Cheater Holiday Stories
There’s something about the impending holiday season that brings about D-days. The double life gets harder for cheaters to conceal as affair partners get demanding. Or the cheater gets sloppy. Worlds collide. And freshly minted chumps wash up on our shores.
Pity the narcissist. They have to come up with gifts. Be present for family. Spend time with their offspring. It’s too much!
So your Friday Challenge is to share your holiday cheater stories. Did you have a D-day (or six) over the holidays? A particularly craptacular Thanksgiving? Did you get the exact same gift as Schmoopie?
If you’ve got a real humdinger and you’d like to be on the podcast, we’re collecting Holiday Fuckwit stories for a special edition. Leave us a 90 second voicemail here:
I think your holiday sweater drove them to it.
Tell me more and TGIF!
And happy Veteran’s Day to all our CN veterans and military spouses (and ex military spouses — it’s a special kind of chumpdom).
I received our credit card bill right before Christmas with a $3200 charge to a jewelry store. I was astounded since FW never got me expensive jewelry of any kind. Sure enough there was a tiny box under the tree with my name on it! In front of the kids and grandkids, I eagerly opened the gift on Christmas Eve to find a note from him telling me how much he appreciated me. It took every ounce of self restraint to smile and thank him. After all the family left several days later, I casually Asked him about the charge and he said someone must have used our card. What an idiot! I went to the store and saw the receipt. He bought her a diamond ring with “Love, FW” engraved on it. Merry Christmas!
A diamond ring? They must have considered that a type of “engagement”. Did he leave you for her? Amazing to think you wouldn’t figure this out especially looking at the bills.
Yeah, he was thinking with the wrong head!!! He did leave me for her but she dumped him and then he tried to crawl back and I was like WTF? Absolutely not. Karma came early!!
Hahaha! My FW did the same thing, except he only spent $780 on the AP, not $3,200. He didn’t buy a diamond ring, just an ugly bracelet from Hermes. Such a cheapskate!
I would never recommend it, but wouldn’t it be funny to actually get the ring re-engraved literally with “Love FxxxWad” and see how long it took for them to notice.
That would be hilarious!! I love it!
Oh God, you lived the heartbreaking scene from Love, Actually. My face aches imagining having to glue a family holiday smile over the inner carnage.
Emma Thompson said her acting in that scene was fueled by her real life chump experience when ex what’s-his-name had the affair with Thompson’s former friend, Helena Bonham Carter. I thought of that scene during my own chump experience as a reminder of how baffling these things look from the outside– someone worthy mourning the loss of someone who’s name you can’t remember and whose pudding face is so forgettable it’s unvisualize-able (seriously, what is that guy’s name again?). May all FWs be ditched in the dustbin of collective memory.
Kenneth effing Branagh. What a douche.
Fun facts; Emma is happily married to Greg Wise. They adopted a child who had been forced to be a boy soldier in Rwanda. They seem like lovely people.
She got rid of a loser cheater and gained a fabulous life.
I think Brannagh is now doing cartoon voices for anime and the last I’ve seen of Bonham Carter is in Harry Potter movies. I believe Thompson is still getting more substantial projects, as befits her talent. Brannagh is such an over inflated bore – he did a part in a Harry Potter movie as a self absorbed phony that I thought suited him very well.
He was awful as Hercule Poirot.
OMG, I can’t even imagine. The mind boggles.
Kenneth Branagh, currently getting panned by the critics in King Lear on the West End.
Oh, right, that’s the overblown pudding’s name. I was in the performing arts as a kid and remember hearing a lot of people rave about Branagh’s Henry V. Years later, I saw the film and thought it was hilarious… “We shall go to Agincourt and we shall bore the French to death! “
Thank you!!!! I also thought the film was quite boring. It doesn’t hold up well over time.
Not a fan of Sir Kenneth here, HOAC. Bit pompous!
That is horrible, first of all to give a woman a small small jewelry pkg with just a note in it, then to find out what he did.
I got a gold choker necklace for our last Christmas. I had opened in a couple weeks early as we wouldn’t be home for Christmas. He had never given me jewelry before aside from my wedding rings. I guess it was the equivalent of a gold watch for my 20 years service, and the fact that it was a choker was the icing on the cake. After he left, I gave it to my daughter in law, along with the silver necklace he gave me at the same time.
I wondered after the fact if it was stuff the whore had that she didn’t want.
Or it could be stuff he bought for the whore that she didn’t like. My FW gave me stuff he got from the whore for Christmas. Finding that out ruined Christmas for me for a few years, but I took it back.
I had an ex who gave me a small wrapped present (on Valentine’s Day, not Christmas). Inside the wrapping paper was a legit blue Tiffany and Co jewelry box. Inside the box was my old sports watch that I’d misplaced and he’d found at his house. He’d hung onto while I thought it was lost, in order to “surprise” me with it.
I think I somewhat foiled his attempt to elicit a moment of disappointment from me, in that instead of getting excited at the Tiffany’s box, I was a little uncomfortable (it felt too soon in the relationship), so that when I saw it was my watch I was relieved of that discomfort. Still, though. I ha-haed weakly to get through the Valentine’s evening. Cruel.
That is sick.
I have several ExH destroyed the holidays with his pity party stories from just two years – 2021-2022, but I’ll only go over three from a 6 month period a little before DDay and before our separation started. The first Thanksgiving he was cheating (end of 2021) he was “triggered” by his family asking when they might see him for the holiday so he had to lock himself in our bedroom -right when the meal was served- messaging the COW for the whole Thanksgiving meal with my parents. He did not come out until the meal was long over and my family left and got pity from his COW on how he was so stressed he was a bad host to his in-laws.
December was hell. The ex didn’t say Merry Christmas to me at all, nitpicked everything I did, and kept finding ways to slink away to message his COW during every activity we did. He messaged her constantly during the Christmas family movies he selected – refusing to sit with me and our son – and I was always a “mean person who didn’t understand how lonely COW is” when I’d ask him to be present for us instead. The ex only bought me one gift for Christmas – which he had his COW help him select. He refused to help me buy our child gifts but took a lot of time trying to pick something out for his COW and her husband. Later Christmas day he admitted to being in love with his COW (my first confirmed DDAY) and said I was the one who ruined the holiday for crying and overreacting/making him feel bad.
Before the Easter after DDAY ExH decided to drop the bomb that he and COW had made plans for him to go to her house and watch a “movie marathon” together – without anyone else present. The Ex could not understand why I was upset that he planned this thing with COW – and was also puzzled on why this was a bad idea at all. Ex was baffled at my anger because he and COW thought it was common sense (and expected) that I drive/drop him off at a halfway point 45 minutes away for his COW to pick him up, only for me to pick him up later when the COW dropped him back off. I told him there was no way I was going to drive 3 hours in one day to let him be with his COW, and that if he was so determined to go to something he knew was wrong/destroying his marriage he could get himself an Uber. I naively thought he’d come to his senses and dropped the dumb idea, but after Easter celebrations he said he was still thinking of going to COW’s and asked me to arrange his Uber. I said “hell no, arrange it yourself, and if you go you can stay there and never come back.” He did not go and instead pouted saying I was unreasonable.
We began in home separation after his Easter shenanigans.
I just had an amusing moment to myself wondering what the acronym COW stood for.
Ah I see – it means COW!
“took a lot of time trying to pick something out for his COW and her husband”
WHAT!!!!!! This guy is completely insane. What was the “husband” doing during this time? I can’t believe he was doing this shit and telling YOU about it and demanding rides from you to spend time with his whore. Was he always this crazy? Is he still with the COW? So sorry you went through such a horrible experience but it sounds like you handled it masterfully and with no shit taking.
Before marriage it was nothing like this. It was a rather slow descent into people pleasing anyone and everyone that was not me starting from the first year of our marriage. He had a literal meltdown (falling to the floor screaming “I can’t do this”) over me asking “why will you do so&so’s dishes when we enter their home without them asking, but refuse to do any of ours?” Silly me accepted his answer “Family of Origin issues” and I helped the man get into therapy.
I’ve no idea if he and the COW are still together as I don’t talk to the ex about much other than arrangements for our kid. It does not really matter anymore anyway as I am no longer in the friend group that enables that nonsense. Probably would have accepted a lot more bull malarkey from the situation if I didn’t have this lovely site and everyone’s stories to read most days. Y’all helped me more than you’ll ever know.
I’m so glad the site has helped you, what CL has created is amazing, and the posters are amazing too! The insights I get here have been really helpful to me as well. I’ve experienced cheating but I have a really dysfunctional FOO too and the site’s been very helpful with that too as many of the same issues arise. It occurs to me marriage is frequently a line of demarcation – the relationship becomes a permanent commitment which can make these dysfunctional people feel trapped into obligations and expectations they just can’t fulfill because….screwed up……also marriage might mean that the spouse becomes viewed as “property” – an appliance as CL puts it, with certain inherent functions. A spouse is viewed differently than a girl/boyfriend and implies more obligations….and maybe fewer rights or needs as well. And then the children come and they are inevitably little bundles of need and sacrifice……we don’t seem to be bringing people up to be able to handle marriage and children effectively anymore. To me, it seems like a lot of people just want to be children themselves forever….selfish children in adult bodies. I can understand that many people don’t seem to be able to handle the responsibilities now but they need to at least learn to be honest and truthful about it. That would create a lot less drama. Glad to hear that he’s basically out of your life and at some point that will be 100%. YAY! This whole experience has shown how strong you really are, stronger than you could ever have imagine when you started out.
Good grief. What was her husband doing while this was going on, or had they separated by then?
I may be jaded by all the disgusting things I discovered about my own FW but my guess would be that the husband sits in a corner and masturbates while crying while his wife cheats on him.
Oh, the COW is still with her husband and they’ve never separated. I think he was going to be at work while those two had their movie marathon. COW’s Husband doesn’t believe she was involved in the affair at all and that it was all my ExH.
He believes the FW bought gifts even though there was no affair? Talk about denial.
So he’s delusional too. A lot of people spend their lives looking the other way. Maybe he’s got his Schmoopies too.
Wow. Well some of us chumps are slow, I certainly was very trusting and naive.
My fw even said about 2 months before he left that “Susie wouldn’t believe I was fooling around unless I told her”. Ironically up to that point he was right, but that was the night that it all hit me that he was a snake. It took another couple weeks for me to admit it in my mind. I really didn’t want to, I did adore the rat bastard.
So glad you are out of or getting out of that mess.
I am years down the road, and I found CL after fw and the whore tried to destroy my son and his family, so my focus is a bit different; but I still remember the pain of betrayal and all the facets of betrayal.
My Dday was 25 Dec 1989. I had been treated like dog shit for the last few months, I knew of course by the time Dday hit. He had insisted we go visit my dad and brothers in TX, and our son in AZ. Son was in AF stationed at Davis Monthan. Becaue of time change I woke up at 5 ish am and FW was gone. Went out he was on the side walk across the way on his phone, I had had it; I walked out and started walking towards him, he started walking fast away from me while talking.
Anyway, the next week at home was hell, we had invited friends for NYE, I told him I was going to call and cancel, he said no, we aren’t going to ruin their NYE. Stupidly I went along. I regret that to this day, of course I should have called them and said my husband is treating me like dog shit and screwing around on me I can’t do this.
That was the night I saw the shark eyes. I was trying to be a good hostess, I looked up at him and said something and there it was, the intense hate for me was clear.
When I saw that hate and contempt in Asshat’s eyes, I wondered if he was going to kill me…seriously. There were times I thought I was going to end up dead and my worry was he would make it look like a natural death. Asshat is a doctor and he had put drugs in my food/drinks previously. He also loved to choke me during sex, close to the point of passing out.
He’s a sick creeper. So much darkness runs deep within his soul.
Oh. My. God.
It is a frightening look. I never saw it before that, and of course never after.
Susie, if you don’t mind, why did he hate you? I don’t understand this hatred so many of them seem to develop towards their spouses. What does it come from?
Also wanted to mention, if you have not read CN from the beginning to now you have missed a lot of info. It is chocked full of “shark eyes” “hatred/blameshifting” , so much and yet so much of it the same.
No, I’m pretty recent. I do go back and check some of the older columns, but I’ll try to see if I can follow people’s individual stories more. The things I read make me realize I’ve been relatively lucky as no children were involved and while there was DV in my FOO, I never personally experienced it in my own relationships. Probably because I was always on the lookout for it because of what my mother went through.
I never had DV in FOO or in my marriage, and he did not turn nasty until the last year when I assume he started the year of discard without my knowledge of what he was involved with. He always had a selfish streak, but by most signs up until the last year, we were building a good life together and he seemed to be happy. My view is why wouldn’t have he been happy, he had a devoted wife, good standing in the community and was hiding a secret life with the whore.
I wasn’t co dependent, or dumb, or any other thing that would explain his ability to hide a double life, it is perfectly natural to trust your spouse. He actually self destructed and destroyed his whole life once his house of cards tumbled down. Many of these folks are excellent liars and most of them have some flying monkeys helping, even if it is only a few, including of course the adultery partner.
I think that is why Tracy recommends us not looking inward to explain the abuse of others (untangling the skein). Once I was out of the mess, I had no issues rebuilding my life, including remarrying a truly decent and loving partner.
He had FOO issues, including his Dad being an alcoholic, who was also was emotionally abusive to his mother. I had no way of knowing this, and didn’t find out until years after we married. We married at 18, which was very common in those days. We were both 18, I didn’t turn into a cheating/lying FW, he did.
CL’s old letters and comments are as full of fresh info and good advice as the new. Very good reading.
Also Hell of a Chump posts some very good stuff, especially in the DV realm if that is something you experienced.
Could my fw have resorted to DV if he hadn’t been outed? who knows. Like in the case of Laci Peterson many don’t know until it happens for the first time, most survive the first time but as in her case, some don’t.
Someone who is capable of leading a double life as my grandma would have said “just ain’t right in the head” said in my best southern AR accent.
One thing I am so thankful for is though fw and the whore treated my son awful just a few years ago, for the most part while my son was growing up he didn’t see this as of course he was hiding it from him too. That is why I am convinced that who fw wanted to be and who he was was just too wide a breach for him to pull off long term.
I think I repeat my usual spiel about “masked dependency” too much but it’s still the best explanation for the unwarranted hatred I’ve read so far. I also think it demonstrates a lot of cheaters are on the batterer spectrum, give or take broken bones and black eyes. The idea is abusers– because of whatever horrible FOO issues they grew up with– are calcified babies who can only experience an infantile form of “love”– i.e., infantile dependency– on partners. But something else these types learn in their kill-or-be-killed childhoods is to feel catastrophic shame over this kind of vulnerability so they go to great pains to conceal their dependency from others and especially themselves. What underlies it is apparently an abiding terror of either being “engulfed” or abandoned by a partner, a power they imagine the partner deliberately wields and also enjoys (pure projection since it’s actually the abuser who enjoys wielding power). This triggers rage, the classic push-me/pull-you shananigans of yanking victims in closer then pushing them away at random which generates a vicious cycle of self-fulfilled prophesy. Abusers “push” and then fear abandonment, pull and then fear engulfment and on and on and back and forth. Particularly the fear that the victim has the power to abandon can theoretically trigger paranoid impulses to “get even” in some way and a lot of “Who needs you, bitch” sort of posturing.
Anyway, that’s what I got from the clinical tomes. Then when I realized that virtually all of the survivors we encountered had also been cheated on in some way, I started to suspect that cheating wasn’t just a common tactic in the arsenal of abuse but that all the pushing and pulling and terror campaigns were really about violently enforcing one-sided monogamy. That seemed to be the core of it. These guys would usually mirror like mad and pretend to be heroes in the early stages of relationships in order to secure commitment from partners out of genuine terror of rejection. Then as the abuser starts frog boiling victims into showing less independence, the disguises would feel suffocating and this would trigger feelings of “engulfment” and accusations that partners were “suffocating” them.
I began to wonder if part of the motive to cheat was as a means of “diluting” the abusers’ feelings of dependency on partners by spreading that dependency out among more than one partner. The cheating would also hedge bets against abandonment by securing a backup plan. There’s also the fact that affair partners start out with the knowledge that cheaters are cheaters so it’s almost like “At last I found someone I can be myself with (unlike with that bitch at home).”
It appears some abusers manage to actually shift some of that pathological dependency to affair partners which might be when the push-pull cycle really starts to ramp up and become outrageous since abusers might be both feeling weary of mirroring primary partners and also because abusers fear their partners will leave them if they’re caught cheating. I think that’s when they start attacking victims’ self esteem as a way of clipping wings to prevent victims’ escape– the old “no one else will ever love you, you worthless loser” bit. You might call that masked “cock blocking.”
One DV researcher found that, unlike stereotypical batterers who are usually depicted as hyper-jealous, the statistically most lethal abusers may never show even a glimpse of jealousy or territoriality towards their partners but yet can become suddenly murderous if victims attempt to escape. The idea is that this is because the abusers’ “dependency” and territoriality are so denied, masked and buried that they enter a sort of violent fugue state when those things are triggered. I thought the latter might explain why so many cheaters seem to do everything they can to sabotage relationships but then become psycho when partners file for divorce and keep showing up like bad pennies to harass, obstruct, lovebomb, intimidate, etc.
“At last I found someone I can be myself with (unlike with that bitch at home).”
I just read this. Anyway, wanted to say I have mentioned before that I caught fw and the whore at our River property, (this was soon after he left, and we were legally separated, but still he shouldn’t hav had her nasty self there. But, I remember looking at him and he was just standing there looking at the floor. I said “why did you do this to us?” he said “this is who I am”. I think it is one of the few times he was honest with me. That is simply who he was and with her he didn’t have to pretend to be a decent man.
The reason I was there was his mother wanted some items back from the trailer that she loaned us and we drove down to get it. Never occurred to me they would be there. It was on a Friday and generally he would be working. They must have both had the day off or taken it off. She had been moved to another city job after they were outed, but I was not thinking of that.
It was funny though because my mil (his mother) was chasing her around the place saying “shame one you, you should be ashamed of yourself”. Bet that was hard to come back from after he married her. Lol.
They have fleas and those flea collars can chafe after awhile. But rather than admit to the chumps they conned that they’re dogs to begin with, abusers blame chumps for not loving their “true selves” and forcing them to be something other than dogs. Then– in supposed “rebellion”– they find other flea-bitten dogs to lie down with.
I remember when I was growing up, my mother used to say “lay down with dogs, get up with fleas”. After I got out, I de-flea’d myself, but fw just found an actual dog to partner with, just like him and their life showed it.
I hadn’t made this connection (between the start of FW’s affair and the simultaneous rise in his level of contempt toward me): “Abusers fear their partners will leave them if they’re caught cheating.I think that’s when they start attacking victims’ self esteem as a way of clipping wings to prevent victims’ escape– the old ‘no one else will ever love you, you worthless loser’ bit.” It’s so sad to look back and remember the assault on my self-esteem!
If he really wanted to be “free,” why wouldn’t he build you up and tell you how amazing you are, how anyone would be enriched to have a partner like you, that you’re lovable and could easily find true love, etc., etc.?
But that’s not what he wanted. He wanted to put a dagger through your shoe so you couldn’t move on and had no hope for better. That’s indirect cock-blocking and the brutal enforcement of one-sided monogamy.
This makes sense to me, and really gives me something to ponder. “A dagger through my shoe”–oh my gosh. I kind of shudder to think I was in that kind of emotional prison, and that I fell for the mindfuck that kept me there! There’s so much to think about here.
Leedy– something else to consider is a theory called “projective identification” where the abuser takes all the traits they hate about themselves and all the feelings and impulses they can’t abide and projects those traits with such mesmerizing intensity onto targets that the targets become confused, lose track of their own identities and start to feel and internalize all the negative traits/feelings the abuser pasted onto the victim.
Now combine that concept with masked dependency and, voila, by cheating the abuser can transfer all their own insecurities, dependency, self loathing/self destructiveness, isolation, despair and terror of abandonment fully onto the victim. Cheating is a handy manner of tricking the victim into feeling these things which is the way by which the abuser temporarily feels “liberated” from those unwanted feelings. it’s the same thing serial killers do when they humiliate and torture. By compulsively reenacting scenarios that relate to the serial killer’s own traumatic childhood but this time with victim/offender roles reversed, the serial killer theoretically hopes to be freed of those haunting feelings of humiliation, pain, shame, trauma, terror, etc.
In other words, if the betrayal makes a chump feel ugly, rejected, unlovable, alone and suicidal, you can pretty much guess that’s how the abuser went around feeling most of the time, that is, if they weren’t so vigilant about detaching, avoiding, denying, etc. I think there’s also a tendency of abusers to secondarily project all the negative traits of affair partners onto chumps. Just like externalizing and dumping their own negative traits and feelings onto victims is essential for an abuser to maintain an ideal image of themselves, it’s also intrinsic for being able to idealize another person (particularly a person who ain’t that great to begin with, which witting mate poachers arguably are not). So you can imagine how abusers will also begin to fling APs’ negative traits at chumps. If the AP is greedy, dishonest, dysfunctional, addicted, compulsive, crazy, etc., the abuser will start accusing the chump of being these things.
Anyway, food for thought. Personally I think it explains a lot.
Projective identification–yes!! I was lucky enough, during the years of chumpy travail, to have studied psychoanalytic theory; and that helped me to realize after D-Day that I had long been serving as a walking repository for my FW’s deep-seated shame. And (true to the model you describe above) even after we separated, my ex used the co-parenting situation as a way to keep trying to rope me in as an object for his contempt. At one point I woke up said to myself, “hey, it’s quite as if he wants to have two wives–the affair partner, who is ‘great’ in every way just as he is, and little me, whom he keeps tidily contained in a box that says ‘loser,’ and upon whom he can periodically unleash rage.” I am so glad I got out of that. Cheers to you, Hell of a Chump!
“There’s also the fact that affair partners start out with the knowledge that cheaters are cheaters so it’s almost like “At last I found someone I can be myself with (unlike with that bitch at home).””
This was how it was with my FW.
To your point about jealousy and possessiveness; my FW was possessive and fearful of abandonment before he met OW. After that he decided being cucked was hot, because other OW cucked both him and her husband. Plus, he had a back-up, so as you say, the dependency was diluted. After Dday, he offered to agree to me having sex with other guys if I stayed. He said that would mean I had all the power. I sarcastically said thanks for revealing that his own reasons for cheating were about delusions of it giving him power over me, but that I wasn’t interested in either power or in finding a reason to stay with him. That one sure got the ol’ narc rage going. 😁
He gave himself away by saying you’d have “power” if you played the field. It’s what he hoped would result from his own behavior. If the theory is correct and the whole ritual of abuse and cheating is all about hiding their own dependency from themselves and others, then his performative display of being “cool” with an open arrangement would have been part of masking. It suggests that had you– the primary “mommy replacement” figure– actually taken him up on that offer, he could have done a 180 and gone apeshit. It might even have been dangerous.
I’ve actually seen some people try to embrace poly as a means of masking dependency. They’re trying to rewire themselves on the theory that monogamy is a learned social construct. You can always tell because, unlike those who seem naturally polyamorous and live and let live, the maskers can’t bear the idea that anyone believes in monogamy and will accuse anyone attempting it as living unnatural lives ruled by possessiveness, dictatorial “control” of other people and sick jealousy. Me thinks they project too much.
They want to punish us because we are no longer a good source of supply. And they know a divorce has consequences, especially financial. They want to walk away because they always want everything to be easy in life. We are what stands in their way of their shiny new supply/toy, so they hate us for getting in their way.
Oh I don’t think he hated me at all, it was just likely his anger at himself and of course he had to blame someone. I think he had to do it to create a case against me to have the ability to do the things he was doing. And he was lying stealing gambling etc. He was working up the steel to walk that night, he couldn’t have done that if he had been smiling and loving.
At least that is my though and a pretty common theme evidently in the Cheaters handbook.
He absolutely knew I adored him, he knew I was loyal. The last year of discard of course was horrible, especially the last couple months.
I didn’t even think of it as shark eyes back then, I picked that up from CL. But at the time those eyes looked so weird. It wasn’t until years later when I read CL refer to shark eyes and it clicked, an I realized it was very common.
It is about what they are doing.
I am going to say something that many may disagree with, but honestly I believe he did try so hard for many years to be normal. I believe he did hate himself, and that is why he chased the highs. Not just illicit sex, but secret gambling, boats, risky behavior etc. It was likely the life we had built that kept him in line for a long time.
I know for a fact that the best he ever had in his life was his son and the life we built together, and he lost is all because of his behavior, and I don’t mean me, I mean the respect of his community, his boss’s etc.
Because he/we were well known I know how his life went down and he crashed and burned, but he and whore remained together until his death. When he died, I cried for what he did to himself.
He was one blessed guy, and he trashed it all. He was evidently juggling like a juggler on crack until someone lodged an ethics complaint then it all toppled down around him.
I agree with you about some of them trying to be normal. I think mine did actually really try to be a real human being. I think there was a part of him that wanted to have feelings and actually care about other people and have real relationships. He was trying to be that person when I met and married him. But he couldn’t do it because he doesn’t have those feelings and faking it only goes so far.
In my case, I think that’s why mine hated me so much. He couldn’t do it and he blamed me for it. Both for him wanting to be a decent person and for him failing to do so. I remember him spitting at me, “I tried so hard, you don’t understand how hard I tried!” and I couldn’t figure it out because he lied to me the whole time. I wondered how he tried at all.
But he’s an evil child molesting freak who can’t care about anybody really, including himself. Now I get how he tried. He was like a lizard dressing up like a person and trying to pass.
When FWs find cheating partners who seem to accept that FWs are cheaters, I think a lot of FWs feel a sense of relief that they no longer have to hide their “shadow selves” and they rear on chumps with a sense of betrayed rage, almost like someone leaving the church when they “come out of the closet” and going through a period of rage against religion for having made them suppress something natural about themselves for so long. They may rear on their families or religious mentors for having made them hate and hide their sexuality. And they they may say things like “Now I’ve found a whole community that embraces the real me and I don’t need you anymore!!”
Except– oops– abusers’ righteous sense of victimization is a delusionally false equivilency. To clarify, just switch “abuser” to kleptomanic. Secretly being a klepto is not like being gay in any sense. Chumps/non klepto partners aren’t religious oppressors and no one “made” the kleptos pretend not to be kleptos. The pretense was because they had initially recognized that they were anti-social and would have to change this about themselves to have a place in society. But then the fundamental change eludes them, the pretense became tiresome, the urge to steal gets worse and they find a gang of fellow compulsive thieves who offer an alternative society where thieving can be normalized, even canonized.
Yep, I remember once in the early part of the year of discard (hindsight), that he seemingly out of the blue said every time I come home you make me feel guilty. I rarely ever questioned him, about his whereabouts, in that case I hadn’t even said anything, but yet he said it. That was about what he was thinking and doing not about me. I know that now of course, but it was weird in real time.
Mehitable, wouldn’t that be untangling the skein to ask why? These folks hate that their partners have the moral high ground, hate that they represent responsibilities and covenants they don’t want to live up to, etc. Basically once the spouse-appliance ceases to be seamlessly devoted to their wishes, including wishes to have other partners, they’re targets for contempt. These types hate what’s involved in living up to their promises, and it could be said that they hate showing the truth of their intentions well before they even pick a partner, and well before they start showing their partner that hatred.
I guess it would be. I like to try to understand things for myself though as I tend to be very analytical and I don’t want to excuse behavior but to understand it….hopefully so I could avoid it in the future. But that’s MY particular thing, it probably isn’t helpful for most people. I just can’t understand why someone could have such murderous hatred (and sometimes it really is murderous) for an innocent spouse….to go from marrying someone you…I guess…”love”….to that turning into real hatred. It seems so alien, almost demonic. But you’re right, for most people it would be untangling the skein and not useful. They are what they DO for whatever reasons. For me, because my father was the violent figure in my life, it has been helpful to learn and understand why he became the man he did. It helped me to forgive him eventually and heal that part of myself that comes from him, as all children have that to deal with. My half sister (child of 1st marriage) on the other hand would not even deal with ME because she hated him so much and anything of that FOO was a reminder, including me. So for me, understanding was helpful but it might not be for a spouse.
Yep, you said it more succinctly than I.
It wasn’t about me, it was about him and I believe he just got wound around the office auger so bad, he couldn’t control anything anymore. (she was his direct report).
He was a police officer, many of them cheat a lot, but most of them choose non work related skanks. Mine chose his direct report, at a time when harassment and hostile working environments were being discussed.
The whore didn’t file a report a co-worker did the grounds were she was fucking her boss and he went to the city council and petitioned for a good raise for her. I don’t know how the suit worked out, but she was immediately moved to another job, and within less than a year he was busted in rank and put back out on patrol.
I am betting that whoever filed got a nice raise and signed a non disclosure agreement. That is just my guess.
It’s Remembrance Day in Canada tomorrow & my ex-husband left me something to “remember” him by. It was a deliberate move too. A covert narcissist in action, folks.
Oh, the holidays! Such a shit show for me for so long. My divorce and everything was in 2020 and this is the first year I’m able to enjoy the holidays.
We almost always had people over for Christmas partly because I hated the idea of anyone being alone on Christmas. I now know that some of those guests were women who were helping him bad mouth me and telling him to leave me. That smarts.
There was also the Christmas when I had nothing under the tree because he didn’t bother buying me presents. Oh, he claimed that was just an accident but I started buying my own gifts after that so my son wouldn’t realize I was unloved. There was the Christmas he presented me with a blue cameo necklace and I said thank you but he got upset because I wasn’t happy enough. “Didn’t I know how hard it was to find a blue cameo?! Just like the treasured one I had as a child?!”I didn’t even know they came in blue. I wonder who that was for. They must have broken up right before Christmas.
Christmas cookies always being mocked “ew, I got a clump of baking soda in mine” and a disgusted gag. Weird how nobody else ever did and he even got it in recipes with no baking soda or baking powder, so crazy how that works. I don’t miss it.
You should have put arsenic in his.
“Cell Block Tango.”
“The Christmas I Got Nothing” happened to me, too. I cried, he pouted and said I ruined the holiday.
I’m sorry it happened to you too. I remember I tried to act like I was ok but I ended up laying down after presents and breakfast (which I of course made a big special breakfast) and I think he realized it was too far. He tried to say he had ordered things but they hadn’t arrived in time. I remember asking him why he hadn’t just told me that earlier rather than surprising me with it on Christmas morning and then he got angry. I’m not a very materialistic person and I don’t need expensive things but to get “sorry, nobody thought of you, thanks for cooking for us and buying us stuff though, now back to the kitchen with you maid” hurt like hell.
Ugh, that’s very hurtful. FWs really show their hatred of their Chumps like this, in what they fail to do. Then sometimes society gaslights chumps about gift giving, how men are allegedly bad at it – nope just the ones who can’t stand you. Such BS. You deserved better.
Katie, that was the hardest for me too – the Christmas where I had nothing under the tree. Not because of me, but because my youngest asked me where my presents were. I had to tell him Santa must have forgotten mine this year. It broke my heart!
I’m so sorry you experienced it too. I was actually surprised how much it hurt. I grew up poor and had some very lean Christmases but never one where I was just forgotten completely. I mean, a cheap box of chocolates could have saved that for me and he could’ve got that at a gas station last minute. But not even that. It was a really clear message and very effective with it’s damage.
Mine isn’t a holiday memory. It’s what I would call an ‘important family event’ memory. My dad died at a very good age in late June 2019. I was in the midst of the really horrible discard and struggling to understand what the hell was going on. Plus Dad’s dying had been intense and painful – I have not seen someone die before and, as the eldest daughter, I was supporting a younger sibling and confused mother and making funeral arrangements. The AP was an exgf from school who lived in Canada and we are in the UK. An affair was not an obvious conclusion to draw, I had no idea they were still in touch, and, hey, I was ‘cool wife’ and trusted him. I thought he was stressed at work!
Back to the story. He did nothing to support me in the run up to the funeral (or the death, frankly – he couldn’t come to hospital because he had to get a haircut). I didn’t get even a hug. His family didn’t send me the shortest of texts to say ‘sorry for your loss’, let alone a card. This was in stark comparison to how I responded to their ‘family and friends’ deaths. The ex stood by the grave as the earth was dropped on the coffin, wearing his sad face. He told me off for minor transgressions a couple of times. Then he drank, ate, and made merry at the lunch afterwards. My mum questioned me later about how he could be happily talking about funny events from our marriage whilst at the same time knowing what he was about to do. A month later I get dumped with a list of my heinous faults to get by on. Two months later I find the emails with exgfOW. One was written the night before Dad’s funeral. Subject line: ‘something to hold on to’. The email contained her homemade poem, in which she stated how she ‘could not wait to tell the world about [our] love and not give a f%#k who knows’. As you can tell from that brief extract, it was quality verse! The ex responded: ‘mate, you’ve moved me, I’m teary, yearning, soulmates xxxxxxxx’. Nothing says ‘love’ like being called ‘mate’. When challenged by me about the email he smirked and said ‘did she’, ‘did I’. This helped me to see what a low life scumbag he is and made divorce very easy!
I’m not going to untangle the mess of their tiny brains. It’s fair to say that my Dad’s death will forever be entangled with their pathetic love story. Fortunately I won’t have to provide support to him when his aged parents die!
The ex had a birthday after dumping but before DDay. My recently widowed mid-80s mother decided to send him a card with £40 as a present. He trousered the cash without ever saying ‘thank you’ to her. He did ask me whether she knew ‘about us’ to which I was able to answer ‘yes’ but, of course, no one except him, the gf, and his family knew about the affair which he has never admitted. He really is a nasty piece of work dressed up in a superficially decent human being. So glad to be rid of him and his ugly persona.
Mate?! Mate?? Sweet jesus, what a moron.
That made me laugh! It was a bit weird.
MW, when we were all back at my sister’s house after my dad’s funeral, FW decided he was going down to the pub – which is rude enough under any circumstances, right?. I knew what he was like so decided to walk down to the pub and take the car (it was only a couple hundred yards but god forbid he ever walk anywhere). My BIL was getting pissed off at the fact that he had “done a runner” so went looking for him. He came home staggering drunk (luckily my mom had gone home at this point), covered in scratches and looking for a fight. He later told me that my BIL wasn’t even “man enough to help him when he stumbled into the bushes”! When I told my BIL this he just smiled and said “oh, he didn’t stumble into anything ….”! BIL threw him in!
Attie, how funny! Good for your BIL. Great story! Sadly I was saddled with 2 x BIL exactly the same as the ex. They would all have gone to the pub and it would have ended in someone having to do a very messy clean up job. In fact, at the MIL’s big birthday, that’s exactly what happened, except that when the ex came back from the pub, the MIL had to clean up their bathroom because I surely wasn’t going to do it! Let’s just say that red wine was involved, discretion being the better part of valour!
When our children were small, the serial cheater left around lunch on Christmas Day, saying he was going to buy a pack of cigarettes and would be right back. We lived a ways out of town so the trip probably should’ve taken around thirty minutes. Five hours. He came back five hours later. I’d been calling and texting, even contemplated loading the kids in the car and driving into town, thinking maybe he’d been in a wreck. When he finally came home, I asked him where he’d been for five hours and he told me I was imagining things. He’d only been gone an hour. What??? Since I can tell time, that obviously wasn’t going to fly so he came up with another lie. He’d run into a male friend at the gas station and they’d sat in his car talking and lost track of time. I obviously knew it was a lie but I couldn’t prove it and didn’t know about the cheating yet so I let it go. And then he went and took a nap. Later I found out about his bartender girlfriend and realized who he had really spent Christmas afternoon with.
That old ‘off to buy cigarettes’ and abandoning their families story is so ingrained in FW lore that it’s become a bit of a parody. I can’t believe he did that to you!
I wonder what they say now that so many people don’t smoke any more.
Down to the pub
“Off to watch the game”
They are insidious ass wipes.
My police officer fw used to “work on Christmas day” to give one of the guys with young kids Christmas day off. Yes I believed him as he was still presenting as happy husband and of course still using me as his devoted wife figure. (which I was).
Towards the end he did a lot of “riding around with ne of the guys” at night for 3 or 4 hours. I bought it for a while, but it didn’t take too long to grow suspicious.
I have mentioned it before but I regret with all my heart not telling people about the shit he pulled and used many of them as his excuse.
In my previous life I was a homemaker and loved cooking Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner for my family for 35 years. A year ago (Fall 2022) I told my grown children that this would be the last Thanksgiving and Christmas I was going to host in this house, as the house would be soon thereafter sold. This would be their last Thanksgiving dinner in their childhood home.
At the time we were officially separated but living together in the house (separate bedrooms). It was quite soon after the big D-day. Ex told me that he would be going to a friend’s house for Thanksgiving and that I could have the house for Christmas eve with our children in the house and he would have Christmas day with our children in the house (and I’d go be with my friends). I was fine with this arrangement. I assumed he was going to Thanksgiving at one of our mutual friends’ house. I did not ask.
My oldest adult child declined my invitation and informed me that he and his wife were going out of state for Thanksgiving and would not be able to make it. I was sad but understanding and wished them a happy Thanksgiving.
All the rest of my children and their spouses and I had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner and soaked up all the memories and laughed and enjoyed our homemade dinner and pie.
Then the eX came home, walked into the dining room, greeting us all as we jovially sat around the table with our pumpkin pie. He walked into the kitchen, his back to us saying, “Yep, son and his wife sure did make a great Thanksgiving dinner, it was sooooooo good! Mmmm! I had such a good time at their house!”
We all at the table froze and stared at one another with the realization of that eX and son, had done to me. My other children and their spouses stared in shock and sadness at me.
“But….. son said they were going to another state for Thanksgiving?” I said out loud to him.
“Yeah but they’re not leaving til next week!” eX said.
Jaws dropped in silence all around my Thanksgiving table as they realized the cruel actions of “dad” and the betrayal of me, by their oldest brother.
……
That was so painful for me that I decided to move out of the house for good right after Thanksgiving. In order to avoid a repeat of that kind of pain, I decided to not host my last Christmas eve at my own home, with my kitchen, my dinner, my fireplace and my decorations, my tree and my cooking. I literally spent Christmas eve at a Chinese restaurant with a single girl friend (just like in the movies) and I spent Christmas day a public Christmas dinner as I had (and still have) nowhere to host my own holidays.
Dear Viktoria
I am so sorry for you! To add insult to injury is to have a son be part of this awful trick.
I think I know how you feel. Right now, I am going through a similar situation of the divided loyalties of my adult sons. I am so disappointed in them. Their father is a master gaslighter and liar, but they badly want to believe him. They can’t see, much less admit that their father is a lying asshole and a mediocre professional.
I think this situation should be a whole CN discussion: Adult Children’s Divided Loyalties. Where does the line stop between adult children’s moral duties towards cheater parent and being disloyal to the chump parent?
To be honest, I think that, at least in my case, it is a matter of sons’ immaturity and listening to sparkledick’s lies. My sons were hiding from me that cheater is about to do something that will hurt me financially and benefit himself. He has been unemployed for almost two years (sparkledick made VERY bad choices in his professional life due to pure vanity), so sons probably feel sorry for him.
Viktoria, this is very sad. How could your ex treat you so badly. He is a very sick and twisted person. As for your son and his wife, they should be ashamed of themselves for being too cowardly to tell you the truth.
I am so sorry, Viktoria. I’ve spent those Christmas dinners in Chinese restaurants with my mother or a friend too after my ex bolted for another woman many years ago. It’s kind of sad, but we made the best of it. My father used to get roaring drunk during the holidays when I was a child so Christmas has always been bittersweet for me at best. I’ve had wonderful things happen at Christmas and also the worst things. Why did your son do this awful thing? Does he support his father’s behavior that much? If I were his wife, I’d be concerned about HIS cheating. Have you reconciled at all?
I’ve spent a few Christmases alone in Chinese restaurants and movie theaters. It was profoundly miserable the first year, but it gets easier. My family is all gone (except for the sister who slept with at least one of my cheaters) and I’m in a new city. I decided I’d rather spend Christmas alone than with someone I barely know trying to exude holiday cheer.
Thank you for your kind comment. The holidays happened very soon after D-day. My eX gaslit everyone and their mother. He gas lit me, our kids, his parents, my parents, our mutual friends and all my own friends. He was telling everyone that it was not true what I discovered, and that there is something wrong with me mentally, and I probably created and planted the evidence in order to have an excuse to leave him. His gaslighting was so strong and unrelenting, that for a while some of my children (not all) believed him. No doubt they were in shock, and likely confused. No that one son who did that to me did not support his father’s cheating.. but he likely had massive cognitive dissonance (wanting to believe his dad) and was feeling sorry for his dad, who was the victim of course (sarcasm). Yes we have thankfully reconciled.
I am so glad to hear that it was a temporary thing and that you have reconciled. Eventually the truth comes out and I think your Ex’s gloating behavior on that holiday spoke for itself. I hope things continue to improve for you and you’re able to enjoy your holidays. Sometimes the smallest thing can make it worthwhile – one of my favorite childhood Christmas memories is singing carols with the entire neighborhood in the park.
I’m really glad to hear that you reconciled with your oldest. Stories where chumps’ kids go over to the “dark side” and side with cheaters always rip my heart out. Did he ever explain his behavior? Had he been angry at you for “victimizing” poor dad? Did he repeat whatever bs dad had told him at the time?
Hi HOAC, no to all your Qs. I met with all of them for an “after Christmas” Christmas, and he gave me a warm hug and expressed his love and affection and we have been ‘good’ ever since. Maybe someday I’ll ask him but not yet. I think that at that time (only just after D-day) that some of my kids just could not believe it (at that time) and they were in denial, so they believed him, because the alternative– believing me– would be horrifying.
You’re very patient. In itself it probably proved to your kids that exFW was grossly misrepresenting the situation.
OMG, Viktoria, I’m so sorry! That was so unbelievably cruel of ex and son. Where were your other children at Christmas when you spent it alone with a friend??
They were with their dad, (visiting) in their childhood home, our home. With the fire in the fireplace, Christmas songs playing and hot chocolate on tap, doing stockings & presents together.
That is so painful, I am so sorry. I hope some day your son makes amends, he should. He didn’t have to mislead you, it is just another betrayal.
If he wanted to be with his father, he should have just told Viktoria from the start instead of blindsiding her and the whole family. Sounds like that apple didn’t fall far from Dad’s tree. The capper is Ex coming in and shitting on the whole family, what a prince.
Agreed on, “he should have just told Viktoria from the start instead of blindsiding her and the whole family..” I am trusting that the “apple” thing is not true but that son was just dealing with massive cognitive dissonance and pitying and believing the lying, cheating eX. Thank you.
While we were together, he perpetually bought the kids things he wanted, often in a panic right before the holiday. It did not make for a pleasant time at all, particularly after the kids politely engaged with his gifts at first and then put them aside. I had spent a great deal of time on their gifts, telling him what I was thinking, and they liked my gifts. But his…arg. One year he gave them oscilloscopes. Ok, kind of fun for a bit, but those sat in the basement for years afterwards. I don’t remember now if he got rid of them before we split or when he came to get his stuff, but I remember how the college kids left behind gifts he had given them when we were packing and moving to sell the house.
But yes, the first three post-separation Christmas seasons were bad, particularly when the judge had all the paperwork in early December and yet hadn’t signed off yet. Agony, waiting! It turns out his attorney had purposely left off one item so he didn’t have to deal with my STBX that month. After Christmas, he sent a runner over with the form, and the judge signed off just before New Year’s. All my attorney could tell me was that everything on our side was complete and carefully submitted. My ex’s attorney wanted his client to think it was the judge who delayed it…LOL.
Now my holidays are fun and meaningful. I have a date to go out with my girlfriends to dinner and a concert in December, and then another to go to a Christmas musical with a friend. I missed the first Christmas in the house I bought because I was caring for a recently widowed relative, but even that was good. We had an early Christmas with the neighbor, and then a quiet Christmas at home that included dinner out and a drive in the mountains when it was snowing. The following Christmas was glorious with my adult kids, and I expect a good one this year.
Lord, the bad presents! The bad presents! He’s the king of terrible presents. a few years ago, he told me he’d “Moved Beyond the Concept of Physical Gifts” as an excuse for buying the children nothing. Last summer, he got my youngest and their sibling, WHO ARE TWEENS, cheap, ugly, “traditional peruvian rattles” that his latest girlfriend had brought home from some tourist shop– it was my youngest’s birthday, and he told them “Your present is you get to decide which one is yours and which one is your siblings.”
They, understandably, have never touched the damn things again. RATTLES.
My husband, who I caught doing online dating (he never actually met anyone so we worked it out and are still together) got me nose hair clippers that year. And no…..I do not have nose hairs that need clipping….or braiding. I suspect he originally got them for his father who was in dire need of that.
Exactly. I could write a chapter or two about the oddball gifts and the cards he used to give me, full of loving praise, when the truth was that he despised me most of our marriage.
One time I was telling him that it would be nice to get a genuine complement here and there that wasn’t related to dinner and/or sex. He told me that he didn’t believe in flattery, so I should get used to how things were because it wasn’t going to change. And no, it didn’t. In many ways, the contempt just piled up until he finally decided that he was done with marriage and family.
There was the Christmas when my ex was knee deep in his first affair, while treating me with a mix of disdain and neglect.
I had made known that the two items on my Christmas list were a bathrobe and a book that had just come out. The bathrobe I bought myself and wrapped it up because I was confident that it was the only way I would receive it. I was right!
The book I had asked for he bought and gave to the affair partner.
My present from him? On Christmas morning he rode his bike to a neighborhood convenience store and bought 2 Snickers bars which he dropped into my stocking. I hadn’t really liked or bought Snickers for years by that time. 🙁
Oh How I remember the efforts I made on X’s behalf to give him something that would mean something to him. I bought expensive gifts like tools and hunting gear, things I knew he’d use and love. And his response to me was always “meh”. Never any enthusiasm or a heartfelt thank you.
Over the years, after never receiving anything I had asked for, no matter how humble, I started to leave a Letter for Santa on the fridge months ahead of the holiday. I thought, now there’s no way he can forget to get me a present, or know what I want. Nope. Those lists were never fulfilled.
My ex never was one to buy gifts for anyone. Never for his family, never once for my family, and not often or always for me except for my birthday, and generally then it was the same gift over and over (flowers, that sort of thing). I always bought (or made!) the gifts for his parents, his sister, our nieces, etc. I absolutely love gift giving (far more than gift receiving) so it didn’t bother me, and I just accepted the fact that he “sucked at picking out gifts.”
Then I got very, very ill with a neurological injury, and for several years the gifts stopped coming, almost totally. I accepted this because he was caring for me, and what right did I have to expect presents when I was making my husband so miserable and ruining his life with my illness? Wasn’t my continued existence enough of a gift? Wasn’t the fact that he cared for me and didn’t divorce me enough? It was selfish of me to expect anything else, as he did so much for me.
I never stopped giving gifts during this time though, as sick as I was. I’ll never forget the Christmas that I sent my ex up to his sister’s house (where we used to spend Christmas) with presents I’d picked out for him and his entire family. I was too sick to go and would be spending Christmas alone. He came home empty handed. No gifts for me from his family (not even a card) and none from him. I was very isolated by then, and while my own parents sent a card with a check, there was literally not a single gift for me to unwrap. It hurt.
During the divorce, I brought this issue up, saying how much it hurt me. That I’d still tried in the small ways I could to show my love, including getting him gifts. He knew I had nothing that Christmas, and yet he still gave me nothing. My telling him this evoked such a serious rage that I’ll never forget it. He practically spat at me: “you couldn’t be my wife but I was supposed to be your husband?!?” He was outraged. Indignant. This was the perfect illustration of how selfish I was, how unreasonable. “I was really sick….” was all I said. He went silent, realizing his mask had slipped.
I realize now that he used this excuse to cheat for years: that I was “no longer his wife” due to the severity of my illness. He’d told me this several times during my illness, which as you can imagine was completely heartbreaking. Yet I tried… I was mostly bedridden and extremely limited, but I tried to still be his wife and friend in all the ways that I could (yes, including sex even when I had no energy or desire for it; I never stopped having sex for fear of him cheating on me or leaving me. It was the main focus, always). Of course, I now see that he was likely cheating well before I got sick, but that’s another story.
In any case, I doubt his family will be receiving anything from him this Christmas, even though I’m sure they will give him gifts… no doubt in his mind they don’t deserve it. Meanwhile, this time last year I discovered that he’d spent roughly $15,000 over 3 weekends with the OW, which included the finest hotels, wine, five star dining, gifts aplenty, and who knows what else. How generous.
That is a heart-rending story. What a monster. I hope your health has improved since then.
Then the Thanksgiving before we separated was awful, too. We lived outside the US in a place where Thanksgiving wasn’t a thing. My ex decided he needed to go on a work trip over Thanksgiving.
While I was totally by myself on Thanksgiving, Cheater took the day off and for the first time ever he single handedly prepared a full Thanksgiving meal for his teammates who had never had an American Thanksgiving before. (He would’ve only invited his 2nd affair partner who was on the team if he could get away with it, I’m sure). Something makes me suspect that he wasn’t griping and snipping at HER the way he did when we hosted a holiday meal at our home.
DDay was the morning of Christmas Eve and I told X I wanted a divorce. I would shortly host our extended families for dinner, after all of us attending Christmas Eve service together at church. I did not cancel. I woke up the next morning and did the usual presents and celebrating with our three children. I will never forget telling them (over the next few days) that I was going to file for divorce. Nothing says “Most Wonderful Time of the Year” like taking your 15-year old son upstairs “to talk.”
In some ways, it was like having a tooth pulled at the dentist: good to have it over with. The downside has been that my kids and I still deal with residual holiday trauma. Eight years later, we’re all very meh about the traditions, religious and secular, that used to make Christmas such a special time. Sorry, baby Jesus 🙁
Oh, fun, I have one! I had been growing suspicious of my exFW’s texting and phone habits over the course of the year. Finally, in the middle of December, when her family was in our house for two straight weeks leading up to Christmas, she finds a moment of privacy to confess to me that she was growing worried about her “ability to remain faithful” vis a vis one of her students. I said that we would put a pin in this conversation until after her family went home. This was not my first rodeo with her cheating, so I had developed the ability to choke back certain emotions, but needless to say it was a bit … challenging keeping up appearances for Christmas with her family and the kids. After her family cleared out, we were together for New Year’s and she was falling-down drunk. She comes downstairs wearing her high school prom dress. She asked me that night what my New Year’s resolution was, and I said “this year, I am going to stand up for myself.” She went white as a sheet.
A few days later I noticed a Snapchat photo she had saved on her phone where she had sent a photo of herself in her prom dress to the student in question. By mid-January I asked for a divorce.
She was banging students? Gross! Did you report her for it?
No. I thought long and hard about it, even as to whether I had an ethical duty to do so, but ultimately I didn’t. She’s not a high school teacher – she’s a college professor, the student was a 21 year-old adult, and he was graduating in 4 months. Also, I was in crisis, so maybe I wasn’t making the best decisions. I wanted the separation and divorce to be quick, uncontentious, and low cost. I didn’t want to drag the pain out for years and make things really ugly. I just wanted her gone. Maybe that was the wrong decision, but it’s the one I made.
It’s been three years and I haven’t told anyone in our community. No one has asked, and I’m not the type to gossip. Also, it’s humiliating. It is amazing to see how indifferent people are. Switzerlands everywhere!
Understandable.
Our marriage had been strained and she was being treated for depression by a psychiatrist. I was walking on eggshells and dodging flaming arrows all the time. It was just before Christmas and we were hosting dinner and a gift exchange for her family. Plus, as a First grade teacher she was wrapping up school. Two days before Christmas she announces that she is going to use her two week holiday to recover from a “laser facial” from her dermatologist. First I heard of it and it was expensive. I could drive her to her treatment or she would make other plans. She would be fine to be a hostess to her family.. Trying to be a dutiful husband, l agreed and brought her home with her face wrapped in bandages and put her to bed. She woke up early in the morning in great discomfort and took more pain medication. When the sun came up it was time to change her bandages and apply topical medications. She looked like a swollen, sunburned chipmunk. Her skin was oozing. It only got worse. Calls to the MD went unreturned. Eyes were almost swollen shut, she had chills and was in agony. I felt so sorry for her.
I finished the shopping list and prepped as much as I could for the dinner the next day. I also canceled our attendance at my families Christmas Eve gathering as XW needed me at home. She was in agony all night. I kept her on scheduled medications and pumped fluid into her. She was literally a hot mess. Meanwhile our two teen sons had to wait to open presents as she could not drag out of bed and I set to work cooking and setting up tables.
Her family shows up and we eat dinner and exchange gifts. XW finally drags out for a few minutes, but her face looks like an inflamed boil! Lots of sympathy and goes back to bed. I clean up, tend to her needs and spend time with our kids who are kind of forgotten this Christmas. The following days she slowly go better, but was in no way fully recovered when she went back to work, which was her goal. At the time I could not understand why she did not wait until her long Summer vacation, but I figured out later. Three months after her plastic surgery she wants a divorce. A month later I discover she is cheating with a younger coworker. This was all about trolling for a younger guy and it could not wait for Summer. I also got stuck for the sugeons bill which she put on a little used joint credit card and never paid any of the balance. She laughed during settlement meetings when I said I didn’t think I should be required to pay for that. I consider that bill blood money and remain virtually no contact with her after two decades.
Evil, conniving woman. I’m watching a friend going through shit with his evil, conniving wife, and the level of manipulation, lies, deceit, scheming – not only towards her husband, but towards her AP who apparently didn’t even realize she was still married (he lives in another state where she went for a few months allegedly to take care of her sick mother). She bamboozled both men to try to get into a situation where she got part of each man’s business (she stole a LOT of money from her STBX husband)…..I’m just amazed at what these people do.
Holidays are such an obvious time for their masks to slip. We actually broke up for good over the holidays. His behavior had been so appalling and stressful for so many months that my parents bought tickets for me and the kids to visit them out of state after Xmas, just to spend some time away. When this plan was presented to him, he was fine with it.
On Christmas Day, which was a dreadful event during which the children opened presents the identity of which he was not even familiar with, as he had so little interest in their lives and well-being, and I opened a votive prayer candle (I am not religious) that he got for the kids to give to me… we took a long walk and discussed how maybe we should separate, as he was not interested in changing any of his behavior (though he made a point of pointing out to me how much he still loved me and was dying to, and I quote “have kinky sex” with me, so long as I stopped harping on him about having a job, contributing to the family, and cutting it out with the girlfriends.) We ended the conversation saying that we’d talk about it more when I returned. He also installed an app on my phone so I could see that he WASN’T visiting his girlfriend while I was away.
I took the kids to my parents for the week. While there, I received panicked phone calls from friends and even his parents, saying he reported alternately that I was “moving out” (his father asked if I needed a ride from the airport to my “new apartment”) to that he was turning the basement of our home into a separate apartment, from which he would live “on weeks he was responsible for the children”, and then, on alternate weeks, he planned “to travel.” (My friends didn’t know what he was talking about, as our basement was NOT an apartment, had no kitchen, etc., nor did they know where I was going to live during those weeks.)
I called him to ask what all of his friends and family were talking about. He didn’t want to discuss that, but he did want to discuss about how he was flying across the country to go away to a New Year’s festival with the latest girlfriend, because it was all of a sudden VITALLY important for him to have a big NYE blowout bash, and I’d left him home alone, and he has no one to celebrate New Year’s with, and etc. etc. Of note: for the at least seven year’s prior to this one, our NYE had consisted of either staying home with the kids and doing a fake cartoon Netflix countdown with sparkling cider at 7 PM or going over to a friend’s house with their young kids and doing similar. NYE blowouts were not our thing and we hadn’t so much as been at a party in over a decade. I hadn’t made it to midnight in ages. But all of a sudden, I was depriving him of a vital life experience. I said to him right on the phone that if he did this, don’t bother coming back. And that was that.
Now, he won’t even give me money for presents for the kids so I stopped signing his name on the cards. But what he does with Xmas is NOTHING compared to what he does with birthdays.
The lack of love and interest in their own kids just astounds me. Even if one falls out of love with a spouse, how can someone not love or care for their kids. Children are the greatest responsibility AND joy in life and one’s legacy to the world and the future. I just can’t understand treating kids like this no matter what’s going on in your life.
Because it’s a false narrative, that they “fell out of love” with the spouse. I “fell out of love” with my spouse, because he treated me like crap. He didn’t “fall out of love” with me. I just stopped being a useful idiot.The children are only interesting to these people in so far as they are useful to him. That’s why they get trotted out for special occasions, or he shows up to take credit for their accomplishments, or uses them as a football in negotiations. He doesn’t actually care for their well-being or them as people. They’re just another appliance. Right now, he’s trying to prove he’s father of the year, so he occasionally shows up to read “bedtime stories” to the youngest — last time it was some Sesame Street picture book. My youngest is in third grade. They read novels.
FW seemed like a really good dad when our daughter was a baby and in day care because she was a total ‘daddy’s girl’. But once she started preschool, her world expanded beyond us, her parents. She was interested in her friends and her teachers. And FW spent less time with her. She and I were always together because he works every other weekend and when he’s working during the week, he’s on 12-hour shifts, so it would be me from wake up to bedtime and he’d get home just before or just after. Now that I know he started cheating when she was in preschool, thinks make so much sense. Just when he was tiring of me AND our daughter was less ‘all about daddy’ is when he started going and finding new avenues (vajayjays) to explore. He now spends about 10 hours/week with our daughter, always talking about how she’s the most important person in the world but he never asks to see her on a weekend and never wants any overnights.
Ah, Christmas– the season when all overgrown psycho babies turn the occasion into a war to compete with children and pass their misery-soaked FOO traditions on to subsequent generations.
The affair covered two Christmas family vacations. Because the affair began right before the first Christmas, it lends to my impression that Christmas season had always particularly triggered FWs Cluster B spoilerism (“tendency to compulsively wreck meaningful occasions”). It may also have triggered something called “compulsive reenactment” because his disordered parents had always dramatically ruined Christmas. He’d also been sexually assaulted as a teen by an older male family friend during Christmas. But the odd thing is that the affair seems to have given FW an outlet to wreck the holiday covertly without his usual seasonal sulking withdrawals and “depressions.” That might explain why FW was uncharacteristically cheerful during the two “cheating Christmases,” though immediately following these events, he’d do a 180 and become a horror show.
I was so traumatized by the radical turnarounds that I admit to dredging for answers and skein-untangling after D-Day. Being privy to certain office gossip and FW doing the “full disclosure” thing during an attempt at RIC therapy (ugh) actually solved a lot of the mystery. For instance, apparently the AP’s manic Pickme texting during family holidays made FW feel like a swaggering Numero Uno King Sparkle Dick who had the whole harem under his thumb (thus proving he wasn’t gay, see, really really not gay…). According to the AP’s gossiping friends, it appears that whenever FW would spend time with family on important holidays, this imploded the AP’s “delulu” fantasies that FW would imminently dump his family. She was apparently a follower of the TikTok “radical manifestation” dating trend where, if someone visualizes an outcome hard enough and willfully interprets the vaguest cues as future promise, then the “delusionship” will become real.
By what the AP drunkenly confided in friends and coworkers, she had the whole thing worked out in her head and “knew” that FW would eventually come around on his own and see that this was fate. But when family holidays burst the bubble and made her question her “visualization,” the AP would crash, become depressed and needy, then furious. Turns out FW’s ego gets super cranked by “depressed and needy.” But after each Christmas, the AP would switch tack and began making ultimatums and punishing. FW would react by continuing to trawl other office doorknobs and the AP would go on Tinder dates but, whoops, they both apparently got rejected. The AP suddenly becoming difficult immediately following family holidays and FW getting a reminder he wasn’t God’s gift seems to have, in turn, crashed FW’s James Bond/King Dick delusions. Consequently, following each Christmas, FW would go into a massive tizzy and suddenly scapegoat me, accusing me of being bad for his self esteem.
I had no idea I’d been assigned the job of delusion-fluffer who was supposed to salve the ego boo-boos FW got trying to be a player on the meat market. I don’t think he was actually following the PUA-type subreddits but, in retrospect, what he was doing looked like the PUA “success begets success” protocol of using certain women as ego boosts which is supposed to magically increase one’s success in scoring with endless randos. Is the “radical manifestation/delulu” bs really just a product of collective narcissism?
So many questions. It’s hard not to untangle skeins in trying to figure out these mutant MOs. But at least learning so many details of the icky drama actually helped me give myself a little credit for stubbornly making what is essentially a *children’s* holiday about the actual children in the situation– despite the best efforts of these two bloated, binge-drinking, grown-ass, petrified, delusional babies who rampaged around in soggy diapers trying to make it about themselves. My kids told me they have only good memories of those and other Christmases and occasions. That’s all I care about at this point– the fact that I foiled the inter-generational Grinching and preserved some of the kids’ childhood memories.
“(“tendency to compulsively wreck meaningful occasions”)”
My father didn’t cheat on my mother, at least not with women (I completely forgot for years and just remembered that I caught him in gay activity at one point – I JUST REMEMBERED THIS! so maybe he wasn’t that interested in women…..I don’t know)….but he always drank very heavily on holidays and always wrecked them. Even if he got me a nice gift (and we were poor so it was an effort) he always ruined the holiday (or most weekends) by getting roaring drunk and sometimes violent. We used to dread it when we knew he was coming home. What a sad life they make for their families. And how much we suppress, I’d completely forgotten about what I discovered as a teenager about his “activities”.
Interesting how you comment that maybe your ex did this shit to reassure himself he wasn’t gay – maybe that was my father’s motive as well. For God’s sake, just accept it and stop torturing other people!
In FW’s case I don’t think he was naturally gay but I think being molested as a teen by a mentor he loved and depended on (who pretty much inducted FW into a cult) left him confused and worried people would perceive him as gay. Being a “playah” might have been partly to compensate for self doubt because rape was his first sexual experience.
Though I recognize that it’s a really serious trauma, my sympathy for adult former victims ends where the internalization and reenactment begin. He betrayed me and the kids in analogous ways to how this family friend betrayed and exploited him. He lied, gaslighted, covered up, blame-reversed and minimized harm in the same way too.
There was something else I read about domestic abusers when training for advocacy– basically that, in order to have a sexual preference, one needs a “self” and a soul first. In any case, it seems a lot of abusers are onions and so empty that they’d have sex with a pizza box or underage circus animals if that’s all that was available.
In advocacy we started calling these types “abusosexuals” as if it was a third gender since so many, though ostensibly straight, might also switch hit or sexually abuse a boy “just cause.” So I’ve sometimes wondered if that emptiness caused FW more doubt than usual. It was interesting that in the film “Shame” about a sexually compulsive, apparently straight guy, the character end up hooking up in a gay club as he starts losing his grip. Was this a depiction of emerging bisexuality or just soulless abusosexuality?
Has anyone ever taken the time to think about how hard it is for narcissists on holidays and birthdays (that are not their own)? My God, it’s like a whole day where they aren’t the center of everyone’s attention!
My ex was once mad at me because we had traveled to visit friends the weekend of his birthday. I got him a gift and a cake and everybody sang to him but it was also the birthday of a friend’s 3 year old and they had a party in the park for her. He was upset because he felt the 3 year old overshadowed his birthday and it wasn’t fair. I remember just staring at him and saying, “she’s three…” A grown man, jealous of a 3 year old’s birthday party. Maybe he wanted a bounce house? LOL
He wanted adult night training diapers lol.
Oh, but the worst are the landmark birthdays that make narcs feel old. The radioactive gloom, oh noes.
FW will turn 50 next year. Are any of his harem of 20-something hoes gonna celebrate that with/for him? Since his entire life seems to be about living like a 25yo bachelor, I sincerely doubt he’s going to want any attention given to it. Which really makes me want to unblock him and post a HUGE happy 50th on his social channels.
Oh, my Cheating, Abusive Douche of an Ex never went a whole day without being the center of everyone’s attention. If he ever discovered he *wasn’t* the center of attention, he’d either have a tantrum (if we were home alone) or sparkle like crazy so he *was* the center of attention.
Yes, my mom was a narc addict (just like my ex), and I couldn’t remember a single happy holiday with her. I pretty much got the same from my ex, particularly after his pill habit took over.
Not a FW story particularly but a general holiday/gift giving one. I’m bad at gifts, uncomfortable receiving them, stressed out giving them. Are they thoughtful enough? Too much? We grew up poor after my father abandoned my mother and us four children for his teen-aged, pregnant mistress. Like, completely disappeared so he wouldn’t have to pay child support. My FW did the same by moving to places that didn’t have reciprocal agreements – England, the Caribbean, etc. Gifts from my Mom were practical; pjs, socks, one toy each, maybe a board game to share.
People tried giving me gifts over the years but they always made me squirm. FW tended toward cutesy, dumb, impractical – envision a stuffed animal sporting a tiny gold chain. For an adult woman. The baby snapped it off my neck within weeks.
I tried to swallow my discomfort and be gracious over the years. The one person who gave gifts I looked forward to was my Aunt. She sent cards for Christmas and birthdays and they were filled with news of her daily life. I loved them (and her). They frequently included a check, sometimes quite a generous one. I told her the money made me uncomfortable and we had a very heated discussion. She said that she and her late husband would have been so happy to receive what people wanted to give them and that she was now in a position to do what she wanted with her money and if she wanted to give it to me I should just say “thank you” and cash the check. Second guessing her was insulting.
A few days before the first Christmas after she died I came home late from work to find a package on my porch. She was the only person who came to mind who would send me a present by mail, but that couldn’t be the case now, surely. I gathered it up, took it inside with happy anticipation to find that it was the colonoscopy prep kit I had signed up for weeks previous. Fitting. I howled with laughter. Thank you, Aunt Evy.
My FW decided to come clean mid-December. He felt he needed to also let me know that he never wanted children (we had a 3 year old at the time). To add insult to injury, I found out he had been siphoning off the funds that were supposed to go to bills to a secret bank account because he thought he was moving to Australia to be with Schmoopie. Apparently that didn’t work out with her boyfriend who was living with her there so she told him no.
I spent the holiday season desperately trying to prevent our water and electricity from being shut off and wondering how I would find any money at all for gifts for our child. It was the worst holiday season ever. He left just after Christmas, which I spent with my son and parents elsewhere. When we got back he had moved out. That was the actual gift, since when he left and I no longer had to bankroll his insanity, I found that I was doing a lot better than I was when he lived with me. Merry Christmas to me!
It was one of many things that I didn’t understand at the time and only many sense much later on and with a great deal of hindsight.
In 2014 I got home from work, having finished for the Christmas Holiday break and – as I came through the door – I walked into what I can only describe now as an ambush. A clearly drunk Ex-Mrs LFTT started needling me from the get go and as soon as I reacted (raising my voice to say that I had no idea what she was on about), she launched into a tirade about all of my alleged deficiencies, shortfalls and character defects. She then finished off with something about an impending house move connected with my work and that “I shouldn’t assume that she would be moving with me.” She then stormed off to her her room not to be heard from for the next of the night, leaving me and 3 children questioning “what the f*ck was that all about?” Needless to say, she went out of her way to ruin what proved to be our last Christmas together as a “family” ….. it was truly dreadful.
What I now know is that she was deeply depressed and on medication that should not be mixed with alcohol, as well as being deep into her affair with her AP (an ex-boyfriend of hers who I now know to have always been “the one” as far as she was concerned).
Anyway, that was that; she didn’t move with the kids and I, choosing to be with her AP after the kids found out what was actually going on – that she was cheating with her former boyfriend/AP – the following Easter. On the upside, she hasn’t managed to ruin a Christmas for the kids and I since then …. if only because the kids have never spent a Christmas or New Year with her since she left in 2015.
And the kids and I are planning on a fantastic Christmas this year; a Christmas in which she plays no part.
LFTT
LFTT– I think you’re in the UK and might not be familiar with “Festivus,” the invented alternative holiday on Seinfeld in which families air their grievances, attack each other and demonstrate feats of strength by climbing the festivus pole. Clearly your exFW was a Frank Costanza fan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1njzgXSzA-A
HoaC,
I am in the UK and perhaps Ex-Mrs LFTT was channelling her inner Frank Costanza for the last 10 years we were together.
That ……. or just maybe she wasn’t a very nice person .
LFTT
May she get the face she deserves and end up eventually looking like Frank Costanza.
HoaC,
I suspect that just being Ex-Mrs LFTT and the fact that things didn’t play out anything close to how she thought they would is punishment enough for her. I don’t need to wish her ill; she does it to herself.
LFTT
True meh is when wishing them ill feels like too much proximity. I get it.
LFTT, horrible story and very familiar. The night before our last skiing holiday, I walked in from work at about 8 to find a completely drunk ex who had done nothing to get ready for our very early flight the next morning. He was sitting watching Gardener’s World with a bottle of wine that was probably his second bottle. No food prepared, bins not put out, absolutely nothing done. I loved our ski holidays (my birthday happened while we were away) and had been excited. He completely ruined the evening (and the holiday – I was so stressed I ended up with my first injury in years of skiing). The row picking, the flouncing, the smirking, total roller coaster. At one point I said I wasn’t going with him if that’s how he was going to behave. The irony is that my Christmas present (the last one ever) was a ski jacket! Which is about to go on Vinted. I assume that exgfOW was creating issues behind the scenes because he was going away with me and he was supposed to have dumped me by then (took another 8 months or so). It’s amazing how, no matter how much I may have loved him and I did, the relief of not having to be near him in his drunken oaf persona outweighs the love. He dragged me down to someone I don’t recognise now.
I’m not sure whether to chalk up FWs’ holiday or post-holiday tantrums to APs stirring things up behind the scenes because male chumps have similar stories of wrecked holidays. I get the feeling that typical OMs don’t lobby as hard for exclusivity on important holidays as OWs tend to. This is why I think these mutants are probably mostly carrying on some dysfunctional ancestral tradition of ruining special occasions.
I remember the furtive glances around the room in the last months when fw would walk in and desperately try to find something with which to launch a tirade against me. Before the year of discard, had he done that I would have walked out, or even shot something back. But, this was different, it was frightening and I just would stand there and let him rant until he stormed out with I can only assume was a raging hard on to schmoopies arms.
In hind sight I realize I was in the fetal position waiting for the end.
I’ve mentioned this little gem before, but its one of my favorite WTF moments of our marriage. The last Christmas we spent together (2014) X Ass ‘gave’ me a digital camera. Then he said, “Well, I bought the camera for myself. But I’ll let you use it.”
And he wondered why I put the ‘gift’ down and walked away without saying a word.
In the years since my escape I have come to realize that several of the presents I have gotten from him over the years were actually obtained through affair partners, or people who’s pants he was trying to get into.
Christmas Eve, I put a few presents for our teenagers, my gift to FW, and a gift I bought for myself (as usual) under the tree. When I came downstairs the next morning, the pile had grown more than I thought possible. Santa had come! There were two giant boxes and a whole flood of smaller ones moving out from the tree. It didn’t take long for us to realize, as the boys and I opened our presents quickly, that every single box, every single one, was from FW to FW. A new 4K Digital TV. A $700 sound bar. A mountain bike. Apple Earbuds. An Apple Watch.
“It’s the best Christmas, ever” crowed FW, as the three of us sat there watching him, mouths hanging open.
He told me that he was moving out three days later – he did and took all that stuff with him.
This story, however, has a happy ending. Over the ensuing months, as our finances were still combined, I racked up an astounding $7,000 in gift cards, buying a few every time I went to the grocery store.
Happy Christmas to Me!
Bravo! I wish I had had that opportunity when I left.
A few years after we were married, X said we should open a joint account and put $ into it for household expenses. Now I was severely underemployed at the time as we were living in a remote tribal community where he was a health aide. There were very few jobs in that community, and what there was available, all the good paying ones went to the tribal members. X made more than 3 times what I did. He never shared his paycheck. Never told me what he was spending $ on. And guess who put the majority of $ into that ‘joint’ account? Hint, it wasn’t him. And then when we divorced, he contested everything and had to go to property mediation. He asked for 1/2 of that account (> than$500 in it) which he hadn’t put a single $ into in over a decade.
My Christmas story is nowhere near as horrifying or mind-bending as many but in the rearview should’ve been a big red flag to me. SIGH.
For years I would hoard all my holiday time for Christmas. My favorite holiday and favorite time of year, I would spend 1-2 weeks at my parents’ house with all my siblings, including those 20 years younger than me. It was a big, happy holiday with family. When FW came along he happily entered into this plan as his family didn’t do anything for holidays (after his parents’ divorce–due to his FW dad coming out of the closet and admitting to 20 years of cheating with men). After proposing to me, FW accessed an amazing program at his work (hospital) and became a nurse with everything paid for by his employer. Once he became a nurse the holiday schedule changed a bit. He would come up to my parents with me, leave for a few days to work, and then return to spend the rest of the time with us. Then, a few years ago (our daughter was kindergarten-aged), things changed. He would insist on us taking separate cars up to my parents. He would come up a few days after me and our daughter, spend a couple of days (max), and then leave for work and not come back. Instead of 2 weeks, he would spend a few days with us but he would call and text regularly. He usually managed to spend Christmas Day with us and I always got wonderful, costly gifts. I NEVER SUSPECTED ANYTHING. You all know where he really was: with the child mistress (or another AP, I’m sure), in a hotel room, or taking holiday trips. Calling out from work.
It is weird how they can get us trained to accept weird stuff.
My fw was never a generous gift giver, it was usually a robe for Christmas, and honestly for quite a few years we didn’t have much, it certainly was fine for me. But as he made more money nothing much changed. He was of course spending any extra on his dick and gambling. I don’t think he used professional whores, he used lay whores, but they have to get paid in dinners and gifts as quiet money.
He rarely remembered my birthday, and when he would realize he forgot he made jokes and in hindsight I think he took pride in it. I just accepted it was who he was. Funny he used a pocket calendar and was anal about writing down all his schedule and appts, but it never occurred to me he never wrote down my Bday.
In my defense I was pretty busy doing his bidding, and working and honestly it just wasn’t that important to me. But when I found out how much he was spending on the whore it tore me apart.
That’s pretty shocking. What an epic creep. I hope your days are now blessed wit peace and joy.
If I can just manage to get divorced from him they’ll be even more peaceful! He’s been dragging his feet for over a year, refusing to do Discovery, not filing or initiating anything so I have to pay for everything. He makes more than double what I do so I can’t afford to drive the divorce anymore. But he won’t. I’ll be stuck married to him forever if he doesn’t move on it.
I know it is difficult, but he could run you into huge financial ruin in the meantime.
Maybe take enough out of the accounts to pay for your lawyer, they know how to get it moving.
Oh, I’m on lawyer #2 and he has spent everything. I am paying all my lawyer stuff on credit, which is killing me. The whole thing is a nightmare.
I am so sorry, that is so difficult.
It’s funny, I have to work hard to remember anymore. It’s only been 8 years since DDay, but I’m so at meh that I have forgotten — or just buried the trauma LOL.
As I read through many of the comments, I remembered that FW hardly ever “remembered” to get gifts for me….this included the holidays, Valentines, my birthday. His go to was to just order flowers last minute. Or I’d get a Vitamix or Nespresso machine that I was buying anyway and he’d call that his “gift.” Nothing wrapped though.
For me, the worst part was dealing with his awful parents and getting no protection from FW. His Mother loved to tell everyone how she’s “such an awful gift giver” (tee hee hee) and then she’d make everyone make a list of what they wanted….but she’d never choose from the list. Every year I asked for Starbucks gift cards… and never got them in 14 years. Instead, she’d give me random pants several sizes too big (passive aggressive and mean)… and FW wouldn’t do anything. And we would all be forced to sit in a circle for HOURS opening gifts one at a time. It was excrutiating. FW made us deal with that shit.
Now I’m free, but my son still had to deal for a little while. He still talks about the awful “gift circle.” But that shit stopped for my son when FW tried to drag him to church early on (son is Jewish and wasn’t having it). FW carried on and was embarrassing him, so son gave up altogether. Now son won’t spend Christmas with any of them.
And it turns out (from what I’ve heard occasionally from the other family) AP doesn’t go visit at Christmas either LOL. I think she went maybe twice and has since stopped. Dang — I was so hoping she took that over since she wanted my life so much.
What comes across over and over again in these sad responses is that the holidays, especially Christmas, highlight the bad qualities of these FWs so succinctly and perfectly. The cheapness, the thoughtlessness, the outright cruelty even to sadism, the delusions, the self absorption…..the holidays bring out the best in some people and really showcase the worst in others. If you ever wonder what someone’s really like, maybe spending a holiday with them is a good way to tell.
Good idea. Surprise them on Christmas. If you see dysfunction or a Festivus pole, run! 😀
We had been discussing marriage, and a few weeks before Christmas he asked me what kind of ring I wanted. “What do you want to see when you look at your hand for the rest of your life?” I told him I wanted an oval diamond and “about this big” (showing him my .33 caret diamond necklace I had gotten for myself when I finished my graduate degree). I thought I was getting an engagement ring for Christmas. He actively encouraged me to believe that.
Under the tree on Christmas morning was an ENORMOUS box . . . you could have put a full sized recliner in that thing. Inside that box was a smaller box, and inside that a smaller box, and so forth. Finally, I got to a box about a foot square, and inside that was a clay garlic roaster. Inside THAT was a note that said “Just kidding,” and a tiny ring-sized box. THAT box had another note in it to the effect of he couldn’t afford a ring, but “it’s the thought that counts.”
And I went ahead and married the fuckwit anyway. I never did get an engagement ring.
How bizarre to veil a prank as “romance.” There’s no way to even categorize it. I think you just got bamboozled into submission.
And the LAST Christmas I spent with the CAD (Cheating Abusive Douche) . . .
I left in October 2017 with what I could carry (and the dog) after finding out about the girlfriend and realizing I was too angry to live with him. At the time, we had been living on our boat because that was our dream for retirement, and had been cruising for a year. I rented a car (because I no longer owned one) drove a thousand miles to a landlocked state I’d never envisioned as a future home and moved in with my best friend who had just lost her husband to cancer. It was a sad autumn. She missed her husband, and I missed the person I thought I had married. And the boat. I still miss the boat. For Christmas, my best friend flew out west to be with her family, and I (because he asked me to and I was hopeful he’d come to his senses) rented a car and drove back to Florida to spend Christmas with the CAD. That year, he bought me a pair of Wonder Woman socks for Christmas. (I had scrimped and saved to buy him a nice gift.) But wait — it gets worse.
In the two short months I’d been gone from the boat, the marina had suddenly decided everyone was to be recycling and built a recycling station. On the morning of Christmas Eve, I’d finished a bottle of water (he never got around to cleaning the water tanks, and the water was too disgusting to drink) and threw the empty in the trash. I didn’t know about the recycling yet. He threw an absolute tantrum about how careless I was, and how when he visits someone else’s home, he goes out of his way to clean up after himself but I couldn’t be bothered. (He has never gone out of his way to clean up after himself in the quarter century we were together.) I apologized, and we went to the movies, then out to dinner at an Indian restaurant I loved. We were halfway through dinner in a very crowded dining room full of happy people celebrating the holiday, when he suddenly began to SCREAM at me for not recycling the damned water bottle. He called me nasty names and insulted me, telling me he thought he could forgive me for all of my “shit,” but he couldn’t because I was too lazy and selfish. Then he threw down his napkin and stormed out of the restaurant leaving me ugly-crying, sitting over a half-finished dinner with everyone in the dining room staring at me. I think if I hadn’t had the keys to the rental car in my pocket, he would have driven off and left me there. That’s the moment I knew my marriage was completely over — there was nothing to work with there. He didn’t think he needed to be sorry about cheating, but was *convinced* I owed him abject apologies for throwing that water bottle in the trash.
I should have started driving west right then and there, but he was trying to hold the dog hostage so I waited until Boxing Day and managed to get the dog off the boat by myself while the CAD was sparkling at some 20 year olds at the marina pool. (50 pound dog had to be lifted four feet in the air and shoved out the hatch because he couldn’t climb the ladder.) The first time I drove to the Midwest, I cried the whole way and stopped frequently to talk myself into continuing on to my friend’s house. This time, I was so incandescently angry I drove the thousand miles straight through, stopping only for gas and bathroom breaks. The divorce became final the next Valentine’s Day.
I want to see that scene immortalized on film as the classic portrait of the blame-reversing psychological abuser so that future generations will be warned.
Oh, that reminds me of my story (one of many but this one has the most holiday-type theme). FW had been hinting for a while that he was about to get me a ring (we’d been talking about marriage off and on, and discussing ring types) and when I saw the card from a local jeweler (which I now suspect he left out on purpose) I was sure that he had gotten me an engagement ring. He kept telling me how excited he was about my holiday present and that I would really like it. So on to the actual holiday – he proudly brought out a box that looked way too large for a ring. It was a crappy open-box car radio that probably cost about $19. I was actually more insulted by the fact that he thought I’d consider it a fancy gift than the fact that he’d lied. He did apparently spend big money at that jeweler – shortly after the holidays, I saw AP (one of his law school classmates) swanning around with a brand-new diamond bracelet. I have no idea why I stayed with him after that but I did end up leaving after a couple more incidents (some involving that particular classmate, others involving generally abusive behavior).
FW went to the Christmas market with a (female) friend, stayed out all night, and then rolled home at 5pm the next day, telling me all sorts of strange things. Like, “even my mother didn’t have a problem with me staying out at night.” He said he got too much to drink and they decided to crash with a friend of hers nearby instead of driving home. Still didn’t explain why he was home so late.
I was too trusting to realize what it was. It felt weird in my gut, especially the things that came out of his mouth, but I didn’t know how to parse them. I naively thought, he’s so weird around his new friends. In my effort to be a good partner, I went on supporting his friendships.
Looking back, this should have been D-Day. It would have saved me a year and a half of suffering.
Hard to know how to parse personality disordered behavior when you don’t happen to have a personality disorder. Think of your confusion and bamboozlement as measures of your basic mental health.
“Hard to know how to parse personality disordered behavior when you don’t happen to have a personality disorder. ”
Exactly.
Planning a low-key, FW free holiday season at this point. D-day was in Feb of this year. Hard to face the holidays this year since last year this time FW was plotting his escape. Took off 4 days after Christmas in the dead of night to go to Eastern Europe (the war zone) to “help the people there.” No warning. Left me a note on the kitchen table. We all thought he was having a “late life crisis”or psychotic break. In reality, spent New Years in one of the neighboring countries waiting for his scam dating site bimbo who was a no show. Had to cancel his beach vacations and air bnb’s.. Oh well. Separated now almost 6 months. He was insufferable most of this year continuing on his dating sites, blowing his retirement, repetitive lying. Has gone downhill even more lately, resumed smoking, drinking. Landed in the hospital due to alcohol recently. Therapy for 9 months hasn’t improved anything. Has the nerve to expect all the privileges of being a grand-parent (step-grand-parent actually). Wants to put up Christmas lights at my house for the kids like in previous years. (Before he decided to blow up his and our lives.) Not happening. I’ll be doing it my way this year, whatever that ends up being.