After He Tried to Destroy Me, My Ex’s Life Tanked
Her ex’s life tanked after he left for his affair partner. But not before he tried to destroy OP on his way out. It all caught up with him eventually, while her star is rising.
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Dear Chump Lady
When my husband left me and our four kids to be with the ‘love of his life’, I was distraught, scared, financially f*cked and all together a mess. Didn’t help that his new ‘great love’ lived on the other side of the world. We live in New Zealand, AP lived in the UK.
We had been married for 27 years. I walked into his home office one morning after hearing him speaking sweetly with someone on a video call, telling her that the lipstick she was wearing was pretty.
That was the start of the sh*t show.
That was three years ago. He left when my second youngest was (un-alive-al), taking overdoses and being pulled off bridges by police when he was trying to jump.
In between him moving to the UK, freezing all my bank accounts, getting lawyers on to me, and him spending up large with the AP in the UK, the kids and I were ruined. Kind of — we still had each other.
He worked out pretty quickly that the AP was a nut-job.
Albeit good looking and from a ‘good family’. She had 3 kids, who he quickly replaced his own kids with. Then came the love-bombing of me, the promises of everything amazing of course. BUT in the time that he had been gone, I had read Leave A Cheater, Gain A Life – and I wasn’t falling for any of his games.
He generously added my kids to his icloud storage, which happened to show my daughter when he had joined apps like Tinder, Hinge, Bumble etc. Those dates were at least 6 years before we separated. I’ve since found out about 5 other affair partners, who knows how many there really are, I don’t care.
FW had earned a lot of money, he was high up in his profession, had an ego the size of Everest and didn’t appreciate me when my mouth ran like a river of rapids telling people, including his toxic family, what he had done. Too bad, I wasn’t keeping quiet for his sake — why would I do that? If he didn’t want it talked about he shouldn’t have done it.
His life has since turned upside down.
He has been to prison for assaulting one of our sons, he has lost all his money and his job, now lives about 3 hours south of us, back in NZ on a government benefit. I have a Permanent Protection Order against him and my kids don’t see him at all. ‘Child Support’ I hear you mutter, he doesn’t know the meaning of that.
In the meantime, my life has gone from strength to strength. After being a stay-at-home Mum, I now have a fabulous job which I love, all the household bills are in my name, I pay the mortgage, do the lawns, chainsaw down trees, and I love it all. The kids and I are a tight team, we got rid of the FW and got a dog, who is loved beyond measure.
In my country it takes 2 years from separation to get a divorce. It took a while longer for me to get to this stage as he had been in prison and lots of other challenges had come my way. It is in court at the moment and I’m awaiting confirmation.
I can’t tell you exactly when it happened over the last 3 years but I am absolutely in the blissful land of Meh.
Every day is a great Tuesday! I just have no feeling about him at all, good or bad, and am not at all interested in how he is doing.
I’m not leaving Chump Nation, because it has helped me so much over the last few years. I hope I can help others in the middle of the mess being a chump gives us. There is light at the end of the tunnel, Chumps. It’s not always a freight train coming towards you, sometimes it is pure sunlight just waiting to get to you. I love my life now.
Chump Lady, I’ll be forever grateful for you and the insights you gave me at a really hard time.
Don’t give up CN, your time will come.
We all know there’s no rule book on how long it takes, but whatever you’re going through, keep strong, be brave, do the things you don’t think you can do, and don’t just survive — thrive!
Lisa-Not-Lonely
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Dear Lisa-Not-Lonely,
Thanks for the pep talk today! It’s Tuesday on Wednesday. An abusive ex going to prison is the sort of justice most of us can only dream of. I’m so glad your kids have you as their sane parent to rely on. Because their father dealt a lot of chaos and rejection at them in their young lives.
Of course, you were on the frontlines of his chaos and rejection.
Way to build back and be mighty. It’s no small feat to re-enter the workforce after SAH motherhood, let alone earn the kind of income to afford a mortgage on one salary.
He has been to prison for assaulting one of our sons, he has lost all his money and his job, now lives about 3 hours south of us, back in NZ on a government benefit.
I wonder if those details feature prominently on his Hinge profile?
I slay myself.
The real victory here is your indifference about his life. He’s giving you ample amounts of schadenfreude material, but you trust the suck and his drama no longer rocks your world. That is hard won. Thank God for the permanent order. I can’t help but admire the justice system of New Zealand. While there is a ridiculous waiting period for divorce, you got a protective order that stuck and the guy’s in prison. So well done, Kiwis.
And well done YOU. Thanks for sticking around and giving inspiration to the newbies.
Happy Tuesday-as-Wednesday to everyone!
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ETA — Lisa, I truly hope your son is doing better since his mental health crisis. An assault and thoughts and acts of un-aliving (Google won’t let us use real words) — are so much to overcome, assuming it can be overcome. It’s more like a life-time project of self-care. Big hugs to you all.
Wait, the stupid algorithm that doesn’t let us use real words on TikTok extends to Google too??
The Google algorithm flags the word s*ic*de and may look into a blog where it appears to see if somebody is promoting, encouraging it or providing instructions for it. We don’t want Google all up in CL’s business, so best to disguise that one. I absolutely do not trust AI’s judgement.
Uncle Google also limits the search visibility of a blog/site if there are a lot of swear words, which is why we have to disguise swear words here.
It’s wild to me how Google and the social media sites censor people who are just trying to talk about difficult topics, while allowing bad actors to keep literally abusing people on their platforms. If you’re a woman online, you know what I’m talking about.
I do indeed. The hypocrisy is strong.
Thanks Tracey. He is doing well. He sees a fantastic counsellor at Northspan Wellbeing, he has a job and the support of his friends and family. We just love him so much, the thought of him not being here just wrecks me, and thankfully he is getting to a much better place!
LNL I applaude you. Extremely proud that you are with us=CN During my illusion years I believed I needed my mentally unstable husband to help with crisis kids and health issues support. But once your eyes are open and you realize the train wreck you married..you know you can live without such a weight tied around your neck. A weight that could drown you. Prison is too good for a cheater but your Ex got some thinking time, not that he used it. Thank you for writing to CL and showing us what mighty looks like- with boots on the ground. Wow!!!
That’s wonderful news! I’m so happy for him, and for you.
I have a child who has bouts of self-unaliving ideation (yeesh, I hate having to say it that way) as well. The last time was little over a year ago and it could happen again if the psychiatrist doesn’t get her medication balance precisely right.
Your FW leaving during a such a grave period in your son’s life infuriated me. It goes hand in hand with being a child abuser.
What a thoroughly loathsome individual. How did he manage to freeze your bank accounts?
Hi CN, this is my story. If just one of you gets some hope from it, then I’ll be happy. I know alot of you will be thinking “how did she get to meh in under 3 years?!”. It’s been a he’ll ride but believe me, I’m here baby! And Meh is a great place once you get here!
LnL — you just saw reality, got under the FOG- stopped smoking the hopium pipe-believed that he sucked, followed the light, did not join the RIC and write love poetry to the cheater, took your children under her sober wings, believed the cheater blue print, and read CLs cold hard facts. I hear some folks break their coccaine- cigarette- alcohol-and every other addiction with one come to Jesus moment. This is the one. Congratulations 🎊 on breaking the spell abd getting a life that most of us stagger through. It can be done!!
Thank you so much for sharing! Congratulations on your great new life and so happy to hear your son is doing well, too. I struggle a bit with “getting him out of my head”, but I haven’t missed him for so long and even though my brain still goes to dark places, I know for certain that I am better off without my abuser, and that is a wonderful thing. Good riddance to bad garbage, forgive myself because he was a conman, I am not “stupid”- that is a great thing here, the “stop beating myself up about having been with him decades”- and freedom is the best. The best for my health, my sons’ health to see me saner, and even though I am not financially as well as off as I was married- at all- I am FINE. I am lucky. I do sort of wish I could erase him completely from my head, but coming here is a nice domaine hit to hear all the good news, and a way to not feel alone with my past victimhood, for lack of a better word. Thank you Lisa!
It seems to me that life is like weaving a blanket on an old fashioned Loom…the strips of material woven in to design a Tapestry that is one’s life. You can’t do without any of those colorful or dark strips being woven together into a pattern ,but neither do you focus on the dark colors and the gloomy sections. Taking it all together..it can be extraordinarily beautiful.
Congratulations on your escape from FW 🎉 exH narcopath is an executive who also screwed us over financially and I can only dream of a similar outcome. Kids ditched by the narc grandparents too. He’s not in prison but should be however this is the USA our legal system favors liars!
A chump friend with 4 kids is thriving while her exH FW is in prison, permanent protection order, also had some similar tribulations with one of the kids. She’s aged backwards looking beautiful and healthy. I almost thought it was her posting here, until you said the NZ part. Very similar story.
Thank you for coming back to share!
Congratulations, Lisa. I hope all the loose ends in court tie up soon for you and your family.
I loved your letter! You did it! The other side feels so good. I wake up every day feeling like I was lucky to escape klootzak and “What a great day!” has become my mantra because I say it so often. I can do hard things and scary things and feel more powerful with every one. I am coming up one the 1 year anniversary of moving away from him and currently entertaining two jobs offers which would increase my pay significantly. I just out an offer on the house I have been renting. Klootzak hasn’t paid all he owes but I am STILL doing it without him. Thriving, not just surviving. And how lovely of FW to share his storage which confirmed for you that this was his pattern. That makes it easier, I think. Klootzak is a serial cheater and that knowledge made it easier for me to file. I had nothing to work with.
Lisa, so good to hear that your son is doing better. One of mine struggled along those lines but is way, way better years later and is acing young adulthood. My college kids and I had a lot to work through but came out solid.
This has many of the elements of my story without the international and prison elements.
I completely hit meh the day that I saw in the online court system that the judge had signed off. It was a year-end divorce, so there were delays logging it, but there it was in January. Nothing my ex said or did after that phased me.
Now it’s been years since we heard from him. I know he’s probably still around because I still get the pension split, but that’s my only connection to him at this point. Thankfully, it comes directly from his former employer, so he can’t mess with it. He lives in another state, and I’m not in contact on an ongoing basis with his family.
Sweet, peaceful days to you!
What a fabuloous story. Well done to you Lisa – you really are mighty – and I’m so glad your son is doing better now. Am I allowed a little schadenfreude about your ex? I love that for him!
Dear Lisa-not-Lonely,
I’m envisioning you waltzing through a field of wild flowers like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music (except in NZ, not the Alps). What you endured was not divorce but a war you didn’t start but had to finish. In fact, I think a new term needs to be coined for “harrowing escape from abuse” in place of the D-word, which is just too loaded with banality and assumes two autonomous parties agreeing to disagree and running out of love. Applying “divorce” to a situation like yours is like referring to a hostage extraction as a “housing transition.” So congratulations on your “extraction”!
But, on a darker note, in my time working in advocacy for abuse survivors, I have learned that whatever “worst thing” these terrifying characters do in the final analysis is what survivors always sensed in their guts they’d do all along and therefore what kept them entrapped. It answers the perpetual, quasi-blaming bystander question of “why didn’t the victim leave sooner?” Because… worst thing.
The assault on your son was a clue. Could it have been worse? No one will ever know but apparently the justice system felt it was bad enough. Also statistics suggest “worse” occurs quite regularly and, on some level, you likely intuited this. It seemed plenty bad that one son was nearly driven to permanently extract himself from the misery and chaos that this abuser was creating.
In fact, several leading domestic abuse researchers have found that survivors are actually extraordinarily accurate in gauging the severity of repercussions for attempting to leave abusive relationships. But one confounding factor is when the abuse had previously involved coercive control while overt violence hadn’t yet manifested (for the record, economic abuse is also considered “violence” in expert circles because of the sometimes life threatening effects on families). In that situation, survivors may know in their guts that whatever is going to happen might be really, really bad but they have no precedent to prove their intuition and gather sufficient support to survive the coming horror show, even if statistics consistently show that histories of coercive control are far more predictive of eventual extreme violence than even histories of physical abuse.
In any event, I think the outcome is proof that your intuition was working for you and your children since you’re all still standing and furthermore thriving. And the world and this forum are richer for it. Blessings and joy to you and your family.
Leave a cheater, gain a dog sounds like a win-win to me.
Thank you for this beacon of hope, Lisa-Not-Lonely!
My story shares some similarities with yours.
One of my adult children suffers tremendously with severe depression and anxiety, though I am grateful there’s been no unaliving ideation (knock on wood).
You know what: You and I are the parents who stayed; our FWs are the parents who skipped out on their struggling children, my FW because he’d rather hang out with his strippers (who are the same age as our kids). He thinks the strippers are in love with him which he is sure has nothing to do with all the money he gives them.
And my FW has f’d up again. I had to text him the other day because there was a charge by him on an account he’s not supposed to be using. “Is it fraudulent?” I asked sweetly. Of course, after much hemming and hawing and “Can’t you fix it?”, he had to admit it wasn’t. Then he slipped and said, “I got mixed up because I’ve had to close several credit card accounts recently.” Several? I was already contacting the attorney who told me to ask him for more information on these “several” accounts. All of a sudden, Mr. Chatty stopped responding. Whelp, the attorneys and forensic accountants will have to track that all down. And they will. Jerk.
As I am about a certain American politician, I am grateful my FW is as bumbling and dumb as he is. And I look forward to being free of him.
Lisa, your are true Xena, Warrior Princess.
You know, of course, that these TV series were filmed in New Zealand, around Auckland.
Long live the Kiwi women!
Laughing at the FW who thinks the strippers are in love with him. Oh dear. It’s interesting that your FW was high up in his profession, Lisa. My ex’s professional accomplishments confused me. He was a good talker and good at assessing people and their vulnerabilities, predator-like. He had a huge ego and knew at the same time how to be self-deprecating — an effective combination. He was successful at work. However, in many other areas of his life he was ridiculously incompetent and unaware. He possessed a strange assortment of capabilities and deficiencies. For a long time I took it as loveable bumbling and vulnerability and I covered for him. A lot of people found his particular combination of cluelessness and eloquence beguiling (think Boris Johnson). I realize now he is an outlier, a savant who achieved success through an ad hoc mix of cunning and antisocial traits. It was a fatal error of mine to laugh at his behavior and gently chide his muddy ethics, because he was so clueless I kind of couldn’t believe it and also felt sorry for him. And I found out about Duper’s Delight only from this site, too late. That guy’s entire life is Duper’s Delight.
… I realize we are all post-gaming here, but if I could warn people away, I would say, above all, beware the hapless buffoons! If they can’t manage their money, dress properly, be affectionate to their kids, follow traffic rules, understand when to stop pushing — it’s a warning sign. Don’t laugh at or indulge these people, they are the most dangerous of all, because their outrageousness and apparent naivete gets past our defences.
Yep, exactly. I always thought of my FW as the absent-minded professor. He isn’t a professor, though he has two very advanced degrees. Part of it was weaponized incompetence: getting me to do all the crap chores he didn’t want to. And part of it was the extraordinary deceitfulness and cunning it took to lead a secret double life for who knows how many years.
I was totally duped, which really shakes me up. Can I believe any of my impressions of people? I used to think I was a good judge of character. 😕