ChumpLady.com

Leave a cheater, gain a life

Dear Chump Lady, I don’t have any good memories of him

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Dear Chump Lady, I am having a problem. I was chumped 5 years ago this month. I am in a good place now, remarried, etc. But my issue is — I have two teenagers and I cannot talk to them about their father. They know what happened and all that, but I cannot talk to […]

Character Assassination? Probably.

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A lot of my Chump Lady mail can be divided into two categories, “I got chumped… what are people going to think?” and “I got chumped… and my cheater is telling people terrible things about me.” Both followed with “And what can I do about that?” Nothing. Sorry, chumps. You can’t do anything about what people […]

Dear Chump Lady, So why the hell isn’t she HAPPY now?

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Hi Chump Lady, So my wife had an affair and after being found out asked for a trial separation. She said she had been “struggling with her feelings for me”, that whilst I was a great dad and someone she admired, she had changed and we had “drifted apart”. Yadda Yadda Yadda. I told her […]

Be the Support You Wish You Had

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I begrudge no one their meh. It’s so hard won. But do me one favor as you move on to happier pastures — be the support you wish you had. I trust that you are. I also know how hard it is to out yourself to the world as a chump. But maybe if more […]

Keeping Secrets

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To be chumped is to be conspired against. Does that sound paranoid? Over the top? Like I’ve got a tinfoil radio transmitter in my head? To change the narrative, we really need to get straight on this part, people. To be chumped is to be conspired against. Actively and with aforethought. If you’re super lucky, it’s […]

Stupid Shit That People Say to Chumps

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People say a lot of stupid, insensitive things to chumps. It’s everything from the grossly mistaken — “Gee, the affair partner doesn’t seem all that bad!” To the dunderheaded smugness of, “I’m so glad my husband would never cheat on me.” (Bully for you.) Chumps, being pretty nice people, are usually taken completely off guard. […]

Dear Chump Lady, How do I stop the smear campaign?

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Hey Chump Lady, D-Day was November 20, 2017. I was coming home late after working one of my 4 jobs I had taken to sustain my wife’s insatiable and inscrutable spending habit and found her asleep, phone still in hand in the middle of a text conversation with another man she had known for years, […]

My Gun Story… Or That Time I Found a Loaded Handgun Under My Bed

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Esther Perel once infamously tweeted at me that my chump story “went beyond infidelity.” I’d fed some execrable article of hers through the Universal Bullshit Translator, got cheeky, tweeted it at her, and she essentially gave me a nice pat on my head. Apparently, I can’t pawn myself off as an expert at chumpdom, because […]

Dear Chump Lady, The cheater doesn’t know I’m pregnant

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Dear Chump Lady, Please chump some sense into me. I separated from my soon-to-be-ex-husband almost 2 years ago… following so many D-days that I won’t even bother quantifying them. He cheated A LOT and I chumped just as much. We were together nearly 12 years, married for 5… and, hindsight being what it is, I […]

Dear Chump Lady, Can’t quite shake the rejection…

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Dear Chump Lady, Long-timer lurker, first-time writer. Post-abandonment three main issues keep reverberating around my head: 1. My ex’s (geographically distant) family didn’t say goodbye. He told them that “‘We decided’ to end our marriage.” (Um, no. He tossed me aside like a bag of garbage two days after I learned that he had had […]