‘I Don’t Deserve This Crazy Love Triangle’
She feels like she escaped a crazy love triangle where she was played by her now ex-boyfriend and his on again, off again ex-girlfriend.
***
Dear Chump Lady,
I just got of a relationship of 8 months. I met his daughter, and even spoke to his sister. At 6 months, I went to meet his therapist to discuss how to work with his daughter. But, at that time, I started seeing red flags here and there. I found a drawer of kids’ clothes.
Now, my ex had an ex, he was close to his kids, but I told the therapist what I found and she stated, “Oh they are old and he will get rid of them.” I remember he went to Florida after I went to Costa Rica, and I stayed to watch his dogs. There were two weeks I could not see him because there were family issues.
Many flags came once we hit the 8th month mark, and lo and behold something in me told me to reach out to his ex.
She added me immediately to Facebook, and there were hundreds of pictures of them in Florida, while I was cleaning up dog sh*t, and during those two weeks she was there. I was so angry, I asked him where he was on a certain day, only for him to say he was not there, but then go silent when I sent him the picture.
The girl told me she knew about me and they are no longer together, but she spends the night when I am not there, she told me that we can be friends, and I can help her set him up, she called everyone to let them know what happened.
Well, I took him back, why?
I talked to him and he spoke to her on speaker, and she admitted that they were not intimate and there was no relationship. She popped up at his house, and more.
Well, I took him back for at least a month, I thought she was crazy, but now I see it was both of them. I remember going to see his therapist and she told me he only cheated emotionally on the kids, and I realized I was being triangulated, lied to, and manipulated,
I don’t have kids, and no baggage. Now his mom and family were mad at me because “I did not need to reach out to the ex.”
I broke it off only to see that they are back together.
She got a matching dog to his service animal so they can be brother and sister. I was so angry, I cried all night, and asked him how he can just go back to her. Then the messages came that he loved me, and blah blah blah.
I blocked him, but why do I feel the need to unblock and wait for an answer, or reach out. I just didn’t deserve to be brought into this crazy love triangle. I’m glad I’m out, but it makes me so angry that it ended this way.
I just don’t understand.
F**K Him and Her
****
Dear F**K Him and Her,
The minute you find yourself in a crazy love triangle, extract yourself as the hypotenuse immediately. The part of this story that baffles me (and I’m a chump) is that you took him back AFTER you watched his dogs. As in, you’re scooping poop while he’s on a Florida fuckfest.
The reason given for setting this startling low price on your self worth is a speaker call, with the Other Woman.
Let me stop here for a moment.
This “Let’s call the Other Person and hash out the pick me dance by speaker phone!” is a THING. You see this come up all the time on Reconciliation Industrial Complex boards. Ostensibly, (usually at the behest of some RIC quack) you’re calling to verify a FW’s story and to achieve consensus with the affair partner that YOU are the rightful winner of the FW’s affections.
Okay! thinks the deluded chump, we’re all on the same page! Completely failing to understand that LIARS LIE. And that every FW (including affair partners) thrill to an unwitting competition. Oh sure, go back to the presumed safety of your relationship (condescending pat, pat, pat) — I’ll be back. You think you can tether that dick? Hahahahaha.
Other Women are not part of the Universal Sisterhood.
The girl told me she knew about me and they are no longer together, but she spends the night when I am not there, she told me that we can be friends, and I can help her set him up, she called everyone to let them know what happened.
This is a mindfuck. But why are you trusting her story WHEN YOU JUST SAW EVIDENCE that she’s very much in his life? A person who is spending the night at his house (whenever) is very much IN HIS LIFE. She contradicts herself. And your head is in the blender because you stupidly think this FW is a prize.
Cheaters are not prizes.
You caught him in a huge lie AND he was using you. Those are two “Bye Felicia” offenses.
Ask yourself why those were not deal breakers for you. I know you dumped him eventually, but we don’t control FWs, just ourselves. So this is the work you need to do — why would you want this deceitful piece of shit over the peace and sanity of staying single?
I’m not clear what the deal is with his daughter, but was he hiding a kid? Why are there therapists involved? This is just MESSY. Six months in it should be just dinners out and recreational fucking. The good times. He’s got you doing emotional labor on his parenting and cleaning up dog shit. Just NO.
Now his mom and family were mad at me because “I did not need to reach out to the ex.”
Who cares? You dumped him. Perhaps they should ask him to stop being so duplicitous instead of scolding women for verifying his stories.
I broke it off only to see that they are back together.
They were never not together. Reread my first sentence — if you find yourself in a crazy love triangle, extract yourself as the hypotenuse immediately.
She got a matching dog to his service animal so they can be brother and sister.
And they got matching pajamas for Christmas. And matching tattoos over their genitals.
NONE OF THIS WILL KEEP A FW FAITHFUL.
It’s as solid a commitment as your speaker phone call. Also, why does this guy have a service dog? To shepherd his dick?
Anyway, don’t look back. Please block both of these people from social media and get on with your life. FWs exist, but we control what we tolerate. ((Hugs))
I would suggest that “F**k Him and Her” needs to block more than just the Cheater and his AP. The fact that the Cheater’s family criticised her for doing what was, in effect, her reasonable due diligence (ie reaching out to the allegedly Ex-Girlfriend) tells me that his family know quite how much of a f*ckup he is and were either hoping that FH&H was going to parent him for them or outraged that their poor little prince faced consequences for his f*ckwittery.
I would strongly suggest that she blocks the Cheater, the AP, the whole of the Cheater’s family and I’d throw in blocking the therapist in as well, as something wasn’t adding up there either. And once she’s done that, FH&H needs to avoid Social Media like the plague so that she doesn’t end up inadvertently (or deliberately) “Pain Shopping” …. she really doesn’t need to know what goes on in his life now, indeed, she will heal faster if she doesn’t know.
And if FH&H is reading this she should know (firstly) that she is worth (and deserves) so much more than any of these halfwits have to offer her and (secondly) that she is the mistress of her own destiny when it comes to building a better (FW-free) future.
LFTT
Yes, and they knew. Also, the girl called everyone he knew and told them and was blowing up their phones. So yes, I know they knew then that they just wanted him and her off their hands
It’s over now thankfully. It’s been about a month and a half and I’m doing better
I also felt like they were trying to push me into this bizarre role as the side piece, just there to fill in the gaps for him while he recycled his relationship with his ex. It’s as if they expected me to sit quietly on the sidelines, doing the emotional labor and waiting around while he juggled two lives. Looking back, it’s unbelievable how they all normalized such a warped dynamic, as if it was perfectly reasonable to have me play second fiddle in this twisted arrangement.
Cutting ties with all of them feels like lifting a huge weight off my shoulders. I deserve to be valued and respected, not shuffled into some side role in a mess they tried to justify as “normal.” This experience has shown me the importance of setting boundaries and keeping my life free from anyone who expects less than honesty and respect. Thank you for helping me see that I’m on the right path to building a healthier, drama-free future.
Great point–FH&H should block every one of these people.
FH&H, please listen to LFTT. He’s a man who knows how a man is supposed to behave.
This is WAAAY too much drama for 8 months of dating. The first year should be the happy honeymoon phase, not on sketchy phone calls with some other woman he’s lying to you about.
Think of this as good practice for fixing your picker! You don’t need to understand him, or his weird dog-siblinghood bff ex and overindulged family. Work with your friends and a therapist to make a list of red flags, like ending up at his therapist’s, a very fast relationship escalator, lying, enmeshment with an ex, not having healthy boundaries with his Mother, plus anything else.
It does hurt for now, but in the long run? Imagine being married to this maddness for years. You dodged a bullet, and you deserve someone who takes you to Florida. Keep working on your own boundries, self worth, and be ready to dump the next one at the first few bad gut feelings.
It will keep space in your life for a much more worthwhile partner, not this clown show.
Thank you for this perspective. You’re absolutely right—this level of drama in such a short relationship is a massive red flag. The first year should be full of positive experiences, not constant confusion and emotional tug-of-war with his ex, his family, and even his therapist. I can see now that this was a learning experience for me to fine-tune my instincts and recognize what true partnership should look like.
Moving forward, I’m taking this as a lesson in boundaries and red flags. I’m working with my friends and therapist to make a list of things I’ll never ignore again: the lack of healthy boundaries, the strange ties to his ex, lies, and the whirlwind of being pushed too quickly into his family’s dynamic. It’s clear now that I deserve better—someone who brings calm, respect, and joy into my life.
While it hurts now, I’m hopeful that someday I’ll be able to open up to love again, with someone who values me for who I am. This experience may have set me back, but it’s also setting me up for a healthier, happier future with someone who’s truly worth my time and energy. For now, I’m focusing on building my self-worth and trusting my intuition, so I can keep space open for someone who will value me without the chaos.
You have a bright, happy future ahead of you!
“Imagine being married to this maddness for years. You dodged a bullet” 💯 EXACTLY!
If you ever need help imagining the level of utter chaos & insanity staying with him and his nutty crew would have involved, I recommend reading the excellent novel “LIARS” by Sarah Manguso — a member of Chump Nation, who has been on Tracy’s podcast. Full of incredible insights about what to watch out for when dating men!
To quote someone here, and I collect a lot of quotes here:
“What starts shitty does not get better.”
(And BTW there is no shittier start to a relationship than a relationship that starts out as an affair….)
The word “deserve” is something I see pop-up in betrayal stories and chump explanations and I see it as a very unhealthy and unhelpful concept to dwell on.
Very often, I hear Chumps say that they didnt deserve this or that and instead of using it as fuel to extricate themselves from a shitfest, they seem to wait around for the Cosmic Powers of What is Deserved to rescue them.
Little kids who starve in African famines don’t deserve it either…recognizing it wasn’t deserved doesn’t change it.
Someone treats you crappy on the regular and not how a valued partner ought be treated. What you did or didnt deserve wasn’t a factor for them.
GTFO
This is a good observation too. OP doesn’t deserve to be in the crazy love triangle, so OP’s next step is to leave, not to log an appeal with this guy.
We can’t make crappy people suddenly be different then who or what they are. We deserve healthy relationships from people who have the character, integrity and capacity to give them in return.
Auditioning with these folks is like trying to get water from a piece of a stone. It’s a whole lot of work that would be better spend finding a real source. Your need for water is valid, but the stone doesn’t have any to give no matter what you do or say.
What separates functional woman from chumps, is that functional woman LEAVE at the first sign of drama and the music start up 🎼for the pick me dance. They say, I’m not that needy to deal with a boat load of manure right out of the gate. People like me..the Chump x2 say..oooooohhhhh I can cure this and everyone will LISTEN, UNDERSTAND, LEARN THEIR LESSON and stay faithful. Right away I’m smoking the hopium pipe, spackling, lecturing on good behavior and reading motives that are kind and worthy of me. So take a lesson from my years of experience, IT.DOES.NOT GET BETTER.
Very well put, 2xchump.
2x, I feel like there is a wife of vicim blaming here – even onto yourself. For a long time, I saw my Stick-to-it nature as virtue and the world was screaming back that same message to me. I did not know what I did not know and I need to forgive myself for it. You are right that it DOESNT get better, but I was a functional person, just one headed in the wrong direction for a long time.
(whiff, not wife)
Unicorn 🦄 no more! Of course you are right! I am one year out on Divorce and 2 years from D day. I tried to fix everything and everyone by my grit and fortitude. I’m just giving my own blame some exercise after 30 years of intimate abuse that escalated to a crescendo. Everyone needs to know that it gets worse not better. I will have to stand by that, but yes I am blaming myself for such intimate horrors I sat with thinking I was a miracle worker. That is all. Thanks for the reminder that to Ere is human, to forgive myself is divine.
We were pushing against the ocean, dear one. Another metaphor I use is that of pushing a boulder up hill…all day, every day. I get mad at myself for stupid things I did in my career or my tolerance of abuse from Cheater, or times I didnt parent well, but for a long time, chronic abuse is all I knew.
After the kids were out of the nest and I married a reasonable human. I finished my bachelors degree and got a Masters at a really good school. Ive been published and in my corner of the world, I have moved the needed in my area of expertise. This is the me who is not pushing boulders uphill all day.
You are doing this, keep going… My Dday was in 2005 …Ive had a long time to think about this.
King Canute..demanding the waves go back. So my first ans second cheater were 35 years apart. I married 2 years after first cheater left me with babies. So I knew the score of abuse. I just could not believe I was trapped x2 with disordered humans. Plus shock so yes. But good for you for all you’ve accomplished. I will get there but I still go into shock as my eyes keep opening to the horrors. I don’t have many years left. The second wave was at age 69 and Divorce at 70. But every single day is a miracle of freedom as close to a freed slave might feel ….though that is not a good comparison. Still the peace is as wide as the ocean I tried to command.i will get kinder soon. In therapy every week with MOCSA. Saves me!
Love?
That’s cake. That’s power. That’s control.
Cut those puppet strings.
Back in the mists of time, I was involved with a man like this – he also stuck his dick in much younger crazy and it was on for young and old.
She ended up jumping off a tall building .
There’s no fixing a stain of a man like this.
Steer well clear and don’t be sucked back in.
It’s just a game to him.
Wait, so why is finding kids’ clothes so weird if he is parenting a daughter?
Doesn’t matter. If you have to see a couples therapist (or worse, HIS therapist) six months in, then forget it. Game Over. It’s a wildly inappropriate ask. “My new girlfriend needs to talk to my therapist to help me parent my daughter.” That’s not a triangle, that’s a hexagon. Ick.
I see it clearly now—it was never about me helping him parent his daughter. The whole setup was so twisted. Those clothes I was finding? They belonged to his ex’s kid. It’s unsettling to think about how much was hidden from me, wrapped up in layers of manipulation. At the time, I couldn’t see how wildly inappropriate it was for him to ask me to talk to his therapist, especially so early in the relationship. Now, it’s obvious that I was being pulled into a situation designed to confuse and entangle me, rather than truly support any sort of healthy relationship.
Looking back, I can’t believe I didn’t see all of this sooner. But now that I do, I’m grateful to be out of it and moving forward with a new understanding of what real boundaries and respect look like.
You absolutely did not deserve this nonsense. People like this are so disgusting. I used to think, why don’t they just stay together? Why do they have to bring other people into this mess? It’s because they want victims. They want to be together and they want the drama and thrill of hurting other people who don’t know about their little sick relationship.
I want to point something out though and sorry if it offends some, but it is a problem. This was an 8 month relationship and the whole family is mad about you ending it and they had you seeing a therapist to work on a relationship with his child?! That is insane and bizarre! I get that you don’t have kids so you may not realize how weird it is but it is really, really weird. It’s dangerous too. The family is extremely dysfunctional for supporting that. They should not be invested in a relationship that isn’t even a year and you should not be talking to his therapist. You are not in the build a relationship with his daughter phase. This is early days where you would be building a relationship with HIM, if he wasn’t a piece of shit.
But he’s a piece of shit so walk away. You should feel no guilt over this. If you want drama, that entire family will obviously give it to you since that’s the nightmare they choose to live in but I’d keep him and everybody else associated with him blocked. You’re not going to get closure from people like that. They were hurting you for their own entertainment from the very beginning. There’s no justice with people like that, you just have to run.
Being a victim in this mess, I think that’s why I felt such intense anger and even a desire for revenge—feelings I never expected to find in myself. It was like they had pushed me to a breaking point where I was seeing sides of myself I hadn’t encountered before. The manipulation, the triangulation, and the constant pulling me into their dysfunction left me feeling humiliated and used. I wanted to make them feel even a fraction of the hurt they had caused me.
Looking back, I can see that those feelings were my mind’s way of processing the injustice of it all. That anger was my response to being treated as an unknowing participant in their twisted games. I’m learning to let go of that anger because I know revenge would only tie me back to them, keeping me trapped in the same cycle. Now, I’m choosing peace, recognizing that walking away is the real power I hold.
Lol, it would be really hard to commit revenge from the end of a thirty foot barge pole but that’s about as close as anyone should get to these disordered freaks.
I’m trying to imagine being young and single in this current messy world of sex pozzy confusion over monogamy and sexual consent. I think it can lead to people learning where they individually stand on these things and how they’re personally wired the hard way– by getting their hearts broken, their consent violated and losing half a year of their lives to chaos and despair in the wake of a life-changing event and only then realizing why it’s so critical to be careful about who they get involved with.
Due to how social media is making certain types of propaganda spread faster than ever and is creating such lockstep uniformity in beliefs that it’s more of a challenge to maintain individuality and threatens more social isolation for anyone who doesn’t conform or who learn by experience that the propaganda is bs and then find they have no social support, I really worry that some young people won’t survive the “education.” This came to mind when a fifteen year old friend of my daughter was opining about polyamory and how monogamy is unnatural.
On the one hand, this seems like a natural philosophical quandary for someone as complex and ruggedly individualistic as my daughter’s friend is, especially as she navigates sexism in school and often feels excluded and disappointed at how peer-aged girls are beginning to internalize sexism by “hyperfeminizing” and hiding their intelligence to placate boys. I think it’s a real challenge for her to figure out her place in the shitstorm considering her own mega-brainiac outlier status.
Bottom line is she’s never going to be able to hide her intelligence unless she plays with a home lobotomy kit or commits emotional suicide. This is a kid who, at the age of nine, struck most adults as a high school student with a growth hormone disorder. I suspect she has an IQ somewhere above 150. Because she’s smarter than most adults, she’s quite typically feeling alienated from most adult role modeling. Add to that the extra challenge of being beautiful.
Because of her deeply affectionate nature and how vulnerable and passionate she is in her friendships, I intuited that my daughter’s friend is starting to get seriously spooked by the narrow gender expectations placed on women in adult relationships and doesn’t want to get trapped, suppressed or hurt so she’s exploring the idea of hedging bets in commitment– never fully committing to or being dependent on one person. Which is fine in theory within the concept of “ethical nonmonogamy” but, unfortunately, I could definitely hear Perelish strains in this girl’s arguments– that monogamy is repressive, ergo it may be okay for people to “rebel” by deception.
In other words, this girl is ready-made and completely primed to fall into the yawning trap of Perel-ish “reverse culture jamming” propaganda to erode public conceptions of sexual consent under the aegis of being “woke.”
Just for some background, “Reverse culture jamming” is an inverted form of “culture jamming” or “subvertising,” or, as Wiki describes it, “a form of protest used by many anti-consumerist social movements to disrupt or subvert media culture and its mainstream cultural institutions, including corporate advertising. It attempts to ‘expose the methods of domination’ of mass society.” The “reverse” reference was originally coined by UCSC professor Susan Harding to describe how extremist radtrad pundits would “revoice” and “ventriloquize” religious fundamentalist values and policies into a groovier, more lefty journalistic tone in order to steer young progressives back to mainstream conservative views.
Anyway, I think Perel and her ilk are doing exactly the same thing by trying to pass off patriarchal propaganda regarding “rape by deception” as somehow egalitarian, quasi-feminist and liberating when, in actual practice, the perspective only really serves predators and abusers who are statistically mostly male and, due to the fact that humans are rather evolutionarily hard-wired, will likely remain so. I think Perel’s real value to patriarchy is that, in a not-so-roundabout way, she’s priming the next generation of women to play bangmaid for old dudes in power by pretending that it’s somehow aligned with feminism to be a fuck toy and potentially participate in the abuse of other women. Perel and other cheating apologists are, in effect, ideological pimps.
I didn’t want to fall into the trap of parenting a kid who isn’t mine by telling her directly that I thought she was headed for a massive crash with this ideology. But she was saying this stuff in front of my children so I responded with an abstract spiel about consent and cheating as rape by deception because my kids and I talk about this all the time. I also veered into a discussion of modern propaganda and the concept of reverse culture jamming blah blah, talking about how it’s used to slip many undemocratic, inegalitarian ideas and policies under the progressive radar.
The whole thing was like playing ideological Jenga because I didn’t want to actually discourage this girl’s exploration of the idea of ethical nonmonogamy– just nudge out the radioactive and disastrous “stick” that sexual deception could ever be ethical or “woke.” Again, I’m kind of limited in how I can convey this stuff to someone else’s kid but I knew my own kids wouldn’t be under the same dry and slightly boring constraints. As usual, whenever themes along these lines come up, my kids went full howling gallows humor, started throwing around Epstein island jokes, mocking the rapey ape paradigm and making gross analogies generally illustrating how the Perelish perspective is simply a masked reflection of it. I think it created a kind of “reverse-reverse culture jam” effect to counter the propaganda muddling issues of sexual consent. By the end my daughter’s friend couldn’t resist jumping on the sarcastic irony bandwagon as they all made fun of groomers, patriarchy-blowers and fake ally posturing, then eventually turned to more kid-oriented fun topics.
I was really struck by how they all looked so young, cheerful and happy together that night and suddenly realized how incredibly complicated it is for kids to maintain their innocence these days. Even my daughter’s friend lost the little furrow in her brow and looked her age again. More than ever before, it’s like kids have to lose some of their “intellectual innocence” about the world in order to preserve their (for lack of a better word) “spiritual” innocence because I think nothing makes people feel more used up and sadder than learning some of these things through terrible personal experience. Though everyone has to learn by mistakes at one time or another, I get the feeling that some gifty types and kids who are already in danger of feeling excluded and out of step might never fully recover unless they’re equipped with enough philosophical scaffolding to resist the relentless nonsense they’re being primed with. That’s how I’ve always raised my kids and I’m glad to see how contagious they’ve become about cheerfully trampling the bs.
You worded that so well and I completely agree. I work with a lot of young women and I see what you are talking about and there are times my heart breaks for them.
I knew from being raised by feminist egalitarian parents that it’s just better to have the critical thinking on culture, gender, etc., “factory installed” in kids from the get-go. It avoids the risk of absorbing and, most importantly, acting on certain crappy cultural beliefs at which point kids– even very small ones– might start throwing good money after bad and kind of fatally internalizing certain received wisdom.
This can happen even when parents don’t believe in crappy cultural precepts themselves if they fail to understand how the culture will aggressively fill in the gaps of everything they don’t intentionally teach their kids. That’s why I’m not really a fan of the new-agey belief that children are “wise” and must be allowed to find their own way in all matters. Nah. We’re all monkeys and we’ll do what we see our monkey peers do. We better figure out what we believe and find a way to convey it to children in ways that get through to them.
For instance, if you let girls or boys unquestioningly absorb toxic gender concepts, either might end up hurting others in a naive expression of that ideology. The girls might end up participating in– or failing to stop– bullying of other girls who don’t fit accepted standards of beauty. Boys might end up sexualizing girls in intimidating ways and bullying other boys who fail to embody dominant concepts of masculinity. Or children can end up being bullied for those very reasons, at which point their lack of overview on how incredibly stupid a lot of cultural concepts of gender are will leave them completely unprotected and the damage might sink in to the bone.
But I think even worse than being bullied is being the one doing the harm. Children might do this quite mindlessly due to peer pressure and not actually intend to hurt others. But once they’ve done the harm, there’s kind of a “gotcha” in it. They may end up having to double down on the problematic perspective to manage their own unsettling pangs of conscience.
To me it’s sort of like how boy soldiers in the Congo were “inculcated” into group loyalty. Basically the warlords would trick freshly abducted children into killing as part of the process of brainwashing. They’d drug and blindfold the children and then put machine guns in their hands, telling them to shoot in a certain direction as if it were a game. When the blindfolds came off, the children would be staring at a bleeding pile of dead and wounded bodies.
The formula was very clever since, once the children had committed something that heinous, it created too much cognitive dissonance to ever reject gang ideology afterwards since adhering to gang identity and ideology was the only thing that could redeem them from a catastrophic sense of guilt, horror and shame. I think cultural propagandists operate on the same “clever” principle.
The same principle applies to racism and every other ugly type of “ism.” This is why I had zero qualms about preemptively “counter-propagandizing” my kids from the second they could talk.
Quite interestingly, my narcy former mother in law was completely outraged over how I was raising my kids. But then I think she was the queen of “rape myth acceptance” and internalized misogyny. There was no mystery that her main objections to how I raised the kids had to do with my “obsessive feminism.”
One of the reasons I never ripped her apart for all her bs is because I recognized that she was really just a former “boy soldier” who’d been inculcated into committing harm (namely trashing other women) from childhood. Ripping her apart wouldn’t have made any difference. She’d racked up too many “kills” to ever change.
Very interesting. Peer pressure can do so much good in this world (depending on the peer group that is). HOAC, good job teaching your kids how to cut through the bs.
The kids are alright. 🙂
Wait – hold a minute – is that song about cheating?
More than a decade ago, there was a massive controversy in the music industry about whether songwriter Pete Townsend had accessed pedophilic porn for his own gratification or whether, as he claimed, he was accessing it as part of his activism against the sexual exploitation of children.
Whether or not Townsend had been radicalized as an activist against child sexual abuse or whether he’d been turned into a sexual predator himself is an unsolved mystery. But he had long been open about the fact that he’d been sexually abused as a child and I think this is reflected in the lyrics he wrote for The Who, especially for the rock opera Tommy.
I’m your wicked Uncle Ernie
I’m glad you won’t see or hear me
As I fiddle about
Fiddle about
Fiddle about!
Your mother left me here to mind you
Now I’m doing what I want to
Fiddling about
Fiddling about
Fiddle about!
I think Townsend’s struggle with trauma is also reflected in some of the very weird, attachment-disordered lyrics of The Kids are Alright.
I don’t mind other guys dancing with my girl
That’s fine, I know them all pretty well
But I know sometimes I must get out in the light
BettMer leave her behind with the kids, they’re alright
The kids are alright
Sometimes, I feel I gotta get away
Bells chime, I know I gotta get away
And I know if I don’t, I’ll go out of my mind
Better leave her behind with the kids, they’re alright
The kids are alright .
?? It kind of does sound like the lyrics relate to cheating from a chumpy perspective but it’s as if the protagonist doesn’t want to intervene in a girlfriend’s potential hookups with friends due to some kind of self-esteem impairment or confusion and doubt over his own perspective.
I had never heard of the “Uncle Ernie” song. For me, the epitome of (presumed) guilt, as well as anger, is “Behind Blue Eyes”, and I never hear that song without thinking about the chain of abuse from one generation to the next.
The original Broadway production of Tommy did Uncle Ernie as an operatic aria and it was weirdly beautiful.
I’m undecided on Pete Townsend. If he’s a split personality, I’d say his inner “victim self” did his best work a lot like Roman Polanski.
In any case, it’s not unprecedented that an artist can both show great sensitivity to the victim’s perspective while being a predator themselves. Some of Roman Polanski’s early films are among the most brilliant in cinema history in conveying “victim’s POV” like Chinatown, Tess and Rosemary’s Baby. But, at the same time, he also serially raped little girls and young women without remorse.
Who knows, maybe there’s a deep schism in a lot of perpetrators where part of their psyches remain petrified in the child victims they once were while the other part has become evil and predatory. I have a similarly “schizo” reaction to this. I might feel sorry for the children they once were and want to protect future children from ever going through the same traumas, yet I feel zero sympathy for the adult criminals they’ve become.
Ditto
Dear FH&H, I really sympathize. You’ve been treated horribly by your ex, his schmoopie, and even his manipulative family.
You end your letter by asking, “I blocked him, but why do I feel the need to unblock and wait for an answer, or reach out.” Please know that this longing for a resolution that will never come is normal. It just feels awful to be treated so badly and NEVER to have that one true-hearted conversation where the cheating ex says “sweetheart, I did it because I’m seriously messed up, you didn’t deserve this, and I’m so deeply sorry.”
But as fellow chumps will attest, it’s a big mistake to keep trying to get any such acknowledgment from a FW. So just block, block, block, and when the little voice in your head says “But why? Shouldn’t I see if he will give me an answer?” just wait for the voice to go away. In time you won’t care so much, and in the meantime, you are slowly getting your life back. Sending hugs.
Thank you so much for the support and understanding. Looking back, I realize just how much I was being triangulated in that relationship, which fueled this need to compete and prove myself without even seeing it. I think that’s where my urge to reach out and seek some kind of closure comes from—a lingering hope that I’d finally get the validation and acknowledgment he was always withholding. But I know now that waiting for that from him is pointless. Blocking him is helping me slowly rebuild my life and let go of that need for his approval. Your words remind me that I’m on the right path. Thank you for the hugs—I’m sending some right back
That’s wonderful! It’s really great that things are coming into such clear focus, now that you’ve gone NC. And thank you for the hugs!
It’s wonderful that you’re finding power in NC. I think proximity to disordered individuals is a lot like exposure to some neurotoxic gas or other. It’s really only when you’re breathing fresh air again that you realize how disoriented you were when exposed. May there only be fresh air and blue skies for you moving forward.
Leedy,
You are absolutely right in the point that you make. Cheaters just do not have it in them to acknowledge that what they did was wrong, to apologise and to make amends; they lack the moral courage to do what is right and that’s the end of it.
I truly believe that I only started to heal when I realised that I had been waiting for an apology that was never going to come. Once I had accepted that Ex-Mrs LFTT was too much of a coward to “own her own sh*t” and that I just needed to get on with my on healing and supporting our children while they did the same, I was able to set myself (and the kids) on the path to a much better future.
LFTT
Good point: it would take “moral courage” to apologize and make amends. (To deeply apologize, a FW would have to face the fact that they are capable of great callousness and cruelty, which is understandably a frightening prospect.)
Hahaha funny stuff Chump Lady
(Not the poster, sorry he’s a shitbag run)
What I find telling is that they were only in a relationship for 8 months and for some reason she was being included in his therapy sessions. Wtf? What is the deal with this creepy therapist who lies for him, and why is F**k Him even talking to his therapist about him? Was the therapist treating both of them? If so, that’s extremely unethical.The whole thing sounds incredibly toxic and freaky. F**k Him, please stay the hell away from these lunatics, including that ridiculous therapist.
I absolutely let her know how I felt. She was fully aware of everything that was happening, and I felt this strange tension between us from the start. I’d bring up my concerns—like not agreeing with the constant labor he expected of me, or how I felt uncomfortable taking on so much responsibility as a step-parent. I even told her that if we were to get married, I wasn’t willing to contribute financially in the way she implied I should. She called me ‘too strict’ and made me feel like I was being unreasonable. Over time, I realized I didn’t want to be around her at all. What I thought would be support for becoming a potential step-parent felt more like being groomed into a role I never agreed to. The whole dynamic was toxic and left me feeling deeply uneasy
Agree that something is waaaay off with the therapist.
The bottom line is that you don’t need this level of chaos in your life, period.
My ex was such a chaotic man even before he took off, and after a year apart and yet more chaos, I was done. He loved to stir things up to his advantage, and the adultery and addiction aspects were all rolled into the mess.
Life apart from him is easy-peasy in comparison, even with a few glitches.
Absolutely. I never believed that drama was a normal part of relationships, yet somehow, I still got swept up in his chaos. It’s like it had a way of sneaking in, little by little, until it felt strangely familiar. Now, looking back, I realize just how much energy I spent trying to stay grounded amidst his whirlwind. Life without that constant storm feels like a gift I didn’t know I was missing.
Where did she meet this guy, a 12 step meeting from hell?
Ha, close! But I actually met him through a much more dangerous place: modern dating apps. At least in 12 step meetings, people show up to work on their issues. Online, it’s like a grab bag—you never know what you’re going to get until it’s too late
Hello, everyone. I’m the woman who sent the email, and I want to share some reflections on my journey, hoping it resonates with anyone who may be going through something similar. Looking back, I can see that my attempts to reconcile, even for a short time, were rooted in a fog of confusion and hope. I held onto the belief that things would get better, but, in reality, they were only unraveling beneath the surface.
At first, I believed counseling would help. I didn’t fully understand step-parenting or the dynamics of blending families, and we had even discussed marriage. In my heart, I thought counseling would provide clarity, but it turned out to be a tool that, instead, clouded my mind further. I began to notice subtle ways the therapist seemed to support his narrative, minimizing or disregarding my feelings. I wanted to believe that therapy would be a safe place to work through challenges, but eventually, I had to face that the therapist was gaslighting me. It was painful to realize that even a professional could contribute to the distortion of my reality. For a long time, I doubted my own perceptions, convincing myself that maybe I was the problem, that maybe I just wasn’t understanding enough.
Blocking him and his connections finally lifted that weight. I can breathe again, think clearly, and see myself with a fresh perspective. Reflecting on the past months, I barely recognize the person I became. The triangulation, manipulation, and justification I received from those close to him, even well-meaning family members saying, “he was just being a role model,” clouded my judgment. I let myself believe their words over my intuition.
In hindsight, I wish I had left as soon as I found out the truth. Staying an extra month and a half only prolonged my pain. A lot of what I uncovered came crashing down toward the end, and with each new discovery, it felt like pieces of me were breaking away. I recognize now that I have a lot of growing and healing to do, and that’s okay.
Thank you, Chump Lady, for this space and for your post. I’m grateful for the chance to process, reflect, and learn. Please be gentle with me—this journey has been difficult, and these revelations weren’t clear from the beginning. It took time to see the truth, but I’m here, learning to trust myself again, and moving forward, one step at a time.
It’s very much like you escaped a cult and had to deprogram yourself for a period. But, for me, this isn’t just an analogy but kind of actual since I suspect narcissism and narcissistic abuse pretty much arise from cultish thinking. I even suspect that’s the origins of the disorder: that most narcissists are “trained” into certain toxic mental patterns from birth and cut their teeth within cultish religious views or cultish racial or gender or class or genetic views or even cultish intellectual constructs or nationalist exceptionalism.
If you think about it, cults– whether religious or existential– are by definition based on artificial hierarchies that, aside from making the false promise of paradise on earth through adherence to cult belief systems, ascribe super-duper magical qualities to designated leaders that make them exempt from all scrutiny and deserving of worship and service (not to mention free blowjobs)… just like every narcissist demands to be viewed and treated. Cults also always require “mortal enemies/out-groups” and scapegoats for contrast and also to represent the “heads on pikes” cautionary example of what happens to people who don’t subscribe to whatever demented fallacies the cult dictates. And like a status-based Ponzi scheme, those on the bottom rungs support this insanity and eat shit from their “betters” on the belief that, one day, they too can ascend to the throne of magical, exempt status and all will grovel beneath them.
Because it’s a kind of collective investment in irrational beliefs, cultish people– and narcissists for that matter– seem to always find others to triangulate with and form toxic little cliques with which wouldn’t be so easy if they were merely mentally ill. These little clusters also, by nature, require victims for their collectives to function. Apparently you were the designated scapegoat for a time as they schemed together, brainwashed and conditioned you and took turns trampling your rights. But like Velvet Hammer’s “three legged stool” analogy for triangulation (or, in your case, four legged stool but who’s counting), I’m sure their little game fell over pretty quickly after you removed yourself as the “victim leg.”
Darn you for spoiling their fun! Infidel!! 😉
Glad you got out before becoming Girlfriend Appliance #3, 4, 5? That FW has way too many enablers.
Good reminder for all of us why we do not go to therapy with abusers. Hugs to you!
I was confused by the facts of this story – did FW have more than one child, did he work, was the bio-mother involved? The term “stepparent” follows a marriage. Otherwise, you’re an unpaid babysitter. Most of all, you’re a chump.
I get it. That’s how I entered my relationship with my ex-husband. He seemed a responsible part-time dad. His ex was re-married. But, being a chump, I gave far more than he did. He needed to parent his daughter, not me. That dynamic strained our 30-year marriage.
Sorry the cheater had one child, his ex girlfriend had two children he was very much involved in
He had an ex wife but I never had problems with her. Shes who he had his biological child with.
Oh thankfully I did not babysit, clean, or contribute. His ex girlfriend did. I wasn’t doing that. Which is why would upset him, the therapist, and his family
I think you should have told the therapist, “Oh, YOU are old and I’m getting rid of YOU!” Her advice sounds lousy in all regards.
Maybe I missed a comment or two, but: what I find most striking is the fact that he organized a partner for dog sitting. That reminds me so much of the extreme pre-planning that my FW did. I still can’t find words for some of it. I had no idea that humans do that – plan for months or weeks in advance how they can abuse someone. I find it… I don’t know, “awe-inspiring” is wrong, because it isn’t positive.