Cheater Reactions to Being Caught
The Friday Challenge is cheater reactions to being caught. Especially any over the top ones.
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In the early days of the blog and holiday Freak of the Week contests, we had a winning story with BarristerBelle who described her then-husband’s reaction to being busted for cheating:
After D-Days 1-3, my (now) ex-husband was desperately pretending to reconcile. Then I saw OW-dingbat-paralegal’s text on his phone after we’d just had dinner with his grandmother. Here’s what happened next:
- He threw the deck chairs into the pool, then jumped into the pool fully clothed in his suit and shoes.
- As I was calling dingbat OW to have a chat with her, he ran into the house. After searching the rooms and yelling for him, I found him hiding upstairs, naked and lying in a sleeping bag on the floor.
- He didn’t feel like talking to me, so he stood up and — still wearing only the sleeping bag — bunny hopped his way out of the room, and slid down the stairs on his butt (like sledding down a hill!)
This tantrum, of course, was then immortalized into a cartoon. (BarristerBelle, last I heard, went on to have a very nice life.)
More bizarre cheater reactions to being caught
And if you think that’s weird, consider the fellow whose busted wife chewed their throw pillows when confronted. Also cartoon fodder.
Now, some of us might have stone cold sociopaths who, without any adaptive anxiety, react to being found out with immediate gaslighting and denial of all wrongdoing. But eventually the jig is up and many of them have Big Feelings.
Inappropriate, ridiculous, hypocritical feelings. But feelings all the same.
HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO THEM?
So your Friday Challenge is to describe the weirdest, most over-the-top cheater reaction to discovery or consequences.
Were any soft furnishing harmed? Sleeping bags defiled? Did anyone wet themselves? When the mindfuck channel of self-pity is set to 11, some freaky things can happen.
Do tell.
And if you’d like to tell me on voicemail for an upcoming podcast, you can leave me your bunny hopping tale of insanity here: Crazy Cheater Reactions to Being Caught!
TGIF!
Sorry to disappoint but klootzak is a stone cold sociopath. He plead the 5th in court and then when he was told that the statute of limitations had run out in Virginia on any potential criminal infidelity charge, he had to answer the question. “Did you have sex with OW when you stayed overnight at her apartment? Did you have sex with OW when you stayed overnight with her at the hotel?” Both times, UNDER OATH IN COURT, he said no he did not have sex with her. Didn’t even blink. My attorney then said, “Well, I guess you like slumber parties.” 😂
Ugh! My cheater tried to deny everything in the court ordered settlement conference with a retired judge leading it. He denied it until his home grown porn that he “accidentally” loaded to my son’s photo account was presented(not just one video either). Then FW denied it was him !!!!!🤣
Receipts and payments were also shown. He denied it, pleaded the 5th and anything else he could do to have his narrative believed. He failed but not after having a huge tantrum with his attorney, the retired judge and the officer called in to de-escalate him.
I am glad it is over. Coming up on the three year anniversary of freedom. Keep calm, it will soon be over. It is very hard to keep all the lies straight so eventually they will topple.
Mine’s a bit disappointing too. 😂. I’ve told it before, but; 1. Got himself a flat, refused to say where it was. 2. When I found out where it was, (and that the rat faced whore was living in it with him) frantic texts to me, she’s just helping me re-decorate! There’s nothing going on! She’s left! 3. Went to the flat, (at his invitation) rat faced whore’s clothes etc all over; She just forgot! I’m going to send her all her stuff! She slept in the spare room! Me, pointing out the sr was full of paint and ladders and no bed; she slept on the sofa! Lot’s more bullshit on the same lines, as I progressively found more and more evidence, including rat faced whore’s phone, gleefully recounting all the gifts etc fuckwit had given her; rat faced whore’s had nothing all her life! I’m just showing her how the other side lives, excuse me for being soft! Regretfully I was so chumpy I believed all this. 4. Fast forward to me finding the texts on his phone, describing fucking ratfaced whore, leaving the flat, and instructing a solicitor; nothing’s going on! don’t do something you’ll regret, I’m just trying to do my best for all! 5. He comes round, and tells me the texts are “just lad’s banter”. Solicitor sends him a cease and desist letter, which he ignores, more texts, still coming round. I call the police, who visit him and also send him a warning letter. In court he insists to my solicitor and the judge that rat faced whore is “just my lodger, I’m not in a relationship with her.”. At the Final court hearing, at which he instructed a barrister who cost him £ 800, the judge awarded me the entire proceeds of our home, plus costs. 😂😁😂
Mine is a sociopath but he had his moments still. For the first week or so, I kept making dinner out of habit. I would sit at the table and not eat and I was like a zombie. Our 19 year old son still lived with us though and he didn’t know yet so I still made dinner. After about a week, my ex came home one night and was like “Boy, it sure is nice to still come home to a homemade dinner!” and grinned at me like he just said the funniest thing in the world.
I stopped cooking and grocery shopping after that. I wasn’t eating anyways and my son knows how to get food. Maybe a week later, my ex had a meltdown in the kitchen in front of our son and said “She still has access to my money so she should still be buying me groceries!” Our son knew at that point and told him, “You’re divorcing her, it’s not her job to buy you groceries anymore. You need to buy your own groceries.” He had a little tantrum in the kitchen over it.
It’s funny to think about now. He really thought he could throw me away and treat me like garbage and I’d still act as his wife when it was convenient for him. He genuinely thought I was a doormat. I hope he has fun in prison.
It is weird how we (I) stayed in that zombie mode. FW was shi**ing all over me for a year, the worst was the last few months, and I still brought him his dinner in his chair every night he was home. As I look back I realize I really was not thinking straight; the only way to describe it is I was a functioning shock victim.
Me too. More shame and burning hot coals pouring over his balding head for eating food I prepared for him. He even had the gall to say I was sulking. No FW that’s what trauma looks like.
You just reminded me about one evening when ex came home (prior to D Day but he had by that stage become deluded that he was a godlike creature fueled by some bs the AP must have been telling him – a balding middle aged loser with tickets on himself all of a sudden same ol) after I had drawn a lavender bath for our autistic 6 year old son (who he had zero interest in, never got home til late yardy ya) and the idiot walked into the bathroom before my son, took his own clothes off and proceeded to get into the bath. Wtf it was the most bizarre thing. I said what are you doing and he said sorry I thought this was for me, what a silly old duffer, of course he would think that the poor lovey why wouldn’t he. His grandma years earlier told a story (repeatedly) of her giving him baths as a boy until one day he told her he was too old and declared “nan nan I am too old for you to bathe me anymore” (they were very posh sorts – he was probably 20 by then i didn’t check the age lol). I think he had some regression to his childhood because parallel to that he used to occasional stare at my son and i which I worked out later was not admiration but that he wanted to be my son, and was deeply envious of our relationship as his mother is a grandiose narc who oscillated between telling him he was a brilliant genius without proper basis and a loser who brought shame on the family (the latter probably closer to the mark, although her concerns related to things like not winning the cross country in grade 2, rather than being a social deviant, which was to be applauded). Anyway jesus how screwed in the head are these lunatics. I hope that freak of yours has left you alone KP, and all his freak enablers and peace is now upon you.
Thank you, he’s in prison for 10 years so hopefully his little followers fall away and lose interest. I hope you have peace too. They are such weird, creepy children. I wish I had a better way to say that because I don’t want to insult children but it is weird how they are immature and stunted as if part of their brains are stuck in childhood. My mom was like that too and if they couldn’t hide it when they need to, I’d feel bad for them. But they can hide it and act right when they need to, which makes it a choice. Such a bizarre choice to make though. I’m glad I can’t understand it.
Oh I see he is still in jail. That should do the trick. Bravo to the criminal justice response. Mine unfortunately is just a moral criminal, so can’t be locked away.
Loved that last comment! My ex-FW liked slumber parties, too! (though he never seemed to use his CPAP machine for them)
He used to say how he took these long, multi-state road trips w/betrayal objects, but then they did not have sex in the hotel room. Because…well, maybe they were married (no worries that he was married at the time), he knew their spouse or bf, or maybe they had an STD/STI/ HPV/cervical cancer and it might be a bad idea, or maybe…he had a ton of unbelieveable stories. My fave was this one, told to me and another person who just happened to be a prosecutor (and so has heard all sorts of incredulous tales in court)…discussing a prostitute he’d purchased for a few years: She just wanted to see what my hotel room looked like. And yes, we got drunk together for years off and on and went to my hotel room and watched CNN on TV. But never on the bed. Never had sex. The prosecutor in the room who heard this: Are you kidding me? I’d love to take that to a jury. This was not at any sort of trial or legal proceeding.
Plus this telling comment from one of the betrayal objects: Does he still have the pictures? FWs say the darndest things. But the one you have from years ago is a winner.
I have the stone cold sociopathic variety as well. Passive aggressive, dismissive avoidant, with covert narcissist tendencies. Very well controlled externally.
Now that I understand a little of how this disorder works. I would bet that he was jumping into pools fully clothed and chewing pillows during the initial confrontation… in his mind.
My FW faked a heart attack/heart turn.
I had just finished a conversation where I said that I was opting completely out of any triangle – leaving just he and Eurotwat as a flat line together.
No sooner had I headed upstairs than he wanly called out, asking for me to come back down stairs. He said that his heart felt funny, and that I needed to call the nurse emergency help line.
I dutifully did (because caution and taking due care).
He sat on the floor with a pretend pained expression on his face and gave baby voiced answers as I spoke to the help line and relayed his ‘symptoms’ to the online nurse. Every fibre in my being knew that he was faking.
Afterward I took him to a nearby emergency dept (because again caution and taking due care).
He clung to me as we walked in. We waited for a long time in the waiting room. Than he was called in.
The hospital nurses wanted to run some tests (of course).
And what do you think happened? The man who had limped his way slowly into their consult room sprung out of there as though a firecracker had been attached to his nethers….he couldn’t get out of their fast enough 🤣
He declared he wouldn’t be doing any medical tests and that he (we) were leaving. Straight away! No time to spare!
After he’d shot through the exit doors, the emergency nurse called me over and voiced her concern about how strangely he’d behaved – of course he had.
I walked back out to the car with him. He was walking with a quick, peppy step, miraculously fully recovered from whatever had ailed him earlier.
On the drive home I think he talked about our marriage, how he loved me so much blah, blah, blah-bity blah.
I had already well and truly decided to divorce him by the time that evening unfolded.
I so don’t miss that crazy…..
That’s so crazy. I wonder how he thought that was going to play out in his mind. Was it like a test to see if you loved him still?
“She took me to the hospital when she thought I was ill so she loves me, I can stop conducting this test now and go back to normal and chat about our marriage on the drive home. She’ll never have a clue I was initially faking and be creeped out by what I just did! She’ll never figure it out! I’m so much smarter than everyone! No one will ever know I was just faking! Everybody else is so stupid!”
He reminds me of the thieves at my old retail job who would pick things up off the shelves right in front of us and walk to customer service and ask to return it. We could see them walk in empty handed and grab a cart, we would see them walk up to the item, put it into a cart, and then walk up to us. Then when we would say “No, sorry I can’t give you a refund for that item because you just picked it up off the shelf.” They would scream “WHY?! WHY ARE YOU DISCRIMINATING AGAINST ME?!” LIKe ma’am, we can see you, you are not invisible. It’s such a weird type of entitlement.
Absolutely a weird type of entitlement KatiePig – I think you’re spot on with whatFW was thinking. It’s just so disconnected from normalcy.
I think they get so immersed into their crazy that they are completely incapable of seeing that we can see….
This whole story was hilarious, and I especially loved this: ” … opting completely out of any triangle – leaving just he and Eurotwat as a flat line together.” 🤣
I’m an ER nurse. I’m sure they could tell he was full of it, we can smell bullshit. The nurse who noted he was acting weird probably suspected he was faking/hiding something and knew he’d be busted when tests came back showing he’s fine.
Exactly! They knew….
I remember when I finally hit my limit with/ FW, it was over his smoking after he was in a motorcycle accident. He was 100% at fault because he wasn’t following doctors’ recommendations for recovery. I was working 3 jobs, and we had to move in with my family because he was wheelchair-bound. My free time was spent caring for him. He would sneak off to go smoke and watch porn in the backyard when I wasn’t there; I already knew about him talking smack about me to random girls he was talking to online. So when my preschooler gave me his hidden stash of cigarettes, I threw him out. He cried snot bubbles, and he said if I broke up with him, it was a death sentence…
After I broke up with FW, we were “co-parenting,” which meant I was doing 99.9% of the work, and he showed up to supervise minutes late or didn’t show up. I was juggling two jobs, attending school, and raising a preschooler. He canceled a supervised visit because he was getting arrested for drug trafficking heroin, alongside his now convicted pedo father, just an hour before the visit was scheduled. I had no idea this was happening, and I did every chumpy thing to get to the bottom of double life. When I confronted him about it, he absurdly compared my taking an iron supplement for anemia—safely stored in a bathroom cabinet—to the serious crime of drug trafficking heroin.
My brother was a friend of FW, and when I found out about his involvement, he was sabotaging what was in the best interest of my kid, his nephew, and prolonging an unnecessary never-ending custody battle. I confronted him he ghosted me and launched a smear campaign against me to my entire family. My dad died from COVID during that period. My brother accused me of murder while grieving, and then I was further ostracized by surviving family members for speaking out and trying to get them to hear my perspective; I was told I was somehow equally at fault and to apologize.
My brother withheld additional information about FW Bunnyboiler being obsessed with us, and during my most recent pregnancy, my family and I were stalked and harassed from out of state; when I begged him for help so we could connect the cases between the states, he chose FW and bunnyboiler. We recently found out that in response to my request for his help, he filed a false report claiming our dogs were dangerous and we abandoned our kids, so they needed to even swat our house an hour after bringing home a newborn.
The only explanation for your brother’s f$$&#kery is that he’s a disordered FW himself
Despite many, burning red flags throughout our courtship and marriage, my official d-day happened with a 60-page private investigator “dossier”, complete with photos, landing on my mat on midsummer’s day 2017 while I was sitting on the couch working (and six months pregnant with our second child), swiftly followed by a knock at the door from his affair partner (one of several, it later turned out) who I invited in for a chat that lasted around six hours (which latterly, FW described as “weird”. No sh*t!).
I immediately called FW when I received the dossier and ordered him to come home from work, which he did eventually, but by no means quickly and when he did arrive, he was cool as a cucumber as the trickle truths of his shenanigans started to tumble out.
While I was in despair the next morning, I could hear him cheerfully singing in the shower. I expect he was elated that the truth was finally out and now, where’s the cake fork??? In the preceding days, we had to flee our home, so-say because said affair partner had some “dodgy contacts” who might be out to get us. Total blameshift on FW’s part, but it was scary for me!
What really made me laugh was a few days later when he was on his best behaviour trying to “make things right”. He said he would cook Sunday dinner (he never cooked and I have since renamed him “c*nt cook, won’t cook”), heading out at 4pm on a Sunday afternoon to the big supermarket near us to get everything he needed. As he sped off in his car, I didn’t have the heart or enthusiasm to tell the stupid FW that the shops close early on a Sunday…. 😉
HAHAHAHA to “where’s the cake fork???”
at least barrister belle has something to laugh about! i got the stone-cold, reptilian stare, lots of mean things fired at me, followed by a casually cruel discard, all while he had an error-ection because narcissists get off on hurting people.
it took a lot of EMDR to get rid of those memories and hateful words, and i’m thankful to be on the other side. but i won’t forget it.
onwards,
damnitfeelsbadtobeachumpster
Mine lied so easily and quickly while maintaining the facade of a dad bod good guy it’s nauseating now to realize that I was constantly lied to for nearly 3 decades!
the string of D days elicited quick denials, he was just helping out a random lady with errands and fake suicide attempts and of course regular screaming tantrums during counseling and in the home. So much blame shifting. In between long sobbing talks with friends and dramatic slaps and punches to his own face. Multiple car accidents while doing this melodrama. All of it while lying every single moment.
Stone cold sociopath
He collapsed on the ground and screamed, in front of the kids, then ran into the woods…to call the OW. That evening when he was home and me and the kids were at a hotel, he invited his friends over, got sloppy drunk, peed himself, and went door to door telling the neighbors he screwed up and would be moving. He shook my one neighbor’s hand and they realized his hand was wet from scratching his pee covered crotch, eww. Then he moved in with mommy and would go from texting me apologies, blame shifting, and didn’t want to see the kids until he talked to a lawyer. Fun times.
🤣Your FW raises so many existential questions here:
Does a bear sh#t (or indeed pee) in the woods?…..
If a tree falls in the forest and no one can hear it, has it ever really fallen?….
…he ran into the woods to call the OW???
Like…where in the woods?? A tree?? A rabbit den?
If he really needed to call her that bad surely there’d be other places to go…
He’s a genuine timid forest creature!
He told me in a baby voice that he didn’t think lies of ommission were lies. Unless someone was lying to him by omission. Then it did count.
He told me I’d have to relinquish my health insurance so the new woman could have it.
He told me that he only had a sex cam chat with another man because he was interested in technology. And since the other guy was on camera while he was not, it didn’t count.
He told me that watching gay porn didn’t count, because after watching it he’d switch to heterosexual porn to masturbate.
He told me that my leaving lights on when I left a room was equally bad as his having a secret sexual world because both are disrespectful.
Two weeks after Dday he impatiently demanded that I should have healed.
He told me he was not at all like other transvestites because they did it openly while he did it only at home where it didn’t count. #Geography
That he had to lie to me because his sophistication and nuance could not be understood by a provincial and narrow pedant like myself. Although he didn’t use those words because he doesn’t know what they mean.
That everyone was a sex addict but only a few honest souls would admit it.
Ugh! It was a buffet of shit sandwiches….but I was too traumatized to see things clearly.
“ He told me that watching gay porn didn’t count, because after watching it he’d switch to heterosexual porn to masturbate”
Gotta cancel out the gay! Everyone knows if you do something straight after doing something gay, it gets canceled out and you’re effectively still straight.
I wonder if it works the other way. If he watched gay porn after watching straight porn would it cancel out the straightness?
🤣🤣🤣
“Although he didn’t use those words because he doesn’t know what they mean.”
🤣 😂 Sorry to laugh; I hope this FW is waaaayy in the past for you.
I don’t think anybody is beating “naked sleeping bag sliding down the stairs”. It’s like the idiot read the bit about “regression” in every Psych 101 book and went “hold by beer.”
Mine was more on the lack of empathy/immediate gaslighting side as seems to be what a lot of the current responses are indicating. A lot more “this is the guy you don’t need to worry about”, “you’re jealous”, etc. Until it turned out that I was right, of course. I hesitate to use the word “sociopath” for mine-I have dealt with real sociopaths professionally and my fuckwit lacked the intelligence and the depth of thought. Personality disorder though? I am probably not the best person to diagnose…but…yeah.
As previously discussed, mine demanded an open relationship the day after I was diagnosed with diabetes and was not handling that news well. I said no. This kicked off the 9 month Pick-me Dance. The part I forgot until recently was that despite my saying “no” he openly sent her flowers a few days later and I was just supposed to cope with that “because he loves me, too.” I had none of it but he started sending her other gifts to our address as well. And then stopped accepting mine. Processing that bit of trauma-it’s very clear that she was just tired of hiding it(not that she was any good at it anyway.)
The closest I can get to “well that’s weird” here-during actual D-Day/the end of the “marriage” 9 months later, she got like really hyper fixated on the thought of me destroying her car and begged me not to destroy it right in the middle of D-Day/the break-up. Which was very, very strange-apart from the fact that I was a little too broken to retaliate(apart from balancing a couple of ledgers), she knew that vehicles are somewhat holy to me and I don’t think I ever even intimated automotive vandalism to her even in jest (I DID say that if I saw schmoopie I would run him over…and then back over him just to make sure…that is hardly “destroy your car.”)
It was really weird-I was the only one that took care of the cars and saw to their maintenance. Paranoid much? Knew she had a receipt coming?
Besides-she completely destroyed one and was well on her way to doing it to her current car if it didn’t get repossessed after she left-if I wanted to see her car destroyed I’d just wait a couple of months.
Have a Fuckwit Free Friday!
I think sometimes FWs just lose track of the off-the-cuff lies they tell to schmoopies and random bystanders in order to paint their own victims as perpetrators and themselves as central, sought-after victims. For instance, maybe your ex had recently seen some true crime show about a stalker keying a victim’s car or cutting their brake lines. So she told schmoops that you were so ‘jealous” and obsessed (because she was so ravishingly intoxicating) that you would do such a thing despite there being no evidence nor history to support this. And maybe she repeated the fabrication enough that she became invested in it and eventually repeated the nonsense to your face as if you had actually made those threats.
My FW was a boring sad sausage but I know another chump who discovered his wife had been having a 4 year affair with a coworker bc he got suspicious and followed her one day. Confronted her in the parking lot of a motel where she was meeting AP. She got back into the car and led him on a high speed chase until she stopped in a Costco parking lot, took her whole bottle of Prozac, and announced that she would soon be dead. Imagine going to the hospital on a psych hold to temporarily avoid accountability. They tried to work things out after that but last I heard it wasn’t going very well.
Mine actually tried all manners of fake suicide and then of course all for show and never went into the psych ward just melodramatics in the parking lot
Oh…oh we have had people come into our ER for EXACTLY this reason. They get caught cheating, or doing some other wildly disrespectful thing to their partner, and they think threatening suicide will get them out of accountability.
They are not happy at all when they find out what actually happens when they do that. “What do you mean I have to take off my clothes and put on this gown?” “Why can’t I have my phone?? Where’s my stuff?”
“WHY CAN’T I LEAVE?? What do you mean by psych hold?!”
Yeah assbutt when you say you’re going to off yourself if your wife tells anyone you cheated, if you take all your SSRIs to stop your wife from calling the OW, or you say you’re going to cut yourself if she gets divorce papers, you don’t get to just chill out for a couple hours and leave when you’re over it.
I’ve seen SO many cheaters pull the fake SI statement to avoid having to deal with getting caught and then regret that decision when it dawns on them they don’t get to make decisions anymore.
I went there for the opposite reason. I was in such emotional pain from d day that I didn’t know how to cope and was a danger to myself. In a way I really liked it there. Sure was sobering the next morning though when you get released and FW or anyone else is there to pick you up. It’s sad to look back on, but I’ve gotten stronger with therapy and my plan is in motion for leaving FW to his dumb lies.
Like who has to go mow their daughters lawn at 10 pm at night and so many other things. Jeez the lies are mind blowing.
Yeah it can be rough when you go through it and the physician determines you aren’t actually going to hurt yourself if you are sent home. When I came home after spending a day in the ER after one of my cheaters, it felt like I had run a marathon but I still couldn’t sleep.
A lot of these fake-a-suicidal-ideation cheaters don’t get to go home though. And ohhh they HATE that. Because usually along with their attempt at manipulation, they’re dumb. They openly admit to the doctor they said they’d kill themselves to control someone else because they think it will get them out. But openly saying they use suicidal ideation as a form of control in and of itself is a red flag to a psychiatrist. They usually end up spilling a bunch of other things they do that make them candidates for psych hospital placement.
I had a patient like that literally yesterday. His girlfriend broke up with him because she was tired of him wasting his life smoking weed and nothing much else. So he told her he swallowed his whole bottle of Zoloft to die. She called 911. Turns out when you take 20+ Zolofts poison control says you have to be observed for 13 hours. He didn’t like that so he decided to be a little shit about it for that 13 hours. Once he was medically cleared, he said he didn’t actually swallow anything and he did it for attention, then he expected to just be able to go home after that. Nope. Sorry buddy you told everyone you took pills with the intent to kill yourself. Now that you think you’re in the clear we can’t just take your word for it that you didn’t.
OD’ing on prozac in the parking lot of costco. that’s bulk buy desperate. expensive. where’s the originality? i mean, shouldn’t she choose a more fitting, economical location? i’m thinking walmart.
cue intro to ‘OD’s of walmart’, a new TV show.
i used to work psych when i was a nurse, and people hide in psych wards. usually it’s for legal reasons, but it can be for other reasons. i remember one guy from vancouver island who faked a suicide jump from a ferry, then hopped a bus further inland. he died his hair blond and showed up suicidal in the psych ward. in reality he’d been swindling the funeral home he directed, lying to his wife about everything, and in a lot of secret debt. think gambling, infidelity, stealing. foreclosure was imminent.
his wife called me and asked, “what would you do? if you husband did this? i mean, he’s sick, right?” and i said, “sort of sick. but he is what he does. i doubt he will change.” she thanked me and called a divorce lawyer.
i’m much better with other people’s problems than my own.
Funny you should say Walmart…
This wasn’t me but a coworker’s friend.
So friend is in a long term relationship with her boyfriend. They just bought a house. Boyfriend coaches a youth baseball team.
Well boyfriend was sleeping with one of the moms of the kids on the team. Friend found this out when he got a little lax with hiding his texts. Friend went to team-mom’s house. She wasn’t home, but her husband was. Friend and husband activated the location on wife’s phone and they tracked it to a fucking WALMART PARKING LOT. Boyfriend and team mom were having sex in her car in a Walmart parking lot.
It sounded like an episode of that old mtv show Cheaters.
nothing says romance like fucking in a walmart parking lot. people are weird.
That’s right up there with the stories of cheating doctors having sex in fluorescent-lit, bodily-fluid tainted hospital exam rooms. Ew.
FW suddenly remembered that the clear plastic cosmetic case (containing lubricant, his favorite brand of soap and a woman’s watch) which I found in our guest room was put there by him ! He carried it from outside by the curb. He thought it might have been mine, even though I don’t wear a watch or use lubricant.
Strictly speaking, my FW wasn’t so much caught as announced himself. He said, “I wanted to be so cruel (mean, nasty, whatever) to you that you would divorce me, because I didn’t want to start a divorce myself.”
Anybody else get a version of that?
I didn’t get that in words, but his actions after separation were such that I even asked him if that’s what he was doing. Of course he didn’t answer with honesty and self-reflection.
I initiated the divorce.
Not in those words, but in actions, absolutely. That seems to be a Cheater’s Playbook standard. When my FW discovered there were – and would continue to be – consequences to his decisions he started to cry, and said “I’m such a coward.” Chump that I was I comforted him, telling him that everything would be okay eventually. It wasn’t until I found CL and others’ stories three years later that I realized he was crying for himself, not for me or our kids. Anyway he told me he would marry Mrs. Bendover as soon as our divorce was final. After which I waited nearly 3 months to be served with a summons that never came. It was so much easier for him to treat me like a sack o’shit that he couldn’t be bothered to throw away. I initiated the divorce, I did – no exaggeration here – 100% of the legal paperwork, both mine and his parts. Banging your mentally unstable employee is so much fun, but paperwork?? Not so much.
Mine followed the cliché cheater manuscript by saying it (7 months of escapades with hookers and strippers) was just a “mistake”, and claimed he would rather be dead than lose me while balled up and crying on the floor.
Weird how he would rather be dead than lose me, but wouldn’t dare tell the truth to keep me.
Pathetic.
When I asked My cheater if he had been faithful to me, I asked 3 times…he ran into the house..we had been taking a walk when i asked that question. He completely disappeared into the house or back yard. 10.min later I’m calling him…he comes around the back yard and drops on the ground by our front door at my feet and starts fake crying and told me he was actually raped at work and taken against his will by an evil coworker. He told me this happens ALL THE TIME to the guys at work and I could call them myself to find out the truth!!! I asked him,,who took off his belt and unzipped his zipper. He went silent, still on the ground at my feet.
What I did find out was he was under HR review and he was trying to keep his job. Both my cheater and one of many OW were found mutually guilty and told they were not to be in contact with each other again. OW who filed a complaint was moved to another building and cheater got a day off as discipline..the double standard lives stong in corporate America.
Initially, eX posted on Facebook (to hundreds of people) that his wife of 34+ years has “decided that we should divorce”, and he would not post the reasons or details because they were “too private and inappropriate to post”. He asked that I be kept in prayer because “she needs it as much as I do”. And every time someone commented, he repeated, “Please keep Viktoria in prayer.” He sounded like a heartbroken victim, with “Thank you all for your love and support.” Everyone was telling him, “oh my God I’m so sorry!”
Inevitably, someone said in a comment that, “It sounds like there might be someone else. Sorry, my friend.” He responded, “I hope not. Pray for us.” He let them all think that I left him because of something bad I did.
All of his crazy cheater reactions involved lying and gaslighting me and friends and family. I found out that he asked them questions about what they knew about me and specific sexual activities. Because he was trying to figure out
what was wrong with me and why I left.
He told me “they” (unspecified online criminals) wanted to blackmail him so “they” hacked his computer with fake texts. He told me his foreign “computer expert” will get to the bottom of this. He told me I probably hacked his ipad myself, and created the text conversations between him and prostitutes. And of course he told me, and everybody that we know, that I have undiagnosed mental health issues.
Only a few weeks into our separation, he began attending church in a different city, reading theology, relationship & self improvement books, and hitting the Gym in the first time in 40 years. The last thing I observed was he was writing and sending me letters, begging to reconcile, guilt tripping me for failing to “look at myself” (my own faults) and shaming me for giving up on a 34+ year marriage without even considering couples counseling. Then I went no contact.
Sounds eerily like my ex’s MO after separation. 🙁
Ah, the parallels….My FW ran two arguments, each incongruent with the other:
1. I was mentally unstable (he relayed this to my GP and requested she conduct an urgent mental health assessment of me). The foundation of my instability? I was clearly florid in adhering to the belief that he had engaged in infidelity.
2. In the alternative, that the material and incriminating links etc that I had seen on our shared home google system were computer hacks, yes hacks! Planted by nefarious dark forces who were responding in turn to concerns I had raised about the quality of a home build we had moved into…
It really is the Cheater playbook, abridged edition isn’t it.
Truly I hope you spoke the truth at least to some people? Libel, slander lawsuit? This is beyond the pale
I got off socials (I posted nothing) and spoke the truth in person and on the phone to all my friends and family. His behavior is garden variety DARVO ie psychological abuse and partner abuse or domestic abuse. It’s not criminal behavior but it should be.
Fuckwit jumped out of the driver’s seat at a highway intersection & ran off!! leaving me stunned while the drivers behind me laid on their horns. A young man got out of the car he was in & seeing the state I was in, got in & drove me safely off the road. Him & his GF stayed with me until I was calm enough to drive. FW never did come back to the car. This wasn’t D day though, this was me being suspicious about his actions and asking him some questions he obviously didn’t want to answer.
Fortunately time does make you block this absolute nonsense out, but one of FWs classics post D Day was claiming APs father had years earlier been murdered (i assume to elicit sympathy from me that he had no choice but to comfort her with his genitalia). The worst thing about that was i didn’t doubt this was true, although I googled it to see how it happened as she is a bit of a scrag so I thought maybe he was involved in drugs. Thats how effective gaslighting is that an intelligent person believes such utter drivel. Anyway a year later a friend who knew the family visited me, I told the story, and she fell about laughing and said no he died of cancer.
Well, my FW said the stupidest crap in the first month:
“We had sex with other people before we were married!”
“Of course I wore condoms, I’m not stupid.” He gave me HPV.
“I don’t want to break up with before Christmas. It will ruin all her future Christmases!” (What about mine?)
“She appreciates everything I do for her!”
Six months later, it was, “she was a bottomless pit of need.”
My XFW went full MMA on me, threw me and his phone, (which I had a death grip on) on the ground and had me in arm bars and choke holds, the last one so tight I couldn’t speak or breath and went unconscious for a few seconds until he could take the phone from me. Attempted murder anyone? Not funny of course, but I never understood why he did that since I had already seen some of the cheating texts on his phone? I came back to consciousness pretty quickly and had him backed into a corner. His eyes were huge like a wild animal caught in a trap, his fingers white from clutching the phone so tightly, and I just repeated, “I’ve already seen it, and I have the right to see everything, give it to me now.” And he just handed me the phone like a 3 year old who’d just taken something he wasn’t supposed to have. WTF? It was truly one of the most horrible, awful things that has ever happened to me in my life. I’m quite sure his Schmoopie never got treated this way by him.
WTF is wrong with these people?
…they are disordered and sometimes capable of physical violence…he could have killed you. I’m so sorry.
Anyone unfortunate enough to be at the end of a discard or ‘discovery of evidence phase’ can face that risk.
I think that’s the aspect that makes me so angry when I think of AP’s generally.
They’re so puffed up about how super speshul (‘sweet’/‘kind’/‘romantic’/‘whimsical’/‘fun!’) they and their FW are – and then parallel to that can be the most awful, awful, acts perpetrated against the Chump – these dark, ugly, harms are deeply abusive and traumatising.
It’s a sparkly turd of a situation, with zero human authenticity or empathy involved…
They have no soul.
He actually told me. It was a three levels down subordinate in his office. He did not know how to get himself out of it.
He was looking for me to HELP him. He had gotten himself into this mess and he couldn’t get out and I think he was scared because of the work relationship. It was his company. And I did help him. I eventually went to HR to report the woman in the end, it didn’t help. I realize now his telling me, may have even been a manipulation on his part instead of taking responsibility in a direct way and handling it. Sort of like hey wife, I mean, mom I mean, whatever I got myself in trouble and now you help me. I did try and help him get out of the relationship and not get in trouble at work because I didn’t want him getting fired. I didn’t want my children to suffer the consequences.
My logic at the time also was that everybody deserves a second chance
He didn’t understand that it was going to snowball.
As so many of us know, second chances rarely if ever, or third chances or fourth chances, rarely solve these problems. I know he continued to have feelings for her and eventually after about eight or 10 months, began manipulating people in the office to have her be present so he didn’t have to ask her directly, but if somebody else did, he didn’t feel like he had to be responsible. At one point, I did threaten to leave him, and he freaked out backed off of her. That lasted about 36 hours
Eventually, she was laid off under unrelated business circumstances, no pun intended.
And at that point it was like some sort of damn had been broken inside of him. He just was looking to cheat everywhere. He was online. He was going to single’s events. He was not letting me go with him places. Again, the tried and true cliché. If someone shows you who they are, believe them.
Sorry for repeat post it was left pending. I don’t know why and then I resubmitted so it basically posted twice I would delete it if I could.
My ex actually told me about the relationship. It looked for a moment like someone who was looking for forgiveness. What he was actually asking me to do was HELP him. His relationship was with a subordinate three levels down and he had gotten himself into a mess at work and he didn’t know how to get out of it so it was like hey wifey or more like hey mom get me out of this. And I did . I went to HR I made a complaint, etc., etc.
I did this inpart because I didn’t want him to lose his job and I didn’t want my children to bear the consequences.
He was contrite for about 36 hours and then he set about creating manipulative ways to see her by having other people set up meetings, etc. She was eventually laid off under unrelated circumstances, but his boundaries were gone. He started looking online for relationships, going to singles events, not wanting to go places with me. I fall back on the cliché, which many of us have experienced with second, third, fourth D Days, when someone shows you who they are, believe them
On my end he just after a year of treating me like dog shit, just walked out the door. What I didn’t know until later is, someone filed an ethics report on him. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when he got called into the mayors office to explain just how they were going to handle the mess of him splunking his direct report.
He got busted about 6 is months after the big reveal. I assume it took them that long to investigate, and get their game plan together. He was busted in rank, and put back out on patrol. She was moved to another position within the city, and he and the mayor parted ways as a team. Didn’t matter to me in the big picture, but I won’t lie, I walked with a little bounce for a couple days.
A few months later she got fired because she splunked up a dispatch and put two officers in high danger.
In the midst dramas aplenty involving police, state patrol, psychiatric counselors, I recall FW sobbing and full of self pity at how I’ve now exposed him to everyone as a hideous jerk.
Zero empathy for me, kids, anyone but himself. I stood there jaw on the floor at the ridiculousness, not understanding then as I do now it was a classic NPD mask slipping moment
After predictive text popped up in a google search we were doing for an upcoming vacation which strongly suggested he was cheating, I was in utter shock and could barely muster questions. Maybe five minutes later, tops, he got up to run a quick work errand before his flight the next day. This was typical and not surprising. Turns out he really went to the local happy ending joint to get jerked off. So, literally his reaction was to run away from the situation and cheat more!