Please help me to decode this.
I have been in a relationship with my partner for 2.5 years. When we met, he told me he was divorced. I queried as to why, and he advised that he and his wife had married young. (He was 27) and that they had simply grown apart in the two years that they had been together. I had recently been engaged prior and my ex had run off without any warning so I simply thought “hey I’m sure that could happen” and we started a relationship.
He was hilarious, good looking and absolutely adored me from the get go. I still felt unsettled about his past, as I am a firm believer that you need to understand why your relationships end so you can move forward, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt as overall he was a top guy, and myself as well as everyone else loved him.
About six months into our relationship, he left his facebook open and I saw that there were a series of email messages between him and another woman from back when he was married. They were discussing how good the sex was between them and how they missed each other. I confronted him with the fact he had an affair and he stumbled and said “it was never physical.” Well bullshit, I told him I had read it and he better come clean. He confessed to a three-month affair during his marriage. Said it was the worst mistake of his life, he had lost everything over it and he would never forget it.
I struggled with it, didn’t know whether to break up with him over it. But again, he was such a great guy! Surely when you lose your marriage over an affair you learn your lesson right? WRONG.
I actually apologized to him for judging him on his past and who was I to judge someone, as they were no longer in that place in their life? Chumpy isn’t it?
Six months later, I saw an email pop up on his iPad, it was from ‘melanielovesadam@…’. This woman had just had a child and had sent him a text with a picture of a new born son with the text message ‘my new toy boy’ xoxoxo. (Vomit)
I confronted him, and he denied anything until it basically became painfully obvious that he was lying through his teeth. I made him open the account and checked the trash. There were hundreds of messages between the two of them, telling each other that they missed each other, they loved each other, and hey wasn’t the sex exactly 9 months before the birth of the new born son amazing? I deduced that had slept with each other after we had become official (only once of course) and it turns out that the affair started six months after he had married his ex and had continued in either an emotional and/or physical fashion ever since. So technically they had been involved for over four years in one shape or another!
As you can imagine, I went ballistic and ran from the house. From that minute he was all remorse. He apologized to my family, his friends, my friends. He enrolled in counselling, he read books like “Not Just Friends”, he went to church, cut off all contact with her and basically handled any trigger or emotion from me by telling me it was not my fault, he loved me and he would do anything to spend his life making it up to me. I started to feel safe again. Sounds like successful reconciliation right? WRONG.
Thirteen months into recovery, he takes me shopping for engagement rings, I am a bit wary, I share my concerns, but we now have a stronger relationship as we can talk about anything and I feel like he really gets me. I ask him if she ever tried to make contact again, he tells me that she never has and if she did I would be the first to know about it. We proceed forward, he lodges annulment papers so that we can marry in the Catholic church, he plans to ask my father for my hand on our next family holiday.
Last week I found a picture he took of his penis and sent to the other woman, turns out she called him about five months ago, he picked up the phone and they just “started talking again’” then oops I accidentally sent a picture of my penis to her???
WTF, why go through all the counseling, all the grovelling, the apologies to family and friends and then do this? He said it was never going to get physical at all and he “never meant to intentionally hurt me.”
I just don’t get it?!!! Now he is grovelling again, telling me I am his world and he will fight to earn my trust and the right to love me again. I feel like I am in an episode of the Bold and the Beautiful.
WTF is going on with my perfect, lying, cheating POS boyfriend? People are saying, maybe it’s not so bad, as he didn’t sleep with her, but WTF??!! What is with this mind bend, a perfect, warm beautiful man, who likes to send pictures of his penis to a married other woman with a child?
Please help.
Melissa
Dear Melissa,
Gee, and I wonder why I’m skeptical about cheater “remorse.” Okay, first things first — this is his child with her, right? I’m sure he denies it (if you asked. Did you even go there?) Melissa, I think you need to brace yourself for the idea that he NEVER ended it with her and he has another life with her and their child.
Look, people don’t enthuse about the great sex they had before they conceived, and send a picture of a newborn to a guy who is NOT the father. That doesn’t happen, Melissa.
What you have on your hands here, Melissa, IMO is a sociopath. Yeah, they’re really sparkly. And yeah, they fake remorse really, really well. (If they want something. But if they take you for a dry well of kibbles, they show no emotion whatsoever. Gig is up.) This is all a big game to him — how much cake he can stuff in his gob. You, her, and god knows who else that’s privy to his penis pictures. The guy who cheats on his wife, gets another woman pregnant, disavows his responsibilities, and sexts his junk — this is who that man REALLY is. The sparkly hologram who read “Not Just Friends”? That guy is a con artist.
You’re catnip to a guy like him, because you were vulnerable when you met him. You had another idiot who just waltzed off and ended an engagement. (Hugely shitty, but at least he didn’t fuck with your emotions and pretend like this POS.) That means, when your boyfriend went all full sparkles on you, and made noises about commitment, you were IN. Failure is not an option! I get it. Mine targeted single mothers. Same dynamic. They want the try harder chump. The person whose got a deep, vested interest in making this work. You don’t want to connect the dots about who he really is because then you think if you do that, you have to connect them for yourself. I’m not worthy. No one will ever love me. This is what people do, they abandon me. What’s wrong with me?
Nothing is wrong with you, except you need to work a bit on your picker. Totally curable condition. Unlike Mr. Sparkles there, who is a disordered freak and will always, always, always no matter how weak his knees get from groveling, be a disordered freak.
Why does he do this? I don’t know. Why did Mengele conduct experiments on children? Why does Jody Arias think her ugly haircut will prove her innocence? You want me to get inside the mind of a sociopath? I leave that to the professionals. (Try the Dr. Simon books up there in the Amazon box and Lundy Bancroft’s “Why Does He Do That”?) There is no understanding them — there is only getting AWAY from them.
You have more than enough information to understand that this man is toxic and dangerous to your well-being. You need to go total no contact with him forever. It’s a blessing that you learned these things before you married him. You’ve escaped. I know it hurts, but I promise you don’t have the sunk costs that a lot of chumps here have.
Please resist the urge to figure him out. That’s wasted energy. We call that “untangling the skein of fuckupedness” here. Work on you. Grieve who you thought he was and what you thought your future would be with him. Be kind to yourself. Good people absolutely exist and they are out there when you’re ready for them. You were right to trust your instincts and you were totally right to end it. You’re off to a great start in getting over this. I’m sorry he wasted several years of your life, but you will learn a ton of good about yourself that you can take forward. (((Big hugs)))
{ 74 comments }

