Jesus Cheaters and Other Holy Horrors

My faith was used against me, especially in the end although X wasn’t religious. Xhole was even baptized into my church. This after I think he discovered they all fell for his charm. So once again, I became the bad guy.

He went down to the front one Sunday, to ask for forgiveness after DDay #3. It was a last ditch attempt to win me back, but I was done and so embarrassed. Before I blocked his crazy texts after our divorce, he would sign off with “till death do us part.” Creepy since we were divorced and I was living with someone else.

My ex was not a religious person. But, he always had a high opinion of himself. He always used to say he hated liars. That liars are the worst people to be around. He was at times critical of others. How ironic was it that he looked me square in the face for 4 to 5 years and lied. Told me he was going away with his friend Bill. All the time screwing my cousin(he said they never had sex). These fuckwits live by their own rules.

We weren’t religious but there WAS that whole Ketubah thing hung above our bed that we wrote ourselves, saying something about faith and trust and love and family. For all I know she fucked OM under it.

I’ve got some fun for you. My ex-wife cheated on me with a woman, who just so happened to be the mother of our older daughter’s now-former best friend. Two families with three kids each have been blown up over this nonsense. (Chump Lady responded to my letter on this website last summer, and she changed my life.)

My ex said that I had failed her and the family by not encouraging the family to attend church more, and that would have prevented this whole nightmare from happening. Really? I mean, it gets tough to keep track of which of the Ten Commandments she was shattering at any given time (coveting neighbor’s wife, adultery, bearing false witness (i.e., being a bald faced fucking liar)).

She also told me that God had brought her and her girlfriend together. I mean, what are the odds that she would start sleeping with the woman only eight doors down, and they were both from TEXAS (I mean, what are the odds of meeting somebody else from the massive state of Texas?!?!). The hand of God must surely have been involved, and surely He must have thought that their love justified putting six innocent kids through divorce and causing pain to two innocent husbands. GOD had chosen this horror.

Assholes.

OW was a big time Jesus Cheater; on her third husband and had cheated on every single one of them. After all, she “isn’t perfect, just forgiven.” Barf. What I now snicker about now, though, is my confrontation of her and what she did after being outed.

Understand that my DD was very, very public and very, very humiliating for everyone in my family. I was caught completely off-guard and was trying to gain my footing in a virtual earthquake. My very first reaction was to call the little sociopath and begin screaming at her. Her response?

A whispered,”I can’t talk right now. I am in CHURCH.” Yes, at the very moment I learned of X’s cheating, his married girlfriend was in church! You better believe I screamed every awful name in the book before she had a chance to hang-up.

I had said all I had to say, but apparently she hadn’t. Later in the week, I received a letter that began,”I am NOT a whore.” Even in those dark days, I laughed for a very long time about that choice of words.

X was never religious, but he was in ill health, and he was quite afraid of dying. No problem, she could save him. That does involve putting one’s head in a married man’s lap, while in his family car, and “bobbing up and down,” doesn’t it? And, of course, later telling the cops you were having a “spiritual discussion.” I wonder how many times that line gets used?

OW is now a so-called lay minister for some very out there fundamentalist cult, and considered the “team leader.” How do I know? One of her besties is a woman I barely knew years ago when my kids were in school. This woman kept calling and inviting me to all kinds of weird religious gatherings, all of which I declined.

When my daughter was home from school a few years ago, she told me that the school mom had gone off the deep end and joined a crazy cult. One thing led to another and Eureka, we realized that OW is considered one of the leaders of this “church.” The school mom had been trying to get me to OW’s church to “save” me!

Yes, the OW is now the leader of a fundamentalist Christian cult (and there are a lot more of those things than I ever knew), who thought she was gonna save me – after she imploded my 25 plus year marriage! Now, that is a hard one to comprehend.

My stbx said I violated the 2nd commandment (shall not take the Lord’s name in vain) when I said “f&ck you” to him. Because that also covers all profanity? I reminded him about Thou Shall not Commit adultery. Thou shall not covet your neighbor’s wife. Thou shall not bear false witness (lie). No reply from him.

My ex was a classic Jesus cheater. He spent a decade (or more, who knows) visiting hookers, massage parlors, strip clubs, escorts, swingers clubs and hook up sites. He was semi-active in our church. I took the 4 kids to church every week. He would go in a separate car and then “get called out of the meeting” as soon as we arrived because…important physician! So not really involved in church, never accepted service assignments because…..busy important physician.

Our church did disfellowship him for a time, but as soon as I filed for divorce he got back on the Ark. He personally converted and baptized his final affair partner and made it legal 5 month after the divorce was final. He played a shell game with the church leaders. He moved areas so no one knew all the information.

At the court hearing for our divorce he actually, wait for it…………brought a bible to court and put it prominently in from of him on the table. We lived in the buckle of the Bible belt so I guess he thought the judge would see it there and think he was so righteous. Apparently the judge thought cheating on and abandoning your family was not so righteous as I got very generous alimony!

Xw had the Ten Commandments hung on a wall in the dining room. The ‘country’ version with Dutch/Amish characters on hand painted embossed tin.

After leaving me, I took a sharpie it and circled the one about adultery with a diagonal line- the international symbol for NO!!

She saw the defaced picture during a subsequent visit and was miffed for about 3 seconds from my message…more angry about her revised picture than her role in it, …then switched channels to indifference after muttering a quip I’ve since forgotten.

I don’t think anything material in the house had value to her. Once The shiny wore off- which I conjecture happens before the receipt finishes printing- it’s on to the next impulse purchase.

Racking up debt from constant impulse buying is a big red flag ???? for me now. Especially expensive clothing that’s hung up in an overflowing closet with the sale tags still on them, never to be worn once. Image management for sure.

Money ???? doesn’t grow on trees ????… in her world apparently it does.

The only reason I can come up with for dismissing spiritual guidance is that they tell themselves they were ‘saved’ at some point in the past and have a free pass from any and All all future ‘sins’ which were payed ahead by blood.

When I asked my Episcopal priest how I could be assured that what I was hearing in my head & heart was coming from the creator…I was told I’d best bounce it off a few genuine people first.

I believe there are no coincidences. Faith has showed me that higher powered messages come through other people (plural) and roadblocks to my plans in such a way that mere coincidence cannot be given credit for. However, freedom of choice reigns supreme over predestination. That’s where AGENCY comes in.

My ex, The Rev Cheaterpants was (is? Who knows?) a LCMS Lutheran pastor (very conservative). No joke, at certain pastors meetings, there would be a session for the wives (no female pastors so all wives & no husbands) that was along the lines of “have more sex with your husband so that he won’t cheat or look at porn”, one time with a selection of racy bras in case we didn’t get the picture. (Apparently there was an issue with a lot of pastors being addicted to porn).

We used to joke about it (bc of course he would never cheat), but now I wish that I had stood up and pointed that his cheating would be more indicative of his character than whether I wore a push up and thong.

Also while he was at seminary, a pastor killed his wife. Apparently the reaction of more than one professor was “I wonder what she did?” Even my ex was appalled at that.

Anyway. Fun fact—after DDay and we separated, he continued to preach at a church about an hour away, which he lived his Ashley Madison cruising, BSDM-loving, blow jobs in the office getting, cheating on the True Wuv OW, best single (but still actually married) life. And then he met his new True Wuv and popped the question while praying over Chik-Fil-A.

The other odd way that religion came up in the end of my marriage (due to my husband’s affairs) was that my mother-in-law was very religious and worked in a Christian church. She would send me the RIC books – I know she was trying to be helpful, but it was interesting to me how her religion made her look at this in such a different light. she essentially told me that a man is not responsible for his affairs because it’s due to the devil trying to pull down a good man to get him away from God. And that she believes the more “good” and holy a man is, The harder the devil tries to reach them and that we cannot possibly understand their struggle and how hard it is. My ex mother-in-law was a great woman and I’m not trying to disrespect her beliefs, but it really bothered me how it removed The responsibility element of it and implied my husband was not to blame for his actions. I get that it’s her son and she wanted to believe that he was a good person and a good Christian, And I honestly think it’s sad that she will never know who he really is inside. I’m not referring just to the cheating but he had intense alcoholism, drug use, physical and verbal abuse toward me, etc. She knew about all of that. what she did not know is to this day he is hiding a child he had with an affair partner. There’s so much she doesn’t know about her own son. But even if she did she would put the blame on the devil and not on her son. This coupled with her sending me the books made me feel like somehow the onus was on me to try to fix an unfixable marriage. I genuinely feel terrible for people in a religion that would make them take on the blame and burden for others actions. I’m sure that was not her intention.

I have quite a lot to say about Jesus cheaters.

The Evangelical church my grandparents took me to every weekend (two hour services on Sundays, plus Sunday school and a communal meal) was full of “handsy” men, especially as I approached puberty. I made up my mind quite early on that if this was what church was like, I wanted no part of it. So when I moved away from home (the day after high school graduation, but that’s another topic) and my boyfriend’s family invited me to attend Mass with them, I wasn’t enthusiastic. Still, they were wonderful people so I went. And to my surprise, no one groped me, put their arm around me and “accidentally” let their hands brush my breasts or made lewd comments. In fact the Catholic Church seemed so much more dignified and spiritual, I felt like I had found a home.

My first husband (not the same guy) was Catholic, and his parents were also wonderful people who invited me to worship with them every Sunday I wasn’t working. My husband (let’s call him Greg, since that was his name) was music director at another parish, and spent the entire service in the choir loft, so I wouldn’t be able to sit with him so I was happy to attend with his parents. About a year into our marriage, I came home early from my 3-11 shift at the hospital and found him naked in bed with the neighbors. He swore “nothing happened.” (Don’t they all.) My parents told me that he “had to cheat” because there was something missing in me, and I wasn’t a good wife. They advised me that it was my duty to figure out where I was shortchanging him and fix myself so “he wouldn’t have to cheat.” My pastor told me that marriage is a sacrament, and it was up to me to figure out what was missing in our marriage that drove him to cheat, and improve myself so he wouldn’t have to cheat. My therapist asked me what I did to make him cheat, and insisted on working on ways to improve myself as a wife. I dutifully forgave Greg, and worked on rebuilding the trust that HE broke. A year later, I had another D-day — a wonderful Friday challenge topic would be “the strangest way I found out he was cheating” — and I kicked him out and filed for divorce. I remained close with his family and even flew a thousand miles to visit his sister at the university where she was working on her PhD. “Of course you didn’t recognize the signs of him cheating,” she said. “He had never NOT cheated.” He cheated with my co-workers, his ho-workers, my boss, his boss’s wife, my SISTER and the woman he rear-ended at a stop light. Oh, and he cheated with the nun who led our pre-Cana classes.

I know what they say about priests — and I was never surprised about that one — but you’d expect to be able to trust a NUN not to fuck your husband. Greg said he was just helping Sister Margaret (also her real name) figure out if she had a “true vocation.” Turns out she didn’t . . . whether or not she stayed in the Order, any nun who would fuck my husband decidedly did NOT have a true vocation from God.

A few years later, I met a charming, funny man who said he was divorced. He was also Catholic, and had been a monk until he left the order before taking final vows to marry this woman in the congregation. He WAS divorced before we got married, but not as much before as I had believed. Nevertheless, they weren’t living together. He wanted his friend from the monastery, Father Steve, to marry us, so we trekked off to Chicago to meet Father Steve. Father Steve didn’t want to meet in the church OR the rectory. He wanted to meet at a bar with which Tom (also his real name) was quite obviously familiar. It was my first foray into a gay bar. Father Steve declared that Tom and I were committing adultery by living together even though by this time I’d been divorced a couple of years (and it took a LONG time to get a divorce in Massachusetts) and Tom was actually divorced as well. Because we were adulterers, he refused to marry us — so I asked my aunt, a judge. Fast forward a couple of years, and I started getting hints that Tom was rather more interested in men than I believed. “Father Steve says that sleeping with a man isn’t adultery because it isn’t really sex. It isn’t sex because there’s no possibility for procreation.” Father Steve would say that because he was one of the men Tom was sleeping with.

Our marriage was, of course, falling apart and Tom was spending money as though it were water. At one point, he asked for the joint checkbook so he could buy himself some toys, and I said there was only enough money in the account to pay the gas and electric bills which were due at the end of the week. The checkbook stayed in the desk drawer, and I paid the bills on time. A week later, I get a call from the Base Chaplain (by this time, Tom was in the Air Force) who wanted to be sure I knew how much I was jeopardizing Tom’s military career by “writing bad checks.” Turns out Tom had taken a new book of checks out of the desk and bought his toys. (OK, they were guns. He bought guns.). The electric and gas checks bounced. During the course of the ‘counseling” the chaplain insisted I needed, I happened to mention that Tom was cheating on me and beating on me. Apparently the session was not as confidential as I had been led to believe. Tom came home and threw me across the room because I should have kept “our private business” private. In an uncharacteristic moment of real boundary-setting, I allowed as how “if you didn’t want people to know you were cheating on beating on your wife, you should not have been cheating on and beating on your wife.”

Shortly after he strangled me into unconsciousness and dumped me on the highway, I filed for divorce.

So, I’ve been groped and grabbed by Evangelical (married) church leaders, cheated on by the music director of the church and the nun who led our pre-Cana classes, chumped by a still-married former monk who then married me and cheated on me with a priest (and several former monks) who happened to be having an orgy the weekend he was visiting) and then gaslighted by the Base chaplain who evidently believed that inadvertently bouncing a check was MUCH worse than cheating on or beating your wife.

Can you blame me for not having much use for religion in my life these days?