My Life Is a Soap Opera

take the long view. it’s hard, i know.

my X had a longstanding affair with his subordinate at work, promoted her then they planned their new life of being successful at the company. both left their partners in a studied/careful/lying and cheating way. they announced their relationship to the company and this lead to a corporate restructure to accommodate them.

guess what happened? he lost his position first then she was forced out. so far, my X remains unemployed (7 months now), and his AP started at a new company in a position where, given the project she oversees, she has a good chance of being a sacrificial lamb. it’s a hot potato project.

but that doesn’t mean you don’t burn with the fury of a 1000 suns right now, so try to take that fury out on things you can control–how far you run; how much you lift; the state of your investments; learning how to cook all the hawaiian foods in the history of time. roast a whole pig. and wait. there will be changes.

Haven’t these guys ever heard the phrase “don’t fish off the company pier“?

Also, someone is still in corporate America, I find it hard to believe that management is unaware of what’s going on and what kind of liability it is for the company. The only reasons I could come up with that they would let this behavior continue without some sort of meeting from human resources is a) maybe they’re not all that in touch with their workforce, or b) they’re enjoying his shenanigans vicariously through him.

I realize it’s not managements job to marriage police their fellow employees, but seriously people. Keep it in your pants.

If you do not cut off the incoming information regarding what the EX FW and the new victim are doing, you will prolong your own pain. You are interfering with your own ability to heal. It’s nice to have empathy and want to save someone else from the pain you know is coming, but chances are they will not believe you anyway. You changed from 31-year-old attitude to 44-year-old attitude. The next victim will change, too.

I tried to warn my sons about red flags I could spot in their new loves du jour when they were teens. They definitely did not appreciate my assistance. Somehow, it made it worse when I was proven to be right with my instincts. I learned I had to step back and let them learn some things the hard way for the lesson to stick. Watching my sons make painful mistakes was far harder than watching new love interests falling for the same old BS. I chose not to lie, if asked. I did not initiate contact. If a new potential victim contacted me to ask why our relationship had failed, I chose my words very carefully. Those who had a bit of discernment could read the subtexts in the answers I gave. Those who accused me of inaccurate things got corrected. As an example, a reply to an inappropriate question, ” you must have misunderstood something . . . I did not have an affair” (emphasis on I). They could believe or not. I figured if they asked questions, they were already having doubts.

Don’t shop for pain. Explain to your friends you have had enough, and don’t need anymore. Soon, you really won’t care at all, and will only think of it on rare occasions.

MyLifeIsaSoapOpera…….again, my sympathies for the pain you are being put through by this vicious person. Your situation highlights an idea that I have long had which is that while we focus on the sex aspects because cheating is inherently sexual (even emotional affairs usually turn physical) I think the problem is a more basic one of someone who uses sex/romance as one process to dominate, control and humiliate others. It’s about power for many cheaters, not just getting their willies and wynonas wet. Many of these cheaters also engage in legal crimes like financial theft as well because…..dishonest people are dishonest, it’s a basic character trait and sex is only one way they can express it. DO CHECK YOUR FINANCIAL RECORDS TO SEE IF STBX HAS BEEN STEALING FROM THE MARRIAGE TO FUND HIS AFFAIRS. This is common and can be considered in a settlement.

In your case the power dynamic is very obvious of an older man constantly looking for young women to control. dominate and abuse. CHEATING IS ABUSE. It is psychological abuse on the same level, possibly worse in some ways, as physical domestic violence and society needs to recognize that. The mental and emotional damage done, the financial damage, the societal damage, the damage to children….this is not just some playful thing about sneaking around and having “fun” sex. This destroys spouses and families and IT IS ABUSE and needs to be acknowledged and treated as such. Your STBX is an abusive, controlling man who will keep doing this pattern of preying (and many of them are serial predators) on young women until the System stops him. Now, I don’t know if you are financially dependent on him keeping his job at this point so you may not want to bring HR into his activities but if him losing his job is not going to hurt you, you might notify them that….he’s doing it again. This man needs to work in Antarctica in a station manned by penguins.

Dear MyLifeisaSoapOpera,

Congratulations for leaving him. As hard as these days are, you will never, ever, ever regret doing so.

But right now you need to free yourself, your mind and your spirit from his ‘power.’ You are not responsible for what he does or who he does. He has his hand in the garbage disposal and is just begging for someone to flip the switch. He is almost daring someone to make this happen. I have come to think of it as Cheater’s Russian Roulette.

You don’t have to be that person. Just D-I-S-E-N-G-A-G-E. In fact, I now offer you “Disengage” as your new magic word. You don’t have to show up for the soap opera. You don’t have to get dragged in. You get a choice in the matter.

Now run and frolic and do your work and heal and grow. You will be able to see his life exploding in your rear view mirror, and I promise it will feel better when he is safely back behind you.

Dear Soap, your life does not have to remain embroiled in this insane soap opera if you don’t want it to. It’s really as easy as that; that’s the beauty of kicking a FW to the curb. We get to retake our power and they get to become road runner dust. I suspect that part of the reason you may – at whatever level – still swirl around it with interest is because like many of us, you’ve never encountered such perplexity in your life as you have being involved with this deceitful, lying, coldhearted, scumbag so the rational part of your brain is still trying to make some sense of it. As it’s been stated many times before on this blog, you cannot untangle the skein of their fuckitude. Not gonna happen. They’re a different species, you’ll never stumble upon an answer that will satisfy you. And by now, his heliocentric theory that he is the Sun and all women are created to orbit around him, is deeply embedded. More fuckery.

You mention that your ex is “many years” older than you, so know he’s had many drama-filled, cheating rodeos before your 8 year run. You don’t mention any children in your letter so I’m going to assume you and he do not share any. Fantastic! The silver lining. You do not have to co-parent with him, it can be a clean break with no contact.

You say that all of your family/friends say “none of this even feels real, it’s like an endless drama show…” and you ask for suggestions how to cope. Well, since the drama show reference is a running theme, why not take a page out of one?

You sound relatively young, but you’ve probably heard of the TV drama that was extremely popular back in the 80’s called “Dallas.” Dallas was a long-running evening soap opera with all sorts of twists and turns and of course, a resident villain named “J.R.” During one of the later seasons, Dallas had what was referred to as the “dream season.” Patrick Duffy, the actor who played “Bobby Ewing” decided to leave the series for greener pastures or whatever, and his character was killed off. It turned out that it was a mistake for both Duffy and the show’s ratings so now the producers had the complicated creative task of seeing if they could resurrect his character. In the end, it was scripted that his wife “Pam Ewing,” played by Victoria Principal, would awaken from a bad dream, and that Bobby had never died. They show him in the shower, smiling and scrubbing his buff body. It was all a dream.

Take a page from Pam Ewing’s book. Your 8-year relationship with this cheating scoundrel was a bad dream. There are no children to remind you that it wasn’t. It was all a dream. A bad one. Move on into a sane, happy future.

Dear My Life Is a Soap Opera,

I get the sense that part of the reason you’re saying your life is a “soap opera”– aside from the complex telenovela type of partner-swapping fuckery that your STBX has gotten up to– is that he’s been spinning a lot of blame-shifting bs about you and you’re currently living in a swirl of negative gossip. Calling this effect a “soap opera” seems to be an attempt on your part to show that you recognize that, while gossip hurts and unsettles, it’s essentially silly and meaningless like the idiotic plots of soap operas.

While I think making a bit of a joke about it shows a certain amount of stoicism on your part and a sense of gallows humor (which I love and applaud), I’m not sure I’d agree that the kind of character assassination your STBXFW is committing against you is “silly” or negligible. Something I’ve been thinking and writing about recently is the idea of “social ruin” or “social abuse” as a particularly vicious aspect of “coercive control,” aka “sub-violent” forms of domestic violence. At least in the domestic violence advocacy arena, there’s been progressive recognition in the past twenty years that things like emotional and financial abuse within intimate relationships can have devastating effects on victims that are as serious as violent assault. By the same token, I think it’s about time social abuse/social coercion got its due in that sense. The threat that someone will say terrible, character-assassinating things about you behind your back because you left them can feasibly have terrible and (God forbid) even life threatening consequences.

Because– in the realm of all that is possible– that kind of negative spin can have dire consequences, I think part of the very serious trauma of leaving an abuser is this sense of “logical extremes.” If– due to an abuser’s self-exculpating, blame-reversing bs gossip– we don’t end up A) losing friends, family, social reputations, jobs, careers; B) losing custody of our children; C) dying, it was no thanks to the evil intent of the lying, blameshifting, character-assassinating ex who was trashing us behind our backs to anyone who would listen.

Sometimes we need to measure the danger of people by what they could potentially have done– the harm the could have committed against us– had their ill-intent resulted in “logical extremes.” In other words, never mind if they failed in those sick attempts, we need to measure their danger by what they could have done. And isn’t it shocking and rattling and unsettling to realize we’d been living in such close proximity to people who could– oopsy, whoops– do us such terrible harm? That’s real trauma.

I think the truth is that sometimes blameshifting gossip/social abuse kills. I collected a lot of stories along those lines from the time I spent as an advocate for domestic violence survivors but there’s a particular story from a frequent contributor to CL which tragically illustrates how deadly and “un-silly” spin and false gossip can be– specifically the case where the cheating husband of a member of CN ended up killing this woman’s toddler after she left him. As far as I know, the “FW” in this situation had never previously been violent (please correct me if I’m wrong). I believe he began making violent threats when his wife left. He also began telling everyone– including police– heinous lies about her, such as her being a prostitute. As a direct result of “FW spin,” police didn’t take the stalking reports the CN member filed seriously and she couldn’t get protection. Her ex ended up kidnapping her son and committing murder/suicide.

Something else that’s been getting more recognition in recent years is that some domestic abusers might not be violent until their victims attempt to escape. There’s a statistic coming out of Australia that, in 60% of domestic murder cases, there had been no previous reports of violence. Some cases could probably be chalked up to under-reporting of domestic assault but there’s also a lot of evidence that a good share of domestic abusers don’t resort to violence until their victims try to escape, at which point victims’ risk of being murdered rises 70-fold. What this means is that a very large percentage of abusers manage to entrap their victims using mostly “sub-violent” controlling and coercive tactics.

For a general introduction to the concept of sub-violent domestic abuse, a book I recommend all the time is “Coercive Control by veteran DV shelter activist and forensic social worker Evan Stark. Stark is currently one of the main spearheads of the international movement to criminalize coercive control, a campaign based on the serious statistical risk that abusers who engage in sub-violent or psychological/emotional/financial abuse are more likely than average to progress to outright violence or even murder. It’s also based on decades of observations from Stark and others that victims of DV almost universally report that the psychological and emotional abuse and coercion they endure as the most paralyzing and devastating aspects of DV even beyond physical assault and injury.

Anyway, of all the forms of emotional and psychological coercion and open or veiled threats that abusers typically dish out, there’s one in particular that I think is under-discussed– this idea of Dickensian “social run” or attacking people’s reputations. Most people understand that, in Victorian times, destroying someone’s name, honor or reputation could have life and death consequences for the targets of it because of the lack of social welfare nets in those times. That may be one of the reasons why, in days of yore, people fought duels to the death over attacks on honor and rep. But these days we assume those social safety nets exist so there’s generally a “sticks and stones” view of negative gossip– as if it isn’t that big a deal and, unless it effects financial interests or business opportunities in ways that justify defamation/libel suits, most of us can just blow it off and ignore it.

The problem I have with this casual attitude towards spin and negative gossip is that I think those social safety nets are partly illusory and don’t always work. At least in the US, you (or your dependents) can actually die because you lose your career and social supports. People die living in their cars without health insurance or social help. And it’s actually in the realm of possibilities that you can lose those things because your character comes under attack from some rando lying, blame-shifting piece of shit.

The point I’m trying to make is that if you feel rattled, unsettled and destabilized on some deep spiritual and emotional level by the bs your STBX is spinning about you to anyone who will listen, I don’t think it’s silly on your part at all. I think you have a gut sense that he means real harm within the realm of possible negative outcomes for you. I also think it’s incredibly traumatic to realize that someone you were so close to could mean you harm on such an intense level.

Your life is not a soap opera. If anything, it’s a serious film or documentary about risk, danger, near-misses, threat, evil intent and loss. If you personally have any social safety nets protecting you from whatever ill-will this ex intends towards you, it’s no thanks to him but just your good luck. My advice to you is to act accordingly. Take his attacks on your reputation for what they are: hopes of destroying you. Take no prisoners as you fight against him for your rights and safety.

Wishing you peace and strength as you move forward to the beautiful life you deserve (and sorry for any typos).

It’s a superpower to not care what people think about you. Truly.
Stop focusing on him and what he’s doing. It’s normal for him and his doings to take up space in your head in the first few months, but that’s a battle to start fighting now. Find ways to cut off thought about him, his affair partner and his current behavior.
Please avoid contact with these former co-workers. If you want to stay in contact, you can say to anyone, “I’m forever grateful to the person who told me about his affair, but now I have to focus on building a new life.” But no contact that includes gossip about FW.
Do tell your attorney about the affair partners. As CL says, the threat of deposition often moves thing along.
Focus on you, your health, your recovery.

In the midst of the firestorm of D-Day discovery and uncovering years of lies, a very good friend yanked me out of the rabbit hole, saying: “You control your character, not your reputation.”

Yep. And that’s enough. The people who bought his delusional version of my reputation don’t matter to me. They believed – or didn’t- a man who was sleeping with his interns behind his wife’s back. Oh well.

I’m three years out from D-Day. It all feels painfully raw in those first months. Focus on your character, and your reputation will follow those who matter.