April Fool's Day

Three years ago today, my ex called me first thing in the morning (I'd just woken up).

"I have something to tell you," he said.
"Ok?"
"I'm cheating on you."
I started tearing up immediately. "Are you serious?"
"Yes. I'm cheating on you. I'm sorry."
I began to cry. My heart sunk down into my stomach. He began to laugh hysterically.
"HAHAHA! I got you! Oh my God, you actually think I'm cheating on you! HA!"
"That's not funny. You just gave me a panic attack. My heart was in my intestines!"
"HAHAHAHAH OH MY GOD I GOT YOU!"

Except, now I know that he wasn't actually joking. He even laughed about it on facebook:

He actually did things like that a few times. Looking back, he was testing me to see if I'd believe him, and to see how much he could get away with. When he came back last summer, we went to a restaurant. They had a taxidermied moose head in the restaurant. He asked me to take his picture in front of the head, so that the horns were sticking out of his head (he ALWAYS wanted his picture to be taken, so he could post it on his facebook fan page). I did. When he posted it, he laughed, and said "This should get an interesting reaction..." I asked why, and he said "Because in my country, this means that a person cheated."

He also went on a talk show in his country where they asked him all kinds of super personal questions about his sex life. He admitted that he'd cheated and been cheated on ("in the past") and that he'd once had four relationships going at once. All of this was last year. He was talking about his life with me (though I never cheated on him...probably no one ever did, actually). And he was just talking about it in plain sight, on a "jokey" talk show, laughing about it. When I confronted him about it, he told me that "they were joking and I fell for the joke!" Lies. More lies.

As soon as the news of our divorce broke in the press, he removed those videos and pictures of him with horns from his page. I guess suddenly they weren't so funny when people might actually think they were true.

I hate April Fool's Day. I hate anything that celebrates taking advantage of people's trust. I hate lies and liars.

More from my journal - The Discard, Part II

I've already written about the day almost exactly a year ago that my (ex)husband left me out of the blue. Here it was, as I wrote about it to my therapist (written exactly a year ago tomorrow).

The thing to keep is mind is that I now know the real reason he did this--because he had a girlfriend back in his home country who he'd gotten pregnant, who was having an abortion that week and was suicidal. So, literally every word he said was a lie meant to manipulate me. Of course, I didn't realize the full extent of it until August 2015, when the other woman called me and told me everything.

Anyway, I present this here to encourage all of you to trust your gut. I knew something was off and didn't make sense, but I wanted to trust him and believe him. I shouldn't have.

March 19, 2015, 4:44 pm

There have been some big developments with my husband this week, and I'm reeling a bit, again. 

 He came back home to me "for good" on Saturday, March 7th. It was bad from the moment he stepped off the plane. I went to the airport, greeted him with coffee, we hugged, he gave me a little peck on the lips, and then we walked to the escalator to get to the train platform. As we were on the escalator, he grabbed my belly, jiggled it, and said "Well, somebody's put on a belly!" This was literally the FIRST thing he said to me after being gone for 10 months, and not seeing me for two months. I teared up almost immediately, and then he got angry at me for being upset, because he was "just joking," and then he began to say that he would just go back to his country, I "obviously didn't want him here," and he threatened divorce. I said that none of that was true, but that I was really hurt by what he said, and he wouldn't let it go how I needed to just get over it, and "Do something about myself if I'm so unhappy with my weight." I told him I wasn't unhappy with my weight, I was unhappy with his comment. It was a long, silent, awful ride home. (PS - I haven't really gained any weight...HE on the other hand, has been very self-conscious about putting on 30 lbs while he was there, and keeps commenting on his own weight and how much he has to work out. Projection?). 

 By Friday, I could tell he was not happy. I said that he seemed sad, and asked him why. He said that he had left his career at it's peak, he realized how much his mom and dad aged in the 5 months he was away from them (while living with me) last year, and how angry his agent was at him for leaving, and how his mom cried when she took him to the airport, and he was homesick. I didn't say much, but I said "Ok, well that's all understandable." Then I said "Do you want to be here?" He said "I don't know." And I said "Well that's honest." But it hurt me, since I've waited so long for him to come back and us to have a chance at having a life together, and now he wasn't sure if he wanted it. 

 The next day was Saturday of last week. We sat down and talked about it, and it got ugly. I told him that I felt really scared that he could leave at any moment, and that it's really vulnerable for me to know how much I wanted him here, and that I'm not sure he wants to be here with me. And I also said that the 10 months he was gone were the hardest of my life, and that I cried every day, and I never really felt like he understood that. He got really angry, really quickly, and took all of my feelings as an attack on him. He said that I was calling him "a piece of shit" and "the worst person ever" and he yelled "I'm going for a walk!" 

 Two hours later, he came back. He didn't talk to me the rest of the night, and I went to bed. He slept on the couch until 6am, and then finally came to bed with me. Sunday morning I thought we'd get up and talk. I made him coffee, and when he came into the kitchen, he already had his coat and shoes on. He said that he decided to leave, and he would leave today. I started sobbing. He went on to say that we just weren't right for each other, and we have nothing in common, and I was forcing him to live my life. He then packed up his bags and I was still sobbing. He asked me to call him a cab, and I refused. So then he left for a hotel (and called me cold-hearted for not letting him stay with me until his flight Tuesday).

The Confab

I'm still having a hard time believing that all I learned yesterday was real life. Nothing he said was true. NOTHING HE SAID WAS TRUE. What I thought was real, was not real. What I thought my life was, was not my life. I trusted him. I believed his lies. Everything I believed was a lie.

I wonder now if anything was real. Did he love me even a little? Or is he not even capable of love? Did he ever feel anything for me? I always got the sense that what I felt for him was unrequited, but WOW, maybe he honestly never even cared about me, not even a little. I did so much for him. He did nothing for me. In any way. Why would he? He never loved me. He never cared. It wasn't real. It was all fake.

It's a lot to process, and I'm not really processing it, if I'm being honest. I'm numb. I'm not sad or angry. I feel nothing. It's too much cognitive dissonance. I simply can't wrap my brain around it. He had another relationship going while he was married to me. He fathered another child. He was living another life. Everything was a lie.

What's been at least a little bit comforting was learning that he treated his ex the exact same way. I emailed her yesterday. He has a son with a previous girlfriend. They broke up in 2010, and the last time he saw his son was 2012. At first I totally believed him that she was a horrible person, but as time went on and I learned who he really was, I began to feel nothing but sympathy for her. He left her when she was 7 months pregnant. He chose his career over her and his son, just like he did me. I knew that she and I had a lot in common, and I always wondered about her. So I emailed her.

She wrote back a lovely email. She was shocked to hear from me, but also happy. She felt guilty for not warning me, but knew that I was just as taken with him at the beginning as she had been, and knew that I wouldn't have listened anyway (totally true). She confirmed that their pattern was exactly the same as his and mine--at first it was blissful and perfect, then he began to change, and then suddenly she realized that she was stuck in a terrible relationship and pregnant. He was also angry and violent with her. He told her outright, just like he told me, that he would always choose his career over her. She paid for everything for him, just like I did. He also criticized her physically, and made her believe that she was much less than him. It took her years, she said, to realize that it was the other way around, and that SHE was the strong, talented one, and he was sick, sad man. She's now married to a "wonderful, caring man," and in addition to he son with my husband, her husband has 3 children, and she gave birth to a baby girl earlier this year. She is happy. She promised me that I would be, one day, too, and that I am too smart and too good to let him ruin me. She gave me hope.

I know it wasn't me. The problem wasn't me, it wasn't her, it wasn't his current (or now recent-ex) girlfriend. It's him. He is the sick one. He is the one who hates himself, and who is damaged beyond repair. We don't have to be. We have the capability to love and trust, which is what you are supposed to do when you're in love. People who love you aren't supposed to lie and cheat and deceive.

He's the one whose life is all a charade. Mine is real. My feelings were real. I behaved in a way that was truthful and in line with my values and with what a person does when they love another person. He did not. My life will continue. His never began.

The Hiroshima of bombshells

I don't really have words to describe the interaction I had a few hours ago, and the information I learned from it, but I'm going to try.

The other woman called me today. I emailed her an apology yesterday for a nasty email I'd sent her in anger when I first found out about the affair. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had been extremely unfair to her, and that my anger needed to be squarely directed at my husband, not at her. So I apologized and gave her my skype name, should she ever want to talk in the future.

Five minutes after hitting "send," she tried calling me.

She called me a few times, and though I answered each time, she kept hanging up. Then she signed off. I thought maybe she got cold feet, which is understandable, so I sent her a message letting her know that I'm open to talk any time that worked for her.

Today, she called. I answered. And we spoke for over an hour.

The hangups, I learned, were because my husband was there in the room with her, batting the phone out of her hand and trying to break it as she called me. So she waited until he left today to call.

They met in January, and the affair began right away. He's been living with her all year. Each time he left me, he moved in with her. She showed me his suitcases and his PS4 (that I bought him). She's close with his parents, and talk to them almost every day.

"I want to tell you everything, but I don't want you to be hurt any more than you already are. I respect you as a woman, and I don't want to hurt you," she said.
"I promise you that there is not much that would surprise me at this point. I've already lost everything, and I don't really think I can be hurt any more at this point."
"You have no idea how much I have lost. You can't imagine."
"I can, and I'm sure that he is also bleeding you dry, just like he did me. And I know that you have even more to lose financially than I did."
"It's so much more than that. I want to tell you, but I don't want to hurt you, and I don't want you to tell him."
"I promise I won't tell him. I never want to speak with him again. Can you please tell me?"
"I was pregnant. He wanted me to keep it. But I didn't want to. I didn't want that life."

Somehow, even though this was new information, I knew this in my gut. I nodded and said "I know." And I then began to cry. "I'm so sorry for you. I'm so sorry that you had to go through that."

"So that was why he left me one day in March, then? That's why you were in the hospital?" I continued.
"Yes. His parents called to let him know I was dying. I also tried to kill myself two times after that."

I cried again. "I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I almost killed myself too, last fall. He almost killed both of us."
She nodded.

"All I have now is my money. I have nothing else. My life is shattered," she said.
"I understand. I never had money, but he took all of it."
"I know," she said. "I told myself that he must have no money because he was sending you all of it, so I paid for everything for him."
"I knew that you paid for everything. I found the receipts for the flights. You even paid his way back to me. That was extremely kind of you."
"I paid for everything."
"I know he spent his money on child support and taxes--"
"He didn't pay any of that. I paid all of that. Because I thought he was spending all of his money on you."
I laughed. "Sweetheart, in the three years we were together, he paid for nothing. NOTHING. Not one bill. I paid for everything. We were both paying for him."

We talked about many things, most of which are a blur. But she really did seem to know all about everything. He told her as much, if not more, about his life than I knew. She knew about his exes, how he was also abusive to them. She was a victim in this just as much as I am.

"I can't imagine how you must be feeling. I promise you, I am not with him, and I will not be with him. I don't want him in my life. I want him gone. He's coming by to get his things later," she assured me.
"I don't want him either. Don't be alone. He can be so violent when he's angry. And right now, his entire web of lies has exploded on him. He must be short-circuiting. I can't imagine how angry he is. Be very careful."
"I know." She nodded.
"Call me or text me when he's gone to let me know that you're ok. I'm worried about you."

We thanked each other, and we apologized to each other again. We empathized, even though we were on opposite sides of the issue, we'd both been destroyed by the same force. She sent me love and hugs and kisses, and I sent the same back to her. She said to call any time I needed anything, and I told her to do the same.

He will not control us anymore.