I Could’ve Bought a Car for What I Spent on Reconciliation
Looking back, he realizes he could’ve bought a luxury car for what he spent on reconciliation with a cheater. Why did he try to fix something so fundamentally broken?
***
Hello Chump Lady,
The ‘Reconciliation Industry’ is a luxury car I never got to drive. But I got the wreck instead.
I’m finally coming into my own after three-plus years of hell, and I have to ask:
Why in the hell aren’t there more “Chump Lady” like resources out there?
I know you cover it in Leave a Cheater, Gain a Life, how the “Reconciliation Industry” makes gobs of money peddling hopium, but it is absolutely mind-boggling to me. The amount of pain, suffering, abuse, and sheer money wasted on “fixing” what is fundamentally broken is staggering.
Ask me how I know — I could’ve bought a luxury car with the money I spent on therapists, seminars, and books that only kept me tethered to a lie.
It is insane to read your site and realize the tactics are the same across the board.
It doesn’t matter the gender, race, or country, the script is identical. It’s an industry that profits from keeping people in that cycle.
You have built an amazing following, but why do you think many others aren’t screaming from the roof tops telling the truth about the reconciliation industry? One of my favorite lines from your book is the reminder that they “fired” us from the job of caring for them once they cheated. I just wish there were more voices shouting that truth, because the current majority of the market feels designed to keep us stuck in the wreckage.
Good luck with your new printing. I’m looking forward to checking it out.
Viva La Resistance,
Chumpy McChumperson
***
Dear Chumpy McChumperson,
I’m curious about Chump Nation’s thoughts on this. I do think there are more resources now, and we’re certainly a lot more aware of abuse tactics than even 10 years ago. However, I’m not sure the focus is always on infidelity, but more on narcissists or “toxic” people. (I prefer the term “f*ckwit” because I’m not a psychologist.)
But why aren’t more people in the “Leave a Cheater” camp?
Infidelity (as a chump) is still a taboo subject.
The victim-blaming is so baked in. The idea that those closest to you were conspiring against you is terrifying at a primal level. So, there’s magical thinking. I would never be a chump. That idiot missed the signs. I’d never be duped. How could anyone be so foolish?
No one imagines they could be conned. And all the discourse doesn’t frame cheating as a con, or an abuse of power, they frame it as “love.” The Heart Wants What the Heart Wants. Or they frame it as sex. (You suck at it. They have needs.)
Who wants to raise their hand and admit they suck?
So, in the big narrative, you’re working against the whole You Drove Them To It forces. And you’re also working against the human desire for stability. We invest deeply in our partners. We’re wired to bond.
It’s very hard to un-bond.
Of course chumps want to keep their families together. Of course we’re going to try all the voodoo out there to make that happen.
Imagine the horror of losing a child. Now imagine that all the resources out there told you your child isn’t really dead. But with the right necromancer, you could bring that child back to life. If you follow the Zombie recipe carefully enough, your beloved will return to you. That bright future you imagined for them could be restored.
You’d spend any amount of stupid money to get your child back, wouldn’t you? Even if you understand the laws of physics and death. You’d take that chance. In fact, you might naively assume that necromancers wouldn’t sell you necromancy if they couldn’t actually raise the dead. Right? So you put your money down.
That’s the Reconciliation Industrial Complex.
False hope is profitable. And, I’ll give some quacks credit, I think many of them don’t think they’re selling false hope. They’re just culturally biased. It hasn’t happened to them. They DO think “unmet needs” cause affairs. Or think that infidelity is a “symptom” of a bad marriage and all you have to do is change your communication styles and the wandering dick problem will end. They lack critical thinking.
And did I mention it’s profitable?
Who would you rather embrace? The wizard who you says you can FIX this? Or me and my cold bucket of water?
Also, not a lot of people want to put their heads in the infidelity space for as long as I have. I think I’m uniquely perverse. It’s traumatic. But I can do this because I believe the message I’m selling:
YOU WILL BE BETTER ON THE OTHER SIDE.
Not for the trauma of it (that will always suck), but you’ll be better for losing the FW. And dumping the reconciliation wizards. Lay that cognitive dissonance down.
why do you think many others aren’t screaming from the roof tops telling the truth about the reconciliation industry?
I think people are doing this when it comes to the spiritual abuse of Christian evangelicals. (I can’t say J*s*s Cheater anymore with Google.) Divorce Minister, Julie Roys of the Roys Report, and Gretchen Baskerville of Life Saving Divorce. They’re all doing an excellent job at pointing out the hypocrisy — and harm — in their communities.
We’ve made great progress on “divorce shame” and the idiotic stigma about being single. I think the needle has moved a lot. And I’m hopeful it’s going to move on infidelity too.
Think of all the money we could save and the fancy cars we could buy! CN, what do you think? How much did you spend on the RIC? Do you think the narrative is changing?
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Oh yes, plenty of money wasted! Starting with an online weekly “emergency seminar.” It was a total waste of time and money. 13 weeks of more lies, praying(skipped that part) and worthless videos. From there it was counseling, a “Therapeutic Disclosure,” that was full of lies and more counseling. So much wasted time. Finally got a good therapist. She had me read Minwalla and Dr. Ramani. Helped me see there was nothing wrong with me, but something very wrong with a lifelong serial cheater. I was awesome, amazing, have tons of friends. The sad little man who wasted over 3 decades with countless betrayal objects, not at all. I did not, thankfully waste money on untangling the insanity of how he juggled multiple betrayal objects at the same time, or retrieving belongings from multiple homes or storage lockers. All of his junk at that historic Georgetown townhouse he lived in during covid? Leave it. Left it all behind. Including him. Huge waste of money. Huge waste of time. He was a huge waste.
I did a couples retreat for 8 weeks, $800 dollars. He didn’t want to go, and promptly slept for 3 hours after every session, getting in touch with his emotions was that taxing to him. After the 8 weeks I had a private session with the therapist that taught it. I had met with her and my husband for a 2 hour private session before my meeting with her. She told me he was done with me. Sometimes you know but need someone else to tell you if they are seeing what you are seeing. She was 100% right. I told him it was over, called a real estate agent, and after 30 years, left. That was 10 years ago. I shake my head and think what was that all about. After a new romance 6 years ago ended, I have been on my own and at peace, no longer chasing the love illusion.
I’m grateful my reconcilliation only cost me roughly a jet-ski
I suspect the most appropriate intervention (earlier or later) focuses on “letting go”. That’s hard to acknowledge when society also demands that chumps stay small and move on without resolution.
What’s the most cost effective way to determine if a therapist is qualified?
I would ask them straight up if they think cheating is abuse. If they say no, hesitate, or make excuses, put them in the bin and keep looking.
Ask them if infidelity is abuse.
The vibe. Not everyone is for yo and that’s ok. Some might be qualified on paper, but are just not good at their job, or don’t have enough experience if they are fresh out of school.
If they are dismissing you about your own life experiences or trying to diagnose someone they have never met, that’s a pretty big red flag.
If they have a hard time with boundaries, like they try to be friends with you outside of the session or are really pushy on what you should do, that’s a good indicator that there are other red flags.
If they think they can sell or prescribe a quick fix for you, that’s a pretty big giveaway.
These past almost 3 years i(n July 2026 )since my divorcev ink dried on the documents.. I’ve had to forgive myself over and over for not seeing what I saw, not hearing what I heard and staying almost 14 days after D day.. The wasted days I cried, begged and almost accepted the cheap chocolate, flowers, letters and weak attempts my last cheater made to try to stop me from filing. Every word of professed sorry was an abject lie.
My heart goes out to those who have better liars than I did x2 who actually were better at deception and pulling on your family heartstrings getting you to stay more days, spend more money, have more sex and more years while they played you. Making sure their cake stayed frosted. I’m grateful both of my cheaters already made up.their minds to scorch the earth with my body, mind and soul I had no choice really to ever go back. Yes I am now grateful.
‘staying almost 14 days after D day.”
Oh my gosh 2xChump. Please forgive yourself in general but also for the mere 14 days you stayed. It took me 3 years to get him out of the house and even once that happened, the divorce wasn’t final until another 2 years passed. You left at 14 days? That is beyond mighty!
The credit goes to the FREE EAP therapist who saw my husband 4 days before he talked to me . He was an African American LCSW who had worked in prisons with the mentally and criminally directed men. He listened while I cried over my husband’s abuse of me and how horrible it was..but but I loved him..30 years together!! He told me my husband was extremely unstable under his mask and that his next step was to make me pay for wanting to leave. He told me to get a lawyer immediately, to go to the police station and tell them to watch my house and get a protection order quickly. He told me to lock my doors as well.
He told me he would not see me again unless I followed through on his action plan. He told me my next steps could cause my injury or death at my husband’s hand. There is no way I would have moved as quickly but I did it all in 48 hours. It was a complete miracle from God that I hot unparalleled after that life saving session with him. I still see JB my LCSW 3x a year to keep up on my healing and to thank him for going against what any other therapist would have advised. I am the most grateful for not becoming a DV statistic. That is why My plans for inhouse separation and more unsure days turned into 14 days before I filed. I am here to tell the story.
That is an incredible story. I am so glad he had the insight to tell you exactly what to do, and you listened.
My STBX was living in another state, but I bought the RIC and proposed various high-cost options to save the marriage. In retrospect, it was good that he outright refused.
I later came across a woman through a friend who had done all of the Christian RIC intensives and workshops with her ex, and ultimately had to go through a complex process to cloak her identity in a new state so her ex couldn’t find her post-divorce. She was in that much danger. They were well off and spent six figures trying to save the marriage, and then yet more on the divorce. He had to go, period. When I met her, he had died about a year before. What a relief for her.
Anyway, my ex’s very religious family believed that they could provide all the counseling we needed and bought the idea that if I wanted the marriage to survive, I would make the necessary changes. No outside counselors, ever. In other words, he wasn’t going to be held accountable. Everything was on me.
He said that reconciling required that he be put in charge of my phone and computer to make sure he had my full attention. Then he retracted that. I took that as a gigantic, waving red flag. I refused to reconcile, and he kicked off the divorce from his “rebel wife.”
No regrets.
My guess is there’s going to be no real progress for the “infidelity as abuse” construct until the science is done. And the only reason the science hasn’t yet been done is… politics.
It was the same with coercive control. For years and years, advocates tried to yell from the rooftops that, in the DV realm, emotional and psychological abuse and coercion are more devastating and even more lethal than patterns of physical vi0lence. For one there’s the high rate of su*cide among abuse victims which many argue should be included in general domestic m*rder statistics since these deaths are brought about in the same intentional, inexorable way. And then there’s the fact that histories of coercive control– with or without histories of assault– are viewed as the statistical “golden thread” in criminology which best predict risk of domestic m*rder.
The late, great Evan Stark knew that no legislative progress would ever happen regarding coercive control without the definitive science to back it up so, like Little Red Hens, Stark and his wife Ann Flitcraft set about doing a lot of that science themselves. They’d done the same thing in the 70s when spearheading the shelter movement in the US and UK (a service structure which wouldn’t exist without them) and just repeated the strategy regarding CC.
But without the science, dah patriarchy would never allow coercive control laws and policies to pass. And it’s certainly not going to allow this buzz about how– heaven forfend!- infidelity is abuse. The media pile up on CL and Sarah Manguso over the novel Liars made that clear.
Today’s letter was by a male chump and we know (and love) many guy chumps on this forum. But to me, the existence of she-FWs and male survivors isn’t a contradiction to the fact that these male chumps are actually paying for societal denialism and apologism intended to sustain male sexual entitlement. Just to boil down the armchair conclusion I made from working in DV advocacy years ago is that most cases of domestic vi0lence may be nothing more than the brutal enforcement of one-sided monogamy.
I know it’s a “bold assertion” especially when the science doesn’t yet exist to prove it. But I think domestic abuse doesn’t just occasionally involve infidelity tangentially but may actually be wholly driven by the right to cheat while being assured that victims can’t do in kind. It even explains the typical stereotype (which does exist) of the psychotically jealous batterer: pure projection. It really explains everything.
Anyway, as we know from DV statistics, most of this is driven by men. So where does that leave male survivors of coercive control and infidelity? To steal a line from Succession, I think the rule of dah patriarchy (can’t say that with a straight face) is basically that you “have to crack a few Gregs to make a Tomlet.” Though cheating apologism generally props up and shields male sexual control and dominance, sure there will always be a solid smattering of women who take license from this to out-creep the creeps. It can’t be helped and the “femme fatale” trope can even be useful to pretend that most cheating isn’t about male sexual control.
As far as the politics of why these flamingly obvious, simple studies have never been done, I think it boils down to the dick wanting what the dick wants. Studies like that would threaten sexual entitlement so they’re very carefully avoided. Even studies that are incredibly adjacent– like a study of the massively high HIV infection rates among battered women in certain countries– will gymnastically, awkwardly try to avoid making the obvious conclusion that batterers cheat. Those studies don’t necessarily demonstrate that all cheaters batter but the fact that batterers cheat far more than average and in horribly high risk ways is newsworthy enough. But you won’t see that headline any time soon. Because research grants are written by entitled dicks.
If you read and follow the work of evolutionary scientist Richard Wrangham, every evil in the world pretty much traces back to male sexual dominance and entitlement. But, as Wrangham so beautifully illustrates with facts and stats and decades in the jungle hiding behind palm leaves with Jane Goodall, no one pays for this dick entitlement more than males. It’s not just that some women (Wrangham has an incredible explanation for this too) draw license from patriarchal injustice to betray. It’s that men statistically kill men at 8 times the rate they kill women and most children killed in homes with DV are male.
Today’s LW wonders why there aren’t more resources like CL and I always wonder why there aren’t more genuine male feminists. Clearly part of it is that dah patriarchy violently polices against male “traitors” and the manosphere reserves weaponized terms for these men who supposedly can’t keep their boots firmly enough on women’s necks: simps or cucks, whatever. But personally I think the simps and cucks will inherit the earth (and save the ecology). I’ve known decent men and there’s nothing weak about them even if they’re emotionally open enough to get hurt.
Anyway, that’s my general take on it. Hate cheating? Vote for equality, get involved with legislation to protect victims of abuse, etc.
I would like to add that popular culture often seems to romanticize coercive control (or the steps leading up to it): He sweeps her off her feet, he makes her quit her job or leave her country, he’s so great she doesn’t need anyone else anymore, isn’t it romantic? Etc. I wouldn’t be surprised if powerful FW were behind many of those narratives, too.
Of course, those narratives mostly hurt women. However, I believe this could also put pressure on men to use such tools (and worse) to control a woman. If a good guy then gets chumped, it’s easy to blame him (he didn’t work hard enough to sweep her off her feet and gain full control), when in reality, the only healthy thing he can do is cut his losses and move on.
All you need to do to de-romanticize coercive control is show the related domestic m*rder stats. Basically he sweeps her off her feet… and then tries to throw her off a cliff.
Oh and– bonus! Scientifically correlating cheating with coercive control/domestic abuse would kill the Reconciliation Industrial Complex.
100% they are paying for societal denial and apologism. My ex wanted to leave his kids and wife behind AND keep his good guy image. And you know what? He has. By cutting me off from access to money, which meant access to a lawyer to defend my rights and reputation. So he may consider the money he spent on lawyers instead of on his children — because he chose to fund his lawyers over his children — well spent. He cares about convincing other people he’s a good father, but can’t muster any interest in his actual children.
Evil is evil is evil. That’s radical evil and the laws really need to change. I hope your kids grow up to be novelists.
Just for kicks, if you have any of FW’s old word salad texts or DARVO emails, feed them all into Google Gemini AI (don’t bother with ChatGPT. It was clearly programed by RIC or Redpill adherents) with a request to filter for “coercive control.” The bot will crunch all the existing social science on CC and diagram every bit of weaponized language FW deploys and will show how this reveals sicko psychology, etc.
I’m not sure this is only about changing the letter of the laws. The industry surrounding divorce is complicit in pushing the “loving father” narrative on mothers who are protecting their children. Systemic gaslighting. That’s what this post is about, all the enablers. I regrettably crossed paths with at least twenty family-law and -adjacent professionals, and encountered ONE who was actually motivated to help me. She was great, but she was volunteering part-time at a free clinic that was overstretched. They could only give me six hours. As for all the others, they fell into three categories: unquestioning of the status quo; disordered themselves, like my ex; or self-congratulatingly cynical and avaricious.
It’s a filthy bog for sure. But laws that aggressively force the main bread earner to cover spouse’s legal fees, etc., seem to help compensate for post-separation financial abuse.
What good are laws if you can’t afford a lawyer?
Laws in some states aggressively enforce the higher earner to cover the legal fees of the other partner in divorce right off the bat. Some lawyers will accept the motion from a court ensuring their fees will be covered by the opposing party soon in place of retainer, but probably only in states that aggressively enforce. I’ll bet there are fewer attorneys willing to waive that retainer up front in the case the courts don’t force the issue.
I spent at least $150,000.00. All I had. He and his lawyer wouldn’t stop. I ended up selling my jewelry to buy groceries.
Thanks to all the predators who helped my ex do that to me and his kids by pretending they didn’t know he was full of it. Every BS letter and accusation, every BS story on the couch — they knew. And they knew he knew they knew. They could have helped end it, but they took the money instead and let him get away with abandoning his family right in front of their eyes.
The cliched term “the best years of my life” comes to mind. Even years later, because of ongoing litigation abuse, it continues to take away from the life I built after I left ExFW; it continues to take away time and resources from my husband, our other children, and our home. Over $100k easily.
The prolonged complex grief from not standing up for myself fully from the start because I was pressured by my family to make it work, the compounding interest of trauma after discovering new levels of betrayal, hell, even after leaving. Priceless.
The loss of my family and extended family who chose to support a known abuser and the hypocritical evangelizing of magical thinking that f*cked with my head years later because I was too “bitter” to be “forgiving”, all because they chose to believe slanderous gossip from people who cannot maintain sobriety for a day. Is a loss I don’t quite know how to define.
More people are waking up, but the RIC has since pivoted hard into buzzwords and labels about relationship toxicity, personality disorders, and countless armchair diagnoses from influencers have muddied the original intent to inform.
I wish LACGAL weren’t just about infidelity; it applies to so much more than that.
Thankfully I didn’t spend a lot of money — just time. I stayed a decade without knowing about any cheating and went to therapy on my own (because FW refused to go to marriage counseling with me, although he frequently threatened to leave me and the kids because he “wasn’t happy”). That therapy was useful (my therapist way back then labeled FW’s tactics as psychological abuse), and although I was eventually blindsided by D-day, I am grateful that I moved quickly to divorce and got a lawyer who kept costs relatively low.
Lately, 3 years post-Dday, I have been reflecting on how much time it takes to heal.
I went no-contact instinctively and am glad I did. Finding LACGAL and CL has bolstered me in that effort, despite Switzerland friends and other ninnies who think I need to be friends with my cheating ex (mainly because it would make their lives easier, I realize now).
But — three years, and almost totally no-contact (my kids are young adults, so no co-parenting), and I am only now starting to feel like I am regaining some sense of balance.
I’m not totally there yet, frequently wobble, feel sad, and have developed a stress-related health issue that I’m hoping will eventually go away. Sigh. I still read this blog every day because I always find a dose of whatever I need to get through each particular day.
So — yes, no contact is the fastest way to heal. But “fast” is a relative term. I am three years in and counting. Thanks, CL, and all of CN for this space to come to terms with reality.
Yes I/we spent enough to buy a used luxury car, even if the wreckonciliation counseling was sporadic.
It’s cringe worthy that ‘get therapy’ is bandied out as a panacea. Many not ever truly trained in personality disorders and betrayal trauma. My own friend bought into the Patrick what’s his name SA BS and thought she could fix couples, never challenging the RIC until I pointed out the holes from CN. Through DDay #1 and subsequent DDays plus my own social circle I’ve dealt with about 10 therapists. One and only one immediately postulated FW had been cheating a long time possibly since the beginning! It was so outrageous at the time my friends thought she was nuts but as we all know at CN she was spot on. I sometimes wonder if she read Tracy’s book but never went back to her again due to cost.
Choose therapists very carefully. They aren’t omnipotent nor wise and sometimes they are not even honest. Excellent ones are gold.
The horror of what we lived through is worse if we feel alone. It makes us weak, fearful, ashamed and paralyzed. This blog’s power is in exposing the abuser’s pattern, the worldwide playbook as OP noted, astounding similarities in our experiences. Sunlight disinfects and finally not feeling alone, trading stories, learning from each other here is priceless. For newbies this blog is a crash course in Know Thine Enemy.
Tracy’s book and blog is like Copernicus’ lone brave voice pointing out the obvious – planets revolved around the sun, when the world firmly wanted believe earth was the center of our solar system and the church beat down people who disagreed.
I’m forever thankful for this blog. Copernicus was eventually proven right.
What did the RIC cost me? Well, in truth not a lot of money in direct fees. In the thousands of dollars for sure…but it was not in “new car territory”. The majority of marriage counsellors we saw, (4 out of 6 over a span of 15 years) were paid for by my work benefit plan.
Where I really took it in the neck was with respect to the Separation Agreement. In Ontario Canada (where we lived together at the time) no-fault divorce is the law. Because I earned significantly more, and because he was self-employed at the time, he engineered his income to be even lower in the year before the wheels fell off of our marriage. Spousal support in Ontario potentially increases the longer the marriage has existed. So…my FW had a very good legal case for a large spousal support claim.
Had I exited the marriage earlier (which I likely would have done had I not been chasing the unicorns and rainbows peddled by the RIC) I would have paid little to no spousal support. The difference in spousal support was definitely in “new luxury car territory”.
So yeah – in terms of dollars and cents (even Canadian dollars and cents), the RIC ended up costing me a ton of money. If only that was the biggest and most important cost to me. But you know folks…the only regret I have now about ending my mirage is that I did not do it sooner.
In 12-Step programs, it’s the Serentity Prayer. In Buddhism, it’s “Chop wood, carry water”. Both are free/low cost and probably more effective for moving on and healing.
Should I have been counseled to fight? To depose the OW and tally the harm done? Is that why embezzlement is less common than infidelity?
I think the narrative is changing, but it’s slow. Society at large still views marriage as ideal and singlehood as a disease, which puts tremendous pressure on people to save their (terrible) marriage at all costs and judges them if they can’t.
Now let me answer the question as my last note I did not.
What I have seen about the narrative is that it is not the cheaters who keep the secrets but the RIC driven chumps who remain martyred- I mean married to their cheater. They tell others of their success, they keep the secrets, they write co books with their “cured” cheater, they go on talk shows,…we know.there are years and better tactics in between D days and they stay.
They are not shamed, they are applauded and they join the RIC mentality to sing the rewards of staying. I know several in my congregation along with the cheaters that remarry OW or anyone else but become upstanding converted “no more cheating for them people. They are gregarious and so happy after the affairs. They look all cleaned up and varnished.
My #1 cheater stayed married to OW 28 years and counting. He looks stable and cured #2 cheater remains in the pew with new wife all shined up.
It’s the numbers and the testimonials weighed against a horrific divorce, loss and single hood with weekend visits. It’s the story absolutely no one wants to linger on.
The Chump who leaves has to be strong with zero desire for that cheater life again.it is a slag through quick sand. Who wants to hear that?
VERY FEW can maintain the story like CHUMP LADY and hold all our voices in her heart and mind.
There is no one close to CL because she is the wisest and knows the underbelly of the beast. She has a beautiful voice, a blood stained pen and never losses her righteous indignant anger. She will not shut up and sit down. Nope, she puts out another addition of her book and keeps drawing cartoons!
CL is Just like those researchers who investigate rare diseases for the NIH and can’t quit even if their pay is slashed and no one cares anymore. Tracy never stops and I love her forever for that.
My therapist told me that if I had spent as much time studying a more useful subject, instead of trying to figure out my narcissistic ex, I could have had my Ph.D.