Best Hoovering Attempts to Win You Back?
The Friday Challenge is best hoovering attempts to win you back after D-Day. Hey! They’re going to make it up to you!
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This one goes out to Thurla Holm Laegreid — the Olympian bronze winner who chose the moment of his medal ceremony to ask his former girlfriend to take him back.
I give him the gold for hoovering attempts.
If manipulation were an Olympic sport, he’d be on the winner’s block. The generic compliments (most beautiful! best!), the nonexistent apology, the implied promise to really appreciate you now …
It made me think, there’s a Friday Challenge in this. How many of us got similar? Did you drink the Koolaid of their affair is going to ultimately make your marriage stronger? Did you win the pick me dance ever-so-briefly? Hey, you’re the one they REALLY love! Did they show up at your workplace with a flipchart?
Tell me your cheaters best attempts to suck you back into their dysfunction.
TGIF!
I’m just dropping this in here for the Chumps that DIDN’T get hoovered back. My FW left me with complete narcissistic discard (almost 11 years ago now). It was like a leech ripped off me and sucking on to his next host (AP). He didn’t EVER beg me to come back. He moved on completely with Schmoopie. At first that made me feel terrible… like I was the problem. But you’re LUCKY if a FW doesn’t return. Hoovering sucks (pun intended). I’m sure the bronze medalist’s ex girlfriend wishes he would have shut up and moved on without the drama and left her the f*** alone.
I didn’t get any hoovering either — he was too busy with his Schmoopie that was 28 years younger than he 🤮 . A couple years later I hit a professional milestone (amazing how quickly it happened once I didn’t have that goober around to suck my energy dry), and somehow he found out and messaged me a super-positive CONGRATULATIONS message. 🙄 I never answered back.
Mine said if we reconciled, that we’d buy the house of my dreams, any place that I wanted, and get all new furniture.
Well, except I’d be there with him. That was the problem. And as the caretaker of the family finances, I wondered how on earth we’d truly afford that. He was retired, and I had been working part-time while raising our children, who were in college.
The thought of having to start over with friends that I couldn’t possibly share the truth with also seemed pretty horrid. I mean, who says over coffee, “Yes, we moved here because he did X, Y, and Z, and we believed that being in a new place would completely fix X, Y, and Z.” I’d have to hide the truth.
And my therapist said when I shared that, “And wherever you go with him, there he will be.”
I refused to reconcile.
Mine was also the anti-hoover kind. In fact, a few days after announcing he wanted a divorce, he started telling people excitedly that he was getting remarried. I tried once to have an adult conversation with him about dividing the assets and my need for insurance and smirked and he told me that I couldn’t have insurance because the new Mrs. FW needed it, and then grinned proudly, like he’d done something especially clever…and started chirping away happily about remarrying,.When the experts say a complet lack of empathy, they mean it.
I completely expect a bouquet of grocery store flowers left at my door. That’s how I will know he’s thinking of me. (Just not while he’s being serviced by his escorts.)