To be chumped is to be lied to. There are fibs, but then there are whoppers.
Like the cheater who refused to wear his wedding ring out of consideration for his wife, because a wedding ring is a “signal” to predatory women, desperate to have affairs with him. (Thank you Kintsugi for sharing that one.)
It makes me wonder how this studmuffin imagines himself — batting women off like fish flies? Or maybe it’s more like an attack of rabid turkeys, enchanted by a shiny object. Ring! Peck, peck peck!
Who among us didn’t swallow some big lies? Judging purely by the all the Bible study that goes on in hotel rooms around Chump Nation.
So today’s Friday Challenge is to share the Stupidest Lie you bought. (Aside from your wedding vows. Don’t play the obvious.) I’m talking gobsmacking lies that still have a scintilla of possibility. Okay, it’s possible he’s sleeping in his car in Vermont… in January… without cell phone reception…
Probable? No. Possible? — well it’s not against the laws of physics, so YES, I suppose it IS possible and to conclude otherwise would smash my world into smithereens…
So, what stupid lie did you buy?
Until you didn’t — because these things do tend to wake you up at 2 a.m. and make you cross-reference your data plans. Then it’s BUSTED. Then it’s more lies…
Then it’s me encouraging you all to get away. And you do. And then later, as you approach meh, you can point and laugh at it.
So put your Stupid Lies out there, CN. Let’s laugh at it. And ourselves. Thank God to be free.
TGIF!
We last played this game in 2020. This is a revision of an earlier challenge. Still doing this moving limbo thing until May 2.
Make your house your home, CL. Amazing you can still make time for daily posts at all, ya dang superhero. Thanks for being you, and happy housewarming!
You should add that it only occurred to me that it was a lie when his AP turned OW and he had wedding rings TATTOOED on themselves. ????????♀️ Something she’s stuck with unless she’s opting for laser removal for the benefit of husband number 5 should he ride in on a unicorn.
The poor turkey pecked fella is free from groups of rabid ladies forever, since he passed away last month…having left behind 6 children (3 still minors) a couple of step children, my older 5 children who wrote him off years ago, and the newest affair partner’s children… (3) who he moved in with him and the AP/OW. Now I KNOW my believing the wedding ring explanation was way out there, but I cannot for the life of me imagine what lie he told his now widow, that would allow him to move his new affair partner in with them.
His disordered-ness got more and more profound over the last 5 years and I am constantly stunned over how much trash took itself out of my life and I am not left dealing with now. So, so grateful for that.
Laser removal hurts like a bitch. She will regret that ring while her finger looks fugly for months.
I am very very glad I never got THAT foolish idea while married to him. I have yet to meet anyone who has had it done not regret it later.
XW had the name of her AP tattoed on her wedding finger, so it was hidden underneath her wedding and engagement rings. I didn’t know about it till my youngest asked her about it. I laugh now about it, but back then it hurt.
The x had tats for his kids… and an infinity tat for the OW and Baby Precious… no tats ever for me.
When he posted a convoluted and vague “Good-bye world, I love you all” he posted photos of the tat he got for Violet, Daisy and my son Sage, posted a photo of a rose tat that was on the arm of the new AP, and totally gave the OW and Baby Precious the shaft by not posting the photo of theirs. Then he posted a link to Dropkick Murphy’s song Rose Tattoo.
That was his final farewell. So deep and profound. ????
Maybe I should be nicer since the man is dead, but every time I try to be understanding or compassionate or reflect on how much pain he must have been in…. I just can’t. I seriously cannot. Even in death I am so over his self centered bullshit that surrounded his final moments before he checked out. Maybe I could be if dying hadn’t been his choice, but it was….. he had to have total control right down to his last seconds…. And fuck anyone else.
It’s better to say it here than to my girls.
As a friend who has followed your story for more than a couple years…whew what a twist of events. Thanks for your update.Sending the best to you and yours. Langele
I didn’t do the wedding ring tattoo but he talked me into getting a couples tattoo with him just a few years before the discard. So he’d been actively planning to dump me for like four or five years at that time. He was probably already dating my replacement. It was so weird because he came home with a tattoo and announced he had already gotten it and wanted me to get a matching one with him. Not gonna lie, I felt pressured.
It’s ok though, found a tattoo artist, saved the money, and I’m finally going in to get it covered up. I’ll be so glad to not have to look at it anymore.
A cheater co-worker once told me how he & his (now ex) wife went to get tattoos of each other’s names … this apparently was his penance for cheating & a way for him to show his commitment to her. They went into the tattoo shop and he came out with her name on his bicep, and she came out with nothing. She divorced him not long after.
Wait!! That was me!! Well, the same thing happened to me. Lol!! My cheater ex is a paramedic; tattoo didn’t stop s@&! APs could care less if someone is married.
(((Kintsugi)))
I remember your posts from years ago and I felt your pain.
You have always been, and always will be,the present, sane parent, no matter the ages of your precious Children.
I feel thankful that you are in control of your life and you remain at peace.
You Are Mighty!
❤️Peacekeeper
All this talk about tattoos. ???? My XWs cousin owns a tattoo shop. In 2017 we were with our friends while they were getting tats. My XW said she could tattoo and wanted to try. Of course I volunteered and now have our initials in a heart on my thigh. A few months later I figured out she was having an affair.
Much like your ex, mine found the love of her life who has 5 kids with 3 women. ???? She didn’t believe his EW and XGF that he’s a serial cheater. But now they’re married. Only a matter of time now until she finds out what it’s like to be cheated on. ????
Moving is the worst. I hope it goes smoothly for you and you get settled in quickly.
I just executed 2 moves in parallel (1 into a condo, 1 into my home in another state) – I relate to your situation!
As an IT guy, every night he had to update the server from home when no one was on the system (which meant late nights in the basement) testing apps like Skype and gmail for work ????????♀️
That her experiment’s IT guy told her she needed an end-to-end encrypted chat app because “people would try to steal data from the experiment”. The IT guy is the AP.
Argh! Was he sexting the ho and surfing porn down there?
That reminds me that I bought that FW used Signal and password protected his phone for security reasons because he has a high security clearance with his job. D’oh!
Ha! Mine told us his security was paramount and he had to password protect all electronic devices, hide thousands of dollars in his car “just to have on hand” ie to pay hookers.
Mine worked at a company that was working on a top secret project (that part was true). He would tell me frequently that if the password to his phone was not entered correctly after three times, it would erase all the data on the phone. TBH, I assumed that this was just him bragging about how top secret his job was (trust me – quite a bit of eye rolling from friends about him talking about his work position). But now I realize it was that he was doing shady things on his phone like texting his AP. What a jerk.
Hello IDB! I used my phone to handle Teams and email communications from clients and yes, a client company installed an “erase all phone memory after too many failed attempts”. I was more afraid of my kids messing up with my phone, though ????
OHFFS, I bought that lie. I also bought the lie that I wasn’t allowed to travel with him on his various conferences and TDY assignments. We had planned for years that I would join him on those assignments. Guess who went instead? Hint, hint! It wasn’t me.
Ditto, Thirtythreeyearsachump! For years he encouraged me to attend conferences with him and was excited to introduce me. Then, suddenly, it became, “I’m going to be really busy at this conference and you’ll be bored. I don’t think you should come to this one.” It was in London – one of my favorite cities to walk around in – but he thought I’d be “bored”. Uh-huh.
The stupidest lie I bought was actually not by my ex but by my MIL and female friends: “We’ll never accept the intern-OW.” “We’ll never abandon you.” I was so grateful. Guess who was having OW over for dinner within, I dunno, a month and telling me I needed to just accept the “new reality” and they couldn’t hold it against son/old friend “forever” and I had to accept my role in making son/friend so unhappy he was “pushed” to do something he’d never otherwise do. (Context, when we got married, I moved from the US to my ex’s home town in another country so his family was supposedly my family and my friends were mostly the wives of his high school buddies. I’ve since made chosen family and new friends.)
MaisyL: The cheater’s family accepts the gaslighting (likely they taught cheater that skill anyhow) so they can make their own world “right again”. I just saw my exFIL – who used to come at me like a big ole friendly bear – treat me like someone inconsequential revving up his ride ‘em mower loudly while I tried to say hello. I just walked away. I no longer waste my time on people who show that my value is conditional.
I totally get it. My ex-in laws pretend I don’t exist when we cross paths at the kids’ sports/school events — but that’s better than the overt cruelty they used to display. One of the first times I encountered them after ex-H and intern-OP had a child was my eldest son’s confirmation mass. My ex-MIL made a point of sitting behind me instead of across the aisle in her son’s assigned pew where he was sitting with OW and baby. ex-MIL whispered loudly “to herself” throughout the mass: “oh, what a beautiful baby. isn’t he gorgeous. I’ve never seen such a beautiful baby. and what a wonderful mother he has. so blessed.” I honestly don’t know how I survived that level of cruelty.
What a disgusting POS she is, no wonder her son is a dirtbag!
Horrible. So sorry.
I do believe in higher power. People do have consequences for their actions. Karma bus or whatever you believe I’ve seen it
How lightening did not strike *someone* in that church is beyond me. 😉
Yes, she was a POS and I hope baby Jesus puts her through the meat grinder.
FWF, ????????????
That’s sick. Going out of your way to hurt somebody. I’m so sorry you had a fuckwit, sadistic MIL.
Jesus, she sounds unhinged. I’m so sorry MaisyL.
Same here..ex SIL was “there for me whenever I needed to talk” until I found out that she told his sister that she was tired of talking about the affair with me. She also said she never wanted to meet the OW and she was a whore…now she’s liking their pictures on social media, so I’ve been told
All the over time he had to work but absolutely not 1 penny to show for it .
He did anything between 80- 100 hours over time a month for 6-9 months and when I asked why he never had any of this money he kept saying that the pay role department was new staff and they didn’t have a clue what they were doing .
Not only was he not getting any of his over time his hourly rate of pay was wrong every month also !
So he simply couldn’t afford to pay for groceries or bills or pay towards his car he was getting no pay poor thing . He asked me to get a second job ( I already worked 45 hours a week ) or ask my boss for more hours just to tide us over until it was sorted out with his pay role .
He kept saying I’m getting it next month babe and we can go away for a weekend as I will have a heap of over time pay to get , yet the next month nothing again !!!
I mean what’s the chances ??
But no worries he’s getting it next month all 400 hours of it dating back months !!!
He really had bought a house with his AP and was paying for it and getting it done up before he left me
My ex often “worked late”. Stupid me never thought to reconcile the hours with the paychecks. For a long time I thought he couldn’t possibly be cheating because there was no time for it – he was always home or with me or at work. In truth, he and OW were using his “overtime” to fuck.
Ha, this was me. I did this too. He worked sooooooo much. I felt so bad for him that he worked soooooo much so I did everything at home and always had meals ready for him. But I remember being confused why we were having money issues when he worked and I worked. It was so weird we could never get ahead. And I thought I had full access to the account and I was the one who had to do the budget because he refused. I would work it and rework it and it would never work. I used to cry about it. I felt like a failure. Never, ever checked his hours though. That didn’t even enter my mind until a couple weeks before d-day.
He came home on a Friday and announced “Wow, I just barely managed to hit 40 hours this week!” and grinned, all proud of himself. Problem was, he had been working 12 – 15 hour days that entire week. So I asked him how the fuck that happens. He refused to answer me. Literally just refused. Until he started to get angry and I started to get scared. When I was sicker, he could ignore me for awhile and then act confused and “what are you talking about?!” all concerned. He treated me like the guy in momento. I basically was the guy in Momento. That really pisses me off when I think about it.
Same story here. Working overtime at a union job but not getting paid for it.
Wasn’t cheating because, how could he? He didn’t “have time for that”.
Same thing. Parked me at home and went back to the office to “work on billing”; he was banging schmoopie on my exam tables, in my office. When I began to suspect, I popped up with a paperback in my hand and told him I’d go with him and wait in the lounge. He worked all of 15 minutes before declaring he was done.
My FW legitimately did electrical side jobs after work, but then he would go to the OWs. The kicker? He would only do that when I was working my occasional 2nd job in the evening, because he “didn’t want to be away from me unless I was away”. He would text me when I was at that job, he even sometimes would visit me there. He covered his tracks well – I never suspected.
After D-day when I was looking to see evidence of his lying in texts, I found that on my birthday, when I was chaperoning a HS band trip, he was texting me very detailed info about his side job. He was very concerned with when I would return home, and also informed me that he took a shower. Yeah dude, you took a shower because you fucked her on my birthday when I was away. Later on he said “I would never do that on your birthday”.
I never caught him in lies while it was happening. He was careful and I never suspected. And since 1 D-day was enough for me, i didn’t have to put up with lies during attempted reconciliation.
Same. But it was our anniversary, kids’ birthdays, his birthday, holidays… He used to “go get his hair cut” like 25 minutes before his entire, huge familly would show up for a party. And i felt bad about it.
Never. Again.
FW would drop in unexpectedly to L&D with donuts or brownies for the nurses. They all thought he was so sweet! He was checking to see if I was really there and how long he could expect to have with OW. I never caught him in a lie until I told him I had an STD and he tried to claim I must have had it before our marriage (49 years of undetected STD through 4 pregnancies.)
Which reminds me of my ex’s excuse: “Where would I find the time to cheat on you? I’m always “working”!” And I believed it. ugh…
“Catching up on work” was the MO for my self employed Sunday FW… “just for an hour or two” (after a 60 hr work week + Saturday soccer coach for the neighborhood of 700 + families / 2nd FT job). Took me 28 years to understand this Masterful Dick was hooking up with his married college roommate — a father of 3, friend, neighbor and I should have known… but didn’t. Now I’ll just also assume there were other men online or in our car (car seat was moved back + long trips to Costco “Sunday mother’s helper” for 1.5 h” / running errands). Home Computer & phone: “Oh, there is this new thumbprint ID” … or late night “updating server and it’s taking forever to download” on the family computer in the basement aka: erasing server / incognito. I naively trusted him.. until I didn’t. Now he’s got a new beard on the other side of the US ironically in SF.. and no, he never admitted to anything. The double life of FW’s! Trust you gut and know you deserve better. Being alone is better. #theydontdeserveyou and never did.
OMG that is insane!! What a complete sociopath!
I hope you added his new house when you were going through the property settlement.
I sure did ???? he never knew I found out about it . So when he was demanding this that and the next thing ( all in cash he didn’t want anything just the money for it ) I said sure I’ll have my marital share of and gave the address as it’s bought out of marital money . His lawyer wrote back and said he will accept £ as long as I dropped any claim against said house . He got less than a 3rd of his original demand .
Good for you!! I love dropping bombs on these entitled, selfish idiots. I bet he dropped a bomb of his own..right in his pants!????
Good for you!
“Most satisfying bomb dropped” could be a fun Friday challenge. ????
That is vile Karmeh.
For me as shitty as it all was, the theft of my money and time was the worst. He was supporting another woman and her big assed kids for at least three years (likely longer) while I scrimped and saved and worked my ass off at a full time job, doing his volunteer work to effect his promotions and trying to keep the house up to his lofty standards.
I hope some day you get to see him or at least know he is eating shit.
When I speak of changing the laws on adultery, what i am speaking of is making laws stronger and the threshold of proof easier so that chumps can at least recover some money.
Cheating as horrible as it is is one thing, theft of a spouses time and finances quite another.
Oh yeah, it bothers me. I went without so many things. I scrimped and budgeted and would cry over the budget weekly while his fucking whores were getting free phones and shit out of him. When we divorced our phone plan was over $300, for “three” phones. A year before it was $200. When we got the phones it was like $140. It is now over $500 and I have my own phone. (I know that because the dipshit has had his bank statements sent to me a couple of times.) When we divorced I found out I had no access to our phone bill or our plan. I hadn’t known that because it was something he “took care of” for me. I remember fighting with him about the phone bill because it kept going up and I wanted to change companies. I never considered he was paying for other women’s phones. His family struggled while he did shit like that. I went without health insurance at one point and I was diagnosed schizophrenic at the time and dying of an undiagnosed autoimmune disease. Because we couldn’t afford it. There’s a special place in hell for these pieces of shit.
Yep. Mine was paying for a phone for AP/OW while married to me.
I found out about it when we were divorcing and so was getting my phone on my own plan. AT&T accidentally let her number slip while talking to me.
Also, I got a call at my job about a month after her left, from my insurance agent saying that he dropped me off the auto insurance and I’d have to get my own policy. I cried and cried over that. A couple month later, I got new insurance cards for my car in my mailbox. I opened it and realized it wasn’t mine. It was his sent to my address by “mistake” and him and the AP/OW listed as married. We were divorced yet and neither was she.
I went to the pharmacy to pick up my prescription about two weeks after ex-hole left and was told that they could not process my insurance. I had to pay out of pocket. I had no job! We were not even divorced yet! I was incensed! I was picking up my anti-depressant! And, he had already taken me off his insurance.
The ex was paying a lot of AP’s bills and taking her and her kids out to “family dinner” every Saturday for years.
He spent at least $60k on her over the years they were together. He also roped me into buying school supplies, shoes, clothes and expensive gifts for them, because “poor single mother” was something he knew would tug at my heartstrings.
Meanwhile, I had to keep working for another ten years after he retired at 50, because we “couldn’t afford” health insurance.
But after the last DDay, he made some very bad decisions (for him) and promised me the entire proceeds from the sale of our house in order to bribe me into staying with him. He also bought a new bed and had to replace the guest beds and all the couches because he admitted to using them with the AP????
He was an idiot and didn’t want to pay for a lawyer, so I held him to all those promises in addition to lifetime spousal support and health insurance (that must have really stung him????).
I’m not well off, but I have enough to be happy in my own little home without a mortgage or that nasty creep in my life.
Here’s to all who escaped from their abusers, and to all who haven’t yet: you’re worth so much more than what they’ve led you to believe. It’s hard to see it when it’s new, but you will survive and eventually thrive without a cheater in your life.
Prior to realizing my ex’s second OW , And he worked an out of state job . I was left to take in and discuss our taxes with a preparer. I find out at that time we owe well over 10,000 because he kept 99 the pay checks to get more money. He had brow beat me off the joint bank account and and his lying also caused us an audit so along with a divorce and loosing my Mother. All occurred all at same time.
I hope you got half the house! If he bought it while you were still married, that should be part yours. I hope that worked in your favor somehow. What a FW he is…. smh.
My ex-husband did something similar–always refused to pay more than 1/3 of our living expenses, always crying poor–but he bought two new cars and new clothes along the way while I made do with second-hand cars and thrift shop clothes and craigslist furniture. I never thought to question his assertion about what he earned compared to me. Because I was paid as a consultant, my hourly rate was 3 times higher than his, so I thought he was being reasonable. But, my hourly rate was offset by times between consultancies where I was not paid, and the lack of benefits. Actually, he had made more than me on a yearly basis for most of our marriage. And I believe now that he knew it, he probably enjoyed the position of power that withholding that knowledge gave him.
I only found out that he had been secretly putting aside money for a new house and a boat for himself, when he bought them and abruptly moved out! When we began the divorce, he had the gall to complain to his lawyer accusing ME of infedelity (!!!????!!!). Unfortunately, my own lawyer was influenced by his lies. She kept on advising me to accept damaging offers from him that would have left me saddled with all of our marital medical debts, and him still with the house that he had bought on the sly and his new car and boat free and clear. I knew he had no proof because I knew that I had been faithful. So I dug in my heels, and made her negotiate a settlement that allowed me to keep full ownership of my own house, which I had brought into the marriage, and forcing him to also pay me alimony equal to his share of the medical debts. I wish now that I had been less generous during the marriage, and had looked at what he was earning more carefully. But if I thought about it at all, I just assumed that he was putting aside money for “our” retirement, that it would all come out equal in the end.
Yeah, I was definitely a financial chump !!!
“I am emailing all day long and going to lunch and dinners with a younger, divorced employee, from whom – from a business standpoint I should have nothing to do with interpersonally because she’s 4 corporate layers below me, so that I can expand myself intellectually and learn a second language. It is not an affair. It is an exercise in intellectual growth it will help me professionally. The pictures of her in the bikini on the beach etc. are just a way for me to expand my vocabulary”
I believe this remained his first real exploration Into marital cheating
He became very attached to her
I actually watched the texts come in on this phone in for a while and believed him – it was just his own version of Rosetta Stone
I finally figured it out and I was going to leave him and he talked me into staying. It was such a huge mistake. He ended up discontinuing this relationship with her – but it was as if some sort of barrier ethically emotionally and sexually have been broken with him, and he He just continued to sext and look for other relationships after that
Five years later I ended up having to divorce him anyway. And I wasted so much time
Oh brother. “Expand my vocabulary”
We should have a list of euphemisms for cheating.
“Expand my vocabulary”: “non-verbal communication”
I feel a Friday Challenge…
What the young people call it nowadays…
I’m so sorry, Meanwell. We need more stories like yours- it helps other early chumps in the stay-or-go phase hear the painful truth: once the mask slips, it’s over. No time to waste in lining up ducks and getting divorced, going no contact.
I hope so. We have so many barriers to jump before leaving. Our denial. Our optimism and “ hopium”. Our need to feel we tried or did OUR best so we can tell our kids or “universe” we tried.
My kids young adults often ? Why I stayed for so long . Upsets me a lot. I end up defending myself.
It is often a rock and a hard place.
I certainly wish I had done more to prepare myself to leave at that time.
That’s the lesson.
Better job etc.
I did line up a lawyer that I kept in touch with until I filed
One lesson I will pass on is that our children – girls especially – need to be self-sufficient and self-supporting. Then they aren’t vulnerable.
I am well educated, financially astute and became the sole breadwinner. I had a prenup protecting my businesses and assets. No one in my life would have ever thought this would happen to me. No one thought he was capable of being so evil and heartless. He lied and obfuscated in court, and told me he would drag everything out as long as possible to get money out of me. I had to pay him a large settlement, hand over a bunch of furniture and a new truck, and pay all his legal fees so that I wouldn’t spend the next three years or so in court. How we love is what makes us vulnerable, how we value ourselves makes us vulnerable, not our education or independence.
We need to teach everyone to see the indicators of bad relationships early and to set boundaries and enforce them. Chumplady is doing an excellent job of it and we need to spread the word. Recognizing the methodology of abusers makes us invincible.
My Dad drilled that into me and my two sisters growing up. Thankfully, he did!!!
Oh, there were so many. I suppose the biggest lie was about OW when he said “she’s cute, but she’s not my type”. I was used to him having female friends, and thought he only loved me, so it took awhile to clue in that whether or not she was “his type”, he was grooming her to be the next victim. It actually didn’t take that long. I had my suspicions about 2 months after he met her. When I raised my concerns, I was told I was paranoid, jealous, and controlling. I wasn’t. I was just correct.
But he also told me he wanted to reconcile, that he wanted to start over, that he wasn’t angry anymore, that he still loved me, that he missed me, that he wanted me to come home, that he was sorry, blah, blah, blah. I wanted so desperately to believe him.
Later, he tried to continue lying, but what he didn’t know was that I was a VERY good detective, and when I asked him things it wasn’t because I didn’t know the truth, it’s that I wanted to hear what he would say. I would smile and nod and say “okay” to whatever tall tale he fed me, but I didn’t believe a word he said.
The funniest one was when suddenly he was sporting a shiny new key on his wallet chain (yes, this 43 year old man wore a wallet chain). I asked him what it was for, and he said he DIDN’T KNOW, that he had just “found it under a stack of mail on the mantlepiece” and maybe it was the babysitter’s. What he didn’t realize was that I had only recently looked through that stack of mail and there was no key under there. And the mail had been there for weeks, so how would the sitter have “lost” the key under it? And I also knew that OW had just moved to an apartment of her own. And there WAS a key on the mantle, but it was silver and was the key to my mother’s house. This one was brass. He claimed he was wearing it so he could ask the sitter about it. Except the sitter came to our house every day, so he could have left it there. No reason to carry it around. A couple of months later it was replaced with a DIFFERENT key (coincidentally right when OW got a different apartment). I asked him about that one, and he said that our favorite restaurant had given it to him since they found it on the table one day after he was there and put it in his mug for him. And he said he didn’t know what it was for. I didn’t believe that cock and bull story for a second, because no restaurant would give a key to someone if that person didn’t know that it belonged to them, and second, he and I had gone out to eat at that restaurant for my birthday AFTER the date he said he had last been there, and he had had a beer in his mug. There was certainly no key there. When I expressed doubt, he said “ask the bartender!” knowing I likely would not. A few weeks after, he was no longer wearing the key. I asked what had happened and he said he had thrown it away. Funnily enough, the next week I went to pick up my son, and both I and my ex were leaving the house at the same time. My little kid, in all innocence, came down the stairs and said “don’t forget your key, daddy”. I looked at my ex and said “I thought you threw it away” and he replied that he had forgotten that he hadn’t thrown it away. In the divorce discovery, HE ACCUSED ME OF STEALING THE KEY AND BREAKING INTO OW’s APARTMENT. What???? She STILL believes this. Apparently someone messed up her little altar of mementos of their relationship (I didn’t know such a thing existed). As if I’d commit a crime in the middle of a custody case. WTF? I still think he did it himself, to make OW paranoid and make sure she didn’t trust me at all and clung tighter to him. The whole “key” situation is so pathetically bad. I mean, why come up with such elaborate and frankly stupid lies? He could just have said “it’s OW’s. She tends to lose her keys a lot so she wanted me to keep a spare for her, since WE LITERALLY WORK RIGHT NEXT TO EACH OTHER”. I would have bought that, as it sounds plausible. OW did lose her keys a lot. They did work in adjoining cubicles. I have given copies of keys to neighbors or friends for emergencies, etc. But no, he had to say all the dumb shit he said that was SO easy to disprove. I think he and OW thought they were very clever and that I was an idiot. How wrong they were on both counts. HAHA.
Oh god. Sociopath.
Also, “Don’t forget your key, daddy.” That’s both funny and upsetting. Enlisting kids to help with the double life in any way is wrong, wrong, wrong.????
IsawtheLight, I hope you and your son are doing well now. ((hugs))
We are doing great. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. I have my own apartment. We have plenty of money. My kid is doing well at school and has friends. He’s a happy, sweet kid. I’m single by choice and enjoying the freedom and the peace.
Karma caught up to my husband quite quickly. OW left him for being abusive. He ran out of money (they rented a huge, expensive house for the two of them and the three combined kids, and he was left holding the bag). His lawyer dropped him for nonpayment. The magistrate and the custody evaluator seemed to be siding more with me. It all got to be too much for my husband. He took his own life last September. OW tried very hard to somehow continue to be a part of my story, and my ex’s sister’s as well. Both of us told her to sod off and not contact us again. We told her not to come to the funeral. Thankfully she did not try. She still thinks I stole her belongings (I cleaned out the ex’s house after he died, since he had taken quite a bit of marital property with him, plus my kid’s things were there), which I did not. I don’t want her stuff. OW rather recently wrote on Twitter about her “arch nemesis” in a way where I knew she was talking about me. Which amuses me to no end (I sometimes check her social media because honestly I find it amusing – I was so intimidated by her for so long, but she’s really quite a shallow, plain girl and dumber than a box of rocks, not the paragon my ex made her out to be). Why the ex wife of her dead ex boyfriend still matters to her is beyond me. I don’t care enough about what happens to her to be her arch nemesis. I have other things to do with my time and energy. My kid does still likes OW and talks about her fondly, which upsets me, though I try not to let it. She not only left my husband, she left my son. Without a word of explanation. He’d known her almost half his life, and my ex hyped her up to my kid as his new family, his new siblings, etc. OW took her kids and ran and hasn’t so much as sent a message to my kid to say she’s sorry. Not even when his daddy died. He sent messages to her and her kids on Facebook and got only silence in return. I don’t really want her in our life at all, but that’s still a shit thing to do to a child you claim to love. I did get upset once and told my son she is not a good person, but he got mad at me for saying that. I’ve let go of the shit she did to me (I haven’t forgiven her, I just don’t care to dwell on it – I have a life to live that she has no part of, and in the end she helped me escape a terrible marriage so it all worked out), but what she did to my kid? I hate her for that.
This online chumpy stranger hates her for that, too. What an awful woman!
Late to the party, but ITA with Spinach: there must be a special circle of Hell for sub-humans like the exOW, ISawTheLight. To cut off and ignore a child like that who has lost so much is worse than terrible. And then to centralize herself and attempt to keep the drama going. Insert eye roll here.
Wow! You too huh?
Same thing happened here… he shot himself in the chest last month after a night in jail for abusing the OW and their kid. He’d sued me for custody and actually had the upper hand until he went to jail. He just couldn’t deal.
How is your son handling it this far out?
Kintsugi… major.
Honestly, my kid is doing better since his dad died (6 months later, now). That household was very toxic (screaming matches with the girlfriend, both of them were alcoholics who were depressed and had volatile tempers, OW is neurotic, the place was a pigsty) and full of chaos. The constant back and forth between houses was extremely stressful for my son, who is autistic and thrives on routine (we had a 2-2-5-5 schedule, which was a LOT of back and forth – my kid said he never had a chance to feel settled). My son had so much anxiety and depression he started talking about not wanting to live anymore. He was 8. I ended up checking him in to a children’s mental ward for a few days. My ex had no idea my kid was struggling (because my son never opened up to him – he put on a happy face for daddy because I suppose him being sad about being away from his mommy didn’t go over so well with my ex). I know my ex (and probably OW) were badmouthing me in front of him. I also know they were telling him to keep secrets from me. That’s so unfair to put on a little kid.
After OW left, my ex was extremely depressed, and I found out later was making multiple suicide attempts over about 4 months (it was the 12th attempt that killed him – I don’t even think my ex thought it would work, since the others hadn’t; he took OTC sleeping pills and drank a bottle of scotch) . My son was really worried about his dad during all that time. Then my ex didn’t respond to me for a few days (texts/calls regarding school schedule stuff) and didn’t show up to the bus stop on his day to pick up our kid. So I knew something was wrong. He was an asshole, but he would never have missed the bus. I still couldn’t get ahold of him, so I picked up my son from school the next day (I told him I didn’t want him to be worried at the bus stop if daddy didn’t show up). And my kid said “I hope daddy’s not dead.” I had contacted the police and they found his body the next day (in his house). When I told my son, he said “I thought it might come to this”. Which is a REALLY heavy thing for an 9 year old to say. He didn’t cry or anything. I was holding him and his whole body got really hot. That was all. He wanted a lot of information, and I gave him what I could without sharing that it was a self-inflicted death.
Since then, my kid has been really happy most of the time. His anxiety is mostly gone. His depression is gone. He does mention his dad sometimes, but not in a sad way. More matter of fact, like “daddy and I used to do X”. We went to see the new Spider-man movie with some friends, and my son said “Daddy would have loved this”. I don’t doubt that my kid is keeping a lot inside. It will probably come out at some point, but for now I’m letting my son enjoy a life that is settled, safe, predictable, and peaceful. We enjoy each other’s company and have fun, and have gotten into a good routine. He was VERY clingy at first and wanted my attention every minute of the day (which is hard for me as I need alone time sometimes), but now we have a good balance where we do things on our own some of the time, and he knows he can always come find me and show me something interesting that he did, or ask a question, or ask to play or read or go to the park, and I pretty much always say yes.
My son is in a new school (SO glad my ex actually agreed to change schools to the one near where I live, since he killed himself less than a week after school started and it would have been a mess trying to switch schools after the year began; my ex lived about 45 minutes from me) and he loved it. He has lots of friends. He joined the chorus. He’s doing really, really well.
So we are great.
Most cheaters feed off drama so I bet it was your ex that staged the break in to OW’s apt. The added “see how crazy my ex is to lose me” is just another attempt to make OW think he is special.
Oh, I 100% believe he did it.
They’re so sick. They just love to play their little games. You know what it makes me think of? Chris Watt’s whore in the police interview. She knew he had murdered his two little daughters and his wife. And she still sat there and bragged about how he bought gift cards to take her on dates so they could fool his now murdered wife. Even with the wife dead by his hand, she still laughed and bragged about how they tricked her. That shit made my skin crawl. Zero remorse, zero empathy. Just happy and glowing with duper’s delight about how she helped tricked a murdered women with her wife and child murdering boyfriend. They think we’re stupid but the reality is we just aren’t monsters like they are.
“But if she was only engaged in a casual dalliance, then why did her online search history indicate she thought of herself as practically engaged? Not only did she spend some two hours browsing for wedding dresses two weeks before Shanann and the girls were murdered, but she even put in a search for ‘marrying your mistress.'”
Gavin de Becker points out that liars, who know they’re lying, throw in too many details and plot twists because their stories don’t sound believable to themselves.
I love Gavin de Becker. Especially his book “Gift of Fear”.
My ex had a key too. He actually said it was for a restaurant as well because we had them store a whole pig in their cooler for my sons wedding reception.
He was trying to get with the owner of restaurant but seriously, she was above his pay grade. She might have let him slap her ass a time or two, but then thought she could do better.
So glad he’s gone.
I bought the lie that physician x’s hours had suddenly increased dramatically because he had more patients and more trouble coping with the the Electronic Medical Records system. He started leaving for “work” at 5am and returning at 9pm. I would wake up with him so we could spend time together. At the other end, I would prepare a nice dinner for him because I FELT SO BAD FOR THIS REALLY HARD WORKER.
Fuck it. It’s so easy to cheat if you’re a physician.
I should have called around to see if other docs also had these crazy hours. Why didn’t I? Oh, because I trusted him and his excuse.
I’m still beyond amazed that that man could come home after screwing OW in a hotel and kiss me and eat the food I made and act as if nothing had happened. That he could lie so easily shocks me. Cheaters really need to lack empathy and have an uncanny ability to justify their lies.
A justification he would later hurl at me was that he had to lie because he knew I would get upset. My fault.
My ex built time into his schedule for affairs AS SOON AS HE LEFT FELLOWSHIP AND STARTED HIS NEW JOB! (He’d probably been planning it since residency!) So I’m not sure how much of his time was spent banging other people. . . I’m guessing as much as he could manage!
Ooh, same same but lawyer. It was such an unusually busy year he was on track to bill 3000 (!) hours!!! And if I had the nerve to ask him to spend more time with me and the kids, it was all “how dare you guilt me after all I’m doing for this family? Look how hard I’m working! While you do nothing.” Talk about guilt – I felt terrible for him. It certainly takes a lack of empathy to fake that kind of reaction when you’ve just come home from afternoon delight with your intern in the presidential suite of a luxury hotel.
My ex is an attorney too. Would get home from work around 10 p.m. Turns out, AP is a teacher so he’d spend afternoons with her then go back into the office around 5:30. All this time, I’m working to help him find a better job for work/life balance. Disgusting.
Ugh. Gross. Imagine someone like that teaching your child? I just shuddered thinking about all those times I couldn’t reach him to find out if he’d be home before the kids went to sleep (why did I bother, he never was!) and he claimed later he was “in a conference room in negotiations and couldn’t check his phone”….right…
LOL. Yep, same situation with me. Said she was super busy at work and got mad at me for suspecting she was having an affair. “How dare you?”
And then i found her out.
Then came the gaslighting. LOL!
Lies flowed out x’s mouth like water.
Mine did that too. He’d be out pretending to work late and screwing gross outs and then he’d come home and have dinner with us.
I do remember a couple times he was upset we waited until he got home to eat. I didn’t understand why at the time. I think the guilt actually started to get to him a few times. But he would just cram it down and carry on. What a trooper.
My x physician claimed, when salaries were cut due to COVID, that he’d been asked to work late and he knew how worried I was about money. We were eating baked potatoes for dinner because he said they “only cost 14 cents a serving.” Meanwhile he was paying $500 each visit with the prostitute, buying her groceries, gas, car repairs, fake fingernails, hair extensions, fake eyelashes, cigarettes, drugs, booze, flowers, cheap perfume, babysitters—when she wasn’t leaving her young children home alone—and sex toys.
Wow.
????????
Thinking about them coming home from the OW, sitting and eating dinner with us, then sleeping next to us – that will always disgust me. Heck, I would shower with him before bed. So he was washing her off of him with me right there in the shower. Sickening.
You can add lawyers to that list.
Said she had soooo much work when in fact she was staying at work to screw an associate lawyer 15 years younger than her.
She used the same justification.
They LOVE fooling us. I would even go so far as to say they live for it and That the lying is much more important to them than anything else.
The power of manipulating and fooling the ones who trust you. They see our trust as weakness and they adore using it.
It’s just so sick.
My collection of lies has a wedding ring one, through not as ridiculous as Kintsugi’s. Sparkledick told me he lost his ring because he likes to twirl it on his desk and must have twirled it too hard and forgot to pick it up. So glad I am rid of this shit.
My X cheater lost his wedding ring cutting the grass near the fence line. I kid you not, he said it must have slipped off when he was putting his hands through the grass to cut it. Only a FW would sit on his butt and use hand clippers to cut grass near a wire fence! So, this was one of the many, many lies I believed over the years. It wasn’t until after D-day that the lost ring memory came back, and I realized the timing of him losing his ring coincided with the time in our marriage that he was mean, cold, distant, “working” a lot, going out with friends all the time, drinking, smoking and saying to me, “You and the kids will be financially fine without me.” I was pregnant when he said that to me, and I am 100% convinced now that he was having an affair at that time and lost his ring while screwing around with yet another ho-worker. Ring was lost in 2000 and D-day was 2014. <<<<<This is why you should never stay with a cheater! They do it again and again with different people!
The wedding ring supposedly broke when I found it after Dday; to me it looked like he cut it. After throwing him out he asked for it back. What ring? I scrapped it. He reportedly has to wear one for the ho as if it matters.
My now X is wearing a ring less than 3 months after the final divorce. I asked him and he told me “no, not married.” Of course I ask “What?” while looking at the shiny new ring on his finger that was definitely not ours. “Oh I’m trying something.” I scoffed “What? She needs you to wear a ring to be happy? It never stopped her from chasing you when you had your ring on.”
Who knows which part of this is the lie.
We didn’t wear rings after the first DDay over 20 years ago. I threw them in the trash.
Later during our marriage, he actually married his new AP and they exchanged rings. I never got a straight story from him about what year they did this.
This challenge made me remember a weird incident about 5 years before shit went down.
I found a really cheap ring in his sock drawer and he claimed it was his deceased dad’s. He then took it out of the drawer and thanked me for finding it. Then he slipped it onto his ring finger. RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME.
I told him that it should probably be worn on a different finger and he sarcastically said “Okay, Ms. Manners.” Then he smirked at me and put it on his middle finger. After that, I never saw him wear it.
He really was a smug piece of shit, and I bet he really got a charge out of fooling me.
He used to go out every Saturday night, I thought these were guys outings but he was with AP. Those were their date nights. Invariably he would say good night and then head back upstairs, “Oops, forgot something”. I could hear him open a drawer, but never thought anything of it until I remembered that both his Viagra prescription and THAT ring were kept in his sock drawer.
ClearWaters this wedding ring scam must be from the cheater play book 101.
Mine did this twice. He also had a lame reason for a missing (losing) his wedding ring. He said he “lost” his ring down the sink at the Hotel he was staying at while washing his hands and went down the drain. Very weird that he never called hotel staff to help open the trap that night nor told management. I was told Hotel sink drains are made so items do not go into the sink drain. They are made too narrow. Cheater said he completely forgot about the ring in the morning and only remembered after he drove 100 miles away from the hotel.
Then ring was replaced only to be taken off again when he said he wanted to buy me a diamond ring and use loose gold he had and his own wedding ring gold to form it as it would save money. He said in the near future would buy another for himself. Well he never did.
To this day I do not know what he was up to but can imagine and really even though I shouldn’t care to know. I do want to know. He insists that these tales are true…..
My guess is he went to a strip club got drunk and gave one of the strippers the gold band as payment for lap dance or sex. Anyway that’s what my imagination tells me. No closure!!! I hate that!
I know how much not knowing hurts.
It feels like, if you just learn the entire, complete story then it will all make sense. Maybe the pain will lessen, maybe you will find some hope or peace with the situation.
Been there, and dug up so much stuff it made my head spin.
You’ll never get the entire truth. You’ll never get the whole story. You’ll never really know why they did what they did.
You can’t get closure from a cheater. You can only get away and try to accept your new reality.
Please try to heal yourself with people that love you and want you to be happy. And that excludes cheaters, who only love and look out for themselves.
“I’m just going out for an ice-cream(or milk-shake)” was one lie I found weird but still didn’t suspect an affair. I loved and trusted him. So many red flags with hind-sight. Ha, what a chump I was.
Me too- I heard “I’m running out for a soda” too many days, weeks, and years. And that was after knowing he had been arrested for indecent exposure early on in the marriage. Although I bought his lie way back then too. “I was just readjusting my pants & this woman saw me & thought I was…” I don’t even remember the words he used but I believed him back then. And I didn’t connect the dots until after 3 more DDays revealed hooker habits and I found CL.
The lies I know were always part truth & part omission of detail.
“I’m running out for a soda (and some time at the adult bookstore)”
“I got cash before my trip for cab tips (and strip clubs).”
“I changed my flight because of bad weather (and this city is great for hookers!)”
“I had to stay late at the office to get a report out (and I just don’t feel like coming home to dinner when I already lined up a ‘friend’ at 6 pm).”
“It was just one time (on this business trip) and I’ll never do it again (with that one).”
Disgusting!
Oh, one more.
Him: “I want to go hiking for a few days by myself. I need the time to be alone.”
Me: “But you *hate* being alone.”
Him: no response
Me: “Well, I’m worried about your safety. Let’s buy this expensive satellite GPS system in case anything should happen.”
Him: Ignores me and hands me a detailed itinerary for his hiking trip: trail routes, camp sites, etc…super detailed.
CN, he didn’t go hiking by himself. He flew to another state to hike with the OW. Says he bought the plane ticket with cash. Really? I don’t believe anything now. He even sent me a picture of a fish he caught and lied about which river he caught it in.
He divulged this big lie on D-Day, which occurred only a week after this trip. He would later say that lying about this trip was his biggest lie. Guess he ranked them.
I have a similar hiking story. Ex never wanted to do anything alone then one day he announced he was interested in going hiking. I thought that we should go as a family. When I mentioned it, he said no, he wanted to go hiking alone and the hikes were too treacherous for us, they were isolated, it also gave him time to think. It wasn’t like him but I chalked it up to middle aged crisis and maybe he needed the time to reflect.
Later I found pictures taken on his phone of him hiking which I thought was odd if he was alone. I asked him who took the photos, he said a passing hiker. What a surprise to find out he wasn’t hiking alone but with a woman he met in a hotel gym.
“I chalked it up to middle aged crisis and maybe he needed the time to reflect.”
Yep. Same.????????♀️
I even went to REI with him to look for camping stuff for the trip. We had our 5-month-old grandchild with us. My daughter (grandchild’s mom) would become enraged when she learned of this. His defense? “But I didn’t end up buying anything” (because they didn’t have what he wanted).????????
Oh, and while at REI, I looked for a winter jacket for our grandchild. He complained, saying that her parents can buy a jacket for her. I remember being really alarmed. I mean, we had plenty of money. I put my foot down and marched over to the the kid’s section, wheeling the baby stroller. Unfortunately, they didn’t have her size. But it fried my ass at the time. Still does. Cheap bastard.
Traitor X was spending God knows what on who, but didn’t upgrade the electrical panel on our house when we replaced the heating/AC system (3000K) and almost burned the house down, with us in it.
Good riddance to him. He was right; our souls do not match because I think his is missing.
They are horrible! Mine was an opposite issue . The old inherited home we had moved to had only a wood stove for heat. He refused the install of any other back up type heat. This meant someone had to tend a fire. Since he worked out of state and lived in our camper . I had to remain to load the fire. He refused to buy firewood. I thought I was going to freeze! I actually think he wanted me to.
Klootzak installed an electronic thermostat in our house, put a passcode on it that he didn’t share, and then flew to Europe for a month, leaving me with a 2 year old in the house with no ability to turn on the heat. I called him and demanded the passcode. He said if I needed heat on, I needed to call him and ask and he would put it on. Only he was constantly in meetings (supposedly) and couldn’t have his phone with him. I found the sensor for the thermostat and put it outside to force the heat to kick in.
In hindsight, I should have checked us into a very nice hotel and lived there in warmth and comfort.
He also refused to refill the oil for the furnace and wanted us to run the natural gas fireplace in the living room to heat the whole house. You know, because gas is cheaper. But he wouldn’t bother to pay to convert the furnace from oil to gas. He spent thousands renovating the garage containing his “project car” that sits there gathering dust but won’t spend on a good furnace to heat the house safely and properly.
the misogyny he exhibited. gah. misogyny is based on money.
When my ex was in nursing school, one of the instructors was Native American Blackfeet and the ex talked a lot about the classes and then was invited to a sweat in a sweat lodge the instructor had on his place and would invite students to experience as part of his curriculum.
One semester, the ex got a very bad case of pneumonia and was coughing so hard that I packed up our kids in the middle of the night and took him to our small community hospital. They air lifted from there to the bigger city 50 miles away and he was hospitalized for 5 days.
I visited as much as I could, but the girls were 3 and 1 and I had other kids at home too. He told me not to worry, that this instructor had stopped by and visited often and x was sleeping mostly anyway.
Fast forward about 6 weeks and I saw the instructor in the hallway at the school ( I was going to
Classes too) and I stopped and thanked him for his visits to ex and how much I appreciated his visiting him in the hospital when I really couldn’t.
I realized much later that the instructor had no damn idea who I was talking about.
Oh… the sweats were a couple times a month and ex seemed to be on some kind of spiritual awakening… so I didn’t question them much.
God I was so dumb.
Needs those photos for his profiles on dating apps.
You’re exactly right, that’s what he was thinking because I later found the same hiking photos on his dating profile.
Oh, I got the sudden interest in an overnight hike too. There were also road trips to Atlanta to catch up with his former co-workers after he retired.
The best was volunteering to keep an eye on the plants overnight for the Master Gardener plant sale lest any local hooligans try to steal them.
When I unraveled the texts and call logs, promises to take another “hike” soon were common.
My then wife stopped wearing her wedding ring. When I noticed she said that it was too warm and sweaty to wear it…
Mine said she didn’t want to wear it when she went to festivals (with the other guy apparently) in case it got stolen, then started saying it didn’t fit anymore..
My XW would leave her ring behind when she went out of town, saying “I’m afraid it will get stolen.” *smh*…l was so gullible.
My now-husband really splurged on a nice ring for me. When I was having to work in Dallas and Houston, I was worried about muggings. I left my nice ring at home, however I wore a CZ version to travel with. I still had a ring! It would never occur to me to not wear one for him.
There were so many lies about everything to everyone that it’s hard to pick just one. I do have to say that there are two that make me smack my forehead: One, the “missing” Viagra was sold to the guys at the gas station (where he happened to hang out at and get his morning coffee and also happened to be at the end of town where SHE lives)!
Two, he had management meetings each Wednesday evening (while I was at Zumba) and instead was taking HER out to dinner to a restaurant that he never mentioned eating at.
Also, his sudden (three week notice) of his retirement was probably just an omission of a material fact (same as a lie?). As SHE was his subordinate, the Company must have found out and couldn’t fire her or they would face a possible sexual harassment lawsuit.
I was WFH before it was a thing because he insisted my commute was too long. (Just a part of the whole control thing, knowing where I was at all times.) Meanwhile, his work was more free-lance in nature and we shared an office at home. He was hardly ever at his desk and when he was, he was on FB (as I would discover later) or writing love notes to the objects of his many affections. More often that not, he’d be away from his desk, standing outside, texting/talking. Or he’d be away on an “errand” and taking hours to complete it.
The lie was that he couldn’t be chained to a desk as it hurt his creative process. Being out and about was an “organic” way of working.
If that were remotely true, we should have been gazillionaires from all that creative processing but it was his way of being able to chat/be with with the myriad of APs, particularly the married ones whose husbands were at work. Creative processing indeed, and I fell for it. SMH
“Creative processing”…seriously? That’s creative, all right.
“I lost my wedding ring in a beaver hole” (he worked on our hunting property a lot so it was believable)
So other good ones were:
“She’s just my work out buddy”
“You need to get a 4th job and work all 4 jobs everyday to do what we need to do to keep the lights on” (I lost my shit on this one, seeing that I was already working 3 jobs 6-7 days a week only getting 2-3 hours of sleep while he lazily had 1 job that he did half assed and spent all OUR money on trips “by himself” and other bullshit)
“I need to go on this $10,000 hunting trip out west to go find God” (he took multiple trips every year….refusing to take me).
I could seriously list out so many more but there’s a twinge of sadness building in my heart as I write these out. Not for my ex but for myself. I lost precious time that I could have spent making memories with my babies when they were younger and instead I listened to that asshole who had me working like a slave “for the sake of our family” while he did nothing except exploit me. I lost that time with them and I will never get it back. I’m at Meh about my ex but the time I lost with my children when they were younger is something I will always hate him for exploiting me. And, that’s ok! He deserves to be hated for that!
SC,
If that first excuse is not a euphemism …. then it should be.
LFTT
Right! I’ve used it as a one liner when people have asked how we divorced. They typically spit out their drink and we all roll over laughing.
“Lost it in a Beaver Hole” That’s hysterical! My cheater ex said he “lost it in someone’s basement”, basically the same thing…..haha. Didn’t wear it for YEARS…
I did too! ????????????
All successful lies should have an element of truth.
I finally decided to “lose” mine at a buy back jewelry shop and magically turned it into a beautiful fire cauldron for my beautiful new patio.
The ex was in home improvement and said it was dangerous to wear on the job. Valid point. Never wore it after work or weekends either. It came off after the wedding parties and into his safe. It’s probably still there because he doesn’t get rid of shit or he could be using it as a prop for sympathy. I’d put nothing past him.
Yes they do! He (and his family) have a rolling list of them.
“Lost it in a beaver hole”
Yeah, I bet it was!
That he kept his phone face down to preserve the camera lens integrity.
That it is possible to bulk buy giant boxes of condoms for friends wanting to take advantage of your Prime account.
After reconciliation, that his car was outside her flat because he was collecting some things.
That he was joking when he said what’s yours is mine and mine is… mine (more settlement related).
I didn’t buy this shit but he tried to peddle it plenty…
“No honey, I’m buying these condoms for my friends.”
Oh those condoms and sexual position books were left in the camper by xxx. You remember that. Umm no I don’t. After I found them, I left them in our bathroom with a note saying at least you use condoms. Thanks. He was furious. Later I asked xxx about them by saying remember when someone gave those to you as a joke and you left them in our camper and he said he never got shit like that or left them.
Found a condom in his coat. He said it was his brothers who had been in prison 5 yrs at this point. They do expire dummy.
Me: “That’s a nice shirt? Is it new”
Cheater : “erm.. ah… yeah.”
Me: “ Nice. ( innocently asking) Where did you buy it”
Just curious . Still in the dark
Cheater: “Oh um my cousin Mary was here from
Ireland and we went shopping . You didn’t see her because she was only here for two days.”
Me: “oh ok”
The same 72 year old cousin Mary who hadn’t been on an airplane since 1961. Sure.
That reminds me of another one. The pink shirt. He started wearing a pink shirt. I bought all his clothes and did all his laundry so I noticed it and said, where did you get that? He said one of the guys wore one and he liked it so went out and bought it.
I can’t believe I bought that. Him buying his own shirt was even less likely than riding around with the guys a couple times a week.
Oh! Mine did this. He had a lovely, new and very $$ coat one day. I asked where it came from and he said that he’d stopped by the outlet mall near where he was contracting. This is the man who hadn’t bought his own clothes in 20+ years–the closest he came was carrying $200 worth of clothes to the counter in Lucky Brand and then looking at me to pay for them. Which I did because… chump. Fortunately in this case, I was aware of the cheating and lining up my ducks–so I asked him to pick one up for our teenage son since it “was on sale.” And he did hahahaha…
My x wanted multiple duplicates of the same black shirt. Turns out the hooker did a strip tease in his shirt and he called it “the highlight of of his life.” He hid them in his car. Stupid me; I’d bought the first shirt for a birthday gift, not realizing he liked it for other reasons…
He brought home some pink and blue towels wrapped in a ribbon. “I got them at Menards, they had a good sale. We can use them in the camper.” I put them away and never used them, it was such an odd thing for him to buy.
After D-day I asked him if he got her a Christmas present and if she gave him something. His answer? “towels”.
I found quite a few presents in his house hidden away in his house. His hiding places made me laugh. He has no idea how much stuff I know about.
After DDay (he was having an affair with one of his grad students), he told me that he had made a huge mistake and would call OW right now and I could listen to the conversation.
He immediately telephoned her and told her that their relationship had been wrong, that he was committed to me and the kids and that she should never contact him again.
Later, I found out that he and OW had planned out that call in advance and were laughing at how easily I’d been fooled.
Omg!!! I had the exact same call. OW lied through her teeth and said she’d just started seeing XH (affair had been going on 2 years), she only slept with him once (2 years of fucking), she didn’t know he was married (lie), her dad didn’t “raise her to sleep with married men” (her dad is a cheater who lives with his AP), she promised to never speak to XH again (he got her an apartment and moved her out of her daddy’s home where she was living at 32, the following weekend), she didn’t know what herpes was (X has it and they didn’t use condoms). . . I wish I’d never had that mindfuck conversation. I lost another 4 months of my life in fake wreconciliation. Sickening. I’m so glad theses two monsters get each other – fast forward 7.5 years- they cheat on each other, lie 24:7, are miserable as fuck. XH has aged 20 years. Health wrecked. Relationships with kids, his own family, my family, all friends, destroyed.
wreconciliation! Brilliant word! describes my experience perfectly!
Ex came home from training and in his suitcase was a shirt I’d never seen before. Ex never bought clothes for himself in the 20 years we were married. I said that’s new, where did you get it? I got the same reaction with the deer in the headlights look, uh.., shirt…, yeah, uh.., he was out shopping with a guy he went to training with and noticed the shirt and bought it.
I’ve never known him to be that interested in clothes, but okay..,
How many guys go out shopping together? to buy clothes?
It was one of those moments that made me pause for a moment but then I
remembered all the lectures he gave on how honest he is and a “Man of Integrity.”
After 21 years of marriage to each other, he got an AIDS test because “it’s standard practice now at check-ups.” I believed him, because our marriage felt solid and stable to me, so I couldn’t fathom an affair. He was mad that the doctor’s itemized bill came to our house (we are on the same health plan), which is how I found out. Turned out that the OW demanded he take an AIDS test before she would sleep with him. Boggles the mind.
Oh my god. Almost same Mybestlife. Saw he had aids test done AFTER a South American trip!!! I panicked as chlamydia had caused me a ectopic pregnancy that almost killed me. For once I followed my instincts and went to dr and had every STD test known. Bingo-HPV (no pos for this in 30 years). Was told I must have gotten it from a random toilet seat. I immediately searched for an attorney. But now I have something that may become cancerous one day. When I does, I’m getting that crossbow set out.
????????????????
I had the positive high-risk HPV test. Didn’t tell FW, and my dr told me it could’ve been dormant for years (she did NOT once suggest that he wasn’t faithful).
It took me a while after D-day to remember that. All he was worried about is if his dick would fall off. He also sent me her reply, that she had had STI tests recently and all were negative.
I wonder why SHE had STI tests?
That is why we now have HIPAA laws in the US. Some guy wouldn’t pay his doctor bill for STD testing and it went to 3rd party collections. (I was working debt collections when the law was passed) When a letter from the debt collector was sent to the house, his wife called the collection company and asked what it was for and…they told her.
Caused him enough trouble that he sued the debt collection company and won… which set up HIPAA under the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act.
Asshole shouldn’t have won jack.
Stupidest I bought was that my vasectomy must have spontaneously reversed when she fell pregnant after being at a festival with the other guy, or that she had to fly 5,000km to deal with an argument she was having with her “friend” rather than be able to deal with things on the phone.. I am not sure which is worse the lies, or the fact that fit a time we buy into their next level BS and actually believe them!!
That’s horrible. They so horribly gaslight and insult our intelligence. I hate them so much
That’s almost as good as “hiking the Adirondack Trail” in Argentina.
I hope you got a paternity test and are not paying child support for OM’s child.
Last one: he said he had to go in for a work thing on a Saturday after he’d retired.
I think by then he’d stopped coming up with plausible lies. When I questioned this, telling him it made no sense because he’s no longer working, he spat this out: “I still care about the fellows (meaning the docs in training for his specialty.”
What makes my blood run cold now is how enraged he got when I dared to question him.
p.s. Our adult kids were visiting that weekend. He chose to screw the OW instead of spending time with his kids and grandchild.
Spinach I hope his dick falls off.
I definitely got the “enraged” response, early and often. I spent years trying to figure out what I was doing wrong that angered him.
Always an early sign of cheating…they become angry at the most innocent things.
To add to the above, my ex-wife FLIPPED on me when I was quietly talking to myself as to how I was going to navigate to a particular restaurant we were driving to.
Me: “Hmm, should I just pull a U-turn, or maybe I’ll just swing around the block and park in front.”
Her: “You can never just make a decision! I have to make every decision for you! You’re like a baby!”
Prior to the affair she was never angry like that.
Mine got angry at me for sleeping. I woke up early, fell back to sleep after a bit for an hour, and FW said “Here’s a thought: why don’t you just wake up and stay awake!” Full-on shark eyed glare for good measure. It was on holiday and we had nowhere to be. D-day within weeks. They really are evil.
I dared fall asleep in the afternoon after a cross-country flight where he slept in business class and I in economy. One seat was upgraded so guess who go it? Anyway, he slept on the flight. I didn’t and was exhausted. Just needed a cat nap to refresh myself. That was INEXCUSABLE. He wrote about it in his journal. “Spinach fell asleep. No sexual excitement or tension.” Oh FFS!!! (Also, married almost 35 years at that point. Guess I stopped making him tingle with excitement. #myfault.)
Gah. I’m so pissed today.
I hear you Spinach! I would work 50+ hours a week for several weeks usually away from home, Come home exhausted, usually to a home far less clean than I left it, with little or no food in the kitchen
(despite me depositing my pay in the joint account every week!) and If I was too exhausted to “see to his needs” I was a horrible, selfish wife.
OMG, FS, are you my doppleganger? I worked for years in the management consulting world where one flies out Sunday night or early Monday morning, then flies home late Friday — if you don’t have pressing deadlines.
I’d come home to a dirty, cluttered house (we had a biweekly housekeeper), no food, no milk for coffee, basic supplies dwindled, you name it. I would often spend the precious weekend trying to get the place back in shape. If only I could get that time back!
You actually reminded me of a story from my traveling days: Once, I had the temerity to ask Cheater #1 to give me a ride to the airport. He insisted on stopping at the grocery to stock up while I was gone (the implication being that I was abandoning him, poor babymanchild). He threw a package of hotdogs on the check out belt and asked if we had bread at home. I replied we didn’t since, ya know, I was leaving for the week. He then held up the check out line to stomp back to the bread aisle and get a loaf. His comment to me? “I should just eat out while you’re gone since there’s nothing in the house!!!!11!!!” I couldn’t even come up with an answer to that kind of crazy. Um, grown man? Shop for yourself? Whatta concept!
I remember a trip we took to Atlanta when the girls were 5 and 3. We took Violets car seat, but really it was just too small for her.
So, when we were borrowing his moms car to run some errands, I suggested we go get a new one.
He argued with me over it and used really STUPID reasons, like how stupid the laws are for 3 year old to have to be in car seats ( well, it’s the law so she HAS to be in one) and how she could just use the seatbelt ( uh NO… she needs a seat) and how it’s all a lie that it’s dangerous ( why the hell are we fighting about this???) It was absolutely crazy making. I won the arguement and got her a seat, but that had always bothered me about WTF was he even TALKING about???
He was pissed to be in Atlanta and unable to get away from me to talk to the woman he was screwing. We were visiting HIS family.
My wife did something similar. I threw out an old security door because the integrated hinge cracked from metal fatigue. A scavenger picked up up from the curb and put it in his truck.
XW: “See, he is going to fix that door. You are wasteful for not just repairing that.”
Chump: “No, that door was beyond repair. Maybe he is going to recycle the aluminum.”
XW: “You’re just saying that because you hate Mexicans!”
That was completely out of left field and greatly hurt my feelings. She didn’t want to explain herself, but it was typical of the verbal abuse I got from her. I chalked it up to her struggling with her work relationships. It was only years later that I understood what was really going on.
Yep, the day before d-day we’d gone out as a family and on the way home I mentioned that he would want to get over because the lane he was in turns into a turn lane. He screamed at me. Apparently I’m a controlling bitch who micromanages him constantly. We had just had a nice day and I’d been that way a few days before and got stuck in that turn lane. His reaction was so insanely over the top.
I experience same behavior
So very familiar! My soon to be XH becomes enraged when ever I point out the facts like…” you brought her to our home and screwed her in my bed, let her leave her dirty underwear & sex toys there, she hung her night gown NEXT To Mine, her crappy shampoo was next to mine in the shower, she left her Cheap tacky fake jewlery on my kitchen counter along with an tacky assed ” Life is Better with You” sign in our den. She marked her new “territory” like a dog pissing on fence posts, and soon to be XH let her!!!! after 22 years of marriage, while I was out of state working 50+ hours a week as an RN in the damn Pandemic, to pay off the debts “we” acquired financing Failed business. but It’s my Fault he cheated, because I left him alone! according to him.
F@#k Steve, I am SO sorry for all that you endured. I have felt and continue to feel so bad for our healthcare workers who have risked their lives and health and it has been so hard. Being cheated on while you are doing everything for others really makes me angry for you. Take care of yourself and F–k Steve front, back and upside down! ????
Yes, FS, it’s official. You are my doppleganger, only I’m not a nurse. Strength and hugs to you, my fellow chump.
Right. I find this interesting. Spitballing here, but I’ll throw out these reasons they act enraged:
*we get in the way of ALL THE FUN, making them have to lie #somuchwork #poorcheaters
*projection: they’re enraged with themselves so dump it on us #trashreceptacles
*they resent that they still need us (cake); or
*they are trying to create fights to justify the cheating. They can look back and say, “Hey, look, we were fighting all the time.”
I think they some times use Anger as a technique for shutting down the conversation. I would back off quickly when he got angry so he used that knowing that I would stop asking questions and would be reluctant to confront him again.
Right – Attack is the best form of defense, kind of thing.
Holy Crap Spinach! That makes so much sense! I am now seeing so many of his outbursts in a new & ugly light! F@#k Steve!!!!
*they are trying to create fights to justify the cheating. They can look back and say, “Hey, look, we were fighting all the time.”
You are so right! We never fought before he started cheating. 3 years after the last d day, I can look back and see that he started these fights purposely to make me look like a bad wife while he was cheating with multiple women. He had to figure something out since I was a great wife to him. I wasn’t shiny and new after 20 years together. Cheaters will do anything to justify their actions and try to make their spouse look bad. So frustrating!
Two years before now Ex-Mrs LFTT left me and our 3 kids to be with her AP joined a choir. She ensured that she was able to attend mid week choir practise (the same evening every week) and either a performance or another practise on a Sunday afternoon. I was keen to support this, if only because what supportive husband wouldn’t? I now know that she rarely, if ever, attended these events and that this was all a cover for her covert meet ups with her Ex-boyfriend AP.
I should have questioned what was going on a lot earlier than I did; she could not and still cannot sing for sh*t.
LFTT
After accepting a higher management position in work (helped and encouraged by chumpy ole me), FW explained that he had to work on reception late 2 nights a week….. Yup I bought this lie. Wtf was I thinking ????????♀️????♀️????????????
He presented as a guy incapable of telling even a white lie. You know the type, harmless, slightly bumbling yet fiercely loyal man who doesn’t know how to flirt with women. Even if he wanted to (but of course he didn’t).
It turned out his real self is diametrically opposite. Highly manipulative and exploitative in every aspect of his life, not just those related to me. The skills required to pull it of, unreal. I still can’t believe it and I don’t even know everything. And I never will.
Had the same kind of manipulator who made a big deal out of hating liars.
But it’s even more absurd to recall the complaint I heard from him after several different paintball game outings: “I hate cheaters.” ????♀️
Yes, the skills required to pull it off are considerable, including Academy Award level acting. Really amazing to me how convincing he was!
Yup. Phrase FW “lived by” was that he would not lie, cheat, steal, nor tolerate those that do. Hmmmm
BTAW, LTC Fuckface used to repeat that phrase frequently. Usually when I would be questioning his inability to keep his story straight. All of his friends are cheaters, liars and frauds. His best friend has been investigated by the FBI as a dirty cop. They all lie, cheat and steal and hang out with those that do the same.
Ouch. Yep, the quality of people you count as friends speaks volumes about you. I have lost a few “friends” that are loyal to soon to be XH, but I quickly realized all the real Friends…are supporting me, they are the ones checking in on me, praying for and with me, listening to me, and they are only praying for him…
My FW just promoted to Col. I grew up in military and I do abide by that phrase. Him-not so much. His promotion was pathetic. Kids didn’t want to go but younger ones didn’t really have choice. Went in dumpy clothes and got pic. I said I would not go and make it seem like our family is ok. I’m not presenting a false narrative for his career anymore.
Yes H4Y, Academy Award level of acting skills. ????
The fake persona makes for an amazing cover. Once cracks started to show, I suspected medical issues. Deceit didn’t even cross my mind. It took me some time to get there which benefited him greatly.
This.
I had often said in 40 years of marriage that if a woman were to approach him, he would not have a clue how to respond. He was so honest and loyal and shy. “harmless, slightly bumbling yet fiercely loyal” – that was his disguise, too. I still am amazed that he was smart enough to pull of this elaborate sneaky double life. He could barely use a flip phone, carried cash to buy his beer and gas, knew nothing about current events. Guess I now know what he was using his limited brain capacity for.
Ooof, they seem to be cut from the same cloth. Lack of interest in current events, slow and reluctant to adopt new technologies, yup!
I suspect high brain capacity, just not in the same area as “regular” people.
Hi tallgrass. It seems to me this “shy, I don’t know anything, I’m just a bumbling a bit awkward guy” persona is part of the carefully put together mask. It instills in a Chump that the Cheater is not and could not be capable of the horror they are discovered to be which makes it all the more shocking. Camoflage just as a praying mantis remains still and looks like a harmless green stem….
tall grass and cttn
#bumblingidiot #metoo
My college boyfriend was like that – a big, lovable goofball who is such a great guy, but has “had such a hard time meeting the right girl.” He would often be nicer to other women, any other woman, than me – one time giving away a lamp I had to the woman who had waited on us at a restaurant. If I got uncomfortable or jealous, I was accused of being “controlling”. I was the bad guy- baited by Boyfriend constantly and when I got upset, he would look hurt and talk baby talk. Drove me crazy, all the things I couldn’t name until Chump Lady came up with the vocabulary. Finally felt certain I wasn’t crazy when I found a post card from another woman that said in French, “I like the way you kiss me.” If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t.
I’m still shocked about his double life…it completely blindsided me. I honestly don’t know him at all…the dating profiles, unprotected sex with hundreds of random online hookups, escorts, you name it. This from the man who condemned cheating…he’s an evil and cruel SOB.
Klootak presented the same way. Oh no… he would never dream of lying. It is the most abominable sin. Except he lies constantly. Once I realized what a lying POS he is, I completely stopped trusting in anything he said and it put some of my cognitive dissonance to rest. He was not Schrodinger’s lying cat – both a liar and absolutely not a liar. He was just a plain liar. Wish I had sorted that out years earlier.
I was also married to a guy who portrayed himself as moralistic. I sometimes felt like I was married to John Boy from The Little House on the Prairie. He’d be quick to point out how inconsiderate other people were and let everyone know he could never do that. He was a man of integrity.
In reality he’s the most manipulative, cunning, devious person I’ve ever known, pretending to be John Boy..,
Kicking me out of her company Christmas party that we went to every year so she could screw sparkle dick while there. “No need to go this year as the party will be over late. Go stay with the kids instead.” Stupid me.
Hey Chump Mike same for me. Except my then husband told his co-workers that we were already separated so him & OW partied freely away. When I saw one of his co-workers a few days later & mentioned how FW was tired from the party when he got home… well, it explains the co-worker’s confused look now ????
Reminds me of my cheaters company Christmas party. He decided to start a fight with me earlier in the day (of the party) and told me not to go because we were “fighting”. So he left earlier without me to help with the party. Well I decided to go to the Christmas party anyways. I would later find out that when I showed up at the party, he had to call his AP and tell her not to come.
Haha love that you foiled their plans!!
Klootzak was in the military and lied and said that his command didn’t do holiday parties. In over 20 years dealing with the military, I never knew of a command that didn’t. He never thought I would ask his colleague’s wife about it. Ha!
I got “spouses aren’t invited this year because they had to scale back the budget.” Oof ????
He was/is a police officer doing fugitive apprehension. He started getting texts and phone calls several nights a week asking him to help track down child molesters or help look for children from Amber alerts. When I questioned why I wasn’t getting the Amber alerts on TV or my phone he would say “oh, you will, it just hasn’t broadcasted yet. I was so proud of him for going to hunt the bad guys down! He really knew what lies to tell me to get me to be completely supportive of him leaving to go see his AP (also law enforcement BTW).
Ha Trixie, I just read this. Those guys are something else aren’t they?
Oh I know they aren’t all like that, but unfortunately so many are. So many lies about working.
Susie Lee – you’re right! Fake AF is a canine police officer who was always “working”. He’s a serial cheater and a practiced liar. I agree with so many posts here where the cheater would sit at family dinners or family events like he was a family man, when in reality, he had been with one of his affair partners the night before. I can’t fathom how they do that – so many lies. On top of everything, they have unprotected sex with APs and us. We don’t even know the lies they told the APs! More than likely that we never had sex with them. Fake AF continues to lie to my kids to this day. My daughters don’t believe anything he says.
Ugh. I was so proud.
He gets promoted gets in great shape and starts the discard. I brought up the flirty text messages synced on his iPad he left at home he said she and her husband both work for me I would never do that. That’s just not my character. You’re reading too much into it. He was too busy to call or text me because he was the lead on the busy night shift. When I ask him why he shut off his location at midnight right after he texted me he’s heading home from a different city then where he was “working” he looks right at me and said I don’t even know how to do that. Then the second phone, second laptop and second office arrive and still proud of him. So begins the overnight surveillance details (mostly by himself staying/sleeping in his truck????) always set up on Thursday night before his 3 days off. Me feeling so bad that he has to work such long strange hours right before retirement. Bought it all.
Shouted at me on a Tuesday evening, while he was watching Schitt’s Creek after gorging on a delicious bowl of chilli that I had cooked for him: ‘I can’t do this anymore. I’m going away on Sunday for a week ON MY OWN to get headspace’. Now known as the legendary ‘Headspace Week’. I was surprised, puzzled, upset, confused. I was due to be travelling in our joint car to visit my father’s grave during that week, with my aged mother, for the first time since his death a few weeks before. It was my father’s birthday that week, hence the timing of the plan. Of course, I thought he was ill, suicidal (‘stress at work’ had been a repeated refrain – well, he was underperforming in all areas due to his ‘situation’). I was worried out of my mind. I received barely any communication while he was away. I had to drag the names of the hotels where he was staying out of him. He announced that he was leaving me on his, delayed, return. Two months later I discovered his affair with exgfOW (continually denied) who lived overseas (also married or she was). A lovely holiday touring our special places had been arranged. Our car was used, so I did grave visiting via tube, train and taxi, taking about 8 hours in travel time instead of 4. It rained a lot on their trip and the imprint of a substantial wet bottom watermark was evident on the passenger seat of our car on his return. Put it this way, that bottom imprint was not mine! ????
I believed his lie about solo travel. Or rather, I wanted to believe it after 26 years together. I had no idea he was still in touch with a woman he had previously described in derogatory terms (yes, red flag!). I blame him entirely for the affair. I’d been unsuccessfully married before and he seemed to consider that to be justification for my disposability. The exgfOW was forcing his hand and the emails I saw from her to him made it obvious that she was threatening disclosure if he didn’t act. I’d been clear that an affair was a dealbreaker for me from day one. He hedged his bets for as long as he safely could.
At the time I was distraught. That week was close to one of the worst of my life. Now, he seems ridiculous to me and I have no idea what I ever saw in him. I’ve worked hard on my picker which isn’t yet fixed but which is in much better shape. The ex was such a drama merchant and life is so much lovelier now.
I was told that I gave him permission to cheat. We had an argument one time about going away. He wanted to go out and I was exhausted from working three 16 hour shifts. He kept hounding me to go. Finally I yelled at him to just find someone else to go out with. He took that as me giving him permission to cheat. I asked him if I gave him permission to cheat? Then why did he keep my cousin a secret. He said that I would not of cared anyway so why tell me. Got to love the mind of a cheater.
To add to my post. I did not buy that specific lie. That was after the fact. The lie I bought hook line and sinker was that he was going out to play pool with his friend Bill that used to work with him. Bill even had a cabin in the woods that my ex stayed overnight. Looking back I do not understand why I bought the cabin in the woods lie. My ex never liked to stay overnights in cabins etc. We once took a family vacation on a lake in a fishing cabin. He was so uncomfortable he made us leave the next day.
FW needed to go to coworker’s house at night to “do conference calls to their overseas clients.”
It still makes me sick to think about it. But I try to give myself grace — I trusted him.
I’m thankful my inner voice questioned it enough that I finally put the pieces together (with all the other lies and crap and crazy making) within a couple of months.
My ex would vehemently proclaim, “I despise a liar!” One time our son took something from my daughter and hid it. My ex threw a fit, got physical with our son for the first time, and when I asked why he freaked out on him so badly, he said that it was because he despises a liar. At that point, I had no reason to believe that he was having an affair or anything else shady, so I didn’t question it. A few years later, once I began to question things, he’d accuse me of being a liar of course, he’d NEVER lie because he despises liars. What a joke.
I was told numerous times “She’s not my girlfriend because…” Sure. You expect me and everyone else in our small community to believe this?
One lie I experienced at work. I am an ED NP and had a married lady come in for STD testing. Her husband tried to tell he he got chlamydia infection from a bathroom toilet while on a work trip and OOPS! passed it to his wife and mother of his 2 toddlers. I had to tell her that no, it is only passed sexually. She cried, I cried and by the end of the visit, we were hugging and she got sent to this website. My ex may disagree but I do have a heart. I saw here not too long ago and she was doing well, divorced, FW rarely sees the kids and so far, he is paying child support. She got a new life like the rest of us.
*her
“That lacy cut out Victoria’s Secret underwear must belong to one of our daughter’s friends”. I actually asked my very confused 13 yr old daughter if it was. I guess the wind must of blew it into our washing machine then. SMH at all the gaslighting I accepted.
“I am going to go out and ride around with one of the guys for a while”
He was a police officer, I was an idiot. Wonder if he used that same one on whore after they married and he started cheating.
LEO are the worst; cheating is part of their culture and quite pervasive in the ranks. And their typical rationale, “it’s the stress of the job” is just BS; a convenient worn-out excuse for crappy behavior and poor decisions.
My XW would tell me “I’ve got to work OT tonight” (i.e. overtime), which, as a chump, I readily believed. Eventually, I figured out that “OT” meant playing hide-the-baton with Sgt Sugardick.
He can’t imagine how he could have gotten HIV, unless it was from twenty years earlier when he was in college and got treated in a rural clinic in India and the needle could have been dirty.
???? I hope you’re okay!!
WHOA
???? Bastard!
He got up early on a Saturday morning put old clothes on, old underwear and left with tools saying “ I’m helping an old man in his yard clean up. I feel sorry for him”. He returned hours later with new underwear. I asked how he had on new undershirt and underwear? He said man gave him his new shirt and he bought one pair of new underwear!
I knew mens underwear came in three in a pack. I tried to figure that in my mind but knew it was a lie.???? Many more lies to end our 35 year marriage.????
Piano Lessons.
Apparently he’d always wanted to play the piano (at the time we’d been married 30 years and he’d never mentioned this before), so he began having twice weekly lessons which I’d paid for the first 6 months as a birthday treat for him. Strangely, or perhaps not, 18 months later he still couldn’t demonstrate being able to play a simple tune.
It was only later when the penny dropped that I discovered the affair partner lived two doors away from the piano teacher.
That he could resist everything except temptation- I thought it was a lame joke; until I learned it had names and dates! Forty years of lies. Forty years of a shadow life!
FW asked me if he would be allowed to move to an other city part time. The reasons for this was to get a pay raise.
He didn´t tell me that he already had an apartment there because “I knew how you would response. You are way too emotional!”. I was also “way too emotional” when he admitted that he was infatuaded with someone else and he needed to divorce me because I´m stupid, idiot and I have no manners and my view of life is black & white. And yes. He had to divorce me because I didn´t let him cook.
He was also so so unhappy for 10 years.. no 5 years.. oh, I misunderstood him, I took his word out of context: he was unhappy for two years!
I´m ashamed for believing this lie: we didn´t have any sex for about six months before his divorce. His reason for this was that his *enis was itchy BUT he didn´t want to go to the doctor because “What if the doctor thinks that I´m an hypochondriac??”.
” … his *enis was itchy … ”
OMG that’s hilarious. (Sorry, no doubt it was anything but at the time.)
In my fantasy, you offer several pithy suggestions for how he might scratch the itch.
I have two: 1) he was so sad because he saw her across the cafeteria at work. I was empathetic towards him. Turns out they were still f*cking each other. 2) I texted him one Friday at lunch. No response. Texted again. Then called. Then called again. Checked “Find my iphone”. It had been turned off. (Note this was way deep in the land of paranoia – 8 months of pick-me-dancing and 3 D-Days gone by). He finally called me an hour later. Told me he was having lunch at the cafeteria and left his phone in his office. He then tells me that he often does that. I said but how do you know your schedule. “I have a vague idea”. He has his phone on him 24/7 outside of work but leaves it in his office at work? Next day I ask for his phone. Buried deep in his deletes were messages from her. I confronted. He confessed he was at lunch with her. I noticed that “Find my iphone” was open. This is when the mask fell and he said with full snake eyes: “How else could I keep track of where you were?”. I told him I wanted a divorce and to get the f*ck out of my house. Here’s me not looking back.
Oh. And it still continues to come, 4 years later. Just found out from my ASD son that during our “working on us” stage during the 8 months of purgatory, he would take my son out to do errands. Turns out he was meeting the AP at a park. He was using my ASD son as a ruse to meet his AP on weekends while also telling me it was over. He would then tell my son that he wasn’t allow to tell me about it. He was telling a kid with an Intellectual Disability and Autism to keep secrets from one of his parents. A kid who is in the high group of people who are sexually abused by trusted individuals that it’s ok to keep secrets. I cannot even. Grrrrrr. Ok, done. Happy Friday.
This was one that my cake-eating Dad (as I now know) told to my Mom, and me. At the airport. I was 13.
“Welcome back! Guess what, while you two were on your three-week mother-daughter trip to England, I dumped the seven-year-old on my sister and family in Ohio, and then I flew to Hawaii. Alone. Here, Hawaiian shirts for everybody!”
Thirteen and naive. I believed it. Mom ate the sandwich and spackled.
Fast forward, he dumped Mom after 30 years and married his secretary.
It’s so hard to narrow it down but I guess it’s when I got to meet Schmoopie. I had an overnight business meeting out of town, 2000 miles away, and he claimed to have a stomach virus so bad he couldn’t care for our 8 year old and 7 month old so he called his employer’s backup childcare program for help. They sent out a delightful 19 year old nanny majoring on elementary childhood education and great with kids. Remarkably, she was free each day of his illness, even offering to babysit one-day when I got home from my trip, when we met. Something didn’t sit right about her constant availability so I tried calling the nanny service, only to learn his job didn’t offer a backup care benefit. A few more days of digging before I learned “Kae” the childcare specialist was really “R—“, a stripper at our local gentleman’s club and she was just the most recent in a string of lady friends he had made there. When he finally confessed, he thought I’d be relieved because the kids had already formed a great rapport with her and she had proved she was good with children. I have a restraining order now, of course.
WINNER WINNER (my vote) x
Easter Sunday 2014: “I’m leaving for Panama tomorrow morning because I won a trip through work as a superior salesperson…going with other guys from ABC Company”
Me literally wearing an apron with a baked ham in the oven and a colored egg in each hand due to family members arriving shortly for an egg hunt, etc..: “What? But you can’t. It’s school vacation week. You had the time off to spend with us (me and two kids) to go…how long did you know about this?”
Supreme Salesperson: ” About 1 month but I chose to wait until 1 day so I didn’t have to hear you bitch”
Didn’t even have the name of the hotel until he later sent an email. I believed him. Such a superior salesperson that was…ugh…and so many lies….
Klootzak never gave the name of hotels where he stayed. His excuse was that if I called him on his cell phone, why would it matter which hotek he was at as I wouldn’t ring him through the hotel phone.
Telling me he got an MBA from Harvard despite the lack of any homework or going to class (he said he did it during work). Telling his employers he got an MBA from Dartmouth, and putting it on Linked-In with the school logo and a graduation date. When I noticed the school had changed, I contacted the Registrars at Dartmouth College and Dartmouth U, and the both emailed back he never got a degree, enrolled or took any class. Telling an organization for medical military that he was a veteran (never served or enlisted), an MD and a radiologist (the closest he came was getting X-Rays. Saying he won an international award twice (not even once). Etc., etc.
Seeing the comments about the ring reminds me that when I discovered his affair, I saw he wasn’t wearing his ring. He claimed he took if off for surgery and forgot to put it back on. The affair that I discovered was solely online. Maybe he was already cheating, or trying to.
Oh, and he got a credit card for the online AP, and allowed her and her friends to use it. When the CC company froze it due to suspected fraudulent activity, he lied and told them that it was his daughter and they unfroze it. When I discovered the AP and immediately explained to him that his twu wuv was an online catfisher, he told the CC company that someone had stolen his identity and opened the account, and got out of paying over $5k. Despicable.
I think the worst lie he told was to our very vulnerable child. Despite court-ordered no contact due to his abuse of child, cheater used a burner phone to call and say that he (cheater) died during surgery, then God came to him and said he forgave cheater and was giving him another chance, and that child should forgive cheater too. Utterly despicable.
He drove to Canada, on the spur of the moment, with his passport but no cell phone, while I had the kids on the other side of the country, just to go “get lunch”. Meanwhile, our friends started a search party for him and talked to the PD. They police let them know “often men may be doing something where they don’t want to be found” in these cases. Yeah…….
“I was looking at pawn shops for your missing jewelry.” ???? Trusty Find my iPhone debunked this one—he was in a parked behind a grocery store, a block from the prostitute’s apartment. Two pieces of jewelry had gone mussing from my home, just after he’d paid her to have unprotected sex with him while I was out of town. His lies, lies, and more lies got more blatant. He ordered her drug arrest video from the police department but denied ever receiving it DESPITE it being saved to our iCloud account. Thank God I don’t have to hear his “I was at the casino because I like it there, not to pick up hookers” ever again. I’m not at meh but I’m also not with a pod cheater.
“I’m too complex, no single women could take care of all of my needs.”( his explanation of his serial cheating behaviors after I asked him point blank why would he blow up our family in such hurtful ways, does he love any of us at all!?)
I can’t believe I didn’t just howl with laughter with that response!
But it was a terrorizing period, not one bit funny, and I wanted so desperately to try and understand and fix us.
He was dead serious, and I now know that level of entitlement is just not fixable, but the hopium was a powerful force on me, I didn’t want to lose what I valued most in my entire life, the love of my life and my family.
It’s was a time I would try to frantically figure out what I lacked that all these other women seemed to magically know and have and how quickly I could get it. ( was always a super confident person through my life and never spent my time comparing myself to others before all this mind fogging devaluation kicked in, and then I felt I needed to somehow step up to compete for my spouse of over 30 years!)
He also would make me believe that I was the only one on the planet who he just couldn’t communicate with and I just didn’t get him. ( again, the onus on me to fix MY deficiency)
We were cooking side by side one time in our beach house. ( he use to get annoyed that I was cramping his flow often in the kitchen, like he was always the head chef and me the subservient one, and was frequently a bit angry I wouldn’t buy that narrative, as I am as good a cook as he is and wasn’t folding!)
We have two kitchens at the beach, we added on another structure when we bought the place, to have a compound large enough for our entire family to visit, our forever talked about dream come true.
There weren’t any measuring cups in the kitchen we were in and it’s a common problem having to schlep from side to side sometimes. ( keeps you in good shape!)
He got sooo angry about the lack of measuring cup available to him, that his body was actually trembling with his fists gripped in tight 5 y/o tantrum balls, and he kept the anger just in our tiny sphere, so no one else ( 25 family members with us for 4th of July week!) casually walking by could hear him mumble “ I don’t get like this with anyone else in my entire life but you!!”He’s pretty scary a person when angered and the anger over literally nothing was probably my most feared type.
I don’t miss any of that shit at all!
Maybe his new Schmoopie wife can buy him 4 sets of measuring cups so they can live a charmed life happily ever after! ????
Klootzak forever gets pissed off and blows up at everything I do. He works from home so our child has seen him talking to coworkers and so on. One time we were eating dinner and I said something seemingly innocuous. “What did you do that for?” He was up in arms. Our child told him to stop being mean and said, “How come you always talk so nice to everyone but so mean to Momma?” And Klootzak shut up and didn’t say another word. He can dream on if he think he will ever accuse me of parental alienation. I never say an unkind word to our child. Klootzak is destroying his relationship with his child all on his own.
Klootzak also mumbles when he talks to me and insists I need my hearing checked when I ask him to repeat himself. I go out with friends, constantly talk with people at work and out and about and never have an issue hearing anyone. He does it on purpose. He will walk into the next room, face the other way, and mumble something quietly to himself and then scream that I didn’t answer him. He’s full blown nuts. And he seems to save all that rage and dysfunction for me.
The worst lie was the one I told myself and my children.
I finally wised up.
Amen. We’re all guilty of that lie, to some degree.
The biggest lie I bought from the ex was “You are not good enough for me”.
How wrong he proved to be.
The most pathetic and sickening lie was not to me but our daughter.
She was ten when he left and after he had moved out, she asked him, straight up, more than once, if we were getting divorced.
He told her no, that we were working things out. Which was never true for even one split second.
When I brought this up in a session with Dr. Kickass CoParent, he said that what he meant when he said that was that “we were working out the details of the divorce.” I think she and I both rolled our eyes in perfect synchronicity.
To lie to your own child, more than once, and tell her you are not getting divorced, is especially evil. She wants nothing to do with him and he still doesn’t understand why, though it has been explained, straight up, more than once.
I fell asleep on xxx couch. This became routine and he was paying towards rent and utilities there.
If it’s my son it happened by immaculate conception (a big words for his voc)
I can’t read or write. This one floored me and I was appalled that he honestly used this as fake helplessness when signing documents were required of him except signing waivers to ride track. I told my attorney he does this and she was surprised it was the first sentence he said to her during depositions which cost me a fortune because she went really slow with his I plead the fifth ass.
I fell asleep watching a movie. You don’t walk in clean shaven and freshly showered smiling slyly into a hospital where you son waited all day for you before having surgery. I was already smelling a rat before this one but it’s the most painful one because my son cried and asked why his dad didn’t visit or want to spend time with him before surgery. This was when I stopped making excuses and only said I’m sorry which encompassed a whole lot that I was sorry for. Even the guys taking him were uncomfortable.
I didn’t have my phone with me or charged. Looking at the bill there were call, texts, and streaming(porno) until 5 in the morning. After questioning several times about things on his account, he got a second phone under his friends name. I found that because I was policing everything.
After I left, I refused his calls. I did answer his burner phone and he said I’d pick up for someone I didn’t know but not him. I replied that you don’t think I know this is your number? He screamed It is not my phone. It’s xxx. Sure. I had an old phone and late nights I’d text that number about what a POS he was etc. he probably connected that after I told him i knew it was his.
You have some blame in this too. (His affairs)
You are so non sexual. I didn’t know you were so non sexual. I left once with the kids and took his call the next morning and that was the first thing he said. My reply was I must not be because I caught every sexual disease you have. Silence
The phone is tapped so don’t talk to anyone. Isolation pre cell phones. Our house is being watched. He was a paranoid person and later found out why.
I have people watching you and telling me everything you do. This was the morning I had an appoint with an attorney. I cancelled and got another farther away. I don’t think it’s true but wasn’t sure.
I have little birds following you. I thought- they can ride shotgun because I’m just being a mom and they’d be bored.
So so so many lies that I don’t even know about or care anymore.
“You have some blame in this too. (His affairs)”
This one takes the cake. I think they all believe this on one level or another or at least they convince themselves of it. Some are too smart to say it outright so couch it in softer terms like, “Well, we weren’t getting a long and you bear some responsibility for that. You weren’t so perfect either”….or some other word-salad, blame-shifting BS.
I got all those lines. Even better was “if you would have just taken some responsibility for the problems in our marriage…we would still be together”. Like my so called problems were the reason for our marriage ending and it wasn’t the fact that he was a serial cheater during our entire 23 year marriage.
*along ugh typos
Also said- you used to be pretty. This sent me into a tail spin of destructive self improvement.
I was no longer 17, extremely stressed and exhausted. So that was a big lie to me. I this point I’m closer to sixty and feel and look pretty good. 7 years out.
I saw him in court last year and he looked exactly like his older brother. I thought I’m so happy I’m not with him, what was I thinking and boy do you look like shit. I hope he thought the same about me.
“Also said- you used to be pretty.”
That’s straight-up cruel. Ugh. I’m sorry he said that to you. Mine said to me: “You think you have a nice body, but you don’t.” I was a size 2 and exercised like mad. But I guess I didn’t look like the porn models he salivated over all day. My bad!!! Oh, and I was in my 50s.
Also happy on your behalf that he looks like shit now, but gotta say, a lot of these male cheaters see Brad Pitt in the mirror, regardless of their age. Women, meanwhile, often underestimate their looks. #thankssociety
So true Spinach. Far too many men have an immense sense of entitlement to have sex with women with perfect bodies, no matter what they look like themselves.
In my FW’s case I’m happy to report that he was massively insecure about his looks, was on an extreme diet and working out obsessively because OW would ogle well built men and make comments about how hot they were.
I’m glad she was such a bitch and deliberately made him feel insecure. He deserved it.
That is a good point. When they look in the mirror they do see Brad Pitt. A distorted image of themselves. Or maybe in their eyes even better than Brad Pitt. Most of these cheaters if ever they are described, are actually quite often butt ugly old farts that a young woman would never enjoy or want. Only the ones on the take who can stomach them for a gift dispensary, ATM etc…until their 401ks are whittled away.
My husband of many decades is very short, obese, has no neck to speak of. Bad breath.unsightly weird skin situations, smells..you get the picture and has an extremely small penis. The experts use the term micro penis. Yet when he looks in the mirror, there is Brad Pitt standing before him and of course Brad Pitt deserves something better than my sorry old self at his side? He told me he was deprived of the hot babe he deserved. Its amazing the self delusion.
Biggest lie I perpetuated, “I’m still dancing!”. The summer he bailed, but was still showing up weekly to mow, I waved and smiled as he cruised by on the riding mower. I forced a BIG desperate smile on my face. The second he drove out of eyesight, I commando rolled underneath truck and cut the tracker I had duct taped to the underside of the rear bumper. Rolled back out, dusted off…….
Still hiding the knife (and now tracker device) – I was standing in the exact same place, slightly covered in dirt when he made the next round. Smile and wave, gals, smile and wave…..
Ya, a snoop and detective roll play. But 100% gave me data I needed to FINALLY believe.
Biggest lie I swallowed? Him: “I’m going fishing – to BE ALONE – and figure out things. I will have my phone shut off due to no cell service!”
I didn’t know he was cheating but I already knew something was wrong in our marriage and was already pick me dancing. I made him is favorite breakfast one Sunday morning. When I called the family to the table he informed me that he was off to go fly his airplane. “Can’t it wait?” “No, I haven’t flown it for a long time and it needs to be flown to keep in working order.” “Can’t you at least eat breakfast first?” “No, I have to go right now or I won’t have time.” He left for the airport five miles away. Thirty minutes later it started thunder storming. I texted and said “It’s storming, you can’t fly anyway so why don’t you come home and eat the nice brunch I made for you?” His response “It’s not storming here”. I didn’t really believe that but I didn’t know he was cheating. I thought he was that desperate to get away from me because I was failing so badly at being his wife.
“It’s not storming here”. Wow. He really quadrupled down on his lies. He was committed to the scene, I guess. These people suck.
“The lie detector test is wrong! I don’t know why it said I lied. It honestly has me questioning my sanity. ????”
I was so gullible. They don’t care about lying. I honestly thought he lived by the same moral code as me. ????
So did he finally confess or did the lie detection cooborate other things you were finding out? I also got “The lie detector was wrong or in my mind I’ve cheated on you so that must be why I failed.”
So many to choose from, but here’s one of his most ridiculous.
After I started to suspect OW number 10 (he still denied 1-9, and had apologized and claimed he’d changed) he told me she was a young single woman (half his age)who came on to him after he had given a lecture in a foreign country where we have worked for 37 years. He said they talked for three hours on a bench in the garden outside the lecture hall, but nothing happened. Then he showed me a Facebook messenger thread where they talked about how nothing could happen because he loved his wife, and she had been cheated on before and couldn’t do that to another woman. I clicked on her name and it took me to a Facebook page of a beautiful twenty-something woman, but I couldn’t see other photos or personal info., except her profile pic. Weird since they were clearly friends on Facebook. Luckily I opened my phone and screenshot everything. The next day Facebook had removed her account. A google photo search showed me a beauty queen in a previous Miss World pageant—from another country. I knew she hadn’t attended his lecture, nor traveled to the country where we work. I did not tell him what I found out—just kept building evidence and started getting my ducks in a row for about five years while my youngest finished high school. The OW was 47 at the time, married, two grown kids. (I’m ten years older than she. He’s 16 years older, and waaay older than the fake profile woman) While amassing evidence of her for our divorce I stumbled on five more women -mostly online sexting buddies— and presented him with a zip drive of evidence on the day I filed. The number of women that I know about to date is 13 with five or six more I suspect. I’m sure that’s just the tip of the iceberg. He was served last September and the divorce isn’t final, but he writes me love notes every day, refuses to get a lawyer, swears he’s a changed man, and begs to reconcile for the sake of our kids and grandkids. He also still denies most of what was on the Zip drive, including continued love letters, vacation plans, etc to OW. Sorry so many details, but bottom line, the OW was no beauty queen, and did not meet him at a lecture or talk on a bench afterward. And in his disordered mind, cresting elaborate coverups to “hide his sins” is proof of his love for me.
Wow. Amazing patience on your part lining up your ducks for five years. I’m still stuck in the house with Klootzak but he has a schmoopie several hours away and career opportunities near her he is looking into. It appears the trash may be about to take itself out, which is great because I’m eager to file and get it over with. Meanwhile, duck, duck duck….
That Tinder was only on his phone because at the time, he was working for Cisco in biz dev, and “needed to understand the trends of mobile apps. Obv I’m not actually Using the app.” (wtaf) My boys were 2 years old and 2 wks old at the time. What an ahole.
Also, cycling…Saturdays or Sundays he would like to go for a bike ride. Poor fella worked so much during the week “in sales”. One time I said, oh I’d love to come biking with you! May I? “No”, he said. “I ride really fast”. Huh? He’s a rather large man…not exactly Lance Armstrong…only in the lying department. Turns out he was going to the nearby college where she worked some weekends cleaning dorm rooms. Ugh….
Queen of Chumps,
Lance Armstrong, the sociopath who altered the trajectory of other pro cyclists’ careers with his cheating. Sheryl Crow wisely got away from him
I saw my husband in his fancy Mercedes G-Wagon turn in front of me in traffic with a very young woman in the passenger seat. I proceeded to follow him. Then I called him and demanded he tell me who was in the car with him. He insisted he was alone though I swear I could see through the tinted windows someone trying to climb into the back to hide. He refused to pull over and told me “I was acting crazy”. Did I mention I had his own mother in the car with me?
He would never admit (even during a deposition) that he was cheating. Narcissist apparently are always right. Who knew!
He now lives a life in hiding from debtors, the G-Wagon was long sold for cash to help fund his lavish lifestyle and I am happily remarried to a man who doesn’t sneak, lie and cheat.
Gosh, there were so many lies…..where to start?
I believed him when he told me that he was impotent post prostate surgery and that he never “regained function”.
I believed him when he told me he was going down to LA (monthly) to visit his brother with colon cancer. I would drive him to the airport — an hour each way. He once got very mad at me for being 20 minutes late in picking him up. I was supposed to be waiting in the cell phone lot.
I believed him when he told me those packages from the Canadian pharmacy were blood pressure meds. I am now sure they were his ED meds.
I was a fool. He is an ass.
I thought it was despicable when I realized my ex had routinely used our friend with colon cancer as a cheating cover, but brother?! That’s one hollow human, DiscardedWife.
The stupidest lie I ever believed (well not really but … it was love ????) was that he fell asleep in the library studying abs they locked him in all night and that’s why he stayed out until the next morning
It was one of the earliest lies in a 30 year relationship I’m hindsight I see all the other lies he told but I didn’t see it then
He needed to take a solo motorcycle ride through the desert to find himself. It was the only way for him to find his elusive happiness. We don’t live anywhere near the desert so I happily booked those flights and hotels for him as I was so desperate for him to find himself again. He found himself with his Twinkie on the back of the motorcycle and I found myself footing the bill. They rode all over the desert while I ran the home and family business. He then came back from the desert and told my family and friends all about his “solo” trip. I always suspected she was there but only had it confirmed a couple of months later when everything imploded. When I confronted him about it, he said “what does it matter now?” A solo motorcycle trip in the desert….I was at my chumpiest.
My aunt-in-law cheated on her husband (my uncle).The AP was also married. The two cheaters got married. AP was already in another affair 5 years later. Then another. My uncle later married a wonderful woman & was happy with her until he recently passed away. My former aunt in law cried at his funeral how she regretted her affair & marrying the AP. She royally fucked up & was having to come to terms with that. I sincerely wish this moment for all of our cheaters.
That he was going out to events, concerts, sports games etc. and to the gym by himself. I believed it because I did that so it was no big deal to me. The SOB refused to go with me most of the time, so I had to go almost everywhere alone. I got used to it. I didn’t take into account the fact that he is a needy little bitch who can’t be alone.
To find out he had done so many things with somebody else but wouldn’t even go for so much as a walk with me most of the time was soul crushing. He would drive for an hour just to go for a brief walk with OW. He went everywhere with her. They had three hour gym sessions together three times a week. At one point I had bought him some snowshoes because he expressed an interest in doing that with me. Not one single time did he go. He wouldn’t even go biking with me, and biking was his daily obsession. He was so into it he went on long bike trips with a group as well. I think he went biking with me all of four times in three decades, always at my urging.
Apparently even people he hardly knew were preferable to me.
I’m actually a fun person and most people seem to enjoy my company. I think he did all that just to try to invalidate me because he’s a bore and was envious of my more engaging personality. Any good qualities I had, he hated me for and he was always trying to compete with me. Some “partner.” I didn’t clue into this sick dynamic until after Dday because he would always assure me he enjoyed being with me but was just tired from work. Ha! I found out he’s be up until five a.m. partying with his slut (while I was conveniently sleeping and didn’t know) but that didn’t seem to tire him.
I could kick my own ass for ever believing him.
When we first married, Klootzak constantly complained that I wasn’t scuba certified so I couldn’t dive with him. I actually spent 2 years in swim lessons and became scuba certified for him. He took me diving with him exactly zero times. In fact, 6 months after I was certified, he took a dive trip to Cozumel and left me at home. To be clear, we lived in Hawaii but he flew to Cozumel to dive for a week. I complained to him that a) since when do we spend our vacations apart? and b) I got that certification for him to do that with him as he had raised a stink about but then was not invited along? WTF? Oh, but I want to spend this trip with my old dive buddy friend. He organized it and it’s not for couples. We will do advanced dives that you can’t do. If I had known he never intended to take me diving – and we lived in Hawaii! – I wouldn’t have bothered. I have an intense fear of deep water. I have a strong fear of heights and deep water makes me feel like I’m falling. I spent years battling that fear to be comfortable swimming and get certified FOR HIM. What did I get in return? As he wrote in an email to one of his APs, “It’s so exhausting being with someone who wants to make everything a two person proposition.” All because I expected when we got married that we would take vacations together. Not that he would fly off to Cozumel and blow all our vacation funds and leave me at home.
He rented the hotel rooms, all on days that I was out of town, to download porn. Ummmm, yeah, research found later was that he had no trouble downloading porn at the house, whether I was in town or not……oy vey…
I pulled aside the shower curtain one morning to surprise him with … shower fooling around.
His back was covered with fingernail scratches.
The explanation: I fell at work and slide down a rough wall.
Me: You should have told me; I would have applied something to make them heal faster.
“Only employees are invited to company holiday parties”
“We didn’t go together, we ran into our female colleagues while we were at the stadium”
“I was texting my buddies” (while coming back home, so driving, after he’d spent the entire evening with them)
“There’s no cell service at the gym”
“It was just a JOKE” (then why is no one laughing? oh because it was sexual harassment)
I drew the line at “I went out with her as a bet with my coworkers”, because it didn’t matter whether it was true or false, it was equally appalling and that’s when I left!
I totally trusted my former spouse right up until a few weeks before d-day. The summer of that year he went on a few weekend camping trips by himself. Not unusual as he liked long bike rides and super hikes and I did not. When he went on these camping trips he let me know that there likely would be no cell service so I was not to expect any phone calls/messages from him. Upon his return, he was full of elaborate details about his camping trips. The way he went on and on reminded me of someone being interrogated by the police or a witness on the stand of a court case. One of the details did not make sense and I questioned it and his reply was “Are you calling me a liar”? Looking back over the summer there were little alarm bells but trust trumped the bells. One alarm bell was his purchase of new underwear called “my package”. OW got him and his package for 4 years, in that time she was able to live rent-free, upgrade her education, and then moved on to greener pastures.
Sudden no-notice 3-day-weekend Army trip to prep for an upcoming deployment. NO contact for the entire weekend was going to be possible as his phone was being confiscated at the door of the top secret building that was so secure it could screen out WiFi, gamma rays & a nuclear attack.
I think it’s safe to say that the only thing that got prepped and deployed that weekend was his pecker.
Other guys, the way they carry on … it’s disgusting. I’m not that kind of person.
I’d hear about the other guys…, they made him sick.., I’m so lucky he’s not that kind of guy..
I figured out he didn’t like me a few years before d-day. It wasn’t even cheating, he made comments about my appearance and how I couldn’t expect him to be attracted to me and men just weren’t attracted to women my age. I was 36, so was he. It hurt really bad but I thought about it and thought, why are we doing this then? Our son was in high school. I had a job that I could live off of and gave me insurance. I had just received a small inheritance from my dad. I was still very sick at that time but I had managed to find a way to function.
So I gave him an out. You don’t want to be with me, we can separate. You have a way better job and I won’t take anything except the inheritance from my father.
Cue the sobbing. Cue the hysterical call to his work to take vacation time to fix his marriage with his wife he loved so much. Cue him on the floor sobbing like a child screaming I was the best thing to happen to him and he didn’t want to live without me. And me saying, you don’t even like me, you think I’m old and gross. And him making up excuses about how he’s sooooo stressed and didn’t really mean any of that. And he’s just scared of intimacy and how emotional I make him feel. blah blah blah And then he proceeded to guilt the ever loving shit out of me for even mentioning divorce. And if I’d been healthy, I probably would’ve told him to go fuck himself and filed the paperwork. But I hadn’t started treatment yet and I was easily confused so I blamed myself. That was the worst lie I bought.
Cut to d-day and the discard and him grinning in my face telling me he’d hated me all 20 years of our marriage and had been actively planning to leave me for at least six. Well then bro, you fucked up. Because when I gave you the out, all I wanted was my inheritance. But that deal expired. Since you found it fun to waste several more years of my life, now you gotta fucking pay. He wanted half my inheritance. I kept it all. I also got 10 years of alimony. Told him if he didn’t agree I’d go for lifetime alimony. Stupid fucker. All “our” friends were like, what was he supposed to do, you wouldn’t LET him divorce you. 1. I gave the stupid whore an out. I offered him a very fair divorce. 2. How the fuck was I stopping him? Even when he was screaming about how much he hated my guts, I still had to file because he’s a lazy stupid piece of shit.
Ugh, part of me really wishes I had left then. But then part of me is glad I didn’t because I wouldn’t have found out all the other stuff and I might actually still be “friends” with the disgusting piece of shit. That makes me shudder.
Katiepig, I’m really sorry. That cruel and heartless man is evil incarnate.
I could have written this. Thank you for sharing.
I do often try to be grateful too, that it lasted long enough that he revealed his most disgusting self. I only had one minor slip up in “no contact”. Otherwise, yea, he wasted my life and I hope to never see him again. Seen all I needed to see. Finally.
This makes me so sad. I can relate. My ex would call me names and say the most awful things. I finally did what you did and said, “then why are we together?”. Basically, it was so he could treat me that way. I hope you change your name to Katie. Even better, Queen Katie. He’s the pig, not you. Don’t even give him that existence in your space with the reminder of how he devalued you.
Oh, I know Katie Pig sounds bad but I swear it’s been empowering for me. I’m building a brand around it. After he left I had to go through so much stuff and I found a notebook with a poorly drawn, angry eye browed, stick figure pig in a dress that had my name, Katie, written above it. And it was the first time since my divorce I really laughed. It really cracked me up. For some reason it was just the funniest thing I’d ever seen.
He probably drew it while I was cooking him dinner. Sitting there at the table, fuming in anger for no real reason, and scribbling it down. “Yeah, she’s a fucking pig, yeah! I’ll draw her as a fucking pig, yeah! That’ll teach her! I’ll write her name on it so everybody knows it’s her! Yeah!” I laugh every time I think of it.
It just kind of stuck for me. Like, “psh, you can’t hurt me, I’m Katie Pig!”, “Don’t you know who I am? I’m Katie Pig.” or “He better not mess with me, pigs eat people.” It’s just snowballed into a thing over the past couple of years. I have pig stuff now because I’m Katie Pig! I make pig jokes. I’m using it as the name on my creative pursuits and even thinking of changing my last name to Scrofa, which means female pig. My self esteem is right back up as high as it’s ever been. I wasn’t really overweight when I got divorced but I’m even healthier now. I’m like Miss Piggy, I’m a sexy pig. It’s weird, I admit, but it’s super working for me.
oh that is a great story!! i love it. i always loved miss piggy and the muppets. Still do! <3!
FW told me ” I thought about leaving you for years but then you got cancer and how would that make me look” So sad
“Since you found it fun to waste several more years of my life, now you gotta fucking pay. He wanted half my inheritance. I kept it all. I also got 10 years of alimony.”
Hope that wiped the smugness off his face. What an asshole. I’m glad you’re outta there.
Stupidest lie? Gee, I can’t pick just one because I’m now convinced that everything he ever told me was untrue. Everything. But here are my favorites:
“I love you”.
“You are all I will ever need”.
“I promise to (fill in the blank)”.
“Trust me”.
“I will never leave you”.
I do think my fw started deceiving me early on. I am not even talking about cheating (though he likely did). I mean by lying about his wherabouts, making up plausable stories etc. All in an effort to “train” me to believe him.
I have to say his efforts paid off. I was suspicious of him a few times ear4ly in our marriage. But as time went on and we got involved in church and the community and he played the upstanding citizen, I grew to be so proud of him and how he was maturing and improving.
Then Thwat, right upside my head. The rest is history.
When I knew for certain, when I finally had proof, I found myself looking back at memories from 40+ years before, things he said and did that didn’t make sense in retrospect but which I accepted as truth because I loved and trusted him. Example from college: “there must be a drug dealer on campus who looks like me. People keep coming up and saying ‘hi, FW’ and I don’t know who they are.” I had just started taking classes and I think now he was afraid women he’d been romancing were going to approach him while he was with me. And later, when I was working nights: “A drunk ran out of gas on the road and came in the back door of our house and woke me up to get a ride home. I held the baby on my lap while I drove him to Morgantown.” I think now he stayed out all night and was afraid maybe I’d phoned home on my break. I mean, who finds a stranger in their bedroom at night and gives them a ride home? Much later: “My company is sending me to Puerto Rico for a week to work” and he came home with no photos, no gifts for kids….I don’t think he was in Puerto Rico. It just goes on and on. My entire marriage was a lie. I was the only one keeping vows. Oh, and one last biggie that completely slipped under my radar: a gay couple meeting me for the first time and remarking, “Oh, we didn’t know you were a woman!” Why in hell that didn’t tip me off, I’ll never know. So trusting, so stupid.
two contenders for stupidest lie:
1. “I wasn’t watching porn (again), I swear I just had my pants down around my ankles when you came home from work early because I was hot!”
2. “I was picking tomatoes at her house” (for 2.5 HOURS, with 5 tomatoes to show for it).
Worst lie:
“Marrying you was the best decision I ever made, I love you more than anything on earth.”
“We got divorced like 10 years ago.” (I believed this one.)
“I talk to my ex-wife every day because of the kids.” (Kids were in their mid-late 20’s, It seemed a little strange.)
“There’s no divorce record because some clerk made a mistake.” (Seemed very strange and possibly false.)
“You can’t find our marriage certificate so I’m not sure we were really married.” (Did not pass the sniff test. I started digging and found it.)
“I think the officiant at the wedding wasn’t licensed to perform marriages, so it probably wasn’t legal.” (Narrator: the officiant was licensed and the marriage was legal.)
I asked him why he lied about being divorced. He said, “Because you wouldn’t go out with me if you knew I was married.”
One night when FW was traveling, someone tried to break into our house. Called police who came out twice. Kids were scared to death when these freaks tried to kick in a window. Called FW repeatedly. Didn’t answer because “he had silence mode on.” Did apple locate and he managed to sleep through that. Frantically called hotel and got put to his room. Slept through that too. Hmmmm. Checked phone and bank statements and no, he had called an escort that night and gotten out cash. Believed it until I found proof, he still denies it but says “I know more than him about what he’s done”. WTF!
My work requires me to change the phone password regularly.
Riiiiight!
Biggest lie I fell for was he was going out at midnight to photograph his tractor by moonlight. I’ll never get over that.
I also remember his anger at me picking the wrong potatoes from the field (the field where he met the howorker, no doubt).
The time we were at A&E with our 7 year old son who’d almost broken his finger and how he introduced me as his wife! Hes a paramedic and likely they knew all about what he had been up to. I only continued onto that one about 2 years after dday.
“Photographing the tractor by moonlight.” That wins the euphemism challenge, Bev. I’m dying over here!
I hope he and his tractor are very happy together (not). Perfect nickname for the OW.????
In 2017, 4 years before our divorce, he had Whatsapp and Tinder on his phone “to find language exchange partners.” I should have been suspicious when he made absolutely no progress in any of the languages he was supposedly learning in all that time, but did have an impressive Harem of women from Turkey, Russia, Iran and France that he chatted with constantly. I wanted so badly to believe it wasn’t what I thought it was.
There were a million of them, but I guess for simplicities sake, i’ll recall the time I found a condom in the drink holder on his bike.
He told me he didn’t know how it got there or why it was there.
Of course that was bullshit, but I was amazing at spackling over his bullshit. I don’t even remember how or why I let that one go.
He worked late on his birthday and had to get a hotel by work because he was so tired!
1) Snakeface made up a co-worker/fishing buddy named “Dan” who had a nice boat. Snakeface loved to fish, but he rarely took our dinky fishing boat out on one of the local lakes during the last few years of our marriage. He’d come home at 5:00am after a night of fishing, telling me he’d slept on Dan’s couch because they drank a lot in the boat, and I didn’t want him to get another DUI, right? He’d gotten one following an evening out at a bar with Spiritual Slut and their coterie of supportive friends, and so I accepted that fiction about sleeping at Dan’s because, yeah, staying off the road was a smart move, and I sure did not want to have to dip into our dwindling savings to pay attorney fees, fines, and other associated costs again.
He never brought home a single fish, though.
2) Snakeface took trips several times a year to a reservation 450 miles from our home, for sweatlodge ceremonies, the Sun Dance, and to support his dear, dear friends, including Spiritual Slut, when they were doing their vision quests, or hanbleceyas. Lots and lots of time stolen from our family, from the time our sons were 6 and 10. Several times he called me late in the evening, when he was on his way home: “I’m really tired, so I’m going to pull over at a rest stop and sleep. I’ll be home some time tomorrow.” When I cared about the marriage, I sucked it up.
“There’s no need to fight over sex anymore. No lead in the pencil.”
Dropped into a sunny afternoon sitting on the patio while he was working on replacing deck boards. A wave of relief washed over me. And a pang of sadness knowing this must be a very painful milestone in a man’s life. But, then that wave of relief again and an excitement that maybe now, we could work on our relationship. Maybe this was the beginning of a new phase that wouldn’t be poisoned by his juvenile knowledge of sex and his brooding demands.
Now, we could start a fresh new phase of life together with straight up love and caring. We had a beautiful home, paid for, and loving children and grandchildren around every week. Just a handful of years until we could retire and though we would never be rich, there was enough in the retirement accounts to continue life as usual.
I was so fooled – I went inside the house and wrote an essay about it.
The joke was on me.
So many to pick from and the sad part is I believed them all. I’m trying hard to put down the hopium pipe. I just got home from therapy and our main topic was trauma bonding. I’m deep in a rut, CN.
I shared this one recently in the gaslighting post but:
He just had to go on several vacations during Covid (because he felt so restricted) while I stayed home to take care of our kid. While I was unpacking his bag (because I acted like his effing mommy and he’s lazy and entitled) after he came home I found condoms. He told me he hadn’t used that bag since we were dating 15 years ago and they must be leftover from then.
Yes, I bought it – so deep was my trust.
Don’t beat yourself up Lost, we’ve all been there. You just need to find the strength to close the door and say “no more” once and for all.
I believed all of XFW’s lies for over 10 years. He lost his wedding ring “swimming” less than a year after we got married. Came home in the middle of the night regularly because “he fell asleep on the last train”, or “had to walk one of his (girl)friends home after a work dinner because she was too drunk”. He would “sleep at work” several times a year because he “worked so late it wasn’t worth driving home”. I was home with our 2 babies all this time. Still wanted to believe him. Until I didn’t.
It’s like this – I slam the door in rage and then I open it back up to see if he’s still there. I can’t quite close the door and turn around and walk away. Even when I fully recognize that is the only option I have. I’m literally torturing myself.
Ugh. It is hell.
The first few months feel like hell. There is a lot to process when you realize your whole life is not what you think it was. Be patient with yourself. When you want to open that door do little things that make you feel better or help you remember who you are and what you want instead. Go for a walk, call someone who cares about you, make a list of things you want to run by your divorce attorney… when I was enraged and found myself ruminating at first, I would write something bad that FW did or said to me and burn it on my BBQ. Also write lists of things I care about or like about myself. It used to help. You got this. It gets better.
Well, late FW traveled a little for work. He dealt with the vendors/pricing/products for the automotive repair business he worked for. Mostly his travel was a couple times a month for a night or two to the couple other states they had stores in-kind of just visiting those stores. But after he died I finally put 2 + 2 together with the usual Chump detective work. He convinced me a few of his trips that weren’t to states where they had stores were to go to “factories, refineries, corporate headquarters” of businesses they purchased parts/products from. Uh, no. They were to go hang/bang old girlfriends from high school now living in Atlanta, women he’d met thru work living in Missouri/Phoenix, etc/etc/etc. And the topper was a $600 odd charge from a visit to NYC…further detective work found that was from some strip club associated with Larry Flint. Hmmm, bottle service anyone? Geez, I’m glad he’s dead and I don’t have to deal with it anymore.
This is so embarrassing in hindsight. A bit of a backstory: my dad is very active: gym rat, cyclist, hiker…he takes multiple showers a day from all his workouts. My ex randomly decided to go work out at 10:00 PM, but he hopped in the shower before he went. Red flag #1, he never works out. Red flag #2, the shower. He argued that my dad takes a shower to go to the gym, so why can’t he? He came back at 2:00 am, and I found him in the shower again. I asked the ex who never works out how in the world he exercised for 4 hours. He said he ended up just sitting there thinking… and wasn’t it better he did it there and not at a bar? The fact I walked away from that entire night not 100% certain he was up to something still kinda blows my mind, but it was the very beginning of the end, and I wasn’t able to process properly yet.
Similar. He would take the kids to activities but not stay and watch them. I’d ask about it and he’d say that he would just wait in the car, strange, why not watch your kids? Turns out he was shlepping shmoopie a couple blocks away at her yoga studio. Gross.
And the showers at odd times when returning home, with his phone always with him. Turns out he was sending naked selfies to shmoopie while I cooked dinner, which he didn’t do anymore for some reason.
It’s so frickn insulting when you figure out the details and little betrayals afterwards.
“I was swimming at the YMCA with [Male Friend]”. During the pandemic, while all the gyms, including the Y, were closed. I also suspect XH was bisexual and the male friend, who I’ll call A, was an OM.
When I found condoms in his car after an outing with A: “They’re A’s. He was going to hook up with his girlfriend after we saw the movie.” A plausible enough story, but XH said it in a weirdly defensive tone. Also, he told me A was a virgin when he was trying to set me up with A so we could have an “open” marriage. I guess he liked A sexually so he figured I would too because in his mind I’m just an extension of him. Blech. XH may look like a model, but the thought of having sex with him or his APs makes my skin crawl.
During the hoovering phase: “OMG! OW broke up with me!”. This was on a Saturday. The previous Sunday he had texted our condo’s gate code to the OW while I was visiting my parents and accidentally (or perhaps not-so-accidentally) sent it to me instead. Even if they really had gone from having sex in our marital bed to broken up in 6 days, no way was I taking his sorry ass back.
I forgot to mention his sudden new job.
A normal man says, “Yes, I’m playing video games. Don’t nag me, honey.”
A better man says, “Yes, I’m playing video games, but I’ve also done X, Y, and Z around the house.” And has actually done those things.
A disordered man invents a work-from-home job in the video game industry, complete with names and nationalities for his fictitious colleagues, and refers to these imaginary people frequently in conversations. I can’y believe I fell for that one until the pandemic forced me into unemployment and I noticed he never Skyped these alleged colleagues.
This is an oldie but a goodie. My apologies in advance.
That white stuff in her underwear was vaginal discharge.
I bought it.
Oh, and: Read a text on her phone in which she tells AP, “I’m so lucky.” I questioned her. “Oh, he’s a co-worker so I’m saying I’m so lucky he had the walker I needed for a patient.” Totally bought it, trusting fool that I was.
Just a note for any one without a vagina – a white, off-white, clear, or egg-white like discharge from the vagina is a normal everyday occurrence depending on where she is in her cycle.
Not saying David’s cheater wasn’t a cheat, just that vaginal discharge happens to everyone everyday regardless of infidelity.
Saw a text pop up on her phone from the affair partner, calling her “BB”. When I asked, “doesn’t that mean ‘baby’?”, she said, “No! It’s a reference to the letters in my license plate.” AND I BOUGHT IT!!! Evidence discovered later confirmed that they do indeed call each other “baby”… Or shall i say, “BB”.
There were so many lies that I believed because I trusted my partner. His work had instituted a policy of all the engineers being on call 24/7 for a week at a time in rotation; I got irate on his behalf that they were calling him in at midnight and 2am multiple times a week and said that they should at least pay for a hotel so he could stay down there! (we lived 60-90 minutes away) Funny… six months later the “company” started paying for a hotel and then he would be away several nights a week. I suggested he should collect hotel points we could use for our family vacations. I was that clueless and trusting.
After D-Day #2, when I was lining up my ducks and trying to wait until our kids finished school before filing, he said he was going to clean out his closet and donate the unworn stuff to charity. I said great! I’ll schedule a Goodwill pick up. He immediately changed his mind. It didn’t occur to me until much later that he was trying to take some of his stuff to the OW’s place.
I think the worst though was the one he used on our teenage son, who worships his dad. After I moved out, our son continued to live with his father for the rest of the school year (about 6 weeks) before moving to join me as I’d asked for and received 100% physical custody. FW routinely texted his minor son late in the evening that he’d had to work late and therefore “there was no point” in his driving the 45 minutes home–he’d just spend the night up at work. Son believed this was quite reasonable; I would have gone ballistic if I’d known because it meant that our teenage son was literally living on his own. FW also did this when I flew the teenage son back for visits during the school breaks (visits I had to arrange as FW couldn’t be bothered).
Upon her telling me of her affair, I asked 1 Q:
Q: do you want to save this marriage?
A: of course I do!
If I ever needed to follow-up w/her again, I’d ask this Q:
Q: why did you originally say you wanted to save the marriage?
A: *crickets*
For almost a year I hadn’t had sex with my then-husband of 36 years because my gut had started getting the eebie jeebies and nausea whenever we were intimate, I apologized to him frequently but told him that, for some inexplicable reason, having sex with him made me feel like a hooker. He was a gym rat and “went to the gym” every day. One day, 36 years into the marriage, I found a condom in his gym shorts. The stupid lie I sort of bought: He told me it was because he had thought about going to a prostitute since I no longer wanted to have sex with him, but chickened out and changed his mind at the last minute. Fast forward one year, I discovered videos he had secretly made of himself with different prostitutes, in which their pre-sex conversations definitely indicated his whorehouse visits were frequent and had been going on for years. He finally confessed he had been seeing prostitutes throughout our 37 years of marriage, through good times and bad, even in the many years when we had sex daily. Yeah, my intuition had been telling me something was wrong for years, but when I reasoned it out in my mind (he’s a good father, he’s always home at night, etc.) it seemed everything was okay. Such a chump! The level of betrayal I felt was excrutiating, but now, 3 years out, I live a hooker-free (haha), asshole-free life and love every day. Cheer up fellow chumps, we are empowering ourselves to move on to much happier, more fulfilling lives.
He had to stop by the office at 2am on the way home from the airport while on a “business trip” because he forgot to complete some training that he had to do. Truth: He was with one of his girlfriends who lived in a different state. I’m so happy he’s no longer my problem!
FW moved a second bed into our bedroom because he couldn’t sleep with me in our bed due to “back pain”. Months later I found out it was his way of being “faithful” to the OW.
Wow- these cheaters really have a demented concept of faithfulness!
So many lies…
The funniest one was probably that x called himself a “feminist”! ????
Still does.
That’s why he was hiring so many cute female interns and “working” with so many women. Guess who OW is…
As ex wife appliance I don’t think that’s what feminism is.
“This company contacted me via Linked In and offered me a job in ‘another country far from home not to be named here’! I’ll be bringing you and the kids out in a few months! (A month later…) It’s not really a place for women, just my yoga instructor and traveling nurse single female friends that I hang out with every weekend. So you and the kids should stay in the US and I’ll come visit in the summer! Oh, and I promise I’ll send money NEXT month, the bank numbers got screwed up by HR this month. And I bought a second car. I didn’t have time to tell you! And you won’t see yourself on my Instagram. Here in ‘unnamed country’ I use it for business, and it looks bad for business to have a wife and family. But I will post about my single female friends! Well, I’m trying to get better at recognizing birthdays on social media, I know it’s something I never did for you. Of COURSE I’m not cheating on you! How could you even think that of me! You’re so paranoid and jealous. I blocked you from my Instagram because I know you don’t like getting too many notifications and I know I post a lot! I don’t have time to respond to your messages on the weekends because my other female friends are SO needy that they get upset when I don’t respond to them instantly! What do you mean things aren’t okay between us? I think everything is fine! I can’t wait to see you!” Surprise! Got an STD when he came to visit. OMG writing this out makes me feel like a total moron for waiting for the STD to finally flip the switch in my brain.
What an absolute dirtbag and conman! Don’t be so hard on yourself. Sometimes the lies are so outrageous that it breaks our brains.
He is a guy that is NOT into the great outdoors (complains about bugs etc.) Or exercise.
He suddenly wanted to start hiking, downloaded a hiking app, and signed up to do a 5k! I even bought him a pair of hiking shoes. I was such a chump.
I found a pair of dirty, green Victoria’s Secret thong underwear in my Ex’s gym bag. He had just returned home after “staying with a friend” for a few days during wreckonciliation, in order to get away from all my “drama and craziness.” When I asked him about the panties, he said “they’re yours. look at how crazy and ridiculous you’ve gotten. This is why I can’t be with you.” First of all, they were size small and I haven’t worn size small panties since junior high. Second, they were green, and I do not like the color green. But green was the AP’s fave color being “irish and all.” Finally, ex had not been interested in my panties in at least a year at that point. But he had been gaslighting me for so long at that point, that for a moment I believed I was that nuts and had just accused my ex of something untrue. Of course, shortly afterwards I found the receipts for the plane ticket, hotel and rental car for him to go out and see his married, former employee mistress out in California. As awful as this sounds, I actually have those panties stored away in a plastic bag and box in a closet at my parents, along with my wedding ring and numerous other types of proof of his affair. I know I should get rid of all of it, but to this day I still don’t think most people, even my own family, believe mr. nice guy/good dad would do such awful things….and I need to hang on to some verification of my truth.
Bought a jetski…showed me photos only..’you wouldn’t like it MorryChump,no need for you to see it’ Fast forward..photos of OW and ex on said jetski.
Oh…and the kick to the gut..ex need a jetski licence and jetski registration…guess who paid for all of that. Clue: it wasn’t him.
My FW told me he was taking an out of town class on drones because it would look good on his resume. Now I thought this was ridiculous but he said it was to get a better job after he retired. Maybe he’d freelance. I bought it.
I found a receipt for a restaurant in a mall two hours away for two meals. One was a wrap which he never ate. When I asked about it he said that he bought one to eat there and one to eat in the car later. ????
I like to think that there’s at least one instant when these liars sweat bullets ???? ???? as they scan their pea brains for some plausible (or, let’s face it, not so plausible) excuse.
He was supposedly part of a study group for law school that met at dinner time 3-4 times a week. Usually took a bottle of wine and got home in the wee hours (such a diligent scholar!) more or less tipsy. I was working 2 jobs at the time, supporting him through school, so didn’t take the time to investigate as I should have. I finally found out that the “study group” was just him and OW when she had the absolute gall to start calling the house when I was there and mouthing off to me when I answered the phone. I eventually got fed up and gave her holy hell on the phone, at which point he tried to have me committed, with the help of my narcissistic mother (!). I ran out of the house as they were cutting up a bath towel to try and tie my hands.
By the way, his excuse was that he was no longer attracted to me because of my “obesity” (I’d gained a grand total of 5 pounds since we’d been living together, partially due to my crazy schedule – remember, 2 jobs, one of which was graveyard shift at a veterinary emergency clinic – which messed up my eating habits, and was nowhere near obese). I guess that maybe counts as lie #2. There were many others, but this episode stands out – I pick-me danced and embarked on a very unhealthy diet regimen and only stopped after I discovered that he’d also slept with my sister (who was supposedly heartbroken after a breakup and needed his comfort).
They were going to tie you up with cut up bath towels? Good grief! They are the ones who need to be institutionalized. That’s absolutely insane and would have been assault and unlawful confinement. I hope you are NC with both those whackos.
That time when I called him at work and he nervously said, “Hi, I saw your ad…” and then I said, “Excuse me?” And he quickly got off the phone saying he thought I was one of his coworkers…
And then came home and explained he was looking to surprise the family with a dog. He even dialed his office phone so that I could listen to several messages left in his voicemail by people selling dogs.
He is allergic to dogs. No dog materialized. It took almost 20 years and lots of other lies to finally unravel it all.
He even told me about the OWs, that he was meeting up with them as part of a side-gig “training” them. Stupid me, said great, enjoy, you’re working so hard. But there was never any money coming in from it. How did I not see that?
Then there were the late night walks around the neighborhood. Sure, go take a break while I put the watch over the kids while being home all day. I would joke that it better not be like that dad I knew growing up who went on late night walks to cheat on his wife. He even came home tipsy and with roughed up lips, and I still didn’t get that he was hooking up in her car down the block.
Top 3 lies of the many during his 8 year affair with a co-worker:
1. “I had no choice BUT to cheat.”
2. “She has to go with me to the trade show. She is the only one who knows the social media passwords.”
3. “My affair with her taught me how much I love you. Really, she did you a favor.”
He had a “friend” who worked security for a Broadway theater and this “friend” always got him A free ticket to see whatever show (never two) so spent three months of weekends in NYC seeing all these shows. Oh, and another “friend” had a friend who just happened to have an apartment a block up from Times Square so he always had a place to crash. While I stayed home with our preschooler.
Turns out he was weekending between 3 OWs. Who all lived within 30 minutes of our house (which is 3 12 hours from NYC).
I still hate him so much.
Early in our marriage, my ex-FW told me he had received orders to ship off during the Gulf War. He was in the Navy. He moved us (me + our three children, all under three years old) back to Texas where I had family. A couple of hours after he left to return to San Diego, his commanding officer called to speak to him. Since the FW was gone, that officer told me the “good news:” The orders to the Persian Gulf War had been lost, and the FW no longer had to ship off. I believed the orders were lost for a couple of years until mounting evidence of his philandering made me re-think that whole situation. I found out later he was already screwing his commanding officer’s girlfriend’s sister (convoluted, right?) – the same one that called me with the “good news.”
Good grief. Did he then move you back? Were they in together on the scam. That sounds like Courts Marshall level shit.
I stayed put, and he had 12-14 “affairs” during the 1.5 years he was a geographical bachelor, by his estimation. I did not put it all together right away which I blame on serious and prolonged post-partum depression and sheer magical thinking. They were in on it together. And he denies it to his mom and kids to this day.
That she was studying in her pandemic study group that whittled down to just her and him, and that they could only do that at his mom’s house (he’s 50+) or his brother’s RV. The former because he had a dual monitor setup, and the latter because it was “quiet”.
Looking back I can’t believe how stupid I was. I kept telling myself that she was in an accelerated nursing program to help our family we’d been talking about having, and because she cared so much that she wanted to become a nurse even in a pandemic.
I hope that dead-weight finds herself on the receiving end of medical malpractice.
You know how they say never to put anything (skeevy) in writing? I think because FW was always surrounded by harem members at work or didn’t want me to hear him drunk on the phone, he insisted on communicating by text a lot of the time and consequently texted a lot of his bs. Come reckoning day, that was his bad luck but my good luck.
The lies FW told in text were pretty pedestrian– phone battery died, last minute meeting, working late, commuter rail delayed, pulling an all-nighter, etc. My lawyer was chuckling because it was so easy to compare what FW said he was doing to what the secret credit card charges showed he was actually doing. But what made the bullshit especially egregious were the epic rhapsodies of self pity and pity traps FW spun around all the lies. The time he ALMOST WENT BLIND from stress while staring at the screen! He was close to having a stroke from overwork and never getting time off! His back, his carpal tunnel, his tennis elbow, heart palpitations, etc.! He was decrepit and, it was implied, it was all my fault! Moan, moan, wail. Because of the costs of providing! There was never a more classic case of FOG tactics– fear/obligation/guilt.
One thing I’d seen from the time I advocated for survivors of DV was how bystanders and even victims’ legal teams can become contemptuous and disrespectful towards victims on some notion that the victim was an equal participant in dysfunction. It’s so cruel and unfair because victims’ understandable reactions to abuse are often framed as aggression or craziness. Worse than pouring salt in wounds, that perception can sway legal proceedings. That thought made me cringe on D-Day. But with nearly everything in writing I looked like a saint in text and FW looked like the most heinous manipulator to ever walk on cloven hoof.
His texts taking me to task for grocery charges or whining over whether we really needed to replace a broken stove while he spent thousands on an affair were especially damning. My responses to his “nearly dead from stress” catastrophizing were mostly concern, offering to make doctor’s appointments and health tips! At several points I was recommending he spend time with friends to avoid becoming socially isolated! Then I’m sending messages of love and support, pictures of the kids in various extracurricular educational settings, etc. There were some exchanges where FW is blaming me for this or that and my response was something like “You seem to be really straining to find something to blame me for. It’s starting to make me think you’re having an affair”… which FW then denies, saying that I’m “sabotaging” his work by trying to bring these things up while he’s at the office. Meanwhile the secret credit card showed these messages were texted from a pizza tavern 45 minutes from the office and three minutes from the APs basement condo where FW spent about $180.00. There were other texts I sent from ER during a few kid health scares/mishaps where FW whines and cries that he can’t come running because he’ll get fired! And, oh, by the way, the ER bills would be enormous and maybe I could do a better job of watching the budget. Those latter texts corresponded again with charges from a bar next to the APs condo or to charges at a seaside restaurant an hour from work.
I think the optics this created made FW a lot more cooperative in the end. First off the whole “ogre wife/bad parent/spendthrift” effigy of me wasn’t going to fly. Secondly how was he going to ever again claim “hardship”?
The physical and psychological effects from porn make them act like this. take my worrd about it- seen it over 4 x in my 25 yr marriage. I asked him to leave 5 days ago when i again asked him about these weird incidents in our married life ( usually refused to answer and fled) after 7 yrs ( the trauma was mostly gone and i could think clearly and calmly) and again he lied at lest 3 x in succession and then tried to gaslight me three times by saying. the rage. the anger. the anxiety. the criticisms. i looked up withdrawal from porn and all his symptoms were always there. i dint have a clue until i did.
no he didn’t say that ( he did) about 2 different incidents over the yrs ( just a start on his lies…). wow, i am beyond shocked yet again at what he will do to protect himself. i stopped the convo and asked him to leave. in the very early am- i told him that i needed space ( but i said we both do- haha) and he should go
i contacted him once- never again but still because he lied to my face and tried to gaslight me- which i explained why is the reason he had to leave. i had been kicking him out of the second house ( he has a house he can live in in another town. i didn’t argue, plead , beg fro his understanding cause there is non. i finally get it- he doesnt care. CL has really helped me from the first time i kicked him out for mysterious weird creepy behaviour ( frightening actually__
I don’t really believe in sex addiction as an alibi for abuse/cheating. It’s like calling a batterer a “punching addict.” So why don’t they all get fired from their jobs because they’re spending 24/7 in a boxing gym or meat locker punching sides of beef? Why do most only beat up their partners?
This peculiar addiction seems to be mostly selective regarding which parts of their lives– or people in their lives– they sacrifice for it. Maybe the addiction is more to betrayal than anything else. I think it was Velvet Hammer who called affairs “three legged stools” which fall over if you take the victim leg out. In order for them to get off, so-called addicts require a victim. I think that’s several shades darker than regular old addict. It’s more on the spectrum of serial killer.
I am amazed you were able to find his secret credit card. I hope to do the same. I’m convinced he has a separate card and bank account he has been using for his exploits. What I wouldn’t give for that info.
Get a credit report; you have all his info, the credit report will show EVERYTHING listed in his name.
What Soldiering On said. It costs about twenty bucks or so to get a credit report. You can request it online. You don’t need FW’s permission either.
When tinder showed up on our 2 kids and my phones (we all shared an iCloud acct) he blamed my 13 year old son.
Prostatitis was his supposed diagnosis when he had pain down there and needed pills. But actually he had an std.
Poison ivy was the rash above his wiener. My friends husband said it happened to him before as well because when weedwacking without a shirt, the sweat brings it down there.
He slept with transgender prostitutes because I was too controlling and he was afraid of me. Obviously not too afraid.
Mine also had to get buttfucked by transgender prostitutes because he was afraid of me! It’s so weird how that works.
Good grief!
“I love you. You’re my perfect match.” ????
The biggest lie? That he was going to spend the weekend at his recently diseased friend’s shore home to get the boat out of the water. We never had a boat. The friend had lived in a water community where any number of neighbors would have helped the widow. She needed (overnight) help again within a few months. Second biggest lie was that he did not recognize the zippered case with the KY jelly someone left in our guest room. Third lie was that the blank valentin