"both W-STBX and OW have told OWH and I that we should move in together so he can give her more child support !!! I kid you not - they are so fogged in they actually thought this was a reasonable request!!! FWIW, OWH and I aren't dating or anythign - we maintain contact primarily for information. They don't care - they just want to continue to make us responsible for any problems they might have which currently are financial."

What?!? That's so whack-o!!!! I would so be tempted to expose this fog-babble to other folks, right in front of the WS, just to let him see their reaction.

And what's really scary is the adulterers probably believe it's a perfectly sane and reasonable request! They probably even complain to each other about how 'mean' you and the OW's BH are to not cooperate...

Such examples of waywards trying to train the betrayed into accepting such sick treatment gives me the creeps - YUCK!

Meremortal,

You certainly gave me a lot of food for thought.

Sorry it took me so long to answer. My DH is registered here, he has posted a few times and sometimes reads my posts. I wanted to run a few things by him before I posted it. Not that he would care, but I didn't want him to be surprised by what I said.


This is where my former best friend played a role. She is the type of person who liked to gossip and she was always sharing with me stuff FOM's W had told her about their marriage. (My former BF is married to FOM's brother). I also should mention I did know FOM's W socially. To complicate things even more, besides the fact FOM's SIL was my best friend, we were all neighbors and FOM and I worked together.


Not at the time, but it hit me like a ton of bricks after I ended the A.

That is why I ended up on the other board I use to post on. I had so much guilt for what I did to my DH and FOM's W. I started reading a board for betrayed spouses because I was trying to understand how my H and she would feel if they knew.

TOS on the board was that OW could not post, so I ended up posting on a sister board for all sides of adultery. I was very foggy when I showed up there and very determined to take the A to my grave. It took me well over a year and getting beaten up on a regular basis before it all really sunk in. I was getting some of it, but not all of it. Posting there really helped me see exactly what I had done.

IMO, F(WS) who read here give themselves an advantage in the healing process. I'm not sure if I hadn't stumbled across that other board if I ever would have "gotten it." I learned so much, but mostly I learned to take a long hard look at myself.


My opinion of her based on what I know of her is she is nice, she is very religious and she was not very social with our group. Quite often FOM would be by himself because she didn't have an interest in joining us. She acted much older than she is. At the time of the A she was 45 and most of her friends were in their 70's and older. I got the impression she wanted to be old.

She tended to make snide comments quite often, but we all just sort of brushed it off as her personality.

Another piece of the puzzle is that our coworkers knowing we were all friends would ask me stuff about her. They assumed because FOM and I were friends and also with my friendship with my BF that I knew a lot about her. Like I said above, she didn't often join in our group activities. People at work would ask things like this, "What is up with her, she's really odd isn't she." or similar things.

This kind of stuff made it easier for me to justify what I was doing. It was OK because people think she is odd, it was OK because she made snide comments, it was ok because, because..... Only in all reality it wasn't OK, I was simply telling myself it was.


There was so much. I guess the big ones were I was sick of being treated like dirt by my DH and I was doing something for "me" (aka the selfishness)

Up until my A I didn't think I had a selfish bone in my body. I was pretty much the type that would give you the shirt off my back if you needed it more than I did. Our children were my #1 priority and everything was about them. I did very little for myself. As the regular friendship started changing to having secrets I started to change how I felt about me. I decided it was time to make things about me and not about everyone else. Only I took it to the extreme.

Wow that was a juggle in itself because even though I wanted things to be about me I felt guilty and was still doing for the girls. Now if you noticed I didn't mention my DH in any of this because there simply was nothing left for him. I had so much resentment for him that I had really checked out of our marriage. He was giving me nothing emotionally and I was giving him nothing in terms of his EN. For at least 5 years and maybe even 7 we had SF maybe 4 times a year.

I remember reading in books your marriage should be #1, then kids, etc. Our kids were always #1, but I also over compensated. My DH was as unhappy I was, but we never did anything about that. He was so crabby all the time and all he did was yell. The more he yelled at everyone the more I overcompensated to make things better. I would tell the girls he was working hard and that was why he was so crabby. I tried very hard to smooth things over all the time.

Of course DH didn't hide his crabbiness in front of anyone either. FOM quite often would ask me why I let him treat me the way he did and after the A took off quite a few times encouraged me to leave my H. He even came up with options for me to do so.

It was very easy for anyone to see my DH and I had a bad marriage. So even though we never discussed our marriages there was a lot to be seen around us.

Hopefully in this long post I managed to answer your questions. I felt I needed to share all of this in order for you to see the whole picture.

I still have to answer your questions about FOM's lies. I will get to that in a bit, right now I need to start cooking dinner or I will have some very unhappy family members.

Fair warning that will be a long reply, too.

LC

Meremortal,

Here are the answers to your other questions I didn't get to yesterday.

Sorry it's long (again)



Most of them were little ones that I saw more in hindsight.

There were times he would be telling me a story and I would just know whatever he just said was a lie. (those were the taps on the shoulder I referred to earlier). Most of his lies were very random. He lied about dreams he had with me in them (or so I assume they were lies). It seemed so made-up when he was telling me.

He would lie about his weekend plans. One weekend he was going out of town with his W, but when I asked him what he was doing over the weekend he told me he was just hanging out. HELLO, we lived in the same neighborhood. Did he think I wouldn't be able to tell he wasn't home all weekend when I could see his house from mine? <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/rolleyes.gif" alt="" />

He also told lies about himself to our coworkers. For example, one day we were talking at work and someone said. "I didn't know Dr. X also has a degree in psychology." Well I didn't know that either so I asked him about it, but didn't tell him I had heard it from someone else. He told me he did not have a degree in psychology, just took a few psych classes in college. (shoot didn't we all?).

He was very adamant his brother and SIL never find out and he "tested" me all the time to see if I shared stuff with her.

He lied about events in his past. This is stuff that would come out when my BF and I were talking about him (something we did a lot). She has known him since he was in his early 20's and knew a lot about his college day. He would tell me something, I would somehow work it in a conversation and she would tell me something different.

I have to give her credit because it was partly because of her I did not sleep with him. She use to tell me how wild he was in his college days, lots of one night stands and such. That knowledge was enough for me to keep my pants on. I know my sexual history and didn't want to risk catching something from him based on what I knew of him through her. He had told me he only had a couple of girl friends. We even talked about one night stands and he denied having any.

I did start to notice the lies more and more as I was getting ready to end things.

When the A ended and it was obvious our friendship was strained he told his brother (my BF's H) the reason our friendship fell apart was because he didn't like a practical joke I played on him. As far as I know his brother is unaware of the A and still thinks this is the reason the friendship ended.

For a long time I thought I was the only one he was lying to. What I also found out later is he lied to a lot of people about a lot of different things. Once he left our employer 2 years after the A ended people really started asking me things and a whole new can of lies were brought to light.

For a long time because no one would let the whole A issue die I had an incredible "need" to set the record straight. All the lies I heard after he left caused me a ton of anxiety to the point I had to stop working for a while to regroup.


I don't really know why I believed him when I "just knew" he was lying. I know there were times I would somehow work things into conversations with my former BF, things I knew she could verify and such. There were times she even proved his lies and I just let them slide.

I suppose I just liked hearing what he said to me. I had a H who didn't treat me well and FOM was charming and nice. He made it all about me and I was craving it to be all about me. Maybe I believed him because I wasn't blatantly lying to him.

Where I had my struggle with his lies is in the time frame between the ending and my confession. I had a lot of irrational thinking patterns going on and I literally fell head first over the deep end. Once I started therapy I got myself back in line and then I knew it was time to confess.

The more irrational my thoughts became the more magnified his past lies were.

Hindsight, I do believe he has cheated before. I never had his cell #, he said his W watched the bill like a hawk (red flag), he said if we ever went anywhere he would have to plan ahead and take a few dollars here and there to get the money. He's a doctor for crying out loud, he had the money. I suppose I was naive because when he told me the money thing I asked him why his W controlled his spending and told him he should just take what he wants. His reply was she is just like that. (missed that red flag). There were more.

After I had ended it and as time went on, where my issues continued is that FOM did his best to cover his butt in all of this. There were things he said at work that I found out much later that made me so angry. He made up things to others to make himself look very innocent.

After the A was over he got very smug about things. I got the impression he thought he was smarter than everyone else. I had people asking questions about our friendship and anytime I told him what people asked he told me I was lying, no one noticed anything. He was in very deep denial because everyone knew and they knew for sure when it ended. He denied anyone knew until the day he left.

I was in the middle of my mental breakdown from the guilt and had to field all kinds of questions from the other techs. Then I would go to him, tell him what people asked and he in turn would tell me I was making it up. It made my head spin. Of course no one ever said anything to him because being a Dr he was an "authority figure." That use to just drive me nuts. I finally just started telling people to go and ask him. No one ever did.

Here is one lie he told that really set off my DH when I told him about it. This happened just prior to my confession and was partly why I chose to confess.

FOM and I had a very heated exchange and my boss was dragged into it. I was sure he was going to go to admin after what I did to him. Coincidentally, I was working the day after the heated exchange. Our boss was talking with FOM and mentioned to him that she was nervous I was going to quit over the incident. His words to her were something similar to this. "Oh don't worry, I will be professional and LC won't quit anyway. As much as she says she doesn't really need to work she HAS to keep her job in her back pocket because her and her H are having marital problems." Ummmm, what he didn't mention was he was part of the equation there. This made my DH angry because not much before this exchange occurred FOM asked that we be private and discreet with the info, yet he wasn't being such.

This was something my boss shared with me many months after it happened. Apparently these events bothered her for a long time and one day asked me if we could talk about what happened that day. It's best I didn't know about it when it actually happened because I probably would have come unglued. I was still emotionally unstable when this occurred.

After my boss shared this with me I shared it with my DH. DH then confronted FOM and FOM denied saying it.


I don't know, maybe it's because they are a bunch of little ones that don't seem like much until a person really starts to add them all up. I certainly didn't want to add them up when actively in the A, that would have put a hole in the fantasy bubble.

LC