What If I Leave and He Really Loves Me?

Ask yourself if you lived in a house for 25 years and then found out that the entire structure was weakened by both rot and black mold would you still live there after someone put on a fresh coat of paint. If you say “yes” then stay and take your chances. If you say “no” move and find a new place.

Good Morning Worth and welcome to CN.
What an auspicious day, a new CL site (looks awesome) and you get a life (which will be awesome).
Who do you trust Worth? CL and millions of Chumps in CN or the garbage that’s playing you for 34 years?
Ok. That’s not fare to ask of you since we (CN) don’t know you, however, Worth, I’m pretty certain that we ( CN ) care more about you as a person than your soon to be ex ever pretended to. Everything he does is a lie, he’s a cheater.
I don’t need to reiterate what you’ve asked and how CL responded. Read it again and believe it.
The one and only thing you need to do is remember how valuable you are to your children and your family and let your STBX have the ho-worker, and the bar girl, and the secretary, and the score keeper and … you get the idea.
And, remember, he can’t have you. No contact, remember he sucks and take him for every penny since you gave him your youth and this is how he treats you.
I sure hope he’s as successful as you say and make sure your alimony and support is at your level. High worth.
You got this.
Xioba xioba

I could have written this account with very little change. Mistook abuse for love. Mistook criticism and distance for things I needed to improve upon.

I went through seven difficult miscarriages. One that almost killed me due to chlamydia (ectopic) that I didn’t know I had. Cheating and lying are abusive. And they are never, ever love.

People who use and abuse others like this for their own satisfaction and snacks are freaking sociopaths and need to be avoided at all costs.

I just found out the FW was arrested as part of a sting on a massage parlor that was doing human trafficking. Harmful, destructive sociopaths.

This was my story if I had written it. 26 years, no kids. Ex’s affair, never admitted, was with his ex gf from school long distance. It was easy to hide it from me. I trusted him. But, and it’s a huge but. His withdrawn, avoidant, cold, superior behaviour, coupled with his heavy drinking (I was ‘puritanical’), plus the rows that he picked which resulted in my being chased from rooms, wrists grabbed hard enough to leave bruises, was all abuse. He hid money, moved it around continually, lied about bonuses, lied about salary, lied, lied, lied. But I never asked myself whether I loved him. Only questioned whether he loved me. He left me. He ran away, but he continued to abuse me from afar during the divorce process, which I had to initiate even though I still loved him. Now I see that I turned into a worn down, threadbare doormat and that makes me very sad. I no longer wonder why he did what he did. I will never understand. My life is often very hard. An affair was always a dealbreaker for me and he knew that so he didn’t tell me about it. When I found out about it, he had already gone. No contact was my way through it. Am I happy now? Honestly often not, occasionally yes. Am I safe now? Yes, and that’s all that counts.

Wow, this one hits hard. Change a few details, and I could have written this letter as well. The years between DDay of the “emotional” affair (which I foolishly believed was “just” emotional) and the final DDay were excruciating. FW saying how sorry he was, buying expensive gifts and trips, promising to “make it up to me,” but all the while taking his deceptions further underground, while also becoming more distant, moody, cold, etc. In my gut, I knew something was off, but whenever I tried to talk to him, he swore he was “happy” and basically blamed me for being so sensitive, slow to forgive, etc.

As I have said before, this gas lighting and emotional abuse was far, far worse than the actual affair(s). I became a depressed, anxious, barely functioning shell of my former self, suffering from various physical and emotional ailments, all the while wondering what was wrong with ME. Through it all and even after the final DDay, I tried so hard to keep my marriage & family together. I realize now I was fighting to “get back” to something that had never actually existed, it was all a “mirage” as Velvet Hammer has stated. His emotional abuse of me was so extensive and corrosive and in retrospect, I see the signs were there right from the start. My kids suffered so much as well, between his manipulations and my anxious state, something I regret more than the marriage itself ending.

CL, this is a masterpiece of a response. I would hope that many could see themselves in this letter and that it is the inspiration they need to take that big step. Brilliant to equate it to birth. It’s painful for a moment of your life, and it’s a new life that you’re birthing from that short time of pain.

I do hope that she has found her “worth”.

You need new friends. Friends who support you leaving a man who is physically, emotionally, verbally and sexually abusing you. You need to get out or you may be hurt or killed. I know this is blunt, but I have been there.

It sounds like you are a religious woman and that’s great, but religion can miss the mark with abuse, especially females being abused by males.

I would recommend a few resources; http://www.divorceminister.com; he pops up on here sometimes and his work is very helpful.
Gretchen Baskerville-The Life Changing Divorce; she has another religious perspective.
Dr. Lundy Bancroft-Why Does He Do That? Is a life changing book; explains the abuse cycle and types of abuse well. It opened my eyes.

Good luck! I hope you check in and let us know how you are doing! Hopefully these suggestions may help someone else.

scooching over on the bench, too………. 40 years of sunk costs here – a lifetime wasted on an abuser who never felt anything real for me or for his family.

I might also offer – I agree that he very well is making arrangements and hiding his plans from you, as chumplady says – this is the part that never entered my mind all those years while I kept forgiving him and loving harder. He let me do all that…..while he nodded and looked sad and confused, asking me to give him another chance, to help him be a better husband…..all the while searching for my replacement and playing victim with the adult children about how miserable he was and mistreated by me. He told my friends (without my knowledge) that no matter what he did, I was never happy. He tried and tried and tried, etc…. He did everything for me and I never appreciated him…..

I woke up one day to find he DUMPED ME! For decades, I had forgiven and given and overlooked and loved harder, desperately trying to hold together the life we had built, the adult children and grandchildren………. only to be suddenly and rudely discarded after 40 years of marriage. He found someone willing to give him blowjobs in the closet at work – moved out of our family home directly into schmoopie’s apartment and then married her 60 days after our divorce was final.

My adult children felt sorry for him, believed his tall tales about how unappreciated and unloved he was in our marriage and supported him throughout his painful ordeal of our divorce – also a total shock to me. They fell for it hook, line and sinker…….they never thought to ask me if this was also my truth.

These fuckwits are so stupid in all areas of life and relationships…..and yet, so devious and cunning.

I hope Worth found her worth and got out of this marriage safely. What resonated for me in this letter was the feeling of being lonely in the marriage and trying to fix myself to make things better. I was so lonely for so long. I kept thinking that it was me. I was at fault. If only I were more entertaining, or less tired, or sexier, or funnier, then things would be better. I kept myself spinning in circles with the “does he love me?” question. Two years after the divorce was final, and after reading Chumplady every day, I realize it was never me.

I like the suggestion to ask whether I love myself. The other important point mentioned is to ask “do I love my partner?” If I had been honest with myself back in the marriage instead of spackling everything, I would have answered that with a resounding NO! I did not love him very much. I didn’t even like him very much. There were periods where I romanticized our relationship and felt something akin to love, but that wasn’t often or real. I was reacting to the abuse being dished out. The manipulation and the gaslighting. I was getting mysteriously sick at times. The stress was wearing me down.

Once I separated and filed for divorce and then finalized the divorce, my life, and my kids’ lives, because so much more peaceful and drama free. Maybe Worth can check in to update us all on what happened and whether she found her way out, making better friends along the way.

I hope Worth got away from her abuser and is safe now.
I remember all the years I thought it was me that wasn’t good enough. I read so many books about how to have a good marriage. I remember the fear of breaking apart my family.

After I had officially filed, and physically separated, and was safely away from FW, one of my adult sons told me that he had been losing respect for me over the years. Taking a stand and calling it abuse, and refusing to put up with FW’s behavior helped all of us.

I’ve been out of an abusive marriage now for 9 years. He cheated, but told me I was controlling, manipulative, jealous, crazy and threatened to take my daughter. He was king of the house and our life revolved around him. He was the gatekeeper to just about everything we did or didn’t do. I honestly had gotten used to it, and I was a shell of my former self. Since he’s been gone, life has stabilized, my mental health improved, my self-love increased enormously. Leaving him was the best decision of my life and I have no regrets but it wasn’t easy. Lawyer up and know your financial situation. Don’t reveal your plans to anyone and find a physician who understands this dynamic. Stay safe and aware. You will flourish after you leave this man. You will find peace and joy again. You don’t deserve this treatment. Nobody does. You can’t fix him and love doesn’t leaving you feeling worthless. Better days are ahead for you.

This letter really breaks my heart. I sure hope Worth got herself out. This is not love, hell, this is no life either. We’ve all been there in one way or another. If you’re here reading those letters and wondering whether you should leave, you probably are.

My story is not as bad. Only married to FW 11 years before separation. He never hit me. When he left me to go after his happily ever after with his Schmoopie of several years, and shatter my little kids’ family and illusion of stability for a while, he told me “it would be harder for you to find someone in 10 years.”. I shudder to think I could have been 10 more years in the dark, thinking that was love. 10 more years of being lied to and used and ground down to something smaller and smaller every fucking day. He never beat me, but how far off is yelling and punching the wall when I dare disagree? When I ask why he doesn’t spend more time with his family, or where are our savings for a down payment on a house, year after year after year? None of it is love. It doesn’t get better. If any of it applies to your situation, get yourself out. Start loving yourself first ❤️.

This letter made me so sad to read. I hope WORTH IT got out and is living her best life. To anyone else reading this wondering if their abuser love them, remember this: a person who loves you will act in living ways towards you. Abuse is not love. Cheating is not love. Lying is not love. Shoving, hitting, or slapping is not love. When I left my abuser, I was really confused about what love even meant. I googled a lot of phrases, and I came across the loveisrespect.org website. It’s aimed at teens and young adults, but I found it really helpful.

Dear Worth-Your-Weight-in-Gold,

I suspect the reason you can’t leave is that you’re a battered woman who’s been told you’re “just codependant” by the poisonous RIC establishment who’s bread and butter relies on minimizing severe abuse because they could lose their licenses for trying to reconcile abusers with victims (ergo, abuse becomes “not abuse.” See how that works?).

It’s like telling someone who’s been held hostage and repeatedly assaulted with a baseball bat that it was “just a pillow fight,” that the “leg isn’t broken in four places” and they could walk if they really wanted to…

I think that because what happened to you has not been properly identified, you cannot get resources to heal from it and can’t get strong enough to break free.

I was an advocate for dv survivors for several years and believe this is the key problem most survivors have with escaping– the fact that society and the so-called helping professions continue to whitewash and minimize abuse. Part of that minimization is only categorizing severely injurous assault– the kind that leaves victims paralyzed, blind or with keloid scars, etc.– as domestic violence per se. Meanwhile in reality most batterers operate on a beat-by-need basis, only becoming physically violent when less athletic, less legally risky measures (such as boiling frog attacks on self esteem, coercive mood swings, financial abuse, nagging, neglect and yes, cheating) fail to sufficiently collapse victims’ psyches, rendering them easier to control.

Even after the shelter movement began in the US and other countries, helping professionals continued to minimize the effects of coercive control that makes up about 98% of the domestic violence experience. It’s psychologically entrapping for survivors to see that society sides with abusers in the key sense of minimizing and denying abuse when denial is abusers’ favorite tact. At a moment when suvivors need more than anything to be enfolded in a protective embrace of wide social support and believed, they are instead told their abusers were “right” to deny the severity of abuse. It’s crippling.

There’s a book out by one of my favorite dv researchers, psychologist Evan Stark, titled “Coercive Control” that tackles this widespread political catastrophe head on. It’s about how violent assault — as long as it doesn’t outright kill– is rated by survivors as actually far less damaging than the endless psychological tactics used by batterers to paralyze prey.

In my experience, cheating is one of the standard tactics in batterers’ arsenals as mentioned above. Canadian criminologist Donald Dutton is another important researcher and author who explains well why batterers seek to psychologically paralyze intimate partners: because of something referred to “masked dependency.” Basically abusers of all stripes are incapable of actual love, instead only a pathological, infantile dependency on intimate partners. But then abusers– who were usually raised in a “kill or be killed” home environment– become paranoid that intimate partners will abuse the power of this dependence and will either “engulf” the abuser (who lacks a core self and so tends to mirror others to fabricate the appearance of solid character– then blames the people they mirror for “engulfing” them. Go figure) or abandon the abuser. Cheating addresses these internally-generated fears by diluting that dependence– spreading it out among more than one partner– as well as enacting revenge on victims for the imaginary crime of merely having the power to leave.

For abusers, detachment is victory because attachment is torture. This is why so many cheaters seem to revel in theit victims’ humiliation and pain: the abuser believes they were just premptively betraying someone who was bound to betray them anyway. Many are cold when confronted because being cold and detached was the main goal of committing the abuse. By paralyzing partners and betraying first, the abuser effectively masks their own dependency from themselves as well as others.

If that sounds like a bid for leniency for poor, sad abusers, bear in mind that the above is a psychological profile shared by serial killers. Dutton says that even with therapy and prison, recidivism is about 97% for individuals with this brand of attachment disorder– essentially incurable.

In your testimony, you write that you worry that you’ll leave and miss out on some renewed burst of love he could develop for you. But the problem and the danger is exactly that. According the best authorities I’ve run across, the closest thing to “love” people like this experience is followed quickly by an overwhelming compulsion to disempower and destroy the object of it. You’ve already experienced that “love” and it’s come close to killing you.

That cycle will only repeat. Only when you’re fully off Planet Abuser and no longer breathing those toxic, mind-bending fumes will any of this make sense. You’ll realize that your present helplessness and paralysis– aka Stockholm Syndrome/captor bonding– were mostly a safety strategy, a kind of boxer’s hug to keep the opponent’s blows from landing with full force. This will become especially clear if he goes berserk and becomes violent again at the moment he feels you truly pulling away and recovering your perspective.

I say the above as a warning because when abusers are in detached/cold mode, they don’t seem like they could possibly go into murderous rages for fear their victims will escape since they don’t seem to give a shit what the victim does. But statistically it happens all the time. That’s the other danger of masked dependency– it’s misleading to observers and victims are left unprepared and unprotected. When that mask slips and the abuser feels their warped rendition of “love” again, some will attack. So please be safe, seek practical support and protection and keep your plans under wraps wirh only a trusted few. Since I’m measuring your level of fear of your husband by your current degree of paralysis (playing possum to keep from setting him off), I worry for your safety.

Sounds like my ex-wife LOL. Do what I did and leave i.e. divorce.