Ex Booked a Cruise with Her, Affair Partner, and First Wife
Without her permission or encouragement, her ex-husband books his fantasy vacation — with her, his ex-wife, his Schmoopie, and his first wife, plus all the kids. WTF was he thinking?
***
Dear Chump Lady,
I found out three years ago that my ex-husband was cheating on me. Luckily, someone recommended your book right away. After reading it, I spent weeks on your website implementing as much of your advice as I could in order to ignore the pleading, begging, and love bombing that was thrown my way in order to keep me locked in a marriage prison.
Divorcing after 17 years with two young daughters was the most difficult and greatest accomplishment of my life.
Chump Nation was a big force in helping me to move forward with it. I have done the hard work to overcome the betrayal trauma. My focus has been on being the woman I would want my daughters to be. This includes my adult step-daughters from my ex’s previous marriage that I’ve maintained a positive relationship with.
Unfortunately, I’m unable to go no-contact with my ex because we get to “co-parent” for a few more years so I feel like I’m eating a lot of sh*t sandwiches. I know that I shouldn’t be shocked by anything this mentally disturbed vow-breaker does or says, but a recent text exchange from him is so delusional that I would love to share it with your community. (names changed for anonymity)
His initial text said:
“I have let Daughter One and Daughter Two know I want to take all of the kids and grandkids on another cruise early next year. I want to do something similar to the last time where I have several cabins together. Interested to know your thoughts about going with all of us. I was thinking of inviting Baby Mama #1 as well. Schmoopie will most likely be joining in and I would want you to know as much when considering going on the cruise.”
All of our children know the reason for the divorce.
None of them have embraced the relationship that he likes to call “the new normal,” so I’m not surprised that he is using an all-expenses paid vacation to entice them to spend time in the presence of the great twu wuv.
I have zero desire or intention of being a participant on his “Pick Me Cruise” that includes not only me and Schmoopie, but his first ex-wife as well. His idea to trap everyone in the middle of the ocean without the ability to escape whatever drama and chaos that he hopes will ensue is pure narcissistic genius.
The biggest surprise is that I’m finding myself having some empathy for Schmoopie.
I spent years being devalued and emotionally abused by this man. But at least I received two loving daughters (plus my bonus daughters), a beautiful home, and financial security through a generous divorce settlement. Schmoopie gets to spend one week every two months with him (they live in different cities 900 miles apart) and now a family vacation with his children who want nothing to do with her and his two ex-wives who want nothing to do with either of them.
Desperate and pathetic are the only words to describe a woman who chooses to participate in a game of “how low will you go” to win the grand prize of begging for breadcrumbs from a lying, cheating, narcissistic turd.
When I received his text, I chose to simply not respond.
This is my preferred comeback to many of his messages; yes, no, and maybe are my other favorites. He then sent me a screenshot of a message to him from Schmoopie that said:
“I would like (Chump) to go on the cruise. I’m completely open to a relationship with her and for all of us to do things together. Maybe we can all get together the next time I am in town.”
I wanted to respond with, “Bless her heart. I hope she finds her self esteem soon.” Instead I said nothing. So he sent me another text: “I decided to include you and you can decide later if you want to cancel. I booked you and Baby Mama #1 in a cabin together.” I finally responded with, “I am not going on the cruise, I have plans to watch paint dry that week.”
He has not brought it up again.
Thank you so much for your book and all you do to liberate chumps like me!
Signed,
Refuse to Cruise
***
Dear Refused to Cruise,
No notes! Your boundaries here were perfect.
A cruise with your ex and his assembled harem is one of the craziest cases of hoovering I’ve ever heard of. (If you can top this, CN, please do so in the comments.)
Of course it was a cruise.
You could conceivably throw yourself out of a moving car, but you’re trapped on a cruise. How could you possibly escape? Fling yourself into the ocean? There aren’t enough seafood buffets and shuffleboard to make that sh*t right.
What was he thinking? Oh hang on, I know. I decode FWs for a living.
He was thinking cake.
You, wife #1, Schmoopie all competing for the wonderfulness of him. Eating sh*t sandwiches to demonstrate your family bonhomie. Him the horny patriarch. You the supplicants. The kids his progeny, reflections of his glory. All united in his impression management, that what he didn’t Wasn’t So Bad. All for the low, low price of a sea cruise.
I have plans to watch paint dry that week.
I’m sure the dryer vents need cleaning too. Or maybe you have some gum you need to scrape off your shoe.
What was Schmoopie thinking?
She’s thinking she won this dreamboat and needs to demonstrate triumphalism. Why don’t you trap yourself in an underwater cabin and braid each other’s hair?
I would like (Chump) to go on the cruise. I’m completely open to a relationship with her and for all of us to do things together. Maybe we can all get together the next time I am in town.”
I think your paint is busy that week.
It’s particularly deranged that he wants you to bunk with wife #1. He’s generous, but not so generous as to spring for two cabins for his auxiliary narcissistic supply.
Does he think everyone can be bought?
Clearly, Schmoopie can be bought. She’ll play nice with the exes (I won the pick me dance!) It’s not that hard if you’re not that deep.
I guess the kids can go (Dad’s taking us on vacation!) and avoid her as best they can. I don’t know what your custody arrangement says about these sorts of things. But Disney Dads and forced family with affair partners = future therapy bills. Ugh.
He’s interested to ‘know your thoughts.’
Interested to know your thoughts about going with all of us. I was thinking of inviting Baby Mama #1 as well. Schmoopie will most likely be joining in and I would want you to know as much when considering going on the cruise.”
He’ll be interested to know you don’t think of him at all. His cruise invitation hasn’t thrown you into apoplexies of jealousy or anxiety. It’s become blog fodder. The same blog that helped you get rid of this loser.
Bon voyage FW!
Discover more from ChumpLady.com
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
There. Are. No. Words.
I love that Schmoopie lives in another city. She probably likes it that way and has someone in her own city she is sleeping with. As for your ex that type of ego is never satisfied, You handled it beautifully and made all of us fellow chumps proud…..
I’m guessing that Refuse to Cruise’s FW has spectacularly low levels of emotional intelligence. I just cannot see any other reason as to how he might think that what he was proposing might be acceptable to the others that he was trying to involve.
And for her response to his invitation to the “Cruise from Hell,” it’s nigh on perfect.
LFTT
I must be at Meh because this has me howling with laughter.
I have to admit I always appreciate proof of the seriously deep issues and stunningly disordered thinking of the cheater and the side piece. Their ultimate cheater-side piece dream is We Are All Friends! See how it was All For The Best? Behold the Mature Adults maturely adulting!
This sounds like the pilot episode for The Real Housewives of Traitor Ex.
Preschoolers are light years more knowledgeable about the real-life dynamics of friendship and loyalty.
When my daughter was in preschool, we dropped by her friend’s house to say hello. Another little girl from their class, also a friend of my daughter’s, was already there on a play date. The two of them holed up in the bedroom and would not let my daughter in. The mother, someone I considered a friend, did nothing.
Friendships over all around.
This is EXTREME. Yes, he’s majorly delusional that everyone will come and that it will be a happy-happy-happy vacation. Not ever.
When I was in the divorce process and no contact, someone in my old church began shaming me one Sunday at coffee time, saying that I needed to be in contact with my STBX during the divorce process so it would go better, and afterward so he and I (in separate rooms) could vacation with our college kids. After all, he’s an amazing person (apparently I’m not) and my children’s father. My husband used to preach there at times. So, yes, the preacher “aura” of amazingness.
My divorce involved what my attorney called the “four A’s”: abandonment, abuse (physical, emotional, spiritual), addiction (over a decade of pills), and adultery. The dude talked about my death at times when we were married and, at one point, shared with his attorney his plans for ending my existence. Oh, and he had been suicidal at times during our marriage and had one unsuccessful attempt. He also shared those thoughts with his attorney over the phone, and the attorney called the police for a wellness check. Then, of course, being an officer of the court, he called my attorney. My attorney called me, discussed steps to be extra vigilant, and said I should call his paralegal to make an appointment. Thankfully, my ex was supposedly living many states away, but you never know. We got the divorce done in a wild, dramatic flourish at the end, and fought our way through closeout because he dug his heels in on that too.
So back to the church discussion. I said, “Thank you for your thoughts.” I walked away.
Gosh, I’ve used that phrase so very many times. Just goes to show that there are delusional exes and delusional people everywhere. I stopped arguing with those sorts and justifying myself after I told my ex I would never-never-ever reconcile with him. I owned it. And no, I am never-never-ever going to take a vacation with my ex. Our adult offspring and I haven’t been in contact with him in years now.
Unlike some people, I live in REALITY.
That this creep even thinks he can organize a harem cruise probably reflects his confidence in his “skills” as an abuser. At least according to Irish DV expert, therapist and author Don Hennessy, this abuser likely believes that none of his victimized past or current partners or children have any choice but to keep placating and orbiting around him because that’s how he intentionally set everything up from day one.
In my effort to catch up on reading current books and studies about domestic abuse that I got behind in (due to dealing with… domestic abuse), I’m currently reading Hennessy’s How He Gets Into Her Head: The Mind of the Intimate Male Abuser.
This passage in particular is stellar regarding the ornate tactics used by abusers to entrap:
These initial tactics are hidden from the target woman and so it is inevitable that these tactics would remain hidden from us as we were all working with only one part of the story. Unfortunately we were working with the half of the story that the skilled offender wanted us to work with. We have all found ourselves struggling with questions like why was she abused, or why does she stay and prolong the abuse. We have tried to look at her and her psychological makeup for explanations. We have tried to distinguish between her and women who are not in abusive relationships. We have listened to her story and compared it to others which we regard as worse in their brutality or lethality.
In all of this we have managed to ignore the only relevant issue, which is that this particular woman is in an abusive relationship because she is a woman and was targeted by a skilled offender. When we begin to analyse her without knowing what has really happened to her it is more than likely that we will begin to blame her. We can expand that blame by saying that maybe she grew up in a family where this behaviour happened, or maybe we can define her as a woman of low confidence or lacking in self-esteem. We can ignore the effects of her experience by identifying her as angry, confused or co-dependent. Sometimes we are guilty of seeing her as tending to be depressive or paranoid or even mentally unwell.
What we are probably doing when we follow this line of thinking is we are buying into the explanations of the skilled abuser. These explanations are the same ones that the skilled abuser uses when he initially begins to set up the relationship.
The passage didn’t blow me away because it’s precisely new thinking but because it’s now the official benchmark for thinking about domestic abuse, which is that “more severe abuse = more skilled abuser” rather than “= more codependent victim.”
That in itself is massive progress in so-called “victimology” in the twenty years since I volunteered as a non-clinical advocate– namely that it’s now out of fashion to even look to victims to explain why domestic abuse happens in the first place. Though this is merely an expansion of the views that the late Evan Stark and fellow researcher and spearhead Anne Flitcraft presented over the course of their fifty + years of groundbreaking research and advocacy, what’s changed is that this is now the benchmark and many state funded domestic abuse education/intervention programs are barred from applying the moldy old “cOdEpEnDeNcy” view of abuse survivors anymore lest they lose their funding.
This progress is so extreme compared to back in the day that I feel like it goes a long way towards explaining the current retrograde backlash against women’s and victims’ rights. It’s because the progress is solid and now scientifically backed (thanks in great part to Stark and company) that it poses such a massive threat.
The backlash (which I think includes the cheater apologism in the mainstream media because, in my advocacy experience, all abusers cheat) could make it seem like we’re not actually in a golden age of intellectual and humanitarian advancements when, in fact, we are. But the only difference between, say, the Dark Ages and the Age of Enlightenment is about which side seems to be winning at any given time.
At least in this individual situation, the light is winning.
I’m always learning great things from your posts HOAC. Wish more therapists actually read like you do.
Exactly. Encounters with willfully ignorant “experts” and clinical specialists who hadn’t read a book in the twenty years since being licensed are what originally inspired me to train as an advocate and continue reading.
I think that, as “ultra-social animals,” even if we theoretically know what the truth is, some primal, hardwired faculty lodged in the prefrontal cortex or hypothalamus or wherever will still be highly attuned to social “zeitgeist” and can be involuntarily spellbound simply because perpetrators and abuse apologists seem so brazenly “assured” in their biases, as if they have the whole world nodding along with them. It can create an ominous feeling that my combat vet dad used to jokingly call being “dead right”– like you may be technically right but still doomed.
The only way I could think to combat that depressing signal was to populate my personal sphere and brain with as many people and resources on the “right side” as possible. It’s really a necessary counter strategy since, as Hennessy points out repeatedly, abusive personalities specialize in single-mindedly steering social contexts and “zeitgeist” to their own side. Unfortunately, they have so many enthusiastic enablers in the “helping” professions.
“Refuse to Cruise” checking in here. I knew Tracy and my fellow chumps here would be able to relate to the ridiculousness of my current situation. I am loving my peaceful life and home without my ex around, but he’s still causing pain for our teen daughters. One of them told me that she was out to dinner with her dad one night and was telling him about her day, when mid-sentence he picked up his phone and called Schmoopie. When she found out about the cruise through a group text her dad sent that included Schmoopie, she came to me crying saying she didn’t want to go. I know her older sisters are seeing it as an opportunity to spend a week together and having Schmoopie there is the price to pay. I suggested she put the cruise out of her mind for now and just delete the group texts as they come through. I told her I would support her decision to go or not go on the cruise either way up until the day it’s time to leave. If anyone has any other suggestions on how I can best help her through this, I’d love to hear it.