state agencies in SC could care less about character, morals. family values, etc. ( Nicky Haley was our Governor) Hired a PI and we were divorced in February of 2017. Although, I brought in 150% of the income for 20 years and he spent most of it, he got 50% of our assets. The truth is, I got the best deal. He got a twice married whore who cheated on both of her husbands and she got a serial cheater who will sleep with anyone who looks his way! Our only child will be getting married this November and I pray to God that I never, ever, ever,ever,ever have to have any contact with him again!!!!!!!!!!
Well-done, IHH–you get a high Mightiness award for throwing him out before you had full evidence, and for contacting OW’s husband.
I wasn’t sure what evidence I neeeded to ‘prove’ my now XH treated me and the kids badly largely through the way he spoke to us and what he would say. So I sourced a little gadget that was a voice recorder and taped every convo we had for about 6 months which inevitably included his nasty comments, sarcasm, put downs etc. When I filed for divorce it was based entirely on his mistreatment of us. Turned out I didn’t need any of my voice recordings to divorce.
6 weeks after starting the divorce process I discovered his secret double life when I stumbled on his collection of over 200 sex tapes which he had made of himself with other people – male and female – over at least the last 13 years judging by the date set on the videos.
After this I continued to tape his rants and speeches including him claiming that I was deceitful for divorcing him (!) and how he had put all his spare money into our family and been a loyal and committed husband. It was hard keeping in check that in fact I knew that he was the deceiver and that at least £400 cash each month was spent on his hookers and that he clearly had a different definition of ‘loyal’ and ‘committed’ to the rest of the population.
BTW, he still doesn’t know I found out about his secret life, our divorce came through 8 weeks ago ( hurray!) and until he has coughed up finance he agreed to give me and the kids I’m not letting on that we know. Note, our kids are 18 and 22 not little ones. Once we have our funding ( it’s not a lot but we really need it) the kids want to confront him about what he has done. They now know most of the details, they are adults, they asked, and they want their say in it.
XH has made no effort to contact our son for just over 2 years or our daughter for 8 months ( since me and her moved out) yet is telling people he is the victim as he doesn’t see his kids. Neither kid wants anything to do with him. Note, kids and I didn’t want the house hence we moved out because turned out a lot of his sex tapes were filmed in our family home whilst I was at work and kids at school. XH is a total bastard.
So, I did use a tech you gadget but only to gather recordings as I wasn’t sure what evidence I would need about his behaviour. At the time I was totally clueless he was fucking around with all and sundry so I wasn’t ‘spying’ on him to catch him cheating.
I also found other uses for my voice recorder gadget such as recording important meetings with hospital consultant, pensions meeting – so I wouldn’t have to remember all the complicated stuff- and the like. Best £7 I ever spent on eBay! Not all techy spy gadgets are to catch out cheaters.
I just looked at our (shared) Verizon bill. Which I had never thought to do, because I was trusting, a chump, and frankly it never occurred to me that phones were cheating tools, or that cheating tools were a thing. (I was beginning to get the idea that cheaters *were* tools, however!)
Well, as a slightly OCD-with-data person, and former teacher of statistics and data analysis, I went to work on his phone records. And so I broke my own heart all over again. (Warning!) When I realized he texted an average of…can’t honestly remember any more … Meh! … some thousands of texts per month or whatever, and the image data went out in the middle of the night (i.e., in the toilet? or next to me in bed? or who knows?). I distinctly remember emitting a high pitched keeling and wailing noise, and then it all went black.
But you know, I had some iron-clad proof, no-fault state notwithstanding. And the phone # of at least one OW, and the capacity to inform on her professionally (she’s an OB/GYN), that she was hanging around on the phone texting boyfriend(s) on hospital time. Yeeeesh. That scared the living shit out of her, so much so that she took out a restraining order on ME (this was no way her first rodeo, and she knew just what to do. I had never been to her state.)
bleh. Leave them to their nasty, brutish little lives is what I say. (Although she still stalks me on Linked-In. WTF, bitch?)
Oh, and that one is a Jesus-cheater, too. Current GF/was OW is just filthy rich and has a terrible disease (well, besides no moral character I mean.) Asshole-formerly-known-as-my-exhusband has basically become a fifty-something gigolo. Good luck with that, pal!
I was a marriage police officer for 8 months, starting with D-day up until he finally called it. I was able to figure out his passcode and then add my fingerprint to his iPhone so I could unlock it even if he changed his passcode. I also obsessively checked his yahoo email and his work computer whenever I could get my hands on it. He was ok with this as we were supposedly reconciling. Until the end, when he said that my demands to keep tabs and know everything probably caused howorker to abort their baby, which was the “greatest tragedy of his life.”
It was an absolutely horrible time in my life and a soul sucking way to live. Whenever I get all woe is me, I’m alone and he’s all happy, I remind myself that the price of “winning” him back would have been to live in that state of constant hyper vigilance and distrust. I’ll take 50 years of solo nights on the couch with my dog over that any day!
I’m 3 years out from d-day, divorced a year and change, and he and howorker are now married. And miracle of miracles, she’s pregnant at age 50! Unlike me, she knows exactly who she’s marrying. I’m more than happy to let her take my place in the marriage police force.
“Whenever I get all woe is me, I’m alone and he’s all happy, I remind myself that the price of “winning” him back would have been to live in that state of constant hyper vigilance and distrust. I’ll take 50 years of solo nights on the couch with my dog over that any day!“
Thanks you Chump in training. Those are words I desperately needed to read today. I often lament the great life I should of had with him and feel jealous of the one he has with her. I need to get over that – quickly!
It was only after I found e-mails between fuckwit and OW#1 ten years ago that he would admit it. After 15 months of lying to my face, over and over and over and over again. I should have kicked him out instead of allowing him to sit in his dirty diaper for 10 years and then poof on me completely for an underground schmoopie, who he lies about now over and over and over and over. Even post-divorce he won’t admit what is clear, and now his lies extend to our adult kids.
I am glad I snooped 10 years ago, at least I got proof of what kind of man he is. It made it easier to accept it this time, but of course ‘easy’ is relative.
Let’s try and be supported. The mind-fuckery is real and sometimes we as chumps can’t think clearly until we get space.
My take on the Marriage Police thing is this: initially, as said before, it’s understandable to be in that mode during discovery and proof. But once that phase has passed; and the (again understandable) phase of unsuccessful reconciliation is passed – anyone who stays beyond that, in my opinion, is staying purely for spite. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to leave you now! You have to live with me breathing down your neck at every turn, you x#59o!” Two wrong’s don’t make a right – like Tracy says, get out.
Couldn’t have said it better myself… that’s exactly what it is, spite. I hate to sound cliche, but the old quote about “before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves” is SO true. Find the proof that you need, then get out. Many of us have wasted YEARS, and some, DECADES. Why would anyone willingly choose to stay? I don’t really understand….you cannot force someone to love you, and making both of you continually miserable and wasting your life is not a reasonable decision.
“you cannot force someone to love you, and making both of you continually miserable and wasting your life is not a reasonable decision.”
So true. I hear this. I read this. I still need to live this!
I needed a brief sting on the Marriage Police Force to do the research needed to understand my situation…got into his computer and found the smoking gun of a letter to her.
I think the funniest thing is that when I remarried, I chose a for real “Special Agent” who was a counter intelligence officer (since retired) …literally a professional at how to keep secrets…and you know what?
I trust him absolutely.
My policing was only a few hours. Didn’t find much, but acted as though I had. He confessed, I tossed him out that minute! Not that I was this Amazon creature, but more like, “I can’t do this, I can’t cater to this any longer….the devaluation, etc.” I’m done! GTFO! Not out of strength, but out of being broken.
Fuck YOU, your mother and liver and onions, too!
There have been a few D-Days in my many years with my him (my husband. I still can’t think of a funny slagging name for him). Each affair came as a surprise to me. Truly. I must be one of the biggest Chumps.
My policing usually happens after D-Day when I go looking for more information to find out the ‘truth’ about what happened. And then it continues for a while until I trust him again. Meanwhile he just goes further underground to cover his tracks.
Not this time though. He’s left for a 6 month trial separation to become a ‘better person’. During his ‘bettering’, he’s been spending an awful lot of time with the OW. He doesn’t know I know. I can see it on social media, tracking of the car, his fitness app. I’m using this time to get my ducklings facing the right direction. He lies to me and I know he’s lying! I play along. His behaviour and detachment from us clearly shows he doesn’t want to be back living with me and our two children. He doesn’t have the strength of character to ‘man up’ and say so. He knows the kids will be hurt (they already are) and he probably realizes one of them might shut off contact with him once they realize he’s been spewing lies for the past 6 months.
Because I’ve never been told the truth I’ve learned to go looking for it. I want to be fired from the police force!
I wasted most of Christmas sitting in front of my computer taking screen shots, looking for proof…and on and on! These are so many precious moments of my life I won’t ever get back. From what I’m reading here, this does seem to be part of the journey. Maybe I have to discover the depths of his depravity to convince myself I no longer should want him. And of course because his behaviour shows he actually doesn’t want me – that should be enough. But it isn’t.
This police work I’m doing needs to be stopped. I have gathered enough evidence 100 times over and the irony is I live in a no-fault state. So none of it matters. Plus if I asked him, at this point he’d probably fess up. I guess I want him to worry over how he’s going to ‘break it to us’. I don’t want to take that joyful moment away from him. I want the bastard to feel at least five seconds of discomfort.
Yes, yes, yes! I need to stop playing detective and put my energy into moving forward. I’m putting off the final confrontation with my husband because I’m terrified of the next stage in my life.
In the meantime, secretively checking-up on him is killing my soul. I’ve seen enough evidence to know he’s still cheating. The hopium I’m smoking has me obsessively looking and watching ‘just incase he’s given her up’. And I think I’m trying to get to the point where I see he’s beyond ‘help’. That he’s too far gone for resuscitation. He should have had DNR tattooed on his forehead at our wedding!
I haven’t detached. And I need to! I need to be hit over the head and regain my senses. Honestly, as I said, I’m terrified of the next stage. Scared shitless!
I’m weaning myself off the ‘undercover work’! Not fast enough though. I’ve read Chump Lady’s amazing book. I know what I should do…but I’m not stepping forward. I need a nudge. Nudge me please!
My husband seems to want the status quo to continue. He gets his kibbles by coming to the house now and then to fix things and have an infrequent meal with us and so on. And I’m sure playing the role of a ‘nice guy’ feeds his narcissistic tendencies. All the while he’s been continuing his affair. And although I’m sure it’s killing me bit by bit to live in this state of waiting/no man’s land/inertia – I’m scared the alternative might be worse.
I read so many posts here on CL about the other side of DD being freeing. I want to cross this bridge too. But fear is keeping me somewhat paralyzed. Somewhat is probably an understatement! Ha! I’m clearly over simplifying and minimizing this. And at the same time I’m overthinking it. My brain could power a city with the amount of energy it expends going around and around in circles.
How do I detach? After years of being with him it feels like a double amputation. My legs might have gangrene but I still dearly want them!
I know I probably sound crazy and I’m really embarrassed to reread what I’ve written. A part of me wants to erase my babble. I know what I should be doing – why don’t I do it??? Who else wants to be fired from the police force?
I remember when he fell asleep, and my stomach churning to go out to his car and search his cell phone. A roar in my ears. Mouth dry. What horror I find this time?
And, that new discovery (that shocks me to this day) of when I would confront him….he would get abusive with me. No tears. No apologies.
But threats to call the police on me for spying on his phone and me with my jaw open: WHO IS THIS PERSON?, Punking me ( like pulling a punch) and wild tantrums where holes would be put in the drywall.
So, standing there barefoot in the driveway, opening his car door and seeing the phone. Grabbing it.
And then putting it back.It was sticky and reeked of his cologne. I padded back into the house and went to sleep alone. In the morning, I packed everything I could in 6 huge laundry bags after he left for work. I sedated my dog because he has motion sickness. I packed my truck like a woman being chased by tigers. I changed my cell number and deleted my email before I shut the garage door. I left no note. I rolled out before 9AM.
The money did not matter anymore. No one is going to treat me with open contempt- EVER AGAIN. I have not seen or spoken to him since. That was one year ago.
I turned in my badge.
Excellent! Taking a stand and not allowing him to abuse you any longer. You are my hero!
I only have one word.. WOW… all of us can use that as a wonderful example of how to deal with a cheater, liar, manipulator. It is difficult to admit that fear is what keeps so many of us staying when we should be heading out the door. There have been many times that fear has crept in, in the dark of the night. At one point, one of my best friends said to me, “If you knew you could not fail, that you would be absolutely fine, would you still stay?” The honest answer is/was absolutely not. Decision made.
May or may not of…………licked my finger and then rubbed on suspicious stain.. in Laundry room on this table…..tasted substance to confirm…it was indeed what I thought……NEVER AGAIN unless getting paid big bucks as a CSI investigator….shame is dispating……slowly…
I fucking tested it………
Ha! I LOVE this brutal honest. “Look at me world. This is me and these are the levels to which I’ve stooped.”
Your post magamcmeh has made me smile and snicker. Thanks!
Seashell, WOW! How you found the strength is beyond me! (CLAPPING!)
When I felt there was something going on, an uneasy feeling there was dishonesty…I HAD to delve into his phone, use my intuition….I needed “proof! of the troof” LOL…Some men are so not good at subterfuge. It was wrong yes but I had it all laid out in front of me, in the end, in an email of admission. What followed were months of tears, indecision, counselling, conversations.
These days I have no feeling he’s keeping stuff from me….but because I don’t trust him anymore to NOT be ‘the person who lied’ again in the future….it’s irreversibly changed our r’ship, and I’m just waiting for one of us to see the light. When (if) there comes a time we both want more than our history together… I can see us parting. But til then we continue to hang on to what was good about us.
Would I love to use technology (or pay a spy) to find out if he’s simply got better at hiding stuff? Yes/no! /you betcha/sometimes/not really.
I’m attempting to work on the strengths I’ll need if I’m no longer a couple (it’s tough/scary at 59)…
so I’m gonna hang in here until I know for sure…deep in the heart of me…that I can make it on my own
@Ellexoh, I was where you are three years ago. I held on for three years and was discarded on Jan. 2 this year. I wish I would have just ripped the band-aid off. At least then it would have been my discard instead of his. Well, maybe not. He did the discard when he decided to have an affair. Can you be in a relationship with someone you don’t trust? I think not. I’m 61 and I have every confidence I can survive on my own. You can too! You are here, so in the back of your mind, you know how this is likely to end. Good luck, friend.
Thank you for the reply 2old4drama. I see myself as one of those women who will take her
time pulling that plaster off. But I’m aware of this, and know if it’s not done my way..and it’s not
a clean break…I don’t want 2nd thoughts/regrets to swamp me down the road.
When and if it’s time….I’m outa here
Me,too. Thank you for your post, LXO. I’m 58, and vacilate between staying with a man I may never be able to trust again, because we do have many wonderful memories, or throwing in the towel and throwing him out. Like you said, our relationship has been irreversibly changed, even IF he keeps his nose clean from this day forward.
My sister told me that when it becomes more painful to stay in the relationship than to leave, I will know it’s time.
Ivy…..I often feel a bit awkward on sites like this, because everybody always seems so staunch and decided re their r’ship, though I know some have taken years to take that step away from all they’ve known & built.
And I’m still in No-woman’s Land, stunned and indecisive
Hi. I too am where you both are. 26yrs together ..2 children. Gave up an amazing well paid career to be a SAHM. Worst thing i ever did because now i feel trapped to stay ( for the time being)…dd was 3 yrs ago and we are merrily wreckoncilng….I am however lining up my ducks to secure my future and ensure my daughters education ( fee paying schools ) are not affected which would happen if we divorce. He may be one of those unicorns…he is “trying” but i am now very sware of the true nature and character of the person i married. After finding CL my eyes were FINALLY opened and i stoped the pick me dancing – which he was enjoying very much but was killing my dignity – and threw away all the RIC books and replace them with…when lovd is a lie….wolf in sheeps clothing. I left them around for him to see….the game was over and he knew it. From then on he has been “different” and even my family has noticed. I havd to say i also took the opportunity to tell him every single thing about his immature selfish unsupporting behaviours ovef the years which i wpuld never have said. Ever thing got said that i needed to day…including the i knew you were messing around for years but couldnt find the proof until dd….he was so shocked that i had “seen” & ” known” about it all this time…..he thought he had been really smart and i has been unaware…Suddenly my well educated husband didnt feel so clever after all….
As awful as it is..i am now being the one who is not being totally honest in this relationship…..
I have lived my life always being honest true transparent so this end game is never one i have ever played.
But thanks to CL i am now biding my time and gettinb my head my life and my finances in order whilst i live with this “unicorn” for the time being. I dont play the marriage police anymore…i spent 20years looking for proof….but owing to the fact he was tech wizard everything was like fort nocks…and i suffered years of discard devalue etc denial as i found out in one massive dd that i had been martied to a serial cheater ( A dd when everything came out at once!).
So one dd to cover lots of cheating…..dont know which is worse….
Anyway i now no longer care if he starts messing around again because if he does i have been through that much pain and traums already…he gave me thd Ilybnilwy speech too….i feel i he in away has influcted so much pain and done so much damage and yet i SURVIVED it thanks to CL….that whatever he does in future wont matter to me.
So i sit here stronger than i have been in 20yrs just putting my life in order for my self & my girls first…whilst i see how i feel about the whole mess…
But i am so strong and “detached” from ” the thing” of my unicorn and i have finallh found ME again. I am not at meh as still living with him…..onviously…..but the balance of power has shifted….
His arrogance his “uou ard not the boss of me” has gone…
He may well be playing his own end game . Who knows. But one thing i do know is that he needs me more than i need him…..i have always been his security blanket…..i think for the first time ever…he feels vulnerable with me…Something i have felt with him for years…
Anyhow …. these are great ingredients for a relationship but today i do not care….. i loved him for ever and was his no.1 supporter through all his family career self esteem s#$t…and look what he did with my love….he took and took an took. Looking back i see he was never ever a “giver”.
When i was at university a few guys used to laugb and say
” treat them mean…keep them keen…
Treat them nice pay the price!”
Shoulda listened…..treated my husband too nice….in fact one day after dd when he was playing the blame game i told him i had “put him on a pedestal”….he said that was wronv and i should not have done so….
Apparently you can love someone too much….
That said it all to me….everything would never have been enough for him”
Ho hum.lesson well and truly learnt.
Now where are those ducks?
Stay strong everyone. CL puts you on the path to “see the light”.Thank goodness i found the site otherwise i would probably be exhaustively dancing dance and killing the last remnants of my self esteem and dignity….
I am back. And i am mightier than i have been in years. Ots not perfect yet but i am in control of MY life now….not the man-child i married.
So yes…..read read read CL …..play the marriage police until u get the proof…then stop…. get your ducks lined up.Take back control of your life .
Love and hugs to everyone.
man-child. perfect description. I call mine an adolescent.
I started being a marriage officer about 3 months after D-Day. Married 20 plus years with two children. Of course I was told what everyone on this site was told… that it’s over. I found out it was never over. After checking the cell phone bill which turned into an entire afternoon’s worth of work did I discover thousands upon thousands of exchanges with the same phone number. This was only after I was told he never texted or called her and that it was a work only affair. It was a work affair alright as in he would drive for 30 plus minutes one way to have sex with her at lunch close to where she worked in some random persons home. I did my best, time consuming research on county auditor’s websites to try and figure out whose home that was. Never did find out. After that I would wait until he went to sleep and go through his text messages, confront him and then all can imagine where that leads. I found hidden phones and email accounts. I wish I would of shown up at her home to give her husband and family the great news that had been so kindly delivered to me but I never got the chance. It took me so long to find her address and so much had transpired that I gave up on that idea. I’m pretty sure since I never got that opportunity her entire family was told a lie that we were already divorced. I also spent years checking Facebook looking for posts and pictures. I became a Googling expert. After many, many years post divorce of wasting my time still searching for things…searching for some sort of information that would give me the answers I thought would help me did I finally realize what a giant piece of my life I had given up that I could not/cannot get back and I could kick myself for it. If there is any positive about all the time wasted is that I finally did learn that none of the specifics mattered. All the specifics that I was destroying myself trying to unearth were for absolutely nothing. I’m now a decade down the road and as a weird twist of fate and through no effort of my own, all that truth was revealed to me. Hind sight is 20/20 right? It definitely is….I know now I should have walked about 10 minutes after the bomb was dropped on my families life instead of giving up 10 years of my life trying to understand the what’s and why’s of it all. There are no answers. You only control you is what I found out.
I remember laying awake at night and listening to make sure that his breathing was regular. Once I was sure, I would grab his iPhone and scroll through his call log and messages.
He was actually doing a good job of hiding things and for 3 months I thought that maybe I was going crazy. After all, he was a man of principles, full of integrity. How could I question him?
Fast forward to that fateful day in August 2017 when I left him at the beach and found his iPad in our hotel room. I tried my thumb on the home button and bingo! I was in. Started by checking the trash of his corporate email where I found two messages from a colleague which seemed a bit too familiar.
Because he was clearly a master of the read/delete kind, I couldn’t open the emails so I decided to save them to a folder. His email suggested the folder “WIN” and when I saw the love letters that it contained, I knew that he had truly LOST (me).
And then came the rage… I did not know what I had inside me and it scared the hell out of me, but it did move me forward.
I wish that I had played the marriage police role sooner. By the time DDay came around, he had successfully covered his electronic footprint (for the most part, there were some disgusting messages and posts on FB he was too lazy, careless or stupid to delete) by the time I was told “everything”. Which I am 100% sure is not everything as the man turns out to be a compulsive liar.
Crazily, I started down Discovery Lane when he complained that he had too many pictures on his IPhone. I started deleting memes and junk from his phone, and when I thought that I accidentally deleted a photo of our grandkids, I found several naked pictures of him (taken outdoors, during the day in a public place) in the recently deleted folder that were clearly not selfies.
He lied, lied, lied until he finally admitted that he didn’t take the photo himself a week later.
Over the next two months he trickled out the “truth”. He has cheated on me literally 1000’s of times.
He had a long term affair that I discovered by tapping our phone about 25 years ago. At the time we had three kids living at home, he swore he would never do anything like that again. He said he loved me and our family and didn’t want to lose us. We went to counseling. I told him that the next time he cheated it was over. So, problem solved. Not even close!
Since then, he has had multiple one-night stands with women and men. Obsessive masturbation to porn. Sexting, Skype, Snapchat, face time to get his jollies. Phone sex (people still do that?!). Exhibitionism. Several longer affairs, including a 10 year affair with the neighbor, during which they held a “marriage” ceremony and exchanged rings. He said that was his idea so the OW wouldn’t “cheat” on HIM!
The last ten years of our 41 years together were terrible for me. He ignored me until he wanted something. That something was either to give him oral sex after a night out with the “boys” or to find or do something for his other “wife”, who was and is a total loser who has never worked and lives on public assistance, a lazy sack of shit, a terrible mother who is always in trouble with the law. She was also as stupid as me to believe all his lies, as he cheated on her, too!
Sadly, I am still with him. But, I just joined a support group and started counseling with a wonderful therapist who specializes in sex addiction. Maybe one day I will pull up my big girl panties and ask him to leave.
Reading these posts makes me wish I was stronger than I am, but also gives me hope that the day will come when I can break free from him.
Such a horrible time, I don’t want to mentally re-visit.
However, who wants to break their family and lose assets if he really IS depressed, having a breakdown and his disrespectful unpleasant behaviour is because of a crisis of self?
So the concrete proof is needed, that you aren’t mental, and reality is that a way.
After that? You have the evidence that even though he MIGHT BE depressed, it is his character that is the problem. (IC: even depressed people have morals).
Then leave.
I’m a little late to the party, but still wanted to comment because this is something that has affected almost all of us chumps. I think what bothers me most about being a member of the marriage police force is the enormous amount of time I wasted trying to figure out wtf was going on in the beginning, and attempting to gather evidence once I knew. Soooooo many hours that I could have been using to improve myself and my life instead of obsessing over the timeline of the affair because he “doesn’t remember” and “nothing happened.” Hours spent searching the house, the cars, the garage, the workshop looking for a burner phone or additional hidden proof that he might have been stupid enough to hide at home, all in vain because he kept everything affair-related at work. Even more hours spent poring over the cell phone bill, cross-referencing his calls and texts with his business trips where he was screwing the MOW slutbag. Probably the most ridiculous thing I did was attempt to break into the “frunk” of his car (a frunk, for anyone whose husband’s mid-life crisis did not include an expensive European mid-engine sports car, is a front trunk). The little switch inside the car was broken, and the key fob button didn’t work either, so I convinced myself that he had disabled it on purpose because there was some giant treasure trove of evidence locked in there. Well, I downloaded the electrical schematic from the internet, and spent hours trying to figure out how to open it, switching or replacing the fuses, etc. Once I got it open and it was empty, I had a sudden realization about how crazy this whole thing was making me. I had spent almost an entire day, shaking with anxiety over what I might find. If he had any idea that I had messed with his car like that, he would have freaked out! Anyway, I just wish I had all those wasted hours back again, they provided absolutely no benefit to anyone. It makes me sad how crazy the whole thing made me, and he did not give one tiny fuck.
## THIS a million times…….##
It worked for me! But I shammed it I didn’t actually do it. I told my cheater I had employed a hacker, and I already knew and had proof of his cheating. The look on his face told me EVERYTHING I needed to know, and it didn’t cost me a dime. First, over about a month, I asked him if he had quit his porn habit I had discovered ten years before. Then, on the day I hit him with it, I explained that I kept asking that to see if and when he was going to stop lying to me. I already knew his porn habit, and a whole lot more, so why not just come clean… That was my story, anyway…
and he did! After the look on his face that said everything, and he knew it, he decided to just let it out. It off balanced him so much that he pretty much assigned me extraordinary powers from that point forward. Turns out, porn was the toast, and the sandwich included lap dancers, massage parlors and little korean prostitutes. What a gem – right? I invested 20 prime time years in this loser, and I am thankful I didn’t invest any more. I only have today and tomorrow and I will do my best to avoid losers, cheats and liars forevermore. I thank Chump Lady for helping my thinking early on, and loved her book. I loved this man and I wish for him healing and better emotional health in the future. From what I can see, though, the twitch CL talks about in all those who wish to reconcile – its permanent. Love to all and strength and peace be with you fellow chumps!