Your Experience of Infidelity As Abuse
Since the earliest days of this blog, I’ve argued that infidelity is abuse.
You can’t cheat on someone without inflicting psychological harm through gaslighting, deception, or blameshifting. But it’s also being sexually humiliated and conspired against, having your health risked, being vulnerable to an “open” relationship you were unaware of. Double lives also cost money. The diverted monies spent on sex workers or Schmoopies. The nest that’s being feathered elsewhere. The theft of your chump labor.
But most of all, infidelity is the theft of your reality. It’s an insidious form of intimate partner abuse. If you’re mugged, it’s nothing personal. The thief just wants your wallet. When you’re chumped, the thief wants your wallet and everything else you bring to the table. Your parenting, your front of normalcy, the sex and paycheck you provide. Most of all, the cheater wants your continued (lopsided, unreciprocated) investment in them.
A thief is honest.
They’re stealing from you out in the open. We understand the power dynamic of “Hand over the wallet, or I’ll hurt you.” With infidelity, the power dynamic is hidden, and the theft is more traumatic, because you don’t expect the person closest to you to rob you.
In my book, I give the example of being thrown down a flight of stairs (as the cheater claims they “still love you!”). Would you rather topple head-over-ass down a staircase, or lose years of your life to a FW? Most of us would prefer the stairs. But of course, you don’t get a choice. To be a chump is to be deprived of consent.
Since 2012 I’ve tried to shift the narrative that assumes reconciliation with abusers. But the Friday Challenge is to marshal your own arguments — tell me how infidelity was abusive to you. What did you lose? Describe the trauma and the fall out. Or share the failings of the RIC. Tell me about the disconnect between what you experienced and what was expected of you (“make the marriage a good place to be!).
I’m also interested in the intersection of infidelity and other forms of abuse that are recognized as abuse: violence, coercion, financial theft. Did your cheater also hit you? Or threaten you? Did they inflict a D-Day when you were at your most vulnerable?
Sorry, this isn’t the cheeriest of topics. But it’s topical. I’ve been reading the reviews of Sarah Manguso’s Liars and so many people seem stuck and cannot see infidelity as abusive. So, let’s create a record. I want to hear your story.
I’m a lawyer, and it’s always struck me that having sex with your spouse after you’ve been unfaithful, without telling your spouse you’ve been unfaithful, is a form of rape by deception: Your spouse Is consenting to sex with you because they think certain emotional and physical promises you made have been adhered to, but they haven’t. It turns out some states agree with me that this is a criminal act. I round up some of those cases and write about my personal journey here which is my most read piece on Medium, btw. Thank you, Tracy, and this community, for changing the narrative!
https://lindafalcao.medium.com/your-husband-had-an-affair-have-you-been-raped-1417759d1589?sk=39d62221805a15dbede2121261c44b64
It was over 30 years ago, but I will never forget talking to a sweet young woman (naive, loyal, fluffy, Peter-Pan collar type) whose husband of 7 years had transmitted HIV to her, from prostitutes. (And the anti-retrovirals were not as advanced as today.) Yes, where are the consequences?
@falconchump , I hope you’ll pass on the advice you got from your Dr to each and every client involved in a divorce.
I was so clueless, that I went to be STD tested after reading Chumplady’s blog. I lost months!
Thankfully, all was well. But I sure felt like another layer of betrayal just having to get tested.
Now that I think more, I was breastfeeding my baby when his affair started.
He put at risk not only me, but also our child! HPV can kill an infant without immunity.
More reasons to be Enraged!
Enraged (I love your screen name by the way), thank you for your righteous anger, particularly on behalf of your baby. And yes, I tell everyone to go get tested. You can sort out whatever emotions you have about the situation later, but your body isn’t going to wait for your mind to catch up, and you need to see what you have to deal with and treat it if necessary. I’m happy to say my two daughters, who were in their 20s and 30s at the time, were extremely supportive of my talking about this openly (my oldest daughter is now a nurse in a STI clinic in a big city :). We take women’s lives and health very seriously and don’t have time or patience for people who don’t.
THANK YOU for this. I could not agree with you more.
I sent your article to Natasha Singh, a local sex literacy educator in my area. I met her when I attended a presentation for parents about sexual consent. She is awesome.
https://www.sexlited.com/
Velvet Hammer, I’ve so enjoyed your posts over the years. Thanks for your kind words, cheers!
Really? 🙂 I’m so glad to hear! I have felt like such a bumbling basket case since DDay!
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Velvet hammer, you have been a light and a beacon to so many people. Thank you!
Yes! Thank you! I submitted a letter to Tracy about the very same thing a few months ago, “rape by deception”. She picked it up and posted it to the blog, so search for that in the blog search box. Most people think that as chumps (there were a few outliers that I disagree with). If you FEEL that way, then it’s your reality and therefore true.
Agree. This was raised in a series I just watched Fake, on Prime. She meets a conman online, compulsive liar, gaslights her, yardy ya. Well worth watching.
Great article. I’ll be sharing this link far and wide.
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THIS!!!!!!! Thanks for sharing that article: Linda Falcao nailed it. I further think that when children result from the marriage in which one partner cheated, that child endangerment and child abuse are appropriate charges. Because children in utero and those being breastfed are potentially or actually exposed to sexually transmitted diseases, some of which can kill and/or permanently disable a child.
But first, it needs to be considered rape of a partner. As it should be, since it meets the legal definition of rape. The fact that it is commonplace in no way absolves the rapist of his/her responsibility.
I wish we’d never done away with the concept of fault divorce. Fault, responsibility and restitution are important considerations, without which justice is incomplete.
On Dday I was shattered, to the point that I could not move for 3+ days; just lay on the bed, stunned and crying, my mind whirling down dark corridors in panic and fear. Did not drink water, eat, or go to the bathroom. They say you can’t go more than three days without water: I know this to be untrue. I thought I was a savvy and discerning woman, but I wasn’t. How many other people had deceived me? How many other people I trusted and loved were not who I thought? And who was I that I could be so completely deceived? The future I thought I had: gone. The present life I was living: destroyed. And neither is the past spared. You have to relive everything in your past in light of the revelation that you didn’t know your own life story, so what was real and what was fake? Past, present and future, all collapsed on top of one another like the 405 freeway after the earthquake.
I did everything the therapists said, as they carefully loaded my poor “sex addict” husband into the figurative ambulance, carefully placing a cold rag on his forehead, murmuring kind words and gently explaining his “disease” making sure he had treatment plans, support, mentors, individual and group therapy…while I was left, alone and smashed flat and every bone broken by the quake, to drag myself off and try to mend as best I could in order to support my husband’s recovery. The whole thing so fucking wrong…but I didn’t realize it because my mind and psyche were shattered.
I couldn’t read books for several years because I could not focus sufficiently…and I have a degree in English and have taught it at the college level. I had to start with “beach books” those poorly written, vacuous and predictable paperbacks with their simple plot lines and cartoonish character development. It was years before I could read real books…something I’d previously enjoyed and done daily. It was weeks before I could drive, and even now I am hypervigilant, and the minor adjustments other motorists make while driving still register as (danger!), an improvement from the period 18 months post-Dday, where any deviation from the strict middle of the lane towards my lane registered as (DANGER! DANGER, crash imminent!).
Discovery of massive betrayal is a bit like stepping on an IED. Everything you love and recognize explodes before your eyes. And you are left trying to piece together the shards and bits into something resembling your old life.
I wish I knew then it was an impossible task.
I wish I knew then that betrayal in one area is always connected to betrayal in other areas, because that is how the disordered operate.
I wish I knew then that Dday is the happiest day you will ever have for the rest of the time you spend with a disordered partner, because on Dday, you do not know the extent of the betrayals and thus have at least a thimble full of hope.
I survived rape, being stalked and shot at while in the woods, being diagnosed (incorrectly) with a fatal illness, being fired for being a whistle-blower, a brain tumor, and partner betrayal. Of all of these experiences, partner betrayal was by far the worst.
Tragically and beautifully said.
That said, in reference to this part,
“I wish we’d never done away with the concept of fault divorce. Fault, responsibility and restitution are important considerations, without which justice is incomplete.”…..
Though I agree with the 2nd sentence here, from my cursory research, I’m understanding that it is no fault divorce that has saved many miserable women from suicide, because in the past, many could not PROVE the fault of their husbands, thus trapping them in their misery and marital abuse. I’ve read that no fault divorce has saved women from the sometimes impossible burden of proving their husband’s fault. So I’m in favor of saving their ability to leave their abusive marriage thought they cannot prove fault. In my case, I can absolutely prove it (thanks Apple Inc!) but many cannot prove the fault of their marital partner. In such past cases, their marriages were a trap they could not escape.
I have read some literature on this too, and you are right. Some abused women cannot prove, or cannot AFFORD to prove, the abuse. So I agree with no-fault divorce as damage reduction, overall.
I understand how you feel about going back to “fault” divorce. But no fault divorce has gotten a lot of people out of abusive marriages while they were still alive.
Principled Life, I have had the same experience as far as the inability to read and focus. It took me years to be able to focus and read books. My mind is so scattered. I am more closed off and far less trusting of others. The other thing lost is my inability to cry any longer. The last time I had a good cry was the day that my mother died- that will be 3 years ago this Fall. I used to be able to cry and did so frequently up until the time I managed to go completely ‘No Contact’ with the FW.
The fact that I can no longer cry bothers me. I think it is due to the trauma of the betrayal. I care for others and work to be nice-but I never cry anymore and I miss that emotional release.
“Discovery of massive betrayal is a bit like stepping on an IED. Everything you love and recognize explodes before your eyes. And you are left trying to piece together the shards and bits into something resembling your old life.”
Perfect analogy.
Exactly. Betrayal trauma is the actual term I was learning about when I found LACGAL. I left my FW years prior but going threw litigation abuse with FW over the child he forced into existence , then abandoned but continues to use as a pawn to control me with leads to what feels like additional DDays.
Betrayal Trauma is farther reaching than just a singular instance of lying, cheating stealing, intimidation, manipulation, etc it’s also hard to put into words for people who have simply never experienced it. It wrecks you fundamentally to your core and for someone to knowingly inflect that level of potential pain and suffering onto someone they claim to love is in my opinion truly an unforgivable act of abuse.
Amen– excellent article. I think there’s no question that rape by deception/fraud should include continuing to have sex with an unwitting partner while secretly cheating.
But it’s clear from the continuing blowback against #MeToo that it’s going to be a massive political firefight to finally create a more surgical and universal definition of sexual consent that’s consistent with the legal definition of financial consent. This is because keeping the concept of sexual consent “fuzzy” is arguably in the interest of several powerful industries (like the media industry that lost gazillions due to #MeToo takedowns or the streaming porn behemoth– an industry notorious for blackmailing, coercing and trafficking performers) not to mention every perv who ever abused power to extract sex.
This is it!! Sex under the presence of monogamy and I was coerced for years. He would not speak to me or touch me for days on end until I agreed to have sex with him or apologize for not doing my duty. He told me sex was owed to him as my husband and it was transactional to him..I was a married sex worker. I’m not kidding.
Marital rape was LEGAL not that long ago! “Marital rape was criminalized in the United States in 1993, when it became illegal in all 50 states. Although marital rape was recognized as a crime by 1993, the degrees of recognition and punishment varied widely by state, with some states requiring aggravating circumstances for it to be classified as rape. Legal loopholes still exist in many states that can downgrade the offense or absolve the rapist of responsibility if the victim is married to their attacker.”
Okay I’m getting more vocabulary terms to help me understand/ describe my experience. Now I can add, “a married sex worker”. wow.
We actually *joked* about how he would insist on sex every night. That’s how gaslit I was.
I hear you.
He never said it but definitely felt he was owed- and that he could touch me however and whenever he wanted despite being told to cease and desist.
His favourite thing was to whack me hard on the bum or grab me without warning like a drunk in a strip club- he made it clear by his actions that I was his property to do what he wanted with.
Same. All the grabbing despite years of saying how much I hated that.
Same.
I agree that it is a consent violation. I felt so violated when I found my Ex’s messages to other women because I wouldn’t be with him or have been supporting him financially if I had known the truth.
Not to mention that you may be open to children and the mental, physical, emotional, and financial realities of them with your monogamous partner, but if they have lied and are letting you put yourself in a vulnerable state that you otherwise wouldn’t have agreed to.
Wow, thanks, this is the first time I’ve ever heard anyone bring that issue up– that chumps might make the decision to have children with a cheater only because they don’t know about the cheating. Talk about a profoundly life-altering result of deception.
That brings up a good point. Shouldn’t any financial support you have provided to the cheater while s/he was cheating be considered theft by fraud? Should you not at least be able to sue to recover those funds? Your support was predicated on your partner being monogamous, so you have been defrauded.
Excellent point.
30 year litigator here— I agree with your assessment wholly. What XH did to me is actionable sexual assault, battery, misrepresentation, fraud, theft, intentional infliction of emotional distress, the tort of outrage…..
MotherChumper, SO many torts 🙂
So many torts, after all the tarts. Consequences!
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This all happened to me. I wish I could criminally prosecute eX for all this.
In my experience, justice is the best PTSD remedy.
Yep.
Many of us who have been exposed to STDs would agree!
Yes, once you’ve had to go for a multitude of tests (blood test, vaginal swabs, urine test), and go back six months later for the second HIV test, you understand how much you’ve been violated. I’m a civil rights lawyer, and I strongly believe that sexual consent is a civil right.
I agree. When I am being treated by mental health professionals for the same issues and in the same ways as a person who’s circumstances fit ‘sexually abused’ but no one else will recognize it… it’s pretty isolating. I did not consent and I would have said no. He admits that’s why he didn’t tell me. If he had vandalized my car, I would have a case in court for some kind of restitution. But my body, my health, my emotions, my trust and my time were vandalized and all I got was a divorce decree… and an STD. (FW was a serial cheater for our entire 15 yrs. He used his work car, phone and 9-5 to do his FWing)
“I did not consent and I would have said no.”
THIS
I would never have let him touch me again. But he lied for years and I didn’t know.
He robbed me of my entire fledgling adulthood, years upon years I will never get back, and I’ll never be able to re-live that time of my life and meet anyone who would have treated me better (or realized I would have been happier single all along.) I have been set back in every aspect of life- emotionally, spiritually, financially, and academically.
I met him at 17 while in college, dropped out of college and married him at 21, and divorced him at 28. I’m 31 now.
I still have nightmares about marital rape and confrontations with him and the affair partner. I still wake up in a cold sweat, on a nightly basis, assaulted with my traumatic memories of his shark eyes. In my waking life he played the part of the penitent, apologetic, timid forest creature. But in my dreams his true face shows itself to me. The callousness. The complete and utter disregard for what he was doing to me. This specter of my ex haunts me even three years out of divorce and I feel I am still a long way from Tuesday.
During the discard, his consistent lies, gaslighting, and fake love mentally broke me to the point of several suicide attempts and multiple instances of self harm because of how trapped I was.
My ex had secret credit cards and a secret phone plan. He spent money we didn’t even have and put the household finances in considerable debt.
I am fortunate only in that I avoided STDs- a considerable risk that he could have easily given me. Beyond some non-con encounters, he was also not physically abusive.
I would have rather he hit me. If he did, I may have ‘woken up’ faster to the fact that being gaslit to the brink of sanity was also abuse.
I would rather be physically broken than to live with the mental damage this did to me. I used to be open and kind, though quite naive and psychologically fragile. Now I feel cold, I don’t trust people, and my nightmares are constant and exhausting. I keep blaming my younger self for not seeing it sooner, and not acting on it sooner. Hating myself for how stupid and easily manipulated I was. I live in a shell now, afraid of being open to anyone else ever again.
I’m back at college now. I’m trying to get my degree which I should have done in my early 20s. I’m trying to get my life back on track while constantly juggling my new mental illnesses caused by the trauma of marital discard.
Sometimes I wish I could die and start over, but I can’t be sure reincarnation is a thing.
But I’m here, and I’ll keep doing what needs to be done. I owe it to my family, and to myself, to salvage the rest of my life.
I hear you and see you. Honey, maybe this doesn’t help, but just in case it does, you are still very young. Yes, you were robbed, and that is not okay, and you are entitled to every bit of anger or grief you may experience in relation to that injustice, but you are still rich with youth. May God bless you.
I am just starting to see my “coldness” and “untrusting” as really a freedom of knowing truth. That some people – many!- will harm you. And that I should be vigilant in who I let in my life. This is strength. I had night terrors and so one, but they subsided a lot after I realized the truth ( it took me 6 years?- We knew each other for 30). Time is your friend. You are doing great. You are free from him. I do sound baths, guided meditations, have a shrink. And my life is “small’ but it is safe. Wariness is my pride and shield. I honor it.
If you took your life because of him would that be 2nd degree murder?
I would not say this publicly, but the truth is, it is very dispiriting to have domestic violence be considered to be about physical violence in our courts and society. Tracy’s entry, followed by this comment, helped me clarify something that’s troubled me for a long time around this. It seems to me that the majority of people believe that everything less than being physically hurt is in a lesser category of harm. The bar is egregious violence. I am not sure, but I have a feeling the effects of psychological abuse may do more harm in the long run. They are more insidious and isolating. After all, you can’t call the cops and tell them, “my spouse has been lying to me and keeps telling me black is white, and is mean to me my children”.
The psychological damage took far longer to heal than the bruises (he didn’t hit me, but he’d push me so hard I fell, on more than one occasion). I used to beg my ex to please just hit me, if it would make the verbal abuse stop. But he never did.
My local DV shelters take in women who have been emotionally abused. They, at least, get it. This was not the case in the past. So we’re getting somewhere, but progress is agonizingly slow.
I agree with what you say and so do the individuals who’ve spearheaded coercive control legislation such as the late Evan Stark. Personally I think all of Chump Nation should get involved in the movement to criminalize coercive control as the UK and Scotland have done because so much of the abuse chumps describe easily meets the definition of coercive control, i.e., subviolent domestic abuse.
Scotland went the furthest and made coercive control punishable by 14 years in prison. So far in the US there are only civil statutes providing some protection to victims of coercive control such as in California, Hawaii, Washington, Maryland and Connecticut while other states have similar bills under review.
The fact that civil statutes don’t really meet the seriousness of the risks to victims is evident in Jennifer’s law in Connecticut which was named for two murdered chumps, Jennifer Dulos and Jennifer Magnano. The law enables victims to get orders of protection against emotionally abusive and controlling partners even if no physical violence was involved based on consistent statistical evidence that coercive control– more than even a history of violent assault– is the most accurate predictor of domestic murder. So the civil policy, though an improvement, seems insufficient both because of lethal statistical risk and because Jennifer Magnano already had an order of protection which didn’t stop a fatal bullet. The only thing that might have protected both victims would be if their abusers had been in jail due to the preceding patterns of coercive and controlling behavior. Plus I think there’s a basic humanist argument to be made for the criminalization of emotional terror campaigns and psychological torture because those things are incredibly destructive and shouldn’t be tolerated in an equitable society.
It’s the frosting on the cake they eat. Lies are the frosting..
My STD physically hurt me. As did the assault that nearly broke my arm when ex was trying to get his phone away from me with the cheater texts.
… and often, if you confide those things to the people around you, their response is ambiguous or straight-up dismissal or to distance themselves. Whereas if you muster the courage to tell your friend, “my partner cracked my rib”, decent people will respond with clarity and conviction that that is not OK. People don’t understand the detrimental effect of psychological abuse at all unless they’ve experienced it themselves. It leaves you so isolated and unsupported. My husband spent many years incrementally isolating me from relatives and friends (and his own care and help, gradually) before he administered the coup de grace — he planned and waited until I was at the lowest point possible.
TRUTH
Both my sister and I..spouses waited till right before delivery or immediately after. You have to be down and out
Everything you said here is very relevant to my experience- I wrote about how after I continued the cycle of abuse (from a new abuser! Because I didn’t get the help I needed for some time) , I got a black eye once and everyone was upset and i thought and said, and wrote an unpublished piece, that said, “this?’ pointing to my black eye. This is nothing. At least you can see it.” And this is the reality of every woman I know and have talked to (once at a fundraiser for the ERA, talking to women who had done prison time for killing their abusive ex husbands)- the emotional abuse was FAR more damaging. The TV show MAID is really good at showing that. If D Day is (sorry still new here) is when reality is finally revealed, then yes, things got worse? But I went No Contact, so that was the beginning of getting better. He was hiding money, lying and even getting angry “how dare you accuse me of cheating”, and – the the truths( so many disgusting things I can’t even write them all) came out when a reconciliation monster made him confess in a “therapy/abuse session.” And i was at my weakest, in the wake of my father’s suicide and my mother’s dying. This is very common. I know a woman who was left when she was caring for her dying sister, who she loved. After 40 years, he left her because she wasn’t fun anymore. This is SO COMMON. And- his financial success was part of him leaving, as he left for someone (years of dating without me knowing), as he didn’t want to share with me, and got a wealthy new partner. This, after we had struggled financially in the first 10 years (we leaned heavily on my parents financially, down payments for houses, co-signing mortgages) and then we were fine for 5, then he started doing well. And he lied and hid everything. I literally had stopped eating and had no idea about ANYTHING I was so brain washed. He would only physically abuse me privately, but he publicly humiliated me often and then denied he had done it when we were home. I love the idea of sad sausage. He did that at the beginning of our relationship and throughout- the beginning was particularly bad, as in the Amy Shumer show episode where she comforts her crying rapist in high school. That happened to me with my ex- I comforted him after he raped me once, before we were married and I was in a relationship with another man. Here is the deal -rape is pathetic. It’s cowardly and pathetic. And he was my “friend” from high school, who always needed “help”. I got him an apartment near me, as he needed “help” moving downtown because he hated uptown. That is when the rape occurred. When he became my neighbor…I now see it all as grooming, and stalking frankly. For a long time, I wrote that time off as “he was a sad needy man and I helped him”. But at the end, and in the severe trauma from my dad’s self murder, he started the physical abuse again and acted like he didn’t do it… I am going to stop here because I’m upset. Gaslighting is being bandied about right now and I think it’s great, but there is also now a backlash and so people are diminishing it, but people who work with abuse victims KNOW it is so real and SO damaging. They know it’s the foundation for all other abuse.
Thank you, new here, for your powerful description of your experiences. In a just universe, these truths would reverberate around the world.
Don’t vultures wait until you are almost dead?
I think he was hoping I would die from grief to save himself from a divorce and I know that sounds crazy, but I – I use that narrative in my mind sometimes- even if it’s not entirely accurate. But yes. He was a vulture in so many ways- not just with me-thank you for that analogy
New here old Chump
Both cheaters wanted me out of the way. Both were armed, one broke in and told me a protection order would not help.all the pieces he left behind of me and our new baby. Enough said
terrifying. so happy you are alive and well and here in this safe group.
Infidelity of the person you thought was your life partner is one of the worst kinds of abuse. I liken it to physical abuse that is so traumatic you end up in a coma for months and take years to recover from, if you ever really do totally. It leaves you with scars so deep, you are noticeably different. That is exactly what happens when you have been blindsided and betrayed by the person you trusted most.
Like physical abuse the abuser often blames the victim. ‘I wouldn’t have done this if it wasn’t for what you did.’ Like physical abuse you are left with a feeling that all the ‘happy’ memories are muddied and best forgotten because they were fake and not at all what you thought they were. The abuser is not the person you thought they were!
But unlike if you were physically abused and put into a coma, with this abuse, people wonder why can’t you forget and forgive? They ask why you cannot be friends, for the kids? Why are you taking so long to heal? What did you do to cause this?
You are abused in the first place and left with no real outside support because unlike physical trauma, nobody who hasn’t felt betrayal can really understand the trauma it brings.
For me the biggest abuse is the loss of the life I should have had had I not been swindled into love, trust and life building with my abuser. I should have taken over my family business and earnt 4x what I do now. I should have continued to live in Australia, not cold dark Sweden, which I am now stuck in because my children are Swedish. I should have had the 4 children I wanted but didn’t, as I respected his feeling that 2 was enough. My whole adult life is completely different because I gave it to my abuser and got nothing but trauma and memories I’d rather not think of.
My whole life was a lie. He was unfaithful in one way or another our entire marriage. He even pretended I was someone else during sex. I didn’t find all this out until a few years ago. All the good years of my life are gone now. I have Stage 4 cancer and there’s no point in leaving now.
Yes, the theft of life is one of the biggest abuses, especially for older chumps who were married a long time. They let us waste most of our lives, knowing full well that they were not going to keep the promises which the union was predicated on. Then we are left to live out our remaining years and die alone, or so they hope. I really believe that is what they want. They want to our entire lives destroyed even after they are no longer in them. Actually, especially after they are out of our lives. We are a living crime scene they would rather did not exist. So they do whatever they can to beat us down, to try to erase us. Hence the litigation abuse they engage in during divorce, the trouble they give us about the children, the continued character assassination long after we have broken up with them.
Most people have no idea what this is like or have been conditioned to centralise a man at the expense of everything else- including themselves.
Feel free to tell anyone who acts like you should be over it and moving on now to fuck off.
Much of what you’ve said is true. However, if you are physically abused, people wonder why you cannot forgive and forget; can’t you just be friends for the kids? And we know him — he’s a nice guy. What did you do to him to make him do this?
Yes, your first paragrah, it is betrayal trauma. Like being slammed into a wall.
Your brain goes numb to protect you because it is all to awful to contemplate. Then you gradually realize that this awful thing actually did happen. It took me about 7 months.
Exactly! I love the analogy of going into a coma then taking a long time to heal after getting out of the coma. Thanks for sharing.
I never saw myself as abused until a “lightbulb” event after I had filed for divorce. A few months after I filed and he had moved out, my lawyer said It was alright to change the locks on the house, so I did. As the kids were at camps, one of my FW’s sisters invited me to visit her in Texas. She was on my team (still is) and knew I needed to have a relaxing respite from FW. While I was at his sisters for the week he kept sending messages with veiled threats. For instance: he asked who was looking after the cats? Can they be trusted? It would be a shame if anything happened to them and other weird things. Before I left he seemed cool with everything, but the barrage of strange messages indicated otherwise. I had not learned about narcissistic personality disorder and sociopathy yet, so I didn’t understand what I was dealing with. I stopped replying to any messages and blocked him.
After I returned home, I discovered that while I had been gone, my house had been broken into through my bedroom window. I found cat poop all over my bed, but the cats were fine. I freaked out and immediately went to my neighbors house and told them what had happened. The wife was my family doctor and her husband was an attorney. We all knew who had broken in, as nothing was taken, just the cat poop on the bed. My FW was obviously upset that he could no long use his key to enter the house and had to show me he could still get in and I wasn’t the boss of HIM!
They told me I needed to call the police. That’s when I really freaked out. I got practically hysterical. I was sure he would retaliate and I was so afraid to provoke him. My neighbor, the attorney calmly said I had battered woman syndrome from his emotional abuse. I literally stopped crying and realized he was right. It was a turning point for me. I called the police and made a report on the break in. I slept at a girlfriend’s house that night. The next day I put an alarm system in the house.
Scary revelation.
People up-thread were discussing the rapey element of having sex with a partner under terms they have not consented to. Breaking into your house just to prove he can is a horrible metaphor for the same rapey mindset.
FWs think of their partners and partners’ bodies, money, time and effort as their property for them to enjoy as they see fit.
I hope you’re safely away from him.
Esther Perel would want us to ask why the person cheated. It’s so condescending: as if the “why” is some big mystery and we Chumps all forgot to look at that particular Check Engine Light. I didn’t have to ask. My FW told me every single day how hard her life was, and how unsupported she felt. It’s interesting that she never wanted to end the marriage despite being so miserable. Rather, when she didn’t get her way, she would cheat. Oddly, the things that she felt were missing in our relationship always seemed to change and shift. Funny that. Maybe, just maybe, cheaters cheat because they lack character, lack empathy, and they want to and they can.
So, how was I abused?
She impacted my physical health. When my FW first confessed to me, it was because she had contracted HPV and was nervous that I was experiencing symptoms and would find out. When I went to the clinic, I was told that I had no outward symptoms, but that there was no effective way to test whether a man had contracted HPV. It was also during this time that I confirmed that FW had lied about certain aspects of how she contracted it. So, even in her “confession,” she lied.
She impacted my finances. She always had her own credit card that I could never see, and when we separated, she diverted $10,000 to paying it down. I never saw that money again.
She threatened the stability of our home. Ultimately, my final D-day was when I discovered her relationship with her student (she’s a college professor). She admitted that her actions, if known, would get her fired. The relationship with the student was undeniably unethical, and I could not allow myself to be complicit with her actions by reconciling again. I raised the issue with her that a student could extort her if they were so inclined. Why are we trusting the character of a college student messing around with their married professor? Having affairs means bringing unsavory characters into your orbit without your consent. We don’t talk about this very often.
She messed with my sanity. Imagine that a person does all these horrible things, and then blames all of it on you. She cheated because she was unhappy, and she was unhappy because her life was hard and I didn’t support her enough. Obviously, that’s not even true – she cheated because she wanted to. However, she knows that cheating is bad, so somehow it had to be someone else’s fault. Somehow it had to be the case that she deserved her side relationships.
What a devil I am to cause such malicious behavior! Why am I staying in this marriage again? If my superpower is to make someone else’s life miserable to the point that they are driven to unethical behavior, then why would I stay? A mugging takes 2 minutes and I never have more than $50 in my wallet. My marriage was 15 years and it did far more damage than that.
Amen to this: “Having affairs means bringing unsavory characters into your orbit without your consent. We don’t talk about this very often.”
We should definitely talk about that more. I would never in a million years voluntarily mix with scary people like the AP and her racist, gun-loving y’all-Qaeda radtrad clan. As the mother of minor kids, I found even being put on the radar of types like this violating and terrifying. Cheaters act sort of like chinks in their families’ immune defenses which let the infectious trash in, sometimes literally.
Yes, this is a great talking point that isn’t talked about much. Thanks for stating it so clearly.
We sorta talk about it, in the sense that many of us have stories about crazy APs that we have to deal with. But, since we are talking about abuse and issues of consent, I feel like we don’t talk about how introducing an AP to the mix is a violation and a breach of consent. Especially if you have kids, these APs are now fixtures in our lives and our children’s lives that we have to deal with that we never consented to, and they can be really terrible people
I think witting APs are, by definition, terrible people which is why I never even considered having a “revenge affair” despite no lack of opportunity. I wouldn’t because the only types who’d knowingly participate in this would be the absolute dregs and maybe even dangerous. Messing with that kind of rough trade isn’t a good idea if someone is childless but I think it’s downright criminal parenting if they have minor kids. Social science seems to be backing up the “creepy AP” concept with studies finding clinical associations between “mate poaching” and psychopathy.
Not that FWs are going to upgrade following divorce but almost anyone they partner with after the ink is dry on the divorce is going to be a sight better than whoever they were bonking during the marriage because that bar is basically in hell.
Mine drilled the idea of “it’s your fault because you don’t pay enough romantic attention to me” into my head so steadily that I believed it for a good amount of time. We had a very healthy sex life. I am not sure that I will ever understand what it was he was looking for besides limerence.
Eventually I told my friends what was going on and got into therapy where I learned that it was not my fault. That he did it because he felt entitled to.
Here’s the thing, he cheated on his long term gf before me too. For years.
And we were together for decades, but in hindsight very early in our relationship, during the limerence/borderline obsession stage? He did some shady stuff that should have been a red flag for cheating but I ignored it.
My point, how can it be about MY FLAWS if he did it BEFORE me? And how can it be about a lack of attention if he did it to me during the new stage where all I did was pay attention to him as well?
Yet, he drilled that in so deep that even NOW, I sometimes forget and start to blame myself. I have remind myself in those moments. And the only thing that really sets me straight is remembering he did it to someone else before me too. That this is WHO he is.
He is doing it to his new gf too! I can’t confirm actual cheating but he says things like he would discard her if he could have our family back. I don’t think that he would actually do that, but my point is that he is involved very seriously with her, likely love-bombing and the whole 9 yards, and I’m sure she would feel betrayed if she heard the things he says to me. But he says them, because he wants to and feels entitled to. Gee- almost like there is a common denominator here…him and his magical sparkle-dick.
My ex blamed me for the fact that he wasn’t where he wanted to be in life. But, like, I didn’t even KNOW him when he dropped out of highschool. So how is it my fault he didn’t graduate college til 29? He also blamed the affair on me because I didn’t give him enough sex and because I was “fat”. I thought we had a pretty normal amount of sex for me having health issues and also having a toddler (2-3 times a week). And the AP was WAY bigger than me. So it wasn’t about the body type he preferred. (Also, I was not even close to being fat. Not that it matters.) He ended up treating AP as badly as he treated me (and in way less time), blaming HER for everything. Because once I was gone from the picture (yay, no contact/gray rock!), there was no one else to blame, and of course he would NEVER condsider that he himself was the problem. Even in his suicide letter, he blamed everyone else for his problems. To his dying breath.
It reminds me of that old joke: “Waiter, this food is terrible, and the portions are too small!”
Why would you want more food if it’s so terrible? In the same sense, if a FW thinks their Chump is so terrible, why do they constantly stick around?
It’s just pure entitlement and unaccountability. At least having lived with that for so long, I can now sniff out unaccountability in a few seconds. So, I got that going for me, which is nice.
Hah, that joke is a spot-on analogy.
“Having affairs means bringing unsavory characters into your orbit without your consent. We don’t talk about this very often.”
This is so true! We should talk about this more!
Next Friday topic!: What sort of unsavory FW was brought into your life without your consent?
The guy who blew the whistle on the affair told me that the nickname behind the AP’s back at work was “Debbie-wise the Gutter Clown” if it gives a hint about what FW dragged in. It seems that, before resorting to banging middle aged dads, she hit on every young buck at the firm who appeared to come from money and had a spooky habit of showing up in whatever odd place her target du jour happened to be. Clearly the moniker was inspired by the SNL skit which aired around that time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hlt3rA-oDao
I sometimes wonder reading your comments HOAC whether your FW was running around telling everyone how dull and dimwitted you were. Mine said to me a few times across the course of relationship that my stories were boring, that I was boring. I might be a lot of things, but the fact i stayed married for 20 years to the world’s least interesting person demonstrates I can make fun out of dull. I noticed online there is a movement to make dull fashionable, which I’ve mostly blocked because it turned in to women in their 50s crowing about how dull they are alongside a sexy selfie, but there was a good one of a woman in her 70s who had endured years of put downs from her husband about how all her hobbies and interests were so dreadfully dull that he was driven to finally leave her. She seemed like an accomplished artist, writer, crafter, gardener and he was obviously extremely jealous that she could make her own fun.
I got “radical” and “abnormal.” Before d-day when I was still completely clueless but intuitively detecting a sudden upsurge in entitlement, assholery and slobbishness, I had what you might call a prescient feminist seizure where I ended up lecturing FW until 1am about how misogynist men treat women as fill-dirt.
In retrospect I can see that, on a subconscious level, I sensed exactly what was going on and I’m rather proud of my subconscious mind for that even if my conscious mind was terrified into inertia by certain logistics– like the fact that I’d given up work to care for three kids with health issues for more than a decade along with the usual social isolation and financial vulnerability that comes with the full-time caretaker role.
Of course because he was frantically hunting for retroactive alibis to justify his ongoing affair, he ended up later referring to that tearful rant as a form of “abuse” that “broke” him and led him to seek solace in the office pass-around. I think the major implied charge was that “normal people” know better than to sound so “radical.” He made the case that normal people discuss, say, naked yoga on Instagram and the latest GOT episode (as it later turned out, the mundane things his AP was into). He did say that I went “on and on and on” which implies dull and boring.
As far as “dimwitted”, it seems I didn’t learn a third language fast enough in his estimation. During his affair, he kept negging me about it even though native speakers kept complimenting me on my pronunciation (if not my grammar which still sucks).
So yes, stupid and dull!
I was just thinking about your ted bundy analogies the other day at work. The court ordered mediation between a known abuser and his victim in the office where I work. I didn’t facilitate the session as I’m out of that area of law now, but I did overhear the guy being awfully pleasant to reception staff asking to use the bathroom twice because no doubt he was trying to access the part of the building where the mother was (it was a shuttle mediation). He has multiple victims, including children, but never convicted. His behaviour in reception reminded me of Ted Bundy luring a victim into his car with his nice guy act. Our staff were wise to it, but obviously not everyone is as he is a good looking, smooth operator that repeatedly traps women into these awful relationships. He has also obviously successfully groomed the judiciary to get them to order mediation in the community where there is no security.
My mother was in court for the entirety of one of Bundy’s trials and made several interesting observations about him. She said that, at times he thought no one was looking, an eerie smile would spread across his face almost as if by reflex. She also thought these kinds of perpetrators tend to lose their magical smoothness once caught and exposed and subjected to real consequences. Then the facades can crack and the underlying rage or crazy start to leak out and become more visible. But this makes it harder for post-apprehension onlookers to understand how relaxed, credible and charming these perpetrators may have once seemed to victims which can lead to victim blaming because bystanders are telling themselves “I would have never trusted that sketchy weirdo so what’s wrong with these victims that they did?”
I’m not very familiar with Australian legal procedures and terms like shuttle mediation but it sounds like that system sucks if, in an effort to legally protect themselves, victims are forced into contact with their abusers.
I’m still waffling about collecting an old jury award from suing a violent workplace stalker who apparently just came into money because doing so would require providing all my current data, address, etc. Total wtf policy.
D day #1 happened after 25.5 years of marriage, D day #2 came a year later. Between them I came to understand that I was in an abusive relationship with someone who abused me in EVERY SINGLE WAY (although he only hit me once, during my first pregnancy).
I lost:
-a sense of who I am
-my belief in marriage
-ability to trust
-emotional and physical health (diagnosed anxiety disorder and depression, fibromyalgia, IBS, & more)
-30 years total of my youth, when I was thin and beautiful
-my career as I knew it
-my country of residence
-tons of personal belongings – all that remains of a 4 BR house overseas I got in 2 totes
-tons of mutual friends
-a life free of STDs
-my desire to be physically intimate with a man ever again
-my ability to focus on my work
-his family whom I completely invested in like they were my own
-what meant the most to me of anything in the world: family togetherness with our young adult kids
Dday #2 sent me into extreme psychological shock, and I have been recovering ever since, for the past 3 years.
I have been set back in every way, especially financially – and I don’t know if/when I will ever achieve my dream of owning a home.
I am working hard to reclaim myself and build a new life in a new city. It will continue to take time. But I am pretty certain I am WRECKED for romantic relationship. Meanwhile, he started dating just a couple of weeks after our divorce. :0
So much abuse…. Physical and mental and financial…… Married 23 years when kids caught XH cheating on Christmas. Before that, he assaulted our son in a rage, drive erratically when angry, diverted marital funds to secret accounts, lied, gaslit, raged on the regular. XH is a 7-figure earning law partner, diagnosed as narcissist with BPD, suggestive of sociopath. He threatened kidsif they told me about the affair. Youngest two, 10 and 15, had MAJOR trauma, suicide attempts, hospitalization, educational disruption, panic attacks, diagnosed with PTSD and anxiety. XH gaslit and blame-shifted later discovered he is a serial cheater, slept with countless APs), threatened to take our assets, manipulated me into agreeing to sell our family home with false promise to seek treatment, lied about having ended the current affair, gave me a STD. Nearly broke my arm in an elevator with our 10 year old present, told our kids he hated every minute of being their dad, chose not to see kids for years, bought our then teen a puppy during the pandemic, then threatened to rehome her when he was angry, used drugs with our 19 year old son on a trip to Amsterdam, blew marijuana smoke into newborn grandson’s face… son will never take baby around him again. I’m sure there’s more…. But you get the gist.
OMG so much abuse and mine is probably so much less than many. TRIGGER WARNING TRIGGER WARNING (sex abuse)
I didn’t know he was cheating with his coworker and my DDay was the day he left me. But about a week earlier, he raped me in bed. I woke to him wanting to have sex and it was weird and I didn’t have a choice and it was creepy. And the next morning I tried to talk to him about it and he just stared at me when I literally said “it felt like you were raping me. What happened with you?” Silence. Keep in mind, he had WITHHELD sex from me for 14 years of marriage. I was always begging for it and he wouldn’t.
A week later I put all the pieces together and realized he was cheating with his coworker and he left me on the spot. And I then had a meltdown and he CALLED THE COPS on me to have me taken away as crazy. I think he was hoping I’d be institutionalized. That’s when I saw his shark eyes. And the police and psychiatrist there recognized that I was traumatized and sent me home. Then I had to get checked for STDs when I realized he had been sleeping with another woman (or more) and had raped me too.
During the marriage, some of the abuse while he was cheating included the awful secret keeping and gaslighting and financial withholding to control me. Then FW’s manipulation of the legal system. It was crazymaking and trauma-inducing … then that was turned into “proof” that “she’s crazy” (Just like other abuse). He stole money from accounts. He refused to take me off his unpaid bills and auto registration (as ordered by the court). FW didn’t follow the therapists’ recommendations or legal agreements and mocked the whole system without recourse.
And when I stopped fighting it and playing his games and just let all the truth out, he turned the abuse onto our son and became verbally and physically abusive to him— our son was the one place FW knew he could still control me. FW would force our son to go to his AP’s house for visitation, then try to force son to behave and get him to spiral out of control… then FW and AP would lock our son out of their house and call the police on him (age 11-14). FW would strike our son and hold him down and slam him into walls. The school took notice of son’s behavior after weekends with his dad. I was told by the counselors there and the police “please get full custody.” It took me dragging it back repeatedly to the attorneys (expensive as shit) to just get our son a say to go home to me when he needed to. And as soon as that was done, FW didn’t have son over to their house again.
Son is now 18 and just meets dad for dinner or a movie or to get a lift to a tournament. But son now manages how much he sees dad and never sees AP anymore.
Any of that clearly abuse?? Smh
Criminal child abuse plus the legal definition of spousal rape and coercive control. He belongs in prison.
Financial withholding? Check. Manipulation of the legal system? Check. Calling me the crazy one? Check.
My experience of infidelity as abuse.Prior to D-day I was being abused emotionally,psychologically and sexually (both harassment and coercion and non consensual sex). His behavior was mostly covert (to the outside observer) and sometimes not. Thanks to my former understanding
of marriage commitment and what constituted abuse, and a misunderstanding of the Christian marriage vows, I stayed
years longer than I now wish I did. I was miserable, knew I was unloved and I felt I was only an objectified sex slave.
I felt in my gut that something was terribly wrong, but he stonewalled me when I tried to talk to him. He turned
these conversations around on me and made my pleas for mercy or information all about how there is something wrong with me.
I fantasized about becoming widowed so I would be free.
My D-day was pure psychological and emotional hell. I was blindsided and did not see this coming. I was in complete agony with shock and pain, finally finding out “what was
wrong with him” and “why he acted so strange”. Discovering the lying, the secret debt, the secret interest in sex toys, the decades long porn addiction and the secret double life with prostitutes and coworkers sent me into a very long time of physiological shock, psychological trauma and emotional agony.
After my D-day and I left him and filed, he gaslit me to the nth degree. Denying actual reality and concrete evidence, he went on to tell me and everyone we know that he is a poor victim because I left him and there must be something mentally wrong with me; maybe midlife mental illness or something out of the DSM5. His complete denial of his activities, his lying, his betrayal and his secrets, did massive damage to my primary and secondary brain (quoting Dr. Minwalla) that was abuse that I would not wish on my worst enemy.
His cruelty— and I’m not even talking about the deviant sex stuff here—– of lying, the denial of my reality and attempting to convince me and everyone we know that I must be crazy—- is more damaging than my previous trying to
imagine him with dozens of young call girls— which I could not even do. The mental trauma I experienced of him attempting to save face and protect his reputation and blame shift onto me and make me the guilty one! —— this was the worst trauma for me.
Panic attacks, hypervigilance, suicidal-ideation and depression lasted two whole years. In truth the trauma I experienced was for me indescribable. It’s impossible to describe. It was like being tortured. It felt like death.
The fall out is that I lost half my family, many friends, my home, my socio-economic class, my lifestyle, and a whole lot of money.
I lost my ability to trust, to date anyway. It’s still recent and raw for me so please don’t lecture me about trusting and finding love again. Right now I don’t want to trust or “find love again”. I lost my belief that I am smart, worthy, deserving, competent, sexy and lovable. I lost my ability to trust my own self; my own gut intuition. I’m in therapy so I know I’ll get help for those things.
I’ve been struggling this entire time since D-day and I dream of getting to “meh”, and slowly gaining a life, the life that I really want. I’m focusing on the positive.
I know that I will eventually gain a life; my life will improve. I’m getting professional help, I’m making progress, I’m caring for ME, and for now, at least I do know that I’m a survivor and I’m absolutely fucking mighty.
It is torture- and the court system is legalised abuse when they insist on mediation and other crap that enables the abuse to continue- haven’t we been through enough?
You are indeed mighty- you got out and saved yourself.
Keep walking forward with love for yourself. You are so worth it.
If you’re in australia, there is a big push in legal systems to become trauma informed. The judiciary, mediators, lawyers etc are all doing the training. But is it being applied ? Not really
If you have to attend mediation, and don’t want to sit in the same building as perp, ask them how it is trauma informed for you to be put in a situation that activates your sympathetic or parasympathetic response. You can’t make good decisions when you are in fight/flight or alternatively freeze/fawn. You might still need to attend, but videoconferencing won’t put you in proximity to the abuser.
It was torture. He said in reconciliation abuse therapy to me “I feel like I’m torturing her” and I was crying (this is before I knew, I was still in the lost fog of being gaslit and belittled) and I said, “you are torturing me”. And he was. I too have no interest in relationships for all the reasons you mention. I’m ok with that now. I jus want to learn how to love myself again.
To summarize for your research, my experience of my eX’s abuse of sexual infidelity intersects with these other forms of abuse:
-emotional sexual coercion ie begging and pleading until I gave in
-sexual activity without my consent ie not allowed to say no
-sexual psychological gaslighting/blameshifting “You must have childhood sexual abuse issues that you refuse to admit!”
-unwanted verbal and physical sexual harassment
-financial fraud (financial infidelity)
-Post separation mental abuse via gaslighting, denial of my reality, lying, DARVO and smear campaigning against me ie “We all know she has undiagnosed mental illness”.
I’m hoping that a) financial fraud in marriage gets the same punishment as in the business world; b) rape by fraud one day includes having sex with an unwitting spouse while cheating; and c) the legal definition of what constitutes coercive control eventually includes smear campaigns.
Regarding the latter, as social safety nets dry up and disappear and social media means local gossip doesn’t necessarily stay local, we’re back to an era when Dickensian level social ruin is possible again and can have life and death consequences. I don’t think victims should have to prove harm– just the threat itself shows an attempt to coerce and control.
100% agree
I’ll add one more to my legislative wish list: that the same laws that govern receipt of stolen property one day apply to dissipated marital assets– meaning that APs have to return the value of all gifts and amenities that were embezzled or face jail and furthermore, can’t plead ignorance of the source of stolen assets as a defense. It makes sense to get the money back because, even if cheaters are ordered to return to chumps the amounts spent on affairs, that still reduces overall assets from which settlements are drawn.
The Lying Cheating Loser’s favorite topic of conversation was himself. I was, and am, a very good listener. And since we all know FWs tell on themselves, I got some insights into his warped mind that I don’t think he intended me to have.
The fact of the matter was, he hated me.
Initially, he didn’t hate me *personally* because he didn’t know me that well yet. But over the four years of our relationship, it definitely became personal.
Also, and I quote, he “needed a win.”
He lied, cheated, and mooched, he disrespected and devalued me because he hated me, and he needed a win.
Living with someone like that – SUPPORTING someone like that financially, emotionally, with domestic labor and chaos janitorial services – is a refined form of abuse.
So why did he hate me? Pick a reason. I loved my job and he hated his. I had joy in my life in the form of hobbies, good friends, travel, interests. He had alcohol, cigarettes, and video games. Oh, and his secret Brigade of Broken Bitches.
He felt inferior, yet he parentified me.
Along with the psychological abuse, there were a couple of instances of physical abuse, destruction of property, and threats on my life (in person, brandishing a weapon).
It’s been over six years since I dumped him. I’ve gained a beautiful life. I’m solidly No Contact.
But surviving this kind of psychological abuse changes you.
Back when I was still trauma bonded, I used to liken it to living with the phantom pain of an amputated limb.
Now I understand dumping him wasn’t a loss, and I am not diminished.
I am, however, fundamentally changed, on a neurological level. And so is every chump.
That, to me, is irrefutable evidence that cheating is abuse.
I definitely feel fundamentally altered neurologically. I am glad to know I am not alone in this.
Before checking into the Chump lady site, there is a page that asks the question…verify YOU ARE HUMAN. Every day married to two different cheaters 35 years apart, I had to ask myself…are you Ms. Chump still human? Because I BELIEVED and spackled that I was needed loved and wanted by 2 cheaters who both
1. Lied to me constantly
2. Gave me ongoing infections which required antibiotics
3. Declined to do child care while I worked so they could run the streets.
4. Were condescending and verbally demeaning
5. Talked about woman as objects and used me like an intimate vending machine in the bedroom
6 up at night on the computer till the early hours
7 late coming home so dinner was never as a family
8. In the bathroom for extended time
9 on the phone constantly -conversation non existent intimate conversation
10 gifts inexpensive or zero
11 flirting openly
12 talking about woman who liked them at work or even church
13 shaving their bodies which I hated and said so..rashy
14 buying nicer clothes but acting distant and cold
15 wearing cologne I hated
16 sat in church, holding my hands to pray..but having an ongoing affair
The list is endless and all abuse and lies.
Also had a baby with #1 cheater after he told me he wanted me and our marriage . I got pregnant immediately ( 12 years married and one son already) I had no idea he had a 2 year AP at that point. After the pregnancy test came back +➕️he said “I NEVER WANTED THIS, THIS WAS YOUR IDEA. The very worst DARVO of all times.
So my #17 is lying that the affair is OVER ( even though i had no idea there was an OW!!)and having more babies, then changing the story after the fact
Terry Pratchett is one of my favorite authors. A line of his is “Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.” It is one I keep coming back to in this conversation.
As someone who has been in unhealthy relationships, I have had several conversations with a variety of therapists trying to untangle abuse from unhappiness from lousy treatment. Abuse is when someone feels such an entitlement to their own needs and comforts that they dehumanize, devalue, and use you as an object, a means to an end, without regard to your personhood. They use and control you for their own interests, deny you access to the truth of your reality, and try to disable your support systems to continue this state of being that favors them.
Cheating is also an entitlement. It is entitlement to intentionally break the terms of your relationship and then lie about it. It is entitlement to your continued presence and investment in that relationship without knowing they have broken the terms. It is using you and everything you bring to their lives without the honesty or character to tell you that the terms have already been broken.
In effect, cheating isn’t possible without gaslighting, lack of consent, and a degree of dehumanization. Those things are all behaviors of emotional abuse and control.
Over my 20 years of marriage of which for at least 10 of those she was living a double life as a serial cheater I experienced three kinds of abuse. Emotional abuse from the gas lighting and manipulation, what I will call sexual abuse from being exposed to potential diseases without my consent, and financial abuse from stolen funds spent on affair activities. The emotional abuse from her often being physically absent and emotionally absent when around was abusive to my children, one of which wound up hospitalized with suicidal ideation in high school. A child who had saw text messages on her mom’s phone at age 12 and did not know what to do.
This is why I keep saying that Perel’s concept of abuse-less cheating is akin to the idea of immaculate conception– maybe a possibility for komodo dragons and goblin spiders but not humans. Cheating is abuse squared since it both requires abuse to commit and sustain and is abuse at the same time.
One of my favorite sayings from my attorney, “Only a fool remains friends with the person who burned down their house.” My breakup after several decades of marriage was an all out conflaguration.
Thankfully, things slowly came together. It took years, but this chapter is truly lovely. Solo life is truly A-OK, and the now-adult kids are thriving and actually like me. We cut Dad loose entirely in the end. Some people just don’t deserve to be close to you.
My FW didn’t ‘just’ cheat. They also had to feel justified in doing so. This meant that I had to suck for them to feel OK about what they were doing. Cue contempt, being told I’m too fat and they aren’t attracted to me anymore (even though I was at my Wedding Day weight) and endless discussions about how marvelous the latest Shmoopie was, how we’d get along great, and how much empathy FW has for Shmoopie on numerous fronts while having none for me. (FW was a truangulating MOFO). I could never be good enough, and as hard as I tried, the goalposts always moved. Then I got criticized for being anxious.
I finally LACGAL’d. A benefit I hadn’t expected is my anxiety is much less severe and I’m finding confidence and peace. Not surprising since I’m not constantly put in fight/flight/freeze/fawn mode due to being under constant verbal/psychological assault, but it surprised me.
I also got constantly criticized by FW for not forgiving and not being at peace. Well duh, that’s impossible when my nervous system is on fire because I’m not psychologically safe.
“and how much empathy FW has for Shmoopie on numerous fronts while having none for me”
My FW is the least empathetic person I know. And he thinks he is an empath. Seriously.
But I had the same experience as you. He started talking about how all his “friends” had been through such terrible things and how bad he felt for them. In the meantime, HE was so incredibly abusive to ME his wife. But these friends were all women he dealt with online where he could pretend to be kindness incarnate.
Mine got teary eyed while listening to Phil Collins sing about being cheated on. He had so much sympathy for poor Phil Collins being chumped.
You couldn’t make this kind of crazy shit up even if you were on shrooms.
Yup. Different people at home and in public. I guess it’s hard for them to pretend about who they really are 24/7.
For me, it was the loss of my personal agency. The sense of control that I felt I had over my life through the belief that all aspects were based on truth. Betrayal called into question the validity of every single emotion and event connected to my relationship and family.
I am fortunate that my children are well married. If I begin to question my positive influence in my marriage and family life, I look at how they’re treating their spouses physically and I listen to how they are communicating. I am reassured that they grew up in a household with one parent who was living in complete honesty and communicated fairly clearly.
Some days I think I would have rather been thrown down three flights of hotel fire escape stairs in my early twenties. I could not have denied the broken bones and bruises. But I trusted and I loved completely. Understanding that I experienced a more subtle form of abuse has helped me reframe and take back my personal agency.
Yes! I thought I was in control of my own life. Then I realized that there is so much an evil person can do to you, your life, your finances, your family, your home, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. For the past year I’ve been a helpless observer watching my life go up in smoke.
Months, if not years, of being treated as the problem with therapists and pastors/Christian leaders while ex-wife cheated and manipulated. Getting abandoned while most vulnerable in my career. Testifying against my ability to keep my ministerial license. Then the months of gas-lighting about the confirmed physical affair partner. This abuse was all done by a licensed therapist!
In my book the Jesus cheaters are the absolute worst. Aided and abbeted by the pharisaical parasitical religious establishment … don’t get me started.
Thank you for how you’ve used your training, wisdom and experiences to heal the chump sheep.
Sigh. Where to begin. I mean, there’s so many stories to choose from.
Possibly the worst: when my husband was diagnosed with HIV. Obviously, he had to fabricate a story about how that would have happened.
I had absolutely no clue that he would ever have cheated on me — he hated sex. So he told me the “only” way he could have gotten it was long before we’d even met, from when he was an undergrad on a semester-at-sea and needed medical treatment at a third-world clinic.
Meaning, he let me think he had to have been HIV positive when he and I were still sexually active, at a point when we were trying to conceive our daughter … who was later born by c-section and nursed for the first year of her life, as any loving mother would do.
Tell me that’s not traumatic. That’s one mock execution I’ve tried to forget for a long time.
You know, now that I think of it, I’m not entirely sure that was the worst, but there’s only so much time to write this out.
Trigger warning.
My cheating wife has coerced me into having sex with her twice after I found out about her infidelity. It was humiliating. It was emasculating. When I couldn’t get or stay aroused because of her cheating, she grew frustrated with me, but she didn’t stop. She didn’t take no for an answer. When I told her I was confused about it all she dismissed me with a simple “it’s just sex”.
She made me question my reality and my choices. She took joy away from me. I have nightmares now about confronting her affair partner, but we don’t live in a society where I can legally do that. It just adds to the feeling of helplessness.
And this is nothing to speak of the months of false realities, lies to my face, wondering if her best friends know, wondering if I’m the biggest fool. The shame. The betrayal. All of that.
She is actually a victim of sexual assault herself. She is open about it and an advocate for victims. I never would have imagined she would be the one to do something like that. It just further distorts reality for me. And makes me wonder how little she thinks of me.
What a psycho! I’m so sorry.
And I’ll add: while she was out having her affair, I was covering for her at the job I helped her start.
While she was out having fun, I was wondering if she would ever feel she was ready to have the kids that we talked about so much. She made it seem like wanting to have kids was a sign of the toxic male ego, somehow. I was fully prepared to give up on the dream of being a father if it meant bringing her happiness.
I’m almost 40 now. It’s all right. She just kinda wasted all my precious time.
I’ve posted it here before, but I had the disgusting pleasure of consenting – in a state of hurt and confusion – to sleeping with my husband after his revelation of unfaithfulness via prostitutes and lord knows what else. Immediately afterward he tells me point blank that because we slept together afterward that it would be considered legal forgiveness, or some such thing. I was gobsmacked. This was during the period of time where we were in limbo and I was trying to see if I could come to terms with what he did. I look back on it now as one of the biggest, nastiest red flags that this man gave not one iota of care about me. When I came to and got out, I took the full panel of tests. One scare, but thankfully whatever it was had been cleared from my body. He took so many choices away from me by living this secret life. I would never have consented to any of this had I known. And the bonding (on our end) that takes place over the course of a supposedly committed relationship makes it that much harder to separate the fact from fiction – that the person who you were supposed to be able to trust could commit such heinous acts against you. It took me months, and the above horrific experience, to parse it all out – which was far too long. There is a special place in hell for these sick fucks. CHEATING IS ABUSE.
Mine cheated with prostitutes for 5-10 years. He paid for his « massages » with bonuses that he hid from me in a secret account. He threatened to kill me by speeding up the car in a fit of road rage when I asked him to please slow down. The worst thing for me is wasting all those years with a morose, critical, demanding, disrespectful, rude individual. I could do nothing right. I cut strawberries wrong. He doubted every thing I said because I was wrong 80% of the time. He would hairsplit things I said to prove he was right and I was wrong. I never did anything nice for him was his constant, manipulative refrain. I used to tell him his meter was broken. He would look at his phone instead of talk to me at dinner, at home as well as in very expensive restaurants where no one else was looking at their phone. He would mumble or talk in the other direction, then when I asked what, he would repeat shout the same words at me because he said I’m deaf. He told me I had so many wrinkles and looked older than he does. He was nice to me 4 days a year: Valentine’s Day, Wedding Anniversary, My Birthday and Mother’s Day. It was easy to leave when I found his burner phone and condoms. When I told our adult daughter, without even telling her about the cheating, that I was divorcing him, she said « Mom, I am so happy for you. He is abusive. »
When I told the adult children I was filing after a brief Christmas reconciliation, they said “Thank God. We were going to break ties with you, Christmas was so awkward. He’s awful” I guess they couldn’t stand to see the pain.
I feel now like the abuse started on the night of my first Dday when she confessed (one of) her affairs the proceeded to blame me for it immediately. After that I experienced all the other emotional and financial abuse described by my fellow chumps. I may be one of the few male chumps that also experienced physical abuse. On several occasions she tried to goad me into hitting her so she could claim I was physically abusing her. She became so frustrated when I didn’t defend myself that she hit me many times. I wish I had gone to urgent care to document the aftermath but had to stay home with my sons.
(Jeff response incoming. Whatcha all snackin’ on?)
I was contemplating this very topic listening to the most recent episode of the podcast during the commute in today.
Our fearless leader hits the high notes in the article above-the gaslighting, the deception, the reality theft(and regular old theft) are ALL abuse. I feel like we all comprehend that there are gradations between “a white lie” and “I’m going to a business conference out of town; that person I tell you to worry about MIGHT NOT be there.”
The way I construct “abuse”, that is when the consent/safety/what is reasonable line has been crossed(or the frequency/intensity of that boundary violation here).
Abuse is a sticky word. When I talk amongst friends and colleagues about my experience of being cheated on, there is usually some spine-lockage when the “A” word comes up(and mind you-I work in mental health with a population where abuse is pretty common). Nobody wants to have that word stuck to them. And that is where the mental gymnastics come in.
It has been fascinating how often people retreat into the “legal” definitions-ie, what would hold up in court. And the matching “would you get convicted for ______.” A stolen kiss, for example, is legally sexual assault(again-if there is such thing as coincidence-came up in conversation last night, actually). If you walk up and kiss a stranger against their will, you have committed sexual assault. Would you go to jail or go on Megan’s Law for it? Probably not in most circumstances.
So what we arrive at with a lot of the dissonance is “It’s only abuse if it crosses an enforced legal line AND I am punished for it.” We can easily agree that getting punched in the face is abuse(also: assault). There’s a “tangible” on that one. Calling a name? Murkier, but OK-not as many people get arrested for talking shit and generally law enforcement are going to wait for an escalation-unless there has been a pervasive pattern.
The simple reality I have come to in the last year is that people do not want to see what they do or have done or would do as harmful or else they probably wouldn’t do it. That is where the mental gymnastics tend to cartwheel in. That little bit of mandatory skein-untangling we all do (whether or not we want to admit it) seems to flip the cards on this-“the relationship was already over”, “the love is gone”, etc.
“The horrible thing that I did actually WASN’T horrible because _______.”
Hits a little differently with “murder” than it does with “inexplicable Holiday Inn reward points balance.”
The bit from Boondock Saints clicks on. “Don’t steal. Don’t rape. Don’t kill. It doesn’t matter what religion you are-we can all agree that those are things you shouldn’t do.” We are humans. All manner or horrors have been inflicted because somebody justified to themselves or others that it was ok to breach “the rules.”
And sex (and consent) happens to occupy a very weird little pedestal in Western culture. The socialization around it seems to revolve around “…just don’t talk about it and it will be fine.” I fear that too many people are socialized around “whatever you don’t get caught doing” rather than “is that harming somebody?” And of course, we Westerners like our victim blaming. The message women get is “don’t get raped.” The message I sort of had to intuit as a male is “don’t rape.”
Below is my subjective experience of how I was abused by my fuckwit. Now may be a good place to move on with your day…I am on a roll as you can see.
I have in my life been diagnosed with PTSD and I have since I was 14. I was identifiably anxious and depressed from around the same time. I was verbally abused and emotionally neglected by my cheating mother as a child(make no mistake-I got off light-it remains a data point.) My ex was made well aware of those facts heading into the relationship. I was retraumatized by an armed robbery I experienced.
So let’s frame it all with “she knew this was going to do some pretty significant damage to me anyway and then did so anyway.” My mental health is generally not her fault-I comprehend this. Turns “I didn’t want to hurt you” into a pretty severe lie at that point though.
Hell, there was plenty of intentional harm. She showed me crotchless panties she bought well after I had been “cut off”(and mysteriously there was always a different excuse why we couldn’t be intimate-though Gods only know what disease she is carrying around so I dodged a bullet there!) I cried myself to sleep listening to her give away my love over Discord just to deny that they were anything but friends when I would confront it. Any money she put into our living arrangement she spent on my credit cards for AT LEAST the last year we were together(will be digging myself out from that one for a while…)
The gaslighting. The lies. “You are twisting the things I said”…no, you promised! Here is all of the reasons why it is ok not to spent time with you but why I can talk to my special friend until wee hours of the morning. “You never said anything about going on vacation together.” Or…”our relationship is fine-we are working on things” when she was clearly already “checked out.” In the immortal words of Chris Rock, there is a difference between “I was out with my friends” and “it’s your baby” when it comes to dishonesty.
Do we even call the thing “gaslighting” when it’s clear she was enjoying watching me suffer? Is it gaslighting or regular abuse when she was trying to push me to kick her out or otherwise trigger her getting an excuse?
Pretty sure it’s just regular ol’ abuse when you beat somebody down to the point where they lose all fight and their will is broken. Neither as a clinician nor as a human being can I call that “consent” or “willful participant.” Seriously, what gets accomplished when hope is gone?
The best excuse offered to me to for “demanded an open relationship the day after I was diagnosed diabetic” was “well Jeff, honestly I don’t think she’s that bright and probably didn’t realize that was bad timing.”
I mean, can we call a behavior abuse when you’re expected to act like an adult and instead are a complete child?
Do we just call it “taken advantage of” when she mysteriously waited until she was almost done with her education to cut bait when she apparently had wanted out for over a year?
Pay my bills. Feed me. “I still love you”. Enjoy your table scraps. “Things will work out-we’re going to be ok, we’re just in a rough patch.”
“Spirited act of defiance”. Right-defying the one that made sure she had the best life that she ever had. I have my problems. I probably did deserve to lose her. But Holy Shit.
I guess all of that was ok because she was unhappy and I’m in the patriarchy. Or something. I guess everything else was…a random act of kindness?
If she left because she was afraid of what I might do(never raised a hand to her, rarely raised my voice-yes, I could get very passive aggressive)-well…lives have been lost over things like this.
Fortunately I at least try to be a decent human being and am not a monster at the end of the day.
I would like to posit another point before I wrap up here-I feel like very often in my experience of this I keep seeing “that can’t be right because I wouldn’t do that/permit that/be ok with that”. In other words, by way of the opposite “I would be totally ok about that since _______.” Without ever having experienced the horror.
I will further posit that it’s probably abusive if you wouldn’t wish this inflicted on anybody.
I know what trauma feels like. I do this for a living(whether I am good at what I do or not is probably up for debate but I digress.) What I went through when I was 14 and having a gun pointed at my heart when I was just trying to come home from a late night at work were rather quaint by comparison but otherwise congruent emotional and psychological health experiences for me. The same things I do with clients to work through trauma are working on managing this experience.
I don’t believe in coincidences. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…I bet you can cook it about the same way.
I have very little recall of between this time last year when D-Day/when she left and about Thanksgiving. My memory is usually pretty sharp. “Hello, I’m a dissociative episode!” Hypervigilance, crying episodes, severe mood swings? Check on all three. Random recall of awful shit she said or did? Check there, too.
My boundaries and my consent were violated pretty heavily and it fucked me up pretty badly. I cannot “not” call something abuse if it has so badly damaged by ability to trust or believe in people ever again. Did I permit some of it? Of course I did. I trusted the idiot and bought into the lies due to sunk cost and the very stupid idea that things would get better.
Sorry for the rant. That pretty neatly sums up my first year of being a survivor(and my road to being mighty.) Reading things I wrote a year ago “in the thick of it”…I am doing wayyyyyy better! I do take issue with being told that what I went through wasn’t abuse/awful/just plain wrong. It is my hope that a fuckwit(or their understudies) will take head and realize cheating is harmful. Perhaps I’m already symptomatic or sensative, but that didn’t give her the right to cheat or hurt me and you don’t get that right, either.
Have a Fuckwit Free Friday!
Nothing to be sorry about. It’s a great post.
The impacts are widespread. To clarify, I was married for 32 years to an executive VP, and have 2 adult kids. My situation is complicated by my X’s addiction to alcohol, on-line shopping, food and exercise.
Physically, I was worn down. My BP was high and my SVT incidents increasing. These are
currently well-controlled. No more recurrent UTI’s, which is great. I will say
that STI testing at 56 was traumatizing as fuck. No physical abuse, but late
days, he told me he fantasized about choking me and wanted to incorporate that
into our sex. Terrifying.
Financially, he lied about the mortgage and investments, which he mismanaged. I know, I’m an idiot. He had a secret credit card (maxed out) and a hidden line of credit
(maxed out), both of which I never saw the balance. They were paid off out of
our settlement monies. His addiction to on-line shopping was expensive because
of his taste in clothes, and involved many leather jackets and leather gloves
and designer suits. I never knew their costs.
Then there’s the alcohol–I estimate $750/week on purchasing wine for consumption and the wine cellar. There were approx. 100 cases of wine in the cellar and I had it appraised at $60,000. I fought for my half of the wine and have given it away. Burden lifted. I will say that I regret not doing a financial audit at the disclosure stage, but I was trauma bonded. I have to give myself grace.
He threatened my stability for financial reasons and because of his relationship with his AP. My D-day involved discovering texts from his AP, his direct subordinate at work, who he, months later, promoted to director. He admitted his workplace affair could get both fired. The relationship was “managed” until he finally disclosed, and the company created a new VP position for him to shift into. This was short lived, as he was laid off in a restructuring, and his AP also left the company around the same time. Coincidence? I doubt it. Busted.
I still cannot believe a company would create a new VP position to accommodate executives fucking, but I don’t live in that world and what do I know?
I reminded him that co-workers could report this affair because they were blatantly flirting/fucking at work, but he shrugged it off. I think it caught up to him. The rumours spread fast and his reputation is in tatters. One and half years later, he is still unemployed, facing the loss of his house. He’s still with his AP but they’re not married, and this surprises me. I think the mask is slipping.
Emotionally it’s complex and I’m still working on it. I don’t want to get into too much here because it’s upsetting. My X complained of my lack of confidence, the same confidence he was stripping, slowly, methodically, over the years. Hypercritical of my appearance and wardrobe, he was savage with other people. “Look at that loser wearing that shitty suit,” he’d sneer. Sneering was his thing. At the end of it all, he called me stupid and loser. Hateful.
He was dismissive, raised his voice, talked over me, rage drove, and freaked out over ordering the dishwasher.
In the final months, he pulled a number of dark/dominating moves like staring/glaring at me for a full minute before answering my questions. Staring at my forehead instead of giving eye contact. Standing up in the middle of a conversation to dominate. When he stood up in the middle of the mediator’s office, I paused the session, saying I would wait outside until he sat down, and the we would continue. The mediator was clueless until a few weeks later, when my X screamed at him.
I suspect that my X told friends and family that I’m mentally unstable, but have no direct evidence. I believe he publicly devalued me for years, in his attempts to manipulate and bed other people, telling them how unhappy he was with his unstable wife. Complaining about how I didn’t spoil him like a man needs to be spoiled, particularly on his birthday. I could write a book on the birthday hyperfocus, but I won’t.
My X manipulated a series of younger, vulnerable women throughout his work life, “helping” them with their problems, both personal and professional. They adored him. What secretary with a fucked-up family wouldn’t? He supported their work education and advised them on their family and relationship troubles. He once told me he could get his secretary to leave her husband. “It’d be so easy.” Machiavellian.
This post is too long. This story is too long.
In the end, I lost myself, my belief in love, trust in other people, and financial stability. But I’m rebuilding. Soon, I’ll be able to buy a little house for myself and my dog, and retire on a modest pension. My kids are okay. We all live together.
The story is long because the pain is real. “It’s complicated.”
The important part of our stories? We made it to the end. We survived. We’re stronger for the people around us.
You’re doing great!
“The pain of destruction is the joy of rebirth.”
I’m rebuilding, too. It’s not what I wanted but it’s way better than where I was a year ago.
Abuse and Infidelity Exist at the Intersection Between Entitlement and Selfishness
I’ve lived with five cheaters. One I just lived with. I married three and my father was the fifth. Or the first. People who are cheaters are selfish and entitled, believing that they are “entitled” to whatever it is they’re thinking at the moment might make them happy and without regard to how very Unhappy their actions may make people who they claim to love. It takes selfishness and entitlement to live a double life, cheating on your wife and your children while promising marriage to another woman — someone who, incidentally, is a classmate of your daughter’s. It takes entitlement and selfishness to believe that you are the arbiter of what is good for everyone in or family — especially yourself — and that you are entitled to behave however awfully you “need to” in order to force your family to do whatever it is you want them to do.
From my parents, I learned that my thoughts, feelings and carefully considered values and opinions meant nothing; that I meant nothing. I learned that I was worthless, and I should “count myself lucky if I ever had any friends, much less if anyone wanted to marry me. I learned to be a chump. My golden child sister learned to be a cheater and a bully. Perhaps you could say she grew up to be an abuser.
My father was a selfish, entitled, narcissist cheater and verbal, emotional, financial and sexual abuser. That probably explains, at least in part, why my mother was always angry. Except in public. My parents were both very cognizant of impression management and maintaining a shiny public image. Is it any wonder that every man I’ve ever believed myself to be in love with was selfish, entitled and a cheater? That they were all abusive in some way?
I divorced my first husband in 1982 after multiple D-days which my father dismissed as, “No big deal. Everyone does it. You need to get over it”. I never thought of him as abusive. It took years of therapy, journaling and even a faith-based 12 step group (not AA or any of it’s family) and years of reading Chumplady before it occurred to me that he was actually abusive. (Both my father and my first husband.)
My first husband rescued me when my college sweetheart became incensed during a sailboat race and swung the boom at me so hard it knocked me into the water. He was eliminated from the race and I swam/waded/walked the half mile or so it took to get to a waterfront tavern where Greg picked me up and took me home. We started dating (because of course we did) and I married him because he wanted to marry me. And he didn’t hit me or throw things at me or knock me overboard. And his parents were lovely people who not only claimed to love me like their own, but stood up to my steam roller mother in saying so.
Greg cheated. He slept with friends, co-workers, his boss’s wife, the church choir director, a few sopranos and a couple of altos, the nun who led our pre-Cana classes, the woman he rear-ended at a stop sign and my sister. But I never considered him to be abusive because in those days, abuse wasn’t talked about much and when it was, it referred to hitting or threatening your spouse with a gun. Greg was selfish, and believed that all of his paycheck was his and all of mine was his too. He took out credit cards (in his own name, but also joint credit cards that I knew nothing about) and charged them to the max. He spent without regard for the rent that was due, the electric and gas bills which needed to be paid or the money I was saving to buy myself a winter coat and boots because in New England, I needed such things. He ruined our credit (and mine was tied to his), and left me deeply in debt. He lied to and cheated the IRS, causing tax audits and penalties. He was sexually abusive, too, waking me up at night when I needed to work the next day, begging me for positions and acts that made me uncomfortable or were just plain painful, withholding, asking in public for threesomes, and giving me sexually transmitted diseases. Those STDs destroyed my fertility and caused cancer later in life. He devalued me — my looks, my intelligence, my usefulness as a wife appliance. One day he took me into an upscale department store, walked up to the cosmetics counter and asked the young woman behind the counter, “Can you DO something with her to make her a little more attractive?” This was the man who constantly told me I was beautiful when he was love-bombing me. I cried. It was no different than my mother always telling me to “do something with that hair” or my father criticizing my figure. Only I had never had the illusions that my mother or father loved me. I believed Greg did.
The final straw came when the marriage counselor we were seeing told me that Greg was a pathological liar; that he would always tell me what I wanted to hear, and then do whatever he wanted to do. It took me a day or two of thinking about it, but I finally got it. I would never know where my money was or where it was going, or where my husband was or what he was doing. I kicked him out and filed for divorce.
You’ve been through hell and back! I hate that guy.
I don’t even know where to begin.
But maybe we can post a link to this in an Amazon review for Lisa’s book when we’re done here today?
❤️
Also, I don’t call myself his ex-wife. Being in a relationship under false pretenses, fraudulently, depriving that person of their informed consent, is holding that person hostage.
I am his former hostage.
That’s a very apt descriptor VH! I’ve stopped calling my X my STBX H because I now believe he was never truly my husband because he never truly meant his vows. He is just my X or STBX because his dishonesty and disorder rendered the ceremony invalid and I have asked for an anullment! I do think that hostage is a far better term for what I was than “wife”; I reckon that it is a better term for nearly all of us on CN actually!
Yes- I don’t use ‘his’ or ‘my’ anything.
That’s definitely not mine .
I have an uncommon type of OCD known as Pure OCD, so my compulsions are mental compulsions. One of my themes surrounded being cheated on. ERP was incredibly successful for me to the point I was essentially asymptomatic. Mind you, I had (still have, as it never goes away you just learn to cope) been dealing with this since I was 16, with many different themes. It was agony before I started treatment, nearly 24/7 ruminations, compulsions, rinse and repeat.
When my FW transitioned into Fuckwithood, he used my OCD to his advantage. Again, I was essentially asymptomatic. I knew something was off and he would let me agonize that it was my OCD getting bad. I would cry about pushing him away from my OCD “getting bad” and he would let me. I would apologize for asking for reassurance that he wasn’t cheating on me (another common OCD compulsion) when in reality I was asking for reassurance anyone in my shoes would have been asking for. He watched me stop eating, he watched me begin a juice fast as eating healthy does have an impact, albeit incredibly slight, on my mental health and well-being in general. He watched me unable to sleep. I cried to him that I was sabotaging our marriage and I would do anything to fix it. He told me he was distant because I was accusing him of things because of my mental illness.
I requested emergency appointments with my therapist to begin ERP again. He played me like a puppet to think it was a mental illness, allowing me to take the blame for worrying, begging him to forgive me for putting that on him.
Basically, he watched me break mentally and emotionally before I even found out he was cheating. And he played into it so that my suspicion were chalked up to be my OCD.
The cheating was not actually the most painful part for me. Watching the man I loved for over a decade — a man that saw me in the depths of despair because of OCD and then crawl out of that through therapy — use my mental illness, that I was so proud to have “recovered” from, obliterated me more than any cheating ever could have.
Have you read Liars by Sarah Maguso? You will feel so heard, and eerily so. That is what brought me here, this place helped her. He, too, sets her up like your abuser did. I too stopped eating and lost my mind and he played my mental health struggles (in the wake of dad’s suicide but also, pretty much often during our marriage, whenever I was “weak”) as a time to really turn on the abuse. They are sick. Being here helps me focus on that I am free now, for the most part. Some old friends say how stronger I am without him.
I understand when people don’t view infidelity as abuse. That just means they have never had to suffer through it. Before D-Day I was absolutely clueless. If someone had said to me “Infidelity is abuse” I would have replied “Oh, really? Well, okay if you say so.” But I would not have really gotten it. It’s up to us chumps to educate others about this issue, which is exactly the mission of this website. People think that an affair is all about sex and sometimes love, motivations for sex and sometimes love, the human drive/need for sex and sometimes love. Narcissistic rage after being caught, lying and gaslighting, theft of time, attention, and money (among other things), and devastating diseases are not considered in the popular conception of infidelity. Telling our stories must include these factors to bring awareness to the fact of infidelity as abuse. (And the stories of Chump Nation do this to perfection.) Still, changing the narrative can only do so much. For most of the uninitiated it’s going to be a case of “When you know, well now you know.”
I wonder if when telling our stories we had left out the “sex with AP” part, would people see the FW as an abuser. As in “my partner lied to me, hid and/or spent our money, speaks to me viciously, purposely gave me an illness” without mention of the affair, how that would go over. Would people then say “well… I guess for whatever reason your partner had to do those things…”
All the above for me too. Physically twice, also violent rapey sex near the end just as he was about to ran off to shmoopie. Def financially and emotionally too.
Worst of all he literally robbed me of my kids as he abducted them and got de-facto custody, alienated and weaponized them. One is now an adult, we’re close and he’s estranged from his abusive dad and he’s thriving. The other who’s 18 is still in XFW’s orbit and we have a cool relationship but I feel very hopeful once she’s safely out she’ll start healing.
I didn’t have a remote clue that I was maritally abused till 10 years after the split when I finally began to process it and seek answers.
This was when he ganged up with my narc mother to actually destroy me and smear me and it all fell in place, how I was groomed all my life with a horrible abusive narcmother and toxic FOO dynamics. I started to recall how right after the divorce my narcmother would constantly stab me with cruel words to blame me & make me feel a failure and an embarrassment to her and rub it in over and over. She became buddy buddy with XFW and would tell me positive things about shmoopie to make it clear she embraced her over loser me, then watch my reaction …I’d respond with a blank look.. The betrayal from her stung far worse than from the XFW though he did a lot of nasty stuff. Without knowing any of the terminology at the time I put up boundaries of No-contact with her. I had minimal contact with XFW from the start but it went even lower. My kids were teens at that point and I started to handle visitations with them plus he’d refuse to answer emails anyway or send barrages of rage mails.
Somehow I have so much peace and relief these days. I just don’t feel much anger and regret. A lot of growth and wisdom happened during the journey. Now my parents are ailing abroad and I wish them well but i feel no fear, obligation or guilt, just joy to be free. I predict a whole new round of shedding after sibling & relatives realize they won’t succeed in hoovering me back into that nuclear waste dump.
Peace and relief. Beautiful. You did it.
Cheating—is abuse
Lying about cheating—is abuse
Reverse blame about cheating—is abuse
Gaslighting, particularly after being caught cheating—is abuse
Taking funds from a co-owned business—is abuse
Turning employees against you with vicious lies—is abuse
Rallying a couple’s therapist to take a side using DARVO—is abuse
Exposing a spouse to STD’s unknowingly—is abuse
Disparaging a parent who you are caring for in your home—is abuse
Secretly stealing marital funds—is abuse
Emotional extortion—is abuse
Using suicide threats as a means to force a split—is abuse
Lying about suicides threats and pretending DARVO about them—is abuse
Alienating friends from your spouse with vicious DARVO lies—is abuse
Abandonment of a disabled spouse without financial means—is abuse
Abandonment of a disabled spouse struggling to care for an elder parent full-time—is abuse
Walking away from all martial debt—is abuse
Fallout? Well…after 40 years together, nearing retirement, savings, income, and financial support gone—my position and security in life, in all ways that mattered at the time, was utterly decimated. There was no ‘bouncing back’ from that.
BUT, I found a few small, but significant ways to carve out a much simpler, smaller way of life that ended up giving me a brand new identity—one that took a while to adjust to, but over time I grew to love.
It’s a life that’s no longer compared against what I ‘lost’ because the version of me that came out the other side doesn’t recognize or resemble who I was in that old station in life. What I’m leading today is an authentic, emotionally well, relatively secure, contented, and peaceful existence that’s fulfilling in ways I couldn’t have imagined possible 7 years ago. It may not be the idyllic do over I used to conjure in my head, but it is REAL, and it is all MINE—I take that as a giant win.
I would love to hear more about how you eventually created this new life and a bit more about what this new life is for you, how it is different, how you did it.
Another comment to answer how my life is different.
My old life was busy–my husband and I owned one business, my brother and I shared another and the 2 business fed off each other. We had a lovely home, some savings, and earned enough to travel often (much of it business related). I was a highly motivated A-type personality who could juggle many plates and get a lot of stuff done with relative ease.
My chump personality was opposite. I became much more introverted, had the usual early struggles with concentration and I felt like I needed to make everything in my life much smaller, quieter, and easier to manage. A big part of that was the fact that my busy life was also a bustling city life. My chump life was returning to a small town in the country–so there were a lot of natural adjustments feeding into that need to simplify.
I’m still socially active, and have now become a bit more active in local government (joining various town boards etc.), but the longer I’ve gone, the more value I find in the time spent on my own.
There’s just something so peaceful and satisfying about puttering around my own space–cooking, writing, reading, and finding new things to binge watch on tv. I’m sure my age plays into that in rather large ways, but there’s just something so serene and satisfying about being in a space that looks and feels like me. And the fact that it’s always exactly as I left it whenever I do return from being out–is something that still makes me smile.
It was a 7 year trek that’s far to complicated to cover here. But I can hopefully pare it down to just the highlights.
I sold the marital home, moved clear across the country and settled in a small caretakers apartment in the country. The farm property used to belong to my family, but after my father’s death his second wife took it over. She allowed me to take the apartment cheaply on what was supposed to be a temporary basis. 7 years later, I’m still here and now she doesn’t want me to leave.
My mother, who I was caregiving full-time, had a tiny pension which she and I lived off of, but since it wasn’t enough to cover all our expenses, I bartered some light work around the place to lower costs even more. Mainly, I cooked a couple family style meals twice a week for my landlords (also elderly), and did some light bookkeeping/computer work for them.
I got my mother and I on as many social services as I could (snap, fuel assist, electric assist, and meals on wheels for my mom) and battled with social security to get myself on disability (a 4 year battle). My FW initially paid alimony, but it wasn’t regular enough to count on, so I built a budget out of pennies that didn’t include his payments, and learned to make everything stretch. When he did pay–I started using it to slowly start paying down what was my portion of the marital debt since I had learned to budget without that money.
Then when covid hit, those relief payments also went straight on debt. It took me nearly 3 years to get it down to a manageable sum, and another year to finally get everything paid off. Thank God too because I lost my mom last year and if I hadn’t gotten everything paid off by then, I would have been sunk (her small pension naturally went away with her).
One of the things that helped immensely, was midway through year 2 (the latter end) I also stumbled on an opportunity to start a quirky small business that I could do from home. I officially opened it as a seasonal (summer) business at the start of year 3 and have been doing it ever since. It too isn’t enough to cover all my bills year round, but coupled with social security which I finally started getting last year, it’s enough.
Emotionally, I worked hard in therapy, leaned on friends when I could, and did the work to gut it out enough to stabilize. It hasn’t ever been easy, but somewhere during the early part of year 3–when I was working hard to get my new business off the ground, everything began changing. I was feeling good for long enough periods by then that my healing took some very big turns for the better.
You’ll probably notice that this telling starts with the financial stuff because that’s how I was forced live my healing journey. I started out in dire financial straits and needed to focus most of my energy on survival for those first couple of years. Once I built plans, and stuck to them, I started allowing myself more and more time to grieve and heal.
I owe most of my appreciation to Chump Nation–who virtually supported me through ALL of it. Back when Tracy had forums connected to her old Chump Lady site, that’s where it started. Then when she had to take the forums down, most of us went to a private Chump Lady reddit sub, and the rest went to facebook. To this day, I remain active on the reddit site helping newer chumps looking for support, and am only somewhat active in the facebook group.
✔️ to “authentic, emotionally well, relatively secure, contented, and peaceful existence that’s fulfilling in ways I couldn’t have imagined possible “. So lovely, grow on💥
What I’m leading today is an authentic, emotionally well, relatively secure, contented, and peaceful existence that’s fulfilling in ways I couldn’t have imagined possible 7 years ago. It may not be the idyllic do over I used to conjure in my head, but it is REAL, and it is all MINE—I take that as a giant win.
What an amazing journey you’ve had Irrelevant! It’s been ten years and I feel the same. I take it as a giant win too.
There are two excellent books on this that I recommend. The first is “Cheating in a Nutshell: What Infidelity Does to The Victim” by Wayne and Tamara Mitchell.” I think my ex used it as a how-to template.
For insights on the horrific lasting damage to their children, I highly recommend “Parents Who Cheat:How Children and Adults are Affected When Their Parents Are Unfaithful” by Ana Nogales, Ph.D.,
Within weeks of “meeting” his twu wuv on a dating site, FW was sending “her” thousands of dollars a day–of MY money, BTW–despite never having met her, and only spoken for a few seconds, emailing afterwards that, “I couldn’t understand a single word you said, and you sounded like a man.” Despite being a fan of the “Catfish” TV show and laughing at the “stupid suckers,” he failed to realize it was a romance scam, and within two months, found an apartment for them about four blocks away and invited “her” to move in with him, emailing that she’d be a new, younger mother for our then-tween. I saw the email open on a shared computer and within minutes proved it was a scam. When I discovered proof of some of the money he’d sent, he assaulted me and tween, knocking me unconscious. I called our friends, who turned out to be his flying monkeys, and despite my bruises and bleeding head, they convinced me not to call the cops and took him to their house. While I was in shock from the discovery and the brain injury, he went to all our friends and associates, telling them that I discovered he was giving “financial advice to a remote work colleague,” (translation: he paid an online stranger for porn pics), I became irrational and violent, and to stay away for their own safety.
After months of trying to get out of the daze from the shock and concussion, I started telling friends what happened. Some didn’t want to hear. Others wanted proof, so I showed them his 500 pages of emails; bank, wire and photo records of his financial “gifts;”and photos of “her” on her instagram hooker listings. Humiliated by the truth, he used marital assets to wine and dine a succession of “life partners” who had the sense to dump him within weeks or onths. He moved on to another under-30 woman (he was mid 60s), and after three dates, put her on the phone with tween to introduce tween to his “new mother.” Tween had discovered the prior online affair (thanks to FW leaving their emails and her pornographic photos near every place tween sat or slept in the house), so he asked FW, “Have you actually met this one in person?” BTW, she dumoped him two dates later.
FW did terrrible things to tween, threatening to kill me and our pets if tween didn’t give him the new house security codes, steal my valuables and run away. He made false reports about me to CPS (which backfired, because the result of their investigation was to order no contact with HIM). On the few times the court allowed him back into the house, he literally sabotaged it, apparently attempting to trigger a fire or electrocution. I doscovered he’d been stealing and hiding my personal, non-marital assets for years, at least since I’d had a brain injury years earlier and he’d gained control of all our finances. He’d also been siphoning and hiding martial assets, and stole money that was intended for tween, including an inheritance.
I will leave out further information, but he abused one or both of us in every way possible.
Now that he’s had health problems and is in a care facility, he wants us to visit –despite court-ordered no contact. He leaves messages from random phone numbers, telling me “something happened,” and he “was a different erson then.” No, the real him came out, and since it didn’t succeed, he want to go back to pretending to be Mr. Nice Guy.
On the people side, we also lost our social circle–some people were so afraid from his reports of my violence that they ghosted us, some just wanted to be neutral/uninvolved–all of his side of the family, the respect of acquaintances.
There’s still a stigma to divorce, and there’s a loss of respect and reputation when people know you were married to or the child of an awful person.
Good riddance. Yes we chumps lose our old social circle but we go on to a smaller more authentic one. Plus a life of FW-free peace that you couldn’t appreciate unless you experienced chumpdom.
I’m currently listening to the Cheating in a Nutshell book and it is so insightful and validating. I’m so sorry about your experience as well. He sounds foul.
It took his infidelity to get me to finally leave what was clearly a very abusive relationship in every other way as well. I’m almost thankful that he did it or I may have oddly stuck it out with the other abuse because I just didn’t realize how bad it was until I left because of the infidelity. It was as if a part of me felt that despite all he did, I felt he “loved” me, until I discovered he “loved” another woman. And that awakened a rage inside me that hadn’t been there before. After all he did that I put up with, cheating was just the last straw. Knowing he raged and called me a c@&$ and then went to work and whispered sweet nothings in someone else’s ear was unbearable.
He was emotionally abusive, verbally abusive, and on several occasions (not often, but it happened), physically abusive. And he was super controlling. Even when we were getting along, he never let me have five minutes to myself. I would even joke that my husband wouldn’t be able to cheat on me because it would require leaving me alone for a few hours. Little did I know, he just messed around while all normal people (including me) were at work.
I wake up every morning thankful I got out of that. Because I learned of his cheating, I finally saw the light.
“or I may have oddly stuck it out with the other abuse because I just didn’t realize how bad it was until I left because of the infidelity. It was as if a part of me felt that despite all he did, I felt he “loved” me….”
Same exact experience.
Same!
In Dr. Minwalla’s Secret Sexual Basement, he uses the term “Reality Ego Fragmentation.” That one really stuck with me. I confronted my FW with suspicions but without proof a few months before Dday. She looked into my eyes and swore that everything was fine, and gave reassuring lies about everything that was making me suspicious. And I felt like the asshole for having suspicions. I mean, how could I ever think this wonderful person, my best friend for 20 years, who helped me survive a previous FW, could even think about cheating on me? So when Dday hit, it felt like I was splitting in half. Part of me died, irrevocably. This person I am now may eventually heal and become something resembling a full human being again, but the person I was is gone forever.
What else? My daughter was in full time day care from the age of 6 months so that FW could “finish school.” I don’t know that she was cheating on me back then, but in 5 years she only managed to write a single chapter of her dissertation and was eventually kicked out. Not that daycare was all bad, but my daughter will never have that piece of childhood back, not to mention all the money that went into daycare and tuition.
Our sex life had been lackluster at best. One of the clues that made me suspicious was how all of the sudden she was much more interested in frequent sex, and much more into it. Sex had always been fairly vanilla for us, which honestly I was OK with. But suddenly in addition to her being more interested, she wanted to try all sorts of new things. I eventually realized that she had been using me for *practice* so she could seem more sophisticated and alluring to the AP. I sure as hell never consented to be her training dummy.
Most of all, I know it was abuse because, now that we’re separated, every time I see a text or an email from her I struggle not to have a panic attack. I’m *terrified* of her. I was in a serious car accident a few years ago, and for maybe a month after I had to work to calm myself down every time I got behind the wheel, and I’m still paranoid when I drive through the intersection where the other car ran the red light. The real, physical paralyzing dread that I get from interacting with her is so much worse. I’d rather take a job as a crash test dummy than suffer what she did to me. Knowing that my kids are now more likely to grow up into monsters like their mother absolutely sickens me.
You model the sane parent. Not all abused kids become abusers. I am not an abuser. My kids are not abusers. Now I worry about them picking abusers. Continuing the abuse cycle, because it feels familiar. I always told my kids don’t marry crazy. The problem is identifying the disordered, they come across as normal at first. I told my daughter to get therapy so her picker is better. Her last BF may have had OCPD like her dad. Thank god she broke it off.
This confirms my concept of abusers as angry poltergeists, zombies and vampires. In fact, I think that’s where the monster myths come from. They’re not actually about undead ghouls but about people who didn’t “survive” whatever horror show life/childhood experiences they had in a true emotional sense. Consequently, it’s like they’re jealous of the “living” (those who are fully human and emotionally alive) and can’t rest until they turn us into trauma zombies like themselves by eating our brains, sucking our blood, whatever metaphor feels apt.
That’s an extraordinarily apt metaphor.
Don’t you wish it wasn’t apt? I hate how we all came to know these things.
Yup.
“every time I see a text or an email from her I struggle not to have a panic attack”.
That is my experience too. It’s awful and evil that someone can do this to another. In my case it was email only and I’d route them to a folder that I opened only once a week or month. Or have a trusted friend screen them.
“Knowing that my kids are now more likely to grow up into monsters like their mother absolutely sickens me.”
I share this worry but our awareness is already half the battle to protect them. Just the fact that you recognize a monster and can put up boundaries will be an example to them. This includes boundaries against the kids if they start adopting ex’s toxic behavior patterns.
She sucks
Oh yeah, I was also completely socially isolated, a common sign of more classically recognized abuse. I didn’t even realize how totally alone and without friends I was until Dday hit and I had absolutely no one to talk to. I was never a social butterfly, but after years and years of being constantly made to feel guilty whenever I didn’t come home to relieve her of the kids, all my friendships just withered away.
Another thought I’ve tried to express and never really able to clarify. They say the death of a spouse is the most stressful thing you can go through, even more so than divorce. I don’t know if it’s true, but I do know one thing. With a spouse’s death, the past stays intact. You can look at old photos of them and yes, feel pain and loss and grief, but the happiness captured in those photos is still intact. With infidelity, they not only steal our futures but manage to reach back into the past and steal that too.
I have another analogy for that. The Stasi in the former East German Republic were infamous for punishing and controlling suspected dissidents by threatening to “disappear” their loved ones or actually doing it. It’s a tactic that Vladimir Nabokov called the “lever of love” and described to full awful effect in his novel Bend Sinister and which was also depicted in the film The Lives of Others.
This is why East Germany was known for “breaking souls, not bones.” While more violent regimes relied on physical torture and punishment, the “lever of love” approach was just as destructive if not even more soul-melting. It would drive people stark raving mad. It would reportedly make artists stop creating art and make dedicated dissidents fold like cheap card tables. East Germany had the highest national suicide rate in history, even higher than the current South Korean rate.
The Stasi understood that the real secret to completely destroying people is taking their loved ones away, not threatening their lives. Anyway, it’s like cheaters create their own private East Germany except they use the “lever of love” to disappear themselves. It has exactly the same devastating, blindsiding effect on those left behind except with the added horrifying revelation that the “loved one” was the one who did it.
Very profound metaphorical description of the devastation of intimate betrayal and abuse.
Sometimes analogies come to us under duress. At the worst point before D-Day, all I could think about was the scene at the beginning of The Lives of Others where the dissident is being interrogated and threatened with having his wife arrested and children taken away by the state (at 4:15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7u6kE9emUs).
At first I felt like I cracked and broke in the same way the dissident does in the film. But learning the truth helped me tear down the “wall” soon after. It was like how, in the film, the truth getting out regarding Stasi tactics and related suicide rates in East Germany eroded the system.
It’s kind of an axiom that oppressors of all stripes lie to maintain power and, consequently, fear the truth getting out because it unseats them. By that token, I think the main lie at hand regarding cheating is that it’s not abuse. The truth getting out that it actually is abuse threatens the whole game.
Publish this widely! :
“The truth getting out that it actually is abuse threatens the whole game.”
My future was stolen, I say that a lot. And an older friend of mine, a friend of my mom’s actually, her first husband died in a biking accident and she thought that was the worst thing, But then her son’s wife cheated on him and left and she said “divorce is worse”. So, she knows. Anyway all of the above. And I can’t believe I’m saying this I only say this to my therapist but- I worry my younger son has the bad gene. I don’t know yet. Mostly I just love him and worry about him.
Rest assured that genes don’t code for good or bad behavior as geneticist Patrick Levitt put it. The commercial genetics industry is always trying to argue otherwise because when you have a hammer every problem is a nail and these applications are how geneticists get published. But in the century or so since geneticists first tried to prove the existence of “criminal genes,” they’ve failed to replicate any supporting research.
The whole “evil gene” thing is really Nazi nonsense. All humans are monkeys with shoes and smart phones and have a “latent” capacity for savage behavior. But we differ from monkeys in terms of free will and the fact that social environment can make an enormous difference in behavior. Your son has you as a mother and there’s hope that influence sunk in.
Yes, but he is the one who spends time – not a lot, but still- with his father and I do not badmouth my ex or even talk about him at all, but I guess I worry about his influence regardless. My other son has little contract and was also probably emotionally abused. I also do think that “social environment” for young men- the one I worry about is 25- isn’t great in general when it comes to how to treat women. I do have hopes and you are 100 percent right about the idea of a criminal gene and studies. But very strange things do get inherited. In twin studies, while the results come from terrible separation at birth stuff, are fascinating. As in, reading magazines from back to front and job choices, etc… Love this stasi comparison. So good. Elizabeth Strout in an interview discusses people whose only joy seems to be in putting people down, and I always felt sorry for those people. I no longer do. Joy stealers. Vampires.
Abuse & Infidelity Exist at the Intersection of Entitlement & Selfishness
For most of my life, I’ve thought of infidelity and abuse as separate things. Two reasons to get a divorce. I thought of them as the only two reasons to get a divorce . . . people who divorce because “we just grew apart” or “it wasn’t a good fit’ weren’t trying hard enough. And then I realized that “we just grew apart” might be code for “I got sick of the girlfriends” or “I’ve had one STD too many.” “It wasn’t a good fit” might be code for, “I’m not really that clumsy — he threw me down the stairs.”
Tom was my second husband, I met him at my new job — the one I took when I moved away from New England in the wake of the disaster that was my first marriage. Tom was divorced, too, because his wife “ran away with a client.” We were both divorced from cheaters — something we had in common. He was going to therapy, and he could speak psychobabble fluently. He was charming and funny and everybody thought he was wonderful. I thought he was wonderful.
I probably wasn’t ready to start dating again, at least not seriously. I met Tom less than two years after I threw out my cheating first husband. I had been to marriage counseling to try to save the marriage, but I hadn’t spent much time in individual counseling. Finding it hard to support myself and pay off my first husband’s mountain of debt (because he was never going to) in the large New England city I was living in, I moved “back home” to the midwest, to the nearest city to my parents’ farm. I was devastated at the “failure” of losing my first marriage, at having the family’s first divorce. And I jumped into another relationship too soon in my anxiousness to prove to myself and to my family that someone might deem me worthy of loving. Tom and I married on the second anniversary of our first date.
The day after our wedding, Tom announced, “Now that we’re married, I don’t have to be on my best behavior any more.”
The abuse started gradually — he’d have tantrums when we disagreed, he’d throw things when he got angry — things like tissue boxes or sofa pillows. Then he started throwing bigger things, and throwing them in my direction. He’d threaten to “go out and FUCK something” or to “beat you to death.” One day he threw a cup of hot coffee at my head — the mug missed me, the contents did not. And then he threw me down the stairs. I packed a bag and left that afternoon, flying to LA to visit a friend. It was the early 1980s. Abuse wasn’t talked about much, and when it was, it was talked about as slaps or punches, or maybe threatening you with a gun. Anyway, after a few weeks and my job demanding I return to work and Tom promising to go to marriage counseling, I returned home.
Don’t ever go to marriage counseling with an abuser — anything you say in counseling WILL be weaponized against you later, and a handsome, charming abuser may convince the therapist that YOU are the problem and the two of them may gang up to “fix you.”
Tom’s rage attacks (verbal attacks) never actually went away, although we both downplayed them because neither of us wanted a second divorce.
It was a few months later that he slammed me into a wall of our home so forcefully that it left a Ruby-sized dent in the drywall. I kicked him out, and we each continued to go to counseling individually, and to marriage counseling jointly with his therapist (male, because “he doesn’t respect women”) and my female therapist. I didn’t see that for the big, fat, flapping red flag that it was.
After a year, the therapists jointly decided that Tom was “cured” of his abusiveness and it would be safe for me to let him move back in. So he happily moved back in. And we kept going to counseling. And he kept making vile threats, but he didn’t actually hit me or throw me down the stairs or slam me through a wall . . . . And one day he decided to “Fix you for good,” (his words) and strangled me almost to death, dumping me on the highway with the clothes on my back and my dog. It was days later when I returned to our house to get some of my things that I found him frolicking with Father Steve, our pastor. I had never caught him cheating before (or even truly considered that he might cheat.) I had been looking for other women, not other men. I certainly had not been looking for our pastor. Later, women emerged from the woodwork to tell me that they thought Tom might have been “too familiar” with their husbands or boyfriends.
I filed for divorce. And continued to pay down Tom’s debts (as I had since the start of our marriage.). He made a down payment on an engagement ring. I made the payments. I also paid for the car he and his first wife bought, the one that she took with her when she left, Tom’s school loans, and continued to pay down the debt both husbands accumulated during our marriages.
There was infidelity, physical abuse, spiritual abuse, financial abuse and sexual abuse in both of my marriages. Only we weren’t talking about any of that in the mid to late 1980s. It was just a marital problem, a private problem between “a man and his wife.” And so I was pretty much ostracized from my extended family as being not only the first person to get a divorce, but someone who had messed up TWO marriages.
If every woman on earth took the total amount of time to completely heal between misogynist traumas before starting a relationship, the birth rate would drop to near zero and the only women having children would be doing it through sperm banks.
Thank you. But you just made me snort my coffee.
As a coffee lover, I deeply apologize. 😛
But, like, seriously. Getting a break between traumatic experiences for a lot of women is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing. Should cis women with, say, really big racks simply plan for celibacy as early as their tweens because– quite realistically– the traumatic harassment is never going to stop? And how much time is time enough to heal or for “trauma baggage” to be stowed? Five years? Ten? Arbitrary amount of time to be determined by blamey bystanders?
Personally I think that, until there are adequate legal protections for women and consistent enforcement against date rape, sexual harassment, domestic violence and coercive control and women are paid equally and stop being imprisoned for killing their abusers before their abusers kill them, dating is largely a protection racket situation and many women will be unconsciously motivated to rush into commitment simply because they feel generally unsafe. Naturally someone emerging from fresh trauma is going to feel even more unsafe and all the more at risk to fall into some protection racket trap with a subsequent abuser.
Of course someone with perfect wisdom and PhD level sociopolitical acumen might understand the risks enough to avoid them. But I don’t remember being warned at age 19 that my desire for a long term relationship was probably partly driven by a protection racket dynamic. I must have missed that course in high school.
I thought I had taken an adequate break after the trauma inflicted by my father, by my college boyfriend, by my first husband. I thought, at the time, that I was ready to date. But you’re right — dating IS a “protection racket,” and I didn’t take enough time or do enough therapy to recognize the red flags that in retrospect are unmistakeable. There probably is not enough time in the lifespan of a human female to take between traumatic experiences. And there are enough judging, blamey bystanders to make sure you know that all of your problems are *your* fault, because you *chose* him. What we chose; what *I* chose was the facade. I fell for the love bombing and the facade. And maybe those judgey, blamey bystanders should be blaming those who DID the love bombing and hid behind the facades rather than those of us who were honestly and hopefully falling for them.
Heterosexual women end up sleeping with the enemy because there are so many heterosexual men out there that are the enemy to women. We are on this site because we’ve fallen in love with the wrong person; someone who is not our friend or our partner and never really intended to be. As a young woman with “a large rack,” dating was a mine field. Just walking down the street in my own skin was a mine field and the traumatic harassment never really stopped until age and cancer claimed the “rack” and I became invisible. Invisible is safer; invisible is more peaceful. I don’t miss the attention of random men screaming, “Nice rack” or describing sexual acts they’d like to do to me.
I remember dating in my thirties. I vowed never to get into a vehicle with a man until at least the third date, told my friends where I was going and the full name of the guy I was going there with (in case I never made it back home) and was always consciously running a threat assessment when meeting new guys. And despite how careful I was, I wound up with cheaters and abusers. And things are getting worse, not better. In the wake of the fall of Roe vs. Wade, young women don’t have even as many choices as I did in a half century ago. I am sad for them. I worry for us all.
Every word you write rings true and reminds me of a parable in the book Friedman’s Fables by Rabbi Edwin Friendman, The Friendly Forrest. It’s online so here’s a cut and paste: https://harleyvoogd.com/2017/02/17/the-friendly-forest-by-edwin-h-friedman/
Once upon a time in the Friendly Forest there lived a lamb who loved to graze and frolic about. One day a tiger came to the forest and said to the animals, “I would like to live among you.” They were delighted. For, unlike some of the other forests, they had no tiger in their woods. The lamb, however, had some apprehensions, which, being a lamb, she sheepishly expressed to her friends. But, they said, “Do not worry, we will talk to the tiger and explain that one of the conditions for living in this forest is that you must also let the other animals live in the forest.”
So the lamb went about her life as usual. But it was not long before the tiger began to growl and make threatening gestures and menacing motions. Each time the frightened lamb went to her friends and said, “It is very uncomfortable for me here in the forest.” But her friends reassured her, “Do not worry; that’s just the way tigers behave.”
Every day, as she went about her life, the lamb tried to remember this advice, hoping that the tiger would find someone else to growl at. And it is probably correct to say that the tiger did not really spend all or even most of its time stalking the lamb. Still, the lamb found it increasingly difficult to remove the tiger from her thoughts. Sometimes she would just catch it out of the corner of her eye, but that seemed enough to disconcert her for the day, even if the cat were asleep. Soon the lamb found that she was actually looking for the tiger. Sometimes days or even weeks went by between its intrusive actions, yet, somehow, the tiger had succeeded in always being there. Eventually the tiger’s existence became a part of the lamb’s existence. When she tried to explain this to her friends, however, they pointed out that no harm had really befallen her and that perhaps she was just being too sensitive.
So the lamb again tried to put the tiger out of her mind. “Why,” she said to herself, “should I let my relationship with just one member of the forest ruin my relationships with all the others?” But every now and then, usually when she was least prepared, the tiger would give her another start.
Finally the lamb could not take it anymore. She decided that much as she loved the forest and her friends, more than she had ever loved any other forest were friends, the cost was too great. So she went to the other animals in the woods and said goodbye.
Her friends would not hear of it. “This is silly,” they said. “Nothing has happened. You’re still in one piece. You must remember the tiger is a tiger,” they repeated. “Surely this is the nicest forest in the world. We really like you very much and we would be very sad if you left.” (Though it must be admitted that several of the animals were wondering what the lamb might be doing to contribute to the tiger’s aggressiveness.”
Then, said two of the animals in the friendly forest, “Surely this whole thing can be worked out. We’re all reasonable here. Stay calm. There is probably just some misunderstanding that can easily be resolved if we all sit down together and communicate.” The lamb, however, had several misgivings about such a meeting. First of all, if her friends had explained away the tiger’s behavior by saying it was simply a tiger’s nature to behave that way, why did they now think that as result of communication the tiger would be able to change that nature? Second, thought the lamb, such meetings, well-intentioned as they might be, usually try to resolve problems through compromise. Now, while the tiger might agree to growl less, and indeed might succeed in reducing some of its aggressive behavior, what would she, the lamb, be expected to give up in return? Be more accepting of the tiger’s growling? There was something wrong, thought the lamb, with the notion that an agreement is equal if the invasive creature agrees to be less invasive and the invaded one agrees to tolerate some invasiveness. She tried to explain this to her friends but, being reasonable animals, they assured her that the important thing was to keep communicating. Perhaps the tiger didn’t understand the ways of the lamb. “Don’t be so sheepish,” they said. “Speak up strongly when it does these things.”
Though one of the less subtle animals in the forest, more uncouth in expression and unconcerned about just who remained, was overheard to remark, “I never heard of anything so ridiculous. If you want a lamb and a tiger to live in the same forest, you don’t try to make them communicate. You cage the bloody tiger.”
You are a badass warrior and I am proud to exist in the same century as you. Heartfelt salutations!
Agreed!
Thank God you “messed up TWO marriages” before they messed you up. Think how mighty you were in that time and religious climate. I grew up with an abusive narc religious Catholic mother who to this day shames me for my marriage failures. Never look back.
wow. Just know you did nothing wrong and you didn’t deserve any of this.
He stole my reality and detonated my life.
He knew what my first husband had done and did the same with a little extra on top.
I’ve known him since we were 19 – I’m 53 now and since last October have found out what was underneath the mask.
He persuaded me to move countries and told my father he’d look after me 😆
He lied, stole, abused mentally and sexually and cheated.
He isolated, gaslit and discarded.
He ghosted me last April while I was working overseas. I’ve been living in my parents house ever since- no answer to calls or emails. Someone showed me a photo of him and a woman I’d had less than ideal dealings with in the past. Apparently my replacement.
He’s done many a horrible thing since including abandoning our family cats to die, trespassing me with a family violence order from our house and not telling me when our old dog passed away recently.
He did however make a Facebook post about the dog he practically ignored because why not get some sympathy kibbles?
I’m currently in the court system with him- you can imagine how that’s going.
Not sure where you are but FASS through Legal Aid is available free of charge to support anyone affected by FV (victims and perps) in the family court. There is a FASS social worker even got those privately represented. Hopefully they are adequately resourced where you are.
Thank you so much- I’ll check that out.
That’s very helpful.
I lost my marriage to my best friend, my marital home, my pets, my in-laws, mutual friends and slightly more than half of our combined savings.
I lost 30 pounds immediately, thousands of hours of sleep, my sense of security and ability to trust, my emergency contact, my status as a married person, my retirement dreams, my memories.
It would have been easier if he had died because I would have been able to successfully grieve.
But, instead, I’m STILL confronted with this bullshit.
Common myths about cheating and infidelity — busted : NPR
utter dumbness
I can also describe my losses as you have described yours. I forgot about the extreme weight loss, the inability to sleep, the fear (terrified of unknown men in public), the inability to think or remember or construct sentences.
Yeah- definitely would have been easier dealing with death reached than the death of reality and everything I thought my life was.
Those closest to me are righteously angry for me .
Some I thought were friends don’t care what tea is spilled as long as it’s a good story- they listened to him and didn’t check with me.
If people are true friends who love you, they will be furious on your behalf and will make it known- no sitting on the fence or dithering about taking sides for them.
They are our people.
I agree. Death of a spouse is a tragedy all on its own, of course. Yet when that happens, the support system kicks in, hugs and coffee and chicken salad. Burials. Mourning. When your spouse cheats, you still lose your spouse; yet they are there. Parenting your children. Talking with your friends and family. You second-guess your own memory, your own judgement, your own ability to love.
Exactly. It felt like death. I absolutely felt like I was widowed. I remember wondering to myself, Where are my sympathy cards, where are my delivered casseroles? Why isn’t everyone calling me up to say “I am so sorry!” and “Are you okay?”, and “Do you need anything? What can I do to help? Let me come over and sit with you.” A woman who loses her husband to death does not feel shame for being widowed. Why do we have to feel or experience cultural shame and social silence just because we lost our husbands and our entire lifestyle and entire life as we knew it, because he was discovered to be a deviant, lying, betraying, infidel?
Limited abused his now adult children by bringing them to OW homes to hook up. What oldest pointed to a street where she played with her children he denied her reality. As a teen he again denied her reality when he hit her and denied it. She left home at 15 to escape his abuse. Limited has three children with two OW. One had a time limit to conceive and he obliged no strings attached. The other was married and conceived a child with him duping her husband. The child died at age six and looked just like him.
You’re describing absolute gothic horror. I’m so sorry you and your children even had to be bystanders to it much less direct victims of it.
In my last year of graduate school Limited gave up his business to move to Florida. My home was auctioned leaving me homeless with two children.
I hate the Limited and wish him all the fiery torments of hell.
The ABUSE continued when i started full time in my profession when Limited claimed it was my turn to support him as he wanted to retire at 44 with no home or assets. I refused and the narrative or cover story became much more elaborate. Suddenly I was an addict who supposedly spent money on addictions. In truth he was a serial cheating drug using covert narcissist who wanted to find someone to support him.
In 2014 with the continuation of dating sprees and no decent intelligent takers he landed a bar whore addict with explosive disorder who according to him made no money. After getting a STD I filed.
After all the future faking she won the prize living in poverty with the pathological liar.
I LOVE where he landed. Better yet gaining a life was the best!
Financial Theft (& The Self-Pity Channel)
My FW cried exactly one time, when I pointed out to him that as business partners, I had evidence that he misappropriated company funds to pay for hookers and hotel rooms. When I made the link between his behavior and a breach of fiduciary duty (potentially losing his ability to be a CFO if I went public), he panicked and called me crying. “It is the one thing I am good at.”
I cried countless times, deeply grieving the loss of my own career (to get away from him, left the business we co-owned), family, home and reality.
Herpes (& I Didn’t Intend to Hurt You)
When called out on my HSV2 diagnosis, responses ranged from, “but I used protection” to “my Dr said maybe I brought it into the marriage.” My FW is now married to his AP.
I’m not remarried, though. I haven’t even figured out how to date, what with herpes and trust issues. It sucks. For now I am enjoying being single, but it is not lost on me that, at 56, my sexuality has been trampled on and set aside, maybe permanently.
Right there w you.
Re criminalising coercive control. Unfortunately anything can be manipulated by a perp, including the law, especially where police aren’t very good at, or don’t want to, identify predominant aggressor. We’ve had emotional abuse provisions for 20 years where I live, and it is usually only prosecuted alongside nasty assaults, rapes, stalking etc. The only case i can think of where it was a stand alone offence is a high profile ex female politician who i suspect (because of some of the publicly known facts) was engaging in reactive abuse (sending nasty messages and the like) and tried a bit too hard to get police to help her. She was charged, he wasn’t. If she is convicted she’ll probably end up with period of good behaviour, so what really is the point other than to publicly expose her.
Id be very careful going to police asking for help with emotional abuse as you’ll either have your experience completely invalidated, or end up a suspect (and I’ve certainly had clients being charged when they’ve gone to police for help due to admitting offending in the context of reactive abuse).
Unless you are at immediate risk, talk to a lawyer first.
This is so sad but not surprising.
If it’s Australia you’re talking about, Victoria police will slap an AVO on anyone they think is a danger if someone calls and completely fabricates events.
Old Dickhead McCluggage did that very thing- not a word of it was true except I did go to MY house- okayed by my lawyer, I might add.
I agree they don’t bother investigating further or to look at the bigger picture even if things look preposterous and very likely to be untrue.
Until you’re badly beaten to the point of death, it’s not a priority.
And HOAC has pointed out several times if you mention infidelity police are even less likely to investigate/help you/charge the perp. Bitches be crazy.
I saw different DAs in different cities reject cases simply because victims alluded to cheating along with strong evidence of criminal battery. The DA’s reasoned (one screamed it) that any mention of cheating meant victims were simply fabricating the rest of the charges out of jealousy. The implication was that mention of cheating would bias the judge or jury but it really sounded like the DAs themselves were biased.
I think this is exactly why infidelity needs to be (mostly) clinically categorized as a form of abuse. There’s an obvious exception of severely battered women who seem to statistically monkey branch more than average simply to have a body guard on hand while they make their terrifying escapes. But the latter cases really aren’t so hard to distinguish from FW’s who are merely playing victim. Victims of severe battering typically (not always but typically) have medical and legal paper trails.
Exactly. Yes Australia. Just wrote a long response to this but got a “oh snap reload” and ain’t typing it out again lol.
My point was victims don’t always present very well, and narcs are good at manipulating legal systems, so be careful who you ask for help.
That damned reload😆
Yes – my lawyers are just working out I’m not some hysterical, vindictive woman after a bloke’s money- he really is like I told them he is.
Victims are bad at being victims because they hate being victims because being a genuine victim sucks rocks. Perps are good at being victims because it’s easier to read the room when you’re detached and easier to be cinematically tragic when it’s mere performance art.
you really have to be strong and keep your spirits up if you have kids looking to you for clues on how to deal, and then the people around you are secretly angry that you don’t cry.
Oh God fuck those people around us who judge us for not crying enough to be romantically tragic. I get nauseating, sleep-disrupting, throbbing, agonizing three day headaches every time I cry. I have to weigh the hits to my liver from taking 12 full doses of ibuprofen against my entertainment value.
Nailed it!
I’ve been a domestic violence advocate for a while now, and I can say with certainty–domestic abuse and infidelity go hand in hand. I do not consider them separate issues. If someone is entitled enough to cheat, he/she probably has other abusive stuff going on too. And if he/she is a raging abuser, chances are, he/she is probably cheating. The root of both is the same. They are both expressions of the same selfish attitude that says, “I don’t care about your pain. I just want what I want.” My ex was abusive AND a cheater. In fact, those things sort of balanced out. He was nicest when he was cheating most freely. If he wasn’t able to cheat, he was in a surly mood and more abusive. When I asked him WHY he cheated on me, he told me he enjoyed getting back at me for all the times I didn’t do what he wanted me to do.
I agree. When I did advocacy, I never met a survivor who wasn’t also cheated on in some way or another. It was so predictable that I began to wonder if the main MO behind most domestic violence wasn’t simply the brutal enforcement of one-sided monogamy.
Yes, infidelity is abuse,and it matters not if no bones are broken or no teeth knocked out. The FW really enjoyed hurting me and son, and found a perverted sense of pleasure from our distress. For decades. The last 10 years or so of his cheating, he was so abusive that he started to purchased the time of very masculine women, then bisexual or trans or similar. He later told me he had always resented the fact that men were attracted to me, and that I was not big and masculine-looking and that I couldn’t drink him under the table, and that I was too educated and so on…constant verbal abuse, financial abuse ( I earned too much money!! He hated that) It feels so good to be Meh. Folks, do not fear Meh. It feels good. If you do not care, the emotional abuse is powerless.
He sounds like one messed up dude. Wtf
Yep. Indeed. Prior to 2014-15 he had a few redeeming qualities, and but after that he developed a magnetic attratction to utter trash. Spending my hard-earned money on gay bars and buying alcohol for pros w/STDs. But not my problem now…Ripped off ihs employer for years,too. They found out too late. Also not my problem. Meh feels so good, ladies. Trust me.
We don’t often hear stories of the victims of those who feel compelled or pressured to conceal their sexuality or gender identity. After they come out all sorts of sympathy flows their way, but not much for the, usually, unsuspecting wife. I suspect in some cases at least this sort of behaviour is just a narc trying to find supply inside any old hole he can find .
This is very true. I appreciate them here, because I’ve witnessed them in my life. But seeing them here in this context of abuse feels so right.
Yes, though he never came out to anyone. He continued to pretend to be straight. And continued to pursue straight women, too, I think. I dont’t know the whole story or the current story and I do not need to know. I think your comment is spot on–any warm, wet hole would do. The more well-used, the better.
He often would say, “Whatever makes you feel good about yourself.” It was an oft-repated remark of his.
When I was young and had just fallen off the turnip truck, I asked a psychologist I met at some arty event why so many men in Los Angeles assumed all women were bisexual. She said that it’s because these guys were hanging around narcissistic party scenes in which anyone would do anyone else as long as it got them attention.
It made me think about how caved in your soul would have to be to circumvent basic gender preference which, in healthy people, seems to be pretty hardwired one way or another.
uh maybe so many men in LA assumed all women were bisexual because they were projecting? And they are all bisexual?
Maybe. But, after a few years in that weird town, I got the feeling that quasi-prostitution was endemic in that city because many women were performing sex acts that didn’t necessarily jibe with their preferences simply for the entertainment of men as a way to break into the entertainment industry or just to make rent money. Eventually I found it completely gross that industry douchebags thought this kind of sexual performance art was “real” rather than just a measure of desperation and misogynist economic inequality.
Just to be clear, I don’t think bisexuality is always or even mostly faked for profit. But I think performative sex is typically sad and messed up.
The abuse could not be deeper or more painful. He lied, cheated, gaslit, deceived and disparaged me and put my and our sons’ personal safety at risk while hiding that he believed he was a transwoman, was cross-dressing, buying tons of women’s clothes and accessories, started hormones for years before I finally found a bill all while acting like everything was normal between us and we were married for well over 40 years. Who knows how much he has given to his f-buddies, and entertained him in the marital home while we were still married, although separated (maybe even before then but I don’t know) . To top it off, when our son discovered his father on a gay dating website a year before I discovered the bill and he finally disclosed to me, he told him to not say anything to me. So my son had to carry the burden of this knowledge for all that time. That certainly counts as abuse to me. Now because of no-fault divorce, it does not matter what he did, he is going to get away with a nauseatingly large sum of money from me. Just more abuse. There is no justice. This was not the person I married, this was not the person I thought I knew and lived with my whole adult life. I cannot wait until the damn divorce is final.
There are so many shocking and horrifying posts on this thread but I am gobsmacked by yours AM22, AND OUTRAGED that the legal system is making you give him anything! If you were in Ireland you’d be able to apply for a civil annulment on the grounds of his keeping his sexuality a secret from you because he’s not totally hetero but married you with you believing he was. I don’t know what the law is where you are but try and find out because if you can get a civil annulment, that would mean there was no legal marriage and they couldn’t make you give him ANYTHING!
It should be the case that you, and far too many of us should be able to prosecute THEM for abuse and ether get damages off them, or at the very least, move on without giving abusing cheats so much as a penny! It’s outrageous that you should be made give him anything! A total injustice!
Please look into getting a civil anullment!
In my case, the biggest abuse took the form of serious gaslighting.
I was suspicious that something wasn’t right so I kept asking and bringing it up in various ways. It started with things like: “What’s wrong? You seem out of sorts and distant.” To which he’d reply: “Ah, sorry I’m just stressed with work stuff.” That went on FOR YEARS. I was begging him to get help, eat better, sleep, exercise but he still just said “stressed- blah blah.”
At some point it turned into conversations like this: “I want to know what’s going on. You’re hard to get hold of, you’re distant, you’re on your iPad all the time and you’re not doing anything. I know something is wrong. Are you okay?” To which he would say, :”You’re so unsupportive! You’re always badgering me. I’m just tired from all the work I do. And you know, I do more than any other guy I know. I’m an executive and then also have to do things at home. Maybe give me a break!.” And then I’d feel bad for bringing it up.
Then the bad abuse started. I’d say something like: “Hey, can we have a proper conversation about something? I’m feeling like you’re cheating on me. You’re always on your phone. You’re hard to get hold of, you’re out late and you seem really different.” To which he’d say, “If course I’m not cheating. Shame on you for making me feel bad. Are you cheating? What are you doing that’s helping? Why are YOU so distant and different? This is your insecurity and anger coming out. You’re just like your parents- you have low relationship skills like they do. I think it’s time you worked on your issues and stop nagging me.”
And when DDay happened, he actually laughed in my face and said, “What did you think I was doing all this time?” Like it was funny that I was such a dumb ass for letting him dupe me.
I was the front wife, living the front life while he was out there paying sex workers top dollar and going to BDSM clubs on the weekends.
If that isn’t abuse I don’t know what is.
The front wife, yes. Same exact thing happened to me, only I can’t prove a bdsm club hobby but it is entirely possible.
The gaslighting of denying and stonewalling whenever I asked him what was wrong was so confusing. I thought he was depressed, stressed out and disappointed with his own professional failures and personal tragic losses in his own life. I sure regret now, giving him so much damn empathy. Because he was using all that as a cover to check out and go deep into the secret sexual basement. Besides denying that there was “anything wrong”, he also used every opportunity to throw it back in my face, telling me I really need to get help for my own issues. These conversations always concluded with him saying that there is something wrong with me.
oh boy this is what happened to me, too.
Yes I agree. The gaslighting is terrible and leaves deep scars
Ditto. Gave a lot of latitude because I thought he had work stress, worked long hours etc. Took at face value. Normal people relationships you can do this. Disordered you can’t. But you have to identify your spouse is disordered. They call us naive because we are normal and trusted them!,,,. It’s f@@@ ed up!
I hated the secondary abuse of being told that I should WANT to promote a relationship between Jesus Cheater and our children. During the height of the pandemic when no one was taking new clients, I had to find a reunification therapist for our teenagers and their father who abandoned them for the child mistress in Thailand. Basically, to avoid an alienation charge from the courts, I was told that I would need to promote a relationship between the kids and my abusive X. I don’t agree that all parents are good. Lucky for us, the X was too lazy to agree to attend and said that the kids should want to have a relationship with him. (The kids spiritually trained EMDR therapist said that he did not support a relationship between the kids and the X, so I was relieved that I had his endorsement. The X is currently circling back around like the disordered person who he is and claims that he wants a relationship with the kids now that they are young adults.)
Which has brought back my nightmares. Anyone who is toxic enough to induce nightmares should be seen as the dangerous person who they truly are.
100% this has been one of the worst aspects for me as well.
Recent examples of family court orders in Australia include courts giving sole parental responsibility to one parent, with equal shared care arrangements -week on, week off. What does that mean? One parent is responsible for the children all the time, including when the children are with the other parent for half the time. This is just an absolute nonsense (it could work if the children were with the other parent for a small amount of time). Opens the door for abuse if the parent with SPR has to be available to make parenting decisions the week the children are with OP.
Insane
I’m very proud of CN stepping up and answering this question/challenge, as I think everyone here agrees infidelity = abuse. I’ve read some of the posts so far, and they’re spot on and courageous, in their own way.
I will give my own account and reasoning regarding this sometime this weekend, when I get time. But I feel everyone’s pain regarding this (no, not like slimy Bill Clinton. For real). And it’s heartening to see everyone stepping forward to tell their truth, and this truth.
Also, thank you Tracy, for putting forth and maintaining this viewpoint in the face of so many people who just want to discount it as a minor speed bump in life, and wonder why we can’t just “get over it.” It’s not minor speedbmp, to anyone w/good character and a good soul. It’s an awful, terrible experience.
And beyond the spouse/partner/significant other, I think you could say it’s also abuse towards any family that are involved, too.
Lasting trauma. Years of unconstructive decisions unconsciously based on said trauma. Triggers to this day when, decades after the fact, OW’s exceedingly popular and highly acclaimed novel is *everywhere.* (Seriously, like recommended on my college class FB page, apropos of nothing, just absolutely frickin’ everywhere.)
For me there were multiple stages. First, FW began pursuing OW while gaslighting me about what was happening. No points for originality.
Then, he dumped me (we were engaged and living together, not married) and told me it was because he couldn’t handle my then-undiagnosed illness, which he claimed had changed me. He also claimed it was killing him. (The illness was eventually diagnosed as lupus and has not killed me, at any rate, though it has certainly tried.) A few points for drama, and all the points for permanently scarring me, as I came away with the belief, at 21, that I was not lovable because I was sick.
Then he took up with OW in earnest. She was barely 18 at the time and cannot be held responsible for his mendacity and manipulation.
I didn’t learn of their partnership for many years. But eventually I discovered that they had made at least one modestly successful film together. Quite a few points for irony, as I understand the film is about an affair. And, as mentioned above, OW is a successful novelist. Good for her, I genuinely have no issue with her, as she was so young and FW was such a manipulator. Anyway, whatever FW told me at the time, he *was* pursuing OW while still with me, and if he left me in part because I was sick (!), it was also in part because he wanted her.
Tracy has it bang on the money: it’s the theft of reality. FW can be all plausibly tragic and “invitus, regina,” and we chumps may even buy it for a while, but in the end it’s lipstick on a pig. FWs are no better than they should be, and it’s a great shame that they even matter enough to traumatize us.
I worked in media since college and some of the pervs who tormented me in the workplace were well known enough to keep cropping up in the news. That’s the downside of dealing with perpetrators who have notoriety. But the upside is getting to know how these stories end. You sound young enough that maybe you haven’t yet seen how things work out in the long run for shitheads. I’m not technically “old” but I’ve lived long enough to see quite a few denouements. The shitheads end badly, often far worse than their victims could hope for.
HOAC I am so torn between wanting him (TV producer) to get his just deserts and wanting him to get it together for the sake of our children. I keep reminding myself that however his story ends, it will be a footnote in my story.
Thank you! I’m GenX, quite solidly middle-aged, and am both dismayed and amused to think that I sound “young.” FW’s betrayal took place decades ago. I don’t suppose even the trauma would remain were it not for the lasting effects of serious, long-term illness. Lupus is the real culprit in my particular story, not no-better-than-he-should-be FW, and certainly not OW. But FW and OW are the ones who left the scars and set off the triggers, and unfair as that is I’m afraid it’s just rotten luck for me. I suppose FW may have triggers of his own. Who knows? Perhaps he can’t read Flannery O’Connor without feeling haunted. A girl can dream.
I was confused by the ages mentioned and timeline. You actually sound hyper-smart but I always remind myself that smart doesn’t necessarily = old (especially as my kids start informing me about things I have no clue about).
I’m so sorry to hear that you’re dealing with lupus. It occurs to me that it may not be just a matter of bad luck that you developed a chronic autoimmune condition. Maybe it wasn’t due to “bad” anything about you. I suspect there are several factors that might explain the general rising rates of certain chronic diseases and cancer and it’s pretty clear from research that domestic abuse and severe trauma can be at least a co-factor. Something I find even more interesting about this is that– for both chronic disease and domestic abuse– susceptibility may not be based on inherent “weakness” in individuals but sometimes actual strengths.
I became intensely focused on autoimmunity and chronic disease since my kids all developed autoimmune allergies as toddlers and I also started showing autoantibodies and suddenly developing allergies as an adult. Because no one in our family going back generations ever had these conditions and since there’s no such thing as a genetic epidemic, it was clear that something in modern life is increasing rates of certain chronic conditions (including a 60% rise in lupus among women especially). Because I wanted to be where problem solvers and ass-kickers are hanging out in order find resources to help my kids, I got involved with the environmental health movement 17 years ago and worked for an environmental watchdog publication for 12 years.
Though the main focus of the publication is the steep hike in rates of cancer and atopic, neurological and autoimmune diseases in the chemical shitstorm age, I also learned along the way that domestic abuse can increase risk of the same conditions which suggests that undue stress can affect some of the same cellular pathways as toxic chemicals. In other words, these are not competing theories but likely complimentary ones which gives new meaning to the idea that abusive individuals are “toxic.”
Speaking of which, the publication always dealt with a lot of vicious professional chemical industry trolls (Monsanto alone paid hordes of them in its heyday) who specialized in “whatabouting” any and every alternative explanation for elevated incidence of chronic disease that showed up in research– including domestic abuse– as a way of exonerating various chemicals. The trolls loved the DV cause theory in particular, not because they gave a rat’s ass about abuse victims but because it suggested that, among other things, all the parents of chemical shitstorm victims who were speaking out about their kids’ unprecedented chronic illnesses were probably child abusers. Nice way of silencing the collateral but it’s a dumb argument because domestic abuse rates were much higher back in the bad old days when it was legal for men to beat their wives, not to mention how exposure to stressful horror was far more common during, say, the civil war and times of slavery and public executions. Yet rates of certain chronic diseases were far lower in those times, sometimes to the point of not even existing in medical literature.
Because I’d previously worked as an advocate for survivors of domestic abuse, I wasn’t going to completely discount the role of abuse in triggering disease just because the theory was being misused to compete with toxic cause theories. Instead I was interested in whether it was more a “one-two punch” arrangement where abuse and severe trauma can make some individuals even more susceptible to environmental toxins by depressing immune response. That doesn’t mean everyone who develops these conditions was abused or experienced severe trauma but– again– that abuse and trauma may be co-factors that “facilitate.”
Because of statistics showing significantly increased rates of cancer and atopic disease among battered women, apparently abuse can be a very potent “facilitator.” It’s even arguable that some abuse victims might never have developed cancer or full blown autoimmune conditions if it hadn’t been for abuse which means that abusers can still be largely responsible for these outcomes along the lines of the “eggshell skull” rule in law (i.e., a defendant in a personal injury case will be responsible for the damage caused, even if the victim had a pre-existing condition that made him or her predisposed to serious injury). There’s also a poetic irony in the whole thing since the strategies used by toxic industrial culprits to amass power, cover up harm and punish and silence scientific whistleblowers and survivors who speak out are right out of the batterer playbook. What’s more, the kind of neoliberal feudalism promoted by corporate villains arguably impedes the democratic process and creates less equitable societies. We know from sociopolitical research that undemocratic societies have far higher rates of domestic abuse.
There’s another potential overlap as well in terms of traits of both chemical shitstorm victims and abuse victims: general fabulousness. In the 1970s, Camilla Benbow did some groundbreaking research showing that children with high IQ had doubled rates of allergies and, as rates of certain chronic diseases have risen, the same principle seems to apply to the latter. There’s even evidence that high IQ is a significant risk factor in Covid. The prevailing theory to explain this is that the brain and gut (where more than 80% of the human immune system resides) both compete for metabolic fuel during developmental stages which creates a turf war. Basically if the brain wins the war, the immune system loses and smarter kids appear to have generally weaker immunity, at least in developmental stages if not throughout their lives.
Then DV expert Lenore Walker discovered that, contrary to the old-timey idea that battered women were especially weak and defective, it seemed more than average had higher level careers, educations and higher than average self-esteem. This suggests that a lot of abusers are actually hunting “big game”– strong, smart, fabulous targets– more than easy prey.
So, sort of like cutting Samson’s hair, it seems that increased susceptibility to both chemical injury and domestic abuse aren’t so much due to victims’ flaws or weaknesses but can be due to their strengths. This principle even shows up in the fact that ethnic groups with especially powerful immune alleles that helped these groups survive famine, drought, plague, icy tundras or swampy jungles, etc., for millennia are suddenly developing especially high and unprecedented rates of autoimmunity and especially severe forms. It’s like the powerful immune “guns” they carried for their own protection were taken away from them and held to their heads in the form of autoimmunity.
Anyway, there’s room for argument that it isn’t just “bad” luck and “bad” genes or bad anything in individuals that trigger certain conditions or make some people more susceptible to abuse. There are also human-wrought causes for these things and it seems the culprits were all cut from the same cloth and the best and brightest are more likely to be affected/targeted.
Isn’t that like every abuser on earth to jujitsu the strengths of their victims and turn them into liabilities?
This is, obviously, a ton to unpack but bottom line — yeah, absolutely. I’ve hovered around the edges of the environmental movement myself (mainly as a translator since I don’t STEM) and the more you look the more the patterns emerge.
I don’t know about you but getting involved in some kind of solution is the only way I sleep at night because I’m so royally pissed off about what happened to my kids. The bonus is also getting first run information on the latest chemical threats and treatment advancements, much of which has helped my kids. There’s also some woo and “crystal healing” type fads that circulate on the fringes of the environmental arena but it’s not really that hard to distinguish legitimate stuff from useless crap.
I don’t STEM either but, like I always argue (to the point of being boring lol), because we’re in an era when laws and policies are often based on scientific theory, this makes the issue political and not just the exclusive purview of scientists. Basically the only certs someone needs to have the “right” to gain literacy in interpreting scientific research is a voter ID, otherwise democracy can’t function if people don’t understand what they’re voting on.
There was always a catch 22 in eco health activism regarding having sciency certs because news programs that host debates on environmental issues would show their industrial bias by inviting activists without any kind of official scientific training– say, victims or parents of victims of industrial disasters– to battle against expert industry defense shills with PhDs up the wazoo. Consequently this made “lay” activists who had a solid understanding of the science very valuable as mouth pieces. Then of course the non-scientists would get bashed and dismissed for their lack of certs but they wouldn’t even get air time if they had those certifications.
It’s a total Roman circus. All the same, some of the activists I knew went on to get advanced degrees in things like toxicology and epidemiology just to earn the “right” to cite science in making political arguments regarding environmental regulation, scientific corruption and industry accountability.
Indeed. I’m so sorry about your kids. When I first got sick, no one in my circles had even heard of autoimmune disease. Now practically everyone I know has one. I’m too sick to be much of an activist right now, even as a translator, so about six years ago I got religion instead. I can’t quite claim it keeps me sane, since religion is by definition irrational, but at least it brings me a measure of peace.
Peace is proven to be healing as much as trauma is sickening so whatever improves your health and helps you sleep is the ticket. If anything else helped me sleep, I might not have spent 12 years mud wrestling with ag and biotech trolls. I wasn’t paid well, can’t use my published work to get other employment and didn’t always like my fellow activists (like why do people with MAs in business administration try to take over everything and think they’re MLK?).
It’s an enduring mystery. (the self-styled MLKs, I mean.) As for the healing of peace — exactly. No one in my family is at all religious, so I am thankful that they support me in my quest.
“Lasting trauma. Years of unconstructive decisions unconsciously based on said trauma.” Thank you for this and I too had years of bad decisions. The last man was so bad..it was only a year, but it was the last one. I kept reliving in many ways the same thing. Now I am buying books like “healing shame” because it did hurt my children who love me, but I am so ashamed it took me so long to get “better” which I am, but I work at it. Glad you have religion. I do sound baths, and guided meditations- those are new- and have returned to other practices of self care. My sons are slowly opening their eyes to what I went through, but I don’t talk about it, or him, with them which is important. IT’s been 9 years. Not sure when or if I will ever talk to them openly about the abuse. The behind the closed door abuse. the consensus here and my therapist say not to. So I don’t. He speaks for himself when theyy are with him, and they aren’t stupid. They are getting to know him outside of me, and will see him for who he is. And that’s enough. Meanwhile, I battle such dark shame, and work on that. And they see that. And they are proud of me.
I’m proud of you too. Peace be with you (in my religion that’s what we say, “as-salaamu alaikum,” “peace be with you”). I understand the dark shame, too well, as many of us here do. But I know you and your light will prevail. God bless you!
You’ve piqued my interest with this story. People here refer to shark eyes & I think of coal chips in dough.