Dear Chump Lady,
My ex-husband said some of the most absurd things after I caught him cheating and I filed for divorce. You know, things that make you say, WTF?! My therapist said it was all a “mind f*ck”– just another way to keep me off-balance and confused.
It certainly worked because in the beginning I tried and tried to understand what he meant by the things he said. It felt like my brain was going to short circuit as it worked overtime trying to make sense of things that made no sense. I now know that it’s because none of what he said was rooted in reality. Just more BS to pile on to the already giant Gaslighting Mountain.
For background, my ex-husband is a successful leader with a narcissist’s overabundance of confidence. For 27 years I was a devoted and loving wife appliance who made my needs infinitesimal. He was always an upbeat person, probably because he got his way in pretty much all things. We rarely fought and I thought we were a great team, so I was completely blindsided by his betrayal.
In retrospect I see how unequal our relationship was. I was pretty much a doormat that he ignored and he was the superstar who ran the show. Once I found out about my ex-husband’s secret double life, I wised up and filed for divorce. That is when he opened the floodgates and really let the BS flow, providing me with many WTF moments:
“I think the divorce will be the best thing to happen to our marriage. The way to save our marriage is to break it up so that we can start it over again.” (WTF?!)
“I didn’t tell you about it because I couldn’t trust you.” (He kept his affair hidden from me because I was untrustworthy? WTF?!)
“I do believe there was abuse in our relationship….but you’re not ready to have that conversation.” (I had told him his cheating and lying was emotional abuse, so he responded by implying that I had abused him! I think my brain exploded when he said that. The biggest WTF?!! of all time.)
“It’s your fault that I took that money out of the account. If you had moved it to the savings account like I asked, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. Since it was there, I had the right to use it as I saw fit.” (Without my knowledge, he had taken $18,000 out of my bank account to pay off his credit card, which had charges for luxury spa and hotel dates with his girlfriend. I only found out about it when I scrutinized our finances, which he had always managed. So he stole my money and I am to blame? WTF?!)
“You need to stop playing the victim. I’m really concerned about you because it’s clear you haven’t dealt with your anger yet.” (Said two weeks after DDay. Are you for real? WTF!)
Five years later I am happy to be on my own, away from the duplicity and disrespect. With enough distance, I can laugh at the nonsense, but it did take time and no contact to get here.
I would love to hear other chumps’ WTF head scratchers for the Friday Challenge. I am sure there will be a lot that are similar to mine since cheaters seem to share the same playbook.
Chump Lady, your book and blog have helped me see the BS for what it is. Thank you for helping all of us chumps!
BuildingANewLife
****
Dear BuildingANewLife,
Congrats on getting free of Mr. Mindfuck. We’ve all been there, and this blog is really nothing but a compendium of stupid shit cheaters say, so you can all compare notes. They’re not original. (And you aren’t freak of the week. Sadly, this crap is very common. There are only so many ways to manipulate a person.)
That said, they do come up with some doozies. I think one of my favorites is: “I didn’t cheat on you, I cheated on your idea that I wouldn’t cheat on you.” Ooh… meta brain twizzler…
You gotta hand it to your ex to think on his feet like that, to make this all your fault. Or perhaps he’d been saving up all his mindfuckery like one big bombing of Dresden. It m must come as a shock to cheaters to be found out, so it’s DARVO, DARVO, DARVO! to gain the upper hand again.
So, your Friday Challenge wish is granted. CN — what nuggets of crazy were you served after D-Day?
TGIF!
I was at work when I received a call from my attorney. “[insert ex’s name] would like you to help him repair his relationship with his children”.
😳
My co-workers came to see why I was laughing so hard!
😂
My decree has this written into it—mother will rehabilitate father!’s relationship with the [adult] children. Uh huh. Liar McLiar can work on that himself. Doubt very much he wants an honest relationship with them. He’s all about transactional (cough, cough) relations.
Speaking as a lawyer, these kinds of provisions infuriate me.
Nope. Folks need to clean up the messes THEY made.
After DDay, before he left, X informed me that we were going to divide up our young adult/teen children.
“I get S21, you can keep D18 and we”ll split S16.”
Haha, no. The older two never spoke to him again (8 years still going strong) and my poor baby boy spent two years in visitation hell. We celebrated that child’s 18th birthday like nobody’s business.
Ha! “Split” the youngest? That’s some King Solomon and the baby BS. What an idiot.
I think it says a lot that he wasn’t interested in the daughter. Either that he knew she would automatically side with you, or see through his BS a lot more easily. Or just some mysogynistic claptrap. For some reason cheater X automatically assumed in the early days of my pregnancy that we would be having a boy, and it broke his brain, like I saw the gears graunch, when we found out she was a girl. He actually admitted that is just what he had thought. They’re not right in the head, I should have seen it coming.
He was interested in her when she was little and cute and adored him. Then she grew up. She told me that how he treated me was abusive and if I didn’t divorce him, she was never coming home again. That proved an easy choice. The nuclear fallout included him refusing to fill out her FAFSA, stalking her publicly on social media and harassing her at work. Now she’s in law school and wants to be a victim’s advocate!
☝🏻This
When my father abandoned us, he packed up the macaroni portrait I made of him in kindergarten. Not one photo of his children growing up from the photo albums. We were teenagers when he left. Years later, he whined about not having any photos. Too cheap to make copies from the shoebox of negatives ? Maybe.
They just don’t care.
FFS. That one made me laugh out loud.
Asshat told me that I “owed him our son” (I have older daughter/younger son). Complete transactional covert narc.
Splitting the children? So it’s not only women who are objects then, ok
Mine said he wouldn’t talk to me until I fixed his relationship with the kids. That line is even funnier delivered through your lawyer. He PAID to tell you that!!
Ahhhhi have so many of these. 1. When ironing out a custody agreement – I can’t take every Friday I have important dating to do! Alas he is a lonely man. 2. My son had a horrible accident and needed his knee rebuilt with cadaver tendons and other tendons he loaned to himself… why does he need such a fancy surgery it’s not like he is an athlete.. yep said in front of my teenager. I replied well he has to walk for the rest of his life. 3. I want to see the kids more which is a lie he sees them 12 hours a week or less. Then often says he wants 50% custody to which my teenagers say please no. 4. When I first left he used to tell me he still loved me. When it was clear I was not coming back he got nasty and discarding.
Thanks for sharing. My ex ( who I had to sue twice for basic child support despite his being a judge, a job I helped him get), told me he needed more money because he had to pay on dates, whereas I, as a woman, got paid for. Yep, that’s your biggest expense raising a kid, your dating budget. 😆
“I hope you better yourself and go to therapy.” Bold coming from the woman who gaslit her partner for months and cheated on her since the beginning.
Snap. ‘Do you think you need therapy?’ So I said, ‘Not particularly, do you?’ Then the revelation that he had indeed been having ‘therapy’. Not your common or garden counselling like I had been having as my dad had. just died and I had looked after him through cancer and then my partner walking out. Oh no, not counselling. That’s for the plebs. He’s had proper therapy ‘Where you look deep inside yourself’. Apparently he hadn’t told me about it because ‘If I knew him I would know his is a private person’. Who recommended the therapist I ask? ‘A friend’. I think we know who that turned out to be. Honestly Bold doesn’t even cover it with their gaslighting does it.
FW told me he didn’t want me to go to therapy because “you’ll realize you don’t need me anymore”.
Yup.
After D-day, when I’d walked out of his flat, filed for divorce, and wasn’t answering his calls or texts, he left a voicemail.
“Listen, you fucking idiot, are you coming back here? (silence, then a laugh). Just give me a call, OK ? (another laugh).
I don’t know how I managed to resist.🙄🤣
Wow, Chumpnomore6, you are mighty! Your silence in response to that nasty voicemail probably rang loudly in his ears for a long time.
Charming
Yeah mine sent a charming email telling me to get my head out of my ass, stop ruining my children’s life and go back. I was acting like a spoiled brat apparently and thought I was something because I have a job. Same dude cheated on me with a plethora of women then financially abused me.
You over there, with your, JOB, think you’re so, AMAZING … God at least it’s funny to be fair
That is spooky, the madness, caught on tape.
I think I’d make that his special ringtone.
how romantic – a modern day Mr Darcy
Too many to write , but my all time favorite was when he said he felt he could date a “better caliber” of women if he could just say he was separated. According to STBX, too many “better women” refused to date a married man.
( He still insists he wants no divorce- he is getting one )
Ooh mine said that too!
What a dick. Mine said that he was tired of going to sex clubs and paying for hookers so he was settling down with one girlfriend. He actually thought I was going to be happy about this.
First date guy admitted he was still “technically” married. I told him I only dated single, not separated and certainly not “it’s complicated”. He was FURIOUS. Talked about how evil she was, how she was dragging out the divorce to punish him, and tons of sad sausage stuff.
“Why on earth would I volunteer to get involved with any of that? To be your unpaid therapist and legal counsel, to have that vitriol intrude on our relationship with no end in sight? To potentially coparent with a crazy and vindictive person? No thank you!”
And he was gobsmacked that I said no. While his brain was processing the initial rejection, I pointed out that lying about his relationship status on dating profiles to reach more candidates suggested that he was a really shitty person.
Then I left to live my life of peace, tranquility, financial security – footloose and fuckwit free.
“You kept asking me if I was gay (because we had an almost non existent sex life) and so I had to find out (by answering a m2m ad on Craigslist but denies actually meeting up) “
According to my STBX, m2m was just something he wanted to try and now he is done. Sure it is…tried for over a decade and only stopped when discovered.. course, we know the lying, serial cheating, gaslighter has not stopped, but who cares!
In my “marriage” apparently craigslist wonders were the norm for decades…he left to live with one 40 years younger than himself…after bringing him into our home for 5 years as his “friend”…I bought his “friend” Christmas presents and accepted him as “our friend”….it didn’t work out and he now lives by himself…I’m significantly happier…he is recovering from major surgery by himself in his small apartment ..there had been so much emotional abuse that I had had no friends for 9 years when he left. I have been blessed with amazing “strangers” who helped me and became friends…abuse is so insidious and deliberate
Im so sorry you were treated like this. So glad you’re free.
Can’t believe you turned that poor man gay, he was just trying to be celibate and pure.
“You’re so strong and independent it seemed like you didn’t need ALL of me.”
Got it: strong and independent are bad. Unloveable, even. And also a license to disregard wedding vows of monogamy. And by implication, the only way to keep a spouse faithful is to be weak and dependent. Though I’m guessing plenty chumps have heard THAT as an excuse for cheating as well.
In related news: I had to throw thanksgiving dinner in the garbage because it was delicious, and I had to throw dog poop on the Klimt because it was beautiful. #UpIsDown
With a little perspective it becomes clear that serial cheaters do what they want and craft these nonsensical “explanations” after the fact to justify their desires.
If you need an excuse, absolutely ANY excuse wor will do.
The tragedy is that the nonsensical explanations take what would otherwise be a good and healthy response (“my spouse is telling me about a problem; I need to take her words seriously, do some introspection, and strike a compromise for the good of our marriage”) and weaponizes it. Since the explanations don’t make sense, we’re running in circles trying to solve imaginary or mutually contradictory “problems”, exhausting and frustrating ourselves. This is a deliberate (though maybe unconscious) ploy.
I wish my XW had just said “I have met someone else”, rather than inventing shit to make me think that (1) it was my fault, and (2) because it was my fault, there was something I could do to save the marriage.
Exactly. And what you describe is the reason marriage counseling with these freaks is pointless.
Noooo, Nomar, it’s not pointless – it give them the opportunity to steal more marital funds while you try to fix critical problems like you don’t like the sitcoms he likes.
Yes. What I wish he had said was “You are a good person and have been a faithful wife but I have decided that I do not want to be in this marriage. My mind is 100% made up and I will be leaving tonight.”
The whole accusation that he needed to divorce me because I was a bed wife sent me down rabbit holes I wish I had never go into.
Unicornomore, I also went down a rabbit hole. I believed everything he vomited all over me. I needed answers… I wanted to fight for a marriage that he had unilaterally ended and I was desperate. I think back to the person I was 7.5 years ago at the time of his departure. It was a dark, terrifying world and here I was bringing up two traumatised teens who were distressed and angry and blamed me.
Those rabbit holes were overwhelming and self-recriminatory. They were confusing and deep and vast. The grief, the immense grief and being so alone in my devastation. The re-run in my head… I beat myself up over everything. And he wanted me to.
What he said on D Day wasn’t stupid. It was deeply disturbing- meant to completely destroy me. To be honest it did for a while… but I crawled out of those rabbit holes and have stayed out.
He sees the kids and has a surface relationship with them… but they don’t stay with him and have never lived with him. I wouldn’t want to be him – he has broken down with them telling them of his regrets. I think it is true, not just manipulation ( he is good at manipulation).
He probably lives in a rabbit hole of his own making. I wouldn’t want to be him. Lost his kids for what…. a woman who had her own issues and agendas and was using him and dumped him? If he is even slightly decent, that must be on re-run in his head. Self gratification ends badly.
Sorry to hear all that Expectations. You are mighty! Sounds familiar. My ex was so cruel and flippant after DDay. He was abusive, cold and cruel. Because he was deeply involved in a terrifying S&M world with some dodgy people, I asked him to get a vasectomy (he had fertility issues anyway but I wanted to be sure). The reason was that I didn’t want our daughter to have to deal with a half sibling from one of his freak show sex slaves. I just didn’t want her exposed to his world. But what he said was this – no, I won’t get a vasectomy because I can have another family but you can’t – you’re too old. I was 50 at the time.
What a FW! Yeah, mine is 48 cheating with a 23yo. I asked if he was going to have more kids and he said “maybe, I don’t know”. C’mon, dude, of course she wants you to knock her up and set her up for life!
As a woman who was knocked up by a FW, I can attest it does not result in being set up for life. You have to chase them in court and still they won’t pay even their share. I’m girding my loins for how broke I’m about to be. Having a child with a FW is not lucrative.
He regrets the RESULTS FOR HIM of his stupid choices. Not the choices themselves, or the harm those choices did to others, most of all his own children. Believe me, kids figure that out.
Been there, dealt with that.
It certainly does.
They try so desperately to claw themselves back from the situation they happily got themselves into. They didn’t care then, didn’t protect a single member of their family. Used everybody to further their situation. Lied and deceived ( both parties in my case, the affair person too.) on a daily basis. Ping ponged between both woman, as and when it was convenient to them or met their requirements.Then have the audacity to call you names, play the victim and defame your character. In between declaring love and change. Rinse and repeat. We are now divorced, selling the home but emotionally and mentally I’ve paid an unbelievable price! Two years since I discovered the affair, he still in the house. Refused to leave and has made me drag his sorry behind kicking and screaming to get out of this marriage, like the spoilt little boy he is.
Yep, somewhere inside their black hole of a personality, they either consciously or subconsciously realise they just don’t have the depth/courage to deal with hard things, and they don’t want to be compelled by a sense of obligations, personal ethics or at least guilt into addressing this in an honest way, either by putting in an effort to fix the relationship issues, or just admitting that they’ve found something shiny that they’d rather put their energy into and look exactly as shallow as they are. So they point the finger to get themselves off the hook and out the door. It’s so childish.
For the 7 years between D-day and his death, I had an endless loop in my brain trying to figure out why he was so mean and selfish. I kept looking for a reason when the actual reason was that he liked neither me not being married and he really did suck that much. I was, however a wonderful wife appliance that he wanted to keep to tend things and children.
It wasn’t until after he died that I realized what a terrible husband he had been.
“nor being married” sorry for typo
Unicornomore, followed by “here are my negative STI results so you don’t have to worry, and you’re getting all the money because I realize what I’m doing is a betrayal and a violation of vows I made to you that you relied on.” Mic drop!
I have experienced exactly this. You made bad choices. They had terrible consequences, you attempted to convince me that indeed they might improve the marriage. Then on refusal of your kind offer, you begin ripping apart the person you still continue to profess to love!!????
Ha! I got this too. I “seemed to be able to stand on my own two feet” and “didn’t need him”. I said “isn’t that a good thing? Wouldn’t you rather be with someone who WANTED to be with you rather than someone who NEEDED to be?” Nope. He wanted dependence.
The whole hoping we can be friends afterward thing. Dude, would YOU be friends with someone who did the shit you did to me (years of cheating via paid sex and so many lies through a marriage, a couple of large moves, and child) to you?!
Yup, same. His jaw dropped to the floor when I told him shortly after DDay shock that our relationship was over and our friendship was over. He said “But…it’s been twenty years, you’re just going the throw that all away!?!?” Ummm…nope, Slimeball that’s all on you – you threw it away by cheating, lying, gaslighting.
Good for you Hardworking Chump. I only wish I had had the strength or self-esteem to do that during my shitshow. It all turned out ok but I think I could have saved myself years and years of pain if I had been able to muster that response.
“But…it’s been twenty years, you’re just going the throw that all away!?!?”
Same. Fuckwit said “so you’re just going to throw 24 years down the drain?”
Crickets from me.
Right? “I want us to be friends eventually”. Ok cool but I require integrity in my friends, too, and I think that excludes you. Sry.
I want to fuck you over, and still reap the benefits of your reliability, maturity, and level-headedness. Yes, I’m sure that we all wish we could be self-serving dicks without conscience or consequence, but that’s not reality. Sry.
This theme really resonates with me… Can you believe that my cheating ex asked me if I would be his legal power of attorney if he had a health crisis as he trusted me (you know.. trustworthy, loyal and sensible) and I would know what he wanted…. Ah, like What? Sorry.. like hell no. That is what a wife does and I am no longer yours.
I got both demands for friendship as well forgiveness because “it’s not fair that you’re angry at me when I did nothing wrong. Anyway, I’ve already forgiven myself.”
Cam yes! FW tearfully told me he had forgiven himself. What? Sure, you fucked yourself over and are about to very publicly lose your family, but you’re hardly a blameless victim. In what world does your own forgiveness of yourself even matter to literally anyone? In what way have you atoned for anything, with any actual victim?
That narcissistic bullshit just made me 100% sure that I could never, ever love or respect this person again. Divorce it is.
Regarding a time that he skipped celebrating our kid’s birthday to drive to Canada for sexy time: “well I didn’t plan to definitely do it. I hadn’t decided yet when I left home.” With his passport. And the burner phone but not his main phone. Yeah right. And he made it a point in couple’s therapy to nag me to admit it is possible that was not premeditated cheating, which I refused to give in on.
And would it somehow ‘not count’ if it wasn’t pre-meditated? What a sicko.
I don’t know if this counts, but at the final hearing, he said to my solicitor, “please thank Rob (my brother) for being there for Chumpnomore6”. I was torn between wanting to puke and laughing hysterically.🤮🤣
Oh my!! What a fucking wanker 🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️
“I support you in your efforts to fix our relationship.”
Like you supported me in getting the truth out of you? Like you supported honesty, respect and civility while you cheated, lied, gaslit, and abused physically, verbally, and emotionally?
I was also supposed to single-handedly fix the entire shit show. Well, I fixed me by getting out. You can eat the entire picnic of shit sandwiches yourself, buddy.
Mine said “Your attempts to fix our relationship are pathetic”
and he was right
How cruel Uni. No one deserves that. It’s amazing when we look back on what we were willing to tolerate for a whole variety of reasons. Easy to say now that it was pathetic but it’s hard to see your way clear when you are in the middle of the storm and just trying to do the “right thing” with respect to your family and your children. Big sigh – this shit leaves a mark.
A skid mark.
I got, “Didn’t you know our marriage was over?”
I heard these exact same words, “Brit, your continued attempts to save our marriage are pathetic.” As I started crying he went to walk past me but stopped, looked at me with a smirk on his face and said, “you’re pathetic.”
I agree…,
Brit, I’m sorry you had to hear that. My heart hurt reading it. So many f’ers out there.
I got “ you look so ugly when you cry” when I was beside myself with grief.
Chumpasaurus, so sorry. What a hurtful comment. On the plus side, it just underlines how much better off you are without him. Hugs!!
“Like you supported me in getting the truth out of you?”
Ha! On point. What a rigamarole.
I’ve mentioned this one before, but it bears wheeling out here.
While denying that she had been conducting an affair – despite me having irrefutable evidence that she’d been meeting up with an old boyfriend in secret and for some while – she said “This is my only chance of happiness and you can’t stop me taking it. I would have suggested an open relationship, but you lack the emotional maturity to make a relationship like that work, so we’ll have to get divorced.”
I still struggle to understand how you can deny having an affair and demand an open relationship at the same time. As others have mentioned here, when your partner demands an open relationship out of the blue, then you are most likely already in one … you just haven’t worked it out yet.
LFTT
PS – I am pretty confident that my emotional maturity isn’t – and never was – the problem.
Yep and I am fairly certain that many of those who insist on blaming the chump, are themselves in an open relationship and just haven’t been let in on it yet.
No doubt you would have seen her “emotional maturity” on full meltdown if you’d said “Great! I’m all in on an open relationship and there’s an old girlfriend I’m going to call right now.”
Adipae,
Of that I have no doubt.
Coincidentally, she was furious that the children (then 11, 16 and 18) wanted little or nothing to do with her AP; she stated that since they would no doubt be accepting of any future girlfriend of mine, they had to accept the AP RIGHT NOW …. and that their refusal to accept him was putting their relationship under pressure to the point that should they break up, it would be the kids fault. Not much emotional maturity – or indeed empathy – there either.
Plot spoiler; I have not dated since she left, but that is very much my choice.
LFTT
My FW blames me for our daughter not accepting his AP. And it’s true that our daughter accepts me dating but doesn’t accept her. Because it’s HONEST! FWs don’t get it.
I think I was one of the many here who were in an open relationship and didnt know it. He also seemed to think that we had an established agreement.
Odd though…we would have an actual conversation to decide on what toppings we wanted for a pizza…dont you think a decision to have an open marriage would also require an actual conversation?
Me coming home really late from work once (I had worked 16 hours instead of the planned 12 in a neonatal ICU) seemed to be the thing that convinced him that we had an open marriage. He assumed I was having sex with a coworker….uh, no.
Uni, we were all in an open relationship we just didn’t know it
Never ceases to amaze me how they can turn their underhanded cheating around and blame the chump. How they justify is mind boggling.
Hey Chump Lady / Chump Nation! We sure are MIGHTY to still have any brain cells left to type coherently after being in a mind fuck cheater blender lol.
There’s not enough space on the internet to list all the stupid shit cheaters say at any time.
They’re so full of shit that that’s all that comes out!
Here’s a short list from the blender spew after D Day:
* MY ALL TIME FAVOURITE!
“You emasculated me!” by working multiple jobs apparently, since it refused to.
TRUTH? = who cares.
My reply “I didn’t emasculate you. I had to grow balls the size of Mars to do everything you refused to do. You cut your balls off and handed them to me on a silver platter”.
* “if you LOVED me you’d spend $100 000 on training for me to become a podiatrist” after 20 years of ME spending countless $ on every other freaking training he ‘needed’.
TRUTH? = he wanted to look up people’s skirts and never wanted to work anyway.
My reply “Your parents love you, go live there and make them pay for it”..
* “I don’t know why you’re looking up all this “infidelity nonsense”, I was FAITHFUL! GET THAT THROUGH your stupid head! YOU are being unfaithful to ME by not trusting me now”
TRUTH revealed = he was ‘faithful’ to itself apparently lol.
My reply “I want someone with equal character to myself…. nuff said”.
* No this is my absolute fave lol… “You’ll have me back because you LOVE me and no one gives it to you like I do”
OMG
My reply “GIT, go one GIT out” and more wonderful comparisons using explicit language.
Ahhh that was the LAST day it was here.
Gotta love the mind fucks stupid shit cheater’s mothers say after D Day: (Double chump here, TWO ex mils lol)
* “A GOOD woman stays with her husband after his dalliances”
My reply “Oh so that’s what you’ve done? That’s why he ended up the way he is?
I call it ‘fucking other women’ and I call them martyrs”.
* “You FORCED him to be unfaithful!”
My reply “Lol so I got home from work, PUSHED him into the car, drove him around to *** house, stripped their clothes off, pushed them onto each other around 5 times…. till the end… how could I do that when I don’t even know where *** lives?”
* “Just like a dog, if he doesn’t get fed at home, he’ll go next door to get food”
My reply “LOL! Yes “DOG” exactly”.
The BEST thing about finding out is knowing the TRUTH and being able to say whatever I wanted to, to ALL of them.
The VERY best thing is loving my NEW LIFE!
Love you Chump Lady and Chump Nation xxxx
“Why can’t you see this as an opportunity?”. (Said less than a week after XW, out of the blue with no warning whatsoever, declared that our marriage was over).
“You have to say you love me because you’re my husband, so it doesn’t count”. (Said to explain her belief that I didn’t really love her, though I told her I did).
“If you really loved me you’d have been jealous and suspicious when I traveled for work”. (Because nothing says “I love you” like monitoring and controlling your partner’s whereabouts).
In retrospect, it’s clear that all these statements reveal more about XW and her (still unacknowledged to this day, though they’re now married) affair partner than about me.
Do you know that saying about wherever you go there you are? Well wherever she went there she is and her new guy is going to find out at some point. Then you might get a phone call asking you some questions. It will be time to get a recliner, some popcorn, a beer and watch.
I got pretty standard Fuckwittery. I think they all come from the same manual. Some of FW’s classics included:
1. Until I met Schmoopie (via a hookup site), I had to masturbate.
2. So really, I should get more than 50% of the assets because I saved money up until now and I am older than you are.
3. Any judge will make us continue to live together (um, big NO on that).
4. The judge will not care that I cheated (but the judge DID care that he spent a ton of money cheating).
5. My affair made me happier and made our marriage better (um, how does that work????? WTF???).
6. You need to get our son to talk to me (nope, the son is almost 27 years old and makes his own choices)
I try not to think about it now and just laugh but in the early days I was trying to get meaning out of and there really was no meaning. It was also worthless chatter.
When DDay came, he gave me one hour to ask any questions I had, and I wasn’t allowed to cry. Then we wouldn’t discuss it anymore.
Wow. I hope you have well and truly escaped from that. Horrible.
Fucking *bastard*. I hate him for you.
I hope you’ve cried since, because crying is cathartic. And I hope that fuckers dick withers and drops off. The *arrogance*! Hugs.xx
Ugh, that sounds familiar, Trudy. Hard to believe we “agreed” to this insanity, isn’t? Even worse, therapists condone such “strategies.” The success of reconciliation rests alley on our shoulders. It’s no wonder we finally crack.
Every single betrayal and mindfuck I pointed out, he turned around and claimed I did to him. It was completely crazy making. I actually started wondering if I had abused him in any way. That took some inner work to eradicate. Like most chumps, I wanted to understand if I had done anything. Wow! That was a lot of time wasted. But, as my favorite movie scene is narrated by Morgen Freeman, the gist is: I crawled through a long tunnel of sewage to emerge free on the other side. YIPPEE! It is so worth the work!
Mine never admitted to what was clearly going on. Always accused me of his behavior.
His levels of projection were off the charts. Even went so far as to relate in court an incident were he had screamed and cussed at me while pounding on the steering wheel at a child handoff as if I had done it.
“I always loved you.”
They don’t know what love is.
VOMIT
Two and a half years after multiple D-days and 18-months of “wreckonciliation” — during which the abuse continued– I finally left and went through a terrible divorce process. Two days after a zoom hearing when the judge approved the divorce, I got this email:
“friday was a sad day for me. i’m not sure how it was for you but i wanted to acknowledge all the pain i’ve caused you. if i could go back in time, my actions would have been different. i’m pretty certain of that. but i know i can’t. in any event, friday seemed like too big an event to just pass by without noting it. ”
He is nothing if not consistent! Passive voice, sorry/not sorry, etc. It’s almost comical.
Like the old game of adding “…..in bed” at the end of every fortune inside a fortune cookie, I add, “…..said the liar, cheater, thief” after every sentence he utters. It’s a great tool for keeping your head out of the blender.
I can now add “criminal”.
My mechanic found a GPS tracking device on my car last Monday. I called the police. It belongs to Traitor Ex. Who that very morning said “You’re trying to control me!” “You’re trying to dominate me!” “You don’t want Little Hammer to have a father!” “I’d be happy to see her more!” (Which is complete horseshit because he never asked for more than the few hours he has and did not do a single thing suggested by Dr. Kickass CoParent or Little Hammer’s therapist to try to repair things with Little Hammer. Not one. Which of course I pointed out.)
The same jerk who has said “My personal life is none of your business and I won’t answer any more questions from you!” and freaks out when I am on the street near his house (the grocery store and the doctor’s office are on the street below his groovy Greg Brady bachelor pad).
Now I know how he knew I was there.
He’s been out of town this week. I’d give anything to be a fly on the wall when he logs on to see where I am and the signal is coming from the police department, where the device will be booked into evidence this weekend after I pick the car up.
It’s a criminal investigation. Out of my hands, bro.
We’ve been divorced just over a year.
I’d have his balls in a vise, but he doesn’t have any.
God bless my mechanic. It pays to maintain your car with someone you know and trust. I brought one of my other vehicles to his shop the next morning. We put it up on the lift and there is evidence on the frame that the device has lived there too.
Little Hammer was with me and I was on speakerphone when he called me to let me know what he found. She asked to go with me to the shop with the other vehicle. Life lesson for her. Here’s what you do if you find a GPS tracking device on your vehicle. Of course the jerk, who claims to know all about love, did not think about how this hurt her sense of safety and security, how it violated her.
And please keep your side of the street clean, fellow chumps. I know it’s hard when the person you loved and trusted, and their hired hitman/hitwoman fucked you and your children over royally. But I promise you it will pay off. It feels REALLY good right now that I have stayed on the high road.
I should add that this incident, without question, puts him in the category of batterer. There is no “l fell in love” or claim of unhappiness involved to obfuscate and sugar coat what is really going on…..abuse.
PS
People who have affairs are not healthy. I know it’s hard to believe because they are masters of confusion with all their talk of “love” and “happiness”. But you have to keep your focus on the affair, which is the tell from which the Wizards of Oz are trying to divert your attention.
Maybe next week’s Friday challenge could be “Stupid Things Cheaters DO After DDay”……
I’d have his balls in a vice but he doesn’t have any. Brilliant! Applies to my FW too.
VelvetHammer i love your witty insights and comments. Makes me smile every day. Thank you
Ya know Hammer, I’ve suspected my ex has put a GPS on my vehicle too. He was just turning up too much where I was & one of the times, it was him & the AP laughing it up in his truck as they passed by me. I booked a mechanical appointment but got t-boned by someone & my car was written off before the appointment. I just took my new car in for scheduled maintenance, but I never thought to ask them to look for a GPS (since I don’t see FW much anymore)….so my question is do we have to ask the mechanic to look for a GPS or will they discover it during general maintenance?
Wow, I have taken my cars in specifically to have them swept for surveillance devices because I suspected them. My local auto electronics guy is a friend and he monitors vehicles for local FBI, Secret Service, lawyers and rock stars. He has never found anything.
But this means it just wasn’t there the day he looked. They are magnetic and can be easily removed and replaced.
The car in this incident is maintained by an independent mechanic who used to be the shop foreman at the dealership. We have a long relationship and he just happened to see it. I doubt this would have been discovered by a mechanic at the dealership.
If you suspect it, take it in. It cost me an hour of shop time per vehicle. The problem is that it’s completely hit and miss. You could have the car swept and immediately after someone could put one on. But I would still ask as a matter of course if you are having a vehicle serviced.
This incident was a total stroke of luck (or help from a Higher Power?)
Otherwise I would have had to have caught him in the act, and that would have meant staying up all night watching my cars every night. Even with cameras and security lights it would be like fishing for a mermaid.
While we were “miraged”, it never even crossed my mind that he might be monitoring me with a GPS tracker, and he probably was. And when you’re married, it’s not necessarily illegal. And how might I have responded? I’m glad to have found out now, with over a year divorced under my belt. That puts it firmly in criminal investigation territory.
I am going out this morning to look under my other vehicle. Cheaters especially are creatures of habit, which helps you when you need to gather intel to make decisions and protect yourself.
VH, that is scary. You’re such a tough cookie and so mighty. I’m glad the device was found the way it was and that the police took you seriously.
DV stuff is a big trigger for me so I’m not sure how appropriate-sized my reaction is, but I’m scared for you.
Magnolia, it is very scary. Not just for me but for Little Hammer, who has been privy to what has transpired.
No one saw the Watts family murders coming. People still believe Scott Peterson is innocent. I assume that bad things can happen to me just like they can happen to anyone else. The last time I was hospitalized by a romantic partner (1988) was after we had broken up.
I am taking this step by step and very seriously.
Thank you for your concern.
❤️
Thanks for the reply, Hammer. I’m going to see if there is something I can purchase (even a long mirror) to scan underneath for a tracking device. I don’t want to pay or go thru the hassle of taking my car in constantly. Good luck getting the xFW prosecuted! That is some freaky/scary shit they’re doing!!
Wow, I think something that picks up an electronic signal would be better. A mirror won’t reveal much. To get a visual you really need the car up on a lift and you need to know what to look for. In the case of my second vehicle, the rust marks on the frame that corresponded to the magnet housings on the device case was the giveaway, something you wouldn’t see with a mirror.
Rust marks ?! That means the tracker was there for a while. I hope the cops nail his ass.
I’m so sorry he did that, VH, and I feel privileged to witness your MIGHTY.
holy shit. this is serious, VH.
Sounds like my ex, who when I asked him not to be at the court hearing that would grant me the divorce (I did all the work of the divorce; he didn’t even get a lawyer), said, “I’ll have to think about it. It seems like I ought to be present for something as important as that in my life.” Too bad he wasn’t “present” in our marriage!
Nothing says apology and redemption like “I’m pretty certain of that”. WTF.
“My actions would be different”. Note that he didn’t say he wouldn’t cheat. He would have simply found some other way of hiding it.
“You need to stop playing the victim. I’m really concerned about you because it’s clear you haven’t dealt with your anger yet.”
7 years post d-day, 6 years post-divorce, and despite Phd-level gray rock education and experience, and I STILL get this one regularly.
That line is like a master class in manipulation. Frame the situation on your terms, then make yourself the wise, detached, “concerned” person who knows what your problem is. And I assume it’s projection, too. I twitch just reading that.
concern trolling!
He kept trying to minimize his big, in-my-face affair with the neighbor, after I applied consequences. Once he was told I was starting divorce, and moving to my Mom’s, he got pretty creative with the truth!
My fave-
“We got a little too close”
And then-
“She’s just like you! And I don’t see why we can’t go on like this?”
Umm, she’s not anything like me, I have self respect and don’t blow married men!?
Basically, he’s a greedy pig, and anything he vowed to me at our wedding doesn’t count now. I guess his fingers were crossed behind his back.
“And I don’t see why we can’t go on like this?”
Christ on a bike. What, he wanted you to be sister wives?!
🤣🤮🤣
After DDay, I felt like I was in a complete Bizarro World. The guy I knew to be quiet and introverted and sexless became maniacal and evil and mocking…. And had cheated on me with his coworker? That guy I could barely persuade to have sex with me no matter what I did?
Late the evening of DDay, I called him in despair and he called the police on me and told them I was “suicidal.” FW showed up at the house direct from AP’s home 2 miles away, and watched coldly as police cuffed me (first time ever in my life) and took me to a facility for mental review. That was the splash of cold water that I needed… while I waited for hours to be seen (and found to be fine by police and their insight psychiatrist, but traumatized by that dick FW), I realized that the guy I knew was gone.
Then over the next year, FW tried to abuse me through the coparenting coordinator (a narcissist piece of shit himself) — saying that “she can’t deal with being without our son. She needs to be with him all the time “ when I reported him for being physically and mentally abusive to our 9 year old son during his . No, FW, I would have liked to have a few days to myself every other week to manage through the trauma and endless discovery questions, but instead was dealing with frantic calls from my son in tears as FW called son names, shoved him, held him down, locked him outside and called the police on him… repeatedly.
FW also said ad nauseum “you still love me.” Which was hilarious when his attorney finally met me a couple of years later and I introduced her to my boyfriend. She still thought I was obsessed with FW, based on his BS about me loving him so much.
I got to hear in court that FW told his attorney and the judge that our marriage was bad for 7 years. That was news to me.
He laughed at me when he left that I hadn’t held a job in 10 years (SAHM) so I’d never find work. I was able to get right back into my career thanks to a wonderful network from past coworkers and friends.
Son loathes AP and refuses to go to their house, so FW just takes him to movies or dinner. But FW has created a story that he doesn’t permit son at his house with AP and it’s somehow all my fault. We just had to update child support payments and FW doesn’t see son overnight more than 20 days a year at most (so he owes me max), but his attorney came after me that it’s my fault because I don’t somehow force son to behave for FW and AP (son is 16 now). I have no words anymore for the DARVO still happening 7 years post DDay.
Happy Friday
Two more years.
When my son turned 18, a solid, smart and caring young man, I was celebrating my freedom from having to ‘co-parent’ with X-Ass just as much as I was his son’s landmark birthday.
Skunkcabbage, the good news is that with the $20k (for real) I had to spend with attorneys 2 years ago to get FW to stop being abusive to our son and to make FW sign to let our son go home and get away from AP and her threats of police… things are smoother. At 16, son is more mature and able to write off that his father is limited. And now FW is stuck paying me maximum child support for the next 2 years (his attorney could ape FW’s DARVO all he wants, but the LAW is if FW isn’t keeping our son the number of days required, then he can’t get out of child support. My attorney and I simply answered — “that’s nice. You owe this $$$ amount per Virginia law.”)
But yes… 2 more years until 18 and free of a FW 🙂
My ex thought we’d be friends and I’d join the ranks of exes he had poor boundary with. He thought he’d tell me how great I looked, get jollies by flirting, and protect his phony image by showing everyone how we were friends.
Fuck off. My friends aren’t nasty, don’t act like a prick and play dumb, and don’t keep whores on the side.
He’s blocked. The other day I saw him out running when I was out running and he crossed the street to avoid me. He never used to do that…..he’d try to exchange phony pleasantries. It was fantastic to finally see him avoid me after trying so hard for kibbles!
Kim, he might be trying another tactic on you. By crossing the street & avoiding you, he might be hoping it will trigger a “run after him”, “you want what you can’t have” instinct. I know because my ex has tried to Hoover me this way. My youngest caught him doing it & told him to stop.
( Insert mistress’ name) saved our marriage. You were not available to me when your mom was dying of cancer.
( Insert mistress’ name) knew what I was going through because she also lost her mom to cancer.
I need more than one woman to take care of all my needs.
I’ve always been fascinated by women, they are such a mystery. ( said Charles Darwin ‘studying’ his latest conquest with his purely scientific eye)
I need change in my life.
I could live a thousand different lives and been happy.
I don’t want to take care of anyone anymore. ( words on his exit) But isn’t that what ppl that love each other just do because of that love?! Look out for one another? 🤷♀️
Once I’m done with someone I’m done. But if ever there were a chance of it working out again, it could only be with you. ( cue blender up to high speed spinning that fuckwittery!)
Chumpasaurus, oh yes! When my father died of cancer, that’s when FW said I stopped paying attention to him enough.
“You were not available to me when your mom was dying of cancer”
Dear God. Do they actually listen to themselves ?!
What a fucking utterly selfish *bastard*.😡
I’m so sorry you had to hear that.💖
Chumpasauras45, I’m sorry for the loss of your mother. 🙁 These FW’s have to have ALL the attention ALL the time! My XFW acted jealous when our first child was born. At the hospital, he downplayed my delivery to anyone who asked about me over the phone. He did not take one single picture of me with our son. He however has lots, because I’m a good person like that! Back at home, he’d make snide remarks about diapers or me not writing in the baby’s milestones calendar, even though he was only born a week before. One week in, and he was already making me feel like a failure as a mother. Then my mom and sister came to visit from out-of-state. That’s when he went into full psycho mode. Our son was crying, and he refused to give him to me, so I could at least try nursing him. The FW stood there in our dining room and flipped through the “Parenting for Dummies” book, all the while our son cried in his arms. I asked him again to give him to me and he said, “He’s my child too.” He then proceeded to go down to our unfinished basement with our crying son. I followed him downstairs and asked again for our son, and he stood against the concrete wall and said, “No!” I went back upstairs and sat on the couch and my mom and sister asked what’s going on. I said I didn’t know. Little did I know I was dealing with a sociopath! He did not like that our son was taking attention away from himself. 15 years later, the same son was performing a magic trick for five people. Me, FW, daughter and grandparents. FW intentionally ruined the trick by picking at the card to find that it was different in some way from the others. Son was so humiliated and walked away and sat on the couch all by himself; he might have even cried, but I can’t remember. FW used to do magic when he was a kid, so I’m sure our son now having that attention trigged the sociopath to put a stop to it. Who does that to their own child?!! A socipath!!
The only thing that seems to vary among FWs is the level of audacity. My fave is my XW’s claim that her multiple affairs weren’t cheating because they didn’t meet in hotel rooms over a long period. But by being an insufficient husband, I broke our vows.
My ex was a real wizard at coming up with gems:
– The SecondSelf I know would never be saying these things- said after I finally asked him to move out. He was right! It took me a while to find my backbone.
– It only happened a few times – said about his visits to massage parlor prostitutes.
– I would like the marital bed for memories sake- said via his attorney during negotiations. My attorney was grossed out, as was I.
“She’s like a sister to me” for whom he bought lingerie and a jackrabbit vibrator. My reply was “if that is what you think ‘sisters’ or family are for, you will never see [our 15 yr old daughter] again.”
“She’s like a sister to me” for whom he bought lingerie and a jackrabbit vibrator”
I got something similar, “I think of her as a daughter!”
I said, so you want to fuck your daughter?🤮
“You told me it was okay to have a girlfriend, I can’t believe you don’t remember that.” 🙄
Omg!! My x said the same thing!
Out Ex’s must have read the same script. Every example you use was used in me. Exactly the same.
My ex tried throwing all this BS at me hoping that something would stick & take me out like a torpedo.
It did blow me out of the water initially, but with the help of Chump Lady, the wise chumps here & some others, I was finally able to see his game & one day said to him: so what you really mean is I’m too strong & smart for you & you actually need a stupid, weak-ass bitch like (AP’s name)?!! Well, that actually blew him back physically & I could see his pea brain trying to come up with a response other than the look of horror that the jig was up (he ended up running away). Anywho, he didn’t try to mind-fuck with me after that! He actually avoids me now because he knows I can give him a slap-down. Stay strong, Chumps & don’t believe the BS! These are not your friends & family who genuinely have care & concern for you…don’t believe one word that comes out of their lying yap-holes!
He was the victim in all of it. So crazy and yet the story of so many others!
“Why would you want to stay married to someone like me, aren’t you glad I divorcing you?” Yeah, that’s the ticket, I loved our family getting destroyed by your need to be happy.
The other is when she guilts me into trying to help the boys by saying we need to be united and help them heal. Excuse me, I’m not the one who introduced a guy to them a month into our separation and had him move in weeks after our divorce was finalized. I’m not the one who put my needs first, I still arrive to an empty apartment that is in disrepair every night. But I need to assist you in fixing your mess.
Cheeky cow!!!!
“I was meeting up with couples for sex.I thought it was better than having an affair”. (Btw trickle truth did indeed reveal affairs)
my husband said, ” I didn’t think it was cheating because I was with men”…right
#downlowdoesntcount 🤦♀️
Exactly.
So many! One old favourite, when I texted the ex to tell him that I knew that he had rekindled his schoolboy romance with life coach exgfOW. Imagine a grave tone of voice and sad sausage expression: ‘truth and perception are not the same thing’. It had ‘life coach’ written all over it. And on this occasion, truth and perception were exactly the same thing!
And a new favourite, said on being told by a friend that I was doing well, yet again with a sad sausage face: ‘I’m happy for her’. Somehow I don’t think so …
“Imagine a grave tone of voice and sad sausage expression: ‘truth and perception are not the same thing”
What does that even mean ?
High grade word salad.🙄🤣
Chumpnomore66, he always was a one for intelligent sounding word salad, and I sucked it up for 26 years. We are both lawyers. He told me that, in a work meeting in Paris, a French lawyer said in French to his team: ‘I hate that fucking little Englishman’. The ex kicked off and the teams had to take time out. As we know, the French love a salad, but word salad, not so much 😂
Vive La France !
👏😆👏
🇫🇷 versus 🇬🇧 🤣 🥗
Another one that I found out way after the fact was that ex FW asked my adult kids:
Do you think your mom would take her own life?
Pisses the ever living hell out of me thinking he would scare my kids like that!! At a time of never before seen unrest in our lives and they were already beyond confused and traumatized by it all! What a selfish prick!
The kids said they didn’t feel it was true but it scared them to hear it anyway.
The LAST thing I would have done is checked out and leave them to deal with the manipulative narrative creating mindfuck of their dad they didn’t even recognize any longer and his lying whore.
No way would I leave ppl I dearly love with that situation on their own, I couldn’t perceive of a bigger nightmare!
My daughter has said many times after the divorce that the most grounded and stable person in the family through any of this has been me. 😳
I laugh at that, because I was anything but grounded and stable!! My insides felt like scorched earth, but it makes me feel good on some level, that they sensed my solidness around that, and it was a valid assessment I see in retrospect. I always knew what to value in life.
Their opinion of their dad through the whole process was someone they didn’t recognize and someone who had “ lost his mind”.
They really do think they are so wonderful that we will just crumble without them. I wouldn’t give the ass wipe the satisfaction.
My skin actually crawls at the idea of FW and his whore AP raising my daughter if something happened to me. Jeebus!
Before I discovered the cheating she said something ridiculous but revealing. She wanted me to get rid of the dog that was our son’s birthday present a couple years before. He was a handful and could be destructive and I was desperate to save our marriage. I caved in and found a breed specific rescue group that would rehome him. When I told her we now have to tell our kids her reaction was,
“No, you are just trying to make me the bad guy!”
This was beyond confusing at the time, but of course now I know she was already cheating. Spreading chaos, mindfuckery and preemptive DARVO. If the story of our divorce was a novel, then this was the foreshadowing.
Ah, my ex was so good at flipping a script, latching onto something I’d said but turning it around so that I was the one at fault and he was the victim.
My ex had a secret life. When he disclosed it, and while I was in “wreckoncliation” and the horizontal pick-me dance phase, I was insistent that he needed to be open with me, to communicate.
Fast forward. I wised up and found a lawyer.
When my then-stbx and I met to discuss the division of assets (meaning, when we met so he could lay out for me what he believed he deserved and was entitled to, to which he expected me to agree), my ex said, “Our problem was communication. But I didn’t feel I could talk to you.”
“My ex was so good at flipping a script, latching onto something I’d said but turning it around so that I was the one at fault and he was the victim.” Yep. All the damn time. Throughout all the trauma of his betrayal these past few years, I had forgotten how often this happened (long before dday). It was crazy-making. Yet another reason to be thankful I’m out.
After 35 years married and me ignoring red flags for few years, I finally served him divorce papers.
He was very angry which I didn’t understand because he told me he wanted to be single. Had to live with him until divorce was final which took 9 months. He slept in our basement keeping the phone on speaker so I’d hear the Owhore
laughing at me and him telling her personal embarrassing lies about me. It was very hard to live like that
but I had no choice. He told me I nagged too much that’s why he fell out of love with me. Sleeping with me continuously while the affair was going on. It seems these lying cheaters have no conscience and whatever they say they believe.
Truly living alone is better than a life filled with deceit and pain.
“He slept in our basement keeping the phone on speaker so I’d hear the Owhore
laughing at me and him telling her personal embarrassing lies about me”
Oh Kathleen, I can’t even begin to imagine the *horror* of that. It’s truly evil . Thank *God* you are now out of that shit show.
What kind of people do shit like that? *Evil* people. Hugs.xx
The one that still bothers me. “I’m not only done with you, but everyone in the family, except our daughter. I will make an effort for her” He proceeded to ignore his parents during their last days. Never went to see them citing that it was too painful for him to watch them die. He has since cut off ties from his brother and nieces. Shows what a true sociopath he is. I was just at his niece’s wedding and was asked why he didn’t come, even to just be with his daughter who was there. I had no answer for the person. How do explain that for 30 years, you lived with a narcissistic sociopath who cared about no one except himself and that you were the one that forced him (his words) into family responsibility? My meh was realizing how he screwed up with everyone and I was still blessed to have them in my life.
I have no idea if he was actually telling the truth (for the first time ever) or just thought this was a good answer but needless to say, it didn’t get him back into my home, my life or my good graces:
“Why’d you do it?”
“I was just seeing what I could get away with. They didn’t mean anything to me”
Ten years later, the 67 y/o gigolo’s life is still one of finding women to live off of. Once he gets them ensnared they find out, like I did, that he’s a convicted felon who has difficulty finding employment.
Three months after D-Day, grey rock on my part and almost divorced by then:
“The reason we don’t talk is because I respect what you said to only talk divorce logistics. We can meet and discuss the reasons for the breakup if you want. I never gave you any because I don’t think it is right to tell you my complaints, the same way I don’t tell my friends my complaints about them.” We had always explicitly spoken about how as a couple we needed to discuss even difficult feelings. I wonder what story he wanted to tell me 3 months later. I told him I wasn’t interested.
“I never told anyone you are a bad person.” (I’m sure this was not the phrasing he used, though 🤣)
“I cheated on you because you spent so much money on groceries, and I told you you need to cook more at home.” Um, what?! (also spoken by the person who NEVER got our groceries including when I was 9 months pregnant, and whose contributions to cooking at home were cooking out maybe twice a summer.)
My favorite of many stupid things he said was “ you just need to accept and respect” … which was the last thing he said to me cause I went no contact.
That was after a 35 yr marriage !
After the betrayal and abuse from him, during my “fix the marriage pick-me phase” he said
“Men like to be admired”
My mind cleared from my fog just long enough to tell him
“The first step to being admired is to be admirable”
“The first step to being admired is to be admirable”
👏👏👏👏👏😆
Brilliant!!
“Submit !” 🤣🤣🤣
There are so many, but I think my favorite was “it doesn’t matter if we divorce because I will sweep you off your feet and we will remarry someday.” Hahahahaha. No.
He showed up at my home recently, 3 years after divorce and no contact. When I asked why he was there, “it was the only way I could talk to you since you have me blocked everywhere.” Um, why do you think that is????
Honorable mentions go to:
– I was wondering what it would be like if I was single
– You weren’t paying enough attention to me (FW classic, as we all know)
– You didn’t greet me at the door when I got home from work
– I guess you were serious (when he received the final divorce papers from the court)
Hah! I got the “You didn’t greet me at the door” also. Was I supposed to run to the door like the dogs did? Also, I realized months later that he never greeted me. Typical double standards.
Before the OW issued her ultimatum and he moved out, he told me he wanted to buy a duplex so she and I could be “sister wives”. She could be the sex and fun wife, and I could be the handle the finances, cooking, and child-rearing wife.
Dear God, that is some serious crazy.
🤪🤣 Said by a delusional fuckwit. Sister wives 🤣🤣🤣
How generous of him to make a plan for you. [insert eye roll]
My ex actually proposed something similar. Ugh. That we could all be one big happy family. OW actually suggested it too, in a letter.
WTF?
Mine would never admit to cheating. Even when my attorney said a woman was listed on his lease he said “she is just a friend”. My favorite line from
him was when I pleaded with him to come home, he said that it was all my fault because two years prior I threatened to divorce him while at dinner with his father, and his father (also a narcissist), heard me. In other words, two men had documented proof so therefore it is my fault. The funny thing is that I never actually said that. He was gaslighting me. Even if I had said it, it was two years ago and nothing happened in our relationship after that supposed dinner. Ugh
“Mine would never admit to cheating. Even when my attorney said a woman was listed on his lease he said “she is just a friend”
🙄
Same. Mine told my solicitor and the Court that the rat faced whore was “just my lodger”. 😂🙄😂
Ex-Mrs LFTT had her Barrister tell the Court that her AP was not an AP and that there was no relationship between the two of them …. and that “he is just a gentleman friend who takes her out to dinner on occasion.”
Watching her do goldfish impressions when my Barrister produced a screenshot of her public FaceBook profile, which stated that she was in a relationship with the AP, and gave a date which was the same month that she left the kids and I was epic. Even better was when my Barrister went on to say “Now that we’ve established that Mr LFTT’s wife is a liar, I would like to revisit her claim about not cohabitating with her AP.”
They really are idiots.
LFTT
With Twitter teetering on collapse, wouldn’t be a shame if social media disappeared?
Bruno,
I don’t think that it would be too great a loss.
That said, that one screenshot probably saved me a lot of money.
LFTT
Ahh social media, the tool of the FW!
FW used FB messenger to cheat and get her dopamine fix. Now I hear she is tearing it up on IG.
I recently heard a persuasionist suggest that IG is a majority of Narcissists. I am not on it
Yep. 😂👏😆
There is a small part of me that regrets I never got to trial, since FW died before our first hearing. It would have been quite entertaining to watch him try and weasel out of all his lies, when I had overwhelming evidence to support every claim I made. And because OW had left him and would have testified against him at that point (previous to that, my attorney and I were planning to depose her, and have her ex husband in the courtroom to disconcert her – she was not a strong person and I think she would have broken and told the truth about when they started their affair).
Oh well. I saved a lot of money by not doing that.
I too was told a lot, some I actually got right away, others that just left me frozen (my trauma response). Here’s a few classics-
“I’m being trustworthy but you’re not trusting me!” – he really wasn’t. This time I listened to myself and knew something stunk.
“[AP] was physically abused by her ex”- said as his excuse as to why he was fucking her.
“I shouldn’t have to sacrifice for a relationship” – he really means that he shouldn’t have to make the $ or be held accountable, be transparent, be empathetic to me, or everything his therapy told him to do. Nah, he’d rather hoodwink someone dumb (he also said “she’s not smart” so hooray)
I made a list of what he said so I could review it and remember when I felt weak
“I made a list of what he said so I could review it and remember when I felt weak”
Spot on. That’s one of the most helpful things to do, although it hurts like hell writing it all down, it’s invaluable for those weak moments. If you’re anything like me, one tends to forget/minimise, and think, well, maybe that wasn’t so bad, or that maybe some of it *was* my fault – writing down all their vicious self-serving bullshit is a salutary corrective to second guessing. Hugs xx
Just a few of many gems from a very long list…..”I was in PURGATORY for years”, he hissed. Hmmm….well, you chose to have a 4 year affair with the janitor from your office (now known as Knob Polisher), so actually I was the one in purgatory. Also, a psychobabble favorite…”It was MY job to make you happy, it was YOUR job to LET me make you happy”. Huh? I guess neither of us was doing our jobs then. I felt like I was underwater and struggling to breathe. Years long slow torture. He also sent me an article about “Emotional Immaturity” haha!! I responded: “where in this article does it address the emotional immaturity required to carry on a 4 year double life”?. Silence.
Knob Polisher!!!!!! Best thing I’ve read all day.
“Knob Polisher”
😂👏👏😂. Good one.
”It was MY job to make you happy, it was YOUR job to LET me make you happy”
Cheater speak for if you weren’t happy it’s your fault, not mine. Wanker.
Velvet Hammer: I hope you have alarms and cameras everywhere. He’s escalating his abuse. And some serious (I mean the type where you learn how to kill people) martial arts might be in order for you and your daughter. I’m getting terrible vibes from your post. He might want to hurt (or worse) both of you because he’s not getting his way. Of course, the most effective way to destroy you is to hurt (or worse) your daughter. You might want to bring this up with your therapist. This business with the GPS might be enough for you to demand that even shared custody ends.
I agree with Lulu regarding Velvet. See if you can get protection orders. And some kind of protection devices. My internal alarm bells are screaming
My attorney and the police recommended a restraining order.
I’ve got an awesome pit crew assisting me.
Unfortunately I know from decades ago DV education that no one can stop another person’s decision to be violent. Precautions cannot 100% prevent. But they still must be taken.
A lot changed when I got a restraining order against my XW.
-she stopped stupid, petty behavior that would land her in jail (not a good look for a First Grade teacher)
-her friends, family and co-workers started discounting her B.S. stories about me.
-My sons saw that this was not a game. Actions have consequences.
I hope the dumb fuck winds up in front of a judge, but you somehow avoid dying of laughter.
I’m sure you must be thinking about this, too, but this new level of asshattery from him makes me wonder having to see him all the time because your business. Maybe I’m getting the logistics wrong? But you have a fair amount of contact with him, yes? I’m not sure how one can proceed to be business partners when you have a restraining order? You maybe have no plans to change your work situation but just know we are rooting for you and want to hear about things as they unfold.
“I can love more then one man like the men in the Bible who loved their multiple wives” My XW was a Jesus Cheater
“God forgave me for all that I did. So I didn’t have to tell you about my affairs”
After taking my inheritance and spending it on the bills for having “our” daughter (actually the AP’s) and taking her to Cancun for our 10 year anniversary (while in the middle of an affair). I told her it was theft she said “It wasn’t stealing because it was my money”.
After I called her our for all her lies she said “I have only lied to you about the affair and nothing else”. If her mouth is moving she is lying. I suspect more affairs but she only say they were emotional affairs.
“God forgave me for all that I did”.
Amazing. The bitch knows the mind of God.
I went through this kind of crazy after Dday too. Married 21 years now divorced over 6. I don’t even remember most of his antics. I do know that I have never told anybody about the bizarre things he would say and do during that last year of marriage and going all the way through to a year after our divorce. Nobody would believe me and I would just look like the crazy one. He was a master at mind fuckery
Lorie, we would totally believe you, because we’ve been there, heard a lot of this! If you feel like sharing, it can be satisfying.
My ex-narc said, “who knows? If my relationship with the “side hoe” doesn’t work out, we can get remarried.”😳🤣
“I hate when you cry so I had no choice but to lie to you (about sleeping around).” Yeah – I’m probably not going to react well to you cheating so best to spare that bad scene and just live a double life.
Yep, mine says he hid his cheating for 7 years because ‘you know how emotional you get.’ Oh, excuse me. I tend to overreact when my world is destroyed. How selfish of me.
said hesitantly, like he was hoping I’d say no (so he could blame me later, natch), in a child-like stance but checking for my reaction with quick glances up from under his eye lashes “so… I guess we should try marriage counseling again?” LOL, I’d suffered through FOUR previous RIC attempts, no way in hell I was signing up for a 5th trip into that hellscape! I said no and he dropped it immediately, no doubt relieved that he was off the hook AND he had a cover story in which I was 100% to blame for whatever happened next (I hadn’t yet told him I was divorcing him). Today I sorta kinda but not really wish I had said something like “sure, get that set up and I’ll see if I can fit it into my busy schedule” but never mind.
Just a few tossed out in random order…
“OW is the most Christlike person I know”
“My goal is to earn enough money to have a trophy wife” (about a month post day while we were very much still married)
“You defied me at every turn!!” (I was tragically compliant in nearly every way imaginable. When pushed for an example, all he could come up with is that I used bleach in the white laundry when he preferred I didn’t)
“She would have been quite a catch if I were single” I reminded him that he wasn’t single and he said “Oh yea…”
“This will be great for the kids, my friend Dan had 2 families after his parents divorced and he loved it”. Dan was a dumpster fire his entire adult life over his parents divorce.
“She isnt a bad person for getting involved with a married man, she assumed I was ‘fair game’ ” I responded with “you live in a house with your wife and kids – how could you be fair game” (Its clear that I didn’t not yet know what narrative he had concocted).
I also got the “we will be such friends after” and “we can always remarry after I go do this”.
He once told me how he and OW “joked” about buying her a $40,000 diamond engagement ring. This was apparently to make up for the fact she would lose the $39,000 one her fiance gave her. Mind you we had 3 adolescent kids and zero college fund for them. He told me she taught him all about diamonds in a talk once since her fiancé is a high-end jeweler…he learned that round diamonds are the most preferred shape and lots of other details. I cant believe he recounted this conversation to me. When I later got married to an actual decent human, the very last thing I wanted was a fucking round diamond. gah.
Yep same, I got the “what do you see our relationship being going forward” (we were not married and had no kids) and he was horribly upset by me saying “uhh no contact!” and insisted on still wanting me in his life, and that we could be friends. Also said “maybe in 6 months or a year is there a second round for us? Yeah maybe.” The entitlement and delusion is just astounding. He left me for his employee to “not be in a relationship” with her but to “explore ethical nonmonogamy” (ie both of them are on every hardcore hookup app looking to F anything their little hearts desire, while they still “are in love with each other”)
Oh yes the ol’ ethical non-monogamy. I got that one, and like others have said, I was in that one sided open relationship thing too. I was just too vanilla, straight, boring, lame, conventional for all that sophisticated stuff 🙄
there are many examples and, thinking about them now, i realize how stupid my X sounds:
1. hey, you know there’s a formula for how young you can date. now that we’re separated, you can date a 36-year-old guy.
2. you don’t adore me. men need to be adored.
3. you used to have nice legs.
he made little sense when we went to a few sessions of marriage counselling, and the counsellor called him out on it.
it’s all ridiculous.
but he’s pathological and causing damage with my kids and that will never go away, unless they limit time spent with him. the latest? my X told my daughter, “i’ve never liked children.” THIS SAID TO HIS CHILD.
that’s a “put $500 in the therapy jar” moment.
gah.
If someone said to me the crazy things my ex tried to tell me after I caught him cheating, I would respond a lot differently today. I would laugh at the person and tell them, “You might want to pause to think before you say things like that because you might save yourself from sounding like such a flaming idiot.“
So so many. Among the choicest:
“I think a more than one a year threesome is for me, or some kind of ENM. Maybe if you would have agreed I wouldn’t have cheated.” (This after I DID participate in multiple 3somes with him, and he was presumably having at minimum an emotional affair for maybe our entire 8 year relationship).
“Believe it or not, OW (direct report coworker of 10 years) really just wants me to be happy, even if it’s with you.” Lol.
“I am afraid to try to fix it because I don’t want to end up in the same place again later, and I don’t know if I could ever get trust back for you” (ummm you’re the cheater dude! You don’t know if you’d ever be able to trust ME again?! Also since when is the choice up to you?)
“I thought you knew. I kept waiting for you to ask. If you had asked I would have told you because I can’t lie.” 6 month physical affair which apparently since I “should have known” made it ok with me. During which he actually had me hang out WITH the OW and him more than once, brought his kids to her house to play with her kids, and continually mentioned her and even outright said he was going to have lunch with her on the weekend, etc, when I had other things I was doing.
Made a 7 PAGE LIST of all my problems/problems with the relationship and wanted me to defend each one point by point, and then do “homework” for him and make a list for him too so he could improve himself for future relationships. Hahaha
One of my very simple mindful favorites that Fkwit said was:
“ I help around the house – I emptied the dishwasher!!”
—This was in fact true, he did empty it, however I had not run it yet. I calmly told him that as I tried to determine what items in the cabinets and silverware drawer needed to be re-done. Nothing like some raw chicken juice on utensils.
He said: “ Because you rinse them so well before loading the machine they look clean- so it’s not my fault”
My ex emptied the dishwasher exactly once in five years, and wanted me to compliment him on that fact forever after, LOL.
I think the goofiest thing he ever said was that “he had always tried to get me to be more independent” Full out lie, and he followed that up with “I (meaning him) am a controller” Totally contradicting sentences. He was indeed a controller, and he was saying this to a person who was holding down a full time job, doing all the housework, yard work and did most of the child care work.
He then went on to marry his whore, who got fired right after they married and never went back to work, except for a short time in a day care, and she got fired from that. I only found this out recently from my daughter in law.
So yeah they are so full of bullshit, and it doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do they are still at their core cheating liar’s.
During one of our sham joint marriage counseling sessions, my now-XW FW had a real gem:
“I know you’re angry, but I’m angry too. I’m angry with you that you let our marriage get to the point where I had to do something like this.”
I just stared at her with a puzzled look. In fact, I think the counselor did too.
After cheating on me for the entirety of our 18 year relationship he said in all seriousness, “Maybe one day I will find someone I love enough not to cheat on” . Spoiler alert he hasn’t.
Someone posted this website yesterday and I recognized it from Reddit. This one really resonated with me
https://www.thefemaledatingstrategy.com/post/psa-there-s-no-dream-woman-out-there-who-will-magically-make-your-trifling-man-act-right
Me: why didn’t you tell me you had a sex addiction?? We could have gotten you help before it got out of control!
Him: well you always had so much of your own stuff going on, I thought one of us had to be the strong one 🙄🙄🙄 (blaming me for my vulnerability around mental health issues. Gee I wonder why I was anxious so much??)
Him: (excitedly) should we tell everyone we’re pregnant?
Me: (in shock) no, they already know from the announcement last week (the church announcement that he’d been arrested and to please support mighty sheep in this time)
Him: I told myself that if nobody found out, then nobody was getting hurt.
Such a load of bullshit. I’m so glad to be away from the mindfuckery, spoken and unspoken.
“Him: I told myself that if nobody found out, then nobody was getting hurt.” This!! Mine used this one! They really do all work from the same playbook.
The things my cheater has said and done to me to keep me off-balance after D-day and separation have been legion. The worst for me was when he wrote an incredibly painful letter comparing me to my mom (a narcissist who has caused years & years of therapy for me) – when actually HE’s the narcissist who likes to play the victim.
Just 2 nuggets from one long letter are about him accusing me of “weaponizing memories”. He wrote: “What I see is that, when we’re in a conflict, certain ‘inconvenient facts’ slide imperceptibly down the memory hole.”, and “…whatever memory-holing or revising history is necessary, it will be done in service of the higher goal of keeping you a victim, blaming, and running from shame. And any vengeance is justified because I deserve it and you’re the innocent victim.”
So basically, although I WAS the innocent victim of his 3-year-long double life and all the lies and deceit it entails, all I do in his mind is forget the good things he’s done [not true] and attack him for his wrongdoing so I can play the victim card. He doesn’t, in fact, deserve any vengeance in his messed-up mind.
He also said in the same letter “This current opportunity [meaning post D-Day] may be too juicy to pass up – this [meaning self-pity and garnering pity from others] is your ticket to ride for the rest of your life.” [What a nasty thing to say to the person you pledged to love your whole life long! It’s like he doesn’t know me at all!]
Inconveniently forgetting, in a memory hole of his own, that I left him, moved to a new city where I knew no one, and have been growing stronger & stronger every day to heal and move forward from all the toxicity that he brought into my life every single day. I am making new friends, surrounding myself with only reciprocal and non-toxic people, doing new healthy things and figuring out who I really am without being defined and put down and devalued by him. I dance in the kitchen more these days as I’m cooking dinner. Not living in victimhood, as he projected onto me!
I also got the “I never got credit for the good things I do.” Right. I’m sure there are plenty of people in prison who feel the same way. “I only murdered one person that one time! No one can see what a wonderful person I am.”
They fundamentally don’t understand that actions have consequences. If they experience one it is always because someone else is being unreasonable or unfair.
And yay for you! I sang loudly and joyfully all morning as I made breakfast for my kids. No one will ever have the power to define my inner world again. We are so much better off without them.
“No one will ever have the power to define my inner world again.”
*Love* this. Spot on to the max. xx
I also have disordered (alcoholic/narc) parents and he weaponized it against me. He said “you always make excuses because of your parents” my calm response: “no, and excuse is when you do something bad and blame it on something. I mention that their behaviors hurt me but I do not do harmful or selfish things and blame my actions on my parents”. He, however, blamed some of his horrible behavior on getting cut from the basketball team in HS.
At various times, he tried to throw me off balance by telling me I should try to have a better relationship with them (thereby going on pointless wild-goose-chase that would free him up to do God-knows-what).
One of his doozies was “Now I know why your parents never liked you”. Another time, he said he needed to divorce me because my parents are racist (as if I could control that).
and when explaining one reason he was leaving, he asked me if I had a good childhood and when I answered “you know I didnt have a good childhood”, his response was “see, Susan and I both had really happy childhoods so she and I have more in common than you and I ever could.”
Ouch to the childhood remark. Ouch to all the remarks. It’s a special kind of asshole who, as they’re revealing their lack of love, rubs your face that people withheld love from you in childhood too. WTF.
FW has said a lot of stupid things, but I don’t think I’ve shared this one before. After we had our second child, my social life basically fell by the wayside. If you’re a parent, you know how it is. Well after d-day, I began reaching out to all of my friends for their support through the devastation. FW told me that it had always bothered him that I didn’t ever hang out with my friends and tended to be a homebody and have no life, and while he should not have had the affair, at least it got me to be more social again. The extent of his social circle was…her. We ended up in a wreckonciliation and when I discovered he had met up with her again for her birthday, he denied that it was anything romantic just platonic. I said people don’t choose to hang out with their totally platonic relationship coworker on really important milestone birthdays and he responded “well, if you must know, she has no other friends to hang out with on her birthday.” He was completely lying about it being platonic but 100% truthful that she has no other friends. Guess her lack of a social life doesn’t bother him so much.
Before EXFW moved in , I had one house rule. One. NO PORN in MY home. period. End of sentence. I remember how I felt when I found my Dads collection. Did not want my daughters going through that. After finding the 35000$ debit he had spent on his “Activity’s” and over a decades worth of porn watching on our family’s computer, he had the balls to claim I was “ambiguous”. None means none. No means NO! How was I ambiguous? He just shrugged. Such a waste of time and space.
Ex FW never STFU, so there is not enough room in any library to hold all his BS. One that stuck with me the longest was when he said,” I had to have something for me because you refused to lose the baby weight.” That something was to fuck the secretary. I was a size 6 at the time. I left that relationship with a very unhealthy sense of myself.
What is that “just for me” shit.
After we split and there was no chance I was going back, fw wanted me to meet him for lunch. I did, out in the open. He said we never got a chance to try again. I said; yes we did and you used me again. Then I said why did you do all this stuff. He said “I wanted something just for me”. I was nonplussed. I said, I thought that is what I was; you were the only man ever in my life and she was married at least twice and messed around with half the married men in town; how was she “just for you”. He never answered, he just hung his head and stared at the floor. I said you made your choice. Then I left.
He called one more time about two months ish before they jetted off to Vegas to marry. He wanted to talk about “trying again”. So weird. I said no. Then he called me just before they left for Vegas and told me they were going to LV to get married. I said “why are you calling me?” He said “I just didn’t want you to hear it from someone else”. I just said ok bye, and hung up.
In hindsight I wish I had said “I wish you all the happiness you deserve”. But that was before CL, and I didn’t know a lot of those zingers then.
When confronted with the fact of his having married me despite his being apparently gay: “I have always known that I was bisexual.”
When asked if he really thought his secret double life would actually remain a secret from me: “I just assumed it would all come out after I was dead.”
He cut me off sexually for over two decades, and when confronted he asked “Did you think I was celibate?” I responded “yes” and he said “But how would that have been fair to meeeeeee?”
So I reminded him that he cut off my sex life, but I never cheated on him, and he said, quite logically in fact, “I never said you couldn’t.”
Just let me know if you want me to keep going, I have lots of these gems …
Oh my god.! My ex wasn’t gay but he was deeply into being a sadist and so as part of his scene he was hooking up with men too. But- his idea was that he was going to stay married to me and carry on his sadistic hobby with his new GF (and others) on the side. He was less and less interested in sex with me because I was a “vanilla”. Like yours, mine didn’t seem to care whether I had a sex life or not or where I got it from. I guess he just wanted me around to be the front of normalcy and do the adulting. I was meant to be the happy service wife. Yay!
Just let me know if you want me to keep going, I have lots of these gems …
yes, please. (really and sincerely.) reading these are opening up my mind.
This, after a year of finding out about about emotional affairs and secret friendships, many deleted text conversations, hidden porn use, many lap dances in Vegas, and watching him gaslight, blameshift, tell outright lies, suggest I’m losing hold of reality, yell at me, throw things, hide things, and mush more:
“It seems like u view lack of transparency = dishonesty = lying. I agree that I wasn’t fully transparent and as such I wasn’t fully honest and that can’t happen again. But I also don’t think I have ever actually lied to you – meaning I’ve never told you one thing knowing in the moment that what I was saying was wrong and I was trying to deceive you. That is a line I haven’t crossed. Where I struggle further is it feels like I’m hearing a perspective that I was dishonest (over years) and therefore am fatally flawed and there’s no way to really ever recover – e.g., fully acknowledge transgressions, etc and start trying to rebuild trust.”
WTF??!!
Wowza, Enough! I think we need the comment button ‘WTF?!’ For challenges like this, because a thumbs up just doesn’t feel appropriate.
Enough – this made me nauseous. My ex was the same. He couldn’t see that not disclosing something hurtful was lying. He always said “I don’t pry into your personal business. I don’t know what you do on business trips.”
So essentially he would make up some story in his mind that I was galavanting with bell boys when I travelled for work and not telling him about it, and then use that as justification for doing what he wanted without telling me about it. He twisted me in his mind into a grotesque version of myself, and then treated me accordingly.
Altering the victim’s identity to justify abuse is a curious mental trick of serial killers and other serial offenders. https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/societies/societies-09-00046/article_deploy/societies-09-00046.pdf?version=1560246670. Criminologist and researcher Donald Dutton writes about this specifically in The Batterer. Very scary. So glad you’re safely out.
My ex blamed me for not noticing the scent of the OW’s perfume when he came home after fucking her. I guess it was his not-so-subtle way of blaming me for not paying closer attention to him.
I’ve posted this before..my favorite was “you are too generous. You made me feel like a man-child.” He was right on the first but I didn’t see that as a bad thing in a marriage. On the second, I didn’t know I had such power..that’s on him.
Thrive, I had the same complaint. While I was kindly helping him with his shopping bags, he got irtitated and said angrily: “ you always try to help me”.
These people are ridiculous.
“If you view the person as a sex toy with a pulse and don’t have any feelings towards them it isn’t really cheating.” It was the exact moment I realized he’d probably been cheating on me for the entirety of our relationship.
Oh my god that’s so disrespectful. I hope you’re well rid of him!
That’s plain scary, DejaBlue. What a predator.
The FW I was married to did not spew out nuggets of crazy. His MO was to say less and less until he was not interacting with any of us at all.
If we tried to engage him, he’d be pleasantly non-committal, otherwise it was the silent treatment. By that time anyway I had stopped seeking his opinion. I lived in limbo for over 3 years. I don’t recommend that.
His silence made grey rock easier.
I feel bad for those who have to put up with craziness coming out of their mouths, or onto emails or texts. Just the omission of the truth from my FW ruined my life, and so did his false promises.
“Reconciliation” should just be shortened to “recon” as in “reconnaissance mission” because all the abuser is doing during “reconciliation” is studying the victim to find fodder to fuel more DARVO.
I was so trusting. Before D-Day when FW was erratic and flying into rages and DARVO attacks, often in front of the children, he pushed me to the brink of asking for a separation several times. But then he’d cry and say it was the stress of work and depression over a rift with his narcy mother. Naturally he left out the year long affair, the pressure and ultimatums from the AP to prove his “wuv” by dumping his wife and kids, the severe drinking problem he’d developed during the bonkfest with a fellow alcoholic, the fact he was going into alcohol withdrawals every weekend with his family because he couldn’t stash booze around the house and the “stress” of hiding assets, borrowing against the house in secret and moving money around to pay for credit card debt from the affair.
I guess he left a few things out for the sake of brevity, right? So of course, chumpy me takes his moaning about severe depression at face value. I hooked him up with my integrative doctor to run tests and even found him a therapist. I trusted him to be sincerely working on himself. Instead he used the integrative doctor to crank his mojo up with testosterone supplements and Viagra for his affair and used the therapist to paint himself as my victim and me as an ogre. As they say, one of the reasons people with personality disorders never change is because, even in the rare event they do go to therapy, they only use sessions to rehearse their lies and self-serving renditions of events.
After D-Day when I got sucked into the RIC fiasco, he ditched the first therapist whom he’d basically turned into a cheerleader for cheating and found another therapist. Again, I chumpily trusted that he’d be using therapy to work on his own problems so that he’d be a better husband, father and human being as he’d sworn he would do. But one day I heard him in the home office doing a therapy session by video. He was doing his sad sausage sobby thing so his voice carried into the hallway. What I heard froze me in my tracks.
I don’t think it was so much intentional eavesdropping as momentary physical paralysis. I didn’t listen for very long precisely because, in general, FWs expurgated, mutated versions of events tend to be extremely short due to leaving out all the abusive behavior, gaslighting, bullying, embezzling, callousness, lying, threats, endangerment, etc., that FWs themselves engage in. All those little details take time to describe and therapy is paid by the hour. So I was only frozen in the hallway for about 15 seconds– the time it took for him to whine out his edited rendition. I basically heard him telling the therapist that the one hour a night marital discussion he had agreed to in RIC was a form of “abuse” because he had to hear “endlessly what a piece of shit he was” and it “broke him.” There was a slight pause in what he said, as if the therapist was reminding him of what FW had said previously because FW responded with, “I remember you saying that and I don’t know, maybe, it’s a form of abuse.” Clearly that wasn’t the first time he’d complained about the one hour talks and the “abusiveness” of these talks was apparently an ongoing theme.
The latter exchange took about 7 seconds. Then FW went on to completely mischaracterize an exchange from the night before when I’d told him to sleep in the other room because, when I’d asked why he seemed to have empathy for everyone but me, he actually became sarcastic. I did the chump thing of reminding him of context and why none of this was funny and he blew up, saying he’d heard about it over and over and over. But with the therapist, instead of describing the full chain of events, the short form FW told is that that I’d kicked him out of bed because he’d told me he had to get up early for work and couldn’t talk anymore (erm, nope, not what happened).
That last bit took about 8 seconds. I unfroze with a gasp and sort of limped away to make the kids’ lunch. I realized that FW was using the adulterated vignette of what happened the night before as proof of how I “abusively” robbed him of sleep. I could tell that the latter charge was a theme in therapy because of the words used. And I knew that, as part of RIC therapy, he’d read a book on narcissistic abuse that described “robbing victims of sleep” as a form of violence. Because his behavior had robbed me of sleep for two solid years while he’d “slept just fine” during his drunken affair, he began to repeatedly depict me as chronically “robbing him of sleep” every chance he got. It turned into a major gaslighting campaign. Like misusing therapy to rehearse their DARVO spiels, FWs don’t read descriptions of abuse to correct their own behavior but to find ways to double back accusations against their own victims.
Before asking him to leave that day, I chumpily admitted to FW that I’d overheard him. Guess what? This made me a breacher of sacred therapeutic privacy and– tada– an abuser! Because I’d previously advocated for DV survivors and had been required to study batterer psychology, I couldn’t unsee the parallels in behavior and MO. Batterers continuously do recon for any scrap of evidence to cast their own victims as abusers. Basically anything the victim does or says– or doesn’t do or doesn’t say– can be used to this end. It’s terrifying.
I can totally relate, Hell of a Chump. My cheater’s sessions with counselors quickly devolved into allowing him to think of himself as the victim of mean, nasty me (when before the 2nd D-Day I was about as placating and voiceless as one can be – he was the one with all the power who always tried to keep me focused on pleasing him.) It’s maddening how even therapists can be deceived and manipulated by these people!
I think the traditional training primes therapists to buy the bull. Plus the person paying the therapy bills has more say obviously.
“recon”
Perfect word for it. In my case he called and I let him come back. It only took me about four days to figure out the reason he was there. It was for him to con me into letting him use the good car for his politicking. So, yeah he conned me for a 21 year marriage, then I let him come back for the recon.
“I didn’t tell you about the affair to protect you”.
“You and I can’t be seperated, we are in love” (while he is still with ap)
When I asked him why he didn’t tell me if he was unhappy, he said: “I was never unhappy with you, I never loved anyone like you”.
“My terapist says this is all because of a trauma I am going through”. (Him losing his father)
When I found out about everything: “You must have relieved to find out why I was acting weird. You were so confused because of me (having a double life for over a year). I am glad you found out”.
“ I wish you had never found out. It was better for me before you found out”.
“ I wish you had never found out. It was better for me before you found out”.
Oh my god Venus! I’m speechless. What an asshole.
Mine said the same thing! Of course it was better when we didn’t know because they didn’t have consequences for their actions but now that they do, we suddenly become the baddies in their sick, twisted story hahaha
Classic blameshift of, “It’s not what I did; it’s how you reacted.” My ex would say things like this, and I would respond, “You don’t wish you hadn’t done it, but instead that you hadn’t told me?” I was shocked at first and gave him every chance to take it back, but my attempts to explain why this was a fucked up thing to think/say were a trap. Seeing this entitled, unethical attitude towards the truth was one of the things that opened my eyes to the abusive nature of our relationship. I didn’t count, and FW wanted me to believe whatever version of reality was best/easiest for him, no matter what it cost me. It also told me his remorse had been phony, he didn’t “get it,” and he wasn’t evolving into the partner I wanted — despite the calculated, convincing hoovering that led me to give him another chance. (Esther said it could be better than ever!!)
The worst was the continuous denial that he was cheating. All the disappearing acts, the disappearing money, the odd behavior. At one point after hearing singer Pink lyric “we’re not broken just bent, we can learn to love again” I said we can get past this if the cheating is over….FW says “Nothing to get over, again, I’m not cheating “
So many time lost for me. Cheated and drugs for at least 1.5 years.
A small selection of fuckwit’s self-serving drivel after I’d filed:
“Don’t do something you might look back on and say, yes he was doing his best to make things better for all ! Only trying to get things right before I pop my clogs!”
“There is nothing going on ! You won’t answer my calls! I am working long hours ! I have tried to hide things I thought for the better. I am sorry I lied but that’s all I can say! And I am not having my MATE out on the streets ! She has a problem and I know that ! Would it be different if it was a male???
“She sleeps on the sofa! Why do you not believe me when I say there is nothing going on?”
“It looks awfully like she’s been playing me ! That’s why she’s gone cos she really couldn’t get what she wanted!”
“Chumpnomore6, I am sorry I have made some foolish mistakes! All for supposed friendship! Can we talk?”
“Rat faced whore has had NOTHING all her life ! All I’m trying to do is show her how the other side live! Sorry for being SOFT ! Carry on like this and it will drive me into oblivion!”
I didn’t reply to any of it. Gak.🤮
I got “she’s a good Catholic girl” and a “we only slept together, not SLEPT together” in response to the text message proclaiming his love with heart emojis meant for HoWorker/Wife, but sent to me, my kids, my backstabbing former BF and her kids on Good Friday 2017.
They SUCK!
Building- it sounds like we have the exact same FW! Mine said so many mindfucky things I can almost not remember- it was just how he talked. But my faves were during the hell post DDay. Imagine the scene-I’ve just found out that my husband of 25 years had a double life of being a sexual sadist. I’m on the floor, shaking, vomiting, screaming, crying. And he interrupts my crying and asks, “Hey where did we buy that lamp?” It was our special romantic bedroom lamp and I guess he was wanting one for his new place with Schmoops. It made me cry harder and feel like a kicked dog. To which he said, “I think you need to tone it down now! The neighbours might hear you.” And after that day it was downhill from there…3 years later and we’ve never managed to be able to communicate because the DARVO, word salad, projection, mindfuckery and blame blame blame is all I get. But I’ll leave one final gem, when I reminded him that he hadn’t paid half of our daughter’s school fees- he’d paid only half of his half, he said “Half of half is half”. So you guessed it, I just paid the remaining quarter of her fees because it was just easier than dealing with his abuse.
FW told me many things like:
1. After I had my daughter “I had no time for him” (when I did everything on my own). What a sad, silly sausage.
2. Apparently I made him so “unhappy” when he never wanted to do anything with me as a couple or as a family but was happy doing things with a random ho-worker. 🤣
3. I found out I was pregnant and he initially said “it’s probably not even mine” and then this next comment followed a week or so later- “No one will ever want you. No one will ever want someone with 2 kids.”
To which I replied to FW “Ummm… But you were so unhappy and didn’t want to spend time with your OWN child but instead you’d rather pursue a woman, who was married, with 3 children?” 🤣🤣 What an absolute joke!
“I kind of hope it doesn’t work out with her because I miss the kids.”
This is so wrong in so many ways. What a clueless fool.
Just reread challenge. After Dday, the reason he cheated with the 33 years younger ho worker was “she just seemed so interested in my work and how I help patients” he must’ve seen look on my face. Oh you do too…. I said you are so gullible, he said “ I guess she could be playing me but I don’t think so…”
My wife and sparkledick worked together along with sparkledick’s wife in a school. Shortly after dday, I outed the affair to the wife. Shortly after that, after catching the two of them dead to rights fucking in the back of his truck, he went off to rehab – for 5 months. This spared him the consternation of his peers once the news started spread through the school. FW was targeted as “homewrecker” among other things. Karma truly is a bitch.
Of course, as with all such inconveniences to her, this was ALL MY FAULT.
Because of this I was told – most sternly – that one ought not to meddle in another couples marriage.
Alas, she has many traits. Self awareness, however, is not among them.
Met at office of a tax preparer for final joint tax return (we were separated at this point).
Preparer asked him, “What is your social?”
His reply: “Anti-“
I remember after one confrontation, one that didn’t go his way, he left me with a pretzel parting shot that monogamy was my fault and how dare I force it upon him. If only I was cooler, more modern and “a little less monogamous” then I wouldn’t be torturing us like this.
😐
what a prick
After the other woman had dumped him for the last time, and he heard from one of the kids that my health had improved, he said that maybe we should stop the divorce. Of course he didn’t come out and ask me to take him back because that would show weakness or something. He just thought I would be a better wife appliance since I was feeling better. Oh hell no, asshole.
“Of course he didn’t come out and ask me to take him back because that would show weakness or something.”
So true! Unless, sensing you’re finally done, they get desperate and resort to Hoover mode. Cheaters relate through power and control, not love.
Where to start…”You want to destroy this marriage. You want to destroy this marriage because I want to put my penis in another woman’s vagina.” “Why did you destroy my life, Susan?” And this one from the OW (my bestie), “I facilitated growth.” For her whole diarrhea spill check out last UBT in the August 2021 Archive – classic.
“I never would have thought of HoWorker/Wife, if you hadn’t mentioned her”.
Seriously?
But the one that had me laughing out loud was “You’re dad is so lazy”–retired PhD saved enough to have two houses to be a snow bird so he could literally golf every day and live the retirement of his dreams. It was hilarious as both his father and now wife are both PhDs.
You just can’t make this shit up.
I told my STBX that his Asian massage parlor whore “Lucy “ received many complimentary reviews on the “rub maps” and “adult search” websites.
He said “She told me she didn’t do this (have full sex) with any other clients. That with me it was special.”
#imspeshul
#dumbfuck
Haha! My ex also had hookers who apparently adored him and he was “special” because he was so good in bed 🙄
hahahaha
Mine told me that the girl who gave him a lap dance told him he was handsome. OMG!
My favourite : “My ears made me do it” (cos he had sticky out ears in primary school, kids were mean to him, and he had to have surgery to correct them). He sent a rather long message to my parents about this as well. So embarrassing. Funnily enough when he tried to claim he was preoccupied his whole life by disturbing thoughts about his ears, and I suggested he get help for body dysmorphia, he then claimed the disturbing thoughts had miraculously disappeared just a few seconds earlier so that wouldnt be necessary.
I told my father the other day that FW did the old fake suicide threat when he got busted (“I’ve been sitting by the gunsafe all week, as I did for most of my childhood” – erm, the gunsafe is in a house that your brother and his family now live in – I think they would notice that Uncle FW is sitting in their house next to the gunsafe!), and that the only thing that was keeping him alive was our son. My father, who is very practical if nothing else, said “well he hasnt got much ambition has he.”
BTW he never mentioned any of this the prior 30 years I had known him
Which dday…? So many stupid things seem permanently stuck in my brain, though (fortunately) only a few still linger at the surface for easy retrieval — most of which I’ve shared here before, like a broken record:
“At least I’m not a rapist! At least I’m not a murderer!”
“You’re dehumanizing me.”
While weeping: “It just not fair… that you think I ruined your life.”
In a private email to the couple’s counselor he begged me to go to: “I don’t think it’s helpful b&r sees this as cheating.” What the therapist and I saw as cheating — because it was — was only the tip of the iceberg. Maybe he meant the terms ‘abuse’ or ‘serial infidelity’ would have been more appropriate?
After an incident of physical abuse that no amount of cognitive dissonance (from either of us) could spackle over: “We were mutually abusive. We’ve both done some really horrible things to each other.” (With you, BABL, this one is a special category of mindfuck.)
After I cried and was not grateful to him for texting me — when I’d left to get space from some other shitty thing he’d just done — to say that every time “we fought” all he wanted to do was reach out to the OW’s: “See, this is why I can’t be honest with you. I thought you’d be happy to hear that.” Poor TFC. And then, I tried to explain why it was reasonable for me to feel hurt and worried about that. Classic DARVO.
I won’t get started with the incredibly manipulative and stupid Hoovers. Fuckwit is THE term for these cheaters, and discovering and visualizing CL’s “mind in a blender” cartoon was immensely helpful as I forced myself to go NC and trust he sucked.
One of the doozies for me was being accused of “acting like the victim.” All I could think of to sayin response was, “I am the victim!” Wish I could have thought of something better. But it wouldn’t have mattered. He was never going to see the truth. These types simply cannot see things from any perspective other than their own. My ex-FW truly saw himself as the victim, and that’s way scarier to me than if it had been an intentional mindfuck.
DDay (2019) excuse: “I thought you were going to divorce me anyway” because of a rhetorical question I asked in 2017 regarding a job he didn’t take. (“If you’re voluntarily moving to Poland for a year [leaving me and kids behind, on top of having traveled every week for work for years] at that point why are we even married?”)
Then post DDay spent the whole time treating me like a child throwing a tantrum, and assuming I would come to my senses and not divorce him.
2 months later as he’s prepping to move out for a different overseas job, “I feel like you’re just waiting for me to leave.” Absolutely I was and said so. And yet he was surprised. Even though supposedly I was on the brink of filing two years earlier; he was SO SURE I was going to divorce him that it justified cheating. But NOW, now that he’s fucked around and got his ego boost, it’s unthinkable that I would divorce his wonderfulness.
He said so many other contradictory things, and I actually like to reflect on them. Proof that I’m not crazy, and this shit has nothing to do with me and is all about how it makes him feel. He really is a narcissist.
Oh there’s so many. How about he never wanted the last 3 out of 4 children (who were all adults when he cheated and imploded our lives)! This was a first hearing this hogwash. He only wanted the 1st one because I got pregnant (apparently all by myself!). It was a miracle!
How about that he was NEVER happy in our marriage. After 38 years and our last daughter has finished college 5 years before he cheated. He said he didn’t ask for a divorce sooner because I might get mad. He sounded like Opie on Andy Griffith. Afraid to tell Pa he broke the neighbors window with his baseball. Ffs.
And there’s this one. We were going out twice a week for dinner while unbeknownst to me he was fooling around with her on the side (for 8 months) We would sit and talk and laugh thru dinner. The one place where we went, the manager would come chat with us and said what a great couple we were. When I questioned him about that after D-Day, he said, oh I never was enjoying those dinners out with you. I was just pretending!
There’s more because apparently he’s the biggest bag of wind and b.s ever. We’ve been divorced 5 years. Been 8 total since we split. I’ve got a whole new life and no man but I’m happy and he’s apparently miserable after marrying the paramour 4 years ago. I saw them at our daughters wedding last weekend. First time ever around them. He looks bad. Really bad. She’s frumpy and weird. The wedding was seamless. That’s all that matters. Hang in there everyone. Time does heal this messed up stuff.
Congratulations to your daughter. I remember a few local cheater-recouplings from when I was a kid. They always looked like shit on a stick after dumping their families. That left an impression.
Thanks. They are the cutest couple.
Oh, I got the “Are you going to be okay? I’m very concerned about you. You don’t seem okay.” On the very same day I found out he was cheating and fucked his mistress in my house! Of course I wasn’t okay! Who would be?! It was mere hours after I discovered it, and also just happened to be the day the whole world changed because it was when Disneyland and The Strip (Vegas, where I live) announced they would be closing for the foreseeable future due to Covid. Yea, that was when everyone realized how serious it really was. My whole life was falling apart, the world changed in the blink of an eye, I was married to a stranger, and this FW is questioning my sanity as if I was losing my mind?
Oh, did I mention I was at work at the time, working as an EMT during the the fucking pandemic?! Yea, it was a fantastic time. I had to scoot off to work mere hours after finding out my husband was a lying, cheating bastard to work a 12 hour shift during one of the hardest days to be a first responder you could possibly imagine. To say people were panicked and stressed out was an understatement. I cried in between dropping patients off and called friends to try to calm myself down. Keeping myself calm and together was a gargantuan task, but I managed. Yet, he was questioning my sanity, and if I would be okay. As if he cared.
I think the person’s sanity who should be in question was the fucking asshole who thought it was okay to go out to a bar with his 20 yr old coworker, who of course had to use a fake id (barf), then brought said underage drunk girl back to his wife’s house to fuck her. His excuse? He was too drunk to drive so she drove him home and she was too drunk to drive home so he had her spend the night in our guest room(sure), naturally. Of course none of that makes sense. You had someone too drunk to drive, drive you home? You had sex with a drunk underage girl who was too drunk to drive? You supplied alcohol to an underage girl then had sex with her? So, you were contributing to the delinquency of a minor by buying her alcohol, then you had sex with her, but my, sanity is in question?
I think I had a perfectly sane and natural reaction to all of this information. The fact that he still lives and breathes is proof of that.
Nothing says “true love” more than DUI-ing with a Schmoops in the passenger seat. Bars and restaurants keep itemized receipts for up to five years and, in response to my concerns that the AP have any future contact with my minor kids, my lawyer recommended finding out exactly how much FW and his AP drank on various assignations that required freeway driving, which the AP did 99% of. The evidence was damning.
They’re such losers. Glad you were able to get the evidence you need. I’m glad I don’t have kids with FW.
After i had packed up all my things to move out of the home we moved into two months prior: “you packed some of my wooden spoons”
My FW (I discovered I was a chump 6 weeks ago) told me that he was a great husband “apart from the obvious” – the obvious being that he cheated on me for 7 years and lied to my face about having a happy marriage every single day of those years.
He also went on endlessly at the reveal about how he’s been so unhappy for so long and he really feels that he deserves happiness. It was all about his happiness, over and over. Dude NEVER said he was unhappy. Not once. And I’m so glad that he gets to be happy while our daughter is confused and sad and I’m a wreck trying to scrape by after having my world blown up by the one person who supposedly loved me most in the world. Our happiness means nothing because he’s a narc and the world revolves around him.
i’m sorry, stephanie. i hope you have a good team set up: family doctor, therapist, lawyer, good friends. it’s important to have a team.
it’s painful, i know. we all know. you are not alone.
Stephanie, they are horrible people. “Apart from the obvious thing”? What a narcissist. So many of them are not even unhappy in their marriage. That’s why they never say anything.
This site about narcissist is great to take a look. It rings so many bells to read through..
https://narcissistabusesupport.com/cognitive-dissonance-and-narcissistic-abuse/
My FW told me many WTF comments after DDay. Like: when you get angry, I get defensive and I shut down. The OW told him he’s everything her husband isn’t. Oh and when he fake broke up with her, he had to tell her in person because you can’t break up on the phone. Oh how nice, but you can lie to your wife for years about having a girlfriend?!!! I could go on and on but I’m sure we’ve heard it all.
Here goes. A brief selection from the hundreds of complete gems from ex-wife of 18 years.
In no particular order:
• I was worried that you’d be ill and I’d have to look after you if we stayed together.
• Some woman on the plane accidentally hit me in the face with a suitcase. (When I noticed the bruising on her face after she’d secretly had cosmetic surgery.)
• There’s no getting away from the fact that you’re an older man with no power. Whereas I look better than I ever did. (On the afternoon she came home early from work and announced that she no longer found me attractive.)
• Our relationship has been in trouble for two years. (I wish she’d told me earlier.)
• Get your head sorted out so that we can be best friends. Real friends who support each other.
• I hope that eventually we can be best friends and have a different kind of relationship. Maybe an even better one.
• You fat c**t!
• You’re good I’m bad. Get over it.
• You don’t take rejection very well do you?
• Let’s wait until Monday before we tell our daughter we’re splitting up – I’ve got two birthday parties to go to and I don’t want to let my friends down.
• People cheat on other people – get over it.
• I lie because I can. (When I finally discovered her lying and cheating.)
• It was bigger than me. (When I asked how she could do all those terrible things to me.)
• Over the years I have enjoyed the attention from men making me feel young and attractive. The more I got the more powerful I felt.
• I have tried everything but this is what you wanted all along. You love it. It keeps you alive. You feed off hate and negativity.
• Four guys hit on me tonight. They thought I was 20 years younger than I am.
• He’s a really nice guy – you should meet him. (On the day I discovered she’d been having an affair.)
• I can’t remember how many people I’ve slept with.
• What’s your problem? When I was a kid my dad used to bring his lovers into the house all the time! (Upon my shock that she had introduced our daughter to her lover before I was even aware of his existence)
• Maybe it’s because I’m pure evil. I don’t think so.
• If I can’t keep seeing my friends and partying I’ll leave you.
• I didn’t want to have brown babies. (The reason she never had a child with her previous partner, who was from Turkey.
I could continue but I think that’s enough.
Wow. What a prize. It’s like these cretins secretly build up volcanic rage over all those years of pretending to be “normal” and, you know, “ethical,” and when found out, they’re like “I’m a personality disordered, soulless, racist creep and proud of it! Hah!”
yeah, I got a version of this: “When I was a kid my mother introduced me to the man she was cheating with and I tried to get her to leave my father and marry him because he was nicer and kinder to her but she wouldn’t.” The problem with my ex wife saying this to me is that her father was a 50-year alcoholic who yelled and had temper tantrums all of the time. The guy my ex wife left me for is a drug addict who yells and has temper tantrums all of the time. My question to her: so your mother traded up and you traded down? To which see said: “I guess so.” Seriously, remembering everything my ex wife said to me after she ran away and came home is like the picture at the top of this page, my head was put into a blender for 3-months…
“Maybe it’s because I’m pure evil. I don’t think so.”
I do think so. What a fucking bitch.
“I didn’t want to have brown babies.”
Make that racist fucking bitch.
you probably have had heard all of these
I wasnt going to leave you. All men do it. Some of them have sti (s). Its because you had a stillborn baby. its u fault u were sexually abused as a child, u could have stopped it. you should be grateful i stopped abusing drugs. will u share me. shes always happy. i like her because she dumped her kids.
After confessing to using prostitutes throughout our 35 year marriage, my STBX said “Maybe I’m just a cancer that needs to be cut out of your life.”
I said – What do you mean ‘maybe’?
“What do you mean ‘maybe’?”
I was having a shit day. Then I started reading all this hilarious stuff.
❤ CN
We are in our fifties. He said, “When a 20something girl touches my penis, it makes me feel so young.”
Not wearing glasses so I misread “penis” as “pan.” Makes sense. Before Viagra was marketed in 1998, all she would have been touching was his bed pan if he’s like most porn-addled cheaters.
That is when we need to knee them in the nuts and say, how does it feel when your old wife touches you?
OK, I know we can’t do that, but it would be fun for a minute or two.
Ali had to laugh at that one. So cringey and gross.
Possible response “But how does she feel with a gray pube in her mouth?”
“But how does she feel with a gray pube in her mouth?”
Ahahahaaa! CN is killing it as always.
Eeeeeew….
I got the same line about playing the victim. This was the day after Dday. I was supposed to be over it in one day, apparently.
The list of absurd things he said is long and laughable. Almost immediately I started writing them down. He would make a statement, then make another statement that was the polar opposite of the first one, within the same conversation, often with only a couple of minutes between statements. They were all lies, of course. That’s why he couldn’t keep anything straight.
He’d also admit to something, forget he admitted it, and then angrily accuse me of making it up when brought it up again. So I’d whip out my memo app and show him I had quoted it verbatim and dated it. You should have heard him sputtering, trying to come up with an excuse; “Well, you wrote it down wrong or heard me wrong!” and; “How do I know you didn’t just hear me say that in a dream?” 😆
One of his howlers was saying he had invited me to go on two double dates with his bitch and her husband (I didn’t go, as I wasn’t friends with either of them and it sounded boring as hell) so that we could be their “chaperones.” I guess the idea was that without us there babysitting, they’d be fucking on the floor of the restaurant. 🙄
Obviously they wanted to passive-aggressively thumb their noses at both of us while sizing up the competition, the sick freaks. They were hoping we’d notice a few sparks flying and do the pick-me polka, trying to head an affair off that was already happening. But I ruined that game by not being the least bit interested in hanging out with his “coworker and her husband.” That makes me smile, imagining their frustration. So they had to settle for texting each other while on date nights with their spouses, hoping we’d get suspicious and start dancing, but that didn’t happen either. Poor widdle fuckwits. 🎻
I could go on listing his dumbshit utterances, but I can’t be arsed to bother. I’ve forgotten most of them anyway, which is a good feeling. I think it means meh is in sight.
“I don’t need your forgiveness, I’ve already forgiven myself.”
“I have forgiven myself”. It is a classic…
I am very late to the party — but this statement still has me laughing.
One day after D-day, I lashed out at him, telling him he wasn’t kind or honest or humble. He was petty and arrogant and a liar.
His response? “I’m only arrogant because I know so much more than everybody else.”
After we got the letter from the IRS that said we under reported income by almost $50,000 and owed taxes on her cashing out of inheritance stock and giving part of it to fuckwit she actually said, “I would never give him money; I would never do anything to hurt you.”
After finding her lingerie in her car: “I was going to donate it”
one of the great philanthropists of our time
“one of the great philanthropists of our time”
🤣
Ugh I got a variation of that! How can something so inane be repeated by two different people. Few months post-divorce, he dropped off my son after a weekend at his place. My son, a teenager, was sobbing. He said he saw a bra in dad’s backseat (and retrieved it as evidence). When I confronted dbag about it in front of the coparenting therapist (required in our divorce decree), his answer was: “It’s not mine.” Uhh no duh. Nobody thinks it’s yours. So the therapist started questioning him and his answer was always an automatic “It’s not mine.” I could see his face though–he was actively thinking of a plausible excuse. Then he finally said to me, “I think it’s yours. Didn’t you ask me to donate it a long time ago?” WTF…I had to laugh. I was just imagining the ridiculousness of handing him a bra and asking him to donate it. In what worlds do these scenarios happen? And we had been separated for a year by then. And of course, it was not my size AT ALL. These turds will never ever EVER admit to anything.
“These turds will never ever EVER admit to anything.”
A thousand times yes. For years I couldn’t figure out why (after lies, discarding etc etc) she couldn’t just say the words “you’re right, I’m so sorry, what the fuck was I thinking.” Now I trust that she sucks. Omg they are so stupid.
I was almost chocking on my coffee with laughter. These people are ridiculous.
He said: (60 yr old cheater- male)
I cant help myself I have an addiction ( to porn sites and hookups)
She (AP from online dating site) wants me to father her next child
“We” knew you would find out eventually
I have nothing only myself
I never wanted to be divorced
You made me do it because we never talked about sex
No I’m not in love with her (AP) but she wants me to be!
Mine told me, on Mother’s Day, after going a little too deep into the bourbon, that “No matter what happens, whether this ends up being true or whatever, I will always love you….”
I had been told at this point by several people he was unfaithful, and had observed all the hints and behaviors for myself, but couldn’t definitively (forensically) prove it.
Thankfully the infidelity eventually broke the trauma bond sufficiently that I realized all the other forms of abuse (for which I had always blamed myself and tried harder to be enough) which couldn’t be denied were more than enough reason to walk away, so I did. Divorce is final as of 10 days ago! 🙌🏻
But “whether this ends up being true”??? Things don’t “end up being true,” they were true all along. He meant if I end up with proof he can’t deny (like the entire baby I later discovered he sired with an employee-unfortunately I don’t hold the authority to demand paternity testing of another woman’s child, and she has a chump of her own all too willing to step up. But this child carries a distinctive facial feature identical to my ex-husband’s, and looks so much like my own children it’s eerie. This in addition to the rumors, in addition to being the timeframes of behaviors matching….enough is enough).
“I never loved anyone like you” is also very common with these cheaters.
Similar to yours, I heard “no matter what happens (no matter how horrible I behave) you and I the closest people in the world”.
These people are absolutely disordered.
Late to the party. I really appreciate reading what my fellow chumps experienced. So much of the same BS!
Here are some of the biggest hits.
“I know the games she’s (AP) playing.”
“I didn’t think it would work out with her and thought that I’d stay with you, but in the last three days, because of how you reacted badly to an argument (the one I created for this purpose), I knew I would be with her.”
“It’s untested love.”
“I lied to you every day for almost 3 years,” which was followed by, “I didn’t have a double life.” Ummm. ok.
“I had to keep it secret to protect the OW.” (so much to unpack with that one)
“I had to lie because I knew you would react badly.”
“She was in an emotionally abusive marriage.”
“You’re psychologically stronger than I.”
“She remembered the anniversary of my brother’s death” (20+ plus years before” and I’d forgotten it. #mybac
“One day you’ll thank me for this.” (patronizing ass)
“We bonded over taking care of sick patients.” This was followed by, “You’re not in medicine so wouldn’t understand.”
“You have everything.” “I only have [insert AP name].” (This said when I was suddenly by myself, struggling to stay vertical, crying all the time.)
“I’m sad every day.”
“I think you can love two people at the same time.”
“I just need to move on.”
((hugs)) to CN!
[email protected], it is ridiculous how disordered they are. I have heard so many of the same things. This, almost word to word:
“I didn’t think it would work out with her and thought that I’d stay with you, but in the last three days, because of how you reacted badly to an argument (the one I created for this purpose), I knew I would be with her.”
He was upset that I was disappointed in his infidelity. He would tell me we should not talk about it, and instead have fun together. He would say: “ It helps me to decide when I have fun with you”. I thought he was going to leave if I showed any emotions. I was pick me dancing for so long. What an asshole. I am so glad those horrible days of devaluing myself is over.
One more for the holidays: a week or so after I told her I wanted a divorce, she wanted to plan a holiday party. When I gave her a WTF look and said I wasn’t into entertaining and pretending everything was ok she said “I’m not separated, you’re separated.”
They are ridiculous. After dday while I was in sobbing mode, my ex told me we should go on a holiday. “ I feel better when we have fun together” is what he said.
Mine was telling me how happy he was with the many hotel points he was able to accumulate. Dumb-ass! He was racking up hotel points with his “sex-worker” AP! (that’s his term for her, he didn’t like to refer to her as “prostitute”.) Here’s another: when I questioned why he was cheating on me for 4 months with such an ugly troll (after I found her on social media) he replied “she’s not really that bad – she just takes bad photos”.
I was with him for 24 years – the first 23 were mostly wonderful, we got along great and I adored him. We were a couple that many others envied (I only know this because it was told to me ). Then he was laid off due to company downsize over Covid in March 2021. I happened to be having the best year of my career financially so I took on all of the responsibility for bills while he looked for a new job online which took 7 months. (We were very fortunate as I had closed a big sales deal that left us with zero worries) However, little did I know he was also online looking for a “sugar baby” and so with his very first paycheck he withdrew $500 to have his first hotel meetup – then he was off and running until I found out in February ’22 when he forgot to throwaway a restaurant-date receipt. He immediately confessed and I was devastated, shocked and heartbroken. 100% blindsided. I asked “WHY did you do this to us ? To me?” He replied that he felt bad about himself, was depressed about turning 60, and also that “she’s nice, friendly and she likes me!!”. (I guess that can qualify as Another Stupid Thing Cheaters Say) He also told me that he “resented my success”. I think that hurt me the most. (other than the fact that he was actually sitting next to as we both work from home to pursue doing this while I trusted him completely never having any reason not to.) By the way – we never had what I have seen referred to as “dead bedroom”. I think he is just your typical, run-of-the-mill cheater. He never wanted to leave me, why should he, he had it made with the lifestyle, friends and family (no kids together thankfully). The sex worker on the other hand lives in a rented room on a farm where she gets to tend to the animals when not fucking others women’s husbands for money. That she is a person he became infatuated with will be something I will never understand.
I apologize for the long post – it’s just that once I get going…..I have to get it out!!
Thank you. From your Chump Fan in PA or FL (depending on the season)
Deb m. I could’ve written everything you said. Soulmates (as he called us), in love all those years, friends often talked about how much they were inspired by our love, definitely no dead- bedroom, we adored (or I thought) each other, travelled, had fun even with the most standard activities like watching movies, listening to the music. Almost 20 years together (friendship+ marriage). Then he trades his soulmate! for a heartless person with whom he would meet behind my back like roaches. They thought it would be better to hide it from me probably to feel more excited about it all.
Such lack of integrity and quality.
It hurts deb m. it hurts very much but I promise it will get much better. I used to think that I couldn’t have lived without him. I am much happier without him now, after 3 years.
Her, “I didn’t think you loved me”
Her, “I didn’t think you’d care”
Her, “I’ve never cheated on anyone before”
“I think you’d like schmoopie. You’re a lot alike! Maybe we could have Thanksgiving dinner together.”
I can’t think of anything Cheater said that WASN’T stupid.
Reading my some of the inane comments that the cheaters make, I couldn’t help but recall a few of the doozies mine said.
Here’s one that made me look at him in astonishment.
I confronted him with proof- an email he sent to his great love that I took a picture of on his phone.
Told her he was “constantly thinking of her” even as he sat in the waiting room while I was under anesthesia having surgery.
It was also his 70th birthday: (What better way to celebrate that milestone than to make sure his squeeze heard from him on that special day?)
When confronted, he squeaked out,
“But look at the date! That was so long ago!”
It had been sent 5 weeks prior to our confrontation.
Then the next thing out of his mouth was, “Now how can I trust you? I need to prepare to live my life alone”.
My response?
“I knew and sought proof, which I got.
I apologize for nothing”
Theater of the absurd.
Here is a list from my Ex in no particular order. These are direct quotes:
“I HAD to be with her. It was like crack. Can a crack addict not do crack? Merely the sound of her VOICE melted me.”
“If it weren’t her, it would be someone else.”
“I would stay married to you if I want my life to be as boring as possible.”
“If you had wanted me to stay, you would have f***** me hard and f***** me often.”
And my favorite:
“You were the perfect and ideal wife, except for being asexual.”
For the record, I am not asexual. In fact, I was pretty darn sparkly for him! Just not sparkly enough!