Holy False Equivalence, Bat Man

I didn’t clean the house good enough so you know he needed to cheat. I am three years free, thankfully.

All pain was always a competition.

Your brother just died a horrible cancer death? I’m even more sad. I miss him too, PLUS I have been home alone all the time for weeks missing you.

You just had emergency abdominal surgery? It’s harder for me, I have to do all the housework and shopping while you recover.

A grownup sexually assaulted you when you were a child? I know just what that’s like. A grownup called me a really mean and gross name when I was a child, but it was worse because it wasn’t just one time, it went on for years.

You were scared and sad while we were apart after D Day 1? It was double for me because I had to deal with how bad I already felt, plus face how hurt and angry you were on top of all my own feelings.

Etc., ad infinitum. Gold medalist in the pain olympics. Charm, rage, self pity.

Boy, given what’s going on in the United States right now I wished I had something to offer here. We are in the golden age of false equivalencies on so many levels for so many reasons. My ex simply ran away on a drug bender with her boyfriend and literally refused to tell anyone – including her own children and family – where she was for 5 days. I found her using the find my phone app and we all figured it out on our own. Maybe her false equivalency was her telling me she just needed someone to talk to who understood her #druguse.

I caused her to feel depressed, I caused her unhappiness.

It was I who checked out, not her. She needed to find her happiness again.

I never bought him a comfortable chair to sit in, therefore he had to cheat….. XH made seven figures. I’m
A lawyer, not a decorator- “buy your own damn chair asshole!”

Funny thing… x left our beautiful dream home— 5 bedrooms filled with our 4 precious children’s things everything we’d collected over 26 years to live in a ground floor studio with a mattress on the floor.

We’d been together nearly 40 years, and thought we had a great relationship because we never argued, let alone fought.

After several D-days, when I insisted we go to counseling, we were surprised that the therapist didn’t give us a gold star for our peaceful home. She led us to uncover that it was because FW must always be in control, and that I, hating conflict, would submit to whatever he wanted. I was so well trained by my FOO, religion, etc., that he never even had to raise his voice – so good was I at anticipatory accommodation.

Reader, this revelation created conflict! FW considered what the therapist was pointing out, and then in outraged defensiveness, nearly jumped from his chair pointing at me and crying, “I made ONE mistake (his ongoing affair with ho-worker) but you’ve been LYING to me for all these years!”

By the end of the session, FW had promised me and the therapist that all that was needed to fix our marriage would be for ME to stop LYING to him about my true feelings. 😳

Turns out FW didn’t actually want that at all. He hated learning that I didn’t like the same foods, TV slows, or his ho-worker, or his his abuse made me feel. Suddenly he was openly complaining that I’d changed, and I wasn’t the same sweet girl he’d married!

He tells me the cheating was all his fault but if we’re going to have to work together to get through it and that eventually I “have to let it go” (for myself of course) this makes me cringe
Telling me to let it go
I thought we’d have done a lot more work by now.
I got a call back from an attorney that I reached out to previously.
Can someone tell me how to approach this? How do I finally decide it won’t work for the long haul?
Of course he thinks it will and tells me to be positive and that it can work.

Okay, here’s one, but it’s not all that funny: Who knew that crying is equivalent to holding a gun to someone’s head in an act of forcible rape? Who knew tears are as deadly as bullets and you could, say, rob a bank merely by sniveling? By that logic, if your nose starts running near a cop, they’d be justified in gunning you down.

The time I burst into tears after FW avoided sex for the entire week following Valentine’s Day was apparently “sexual coercion” on my part– i.e., attempted rape! Meanwhile, his demanding sex for more than a year under circumstances where I would have refused had I known the truth– that he was rawdogging the office doorknob and exposing me to God knows what, racking up credit card debt equivalent to the kids’ college funds, secretly drinking himself into psychosis, etc.– was somehow not “sexual agency robbing”?

The absurdity of an equivocation like that would be hilarious if it weren’t for the fact that, by the time a FW is spewing such bizarre crap, they’ve usually got you over such a barrel that you’re afraid to openly disagree much less laugh in their face. Then they take hijack your stunned confusion or silent gaping as agreement. The worse the absurdity, the bigger the power flex and the more victoriously complete the indoctrination probably seems to a FW. It’s like Winston Smith sitting at the Chestnut Tree Cafe tracing “2 + 2 = 5” on the table at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

And like they say, every accusation from an abuser is a confession. I think FW’s need to jujitsu accusations of “perversion” and sexual coercion reflected his own creepiness and the fact that what he was doing was a kind of protracted rape. The blameshifting should have been obvious but the weapon he used to keep me pinned in place was so brain-melting that it banished all rational thought. He’d started making not-so-veiled threats to cast me as nuts and “unfit” and take custody of the kids away every time I called out his shitty behavior during the affair and threatened to leave. Mitigating circumstances made this feel like the ultimate thumb trap. Long story short, I’d quit work ten years before to care for and educate my chronically ill, disabled middle child full time after he was physically abused by school staff. Furthermore, I’d had to fight the school district, state and FW’s narcy mother’s accusations of “educational neglect” to do it. I already felt like I was under siege for parenting choices and FW played directly on that fear. He seemed to hold all the cards and I stopped sleeping.

Before this, I never thought FW was capable of being so evil. The more exhausted, stressed and sick I became, the more “grounds” it felt like FW had to cast me as “unfit.” Even accusing me of sexual coercion was more hostage taking: “She forced me to have sex, yer honor! I can’t leave my children with such a monster!” Never mind that he outweighed me by more than fifty pounds and I had no history of aggression or even mental illness, he seemed so invested in his bs that I feared everyone would believe him. After that, I sank into an inert little puddle of paralyzed despair for a couple months until an attorney friend snapped me out of it. I explained to the friend what was going on and what I was being accused of and she started chuckling and said, “Oh right, yeah sure, you’re such a monster. Look, he’s cheating. I’ve seen it a million times.” She explained that when someone preemptively threatens to take child custody, it’s usually because they’re doing something so terrible that it could realistically put their own custody of children at risk. She strongly advised me to hire a PI to turn the tables. She also warned that, when a disabled child is in the picture, a typical side dish maneuver to hang onto the cheater’s money and avoid child support as well as to avoid being saddled with caring for a “defective” child is to rally the cheater to take full custody and then stick the disabled kid in institutional state care on a waiver. That put the fear of God in me. I went underground and started digging for dirt, gathering evidence and lining up ducks. My friend was right. The facts made FW look like a terrible parent, not to mention a terrible human being. Suddenly, what formerly would have been worst news in the world was the best news possible.

After D-Day, I learned the creepy backstory of the February massacre. Because FW had decided to go on a family vacation over Valentine’s Day which left the AP only the dreaded and humiliating “side chick Valentine’s Day,” she went into a rage and staged a temporary “breakup” to punish him, likely in the hopes of expediting divorce. Since the AP had been increasingly consumed with FW continuing to have “marital sex,” FW understood what was expected. He ramped up the cruelty over Valentine’s Day as a half measure to appease the angry pussy gods or something but he’d still get spooky and menacing if I talked about divorce.

In reality, I hadn’t gotten upset on the last day of vacation because he was withholding his precious sparkle dick. That was his willful interpretation. At the time he was starting to repel me– the booze-induced bad breath, beer belly and himbo clothes he started wearing– bleah. Instead I was crying because I felt like a hostage who’d just learned no one was going to pay the ransom. The cue that he might no longer have “sexual use” for me took away whatever tiny remaining assurance I had that he wouldn’t escalate the viciousness and destroy me.

I think it saddled me with an extra sense of shame that I’d gotten hogtied an entrapped despite the fact that I’d formerly worked as an advocate for domestic violence survivors. Being familiar with red flags and abuse tactics but still finding yourself unable to bust out feels like being half anesthetized on an operating table where you can feel every cut but are too paralyzed to stop it. But it dawned on me that the model for domestic abuse I’d learned back in the day was flawed and incomplete and I realize I wasn’t really that well prepared. I just thought I was because everyone else thought they were. At the time, experts generally assumed that verbal threats and psychological coercion were merely overkill and that what really entrapped survivors within abuse was overt violence. Or it was thought that only the overt violence gave real “credence” to verbal coercion which otherwise might seem empty.

That seems so stupidly wrong now. At least the rest of the world is slowly waking up. There’s currently a worldwide campaign to add coercive control statutes to existing domestic violence laws and policies because it’s finally being recognized that psychological coercion is the key to entrapment in domestic abuse even more than physical violence. It may still be a few decades before the world recognizes that cheating is part and parcel with criminal coercive control.

However long it takes the world to catch up, I’m enjoying the glorious freedom to say, “Two and two make four, motherfucker” over and over.

I’m going to be generous to FW and post his very best effort. He tried lots of crazy ones, but even he sort of realized they were crazy as soon as they came out of his mouth. So he cast about in the void of his brain for some sort of memory. This gem is the best he could come up with:

In our early years, when we had two young kids and not much money, I asked FW to return a gift he bought for me which we couldn’t actually afford. I had developed a serious illness due to pregnancy and was not able to work at the time, so things were tight and I was worried. I guess FW wanted to give me an extravagant push present like his buddies did for their wives or something.

My conclusion (AKA reality); I had to do the adulting. FW lived in a fairy land. Things were could not afford, we could not have, and I always had to be the bad guy and say no.

FW’s conclusion (AKA conveniently historically revisionist bullshit); I was a cruel harpy and threw his heartfelt gift back in his face just for laughs. Therefore, twenty years later, it was okay to cheat for years and plan to dump me for a philandering alcoholic, if she’d ever have him. She wouldn’t. She had a chump with money.

They are delusional.