Talked to another friend today who ran into him recently. She got the same "hopeful" story along with comments about how divorce is just a piece of paper, and he "has always loved TC".(Really? funny way of showing it) Then he went on to explain to her how women don't understand how the "Third Leg" needs constant attention and that he is making sure it gets lots of it. ( Yeah - THAT'S gonna bring me back - NOT!!!!! EW! )
This week he told my daughter outright lies about how, despite his encouragement, I refused to allow my own dad into my life after my parent's divorce and therefore destroyed his relationship with our kids, and forced him to remarry and have a different family.
What the heck?! I was ELEVEN when my dad cheated and left us to make a new family with his OW. When I refused to accept her presence on our daddy/daughter nights, he abandoned me for the next 20 years, until I invited him to establish whatever relationship was possible.
I am SO sick and tired of XH's revisionist history! And it all works toward garnering sympathy and support. Even my adult children are starting to believe his crap.
I was with him for 43 years, and I have yet to figure out whether he actually believes his own nonsense, or if he is just a master manipulative liar.
I believe mine rewrites history because it is easier to play the victim than own up to the reality that he crushed me.
There are times when he's being very honest with himself and expresses a very pained regret over things he did that ruined our marriage and "killed my joy" as he calls it. Those moments are rare and fleeting, but stem from guilt and shame.
I finally decided that I don't give a cracker about what he's saying. The people who love me will want to know the truth.
Interestingly, a lot of people have already sensed and figured it out just based on knowing us over the years.
I really hate when betrayed spouses on here state they don't want their kids to know what mom or dad did to protect them and not hurt them (the kids) the truth doesn't hurt, it the actions of the cheating spouse that hurts the kids, not the truth.
I think more damage is done by shielding your ex and his/her lies because your kids are believing those lies and actions as a normal everyday behaviors and either copy them or become attracted to someone with those behaviors.
I'll never forget a letter I read from some advice column where a woman wrote in saying how her parents divorced as a young child and her mother painted her father as a low life who ran off and abandoned them.
The truth came out after her father died and she cleaned out his house, she found all the letters that he wrote her that she never got because of her mother returned them, birthday cards, some presents, she was so angry at her mother for denying her a relationship with her father by lying and distorting the truth.
If your kids are starting to believe his lies because you want to shield them from the truth you're going to end up being hurt yet again by him.
That woman in the advice column wrote in because she was seeking advice because she had cut her mother out of her life because of her lies.
"The third leg needs lots of attention"...What the fuck?? Why in the hell would you ever say that out loud?
Me too. At the same time he is projecting that *I* am the one playing the victim.
My ex is definitely a liar. However, some of his lies he actually seems to believe making him delusional too.
It's disgusting that he is willing to say something like that. If he actually believes that a CHILD can make a grown man abandon him/her and go start a new family, he is a really sick POS!
[This message edited by Housefulloflove at 11:36 AM, September 15th (Sunday)]
My ex is both. He is completely delusional as to the history of our marriage even going so far as to tell anyone who will listen (which is a smaller and smaller group all the time) that he was miserable for our 20 years together, blah blah bullshit blah. NOBODY is buying what he is selling except for him and his slutface.
He just sat our son down to tell him about slutface and of course lied. So of course I had to set my son down and travel the path of truth. Was so easy to do- because the Dooosh is such a liar that he can't even recall things he has said or done in writing, but I sure do! And I always have the evidence to back up the TRUTH!
[This message edited by PurpleRose at 11:45 AM, September 15th (Sunday)]
Today I posed this same question to my eldest daughter and she replied: "I think he lies to paint himself as the entitled victim to any who care to listen, and then believes his own lies. " I think she's probably right.
As to the "third leg" remark - I seriously no longer know this man! WHO wants to hear that!? Certainly not my friend to whom he has not spoken in years!
What amazes me is how disgusting he has become and how much he has changed, and at the same time he still holds out HOPE for us to be together????! In THIS universe??
Recently, when cleaning the garage, my son came across a journal his father started a good seven or eight years before his terminal affair.
I didn't read much of it--really, I just glanced at it because DS insisted he was going to read it to gain insight into his loser father (my words, mostly). Well, that, and it is a cool leather-bound journal, and Trac-fone has the attention span of a gnat; there were only a few pages used, and DS fancied ripping out his father's few entries and purloining it for his own writing.
Reading the paragraph or two that I did cemented the need to expressly forbid DS from reading the journal--I used some sort of blah-blah-blah about privacy and the need to return it to Dad--but my concern had very little to do with that, and everything to do with protecting DS from the insane drivel the journal contains).
Anyway, during the only time of our marriage I would describe as settled and relatively content, he was already living in a parallel universe, where we were "marching inexorably toward divorce," and our kids were "constantly scrapping." (Seriously; this man wrote as though he were a Civil War soldier writing home, the language is so bizarrely stilted).
He was lying to himself years ago. Before ICs, before the shit hit the fan. At this point, I wonder if he ever lived in the same world that I did. I mean, I get differences of perception and all--but we're talking a HUGE departure from what was really going on. Could it be that it was his genuine experience? Sure. It was the experience of a negative, sick, distorted mind.
He bought the story he was peddling. Of that, I have no doubt. He really believes his tales.
He's a liar. And he's delusional beyond belief.
It's really kind of sad. He's got this transcript of a really unhappy life--and it could have been so much different if he'd expended a fraction of the effort he spent validating his lunacy on actions that actually brought him pleasure and improved his life.
They are lying to themselves. Maybe they want to really believe it. If they construct something like that to believe in, then they don't have to face themselves in the mirror.
Maybe they are/were clinically depressed and saw everything through shit colored lenses-- maybe they were really that unhappy--but I know from my experience my WH acted really happy, everyone we know, friends, family, our kids, me- thought we were happy. And he has rewritten the last 5 years to be so unhappy.
He thinks I was "a dictator" who treated him like the guy who is just supposed to take out the trash. I wasn't attracted to him. I just "settled" for him and was just in the marriage as a convenience. No one is buying any of what he is selling. Not me, not now, not EVER!
Except maybe the cheap, skanky pig who knew this guy had a beautiful life and family that were going to suffer greatly by this sleezy A and didn't seem to let it get in her way of "falling in love" with my H and ruining not only my family but her own....what a bunch of selfish assholes.
