Bang! The Lies My Wife Projected On to Me
When we first started dating, my wife was living with another man. She failed to mention this to me over the course of several lunches that got ever-more flirty. So, in some ways she was hedging her bets by staying with the other guy and not telling me about it. She wanted to see how things went before telling the other guy she was unhappy or looking for something else. Hmmm. This is not a good opening.
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She was confessing and confiding in another man about her husband’s depression, and the hardships of her life at that moment in time.
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Then we got married, had two kids and suffered the financial disaster of 9-11. Everything we had imagined was going to be easy, was hard. And it got real hard.
During one of the hard parts she began to have very deep email confession sessions with a younger man from work. She even took him to lunch and showed him our local library. WHAT? Do you think I heard about this little migration? I did not. Another WTF moment. When I discovered the indiscreet emails, by accident (I was cleaning spam off our shared computer) she apologized immediately and cut off the relationship.
But it WAS a relationship. She was confessing and confiding in another man about her husband’s depression, and the hardships of her life at that moment in time. He was recently out of a relationship, and from what I understand, fairly attractive and bit young. < THIS MY FRIENDS IS EMOTIONAL INFIDELITY.
She may not have slept with the guy, but she went a lot deeper than that. Yet, the real betrayal was in NOT telling me what hardships she was experiencing as a result of my depression and the hard times we were in. She was a stoic. She clammed that stuff up and rarely talked about emotions. But it must’ve been easy with this guy, because it wasn’t long before she was revealing my depression and her dissatisfaction with her current life.
That’s when the light bulb goes off, now, looking back on the entire way our divorce went down.
She was unhappy with her life. I got us into marriage/couples therapy. She was not talking about being near divorce, but at the same time she went and met with an attorney to “figure out her options.”
We were spending weekly sessions in couple’s therapy and she was not talking about wanting a divorce? WHAT THE HELL? Why was she agreeing to be in marriage counseling if she was also seeking legal advice about a possible divorce. They say you can’t prepare for war and hope for peace at the same time.
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She would occasionally go to lunch with her ex-husband and fail to mention it to me. Why? Why should she hide unless she was, again, “checking out her options?”
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While all this was very shocking to me, as it happened, and even these years later as I’m still unravelling what happened, the illumination I got today was this: she had been lying to me all the time. Several times in our history, her trustworthiness was called into question. Yet in therapy she was hammering me for being untrustworthy. Like the time I didn’t tell her I’d gotten a speeding ticket. (As in avoiding unnecessary conflict with her during a difficult time.) But she was using those minor transgressions to trump of charges of being deceitful, and it was HER that was not coming clean. She was projecting her guilt and lying on me. Saying I was the one with the honesty problem.
There were other little things along the way, during our marriage, that didn’t make sense. She would occasionally go to lunch with her ex-husband and fail to mention it to me. Why? Why should she hide unless she was, again, “checking out her options?”
So I was being raked over the coals about being dishonest and my wife was consulting with an attorney rather than bringing her issues into couples therapy. She was focusing her unhappiness on me and what I was or was not doing for her. That is what killed us. Her lying. Her secrets. And her trying to keep the focus on my issues to keep from revealing or confessing her own. And that’s fucked. We were doomed from the time we started dating, by her distrust and dishonesty. Wow. And I’m just getting this six years after the divorce.
Respectfully,
The Off Parent
@theoffparent
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related posts:
- You Are Ahead by a Century
- The Painful Business of Divorce
- Your Contempt for Me is Hurting All of Us
- The Humans Of Divorce, Dear AG’s Office Special Cases Officer Mr. McK!
- And Just As We Reach A Calm Moment
- What I Still Fail to Understand About My Ex-wife
- When Kids, Money, and Divorce Collide
- Trusting Your Unreliable Ex
image: close up portrait, creative commons usage
The 1st and 2nd Time I Knew My Marriage Was Finished
I don’t talk about my first marriage much. My starter marriage. The marriage that took me five years to get out of, even after I’d decided it should leave. The marriage that, thankfully, produced no kids. The marriage I’ve left behind. But the setting and timing of my initial, “Holy shit, what have I done?” is so astounding I thought I’d best tell the tale. Then I’ll look at my real-marriage-with-children that could’ve had a quick stop at the initial RED FLAG, but I was too far gone when I discovered that she had been living with someone the two months of our courtship. OUCH.
But let’s start with the storybook wedding, big dress, big church, big party, big send off and honeymoon flight to Paris and cruise across Greece and Turkey. Let’s start there. We were 27 and on our way to great things as artist’s in the world. I had some money she had a father who was a divorce attorney. But of course this didn’t register as a problem.
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It was in a marriage counseling session when she said something that caught me off guard. I don’t recall what she said but suddenly I had a very deep feeling of dread.
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It was during the first week of our magical mystery tour heading to Santorini when my new bride got sick. It was ironic that I was reading Celine’s Death In The Afternoon at the time. If you don’t know the book, it’s one of the most dark and cynical books ever written. And it’s beautiful about describing the general unrest and anger the main character has with the world and how he feels he’s been mistreated. And I’m reading this angry and poetic book and my new wife begins to transform before my eyes into some feral animal. She was bitter, spitting, and unconsolable. She just wanted me OUT OF THE CABIN. She didn’t want to be around anyone. She didn’t want anything. And while some of that is understandable, the feeling I began to develop was an overwhelming sense of, “I’ve made a terrible mistake.”
It took me seven years to really get out of that one. I gave it the spirited try. I tried to be better. I tried to be more creative, to earn more money, to be more charming. She recoiled frequently into passions of rage and vitriol. I didn’t have any compass for this behavior, at least not from a small and very attractive Basque woman. I had seen this kind of blind anger from my dad when he drank sometimes, but she was stone cold sober, and even more dangerous.
The two times I attempted termination she agreed to enter counselling and to work on her stuff. We went together and we both went alone. Me to figure out what my part in her madness was, and her… Well, who knows. But things got worse and not better. They never got better. And finally, even though we’d talked about a peaceful separation, if it wasn’t going to work, she filed for divorce while I was out-of-town on a business trip. We were having a tough time, but I assured her that we could end as friends. And I begged her not to engage lawyers, if we did decide to part. Someone else was whispering in her ear by this time. And my first day back at work, I was served by the Sheriff and given a restraining order that prevented me from going within 500 yards of my house, my cats, all of my worldly possessions.
And even after all of that, the moment I took off my wedding ring I broke down in tears. I was so disappointed, even with all of the struggle and mess, to give up the dream of that long white dress and the promises we made at the altar. Strike one.
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In my second marriage, I had a lot more invested. We had a family together, two kids, and a house, and a significant number of hopes and dreams that we had joined together with our marriage. And while we had ups and downs, I walked pretty strongly in this relationship. I wasn’t really very concerned about the future of our marriage. The happiness and stress could fluctuate up and down and I had the belief that we’d be okay. I think we both did.
We went through a lot. 9-11 took out my entire business at the time. And we floundered for our bearings together. Always together. And we had a very difficult pregnancy of our second child and we took another round of despair and struggles and turned it into strength and bonding. We survived. And we struggled on over the next several years.
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The idea of getting married still appeals to me. But what would the conditions need to be? I am not planning on courting a third ex-wife.
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Even when I discovered an online tryst with one of her coworkers, a younger man who she had gone to lunch and coffee with, I worked in therapy to regain my trust. She apologized with all the heart she could muster at the time, but we were fragile and shaken by the “affair.” (see: Cheating Hearts, Cheating Minds)
The blow came much later, when I was certain, even in the face of growing unrest and antagonism, that we were still safe in the marriage. We just needed some work in the relationship. In the communication. In the trust. And I was certain we were both trying at our full capacity to keep the marriage together. The friendship and passion would surely follow.
It was in a marriage counseling session when she said something that caught me off guard. I don’t recall what she said but suddenly I had a very deep feeling of dread.
“Have you been to see a lawyer?” I asked, angry, scared, and curious all at the same second. (See: Giving Up On Me)
When she admitted she had been seeking advice from a divorce attorney I was thrown. And the buck off the horse was unrecoverable. Within a month I had capitulated to giving her a divorce. And though I went down swinging to keep the relationship together, she had seen some other light of promise outside our life together. Strike two.
The idea of getting married still appeals to me. But what would the conditions need to be? I am not planning on courting a third ex-wife.
Sincerely,
The Off Parent
@theoffparent
< back to The Hard Stuff
related posts:
- Waiting for the Other Person to Change
- Love, War, Divorce: Why I’m Not Fighting My Ex-Wife About Custody
- Divorce is Not About What’s Fair, Let’s Get That Straight
- Getting Angry, Reaching Forgiveness, and Moving On After Divorce
image: marriage trouble, chris lau, creative commons usage
