A pernicious and predictable bit of mindfuckery after D-Day is the Sad Sausage.
Did you find evidence on a cell phone? This is absolutely heartbreaking! For them. How COULD you!
Need some questions answered? This is not a good time right now. They’re in a shame spiral and need some space (from you, consequences, probing time-lines…)
Does it hurt them too? More, really. This is hard on Schmoopie too, you know. A GOOD person. And if you could get past the judgment (they suffer unjustly from your judgment) you would see that no one intended any harm. Also, they said they were sorry, OKAY?
This is all very difficult.
Your Friday Challenge — Best Sad Sausage Performance.
TGIF!
He said “I was waiting for you to love me”.
Obviously I didn’t show him I loved him enough after all those years.
Similar -“You never loved me”. ='(
“I go to the gym for *you*, and you never compliment me on my biceps.” ='(
Yep, 27 years, six kids, “I didn’t think you would care.” Also the ho-worker told a group of of friends, in front of her husband during their divorce (the one who told me), “I couldn’t help it I just fell in love with him.” Yes GROWN ADULTS we are talking about.
Oh yes, this falls under the manipulative ignorance category, doesn’t it? When cheating bastard ex was arrested for solicitation of prostitution 23 years ago, I got the “I didn’t realize infidelity was a deal breaker.” Geez, really?
We separated for three years after that, but I let his “new and improved after counseling” ass move back in. He just built a bigger and better secret basement.
Ex and I had been married 20 years, with a teenage son. We had our daily routines, garbage day, check mail, pay bills, band practice, school fundraisers, band competitions, recitals. Fairly normal routine of a long term married couple with a teenage son in high school marching band.
We were walking through the mall one day when ex says in his sad sausage voice, ” I don’t feel butterflies in my stomach anymore when you walk into the room” not knowing what to say, I said nothing and chalked it up to ex is being weird
Butterflies in his stomach when I enter a room?? I don’t recall ex ever mentioning butterflies until then. We were a long term married couple in our 40’s, not adolescents.
Infatuation, excitement of a new relationship will give you butterflies in your stomach.
Band Mom’s are predictable and boring.
If only I had been more exciting.
It all made sense when later I discovered ex had found someone in a hotel gym who had been giving him more than butterflies when she entered a room.
OMG!! Yes, same! He went directly from work to workout every night, keeping notes of his workout AND names/descriptions of girls from the gym. Never got home until 8pm leaving me to do everything with 2 kids and I didn’t compliment his muscles enough! I told him I didn’t like his muscles or leaving us alone all the time!
Uhg! Those muscles are super gross, especially when they come from abandonment.
Workout Widow SAME.
He was away all week with a military job (they expect you will need time to work out) while I was home with the kids & a desk job.
When I asked him, why? Why her? …She complimented his physique. (Firstly what sort of douche even says ‘physique?’) Oh if only I had complimented his physique more! ????
And then he had the nerve to say that he was disappointed in my post-baby body! I weighed less than when we met… but I had a diastasis. Which looked unattractive ????
But he also had the sadz because wanted a third child. From my appalling disfigured body. ????
Sometimes you want to just record the random victim acts and then play it all back to them, juxtaposed. They can’t possibly be listening to themselves. He really isn’t that stupid of a person.
I missed a pronoun: HE wanted a third child. But complained about how I looked due to childbearing. ????????
HE was the third child.
Exactly!
????
I knew something was wrong when my stbx couch potato started working out in the basement with music blaring to Iron man by Ozzy Osbourne.
The FW was always a gym rat, very muscular. I work out and run, so our lifestyles meshed. We participated in races together, trained together, motivated each other. BUT – at one point he was under the illusion that he should have someone “better” and he thought that Instagram fitness models were his caliber. Totally laughable.
Who was schmoopie? In her 50s like me, never ever worked out at all.
Who is he with now? She’s almost 60, skinny, with zero muscle tone. Not into fitness.
And my bf doesn’t work out, but he’s perfectly supportive of my running etc. and that’s all I need. I don’t care about muscles, I care about decency and respect.
Oh those notes…found symbols on ex’s calendar with the legend below. Triangles = dinner, circles = phone calls outside of work as Owhore was a subordinate & stars = kisses. When confronted ex said he hadn’t slept with her yet but wanted to. Even though my heart was breaking at that moment & my brain was in a disoriented state, I knew he was lying big time.
I found emails from my thirty something ex to the college intern: “I’m doing pull-ups for you. I’m shaving for you.” Ridiculous. A guy who needs kibbles for his (puny) muscles and smooth face – from a very young woman who is not his long term partner – while working in the woods in the middle of nowhere… not my type! I had no idea he was like this, and I never would have known if I hadn’t found all of the cringy, incriminating emails and texts from over the years.
Chumps worry about being desirable and loved, when it really should be the cheaters. My ex is a joke, and he was a big, drunk baby who was terrible in bed. He had no idea how to treat a woman. My high school relationships were more fulfilling, and I’m not saying that out of “bitterness.” With him, I believed there was something wrong with me… but now I scratch my head and think, what about the relationships that came before? They were fine. Intimacy was never, ever good with that clown. He can jerk off to porn or feel like a big man when he has flirty young women hanging off him. This does not make him attractive or interesting to me.
Yep. I didn’t praise his appearance enough and howorker did. So obviously she loves him more. (25 years of being a devoted military wife count for nothing). What he didn’t understand was that I didn’t mention his appearance often because it didn’t matter to me. I loved him. I had loved him since I was 18. I loved him regardless of what he wore, how he looked, what he weighed . I loved HIM, not just his appearance. That’s REAL love. The kind of love that sticks with you through better or worse for the rest of your life. But he threw it in the trash for the hero worship of a younger coworker.
One of the red flags chumps are supposed to look for is FWs’ suddenly “improved appearance.” He did go to the gym a lot more during the fuckfest, but after all the endless booze and bistro grub consumed by him and “Beefy the Danger Pig” (the name my tween daughter coined for the AP after finding APs texts), FW’s hair radically grayed and thinned, his formerly flat gut cantilevered over his belt, his once firm jawline got squashy and he began to pose for every photo with his chin lifted up to hide his extra flaps.
It threw me off the scent at first. I didn’t compliment his appearance during that time because I was seriously worried about his health. We’d been crunchy health nuts for 19 years, then he seemed to be suddenly aging faster than his parents.
Meanwhile, as I learned after D-Day during the “full disclosure” portion of otherwise waste-of-time/money RIC therapy, Beefy basted him with flattery with one hand and picked his pockets with the other. The only slight kick I got when the dissipated marital assets were fully tallied was that the AP looked like a bleary-eyed beluga whale by the end of the affair. You could say they both choked on their embezzled spoils.
Love “Beefy the Danger Pig”! ????????
And “bleary eyed beluga whale” ????????
A thing that strikes me is that *very* few of these skanks are anything special to look at, (fuckwit’s whore looks like a rat with specs ????????) it’s all about the kibbles and duper’s delight. And some of them (like my ex fuckwit) get off on the idea they’re a special, superior person *elevating* the whore.
“rat faced whore has had nothing all her life! I’m just trying to show her how the other side lives!” Excuse me for being soft!
What a nasty person I was not to appreciate his magnanimity. ????????
???? I’m still in a lot of pain at the moment but yup – AP is about 3 times the size of me and bloody rough. I’m slim and I think fairly classy. So many people have been shocked by the girl he chose to do the dirty on me with. Chubby, ugly and not one jot of style. He also put on a shit tonne of weight. Stuffing their little piggy faces together whilst working I suppose. He always seemed to adore me I’m in utter shock! I was 8 months pregnant when he started this.
Yet another Workout Widow here. If I dared complain about him keeping me waiting for dinner until 9 pm b/c he was working out after work, it was “I have to stay fit so you will stay attracted to me.” I fell into the trap of arguing, of course: I’ll never not be attracted to you; I don’t care about superficial stuff like that; I love you for who you are…. Once I learned about narcissism and projection, I learned what he was really saying was, “You don’t work out enough, and so I’m losing my attraction to you.” He left me for a woman he’d met at the gym, and on the way out, it was all sad sausage: “You don’t train for these races with me” (Um, 32 mile running races? No, no I don’t…. We did plenty of other things together BTW, like multiple-day bike tours, climbing, hiking, etc. People were SHOCKED when he said he was leaving me b/c we didn’t have similar interests anymore. They were like: You guys do more together than any couple we know.) I also got, “I’m tired of feeling alone in my own house.” “I just need to be happy again,” etc. Just a complete lack of adult awareness that there might be other people in the world with needs, too.
Oh, and my favorite was during the divorce: he had to move his stuff out of my house per our decree, and of course he kept refusing to cooperate, making it work on his schedule, etc. Finally, I put my foot down when he tried to cancel plans one more time, and I got a self-righteous text about how “this was a difficult time for both of us” and I needed to be cooperative. If I could have punched him in the face through the phone, I would have. Yeah, buddy, a difficult time 1000% of your own manufacture. But no, in his little five-year-old brain, he was the poor sad sausage and I was the mean, nasty witchy wife.
okupin, I heard the same thing “I work out so I can look good for you.”
Translation-“you don’t work out enough, I’m losing my attraction to you.”
We were active, we’d go hiking, take long walks, until he suddenly decided that 5 mile hikes and walks weren’t enough for him. He needed something more challenging, like all day, 26 mile steep uphill hikes in rough terrain “alone.”
People we knew were also shocked when ex said one of the reasons for our divorce was we had nothing in common. He told me wanted to find someone he had more in common with. “Something different” he forgot to mention he had already found something different, coincidently “something” liked to hike, 26 miles in steep, rugged, mountain terrain. She happened to be a triathlete.. Guess who became a triathlete??
I also fell into the trap of arguing that he didn’t need to spend that much time at the gym I loved him the way he was. He’d say, “you’d tell me I looked good if I became a fat slob.” Translation: “don’t expect me to do the same.”
There was a period of time when he was unemployed for three years, and gained a considerable amount of weight. I never considered leaving a depressed, unemployed chubby husband. I actually like him better. Hugging him want like hugging a mannequin.
He wasn’t as intense, not stopping to look at himself in every mirror or window reflection and our conversations weren’t revolved around his workout.
I packed up my ex’s shit to get him out of the house faster. He was doing nothing like he was going to wait until the last minute and then make excuses about not having enough time. He would sit in his game room playing video games and talking to his adult baby girlfriend loudly on speaker phone every night after work. He had lots of time, he was just being a dick. A now ex friend told me I shouldn’t be doing that and I was liked I want him out! I want to start healing! And then she told me I shouldn’t be touching his things. Fuck that. I wasn’t leaving his shit in my bedroom to look at every day because he was playing mind games by not doing it himself. Also, I was good enough to clean and organize all his crap for 20 years, I’ll touch it while getting it the hell out of my home all I want.
Good for you KatieP! I did the same. Every Wednesday and alternating Fridays when he came to pick up the kids I had tubs and boxes of his things labeled with his name sitting on the porch. Everything was arranged nicely – clothes folded, fragile stuff in bubble wrap, reasonable weight to the box. He threatened to report me to his attorney (he’d moved into his mother’s condo and didn’t have much space) but I knew the court wouldn’t care since I’d treated his things with respect. And it felt so damn good to rid my house and garage of 18 years of his crap.
Oh, trust: I had already packed all his shit in boxes and put it either in the attic or the garage b/c same story as yours. Plus, I knew he was going to treat me like his personal Goodwill if I didn’t make him deal with his own shit. And even then it was pulling teeth to get him to just load the boxes in the fucking car and drive away. I was like, You were the one who was in such a hurry to discard me, and now you’re dragging your feet about moving out? But it was all about control, of course. He didn’t like me calling the shots—on anything.
“I wasn’t feeling love from you and the kids”. Meanwhile we were all performing a perfectly choreographed “family “ pick me dance that was more strenuous/exhausting than the Rockettes Christmas show…….and that is why the kids and I are enjoying over 3 years of NC.
I feel trapped in a little cage.
Ex looked at me one morning as I was drinking coffee, and said “you’re never happy,” I didn’t understand why he’d say I wasn’t happy when I felt happy. He said I didn’t look at him with a smile on my face.., being a good chump I worked on smiling at him more.
A couple months later ex tells me I’m never happy, and he can’t make me happy, hr’s tried everything and I’m not happy…again I didn’t know why he’d say I wasn’t happy.. and he could never make me happy? I had no idea what he was talking about. I was confused and did my best to make it known I was happy, smiling, and not voicing any concerns or complaints. Wouldn’t want ex to think I wasn’t happy. Then he left, one of his many excuses or reasons from a long list of my shortcomings was “I’m never happy and he could never make me happy” he claimed to have tried everything to make me happy and it was impossible.
Translation: he wasn’t happy, and there was nothing I could do to make him happy. It was a waste of time, I wasn’t AP.
I made the effort into making ex happy, being happy, proving I was happy and working on our marriage, ex sat around being miserable. It never occurred to me that it wasn’t me.
Classic projection. If only I had known them what I know now.
To anyone who hasn’t seen this TikTok — sad violins set to apology text, which went viral.
Awesome! Luv how she mocked the FW “I haz a sad” story instead of falling for it!!!
Such a good TikTok. The final Netflix is so common as well. The version I got was “Did you change the locks on the apartment? ”
Because asswipe, you raid my fridge and make long distance calls on my phone while I’m out.
Yep…..the dick texted me one night early on because he was locked out of his music library on his phone(apple, Amazon idk) yep, I changed all the passwords when to told me you weren’t coming home……you were the one who knew what you were doing all those years, you should have expected that. Explain that one to your band mates. New phone who dis.
“I love you so much more than Emily……..”. Bahahaha. I got that, “I love you not them. I never stopped loving you”. Wtf!!
That video is gold. Wow!
Omg, just watched it. LMAO. Those two women, so young and soo smart. I’m proud! I lost it with the Netflix at the end
“… also, did you change the Netflix password?”
This is fan-fucking-tastic.
Extra credit for the Minnesota Vikings sweatshirt.
I know, exactly…pure gold…and the Vikings sweatshirt – love. My new husband is a huge man who loves the Vikings and dresses in gold and purple (including 2x purple zebra striped zoomba pants) just to watch games on TV.
OMG love this! Netflix password…..????
I was thinking – wow on that violinist- then I figured out it was Lindsay sterling- doh! I really should read more – ha
Hilarious! Thank you!
so great! This also reminds me of an artist, Sophie Calle, who did a fantastic three-floor installation about her break up with her boyfriend. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-artwork-changed-life-sophie-calles-exquisite-pain review of
Hah, did you see the very end of that article?
‘I sat in my room, typing, thinking, “I will stop being obsessed with my own pain, as it surrounds him, on Tuesday at 11.” It didn’t work, mostly. Until one day, it did.’
Maybe Tuesday is a universal truth.
Yesss came here to say.
Toward the end, after she reads, “I’m sorry, okay,” she tries not to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.
I kinda wondered if this text could be real, but after what I’ve seen from CN, I know it is.
????????????awesome
This was the best thing I’ve seen in awhile
Sooooo fun! I love it love it love it…
This is hysterical!!! Did you change the netflix password? take me off the costco card? change the amazon prime password? did you drop me from your car insurance? can you help me and my kids get health insurance through obamacare again after the divorce is final? are we still going to Tampa?
Did you change the Netflix password?
Brawhahaha!
I changed the Netflix password to fuckyouxxx, with xxx being the cheater ex’s name. It made me giggle every time.
Watched and it’s an instant classic!! ????????
I was standing in his way of true happiness & how could I not want that for him?
Yes, as I was bawling on the floor, ex yelled, “Why can’t you see that I deserve to be happy?” This from a man who never raised his voice to me ever in over 26 yrs together. I became instant afraid of him & it tramatizes me to this day.
Me too. My tears just upset him.
Mine just looked dead in the eyes. Truly seeing how he felt (i.e. didn’t feel) about my pain said it all.
Mine said my tears were abusive. I was abusing him by crying when he insulted me and threatened me. They are such a joke.
Omg, that is word FOR WORD what my soon to be ex said! 20 years of marriage and no regard for my hurt. They are all the same sad sack of shit, aren’t they?
OMG love this! Netflix password…..????
Love that Tiktok. I dated a moocher! I broke up with him when I realized he was a mama’s boy narc. I changed my Netflix/prime acct pws and kicked him off my account. I got the nastiest text from him about how I took the “Ozarks” away from him! Bahaha..then I blocked him forever.
My ex said “he didn’t get to date enough before he met me”. He was 29 when we married and we dated three years before marriage. Unbeknownst to me, he was on a sex chat line before we met and “never” left it. 20 years and two kids later…who knows how many “dates” he went on. He felt justified. What a sick fuck! And I don’t have a problem saying that he can burn in hell for the hell he put me through.
OMG mine said the same thing when he wanted to be polyamourus!! I thought to myself then WHAT DOES THAT MEAN. Mine was also 29 when we met and he only had 5 girlfriends.
STBX was 39!!! When we married
Red flag in its self but said after got caught he hadn’t dated enough, married 27 years, why is it only now after d day I see all those many, many red flags ????????♀️
Wait. Mine said the SAME EXACT WORDS. “he didn’t get to date enough…” He was 29 when we met and we dated for 3 years before getting married. After 25 yrs of marriage, he can now date all he wants. What kind of subhuman discards his family like this?
Aurora Cruz HA. Yes, the young ladies on internet dating sites are desperate to date 57-year olds schlubs who need Viagra to get it up! Fer sure! One of my pleasures in dating (there aren’t many) is listening to the whining of the many, many men my age who say “I didn’t think it would be this hard” (to find someone nice to date) – to which I always add mentally in my head, “You mean, when you left your wife?” and that’s usually what they do mean. They were last dating in their 30s in the 1990s, when women were fed a load of crap about being more likely to be killed by a terrorist than get married at their advanced age, and were desperate to have babies before their fertility ran out (this back in the day when it was much less socially acceptable to have babies by yourself – now, who cares?). So they were dealing with a desperate pool of women, who would put up with a ton more nonsense than women in their 50s today are willing to accept. One man my age was honest enough to tell me that yes, he did get approached by younger women – who then made clear that he was supposed to pay for their education, their kids, their ride, their stuff – i.e., it’s a business transaction. I guess this is the SADZ of the middle-aged chump: “It’s so hard to find quality women these days!” 🙂
YES!!!!!!!!!!!
????????????????????????????????????????????????☝????Yup
Yes, my ex is paying for his (daughter-aged) wife’s third degree at med school in Texas. I’m sure he thinks she loves him for his mind and personality (he lacks everything in looks). But, I’m pretty darn sure she sees a meal ticket when she looks at him and nothing else. I suspect, after a few years, and when she’s actually doctoring (if that happens – history shows she doesn’t stay with any one job very long), she will find a handsome doctor closer to her age, who doesn’t need viagra for a stiffy, and she’ll walk away from the old man after he invests thousands in her. All of that is very appropriate since he walked away from me with thousands after I supported his career for 30 years.
Toot toot ! Here comes the karma ???? ????
Mine said the same 3 years ago! He was 29 when we got together. Is he dating, though?! No, he’s an almost 43 year old who works until 5, then sits and plays video games while smoking pot. I guess that greener grass and lost youth isn’t as fulfilling as he thought it would be. I guess howorker gets to wonder why he doesn’t ever want to go anywhere or be intimate more than once every week or so. I would say they are both sad sausages right about now.
Warning, my first XH said the exact same thing… We got married at 30… then 16 yrs later with kids he discarded me …. ‘we shouldn’t have gotten married; he was too young’ blah blah blah. He had a big and well hidden (until the end) porn habit.
After being devalued by H#1, -H#2 came along years later -I was prime target for love bombing. Then, H#2 discarded me for younger office whore (who was married with kids) and fuckwit H#2 blamed it on his former wife!!! He cried and said he shouldn’t have stayed with his ex-wife so long because she was a miserable controlling woman (he had left her after two decades of marriage).
Both these men are well educated high-level business professionals.
This sounds like a very bad soap opera. My warning is to watch out for love bombing if you were devalued previously. I was treated exceedingly well for several years and then poof, it was a one day to the next total devastating upheaval.
One afternoon ex and I were waiting outside the high school to pick up our son. School had just began and it was our son’s freshman year.
As our son was walking towards us attractive girls ran up to him, then gave him hugs.
My first thought was how sweet.., I looked over at ex and he looked almost angry, ex grumbled.., “girls that looked like that never said hi to me in high school.”
Weird, instead of being happy for his son having friends in high school ex was actually jealous. Ex resented the attention my son was getting.
He’d also occasionally refer to the “cool” kids in high school, that he wanted to go to a reunion to show them he was successful. Who cares? and why?
Who even thinks of high school and having to prove yourself to anyone.
Funny story, I was getting phone calls to go to my high school reunion. I wasn’t going to go. They were persistent so I finally agreed to be there.
Ex wondered why his high school never called to invite him to a reunion. He researched and called his reunion committee asking when the next reunion would be, they din’t have a date but said they’d let him know. In the meantime ex wrote a letter to the reunion committee detailing his accomplishments.
Time went on and he never received an invitation so again he contacted the reunion committee. They apologized, they had the reunion and forgot to invite him..
Oh so familiar. My ex cried about how he was a fat kid in high school. And he’d never had a girlfriend.
And my cheating ex wasn’t even given a second look by the slutty high school girls.
So at 46 cheater was going to give those sluts another chance. FOMO
The office slut ( 3 pregnancies by age 20 by 3 different men no husband in sight ) made
cheater her mission for a meal ticket. Police restraining order needed.
Slut #2 from the rowing club is now his live-in appliance. Her version of dressing up is
putting on a clean hoodie.
How’s your happiness now, lover boy?
“ Made your bed, now lie in it “. Cheater hoovers but no success here.
Life is so much more peaceful without a man-baby, my so called third child.
Bread&roses. Lol! ex cried and felt sorry for himself because he was so skinny in high school, didn’t wear name brand jeans, or shoes (so sad) he also never had a girlfriend.
Oh yeah, I got to hear about the clothes, too. He wore sweatpants in middle school. And a popular senior made fun of his dickies and Hawaiian shirt freshman year, which he’d gone to school feeling so proud in. Are these really things that well-adjusted adults hold onto? Let alone use as excuses for leading double lives?
The weirdest thing about the girlfriend comment is that FW did have a couple of girlfriends before we started dating in our 20’s. Nevermind that his insensitive comment also implied I wasn’t a girlfriend. Such bagged salad!
FW became much fitter and more health conscious when he met me, because my lifestyle rubbed off on him. It was also the start of him becoming “cooler” – eye roll – through the friends and work connections he made through me. I have avoided cliques my entire life, and I thought he was the same. I fell for him precisely because of his originality and authenticity, and the fact that he didn’t seem to care about appearances, He seemed real, and he seemed kind. He’s unrecognizable now that he feels like a big shot. He really gets off on being part of the local in-crowd and being a small-time internet celebrity, but it never impressed me. I always supported him because it’s what he seemed to love, but his achievements and growing popularity didn’t make me love him more – or see him differently. Now he’s surrounded by people who share his values, which are not mine. I was so disappointed when I first realized how different we had become. It made me sad, and it took awhile
for me to stop projecting.
Mine too said the same thing!!!. That he felt he missed out because he didn’t date enough nor had many sexual experiences and he felt he missed. He was 26 when we married. I told him at that age he should have known what he wanted and before then if he couldn’t get dates maybe it was because he was a loser and had no game. I went out with him in the first place because initially I felt sorry for him.
Advice here don’t get involved with a man you feel sorry for or feel you need to help.
Turns out at I learned when he was 18yrs old he hired his first prostitute. Right before I met him he was cheating on his friend with the guys fiance. So his sadz story was a big lie.
I’d have to go back to the journals I kept during gaslighting/discard phase for the details.
He became increasing preoccupied about his health and concerned with his adult daughter’s well-
being and life decisions. That could have been to cover his absences and private phone calls.
The weirdest sad sausage monologue was when he asked me to come back over to “our” home to talk. That was the only time in 30 years he initiated a conversation about our marriage. He said he was feeling depressed, separate from daily life. That he often felt more (psychically?) connected to his friends who had died in the previous few years.
Turns out he was fucking a nurse – his best friend widow.
He had a one night stand after the birth of our second baby. He started sleeping with a secret girlfriend. He have me an STD. He left me and the kids for GF#1 and then I took him back later.
But he was super sad that I had trust issues, guys. Super sad! He was super sad that I still wanted to tall about it. He said he was sorry! Why wasn’t I just forgetting about everything?! He was especially sad that I wanted to know more about “she’s just a friend” (revealed to be GF#3/later Wifetress)! He’s really the victim here, everyone.
Okay, I typed all that out with admittedly snarky fingers but it was also all true. He did a lot of horrible things, would look me in the eyes, and, with tears, he would wonder why I “just didn’t trust him?” I can almost see him with his head on his AP’s lap, lamenting that his wife is driving him away because she’s doesn’t trust him, and her, agreeing and assuring him that he’s noble, wonderful, and deserves better. And neither one understanding the irony.
That’s why I throughly believe it’s important to detach from the FW and FW supporters. It least, that’s how it went down for me. FW honestly believed the sad sausage tales; that he was a poor fool of fate and a victim. The more I would try to talk to him and get him to see that he had hurt me horribly, the angrier he would get with me because his perspective was binary: there was only one victim in his story and it wasn’t me; it was him–the sad sausage who always deserved better.
It’s untangling the skein a bit and I’d better stop soon, but it fits many of the talks I had with him before I protected myself with NC. He didn’t want to hear about how I was hurting. He disagreed with it. He’d rather, instead, talk about how he was hurting because I asked him if he was having another affair. (Which he was.)
The sad sausage state of mind is an easy target to make fun of, I agree. But the more I look back at my FW’s sad sausage diatribes, the more scared I get of them.
LOL your snarky fingers have given me a good laugh ^^ (second paragraph though, as all the rest is pretty sad..)
Hey, if we couldn’t laugh we’d cry, right?
Absolutely!
Gee, I wonder why we shouldn’t trust them? And believe them? Cater to them?
ExAsshat was put off our relationship because I stopped trusting him after many many many lies, etc. Jesus Christos, they really ARE freaking morons. At least we eventually kicked their sorry, saggy, stinky butts to the curb. Eww.
‘I want to talk to you. You won’t talk to me. You blocked me!’ ????
And ‘I’m profoundly saddened’.
I can laugh about it 2 years out.
Mine too: “She refuses to talk to me or see me. How awful, right everyone?”
I got that comment twice in court.
“ nobody will speak to me.” To the judge
The second was this year when the last question his attorney asked was when was the last time I spoke with the ex? I was puzzled because it had nothing to do with why he brought me there, or so I thought, and answered. It was a light bulb moment. Really he was bored, thought I’d inherited money and wanted interaction. It cost me a thousands I don’t have to spare because he’s sad i guess?
My therapist said I should have said-why would I need to speak to him. He’s abusive to me.
THANK YOU for posting this. Residual effects of gaslighting still lead me to question myself. Blocking an FW was the healthy choice. Unblocking him was the problem.
Letting this speak for itself. After 28 years this is what I got. He didn’t love me he loved what I did. No mention of me finding his profiles on the dating sites. Just a small oversight. He s.ent this to me the day after I moved out. When I left I left with zero warning…. I just moved out to a hotel for 2 days then to my apt.
“As I sit in an empty house, alone and in shock, I started to think about things and I am starting to clearly see my part in this. I was never an emotionally available guy, but I think that got worse as we got older. Also, aside from the stuff you did financially, I think I was unhappy in ways, but also happy in other ways. I never gave you credit for all the shit you did, and it is sinking in as I now have to actually think about those things starting right away. So like I told you on the phone, I am sorry for taking all of that for granted. Its usually not until this kind of thing happens, that we don’t see it.
Its hard to hear that the kids are happier living somewhere else and I have to really think about that. I must take my piece of the blame, I know I have plenty of it. I am also really hurt and sad. I cant sleep and I think that has been the case for the last couple few months. I am going to ask for help with that and maybe I can have more patients ( not that I have ever had any to begin with). I want to be there for the kids and try my best to help where I can, I love them dearly. I dont know what else to say, other then I am wrecked and feeling shitty about myself.”
Wow. We were married to the same guy.
I am a financial villain too. According to the guy who was hiding money from me all 20 years of marriage, lying, and cheating.
For just one month, at just one of the hotels he was booking up at, out of 27 years together, the bill was 1750.00.
The Quality Inn.
“Quality” Inn! Hahahahahahhaha!
????
WOW… glad to know I am not the only financial villian.
Ah sorry not I Count m, this one is also a cheater playbook special.
Despite never saying anything except once and the fact I handled all the household finances which sometimes did my head in as I also work full time/young child etc) I should have known something was up when he starting saying he was worried about money. Like an ADULT we sat down and had a conversation. I pointed to his lack of involvement, the fact that is well aware all our monthly outgoings are documented o a spreadsheet and the point of our joint account is that we use that for expenses. Anyway basically there has been nothing hidden on my part. Next week I am away with work and go to get money out of the account and he hasn’t paid anything into the joint account and I couldn’t even buy a sandwich. He reneged the minute I said what the actual fuck is going on. All the things we planned because of his money worries he never stuck to, such as us putting EQUAL shares of our salary towards the bill instead of me paying. Of course, as that wasn’t in his favour and he could hardly put through the receipts I later found for drinks and flowers etc with you know who…
And when we were splitting I was told ‘The magic money tree is drying up’ and he was soooo pleased with himself.
Despicable human being.
Mine was HORRIFIED when I stopped his access to my bank account. Oh he earned decent money but I earned money but how the hell was he going to continue buying rounds of drinks at the ho bar if he didn’t have access to both our salaries?
The magic money tree comment says it all. That is so, so worthless.
Like the old phrase-Quality not quantity right? Lol
“I am starting to clearly see my part in this”
But I have to squint because it’s so small. Really, this is your fault.
“I must take my piece of the blame”
But it’s such a small piece. Yours is bigger.
“I am also really hurt and sad”
How could you do this to me? Why are you so mean?
(Oh my gosh, this is such a sad sausage letter.)
I know. I have saved it for that reason. He LOVED to be the sad sausage. Thank you for this comment and using your own Universal Bullshit sniffer so to speak. So validating.
Ok, well that’s pretty much what I heard, Fourleaf.
Also:
“I’m sad every day.”
“You have to own your part in this.”
“I just fell in love.”
“We bonded over taking care of sick patients.”
“You’re so vindictive.”
“Why can’t you look me in the eyes?”
“Do you think I’m white trash?”
“I lost everything.”
“You turned the kids against me.”
“You’re sitting pretty. You got everything.”
“Years from now, you’ll thank me.”
DARVO. Projection. Justification. He seems stuck on those channels. Must be fun times for the wifetress.
HE was the third child.
Me me me me me
“You snooped and found out what I was really doing! You discovered I was lying to you! How could you! This is such a betrayal!”
When I realized I didn’t know the truth about my own life, I went and found it. But somehow my learning the truth was worse than all his lies. All the pain was his, not mine. The RIC therapist agreed my snooping was worse than his depravity.
When I found my exhusbands dating profiles I didn’t confront him I made a ton of fake profiles and he tried to pick up every single one. When he found out he was SCREAMING at me you BETRAYING BITCH. HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAH ok…. cheater. Of course this was in front of our kids. Of course..
what.a.piece.of phony.lying.shit.
I could probably spend all night writing these tbh, and sure I am not alone with that but the one that was just Academy Award winning was the emotional proclamation, ‘do you know what it’s like not to be seen?’
Followed by data of him doing his hair in every mirror and standing next to me in the kitchen with my daughter there saying things like, ‘don’t worrry love no more Mr Daddy Grumpy Toad, I am on my recovery’
Wish I had stabbed him with the bread knife there and then looking back.
I am not sure at that point I even knew about his affair…. But that didn’t take long to suss.
Oh there is another classic. He was telling alll the awful things and me/us our past etc and I was over it and say ‘Boy, that’s some list of resentments you have been building up there’. His response? ‘I feel the highs very high and the lows very low. MY life is VERY experiental’ Less sad sausage the latter one than delusions of grandeur but too funny not to mention!
That second one, was he dating a therapist, new age fb quote master or a life coach?
He been attending therapy you know. Didn’t tell me of course because he’s a private person and if I knew him he’d know that was the kind of thing he’d want to do. A ‘friend’ recommended a therapist (cough cough). This was told to me after the usual gaslighting of ‘Do you think you need therapy?’
Note, not a counsellor like I was seeing for the extreme trauma of nursing my dying father and watching him die and then one week later my family be split up, no he didn’t see a counsellor. He saw a PROPER person where you look deep inside yourself and get to really understand yourself. Not the sort of counselling that us mere mortals might require.
Mrs OW liked an inspirational quote on insta it would seem, wrote a few choice ones the day he moved out.
May they both disappear up their own backsides, they seem quite close already to my mind,
He found somebody to hold his hand while he gazes at his navel
Our mutual friends agreed it was so terrible for me to snoop on him.
I found his public profiles on sex and dating sites. That was snooping and such an invasion of privacy to them.
Yeah those mutual ‘friends’ are his and total dicksss.
I hope you flipped them the bird
????
Oh yes the sex dating sites – his dick pics went on a World Tour!
She had “postpartum depression.” She did not give birth to the baby, get up in the night with him, or care for him during the day (that was for lesser mortals, like me) but somehow she had postpartum depression anyway.
She bursts into tears every time the subject of alimony comes up in mediation because she’s “so, so broke.” She earns six figures. Actually got a substantial raise and promotion lately and didn’t tell me. She just bought a new couch and TV.
She’s hurt by “my behavior” since finding out about the affair. I’m angry with her for cheating on me. So meaaaaan!
She felt SO BETRAYED when I mentioned in mediation that I have my own lawyer. The fuck?? Our mediator told us to get our own counsel. How is this a surprise??
Help me understand…she adopted a baby in some manner that she did not care for but claimed Postpartum Depression ? That is one of the craziest excuses I have ever heard. Caring for a newborn is a big job but when someone else does the birthing and caring, she had a pretty big head-start.
Yeah, we’re both women, used a donor, I was the birth parent. She took one look at the baby and was like “I’m going to the club, don’t wait up,” then began a two year devalue/dump process that ended in me finding out about the affair.
She found it especially unfair that she bore the “mental load” of working a 9-5 while I was 24-hour baby duty. During the pandemic, when she worked from home, this job basically entailed playing Animal Crossing and occasionally checking email.
I worked 100 hour weeks to launch my own business even before finishing school. Caring for newborns and toddlers full time was way, way harder.
Dracaena,
Gah that is awful….and so often people who do this are all about the lead-up to the baby…act like they will be a great parent and then regress to some late-teen/early-20s stage of development.
Sometimes us hetero women mistakenly think that being with another woman would prevent the problems we have with men, but its not a man/woman thing, it’s a fuckwit thing.
Yeah, men don’t have a monopoly on fuckwittery! Things are only equal in female same sex relationships when both women want to make it equal.
It’s funny, too— before the baby was born, she was very smug about what a great parent she’d be. I showed her an essay by a father who struggled to do night feedings while his infant daughter went through a bottle strike, and she was like “men are stupid, I would have figured it out immediately.”
Imagine my surprise! I often said that I felt like the mother of two children— a baby and a fourteen year old girl.
omg. I know how this feels. my wife and I were together 17 years. I helped her raise her 2 children. overnight she became a teenager. it was terrible.
That teenager thing is so weird.
I went through my year of discard pre CL and internet. But, I remember thinking in the last three months we were together he was acting like a hormone crazed teenager. Getting mad, screaming at me for stupid shit, being out all hours of the night. Just so weird.
I have wondered why some folks do this and others don’t. Don’t get me wrong, I have always tried to look nice, and have some fun. But I don’t believe I ever acted like a teenager once I passed the teenage years.
Do they start feeling like teenagers, then start doing stupid shit, or do they start doing stupid shit then the teenager kicks in. Chicken or egg.
How can anyone who hasn’t *actually carried and birthed a baby* claim to be suffering from post partum depression??!!
What a fucking fuckwit. ((hugs)) ????
She sounds like my stbx. He was “so tried” after I had each baby. He would sleep like a baby while I did all the night feedings, sick kids stuff for all 3. I vividly remember after baby # 1 him whining to his enabler parents how exhausted he was from caring for our child. I was totally dumbfounded, he’d snored all night (every night) and played golf regularly… seemed pretty easy to me. Out of all he’s done sometimes it’s the heavy burden of work, which has felt like slavery, that really gets to me. Meanwhile he pranced around like king of the castle, only mortals do housework and help with children.. he’s far too special for that.
This sounds like klootzak. He also got a significant raise and didn’t say a word. He forbid me to add funds to my IRA but just plunked $20k into an investment account for himself. He also never got up in the night even once to change a diaper or anything. But it flips as they are preparing to discard you. Now klootzak acts like he is the Father of the Year. He puts on a show of being Doting Dad when others are around. Image management. Fuckwits are all alike.
When he writes ” for all the shit you did” it means all the “shit he’d never do”. You were treated as a spousal appliance as all of us here were. And the rest of what he wrote is all sad me me me. Nothing about you or the pain he caused you.
Good riddance to the selfish & entitled!
“I can’t believe you’d leave me to do my own dishes and laundry now when I never did anything to hurt you.”
Navigator and Fourleaf YES! Look at my the Wife appliance. I was TOTALLY this. He brought nothing to the marriage after the kids were born. I should have left in 2008 when he cheated the first time. As I moved out he called me and asked if I would pick up the drycleaning and I said NO WAY.
This was all 2 years ago….. I am free and I have 90% custody of my kids.
“As I moved out he called me and asked if I would pick up the drycleaning”
The sense of entitlement is beyond belief, isn’t it!
Fuckwit asked me if I’d collect his mail and send it to the flat he was sharing with the rat faced whore. No. ????????
Yes, because he thinks of work in the home all as ‘shit’. Meaningful work is not ‘worthless shit’ but I completely understand how unending work without help or appreciation can feel like slavery. FW meant it like that too. Menial chores are beneath most Narcs and an unequal division of labor is a huge red flag. Let them try hiring out those jobs! Maids are about $75 an hour and babysitting is around $15–(see the Price of Motherhood, a great book).
The part I still struggle with now is doing house and yard work for ME because—- I like things clean, tidy, pretty and a certain way. Before The divorce to some extent I had given up because the only help I got was when I fussed at FW and the kids and as soon be as I turned my back they would go back to entertaining themselves. It was exhausting keeping after them and also working 10-11 hour days on the weekends to keep up with the chores. There was just too much work for one person, working full time with three kids and I literally wore every hat trying to do it all: recreation director/chauffeur, personal assistant to exFW, FT housekeeper, FT Mom-nanny, FT outside job, accountant/bookkeeper/bill payer, cook, home and car repairs/maintenance/improvements. I swear the exFW would literally mow the lawn and call it a day because he was so ‘exhausted’ he had to watch ESPN. I’m pretty sure FW never planned anything ever.
So somewhere along the way I lost myself. I never did anything I wanted to, I did what I HAD to to survive. I had no choice. I went so long that I had no idea what I even wanted or liked anymore. I am slowly rediscovering these things. I am trying to reprogram my brain that work at home is not martyrdom and punishment, but something I do lovingly for myself —and for others —to enjoy my peaceful and beautiful new home. Its an uphill fight but I’m making progress, climbing steadily to meh to arrive some Tuesday hence.
Yes!!! I did everything except mow the lawn too. All the kids stuff (many dr and therapist appts I had a kid with 6 life threatening food allergies and another with autism) the house, wash, cooking, shopping, cleaning all of it. When everything was a mess he blamed me and would belittle my job and what I did for the kids abs for him. Why do they pick the lawn. Probably because they don’t want the neighbors to think they are a scumbag.
I asked many times for ex cheater to make some of the meals for our family of 5.
Oh No! He cuts the lawn, 30 minute job, every two weeks.
In 14 days, family of 5, 3 meals per day equals…….drum roll please…210 meals.
No small feat, for darn sure. Throw in laundry, homework, housework etc etc etc
Way below his pay grade. Little people do those kinds of jobs.
Well sucker, I now use your spousal support cheque to pay a gardening service.
No lunch, no coffee provided and no complaints either.
I even mowed the lawn. I did it one year as a birthday gift to him, and he never mowed the lawn again.
I was just an average house keeper, not a spit shiner. But, I kept it cleared out, kitchen and (one bathroom) clean. Did all the laundry, cooking and childcare. I don’t remember him ever thanking me for anything. Though I was careful to brag on him and his accomplishments.
Oh and I also worked part time in a school until my son started 12th grade, then I went full time. That was always the plan. I still had to do everything else. And add to that I did lots of volunteer work for his Lions club jr. baseball league, and the last couple years lots of time politicking side by side with him.
I really think their plan was for him to drop kick me when our son graduated from HS, but by that time he was involved with getting his choice for mayor elected and he needed me for that. We succeeded, and then he had a shot at a good promotion so he had to keep me thinking we were in a solid marriage.
Within a couple weeks after he was promoted (about 11 ish months after the new mayor took office) he started the year of discard. Of course I didn’t know it then, but in hindsight I saw the timing.
He had extracted all the value he could from me, on to the whore and his new and improved life.
Can’t believe how long she kept it quiet. But to be fair she was getting lots of financial support from him in gifts and dinners. I am pretty certain he was handing over cash to her as much as he could.
I ended up paying for lawn service because he wouldn’t do that either. I distinctly recall telling my dad at the time “it’s cheaper than a divorce.”
Turns out a divorce would have saved me a lot more.
I used to do everything AND the lawn and he complained about how I did the lawn. He wanted it weed free and cross cut like it looks in baseball stadiums. I didn’t want my child playing on a lawn covered in RoundUp. So he retired the military and has an easy 6 hour per day job that pays well into 6 figures and took over the lawn care. ????
After so many years being told how Mr. Special wants everything in the house, it is indeed hard to keep it neat and tidy for me. I actually like cleaning up and having things nice when I have time to do it. But there are times I feel this crazy resentment like I am being forced to slave away when I am not. Having the right mental attitude about it might always be a struggle. I have found some freedom in doing things my own way that he would never have approved. It’s hard to let go of the resentment around housework.
I well remember coming home from work one Friday evening in 2012. I was CEO of a high-profile organisation. FW was an in house lawyer at a fairly junior level i.e. not General Counsel. He was supposed to be mowing the lawns. Pretty much all he did except grocery shopping on Sunday morning. He insisted on doing that in person on his own (he would have been communicating with exgfOW which is why it took him so long). I walk in, to find him watching the Olympics with the usual large glass of red wine in his hand. I expressed mild surprise that the lawns had not been cut. He responded ‘there’s a chicken in the garden’. OK, but why wait for me to come home to sort out the chicken, was it a particularly vicious chicken? A giant chicken? A scary chicken? No, just a normal brown chicken. I calmly got the number of the farmer from our neighbour, called the number, and arranged collection. The farmer’s teenage son with the box clearly had the ex’s measure. He asked ex if he wanted to stroke the chicken before he took it away. Ex looked horrified and said ‘no’. I fell about laughing at that point. The ex was a total waste of space. Completely useless. His exgfOW life coach really deserves him. Laughing now, just thinking about it.
I love that bitchy teenager!
“I actually like cleaning up and having things nice when I have time to do it. But there are times I feel this crazy resentment like I am being forced to slave away when I am not. Having the right mental attitude about it might always be a struggle. I have found some freedom in doing things my own way that he would never have approved. It’s hard to let go of the resentment around housework”.
I totally understand this! One of ex fuckwit’s favourite ways to dig at me was to accuse me of being lazy, sloppy, not caring about housework, yadda, yadda. I still sometimes remember his wagging finger and screeching face, “you’re a lazy slag! You just don’t care!”
Even though he actually admitted it wasn’t true, and he did it “because I know it winds you up”.
And still those memories come back sometimes, even in my own dear little house, where the only person that matters is me.
These evil fuckers really did a number on us.
You summarize it all so well. Our lives sound very similar. Over functioning in order to survive, to the point there is no time to even consider what I enjoy doing. I absolutely lost myself in it all as well. It’s sad to look back and see how hard I fought for myself, asking for help, breaks and being shot down every time. I look forward to the rediscovery.
????. I recently got the, “I’m sorry I have such a hard time with these shitty conversations and it takes days to recover.” Meaning he mopes around looking at the floor, throwing up, and saying he has headaches. I explained that it isn’t that he feels so bad about the effects on me-I’ve become really kick-ass at calmly reciting everything back to him. Teehee-it’s more that he doesn’t like hearing what he’s done. He lead a second life for 10 years and like women block out labor pain, he has been able to just put everything in the back of his mind and forget about it. He’s a grown man that I have to explain to that he’s choosing to dwell in his “guilt” alone instead of being a man and repairing. I’m talking-that’s it-he used whores to share intimacy that should have been mine alone with him, yet he’s the one that’s struggling. In the heat of an argument one day I did scream, “well you know what? My dick is bigger that yours mofo!”
There are almost too many:
– Shortly after she left the kids and I to be with her AP, now-Ex-Mrs LFTT complained to our youngest that “Daddy won’t make any kind of small-talk with me when we meet up at handovers …. he’s just being rude, as all he’ll only talk about the logistics of co-parenting. It’s as if he’s no longer willing to be friends with me.” Plot spoiler: I wasn’t prepared to be friends with her.
– Shortly after the divorce was finalised she had to go into hospital for an operation that resulted in complications and a longer than expected recovery period. She complained to anyone who would listen about “what an assh*le I was” because at no stage had I asked her if she needed any help or if there was anything I could do for her. Plot spoiler: when word of this finally reached me (she was and is too passive aggressive to confront me directly) I told people that she had someone else (her AP) to wipe her ar*e (literally) and that it wasn’t my problem.
– Also just after the divorce was finalised, she demanded to come over to the house where the kids and I lived so that she could “discuss how we divided up the contents of the house.” When I pointed out that this was unnecessary as she’d already signed over all of the contents as part of the divorce agreement, she was “sad sausage” for a nano-second or two before going nuclear and threatening to take me to court. Plot spoiler: she didn’t, because her laywers explained that she would lose and she would end up on the hook for costs. She still (4 years on) plays the “it’s not fair” card, even though she never actually told me what it was that she wanted.
LFTT
XW repeatedly told our teen sons that I took advantage of her in court and “forced her out of the house”. In CA it was pretty cut and dry, 50/50 property split. I ended up with the house because I qualified. (She tried to force sale so neither one got it) I told our sons that we both had competant attorneys so she is just wrong. That seemed to end it.
Bruno,
I get the same message played back to me through my children. Sadly, the only person who scr*wed Ex-Mrs LFTT in Court was her. Funny old thing, she lied to the Judge and she had her AP accompany her even while denying that she was in a relationship with him … what the f*ck did she expect would happen?
I told our children that the Judge had described her settlement as “generous” (because he did), that no-one forced her to sign the divorce agreement (she signed after the Judge said that if she dragged things out further that it was unlikely to go well for her) and that – typically – she only started complaining after she had cashed the settlement cheque and realised that nearly a 1/3 of it went on covering the legal and other costs that she’d run up on the incorrect assumption that she was going to get everything that she was demanding.
LFTT
You don’t make small talk with the cheater? Well, if you are like me, the ex makes your skin crawl and you cannot wait to leave their presence.
WCBO,
I wasted 26 years with Ex-Mrs LFTT and I’m not wasting another second on her if I have a say in the matter. Since she does not spark joy (actually she sparks my gag reflex), she can f*ck off and take her small talk with her.
LFTT
^^^THIS^^ Meanwhile, Asshat keeps telling the kids that one day Mom won’t be so bitter and we’ll spend holidays together. Like TV families.
Does Asshat tell the kids in which Universe these get togethers will occur?
Tell him to hold his breath while he waits for it.
My cheater ex Assumed he would be invited over to the family home ( where I live )
for all the holiday celebration and birthday meals. First Christmas without Ex, adult
child #2 leaves front drapes open “ just in case dad drives past and he sees a party
going on with lots of action without him “.
If Ex were on fire on my front porch, no glass of water would be wasted on him.
If Ex were starving on my front porch, not one bite of food would be wasted on him.
Lol Patti!!! Mine would be burning in the street since he’s not allowed on my property. Someone else can call 911.
Point 3: got an email with list of things FW wanted 18 months after break-up and a year after divorce. I gave him stuff our sons and his family gave him. That was it. Anything I had bought he had left, I gave away or sold. He still complains to our sons. Oh well!
Woah that post op stuff is very telling. She’s realised AP is okay for Shia and giggles but when it comes to the hard graft she’s obviously feeling the lack, both of quality care and triangulation opportunities. Sucks to be you, lady.
When I asked him to explain himself, after I realised he was lying and trickle truthing me, he came out with: “My behaviour? My actions? I wasn’t happy. You showed me fuck all affection for years. Every time I came home I was presented with negative emotions.”
This “presenting him with negative emotions” was standard bitching about my job. He seems to think we were both supposed to be living in Disneyland 24/7.
He also said, after ditching me for his ward junior with big tits, that this was “hard on me too”.
Now he’s making accusations of aggressive and threatening behaviour through his solicitors as justification for locking me out of my house, that’s how sad he is about it all.
Oh the pity parties they have for themselves. It’s ever so hard on THEM.
I’ll never forget the sob story on my first D day. I was a new mom with baby that had been sick with high fevers and ear infections for months. It was such a stressful time.
He tells me late one night SOBBING about how he propositioned a friend of his and she turned him down *gasp* and kicked him out of her house. Because NO ONE LOVES him you see – *sob* not the wife he lies to – not the friend he hit on while he was married *boo hoo* NO ONE!
I remember just sitting there watching him cry for his poor lonely dick and not knowing what to say.
If only chump lady and been around in those days!
Mine told me once that he made out with the wife of a guy he worked with and she made fun of him for being a bad kisser and laughed at him. I was just sitting there like WTF? WTF? WTF? and he’s angry with me because I never told him he was bad at kissing and it was my fault he was humiliated.
Unfortunately this was while I was being treated for my misdiagnosis of schizophrenia and on medication so it was easy for him to say later that it never happened and I was crazy. But I’m healthy now and I can remember that conversation clearly.
When I FINALLY got him out of the house (3 months after I filed for divorce- moved to his Dad’s) he complained that his father’s house was “too small and there was a large table in his bedroom”. I tried to get him to take some furniture, but “no room”. I wondered why he never wanted to have his kids overnight- “no room”. His father lives in a MANSION with TWO intact suites (not including the master suite) and a total of SEVEN beds on a 2-acre plot in an affluent neighborhood. But poor pitiful him had a BIG TABLE in his suite and it was SO CRAMPED.
Such a good example of how anything at all can turn them into sad sausages.
It is real hard to say because these cheaters have so many sad sausage moments. After DDay#1, the poor sad sausage felt that he had no rights to privacy meaning that he wanted secrecy to conduct his activities. The worst part was when he accused our 25 y/o son of spying on him when the Ed sausage still had all his pics and so on going through a shared family account. DS saw the nudes and what not and just asked WTF? The RIC of course agreed with him and that he had a right to privacy. That combined with all the victim blaming in the RIC made me drop out, get my ducks in a row and file to get rid of a FW.
Poor sad sausage continues to tell tales of how he was not trusted and how he tried for so many years to make everything work as well as how cruel my son and I were to him (son is no contact, hates lying cheaters). Blames me for everything and accuses me of all types of horrible things. Those who believe him are totally blocked now and the ones left are people I trust. I can’t wait for the moment when I no longer have to deal with him over anything. He is trying to prolong the divorce but yet always tells his attorney that he is ready to move on. Yep, everything goes through attorneys because I need some healing time.
Sitting in our first counseling session after d-day, he jacked up from pumping iron the previous 12 months, I in a most vulnerable post-party state, newborn at my breast:
“Sometimes she gets really angry, and she tenses up and clenches her teeth, and I just don’t know what she’s going to do when she gets like that!” ……..lol…
OMG, I really hope the therapist saw the ridiculousness of that statement.
Sounds like you really fly off the handle – by not moving and barely reacting at all. ????
How could he possibly cope with your silent barely detectable rage fits? Who knows what basically motionless and subtle thing you might do next – furrow your brow? The tyranny!
hahaha, exactly! Yes, the therapist was great. He turned to me and said, “Is it true that you get angry sometimes?” with almost a smirk on his face. I said, “Well, sure, yes, I have certainly felt angry about all this.” …..again–lol…
I could write a novel!
After 21 years together and him juggling 2 other ladies whilst we’d just had a new baby and him managing to go abroad with each of them (to the same destination I may add that we’d just been to as a family the year before I got pregnant) by telling us he was working, he somehow managed to juggle all that and make decisions but when I discovered all the betrayals and lies going back years and the lies he told friends too, and the pretence, he somehow had a ‘breakdown’ and couldn’t speak without stammering and had involuntary muscle twitches and spasms and was to go for a psychology evaluation and neurology tests and mri etc etc… I didn’t believe a word! I now knew what he was capable of and the lies he could weave.
As he told me before: he’d just lie to a psychiatrist, and his family have a history of playing up ailments to get pity and get out of doing things. Then he vanished and moved away to live with OW#2 leaving me, the kids and OW#1 in shock and thousands of pounds of debt. He was my best friend! I knew nothing of the real hidden him.
Then I get messages from OW#2 saying how dare I “empty his bank account” and he “has no money”. He just fleeced me for £18k to set up a cafe with OW#1 who thought it was his dead dad’s inheritance money. It was mine! And our downstairs neighbour invested too! Coz “what could go wrong with a small tiny coffee shop”. OW#1 thought it was “their cafe” (she was also our tenant in our old family home btw, just to add to the mix) and I thought it was our “family cafe”.
His father isn’t dead! Well, he might be but it turned out ex had never met him or even asked his mother about him. Yet for 21 years he often told me he was going to meet his father when “he was up visiting from London “. I kept schtum coz his “mum didn’t know he was in touch with him and he didn’t want to upset her”.
Whatever tale he told he was the victim. Over 30 jobs in 20 years coz they were nasty to him or somebody wanted him to work for them or he didn’t like how they done things… Always the victim.
To fool doctors is in his repertoire I believe now. I’d never seen such a pathetic portrayal of a breakdown yet I knew he was still going out to the pub with her…. Funny how his symptoms vanished after he moved in with her and her parents in a caravan in their back garden. Now poor him is cold during a highland winter….
He’d played all his cards and I knew not to believe a word so we’ve not seen him for 5 years and he has abandoned his own children. Yet that will be down to me being a “controlling bitch” and stopping him.
Yeh Yeh… Whatever… You reap what you sow mate!
During (false) reconciliation she tearfully told me, “You have to know I would never have another affair because it is so very painful to give him up.”
Yeah, I comforted her through that shit. Even though, as it turned out, she kept seeing him throughout. I’m sure she was in kibble heaven.
In an email from FW after D-Day…
“I can’t eat or sleep. Things have been really hard. I lost my best friend too.”
No m’fkr, you killed your best friend.
Exactly! Why can’t they take any responsibility for their actions. My x feels he is the victim because most mutual friends supported me and my family thinks he’s horrible. This guy was under the delusion that he could steal time and money from me and expose me to STI’s and we could just keep going once I found out (because I had forgiven a supposed one night lapse in judgment years before and didn’t understand the dynamics of infidelity).
As far as I am concerned you fall into one of 2 camps on your views of infidelity. Either meh it happens or it’s abuse. I can’t really be super close to anyone in the first camp as it means our values are not the same.
Oh my. This kills me. Mine said “But you’re my best friend!”. I responded “Wow, if this is how you treat your best friend, I’d hate to see how you treat your enemies!”. Stupid f*$k could not understand why I wouldn’t “give him another chance”…after I’d already given him 4-5 chances.
What an absolute entitled ASS..He died before we could get divorced but I told him it would be ugly. His brother actually thinks he didn’t really want to live thru the last surgery because all of his infidelities would become public. And I didn’t know HALF of it at that point, more came out AFTER he died.
Oh my goodness! My FW said to me “You are the only friend I have! Except your dad!”…and I’m thinking, “Oh good. You are f***ing these women but you aren’t friendly with them.”
My ex’s version of “you’re my best friend” (and additional example of sad sausage):
“..the one person I think really understands how much
it hurts to disentangle a 40-year relationship is the one person I can’t
talk to about it, namely you.”
I got this too! Last year I was his best friend…. yeah that’s why you were looking to date!
Mine said, “she’s my best friend” when found out
Then 6 months later, “no, you are my best friend.”
Ugh, go away
Never waster your life on a FW!!!!!!!!!!
I love that he’s blaming the amorphous force that’s thrust you both into this situation against your will.
Opposite for me. One of the last conversations I had with FW before I realized I needed to go NC or I was going to die of grief was when he told me that he never considered me a beat friend and, in fact, on his list of friends, I was pretty far down on the totem pole. It was one of the last times he broke my heart; I was hoping that he would, at least, consider me one of his best friends.
Gold medal winner on my dday: “Some of them were disgusting!” Translated — Feel sorry for me that I had to resort to sex with disgusting women because I don’t know what love is…
Silver medal goes to: “I have no intention of seeing my (97) mother ever again” translated– it is all her fault I am the way I am.
And for the bronze, “I seriously gave a lot of thought to an unbridled titilation scenario, but the more I went down that path, the less attractive it felt. It actually began to make me a bit nauseous after awhile.” Translated: when you left, I went on a sex fueled bender and now my tummy hurts.
I won’t even get started with the participation awards….
Wow! There’s a playbook isn’t there.
The “they weren’t even that attractive”-yet he easily got hard every time and kept going back
The “I was just so drunk I didn’t know what was happening”-yet hundreds were taken out days before the trips
The “is was so awkward every time”-yet kept going back
The “many of them didn’t even look like their what I like to call WHORE-DASH photo”-yet he was able to perform for them and kept going back
Seriously, where do they get this shit from?
No kidding, right? The day after I left I looked up one of his elitemate hookups… the one he texted “I feel so good when I’m inside you”. That was when I was debating over whether to file under adultery and include some of his gals as co-defendants. I took one look at a picture of this very sick woman and closed my laptop. She could have been my sister, the resemblance was eerie. What a sicko…
It could have been worse. One of my FW’s schmoopies is a dead ringer for HIS sister.
Yuck!
I have heard all of these!! WOW.
Tracy, thank you for the book and the website they truly have been helpful.
Chump d-day anniversary one coming up this Thanksgiving weekend. Married 27 years — together 30 years — 2 adult children. There has been no disclosure. I asked her to leave in spring 2021. Found a love letter (how could i), found texts (how could i), asked about phone calls (i was imagining things, no wait she called him to end it she did not get him and it must have gone to voice mail for a half hour), …. all of us chumps have been here.
My contribution to sad sausage might also go into stupid shit cheaters say. It was just this past Wednesday when she explained to me with tears in her eyes that “the situation was less disruptive to me because i am in our home”. She went on — having to find a place to live that is not hers and to not have her clothes and space the way she wants it is hard on her.
That visit kept on giving though. She wanted to know what we were doing for Thanksgiving and i said that i needed to be alone (d-day anniversary and all). This had been communicated to her before — but for some reason she did not recall it. The mantra at this point was “why can’t i say that i dont want to be with her”.
Sad sausage indeed. I am feeling like it applies to both of us though.
They feel their own pain acutely. Your pain is of little to consideration to them.
“They feel their own pain acutely. Your pain is of little to consideration to them”
Yup.
I’m so sorry you have had your Thanksgiving holiday ruined by a FW – Turkey day is also the anniversary of my D-Day #2, which was in 2018. Unfortunately, I stuck around and let another D-Day happen 11 months later before I wised up. The first anniversary was hard, but they do get better – I’ve been working on slowly reclaiming the holidays for me and my son. I hope you can find some moments of peace this week.
yes, the old “the situation was less disruptive to me because i am in our home” line. i got that one recently but he used inconvenienced–to which i responded “you’re the one that wanted out of the marriage so you left.”
he’s moaning about living in a shitty rental while i live in the marital home, keep in mind i will prep it for sale on my own, etc. etc. he’s long gone, nor do i wish him to return
other lines included:
1. i’ve been living on auto-pilot for years and just want to live
2. i love you but i’m not in love with you (standard)
3. i’ve never loved you
4. you don’t love me, you give me nothing
5. men need to be adored and you don’t adore me anymore
he has no clue what love is.
today is the 1-year anniversary of D-day, when i discovered him “dining out” with his co-worker, whatever that means. we are in the midst of negotiating a separation agreement and it’s close but not quite. he’s shown a distinct lack of judgment during this process and it’s taken him a long time to accept that, in no-fault divorces, the law applies a spousal support ratio of 50/50.
i feel quite well, actually. therapy helps.
Klootzak said on the last D-day that I don’t love him, I am only with him because it’s convenient.
I assured him that being married to him has been anything but convenient. A rare occasion when my brain immediately spit out the correct response in the moment instead of hours later.
The Monday after thanksgiving is the anniversary of my divorce. That was a fun turkey day…not!
I was told that she was a good person, and he was hoping she and I could be friends?? Never mind in the past that she had:
Affairs with 5 other married men
Was a prostitute for at least a year
Had no friends or family because she alienated everyone in her life with her awful behavior
Met randos off Craigslist for sex threesomes with her husband
But she’s “changed” now.
Give me a break.
My FW also pushed me to be friends with the OW (I didn’t know he was having sex with) and I remember me talking to him about it like: her story just doesn’t make sense, she just doesn’t have good morals, I don’t want to be around someone who treats people the way she treats them, etc.
And then it would all be happening with another woman.
Since we’re on sad sausage stories, one schmoopie got fired (from the job where her subordinate was my FW who she’d spent a year of lunch breaks fucking—- I didn’t know this at the time)
She’s so sad about getting fired for totally different reasons that she calls me one day to cry, for like a long time. Like even closer friends don’t usually cry on the phone for an hour.
Now I know she was also crying because she lost her access to my husband. How messed up!
I wrote an email (yeah, I know, newbie mistake) to OWhore Schoopie after DDay, after FW ended it with her. I rated at her and asked how could she DO this?! A nd she wrote back with Sad Sausage GOLD:
“…I can hear my screams, my wailing, I can feel me hyperventilating with my own pain until I passed out and woke up later in clothes as soiled as my soul. I can hear me repeating these wails as I live here, alone, without the man I love…”
Yes, ladies and gents, she turned it into a PAIN CONTEST, and she was DETERMINED to WIN!
The good news is that both in this email and in THOUSANDS of pages I extracted from Fuckwit’s email account, she provided hours and hours of mockable gold. Like, Bulwer-Lytton Contest submission material.
“clothes as soiled as my soul”!!! Definitely Bulwer-Lytton level. Maybe she should have worn a diaper…
When I contacted the other woman, she sobbed about how MEAN I was to my cheating wife.
I was very restrained, too. I said that she that someday she was going to learn who fuckwit really is when fuckwit wasn’t trying to impress her, and that she’d find the experience rather disappointing. I didn’t call her a bitch or hope she’d be miserable or anything like that.
MEAAAAAN.
Glad you’ve got that, some comedy gold coming out of the madness is always cathartic. And hilarious in equal measure.
I’ve got some scribblings including a poem I found – it’s dire. But hilarious to me.
It does help. For the comedy and as a reminder that you weren’t the problem. Also reinforces the major differences between your and the cheaters’s values and desires. He likes… that??? Painful as it was at the time, this is why I’m thankful I saw evidence. It was also helpful – after all that gaslighting – to have solid proof that my ex was a shameless filthy liar – and to everyone, not just to me.
Mine loved tricking me into becoming friends with the OW. So many of them. Usually I would get a bad feeling about the woman immediately but he’d tell me I was being judgmental and should give her a chance. They were wives of his work buddies (some he screws and the husband watches, maybe the husband joins in too, who knows?) Some were very old friends from childhood.
One of them ended up having a baby and a couple years later it was revealed it was not her husband’s child and he lost all rights. He fought for that child because he had been raising him. He lost. I went on a rant one night in our home about how not only was she a piece of shit wife, she was a piece of shit mother for doing that to her child. Giving him a father and then ripping that father away from him. The only father he’d ever known. The next day she had unfriended me on facebook. I confronted my husband and he said, “She unfriended me too! She probably unfriended a bunch of their mutual friends!”
They are still friends on facebook. I know because I deleted my account and made a new one. He hid her on facebook from me.
My son asked me, “Could that kid be dad’s?” I said I don’t know but probably not, he had a vasectomy years before that child was born. Recently my son asked about another friend’s daughter. One of our closest mutual friends. I started to say no way but then stopped. The timing actually lined up as we were traveling to his hometown a lot at that time (to help his mom and brothers) and he hadn’t had his vasectomy yet then. I just said “Oh fuck, that would be really messed up.” Because my ex and “friend” used to joke about him being her real dad since her dad was not in the picture. My son just said “Jesus fucking Christ…” and I said well, one day maybe you can do one of those DNA kits and see if you find some siblings.
It’s so fucked up. He could have at least had the decency to just keep them away from me rather than make them such a huge part of my life that it would be even more soul crushing when it all came out. But he enjoyed abusing me in that way. I think cheating was much more fun for him when he could rub my nose in it and they could laugh about how stupid I was behind my back.
Your ex is a depraved ????!
I’m so glad you eventually got the proper diagnosis and medical care and AWAY from him KP
Me too. FW had a long talk with me excitedly telling me how much I was going to love GF#1 and how excited he was for us all to be the best of friends. He just knew it would all work out because “she’s so amazing!” He said this to me as I was crying, shortly after D-Day #1.
That’s when I started to think that the man was insane.
SAME exact conversation only mine went one bit further. He wanted to visit her (she lived across the country) and bring her back home with him. Started talking about polyamory and renegotiated marriage contracts. I filed for divorce asap.The whole “we can all be friends” and “you’d like her, she’s a good person” didn’t work with me.
I was a labor and delivery nurse, so when I found out he was cheating I asked him if he at least had the forethought to use protection. Of course not. When I explained how this put me at risk and also embarrassed me at my job because I had to admit to my colleagues that I married an a$$hole so I could get tested for STD’s, he said he was SO sorry! He never thought about his actions affecting all of those aspects of my life! He was ashamed that he let himself get so caught up in the moment. What he was worried about was me quitting my job because I was so embarrassed and sad and he would have to pay a crap ton more child support.
Cheaters sad sausage lament about being finacially destitute…… then a friend saw him driving around town in his new expensive sports car (which was later revealed he paid cash for).
“I’ve been so depressed thinking about our marriage that I almost drove my truck off the bridge a couple weeks ago.” (This after D-day 292)
Hands down Oscar-worthy performance.
My only regret, not calling 911 and having him admitted for a psych eval and call his bluff.
Rock on Chump Nation – you’ve got this!
Mine too told me, after DDay #1 and shortly before our reconciliation, that he was so sad about “what happened” that he parked on a bridge and thought about throwing himself off.
I felt so sad for him. I forgave him for everything. I was just so glad he was alive. Etc etc.
Dday #2 and GF#3/Wifetress came later. And it wasn’t until years later that I found myself thinking “…I bet that ‘I almost ended it all’ story was also hot air.” Good lord, I was so gullible.
Neither of us was gullible, we were/are empathetically human… our fuckwits are the monsters. <3
The other day, a couple of people were wondering why a chump would still keep coming here. I feel so much better after just a few minutes reading the eerie similarities between us all that I cannot imagine depriving myself of the free emotional pain medicine this site provides me with.
THANK YOU to each and every person here and an especially big thank you to dear dear Tracy. If I was whipping’ and jingling alone with this shit I am sure I would be in the state hospital in a straight jacket instead of on the road the Meh.
Our daughter recently agreed to meet him in a session with Dr. Kickass Co-Parent to talk to him. The agenda was for her to talk and for him to listen. She has not spoken to him in almost two years (though she goes to his place for a few hours three days a week). She is now almost 15. He burned down our bird nest when she was almost 11.
She came in the house after the Zoom session, exasperated and angry. His only feedback was about how he was hurt too…how his “life had changed”…how Dr. Kickass Co-Parent had to keep reminding him that HIS behavior was the problem, that he was not the victim….that he is oblivious….etc.
It is sad and strange and super messed up that our own daughter’s experience with him has been validating for me and been a total reality check to help me keep my sanity.
The relationship with your child is the easiest relationship you will ever have with another human being, and anyone who can’t do that one is definitely out of their depth in any kind of romantic partnership.
IMHO
To a point VH
My ex told and tells our adult children many lies about me, and for some reason ($$$?) they choose to believe many of these ridiculous lies.
Mitz, ex is on a continuous smear campaign, bad mouthing me at every opportunity, with blatant lies, made up stories. Ex is also good at portraying himself in these stories as the victim/hero while demonizing me.
My only son (who knows better) chooses to stand by and believe ex ($$$).
Sadly my son has become a clone of his father.
I have had a similar experience or heard, almost word for word, the EXACT SAME THING from Traitor X, that is in EVERY SINGLE POST here so far. Spooky and creepy and eerie and LIFESAVING. JFC.
(Does anyone here remember Speed Racer and his older brother, Racer X?)
Yes, I grew up in LA and watched Speed Racer!
Loved it! And Chimchim & Spritle. My brother & I named my dolls after them.
Traitor X – good one!
Best performance from the X in my life: expecting me to feel sorry for him when he described stuff coming out of his wick and he asked me what to do. He expected me to be interested! And caring! He had already moved ahead out of town for a new job & left me at home with little kids. My shining moment “You got this on your own, you can find a public health clinic on your own!” Unfortunately I moved to the new location & spackled for years.
this site shows me how disordered my X’s thoughts/actions are, as they mimic others. it’s all so stereotypical and that helps normalize the nonsense, you know?
this site keeps me on the straight and narrow from an emotional perspective, as difficult as it is to read most days. i don’t wish to delve into pain but here we all are, vulnerable and hurting. humour helps.
Yes, when my ex decided to make the separation long-distance, I somehow had the piece of mind to decide that I wasn’t going to get in the middle with our college kids. I was a mess in other ways, but I nailed that. They didn’t want to discuss him, and I told them that they were going to have to define that relationship, not me. They had their own phones, emails, friends, work, and school. The reality was that we were all busy, and we just enjoyed being together when we could. I didn’t defend him when he barely contacted them in the first year and missed recognizing the birthdays/holidays/graduations.
He actually hasn’t seen or talked to them in years now, and yet he wants them to visit as if nothing happened, I assume over the holidays. Not my call at all, of course. They don’t want to.
The fact that he messed that up with them says volumes about where he remains. I don’t know if he is in a romantic relationship or not at this point, but perhaps he told “the one” that he’d get his kids there to meet her. Well, they’re not coming, their choice, not mine.
My poor sad sausage was sad and angry because I no longer trusted him after D-Day (caught him trying to video chat women on our anniversary vacation.) In a toddlerish tantrum he yelled out, I feel attacked! You don’t understand! I’m not used to people not trusting me!
Yeah I got that too.
And “come on, it’s Me, you’ve know me for years, you know I would never do _____”
No, I just learned that who you are is a total lie, now you want me to think there’s some things you would never do? Uh-uh
Yup. Mine was furious with me for not trusting him despite all the evidence he was giving me to, y’know, not trust him.
They are enraged when the jig is up
Then you will be attacked
Exactly.
From the man who agreed he’d lied to me every day for almost three years and was caught in MORE lies during the divorce process when he said he’d stopped lying, I got, “You should meet with me and call me a pathological liar to my face because then *you’d* be the liar.”
You can’t make this up.
Of course, I refused to meet with him. So glad I came across LAC;GAL on day ONE so I knew to go NC asap.
So true. Regardless of cheater status, additionally I find that people of poor character caught out doing something wrong get raging mad at the person exposing them. It’s a kind of a DARVO and ‘it’s not what I did but your reaction to it’ mosh-up moment. What a mindfuck though: I’m super extra mad at you because you’re mad at me —about something bad I did. How dare you be upset with and judge me!? I will throw a major fit so that you will have to worry about THAT immediately and not be able to address what it is that I did!
I discovered the affair about 2 years ago, 6 weeks after the ex had left me. He never admitted the affair which was ongoing and had been underway, long distance, for at least 10 years. She was also married, with children. He had a number of toxic enablers helping him out. He lied to his friends about it. He lied to his family. He lied to me. When challenged with its existence, he would defiantly stonewall, resist, like a teenager. Must have been so frustrating for exgfOW who was desperate to ‘tell the world about our love and not give a f*** who knows’. And clearly he didn’t love her that much because he hadn’t got the guts to admit this one great true love with his soulmate. His image mattered more to him than their love. At the conclusion of a horrendous Zoom mediation session enforced on me by the English courts, during lockdown which I did completely alone, I said directly to him, ‘do you understand why I don’t trust you?’. He stared back through the webcam with the shark eyes. It was the only time I cried during the session, which ended on that note. The last time, please God, that I will ever see that inhuman, cowardly POS. It brought home to me what I had lived with for 26 years. For all his sad sausage routine, a feature of our lives throughout the relationship, the angry, spiteful, vindictive characteristics were always there, waiting to be revealed. The sad sausage sayings are intended consciously to manipulate, to get what they want. No matter how funny the sayings are they are red flags waving. I choose not to swim on those beaches any more.
What I have noticed, with the help of a lot of therapy, is that I blamed myself so much for the way he behaved that I never said to myself ‘it’s him, not you’. It never occurred to me that I did not have to fix myself, the relationship, to keep him happy. That I could stop, reflect, and choose whether I needed to make a change in my response to him. I was so in to the ‘I’ve got to put this right, immediately’ mode that I was exhausted. A husk. And he used the sad sausage sayings to get me to perform. Which caused his frustration and anger when I changed and stopped caring. I am so relieved to be free!
I’ve noticed this, too. Makes me wonder if anyone who so readily and nastily employs DARVO is a cheater at heart, even if they haven’t yet acted on it.
My ex would get so furious when caught. At me. It was ludicrous and he never made any sense. He’d actually take words he’d used, put them in my mouth, and then scream at me for accusing him of it. “You think I’m a monster?!” “How can you accuse me of not being compassionate?” This was spat out at me the day after i found troves of incredibly hurtful emails where he shared intimate, and largely untrue, details about me and our personal life in the meanest ways imaginable. So, I’d just found out I’d been living for years with a guy who was saying and doing these horrible things behind my back, gaslighting me when I sensed his hatred. I was shaking and hadn’t eaten or slept, I was ashamed and afraid to tell anyone else, I tried to talk to him because I needed to talk to someone – so crazy – and he sat there glowering, arms crossed. I just stood up and said, “I am not doing this. This isn’t what I need. You’re not showing me any compassion.” I calmly walked over to the sink and started to do the dishes, because I didn’t know what else to do. Then he said that. I calmly walked back over to him and then screamed in his face, at the top of my lungs, “FUCK. YOU!” I really tried to keep my shit together and not engage, but that just pushed me over the edge. So of course, his story became that I was emotionally abusive.
How many stories like this do we collectively carry? It’s overwhelming. I can’t possibly count or remember, and I “only” had fifteen years stolen.
So many of your posts punch me in the gut because I feel like I could’ve written them myself.
Hugs to all of us here for the unbelievable shit we’ve all been through.
“Schmoopie is mad because it wasn’t my secret to tell, and now her marriage could be ruined”
My FW says to my face. Poor schmoopie
I got a version of that, too!
I had called the other spouse – he had been kicked out only 2 months before and apparently had no idea his wife was having an affair – with my husband! I told him everything I had recently found out including that my husband had moved in with her the night before! He was dumbfounded. About an hour later I got a text from my dumb ass husband saying: Are you trying to get me killed?!!!! I think I replied, you two idiots might have thought about that sooner!
Blaming me, for his affair, and her husbands “anger!” Ya think ?
aww, how sad for her….
hahahahaha
Poor schmoopie! My god. This reveals such a shocking lack of empathy.
“I feel so betrayed because when I talk to your parents they agree with me, but then afterward I hear that they disagree”
I actually felt sad for him, not knowing who he could trust to “agree with him”.
For about a day
Then I realized it’s BS
My parents (and others who don’t do direct disagreement) have a habit of saying “uh huh, uh huh” when FW was spouting crazy talk. Poor sad sausage that he confused an “uh huh” with people being on “his team” or something
Similar experience here. During our reconciliation, FW had a sitdown chat with my mother, to discuss him apologizing to her.
My parents picked me up off the ground during the worst time of my life. My parents moved me and my kids into their spare rooms. My parents supported me financially and emotionally for months while he honeymooned with GF#1 and had the misfortune to see me collapse into inconsolable grief… I can’t imagine the pain they went through but I’m so grateful they were there for me.
My mother (while crying!) told him that she didn’t forgive him yet and he would have to work hard to earn that honor from her after what he put me through.
He told me later that people like my mother and [a mutual friend from high school] who don’t forgive someone *after they’ve apologized* are toxic people that we don’t need in our lives.
He said that about my own mother. He didn’t even register her pain. ?
Lemme tell you, I felt *really* bad about how quickly I forgave him after that. I look back now and wonder how I ever could have loved him.
The secret became yours to tell when she fucked a husband who wasn’t hers to fuck.
Cheater logic = comic gold
Velvet, your insight and wit is akin to a samauri sword…yet your handle is so plush. Every time I read your statements you make me laugh and cry. You, nomar and Tracy are almost fantastical. I would love to spend just one afternoon in the presence of you, nomar and Tracy.
I will never know how many of his coworkers he fucked…for a while I thought it was 1…how quaint that was…Im now sure there were quite a few.
In a rare Sad Sausage moment, he said
“The worst part is that now I cant be friends with women at work”
Really? WORST part? the destruction of your family and soul-destroying pain to your wife and THAT is the WORST part?
I regularly tried to get him to grasp the magnitude of the damage he did with his abuse and he said:
“You just want me to feel bad about myself”
(Actually, I wanted him to quit being an abuser)
The day after I said I wanted a divorce, I had to leave the house at like 6 AM for some fieldwork. I was doing a task that was timed and required concentration, and throughout the morning I got anguished texts and emails. At one point I sent him the number for the suicide hotline. He eventually sent me an email saying he had to leave work early because he “couldn’t stop crying”. This from an emotionally challenged man who said to me that crying was only maybe acceptable when somebody died, and maybe not even then. He asked if he could go to my parents vacation cabin for the weekend one last time to get his head on straight. That was a Thursday. So I was stuck with pretending everything was normal and caring for our son solo for 4 days while he went on a vacation. When he came back, he told me that he spent 4 days pacing and thinking about “where things went wrong”. He said he eventually came to the conclusion that he pulled away from me emotionally during the first year or two of our marriage because “something was missing in the bedroom”. You may wonder what that elusive “something” was, as did I. So I asked him what it was. He refused to tell me. He sure as hell didn’t tell me anything was amiss the first 2 years we were married, even if that hindsight story was true.
They are stupid enough to think that they intensity of ‘early days sex’ should continue forever
Ha! You are so right. I assumed he wanted butt sex or wanted me to look like the girls in the porn he likes.
Seconding the “early day sex” he wanted to last forever. Especially ridiculous is that my second trimester of pregnancy (when morning sickness waned) I wanted more sex with him than he was interested in. Come birth of our baby, he starts cheating, because I just physically couldn’t have sex for a few weeks.
He says about that time that he told the OW “his relationship was declining”.
Grown up men get through the birth of a child just fine without cheating.
He really was the baby
I didn’t get much sad sausage, he had conned and lied to so many people; it wouldn’t have worked.
He did say well whores parents want what is best for her too. I just said and they think a cheating married man is best for her. Fact is they likely did think that because she was unlikely to get a single decent man.
What I should have said but didn’t think of it was; “I get that, my dad wants what’s best for me too, and he does not want you anywhere near me” Dad said to me, you will be miserable for the rest of your life if you go back. And this was in 1990 before all the info out on internet. I am sure my dad never read a book on infidelity, he just knew in his gut the bastard needed to go. I wish I had been strong enough to listen, and not let the bastard back to put me through hell for another week before I kicked him out.
FW went on an apology tour a couple months later, when he went to my dads house my dad was clear to him that he needs to straighten up his life, but that he can’t go back to his old life; he needs to keep moving. I can’t remember the exact words, but hopefully that cleared up any confusion on fws part that my dad was hoping for any recon.
So no a decent father does not want a cheating liar for his daughter. (my mom had died years earlier)
The only other sausagy thing I can think of is the night he told me he was leaving. He hung his poor head and said he had been unhappy for ten years and he had been “dating”. He then told me he never loved me.
I mean he was the victim here, he had lied to me for our whole marriage (his words) so of course he had to do what he did, who wouldn’t. It must have been horrible for him, letting a woman he didn’t love, wait on him hand and foot, scrimp and save so he could have his boat (and unknown to me other women), smooch all over him and want sex, work in the community and in politics to help him get to his goal, work her rear end off to be the best mom to his son that she knew how. I don’t know how he put up with me.
I’m sorry Susie. My FW was a mooch too. My parents were dead when this happened to me but they both used to ask me so what’s FW doing? They said I was working too hard..always. I wanted so much for my family I was ok letting him go along for the ride. I don’t know..too much energy to think through.
Asshat:
“You’re sex drive is too low and that’s not fair to ME.”
Me:
“I’m sorry-I’m 50 years old, raise 3 teenagers in a house that is falling down around us because YOU “needed a house that needs you”(that has 20 unfinished projects that you started), I’m running my own multi-million dollar corporation and I take care of EVERYONE’S needs in this entire house.”
How dare you not be a sexy vixen every time he is around? So sad that he has to be with someone who raises the kids, takes care of home, business, and logistics, while not attending to his every fantasy, so unfair!
BOA-SO tragic and selfish of me, the chump, to make sure that the bills are paid on time so our credit isn’t ruined, we never run out of toilet paper or peanut butter and his Special Agent underwear is always washed, dried and ready for him.
So selfish of me ????????.
So SOOO selfish. Did he tell you he felt emasculated by your success? Because you sound like a baddass.
Sorry, that didn’t come out right. Better would have been: Did he accuse you of emasculating him, because you didn’t need him, while at the same time taking for granted every one of the benefits in his life that your badassery granted him? I don’t get these cheaters, so many of them are dilly-dalliers who really don’t have one hard thing to worry about in their lives, thanks to their kick-ass chump partners, but they make out they are so hard done by. It’s almost like they’re masochists with too much time on their hands who actually wants someone to be a real bitch to them to keep them tingly, but let’s be real, if we did that and made strict demands on them, they would bottom out because of resentment.
Stig, I love your comments. Smart and fucking funny.
Oscar-winning Sad Sausage performance in this letter he sent:
I know, longer the wait, the more the anxiety builds. So I’ll start out
simply by saying this is just a letter, there’s nothing new or momentous
in it.
One reason I have waited so long is the hope that I might figure
something out that would make things better. Or at least I might
recover enough to send something upbeat. Neither of those things has
happened, nor was it reasonable to expect them to. I’m sure it has been
quite apparent that I’m not in good shape: the year was endless and
painful even before the hearing came up, and the hearing was crap icing
on shit cake; and now that I’m free of that, and at last have a little
time to breathe, I’m tired and depressed. And of course I’m worried
about us. But “if you can’t say anything good, don’t say anything at
all” has not been a strategy that has worked for me particularly well
over the years, especially with you. So I’m writing, sans insight and
sans good cheer. Trying to communicate.
I can’t even write in my journal, to
speak of: I’ll start an entry, kvetch a little bit, and then stare at
the blankness. (As opposed to this letter, where I’m kvetching more
than a little bit. In a way that’s progress, but it doesn’t make for
good correspondence.) At some point, we’re going to have to figure out
what we can be to each other, sexually.
I think maybe what I’m trying to do in this letter is not so much to share my pain as to just bottom out: to
acknowledge what a low point I’m coming from, in hopes of building from
there. It’s not all I could talk about. The crucial fact for the moment is
I’m tired and demoralized, and it’s going to take some time to build up
energy and creativity. I hope you will be patient with me.
First reaction was a genuine “ew” from me.
I, I, me, me
That is all he talks about, himself
ew, can you get more navel-gazing?
Oh FFS. Me me me me me me. I’m suffering. “I hope you will be patient with me.” “I can’t even write in my journal.” Cue the violins. ????
He is sans empathy for the woman he betrayed who truly is suffering because of his abuse. Classic clueless, self-centered cheater shit wrapped up in some flowery language.
I can’t help but picture him writing this at an old, wooden desk while wearing a black beret and smoking Gauloises.
All the best to you, Adelante. I hope you’re either at meh or nearly there.
p.s. He sucks.
((hugs)) Spinach
Were you married to Woody Allen? (sorry, that’s in extremely bad taste) But what a pseud.
Not married to him, but the ex did like his films.
“ At some point, we’re going to have to figure out
what we can be to each other, sexually.”
What the actual fuck?
I’m laughing so hard because WTAF was my exact response to reading that. All this drivel and then out of nowhere he wants to discuss how he can keep getting sex.
Seriously. I thought maybe it was a typo.
His word vomit makes me want to vomit.
Well, a bit of a backstory, FW was cheating on me for 3 years with a friend ( obviously, our friendship was way tighter than either me or now her now ex-husband ever realized). So he was really sad that I put her in the middle of our nasty break-up, and it was so good of her to actually to respond to me asking why she wanted to be around my kids, because she is a good person you’all. Oh he was oh so sad that I was concentrating on his infidelity and was not more sad about our break up after 17 years together. And he was so sorry about telling me the truth because he had to be subjected to my vindictiveness: I refused to pick him up from a hospital after an outpatient procedure, so his brother had to do it. He was oh so disappointed that I was not impressed by his being “honest with me”.
I think my ex was expecting me to be impressed be his honesty too. Perhaps for a second I was. But they sure do hate it when their actions have consequences. I was supposed to just take in what he admitted and not react, or simply forgive him. After all, I had six years of sunk costs and we had a baby. My agency to be honest in my response to his honesty was not expected, and likely he was not “impressed”.
X was very publicly exposed and his affair was all over the news. My then 12 and 15 YO were teased mercilessly at school for months. Did X give a flying flip? No, he was too busy bemoaning his professional fall from grace (which in those days lasted all of about 10 minutes). Poor him, he was no longer a super hero.
He demanded that I commiserate about every single public sleight of him, no mater how inconsequential. The family’s humiliation not only did not matter to him, if I even mentioned the bullying my children were experiencing because of HIS actions, I was accused of selfishness and pain shopping. (there was no need to shop for it because we had it by the ton).
“No, he was too busy bemoaning his professional fall from grace (which in those days lasted all of about 10 minutes). Poor him, he was no longer a super hero.”
I love it when these assholes fall from grace. But, of course; it shouldn’t be that way. It is ok for Chump and the family to eat shit sandwiches; but they should not have to lose anything just because they can’t keep it in their pants.
My fw had the audacity to complain that the mayor stabbed him in the back after he had been so loyal to the mayor. Which he had not been loyal to the mayor, because he didn’t tell the mayor in campaign disclosure that he was fucking his direct report and about to blow up his 20 year marriage.
Yep he was sure he would keep his status and he could hand over all I worked for to his whore and they would live in Camelot. Yeah, no; didn’t work out that way.
First discovery I got real hatred anger and gaslighting.
Second I got the privilege of sharing blame for his shitty character.
Later I got a fake cry and “I’m sorry I’ve been depressed about my brothers death” I gave him the depressed card. This was after he returned after a rage and abandoning us 200 miles from home without money or transportation. We did have a place to stay since it was a planned vacation that I insisted he go on if he wanted to continue with the family because he was completely negligent for years. They don’t do well with an ultimatum. I stayed a number of years after all this including the abuse before, during, and after this. I was beaten down to my core.
7 ys out, 5 divorced, we had another trial this year that he filed. It takes a bit to get over after an encounter but today is brighter than any day I was in that relationship.
My first cheater complained to me and the marriage counselor that “the only thing wrong in our marriage is that she doesn’t TRUST me.” This after countless affairs with coworkers, friends, friends of coworkers, neighbors, friends of neighbors, my sister, the nun who lead our pre-Cana classes and a couple of sopranos in the church choir. This was after years of never “remembering” to deposit his paycheck in our joint account for expenses, but somehow managing to drain it every month just before the rent was due. This was after telling the IRS such egregious lies that they audited our joint returns every year we were married. The only thin wrong in our marriage was that I didn’t trust him.
Oh yes, there was the time my piece of shit father complained that my mother wouldn’t give him a divorce. “What am I supposed to do,” he whined. “I promised to MARRY this woman (who graduated a year ahead of me from high school) and your mother won’t give me a divorce.” (Mother said she told him he could have his divorce, but she was keeping the house. “I paid for it; I’m keeping it.” Oh, and she also told him she wouldn’t be continuing to support him — he’d have to figure out how to support himself and his 23 years younger Schmoopie on her paycheck — waitressing in a dive diner. Of course there was no divorce. My father didn’t want to work.)
XW asked how I was doing. I told her I was a wreck. She accused me of “emotional blackmail” and told me never to speak to her about my feelings again.
Hearing a truthful account of the effect her actions produced was simply more than she could bear, poor thing.
Ha! Mine accused me of “playing the victim”… un huh
aww, so hard to face the consequences. I was accused of weaponizing my hurt by not wanting to have a friendship with my FW
Yeah, they don’t want to hear about your pain, theirs is the only “real” pain.
The ex told me that he was in pain too.
I told him that you don’t complain about bruised knuckles to the person you punched in the face.
Well, this topic brings up some great memories…
So hard to choose! The one that really stands out after discovering his 2 1/2 emotional affair with a school chum from 25 years prior, when I was wailing, “Why? Why? Why? Was: “ You never made room for me on the couch”
Um, we had three pre teen girls, two mine, one his, we were so “lucky” at how well they got along, and truly loved each other. I would watch Disney movies with them occasionally- all bundled up on the couch with blankets, popcorn the works. This? This is what he comes up with for a reason to cheat? – on all of us!- I’m glad to recall this today, makes me so glad to be rid of him!
Lol as an after thought, must add: after I threw him out for his affair with office girl, he came back home 2 days later to pick up some things and bemoaned how hard this was on him too!!! ( he had moved in with her the same night) But poor sausage ! He had to sleep on HER couch because her two very young children were at her home and he would be on the couch til they went to her ex’s house…
Well at least someone made room for him on their couch. Now he can be happy! Oh, and he asked me on that same visit why I was being mean to him. Really?
Bear with me while I remember all of them!
“I lost my best friend and my WIFE”…”you said you had a “feeling”, “I just don’t know what to do anymore”, “I know what I did, okay?!? And I said sorry”, “I wish you could feel me”, “it wasn’t anything and not worth it at all”
Flip flops in bed. Sighs at my snuggling myself. Mopes to the couch. “Can’t sleep”. Snoozes away while I have insomnia thinking about real s$@t. Not just the “act”
Owns BIG bottles of lotion. (Never buys body products)
Below are some of the sadz I got from FF after D Day. These only get more ridiculous with time:
– Hours after I confronted him with texts I found, he came to me crying and hugged me. Silly me, I thought it was because of us. No, he cried to me that his parents were having marital problems and were probably going to divorce. This happened several times. Well, we are divorced and they have been married 52 years!
-his cheating is a “we” problem
– the therapist made him move out. Oh and I should think of him moving out like him going off to college like our son just did. And I should help pay his rent??!!??
-he didn’t want to feel this way, didn’t want to hurt me and he wasn’t mad at me
-he still had time to find happiness
-we never did anything while also telling me that I was always booking vacations to mask our problems
-I didn’t love him, only what he did around the house (which was very little)
-it’s easier to walk away then try again (there wasn’t ever any trying) and get hurt ?????
-I need to work on myself and you won’t let me
-was told I’m taking the high road and putting this all on him
-after confronting him with evidence of cheating he cried saying that I’ll never forgive him. Never got an apology. Oh and I must not care because I wasn’t crying like him. I was literally in shock and couldn’t cry for many months afterwards.
-told me that I hurt him so bad. When I reminded him I did not cheat, verbally or physically abuse him (all things he did to me) so what did I do??? He could only muster up well, you put the kids and your job above me.
I left on a business trip on a Monday morning to warm hugs and kisses goodbye. I landed Thursday to an e-mail from him announcing he had moved out. He came back 2 days later to violently rage, deny any affair, and assign all blame to me. He said I was awful and that our adult daughters and all our friends agreed. He had to abandon me with only a note because I couldn’t handle the truth that he never EVER loved me and he had to escape to pursue his true happiness. I thought he might kill me at the high point of this explosive rage. Married 28 years.
He moved 5 hours away and left the unwinding of 3 decades of life completely to me including getting rid of all physical assets, having to explain to everyone what happened, and being his chaos janitor. The ho-worker, #2 known OW in our marriage, was the same age as our eldest daughter.
2 months after this dramatic runaway husband exit he showed up at the house declaring he was just so, so lonely. He took off all his clothes and stood there helicoptering his dick and yanking his balls while he cried. He blubbered at me about how difficult it was for him to be alone now. I was thoroughly disgusted and quietly told him he was a completely inadequate husband. He looked like I slapped him and cried harder.
Even nearly 5 years later as I read this I am still horrified by what a coward he is. Entitled, childish, petulant, he had the nerve to demand sympathy from me after he nuked our family without so much as a conversation ahead of time and told me I deserved it. In the midst of me dealing solo with the disposal of our lives while he skipped off to the bed of his child ho-worker unfettered by any adult obligation, he wanted me to soothe him for how difficult it had all been for him. Just amazing.
Like the the old trope of a child who murders his parents and demands sympathy for being an orphan, he is a miserable piece of shit who still declares how unfair it is that his kids are NC with him and still cries sad sausage in his one-way texts to them (only one has him blocked, the other keeps tabs on him this way but never replies).
If there was cosmic justice these cheating asshats would burst into flames from the gross entitlement of demanding sympathy from their victims. They are the worst of humanity.
Wow. I am aghast. Did you make him leave while he was naked? Take video for blackmail purposes? What a strange thing for an adult to do.
No, I was a doormat and just sat there unfazed. After the kids went to college he walked around the house naked a lot so he could freely whip the dong and tug the walnuts like he so enjoyed; it was his best seduction move. Why not give things a literal whirl one last time to see if the Wife Appliance will serve up a tasty BJ to soothe his sad, sad soul? You know, for old times sake. She’s a good egg.
Barf. Truly nausea-inducing, but he thought he was one sexy mofo because I made him feel that way as a good and loving wife.
I now feel an immense gratitude that God had shut down any physical attraction to my husband and I can fully see him for the disordered person he is. I look back at the 6 months between abandonment and final decree with amazement that I could move forward and protect myself at all. It is like I was placed in a protective cocoon with the sole purpose of surviving long enough to get him off me before he could come to his senses and try to claw things back. I truly hope he continues his self centered stupid life just as he is and dies alone. Nope, not at meh.
“I botched things up.”
That was his summary when he called to say he wanted a divorce. I had been refusing to reconcile for months during a long-distance separation with far more questions than answers. I had no reason to believe that he had changed and any trust that I had when he took off had evaporated. My gut was that reconciling was primarily for his family and out of shame, not because he wanted to make things right and truly loved me.
He confirmed my gut in the divorce which was long and messy. Even his attorney called my ex on how he was approaching it and ganged up with mine to get it settled. Both attorneys decided that I had to be a saint to have been married for so long and made sure I knew what they thought about it all. So that was my confirmation, not the summary statement my ex made.
I didn’t get the sad sausage… his family did with his gaslighting tale of woe…
“MichelleShocked kicked me out. She wanted a divorce. Thank goodness coworker was a good friend and took me in. We started dating after I was thrown out.” (Not sure anyone believed that crap)
I didn’t even know. But then his narcissistic mom told me “you know what you did!” (I didn’t — but she’s a passive aggressive wacko). I asked what I did and she wouldn’t answer.
2 years later one of FW’s brother’s wives (SIL) called and wanted to know the truth. So I told her. And she told me the sad sausage story that was used on his side of the family. ????♀️ ????
After what my X Asshat did to me he had the nerve to tell everyone we mutually decided to divorce. It is so bizarre and so completely the opposite of his unilateral decision to simply abandon me without even having an argument. I guess admitting to everyone that he skipped out with just an e-mail would be awkward for the tender heart.
He would rather I went through the shrieking grief of shock and horror rather than feel a moment’s discomfort himself. After all, I am not even a real person.
Off topic but related to the fallout from cheating…
A dear friend who is also a fellow chump (whose X, sixteen years later is still cheating and lying everywhere he goes) fosters babies. Her newest foster, baby Luke, was 5 weeks premature because of mom’s drug use. He went from the NICU right to my friend. He is safe and cozy and thriving at 3 months old now. I get to be their Fairy Godmother! ???? I’ve been spending a little time assisting this week and it had a profound effect on me I didn’t see coming.
Today I am feeling so angry that my time and attention and energy, which I want to use to help and be of service, and be part of the solution while I’m here on Earth, was kidnapped by two (and more) parasitic selfish self-centered losers who are doing nothing but contributing to so much that is fucked up in this world. I feel angry that I wasted one split second on these wastrels.
Besides my “baby” (my daughter who is a teenager), my animals, my friends, me, the only other baby I am going to give my time and energy and attention and money to is an actual baby who needs my help. Not the dumbass disordered adults whose primary purpose is to achieve orgasms and crush kill destroy their own loved ones.
I have known for years that helping others is good medicine for my own wounded soul. But meeting this precious vulnerable little baby last week was a big spiritual 2 x 4 of Truth (thanks for that phrase, Thirtythreeyearsachump!) that there are much more important places my efforts and energy and attention and time and money need to go. My child, my animals, my friends whom I love and trust and respect, and admire. Baby Luke. His parents, if they get into recovery (I hope!)
Other babies and people and places and causes. (Please pray for baby Luke, his parents, every baby, etc…if you’re the praying type…)
Fuck the energy sucking lying cheating thieves. Put yourself and your children, the people, animals, places, things, situations where you are needed and loved and appreciated FIRST. Don’t give loser energy vampire cheaters another second as soon as you have the capacity to do so. They don’t deserve it. We all have free will to do the right thing, to do good. They use their free will to fuck up and damage and hurt and ruin and cause and perpetuate problems. They are lost ungrateful causes who deserve none of your precious resources.
My daughter is back in school. When she doesn’t need me, and I’d rather come here
and maybe help someone else with what I have to say. I’d rather sit in a rocking chair with baby Luke while my friend, his foster mom, runs to the store. I’d rather do those things than waste my time on a lying cheater.
Thanks for helping me, Tracy and Chump
Nation, to recover my purpose and priorities.
???? ???? ❤️
Great post, I too am working on my priorities.
Thank you Velvet Hammer, for all your inspiring posts and words of wisdom.
I look forward to reading your posts.
Finding Chump Lady was a God send.
I don’t know where I’d be if I hadn’t found Chump Lady and Chump Nation.
I’ve learned so much from everyone here and I continue to apply what I’ve learned in my daily life.
Thank you all so much.
May God bless you and baby Luke through you. Prayer already issued on your and his behalf.
D-Day was Jan 2, 2019 – almost 3 years ago…
My husband & I spent Christmas 2018 with my family in Napa, Ca, and flew home the Dec. 30th. On New Year’s Eve, we went to dinner with my best friend, and her husband (like we did every year for 5 years). She and I decided to wear matching fancy-jumpers (different colors). I was kind of surprised when she showed up in the shortest dress I’ve ever seen. We went to a party after dinner where my bestie’s mom even said, “B, where’s the rest of your dress?” LOL.
Anyways, my friend’s husband commented to me about how my husband & his wife (my BFF) were talking extremely close at the party. I made a comment to my husband that her husband, R, mentioned that they were acting suspicious. My husband laughed it off – as did I.
I only had two glasses of wine at the party because I was extremely tired from jet-lag (live in Cincinnati area, 3 hours difference) from returning from CA. After the party, we went back to my friend’s house and she opened some champagne. I told my husband that I wanted to go home, but he insisted that we stay a while. I remember watching TV, fading on the couch, and noticed the clock said 12:25 AM. Anyways, next thing I knew: I woke up (still on the couch), my husband on the other couch, and the clock said 4 AM! I woke him up and said we had to get home. On the way, he got a call from work saying they needed him to come in. As soon as we got home, he tore his clothes off, threw on work clothes, and headed to work. I went back to sleep.
My daughter (21 yrs) and I were chatting around 10 AM and she told me that she texted me & my husband around 1:30 AM to say Happy New Year’s, asked if we were good, and/or if we needed a ride home (she worked at a bar/restaurant). My husband replied, “No, we’re good. Your mom had too much to drink with B, so I’m just trying to get her to sleep here at B’s house.”
What? Um, wait. I specifically remember seeing the clock at 12:25 AM. I then wondered why we woke up there at 4 am. I wondered why my husband didn’t wake me when we both would rather sleep in our own bed only 1. 5 miles away? Why would he tell my daughter that I drank too much and was trying to get me to sleep at 1:30 when I clearly fell asleep around 12:30? My daughter even showed me his text messages as well as the time stamp.
My Jedi-Mind powers took over. Hmmmm….
The light switch went on in my head and I went downstairs to the dining table where I put our New Years clothes so I’d remember to take them to the cleaners. And there it was….
(semi-grossness warning)
On the front of his slacks were large, dried up splotches of what I can only describe as 12 hour old vagina-juice. Oh yes… as if he had sex with a woman from behind. And that woman sure AF was not me. My heart dropped. But…. I still had to call him out in my way.
He came home from work and I made a big dinner. After we ate, he motioned me to the bedroom (aka international signal for sex). We did it – and it was soooo tough to go thru the motions like I knew nothing. **note: I didn’t have an orgasm and gave a small sigh with, “it’s OK, maybe next time” comment just to stab that f***er’s ego — he-he he….
Afterwards, he made the comment, “Damn, you just changed the sheets and now there’s a wet spot,” as he used the bathroom. I replied, “Yeah… funny thing? It looks like the wet-spot you left on your pants last night.” He didn’t turn around – he didn’t say a word. That’s when I knew 100% that he had sex WITH MY BEST FRIEND.
I still didn’t say anything, but the next day? The pants on the dining table with the rest of the clothing that needed to go to the dry-cleaners? They WERE MISSING. LOL
When he came home from work, I confronted him and asked were the pants were… he tried to lie, said that he “jerked off” after we came home from my friend’s house. I told him he was full of sh*t because I SAW HIM TAKE THE PANTS OFF, PUT WORK CLOTHES ON, AND IMMEDIATELY HEAD TO WORK. He finally admitted that they had sex that night – but only that time. I remember sobbing, then he tried to calm me down, but I ran from him. We were actually running around the BMW like crazy people when I’d occasionally stop and start bashing him with the Vag-Juice Pants, then start running away again. LOL!! I wish my neighbors took a video.
Anyways…. after a little research, I found out that he slept with her 5 times within a 2 month period. He’d literally load snapchat onto his phone to communicate all day with her, then uninstall the app when he was headed home from work. He’d push me to drink alcohol (I’m a fitness pro – I don’t drink much) when I didn’t want to because he’d want to meet her around the corner in the middle of the night and bang her in her SUV – soooo classy!!!
I kicked him out on Jan 2… we were divorced by April 15th, 2019. He had a twenty-something year old girl pregnant by the same month. He proposed to her by Sept. and baby came in Dec. The idiot had quite the year! LOL. As for my “BFF”? She and her husband of 18 yrs decided to “work it out.” Dumb F*s.
All I can say is that everything I’ve learned from this website (and finding, reading, and using your book) IS ABSOLUTELY TRUE. It’s painful at first, but it gets better. Marriage therapy is shit (yes, we tried – and therapist said, “well, there was probably a crack in the marriage before the cheating” — um, really? No marriage is perfect – but I sure AF wasn’t going to take credit or be responsible for any of his douchebaggery!!!). NO CONTACT is better than an orgasm. A life without checking your significant other’s whereabouts (or phone) is fantastic and liberating!!! I’m extremely happy these days and live life on my own terms.
Basically, in a nutshell… my husband was caught with evidence the “Monica Lewinsky blue dress” way! LOL!!!!
Leslie
love your story, Leslie. It is so illustrative in so many nuanced ways, of the tangled skein of f***kedupedness… (and I’m so sorry it was your good friend. I will NEVER understand that).
Makes me wonder if you faded off on the couch because he drugged you.
I wouldn’t put it past him!!
My only comfort in all this was that your ex-‘best friend’ must have felt so special when she heard he knocked up the 20-something. I’m so sorry you had to deal with trash behaviour from your so-called ‘nearest and dearest’.
Happy Escape Leslie !
????????????????????
Thank you! Life is ass-Banana free!!!! ????
I love that violin video, it’s so good! I’ve played it over and over, the violinist is so legit, makes it even funnier.
So many sad sausage lines posted here, the most shocking part is how they act like they are so serious delivering them to us and we are just soooo blown away that they can even BE serious with their total blatant lack of any possible awareness. It’s bizarre and pretty scary too.
Mine told me he “needed to live an honest life”, lol. And that he was a good person.
( cheating on me for majority of our 38 year marriage, gave me an STD at age 60, as many as 12 other women with fictitious names I found on his phone, attempting to buy one of them a town house in Maine, another he bought a car for) He would change the photos of whoever he was involved with on the walls and bedside table in his apartment, so you would see pics of yourself and him,so happy and in love and also my kids when it was my turn to be conned. ( had the apt last 5 years of our marriage when working from another state and I kept the home base) Certainly takes a lot of devious thought and high level organizational skills (and memory!) to pull that off! He is that talented.
He is deeply hurt currently that I blocked his ability to text me. ( divorced me when he retired, was already living with her and building a beach house with me, then married her a year after the divorce)
Her apt was on another floor in same building as his fictitious love nest. I titled the building “Sodom and Gomorrah” as I later found texts to many women in that same building that he was involved with, jumping in the middle of the night from one bathtub to another, you know, that kind of honest, loving behavior. He actually explained it to our crushed adult kids that it was his “ho stage” he was going through!
He wants us to be able to remain friends ( image management) and vacation together at our shared beach house with his new wife, “who really gets” him and was “there for him through such difficult times” in his life. ( while he was nuking his family)
He’s told me he has “completely changed emotionally and physically” now and chameleon’ed himself into a whole new life( everyone else in your previous life system was on to you FW, so of course you had to beam yourself up to a new galaxy and create a whole new identity) and sees no reason I should question whether he loved me or not.
He would actually say to me during attempts to try to save us, that he loved me, but that he also just happened to romantically love Jean, and Judith and Ginger, but saw himself as having some integrity when he didn’t add the other dozen or more love interests names to that list! Like he is discriminating and honest to himself of who he truly loves. ( entitlement to the max, and cosmic level mind-fuckery!)
He would do anything in this world for any one of them to this day, he told me, hahaha! ( mind you, the one he bought the car for and the almost town house for another, did not even make the love cut list).
The ‘Jean’ on the list, he tried to contact again 20 years later. ( 8 year affair with her when my kids were toddlers I discovered 15 years later)
Her new husband ( their affair broke up her previous marriage with three young babies) called him back to say that Jean wanted nothing to do with him and never ever try and contact her again!)
These sociopathic narcissist do a great deal of damage to this world on their destructive land mined paths, we just were unfortunate to get the lion’s share of their abuse.
Sure sounds to me like this is a guy who “ just wants to live an honest life”, right CN?!As long as he gets to define honesty, all of life’s problems magically disappear in his mind, and peace and harmony reign once more. They can’t stand that we won’t buy their BS any longer, a way bigger loss to them than actually losing us.
Yeah, no thanks FW.
I’m going with the “I don’t choose to be friends with someone that burned down my house” position. Honestly speaking that is.
That Netflix ending is just a cherry on the cake.
They employ all kinds of magical thinking, don’t they? Honestly, they’re just an arrow looking for a new desire to point themselves at and it’s as simple as that in their minds. There’s some serious pot holes in their mental processes from idea to execution, they either suffer from a lack of imagination, in that they can’t step themselves through the decision tree of all the different ways they could set their pants on fire if they pursue that course, or they have too much, or rather it’s super-concentrated and they think that thinking it is the same as a done deal. Underdeveloped, immature and self-interested in any case.
I asked mine if years of love and solid friendship didn’t mean anything to him? That sure, new romance is exciting, but is it better than something stable and good? He said that’s how he was, he liked the ‘”newness” and thrill of it all. Wish I had known that earlier.
FWs will say one thing one moment and contradict themselves ten minutes later. Or ten years later! They can go from bible thumpers to atheists and back again with dizzying speed. Nothing they say can be held against them! They have no object permanence. They don’t have any substance, they don’t have any morals, they have no firm beliefs, they don’t stand for anything except their own entitlement and superiority. They are Hollow Men. Or maybe Creatures of the Black Hole.
I think we Chumps tend to place too much importance on *what the FW said* (and not enough importance on their actual behavior). My FW said whatever he thought I or anyone else wanted to hear in order to get himself out of trouble or to get people to do what he wanted. He would change his tune on a whim. Now I know. He is a lying liar who lies. (Thanks whoever coined that). He lies even about stuff that doesn’t matter. Because reality and truth are what he makes it. Because of this, I place as much importance on *what he said* as he does, which is to say very little to none. I wish I had realized THAT at the beginning and not taken X at face value.
It’s like popping a balloon with a pin. There was nothing there to begin with. What we based our lives and future on was just hot air.
He would do anything in the world for any one of them *but* be honest with any of them.
So much for an honest life. Keep trying buddy!
I’m pretty sure I win this contest. Backstory: FW accidentally forgot to mention that he was gay (or, as he calls it, “bisexual”) before he marries me. He cuts me off sexually for over two decades, during which time he resorts to increasingly complex lies and deceptions. Surprisingly, he eventually gets caught. He has a prepared speech ready (he’s been working on it for over half his life), at the end of which the following transpires, and this is verbatim:
Him: Did you think I was celibate?
Me: Yes.
Him: But how would that have been fair to MEEEEE?
Me: You imposed celibacy on me, for over two decades, without explanation, and I never cheated on you!
Him: I never said you couldn’t.
I am not making this up. He actually said that.
My x had a huge porn addiction but told me he thought he was asexual… yes, asexual. He would avoid sex, was impotent (babies the result of artificial insemination). I tried everything, worked out, dressed well, etc etc. He was always perving on young girls at the mall, restaurants. It was gross. So when I found out he was screwing hookers—in my home—a d gifting them sex toys, I had to ask why the f didn’t he ever give me a sex toy? He couldn’t perform with the viagra he prescribed for himself (Dr Perv) with the hookers… but said she made him feel alive, needed (poor thing, she’d had a tough life and her threats to me “what did you do to make her mad?”). Alas, he’s now living his fantasy of porn brought to life, drinking, gambling, hanging out with hookers and paying through the nose for the joyful, free life. He’s escaped his “prison” of a family—but is pissed off our kids want nothing to do with him—that’s my fault—I ruined the family by filing for divorce. Had nothing to do with the prostitute problem. ????
I managed to force the cheating XW out of the family home after some DV and a restraining order. A year later she forces the sale of the house and I am left with cleaning up her residue. Inside a shoebox, I find several notes that prove another co-worker affair going back several years. When I confront her with this she says, “I can’t believe you are snooping in my personal things!”
I PSYCHOLOGICALLY and EMOTIONALLY abused him for years by not giving him enough sex, i.e. every night, or now that you mention it every morning and every night and of course extra on weekends and holidays. It was REALLY HARD for him and he put up with like 5-6 times a week for YEARS before he absolutely broke. His sausage was so so so sad. ????????????
Men like that need to buy either a cheap blowup doll or one of those very expensive sex robots. They can choose her skin tone, hair color, cup size, etc. Three holes to thrust into while they use a virtual reality headset. ????
How in the living “hell” were you able to keep up that regime. I have a healthy libido, but “wow”.
Saddest sausage OW ???? She was our neighbor, and her house was the weekend party house, so of course, FW ended up there. Lots of cheating ensued, even though he was at home love bombing me, too. So, eventually I decided our marriage was over, and moved to my Mom’s, but he wouldn’t give up, he wanted both! When OW figured this out, her heart condition landed her in the hospital, and FW had to go see her every day, and I had to hear how awful it was, she was in such danger, oh no! I’m sure you can imagine my snarky thoughts, even though I have a lot of empathy for everyone, but this Ho was a heavy drinker and smoker, not exactly caring for her heart!
Then, FW started begging me to go visit her in the hospital, with him. So many kibbles. And I almost went, I was so hurt and not thinking straight. So glad I didn’t. He threw that in my face later, telling me I was an uncompassionate person. Yeah, right, at least I never screwed the neighbors and broke up marriages!!
The sadz would fill a book! The most recent is that they’ve weaponized Gottman terminology against me. I’m critical! Displaying contempt! Stonewalling! ???? If only I would unblock them, we could talk and fix everything!
I love the thought of you rocking Baby Luke, Velvet. That little baby is sure to benefit from being held and loved. Your friend is lucky to have you right there, on the ready and able to help. I hope your disco ball heart just glows and you sparkle and shine!
❤️
“Had you only been there for me when my pregnancy hormones were raging”— she said this to me after she ran off with the gardener. I didn’t know about the gardener until she was about to birth my daughter— she tells the gardener the baby is his though DNA tells the truth. She’s mine.
“I hope you suffer and die a miserable death for what you did to me. The gardener is a better man and father than you’ll ever be.” — I didn’t butter her toast and the gardener threatened and stalked me to keep me from my children. They are a perfect couple.
No contact. Remember she sucks.
YAAAS! YOU’RE BETTER OFF and I think you know that ????.
I got: “I got married too young, I never got to fuck whoever I wanted”. That was all he had to say after being together 15 years, married 11 with 2 little children. Also my question was: “what will you do to see the kids?”, because he had decided we should separate for no reason at all, packed one bag and had moved to an undisclosed location. Poor sausage indeed, never mind he broke his little kids’ hearts, and mine, he had a right to fuck who he wanted!
“I am such an asshole, please don’t tell the kids” was when he missed their school end of year show that they’ve been talking about for months, because he was on vacation in Hawaii with his secret GF. We were just separated and he denied being in a relationship with someone else mind you. The fact that he really thought he had everyone fooled nonetheless never stops to amaze me.
How in the living “hell” were you able to keep up that regime. I have a healthy libido, but “wow”.
Every time my ex tried to sad sausage and blame me for his cheating I secretly used his toothbrush to scrub the “landing zone” in the toilet. If he had been a better husband and hadn’t cheated, I would never have done it.
It’s his fault, really.
????????????????
I might have used protection but, you know, “it looked clean”. It’s a shame I had to risk his health over my selfish desires, you know?
Mine goes into what I call “Butterfly McQueen” mode. He might as well be yelling “Miss Scarlet! Miss Scarlet!” for all the wailing and crying he does.
“I always loved you!” Uh huh. Your constant need to stalk and try to date other women, your stripper habit, your 20 year infatuation with my cousin, and your ending up in bed with a co-worker was because you “loved me soooooooo much”.
“I have a disease. This is an addiction!” Uh huh. Sounds like a great excuse for your abhorrent behavior over the last 30 years doesn’t it?
“But I’m different now! I’ve changed!” Uh huh. Like you said you had changed in 2000 when you cornered my cousin and tried to kiss her? Like you said you’d changed in 2005 when I was pregnant with our second child and you were stalking a neighbor and dating a woman at our oldest’s preschool? Like you said you had changed in 2017 when I caught you AGAIN stalking my sweet cousin and you swore you had learned your lesson and that it “really didn’t mean” what I thought it did? Like you said you’ve really changed now in 2019 when the guilt of sleeping with a co-worker finally got to you and you came clean?
Yeah. Poor Sad Sausage. Such a fucking victim. How dare I not believe you and your Butterfly McQueen tears.
Yeah my FW has promised he’s changed so many times already. Or that this time he really will. Yet there never seems to be a change at all, go figure.
Actually, there is a change. The longer you stay with a cheater, the worse he/she gets.
“We feel like roommates. We don’t talk enough or do much else.”
This is the guy who stopped sharing with me verbally (you know how they begin shutting you out during the discard phase), and I finally quit trying & probing for verbal connection after a few years of being stonewalled.
This is the guy who stopped initiating sex, and stopped responding to my advances.
This is the guy who either grudgingly attended vacations I planned or told me to count him out.
Sad sausage. We were like roommates. However did that happen?
I got the roommates line, too. Why yes, klootzak, because you claimed you are a sex addict. Because you said maybe you could stop cheating when you got older and your hormones settled down. Because you don’t use protection. So yeah… no sex from me while you are having your unprotected sex with who knows how many others. Add to that he wouldn’t get a vasectomy after promising he would and he knew I could not go back to hormonal birth control. But he won’t wear a condom so…. For the record, I would still give him a hug or kiss as he was leaving. I was stupidly remaining the committed wife to his face, trying to keep our child from seeing anything but love, but then he stopped wearing his ring and wouldn’t let me kiss him anymore. He turned it into a “roommate” situation. Only it’s worse because he controls all of my finances and expects me to get his permission to go anywhere. I would be far better off if I had an actual roommate!
He wants out? Fine. It will kill him that he will be paying child support, alimony, and splitting the pension and retirement accounts and not able to control what I do with a penny of it. He will lie awake at night trying to guess all my new passwords to my bank accounts and investment websites.
Two more (the keep coming up):
1. “She flirted. I’m so naive.”
2. “You’re so tit for tat.”
Yes, he lied, cheated, betrayed, and defrauded me, but I had the audacity to react. My bad!!
His overall narrative goes something like this: “I just fell in love. Spinach and I grew apart (devalue and discard will do that), and then Spinach had a terrible, bitter reaction. I lost everything–kids, grandkids, more than half my money–and she’s sitting pretty. Poor, poor pitiful me.” No doubt he’s got a flock of flying monkeys who support his sad-sack narrative.
Oh boy, I don’t think I can compete, fuckwit didn’t have the brains or acting talent to really pile on the sad sausage, plus I think he was truly convinced it was all my fault anyway.
A few things, (not sure if they qualify as sad sausage, but I’m joining in anyway????)
Texted me, after I’d caught him out in numerous lies, and told him I was seeing a solicitor (yes, I know rookie mistake)
“why won’t you believe me when I tell you there’s nothing going on?”
“this is all for you and me! (the flat where rat faced whore was living with him) I know it looks bad, but nothing is going on! You’re making this really hard!”
When he came over to collect his stuff (I’d found the texts boasting about fucking rat faced whore)” you’ve just thrown all my clothes into bin bags! You didn’t even fold my para regt blazer! You left my fishing box out in the rain! ”
” I don’t want a divorce, I’m going to come to Court and explain everything to the judge!”
On his Form E: “this whole process has made me very ill.” (as if he’d had nothing to do with the process ????????)
There’s probably more, but honestly, 4 years after Dday, 2 1/2 years after the Decree Absolute, it’s starting to recede into the murk, but the above still stand out.
I *so* wish I’d unpicked the hems on his foul clothes and inserted a few prawns.????????????
hahahahaha
I left a bunch of hidden bombs in his stuff when I threw it in garbage bags. I don’t know if he’s discovered them all. Like a post-it in the DVD case of his favorite Christmas movie ( maybe he’ll find it this year in front of his new victim). Or a note on the back of some pictures, that I placed back into the frame. There were several others. No prawns though, I don’t think he would have noticed amidst all his hoarder junk.
???? ????
I hear the shells work a treat shoved in hollow curtain rods. “Where is that stench coming from ?!”
This reminds me of my brother when I was getting ready to turn the Cadillac back over to my ex. He said I can put a few discreet slivers of fish in that caddie the will take him months to find.
I laughed, but we didn’t do it.
The EX used to lecture me about how I just had a negative view of him. He would get teary-eyed, with a noble, heroic, faraway expression and say, “I may have made some mistakes, but everything I ever did, I did for the family. I did it for YOU and for the kids.” I finally lost patience and said, “You fucked whores for me and the kids?” He turned around in a fury and said, “Why do you insist on bringing up every small mistake I ever made? That’s all in the PAST!” He just slid easily from one sad-sausage link to another…
” I may have made some mistakes, but everything I ever did, I did for the family. I did it for YOU…”
Ah, yes, the ‘mistakes’ shtick. Just remembered another text, “I’ve made some foolish mistakes, all for so-called friendship! Can we talk?
Not in a million years fuckwad. ????????
I remember once asking the FW (this was after we were legally separated) why he did what he did, why all the lies. He said and I quote “I just wanted something for myself” I just stared at him and said “I thought that is what I was to you” He was the only one I was ever intimate with, and she was the town bicycle but he wanted something all for himself.
What a fucking delusional asshole.
Pretty much everything I did was for his benefit, and all the major decisions had to go his way; but he was just so burdened I guess.
I am so glad he ended up with that whore. Though I rarely ever saw him again, I know from what my son told me; they were an unholy mess the rest of his life. Cheating, bankruptcy, family fights etc.
I herd the same about “I did it all for you and the kids”. It was just a toss of guilt to me for wanting a divorce due to his cheating. Its always so validating to hear others FW’s with the same or similar lines.
Yes, the three channels of the mindfuck, rage, self-pity, charm. ????
Direct quote from an email:
“My heart is broken because yes I did cheat which was so wrong!! And it hurt you sooooo bad!!! a broken plate. But it was an addiction and I am in recovery now because it was never fixed from before but I fell in love with you over 4 1/2 years that we were together and now my heart is still broken because the future that we had is all gone!!!!”
My eyes rolled so hard at this. Poor baby.
Shortly after this he met a new victim and moved in with her within 2 months.
I am so glad to be off that crazy train.
Off the crazy train. Yes, you said it. Mine is dead but ya, it’s so nice to not have to worry about him anymore. But I’m not sure the crap ever really goes away totally. A family member called to let me know that FW’s name was listed on the state PAY BACK site (unclaimed funds go back to the state)-I logged on and claimed the $425 dollars which appeared to be from a secret bank account in ANOTHER state he frequented for work! Ah, how nice to know that slimy piece of work had a secret bank account in another state. Just when you think things are DONE (he’s been dead for 5.5 years), something else pops up.
This reminds me off something a friend told me – James give it 12 months and you will look at her and think thank fuck I don’t have to deal with that crazy anymore.
10 months in and I look at that QANON following FW that ran off with her QANON “soul mate” ex boyfriend and I am getting there!
And why the fuck do all our FW exes suddenly think a “soul mate” falls out of the sky and helps break up their marriage ????
The FWs spout all the ‘soul-mate’ BS because they think it’s the best justifiable excuse people will buy for torpedoing their former family (the other excuse is ‘we grew apart’ and ‘IloveyoubutImnotinlovewithyou’ used if AP is still secret). It’s impression management with their public. Most Narcs monkey-branch from one relationship to another (or several, for insurance you know), because they need the constant high of attention and high quality kibble. And for the chump? Who are you to stand in the way of twu-wuv? Don’t you want them to be happy? Finally? Since YOU could not make them happy? In fact, it’s YOUR FAULT they have been miserable for so long. You had your chance, and failed, cue pick-me dance on the discard. (Insert eye roll) Really, its the perfect excuse to end the relationship and simultaneously demoralize/destroy the former spouse to eliminate any resistance during separation and divorce and stun the spouse into cooperating so they can get what they want. And also leave room for hoovering later.
These people are disordered. They have no idea what love is. They are shallow. They don’t form deep attachments. The ‘love interest’ and ‘Spouse appliance’ are just slots that are interchangeable to them. Love bombing is a necessary strategy to acquire bodies/slaves to fill the open slot positions. No one is special to them except themselves. You just have to trust that they suck. Even if you don’t witness any more of their never-ending train-wreck drama-filled life, you just have to believe *with all your heart* that nothing has changed.
We chumps have a really hard time believing the people we trusted and CHOSE are such intentionally manipulative and calculatedly insincere people. I know I was in denial for a long time. Then I was so angry at him but especially myself for allowing myself to be duped. I got over it in time. But once you are ‘woke’ to the fact that such people really exist in this world, you can never go back. I just wish the knowledge made one bulletproof.
My exFW was very surprised when I finally walked away and went grey rock. My behavior just did not compute for him. After all, I had put up with his BS for decades, endlessly ‘supportive’. He kept trying and escalating all the usual triggers he used to get his way. When that no longer worked, he tried to use his intimate knowledge of me to hurt me. By that point I realized that the person I loved never existed, and with that he lost his power over me. I no longer cared. He had always insisted that he should have a clean slate (read, no consequences) after he majorly screwed up and apologized (with his words, never by his actions). I think he fully expected to reconcile eventually. Failing that, I think he fully expected that post-divorce I would be right there where he left me, for the rest of my life, pining for any scrap of his Majesty’s royal attention, with the kids lined up, compliant and presentable, whenever he wanted to step in and play dad. That I would be so desperate and grateful for his attention on me or at least the kids, that I would eagerly comply with any of his hare-brained schemes. Regardless of the fact that he didn’t just burn the bridges to his past life but laid nuclear waste to it. That’s a HARD PASS from me.
Unfortunately, while the extended family has been made aware of the basics of what transpired, and were appropriately horrified, even helpful, they can’t seem to wrap their minds around what this means in long-term execution. From time to time I hear from them “can’t ex-FW help with the kids?” Or “can’t you just talk to ex-FW about this?” As if I were suddenly now dealing with a reasonable, responsible, sane or even generous person. Would YOU want a narcissistic sado-masochistic suicidal addict/alcoholic to pick your kids up from school? Give you a moms day off? Beg to share extracurricular costs? Take them on extended vacations? But he’s their Father! Like that makes the kids immune to his abuse? He already abandoned them and refuses to help financially? They do not seem to understand that I can’t be friends (or anything really) with someone who burnt my house down while the kids and I were in it. Not now, not ever, 100% grey rock/no contact. (Thanks CL and CN for giving me the words to describe my life). That FW will never be given the privilege of entre into the new and better life we constructed out of the ashes of the old. That was some really hard work! He has tried to storm the front gates a few times, it’s true. Probably because we have excluded him from our lives for our sanity and he perceives that we now hold something of value he might be able to extract from us. Fortunately, though he tries, he can no longer steal our peace of mind.
Well said!
Sounds like you are in a good place now – good job!
If it’s any comfort Jason, the ex ran away with his ex gf from school, calling her his ‘soulmate’. He ‘yearned’ for her. He was ‘teary’ in response to a poem she sent him 4 days before my dad’s funeral. ???? It was a blow to me after 26 years of relationship and marriage! This was the same gf who had dumped him twice, before he and I met, and who got engaged suspiciously quickly after the second dumping. The ex chasers are even more disordered than other cheaters. As one of our mutual friends said when I told her he had gone back to his ex ‘not [the gremlin]! But they argued all the time!’ My answer ‘not my circus, not my monkeys’. I don’t want to be anywhere near people who behave like this. Their narcissistic traits know no bounds. They are dangerous.
You made me laugh MW!
I remember my ex came back from spending two weeks with this jerk AP and sat in bed for 3 days depressed and writing terrible poetry about all his flaws and how emotionally unavailable he was blah blah blah. She finished this SIX page poem with then proclaiming that she didn’t care and still wanted him anyway ????
It still hurts like he’ll remembering how I found that poem but I’m getting to the point where I can laugh at how ridiculous it is that a 46 year old woman can act like a 16 year old child ????
He did say, “if only you would have come outside whenever you saw me and comforted me (bj). I was so lonely.” He may have stopped by to get something from the property but never spoke to us while there.
Uuhh? I was a single parenting, doing ALL the heaving lifting concerning bills, home,life, homeschooling etc. He was practically living with a younger single guy and helping him pay HIS bills for a party flop house. In fact the kids thought he lived there and when the guy moved and the ex had to land at home more often -entitlement- one asked me what he was doing here and the other fearfully asked if he’s moving back in.
The abuse really ramped up at that point because he didn’t want to be around us. The abandonment vacation mentioned above happened shortly after this. I had whiplash being around him. Depression, tumor, bipolar? Nope!! Just a mean, abusive, entitled, wealthy, disordered individual.
Later he let a truth fly by stating he felt nothing and was completely empty on the inside. It was chilling because I knew it was true.
That’s why they try to fill their emptiness with things and people. Users. We are just another “thing” to them. In fact, someone I knew told me after the breakup that while we were together and he spoke of me, it was as if he were talking about a “thing.”
My ex would tell me how he didn’t really feel anything for his young niece and nephew. I assumed he was “just” being a dramatic jerk (he is an eccentric contrarian with a mean and immature sense of humor – dreamboat, right?). They are sweet and wonderful children whom I loved dearly, and so I projected my feelings onto him. How could he not love them??
Now I understand he was being truthful. I look at how he treated me for years, and then how he went scorched earth. I was his best friend and most loving and loyal ally for fifteen years, and I meant absolutely nothing to him. Why would I expect a person like this to care about a couple of kids on the “periphery” of his life? He just wants to be the fun uncle when it suits him, and he enjoys the kibble when being be obeyed or adored by them (does not appreciate when they are actual humans, however). I learned he also used the kids to look good to his young OW’s who wanted to imagine him as daddy to their kids one day. (He also misconstrued his nasty, codependent relationship with his narcissistic, widowed mother to make himself look like the selfless, devoted son. From the trenches, taking care of and putting up with both, I knew better.) I don’t doubt FW will eventually go there with one of the young women, or maybe he’ll find some even younger fresh supply. (The women are pushing 30 now, and I hear that studies of online dating sites have revealed that shallow men of all ages prefer women in their young 20’s.) That’ll gain him kudos from the superficial dudes he now pretends are his brothers (though I know they don’t matter, either).
FW will be an emotionally immature, patronizing, selfish and controlling father. He’ll expect his children to be pawns, just like he expects everyone to mold around him. It was hard enough to live alone with someone like that; what a nightmare to try and raise a family with him. A man who isn’t partner material definitely isn’t co-parent material.
AP You best stay home with your wife then. I am always left alone. I need a cupboard moving and some other things done. I suppose I shall hve to do them myself. You men are all the same you want your cake…
HIM No darling its not like that…its just I have to pick her up after work.
AP Yes go home to your wife . I / we don’t get lucky ( has come on period and not pregnant) and I suppose I do feel guilty because, well, I suppose I am the MISTRESS always second best , never a priority
HIM No you’re not second best. Dont think like that . I didnt know she was changing her shift. I am sorry I am making you feel this way. I have nothing only me!
After I discovered the first (that I was aware of) long term affair with a married woman with kids, I insisted that he break it off with her. Because I was that stupid and wanted to save my “marriage” and keep the family together.
Due to a shitty marriage counselor (the marriage was shitty and so was the counselor), I was encouraged to help HIM deal with the pain of losing her.
And man, that asshole milked HIS pain for all it was worth. He got extra sex, over the top meals and gifts, and lots of attention. Actually, not much different than how it already worked in the relationship. I got nothing but more disrespect and drunken rages. Again, nothing different than before.
Years later when he inevitably did it again, I asked him why he had a thing for skanks.
He said in a sad tone, they weren’t all skanks. I knew by the wistful little voice
he was thinking of her. A married woman with kids fucks a married man with kids, and he put her on a pedestal.
That’s in spite of the fact that he caught her cheating on him twice.
But I was mean for calling her names.
Fuck that guy.
“Due to a shitty marriage counselor (the marriage was shitty and so was the counselor), I was encouraged to help HIM deal with the pain of losing her”
Ew!
It’s so bizarre how us chumps just don’t seem to exist to people.
Okay, I’m being totally lazy as I don’t want to rewrite all this again, so I’m copying and pasting something I wrote a few years back. 🙂
Martha the Chump: My Sad Sausage curled up in the fetal position in our bed, crying like a baby and saying he was “so ashamed” after he told me he went to Canada over ten times while I was pregnant and got 100% naked lap dances (found out by a chump that touching is allowed, you can get bj’s and sex for extra money which I’m confident in saying that my perverted ex would most certainly have done if he had the chance). Chumpy me hugged him. Wrapped my body around him. Told him I forgave him. And ended up having great “make-up sex” with him that very night. NEVER ONCE did he try to understand my pain over what he did. Even though he said he’d “make it up to you for the rest of my life”, he didn’t do one damn thing to make it up to me.
My daughter who I don’t think ever will be a chump (I hope and pray!): The night we told our kids that we were divorcing (ex lied to the kids and said we both wanted the divorce — I didn’t — and right away I set that record straight and said “your dad has just been pretending” — narc dad “didn’t like that I said that” — too bad lying jerk!), the kids and I were in a heap of hugging each other and crying while their dad was emotionless and didn’t care about the pain and suffering he was causing the family he supposedly loved. I told him to leave us alone as I didn’t want the person who was hurting my children near them anymore! Narc dad slept on the couch that night. My daughter decided to sleep in the room above our living room which is a loft with direct openings so you can look down into the living room. The next morning I asked her how she was doing and she said she didn’t sleep well, “because dad was crying and I just kept saying to myself ‘shut up!!’” See, narc daddy had all the sympathy and empathy for himself, because he was the victim I guess, but none at all for his family. Going forward he was totally cold and emotionless to what he was doing to us, but for himself — Sad Sausage and tears for himself.
Unchumping Martha: A few days later, I told my ex, “Since you no longer want me to be your wife. You are sleeping on the couch. I’m no longer making dinner for you or doing your laundry. I’m no longer doing anything for you that a wife would do.” He looked at me in disbelief. A few days later, the kids and I asked him to leave and move back in with his parents. Daughter was sobbing. Son was protecting me and saying, “Look what you are doing to mom.” And ex said robotically, “I understand, son. I understand, son.” Absolute no care or concern for the pain he was causing his children. He said he wasn’t going to move, because “he had his rights.” Didn’t give a shit that his presence was making us all miserable. Once again, life is all about him and his needs. That’s all that matters to him. Same night I come downstairs and he is nowhere to be found. I go down in the basement (it’s unfinished with concrete floors) and he’s sleeping on the floor! I’ll set the scene so you can picture what a big baby he is. Camping matt is on the floor. His nightlight of sorts from his grandma is plugged in and is near the top of his head. His Bible is there too. I think there were a few other things there, too. But the Baby Boy nightlight and Bible are all that stands out. He’s in his sleeping bag on top of the camping matt. I go up to him and he’s like a caterpillar in a cocoon. Even his head is in the sleeping bag, but just his face is sticking out. He’s also in the fetal position again. I gave him a small nudge with my foot and said, “What are you doing down here?” He’s all whimper noise. I got disgusted by his sad sausage infant/man behavior and walked away, turned off the basement light and went back upstairs. I told my sister (she was in town helping me get a backbone) where he was and she said, “Leave him” and I did.
He was the one who lied to me for 25 years about so much stuff. He was the one who cheated and lead a double life. But he was the victim. When I think about this night in the basement, I realize was a disordered person he is.
That’s so familiar. He was shocked you weren’t going to cook and clean for him anymore… You’re right, this stuff shows how disordered they are. Mine threw a tantrum in the kitchen because I stopped grocery shopping. He went off to our adult son about how since I still had access to HIS bank account, I should be buying HIS groceries! Our son was disgusted. He told me about it because he wanted to tell me it was not my job to buy dad groceries and if he didn’t want a wife anymore, he needed to get used to buying his own damn groceries. That’s part of the freedom he claimed to so desperately want.
Yeah, they don’t like it when we turn off the wife appliance. They think they can lie, cheat, steal, gaslight, slander, be mean/cold and still feel entitled to all we have to offer as a wife. That’s why they have to get another wife appliance ASAP, because they don’t like doing any of the work in running a home and family. “When a man marries his mistress, he creates a job vacancy.” 🙂
I think it’s also to avoid the emotional work that comes with being alone.
That really pissed me off when I found out for several years I had been doing all his laundry, his cooking, his errands, his volunteer work etc; all so he could have more quality fucking time with the whore(s).
Yeah, I was stunned, then furious, when I realized that when I gave up my summer to take care of FW’s sick mother, her pets and her hoarder house so he could have time and space in the woods to get sober and heal… he was actually having the time of his life with an intern, frolicking naked, canoeing and fishing, writing love notes, etc. He had no problem putting me in similar positions for the many years he cheated on me, and I never suspected a thing.
F############R
That is awful.
Is your story the inspiration for Tracy’s cartoon of the man hopping away in his sleeping bag ?
No, that’s not me. I’m not sure if this is the original post, but this story is what the cartoon was drawn for. https://www.chumplady.com/2021/07/most-psycho-reaction-to-being-busted/
Martha, your story is cinematic — replete with mood lighting of the BabyBoy(TM) nightlight and Props (a Bible lol, maybe a tad late for the adulterer though) and even a camping theme which is evidence enough he was only ever ‘camping’ in the role of devoted husband and family man. Your ex-FW fantasized about himself as the lead in the movie that was your family life. I am so sorry you endured that and so glad you are out!
Funny you should link that classic post as I thought of that one too when reading Leslie’s story above (with her cheater’s helicoptering ahem ‘man’hood and their running circles around a BMW while she whips her cheater with his vag-juice pants) is pretty hilarious and deserves an entry in the ‘Most Psycho Reaction to Being Busted’ hall of fame. And at least she didn’t set the Beamer on fire.
Samsara, you made me LOL’d with the BabyBoy(TM) nightlight comment. Yeah, and with that Bible that he’s read through multiple times; he doesn’t have to follow what God says to do. As long as he reads the Bible from Genesis to Revelation every single year, he’s on his way to heaven because he reads his Bible. The god he serves doesn’t care he’s a pathological liar and serial adulterer. #satan
Yeah, poor Leslie’s story definitely needs a cartoon of it’s own!
“NEVER ONCE did he try to understand my pain over what he did. Even though he said he’d “make it up to you for the rest of my life”, he didn’t do one damn thing to make it up to me”
As I find myself saying often around these parts… I think we married the same guy.
Wow, I could have written that word-for-word. I probably have, here even. I can’t help but wish I’d found CL right after dday1.