I Caught Her with the Other Man
He thought they were partners, and then he caught her again with the Other Man. Yet, he still can’t let go.
***
Dear Chump Lady,
My partner of 8 years had an affair with another man over a year ago.
When I confronted her about it, she chose him.
A month later he dumped her.
Then he went back to her for another month… Then he dumped her again (on the basis that he said he was fearful avoidant).
For 9 months, we slowly rebuilt our relationship to the point that we were again partners by last Christmas.
A week later, he showed up at her front door… And she withdrew from me.
She spent 3 months “processing” the history of everything, but told me she had “no interest in ever going back to him”. All that time she was keeping me on the hook waiting, but telling me she wasn’t with him.
She went away for a month, and on her return I went to see her.
When I got to her house I saw them through the window. She was naked and his face was buried between her legs.
It is the most horrific and traumatic thing that I have ever seen.
I can’t get the image out of my head.
I love this lady more than life itself and I can’t bear the thought of her with him.
He has been bragging to his friends about all that he achieves with her (along with other ladies that he is manipulating for sex), but I can’t protect her from him.
I feel powerless and sick at the thought of what is going on.
I need to move on — somehow — but it’s so hard to do so.
Any guidance?
Oz Chump
***
Dear Oz Chump,
Yes. She’s not your partner. She’s a mindf*ck.
Read that again.
She’s not your partner.
Stop calling her your partner. Stop investing in her. And for God’s sakes, stop thinking she’s some poor moppet who needs protecting. She’s an adult who made choices, which include deceiving you.
Reality alert: She was not spending three months “processing”. She’s not a Kodak darkroom. Nor is she misunderstood, confused, or having some cliched torn-between-two-lovers crisis.
By way of instruction, let’s go point by point through your letter and bitch slap you. (With love. We’ve all been chumps here.)
My partner of 8 years had an affair with another man over a year ago.
Was this a dealbreaker for you? And if not, why not?
When I confronted her about it, she chose him.
You had to confront her. Meaning, she was quite happy to go on deceiving you. Having your investment, plus a f*ck on the side was working for her. You, the wronged party here, had to endure the additional insult of confronting her. Think about that.
What does this tell you about her character?
It tells you she’s not an adult who considers your welfare. She weighs the cost-benefit analysis of honest disclosure and chooses a rigged system that benefits her. You in the dark. Her entitlement intact.
she chose him.
Proper response: Don’t let the door knob hit you where the dear Lord split you.
You invested 8 years of your life in this person, I get it. But she deceived, rejected, and devalued you. Rookie mistake borne of grief, you pick me danced. You took her ambivalence as permission to keep investing. Instead of asking yourself: Is this relationship ACCEPTABLE to me? Not as you thought it was, or hoped it could be, but AS IT IS.
Casual betrayal followed by massive rejection is not the stuff of solid relationships (regardless of what Esther Perel says).
Don’t grovel.
A month later he dumped her.
Oh yay. You win the pick-me-dance by attrition. Throw confetti.
Oz, do you really want to be Plan B?
Then he went back to her for another month.
Please notice your passive sentence construction here. She does this, he does that. Where are YOU here? It’s like THEY are the deciders and you’re the spectator. Well, I’ll just wait and see what they do next…
NO. YOU ARE THE DECIDER.
Who cares what they are doing! Is this cluster okay with you?!
Then he dumped her again (on the basis that he said he was fearful avoidant).
She told you this?! It’s bad enough she’s jerking you around, but now she’s sharing his sad sausage avoidance issues? LIKE YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO CARE? WTF does that even look like? Oh yes, it’s a shame he can’t bond with you.
Tell them to shove their pop psychology diagnoses up their poop shoots. WHY AREN’T YOU ANGRY?
For 9 months, we slowly rebuilt our relationship to the point that we were again partners by last Christmas.
Oh well I guess the menace of the Other Man is contained because of his avoidance issues. Oz, you realize this is total bullish*t, right? You thought you were rebuilding, she’s probably out there crafting dating profiles. Whatever, it doesn’t even matter. You should’ve been done with this person back in our first paragraph.
A week later, he showed up at her front door… And she withdrew from me.
Avoidance issues cured! Thank you. Your services are no longer needed.
She spent 3 months “processing” the history of everything, but told me she had “no interest in ever going back to him”.
You think she withdrew from you to “process”? I’m a jelly donut.
She went back to him three times, at least. Pay attention to her actions.
She’s a lying liar who lies.
All that time she was keeping me on the hook waiting, but telling me she wasn’t with him. She went away for a month, and on her return I went to see her.
People who are serious about working on their failing relationship after infidelity don’t go away for a MONTH. Cheaters do that.
When I got to her house I saw them through the window. She was naked and his face was buried between her legs.
It is the most horrific and traumatic thing that I have ever seen.
I want you to reframe “this is the most horrific thing I have ever seen” to — he is THAT BAD at sex. It’s horrific because they’re horrific, shallow, worthless people.
I know it hurts. Really. (((hugs)). I’m also many years out from this kind of heartbreak and I’m here to tell you that they’re ridiculous. They’re both rutting around like their tingling loins are the most important thing instead of how you treat people.
You don’t want validation from garbage people.
I can’t get the image out of my head.
I love this lady more than life itself and I can’t bear the thought of her with him.
You can bear it. I’m here to tell you that you can bear it and someday you’ll even point and laugh at its acne-pocked ass cheeks.
I forbid you to love this idiot more than life itself. Your life is WORTH MORE than a f*ckwit. You misplaced your love. It happens. I have a big blog community because it happens a lot. It’s a completely curable condition. Being chumped doesn’t mean you’re unlovable, it means you loved unwisely. You invested in someone who wasn’t invested back. Once you realize that, you can stop investing and leave the table.
He has bragging to his friends about all that he achieves with her (along with other ladies that he is manipulating for sex), but I can’t protect her from him.
Who cares what he brags about or who he says it to? He’s the bludgeon your partner is hitting you with. He’s not a wily seducer — he’s available. If she in turn gets cheated on by him? (whack!) Karma, baby.
His complicated love rhombus is not your business. You could fill your brain with a thousand things more improving than Rico Suave’s bed notches. As for her, she doesn’t need protecting, she’s choosing this nimrod. Neither of them are your problem any longer unless you choose to make them your problem.
I feel powerless and sick at the thought of what is going on.
It will pass. The pain is finite.
You are NOT powerless.
I need to move on — somehow — but it’s so hard to do so.
Any guidance?
Yes, an entire blog, book, and podcast series. The important thing is that you realize you need to move on. Stop saying it’s hard, and start doing the hard things. Go no contact. Burn the bed sheets. Let her have Mr. Avoidance Issues.
And when he inevitably avoids her again? Don’t pick up the phone. You’re not a consolation prize.
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Did she know you were coming over to her house? Sometimes FWs purposely disclose just how little respect they have for chumps. And I do mean purposely, as in — they enjoy flaunting it to the chump. Mine put a picture of his ex in a not-so-accidental place, just to watch me react. Your “partner” was going at it in front of an open window — oops!? Really?
Oz chump, you have my sympathies, but listen to CL. When you said, “I can’t protect her from him,” I was practically shouting at my screen, “Eff her. You protect you!”
Yes, Oz Chump, listen to FYI, braincramped and Tracy (Chumplady). Get away from this woman. Forget her and her stupid AP and their shared stupidity of character. She doesn’t deserve you.
But you have to WAKE UP and realize that. Nobody else can do that for you. You have to start realizing now that you’re worth more than her, more than them. They’re shallow, stupid, cruel and uncaring idiots. Get away from them.
There are other women who do have good character and that will also be attractive to you. Realize your worth and give them a reason to be attracted to you. You matter more than they do (the infidelity idiots in your life, not the women of good character), because you don’t see infidelity as a good thing. Them? All they care about is themselves. That’s not a desirable trait in a partner, or a human in general.
Leave the selfish idiots in the dust. Go build yourself a new life without her or them. You can do it. Many of us chumps have. And the freedom from these jerks can literally make you giddy with happiness.
We’re here for you. Go make yourself a new, happy life without her. We’ll all cheer you on.😊
P.S. Tracy, this has got to be one of your earliest posts (at least, that I’ve caught). I hope you got a good night’s sleep, and that all is well.😊
As someone who stayed through multiple affairs, both short and long term, run away and don’t waste another minute of your life staying tethered to someone who devalues you without a thought. Leaving is scary but CL is 100% correct in her response. Your pain will stop, the fog will lift, and self respect and real happiness is just through the door you must close and lock behind you as you walk out and don’t look back.
He has bragging to his friends about all that achieves with her (along with other ladies that he is manipulating for sex)…
Oz Chump, I suspect your “partner” likewise is bragging to her friends about manipulating you, and maybe along with others, too. Many chumps eventually learn/realize the cheaters cheated on them multiple times with multiple “partners.”
… but I can’t protect her from him.
The person you should be protecting is yourself, from her. Per her own story to you, she wouldn’t have stopped cheating with him until he dumped her…and even then, that only tells you that she’d stop cheating with him, not that she’d stop cheating.
I can’t bear the thought of her with him.
Once you move on, it will eventually be hard to bear the thought that you stayed with her.
She spent three months “processing,” then went away for a month. She may have been with him, or someone else. Whatever.
You feel powerless because you have given her all the power to decide what happens in your life. How about you tell her you are taking four months of no contact to process what happened to you? And vow to yourself, for yourself, that it’s actually over. Spend the time reading the archives and gaining a life. And move on. No doubt she will. At some point, you’ll stop caring.
Oz Chump, you have bonded with a cobra. Or, in honor of your Ozness, a gaboon viper. She is going to go on hurting you as long as she can, because it is who she is.
I understand how you feel, because I had a gaboon viper myself.
May I suggest that a good therapist is in order? A good therapist can help you sort through the emotions around why you are having trouble recognizing her pit viperness, and help you pick yourself and your well-being and move past the hell you are stuck in. It is the brave choice.
Good luck to you. You matter.
Aww don’t be coming for my gaboons! Those are my favorite snakes!
Nah cheater is a leech. She latches on to whoever is giving her the attention she wants at the time and sucks out the energy. She cheats on Oz and leaves for the OM, because he’s giving her more kibbles. Then OM dumps her and she’s back at Oz’s door looking for that kibble supply. Then OM comes knocking and oop! Back to him.
She’s no snake she’s a parasite just hunting for supply.
She chose a disordered and pathetic man over you and your eight years together, and that is painful to think about. At the same time, it is selfish to think our love will save and change them; we are not that special. We accept the love we think we deserve, and you deserve so much better. You can empathize, sympathize, and therapize them, or you can find your self-worth and walk away from this dumpster fire. Let her and the “fearful avoidant” Romeo with mommy and daddy issues continue to triangulate with others.
Yes, Boundaries by Cloud and Townsend. You can’t love people out of their anger (or entitlement). People act the way they act because it works for them. Unfortunately, there are often enablers around to help it keep working for them. So, we have to do what works for us.
Or, people act the way they act because they’re too weak and selfish and immature to do anything else. You can’t “cure” weakness, selfishness, immaturity, or entitlement. All four are going on here. Listen to Chump Lady!
In case Oz Chump’s ex-FW tended to text or email a lot or in case he remembers her words or various verbal exchanges verbatim, as an exercise in perspective-repair, I would suggest he run ex-FW’s word salad rationalizations through AI to analyze them for things like gaslighting, “DARVO” (deny, attack, reverse victim/offender) and other classic manipulation tactics.
The more context and history you feed into the bots (unlike human therapists, bots don’t experience compassion burnout when you emotionally dump and ramble out all the endless deets), the more fine-tuned the results can be. In any event, it might be really interesting for Oz to ask the bots, “Analyze these texts for manipulative language that might have contributed to my current feelings of being paralyzed or “stuck” in emotional dependence and in a state of ‘learned helplessness.’Have I been conditioned to be in the state?” I suspect the results might trigger some “Aha!” insight and Oz might realize that, rather than being some particularly codependent glutton for punishment, Oz’s ex might be a master of toxic manipulation who boiled him like a frog for eight years with the full intent to collapse his agency and foster dependency.
Though hardly as funny or uncanny as Chump Lady’s Universal Bullsh*t Translator, some advocates for domestic abuse survivors are recommending running abusers’ words (texts, emails, quoted statements, etc.) and deeds (detailed description of history, behavior and interactions) through AI to analyze for things like coercion and gaslighting. It can be done as a way to buffer ongoing communication so victims aren’t getting the unfiltered brunt of abusers’ toxic word salads or can be used to process past abuse or even to factor relative risk of post-separation escalation (and how this will manifest) or potential violence.
I found it pretty interesting and even educational to run past emails and text threads through various AI platforms like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini 3 though I’m fully aware that bots– aside from having no sense of humor and didn’t understand gallows humor (ChatGPT didn’t like my sarcasm in old text exchanges )– aren’t moral authorities nor actually emotionally intelligent. All they do is crunch data and frame things from what the majority of humanity thinks is either ethical or transgressive, understandable or dysfunctional, etc., and they can “poll” the bulk of psychology, linguistics and forensics to analyze intent and predict potential next moves.
But imagining AI existed in the pre-civil rights era, had I run the same texts and emails through it back then, the results would have come back telling me I was an unnatural strumpet with a raging case of penis envy and needed a lobotomy or a long stay in the booby hatch while FW was just exercising his entitlement as a red-blooded male!
In fact, enough differences currently exist in bot analysis that you can almost smell the cultures at these companies according to results. For example, Gemini’s sensitivity for things like coercive control and almost creative analysis of power dynamics (for instance, offering the slightly obscure but potent new expression in victimology, “predatory chivalry”) seems more nuanced than ChatGPT’s, plus the latter’s results seem to be slightly laced with little daubs of victim-blaming such as giving summaries like “This is a case of he-said/she-said’ or peppering results with “allegedly” like a Swiss bystander even when the texts themselves contained solid proof or direct admissions of wrongdoing. It’s as if ChatGPT bots had been tweaked a bit by stereotypical sexist nerds trying to prevent the tech from inciting uppity chumps too much. The difference also gives insights into why so many media sources seem to be flooding the airwaves with cheater apologism: because, like bots, humanity tends to “crunch” prevalent data and, because we’re rather lily-livered monkeys, arrives at middle-of-the-road conclusions in order to “conform to norms” so propaganda is all about nudging those perceived averages or norms.
Anyway, the humans behind the tech still leave fingerprints on results by programming bots to either ignore or emphasize certain signals or sources (Google seems to like Chump Lady and Dr. Ramani more than ChatGPT for instance). But one thing I sensed could be objectively useful about it was to weigh legal strategies in response to post-separation abuse. I see a lot of potential there for survivors– not as a replacement for expert legal advice but as a way for survivors to participate in formulating legal and financial safety strategies.
Thanks for these ideas. A friend of mine was telling me about the same kind of thing (using AI to parse difficult relationship exchanges, looking for themes derived from psychotherapy) and I wondered about the tendency for the AI routines to ‘flatter’ the questioner and ‘oppose’ their anatagonist. He said that was true – he had run the same emails through as if he was him, and as if he was his partner, and it tended to show a bias towards who it thought was placing the question. One way he tried to get around that was to pose as a therapist (!) whose ‘clients presented with the following exchange’ – and prompted the AI to ‘give a balanced analysis’ of the contents. He found that worked more reliably – but I have not explored this myself, so I just offer it here as a possibility. I did like the idea of an AI ally – but one has to be careful I think.
Wow, kismet. I eventually figured out the same thing that your friend did–giving pseudonyms to the parties being discussed or quoted and discussing them in third person. Another way I found to equalize the results was to bring up anything that the “injured party” (moi) did that might have had bad optics (seemed aggressive/excessive) or otherwise compromised their moral high ground because this only ended up underscoring the fact that FWs drive chumps to the brink. One thing I didn’t have to do to even things out was bring up anything tragic in FW’s history or present stressful challenges because that’s basically most of what FW was conveying in texts anyway, to the point that AI consistently deemed this “DARVO” and paying victim.
So far, called expert legal advice has been greedy sharks seeking to pick my bones clean. Post divorce so I am genuinely curious about the use of AI for post divorce abuse?
I wouldn’t pay for ChatGPT but Google’s Gemini 3 has some different cheap monthly subscription options. Naturally the more you pay, the more data and complicating factors you can feed the bot to crunch and the more complicated questions you can ask, etc. You basically get back power point presentations on legal strategies, ins and outs, potential benefits and fallout, etc.
One definite upside to using AI to start polishing up one’s own narrative and developing strategy is being able to explore options and ideas without that textbook terror of alienating others that survivors of abuse who are still experiencing active trauma usually have, namely the fear that we’re “burdening” others or coming off as babbling fruitcakes (as abusers have usually cast us) because we’re talking someone’s ear off trying to pack as many mitigating circumstances and context into our narratives as possible because we know the abusers in question got a huge head start in polishing and arming their nuclear character assassination missiles against us.
OP it sounds like you are not married to this piece of trash nor have children. Please RUN from this pos!
When I was young and lovely and carefree my then-fiancé cheated on me and I stupidly took him back because hey, we went to therapy right? Many therapists are sh*t. A wedding guest told others I shouldn’t marry FW but she never pulled me aside to tell me.
Fast forward 3 decades, me enduring my marriage for the kids and finding out FW narcopath was a seraial cheater, stole seven figure sum from the marriage, and was considering a fatal accident for me.
I was conned into losing my entire adult life to a sociopath and now gray divorced with minor children whose futures are also uncertain thanks to the crap lawyer I had.
Don’t be me. Please run.
My sincere condolences to you, Oz. The pain is indescribable, and the only cure for it is
1) stop putting your hand on the hot stove. She is the hot stove. NO CONTACT.
2) Time. When I sliced the tip of my pinkie off slicing an onion with a mandoline without using the guard, it hurt for a VERY LONG TIME. Betrayal hurts for a VERY LONG TIME.
3) Building tolerance for the pain and putting together a plan for taking EXQUISITE care of yourself is essential. I had a great therapist and came here to read every day. Please beware of using alcohol or other drugs…it does not help and only puts the pain in storage.
Do some writing on WHY you love her. What exactly is there to love, given your experience with how she has behaved?
Big hug to you. She is ABC gum stuck under the table and so is he.
Betrayal is a massive emotional and psychological injury that takes a very long time to heal, and staying away from the source of the pain (her!) is the difficult and essential first step.
♥️
Black widow spiders and rattlesnakes and chemical weapons do not need protection. YOU need to protect yourself from THEM.
When I had been with Traitor Ex for three years, before marriage and a child, I had very suspicions that he was cheating, which he denied. He denied it every time I asked about it. He SOUNDED like such a nice guy I figured something was wrong with me. I did know for sure that he had a habit of embellishing and exaggerating, lying by omission, or directly. I reasoned it was about little insignificant things, so I dismissed it. Big mistake. Huge. Never again. What I did not realize is that when someone lies about “insignificant” things, they are going to lie about significant things. Especially VERY significant things.
They have shown you they are a liar and are not to be trusted.
Lying indicates A LACK OF LOVE. An INABILITY to love.
I went on to marry him and found out at year 27 that he had been lying, cheating, and hiding money from me the entire 27 years.
I’m glad I have my daughter and would not trade her for the world, but I wish I had left him in 1993 when my suspicions, accurate and warranted, first came up.
My new guideline post DDay is LEAVE AT THE FIRST LIE.
OMG I could have written every word of your post, and we’ll the way I see it I could have had my DD with a different father so nothing positive came out of losing nearly 30 years of my life to FW
“In lying, one is identifying the other as one’s opponent, even one’s enemy. In marriage intimacy is developed through confessions, explanations, and soul searchings. But of course intimacy involves equality, and people who are telling lies are not seeking any aspect of intimacy, especially equality. Liars are hoping for advantage, which will be produced by disorienting and distracting the other person. The liar is stepping outside the relationship. The lie may be a greater betrayal of the relationship than the misdeed being lied about. It takes very little misinformation to disorient and destroy a relationship. I often point out to people that if I gave them detailed instructions on how to go from Atlanta to New York City, and threw in only one left turn that was a lie, they would end up in Oklahoma.”
-Dr. Frank Pittman
Private Lies
(p. 59)
No one keeps you on a hook, waiting. We choose to apply ourselves to that hook and wait using an assortment of what seemed to be at the time, good reasons because we can’t or don’t want to see the truth. For me unapplying myself from said hook took years of miserable revelations of the truth of who Cheaty McLiarface really was and then educating myself until I chose to face the truth that there was no recovering our relationship because there was never truly a relationship to recover on his side.
Oz, she is a classic example of a disordered transactional being. When she feels that you’re serving a need of hers, you feel loved. When she feels you don’t, you’re temporarily put aside or rejected until you are of use to her again. Yes, the painted ponies are pretty, the lights are dazzling. And the music is enticing but please step off of her carousel of crazy.
You’ve got to stop listening to her words. She’s a lying liar who lies. You need to watch her actions instead. Her actions show that you’re just a side piece that she’s hanging on to while the guy she wants cheats on her.
The fact that they were fooling around in front of an uncovered window means that they both wanted to flaunt to the world what was going on. Normal people don’t do that. Normal people think that a delivery person (or even a child) might come to the door so let’s keep this private. They are disordered freaks who need to stay away from regular people.
You need to dump any of her stuff she’s left at your place at her front door, and block contact. Then take at least a year off from relationships and try to figure out what the heck is wrong with YOU that you can bond with a crazy piece of trash. And why you feel bonded to someone who obviously doesn’t care about you.
Harsh truth but essential for any chump to learn if they want to escape the abuse cycle.
Classic explanation it’s because the chump must be ‘co-dependent’ but that’s not always true. IME sometimes the chump is from a loving family, so is naive easy prey to the personality disordered.
Whatever the case may be, we all lost our innocence when we became chumps. OP needs to learn from this, get a clue and not cling to fantasy woman/gf who never actually existed. Writing to CL is a great first step. Let’s hope he escapes, before she FW conveniently gets pregnant!
No contact is the path to the truth and the light!
Not. A. Kodak. Darkroom..oh my goodness!!! This one has me laughing so hard. And the gifs!! Tracy🛑 stop!!!! All I can say is there are a billion people on this sight who would love a partner that hangs on like this one. WOWZA!! You get a terminal illness– staying- you have 27 miscarriages, staying- you get fired 20x times, nope still there. IVF NEVER takes so childless..still there. OK I love this person already.
But take a ⚠️ warning. One of my friends is 79 and still wringing his hands over keeping a wife who had years of affairs, couldn’t decide, had the other guys baby and brought it home as his, then told him LATER. Like thar. Today 50 years later, still I’m turmoil. I’m not kidding, but he chose to stay. Can volunteer 🙋♂️ still wrong their hands in the ” why me, how awful to live this lie?” I guess so.
Not mem
Dear Oz Chump,
Firstly – I am sorry you are going through this. I understand your pain and I understand your reluctance to admit that your years of investment were wasted. I was in the same boat. Details were slightly different, but the dynamic is sadly familiar.
Secondly – many of us have been through this cycle of abuse multiple times. I assure you, persevering in this relationship will not yield a different outcome. In fact, the only thing you will ever regret is not ending this abusive relationship sooner. Get out. Chump Lady is correct.
Please stop listening to your girlfriend’s words and start looking directly at her actions. Her actions should tell you what she truly values. Her own gratification – full stop. Your feelings and welfare do not matter to her. They never will. No one’s feelings or welfare will ever mean anything to her.
Please…..run, run, run away. At least you are not married. At least you don’t have children together. I sense you are still young enough to rebuild. Don’t invest one more minute into this abusive relationship.
Oz Chump – shortly after D-Day when I was in turmoil my dead father came to me in a dream and said “Who are you? And what are you made of?” I think this is a good question for you, as well as any other Chumps who are in the confusion, grief, and bargaining stages of Chumpdom. My suggestion for you is that you sit down in a quiet place, with a pen and paper, and write down a list of truths about yourself. What are your values? What are your interests? What qualities are you looking for in a partner? Etc. etc. Then think about what you wrote, and decide if your FW is a good match for you. Also, as Velvet Hammer posted, why do you love this woman? From your letter it seems she has ZERO redeemable qualities. But maybe she is a good cook, or she donates to charity, or volunteers at the Red Cross. Whatever. And then analyze your thoughts, e.g. “I saw the back of another man’s head in her ‘area’, but she never forgets to feed the cat. And so this is acceptable to me.” Or whatever. I don’t mean to make light of your pain, Oz. But it sounds like you need to step waaaay back from the drama and take a fresh look at what is going on here, and who she is as a real person with her own agency, and not a fantasy of who you want her to be. If you decide to stay with her, that’s your own agency, and are no longer a victim. If you decide to leave it will be hard on you for a while – maybe a long while – and that is where you find out what you are made of. Can you endure emotional pain, uncertainty, self-doubt, her attempts to get you back on the hook? Can you crawl through the “river of shite and come out clean on the other side” (Shawshank)? In which case Chump Nation (Chump Planet is more like it) are here for you. Good luck Oz. None of it is easy, but it sure is worth it.
It’s confusing without more context, but it appears this woman no longer wanted an exclusive relationship. And she tried/failed to communicate this through her words and actions. The only way to respond is to not engage and move on. That’s when healing begins.
The thing I’ve learned is if we stay with someone (or long to) that’s treating us badly, it’s not about them at all. It’s about us. The cheaters could be swinging from chandeliers engaged in orgies, and it’s still all about us. Why are we settling or putting up with this bad behaviour? That is the Question. The answer lies in finding out what’s in you that is willing to sacrifice your dignity & your respect for such an undeserving person. Maybe she was worth it once upon a time, but that time has passed. That’s what you must accept. Things change. People change. They go from loving people to something you don’t even recognize. Pick thee self up & go get support to get over her: divorce care group, a divorce therapist & a good friend who’s come out on the other side of a break up, and reading Chump Lady. These are your tribe now, lean on them.
“Maybe she was worth it once upon a time, but that time has passed. ”
Oz, I hope you are still reading.
The problem with getting cheated on, especially in your situation where there has been so much back and forth, is that it hurts and that hurt and often shock, leave a chump so completely confused. We can’t help but feel like it’s all about us vs AP. If your partner had just broken up with you with no cheating, say she decided that she wanted to focus strictly on her career and had decided that she just has no time for a relationship. That would hurt. You would be broken-hearted over the ending of a relationship. But it just hits different when a 3rd party is involved. You feel compared and found lacking.
And the thing is, I don’t know that anyone here can convince you otherwise. But lots of us have the gift of time and hindsight. And I promise you, this isn’t about you. This is about HER.
My D-Day happened as I was turning 50. I was not overly keen on that big 5 0. And then I found out my marriage was over. AND she was in her early 30s. I felt 600 and disgusting.
But here’s the thing. They didn’t work out. (She dumped him as soon as he signed a lease on a new place, almost like she just wanted to be sure he blew up his life before she left)
We got divorced anyway. And then he went on to have a dating life.
He met one woman, D, and was talking marriage 8 weeks in. They lasted a year. When they broke up, she got a restraining order. Within 2 weeks of that break up, he met B. They have now lasted a year and he is moving in with her. Now, these women were after the AP. After we separated. That fact and having had some time to heal allows me to look at those relationships with clear, unwounded eyes.
I am sure that D was blissfully happy with him until it went south. He has anger issues. I do not know what happened that caused her to seek an order of protection, but I know that she didn’t renew it. So my guess is he finally showed her his raging side, and it scared the hell out of her. But then he lkely adgered to the order, didn’t bother her, so she didn’t renew. (If his anger issues had escalated and he had physically harmed her, I don’t think she would have dropped it)
Now he is moving in with B and tells anyone who will listen how blissfully happy he is. I believe it. I believe she is seeing a happy guy who expresses how she makes him happier than anyone ever has before. And it looks real And feels real.
But just like the women before me, who were all “crazy” and made him so unhappy, and me, and D, at some point B will see the real him too. She will lose her “new kibble” shine. His mask will slip.
I don’t harbor any bad feelings towards B, she is not an AP. I actually feel bad for her because she has no way of knowing what she is in for. He has a great “mask” and is extremely convincing. But what I am trying to say to you is, this FW is the issue. He is going to BE the same awful FW no matter what woman he is with. Me, an AP or these nice women that dated him after all that.
And yours is the same. SHE is the issue. She is the person who is lacking. Not you.
I will say this, it’s hard to be wallowing in sadness and alight with anger at the same time. And anger fuels action. Get a little angry. Don’t live in it forever. But find enough anger to realize she’s the bad guy and you didn’t deserve this. And get out. Far too many of us didn’t, and wasted decades on FWs. Please learn from our mistakes.