SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Did you discern low selfesteem or sense of brokenness in wayward before marriage?

[This message edited by MidnightRun at 11:43 PM, November 14th (Tuesday)]

Yes.

Fuck yes.

But, as embarrassed and ashamed as I am now for ignoring some of these flags, I gave her the benefit of the doubt that it was her past and she was genuine in her sense of family and marriage.

Holy shit, I could not have been more wrong.

In hindsight there were many red flags. More than anything I see how WW mirrors those she feels closest to with her behavior. She is incredibly easily influenced.

When she would go visit her parents for the weekend she would come back like her mother. Took weeks before she stopped behaving like an absolute bitch. I grew to dread those trips.

When she started the new job she began to mirror OM shortly. Even to the point her ultimate boss pulled her aside and asked about the change in her. Was all downhill from there.

The key thing to remember is that it's not your fault you didnt see those things. You don't own their choices.

No I didn't. She was outgoing, joking, etc. There were other behaviours that should have been red flags though that I attributed to her just being an extrovert and lacking commitment but I rugswept and excused.

ETA: Turns out she cheated with 4 different men before we wed. She cheated on a former boyfriend with over 20 different men before we started dating. All this came out after DDay1.

[This message edited by steadychevy at 4:11 AM, November 15th (Wednesday)]

Yes of course but I never knew how broken or how capable of self destruction and dishonesty he actually was.

I thought he loved me and respected our M enough not to have an A or hurt me. I was very wrong, the old saying you have to love yourself before you can truly love others is so true.

I believed that love was enough and that was my own undoing. I’ve learnt love is a verb. I’ve learnt that M requires honesty even if this means conflict. I’ve learnt that redemption doesn’t happen overnight, requires consistency but is only felt in the present moment.

No, not at all. He was a good man and very anti-cheating since his mother had broken up their family after she cheated and married the OM about 5 years prior to WH and I meeting. He was still angry at her, and avoided seeing her much over the years but when he did, he was very civil toward her. The OM she married was horrible to be around, kind of controlling and sometimes out of line with his 3 much younger brothers. He never understood how she could cheat and destroy their family but he eventually did the same thing to me and our sons.

Now that I think about it, he also became very controlling (and our sons) and mentally abusive to me over the years, much like his step-father was. Maybe those traits, and the lack of character which allowed him to cheat, were there when I met him but he kept them in control because he didn't want to be like either of them???

Sure, I knew he had low self-esteem, but he was so sweet to me. He was still hurt about his ex-wife cheating on him, so I figured that wouldn't be something we had to worry about. We talked a number of times about that. He was an alcoholic, but a sweet and gentle one who paid his bills. I didn't nag about his drinking and I appreciated how sweet he was. It was like a balm to my soul to be loved like that.

The truth is that he was an emotionally-distant father, an emotionally-distant son, had a couple of friends but wasn't especially close to them. His closest relationship was with his brother and that was mostly because they drank together. But see, I was "special". He bonded with me so closely and we were so inseparable. He wasn't distant with me because I was "special" and our love was "special". You'd think I'd have been wise enough to see that my "specialness" would wear off at some point and I'd be treated like everyone else in his life, wouldn't you?

I knew there were characteristics in herself that she didn't like, but those were the things that hooked me. For example, she refused to dumb herself down to catch a man. I thought that meant she had high SE. I was wrong.

I admired her morality for decades. During her A, I realized she acted morally mainly because she was afraid of the consequences of breaking rules and getting caught.

Her SE is still low but improving, but she's changed her behavior. She does at least some right things for their own sakes, not because she fears pain for doing a wrong thing.

Without a doubt or reservation : yes

No...but we were basically kids when we got together and early 20's when married. Big difference between people being 20 and 35 age wise.

Yup. At first I mistakenly took it for something else, uncomfortablility in a new place (she had just moved to my hometown before we met).

Looking back she was broken, and looked for happy and confident people (men mostly) to build her up. She also hid her low self esteem behind a mask of "I'm independent and don't need anyone to take care of me". Ultimately if she was so secure in herself she wouldn't have lowered herself getting her pride built up by less than desirable male interest, let alone to her "prize" of an AP, a live in the basement with my mom type of loser alcoholic bartender.

T/J - wedding reception scene from The Hangover has now started to make me laugh hysterically. "When you fucked that waiter on your cruise last year! Oh! I stand corrected, it was a bartender, you fucked a bartender!"

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4NvFgoAKOhI

He was very sensitive and broken when I met him due to his own broken family. Always promised he would never cheat because his father destroyed him by cheating on his mother. 20 years later, he forgot that pain and did it to me. I never knew much about infidelity. My parents marriage is close to perfect and no one has cheated in my immediate family. It destroyed me.

Yeah, I had some idea that her self-esteem was low. Didn't really catch that she got such an ego boost from men though. She hid it very well.

Reading through her diary from her early 20's before i ever met her has been an eye-opener. She had problems with cheating on her boyfriends all the time then.

I never ever knew that. If i would have It would have made me approach things much differently.

Actually I was the broken one - not WW. And I felt so incredibly grateful and lucky that someone as wonderful as her would even consider being with someone like me.

Maybe that's why I didn't cheat and she did. Maybe she finally realized that I wasn't worthy.

No signs of anything. Not a clue. Never expected he’d be a cheater.

Twice. That I know of.

Very flirty and LOVES the attention. I believe there were more EAs than I know about. He travels extensively all over the world. I now suspect he took advantage of those opportunities.

Of course he won’t admit it but after two A you cannot tell me otherwise. And since I was home and was in a hotel for weeks at a time (definitely days at a time) I have no way of knowing or any proof. Not that I need it.

It’s just sad how I think of him now. A cheater. A lying cheater.

There certainly were red flags, many red flags. That of course is easy to say in retrospect.

He seemed so sad, was living in a "flop house", seriously.

He had such good stories for it all though and I fell for it. I wanted to help him and felt so badly for all he had been through.

The twist of it is that the "bad times" he had been through did not happen to him. He was not the "victim", in reality he was the perpetrator.

I was so naïve and trusting. It never occurred to me that he was lying. His family knew his history but no one told me. His brother's wife finally started filling me in after the 1st time he walked out. She thought I knew because he said to his family that he had told me everything.

I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around it all.

I am much more cautious now. I listen to not just the things people say but the qualifiers. I remember one time saying to his sister, "he is such a good person". Her reply was, "yes, he has changed so much since meeting you". I guess I should have asked her to explain then! I just thought, what an odd thing to say.

In some ways yes. But mostly no.

He was so black and white about cheating. Like I would never, oh it's a deal breaker, blah blah. 3 ddays later I think back to what was that load if shit he fed me?!? I felt so safe with some one so certain that cheating was wrong.

Yes, but these behaviors were "harmless", his heart was in the right place, he was a "good guy".

Joke was on me.

I'm with nightmare01.

I think anyone who ever met us, if pressed, would have pegged me as the potential cheater.

I never thought he was perfect, but I did not have the slightest hint of his terrible boundaries before this, because nothing had ever ever happened. He's prickly and standoffish. I don't blame his AP but she had to put in a whole lot of hours just to get past the Lukewarm Apathy stage of his acquaintance.

I just felt so lucky to have him, and that was evidence-based, not sappy love-is-blindness.

I was the one with low self-esteem. He was the one who had just returned from a mission trip when I met him. He's the one that said not to marry him if divorce was an option, since he didn't believe in it. His perfect family ends up being dysfunctional, led by a narcissistic mother who had been abandoned by a serial cheating husband. My WH was the lucky one chosen by his mom to replace his father emotionally. If I had self-esteem back then (26+ years ago), I would've run for the hills! But they were masters of deception, masking their insecurities like the pros they are.