AHguy
First off, I think you’re handling the divorce/possible reconciliation really well. I think it’s especially important to hold her feet to the fire for honesty and to encourage real introspection. That’s the route my brother’s taken and it seems to be working for them.
In one of your posts you question how your wife could have been taken in by this guy, let herself get duped into cheating on you. From the way you describe her she’s smart, a business woman, successful in her own right. She’s not a fool, yet she wound up acting incredibly foolish.
With all honesty I don’t think any of that matters as far as a relationship with someone goes. You and her were each other’s firsts, from high school on. You’ve been married 25 years or so? Despite how she presents herself, or what she’s done, she has zero experience with men, other than you. What she knows from soap operas and romance novels doesn’t count. Now granted, as a real estate agent she’s probably been hit on by men more than you want to know, but she never acted on any of that (as far as we know). Because of that, she probably thought she had a good head on her shoulders and could handle a customer that was too friendly. And then she met the POSOM.
Her meeting this guy is literally like going rabbit hunting and running into a grizzly bear. POSOM isn’t some bored husband looking for a good time. This man is a predator. A sexual sociopath (if not an actual one). As far as starting and maintaining these ‘relationships’ go he has no remorse, no compassion, he will say or do anything for it because his self esteem is built on them. Look at how many women he had on the line in the last year or so? 5? 6 including his wife? This isn’t a fluke. This isn’t something he does for fun, or because he’s looking for a distraction. This is what he does. This is all he does. His entire sense of self worth is tied up in controlling and manipulating women. The money, the business, it’s his vehicle for meeting and exploiting women. His entire life is built around this. I guarantee you this man has never had an honest relationship in his life. He gets women, he uses them, and then moves on to the next one. He’s what 58? Odds are he’s been doing this his entire adult life, so 40 years or so. Almost as long as you and your wife have been alive.
And it’s not about the sex, it’s about the power, the control, the domination. You mention that he had a girl in a condo that he was paying the rent for. That’s not because he’s a nice guy, it’s to control her. Making her dependent on him is paramount to his ego and self esteem. Everything comes from him and she has to be grateful. This is why your wife got the contract from him, to make her grateful. This is why you got a contract, to make her more grateful. The whole thing with having you drive out to West Virginia? That was him flexing, not for you, and not even for your wife. I believe her when she says she didn’t know, because that made it so much better for him, a manipulation on a grand scale. It was solely for his own enjoyment. Having you drive her to him was a 100% ego trip for him and him alone. His comments to her afterwards were the same; incredibly funny to him, because she didn’t even know he had tricked her into humiliating her own husband. To him you were just a couple of country bumpkins that he could trick, and humiliate and the best part was that neither of you had any idea it was going on. It was all about him preening for the only person that matters to him; himself.
Again everything is for this purpose, to feed his ego. He uses money like a tool to get what he wants. Let’s both be honest, the sole reason your wife got the contract was because he wanted to sleep with her. That's when this really began. He went into this for the sole purpose of stalking and seducing your wife, it wasn’t because she was a good realtor, or was smart, or competent. He wanted her, and in his mind, he gets what he wants.
I’m not saying your wife is guiltless, she certainly isn’t. She admitted to you that when she got the tulip tattoo she wanted to open herself up to ‘opportunities’. I imagine she thought she’d try a fling. Again, she saw herself as a smart, sophisticated woman. She’d watched enough Sex in the City to know what was what. She had opened herself mentally to the idea of an affair, something small, just dipping a toe in and seeing how she liked the water. And then she met POSOM, like a teenager deciding to hitchhike down to the store and the first person that picks her up is a serial killer. A guy who has been playing love games since she was wearing diapers. 40+ years at this, how many other women do you think he’s tricked and manipulated? 100? 200? more?
You’re still in touch with the OBS, his soon to be ex-wife. It sounds like you respect her. She seems smart, determined, driven. Guess what? He fooled her too, just like your wife. Ask her why she married this guy. How did he trick her? Because he obviously did, and did it for a long time. If a woman as tough and smart as OBS fell for his bullshit what chance did your wife have? Again, not excusing her behavior. She betrayed the fundamental trust of your marriage, but she got played by a pro, and played hard. Run what I’ve said about POSOM by OBS and get her take. I’ve never met the man, but I’ve met men like him. I’m willing to admit I could be wrong, but I doubt it.
Another thing. After reading the transcript of your wife’s final call with POSUM the part where he goes from lovey dovey, to absolutely enraged in .5 seconds, that really made me nervous. What do you think would have happened to your wife if she had been there in person? I have a feeling if you go back far enough, dig deep enough, you’re going to find at least one girl who told him no to his face and it didn’t go well for her. Healthy people can’t go from happy to I hate that quickly. Something is broken in this man and personally I think your wife was lucky she wasn’t assaulted, or worse. Again though, I don’t know the man, just how you’ve described him.
The other thing I wanted to cover was your confusion over your wife’s inability to fully accept responsibility for what happened. I know a lot of people have talked about blame shifting, or cheaters revising events to paint themselves in a better light as standard behavior. No one really talks about why.
Human beings are all pretty consistent despite all of us being so much different from one another. One of those constants is that we all want to be the good guy. We are hardwired to not only want to think of ourselves as good, but to help other people. We get a burst of chemicals in our brains that reinforces that desire. We literally become addicted to good deeds.
Your wife is no different. She created this image of herself where she was a good person, a good wife, a good mother. A church going, God fearing woman. Someone respected by her friends and co-workers, loved by her husband and children. And it was all a lie.
Again when she got that tulip tattoo she didn’t say she did it to cheat, just to ‘open herself to opportunities’ or some such. She says that because the truth, that she wanted to look into fucking other people, is just too vulgar to say. Good wives don’t do that sort of thing. It’s certainly not something a good mother or God fearing woman would do. No, it has to be phrased *just* right, otherwise she isn’t the hero of this story, there’s nothing heroic about breaking your marriage vows. When she starts with POSOM (can we just call him possum?) she tells herself it’s just a kiss, just a little fooling around. Then it’s just this once, the husband will never know. Then she starts to get feelings, get confused, and she tells herself she deserves this because you don’t pay enough attention, spend too much time at work, went to Canada to go hunting. Each step of the way there’s another reason, another justification. To continue she has to believe these things, because if she can’t then her whole self image is a lie, and she’s the real bad guy here, not you. If you look at Nazi Germany’s slow walk to the holocaust it’s filled with same self deluding nonsense. Each step justifies the next and down the hole she goes. Any rational person would poke a thousand holes in the cheater’s arguments, but they become real to the cheater because that little sliver of truth is enough for them. And in order to live with herself she absolutely has to believe each one of them.
So when you confront her she rolls out her cheater excuses because they are literally the excuses she told herself as she betrayed your marriage and has convinced herself are real. You ask why didn’t she divorce you and just move on? Because she loved you. All those little excuses and justifications allowed her to reconcile what she was doing with the fact that she still loved you. It’s bizarre and warped but it’s the same warped internal logic that leads someone to go from “I’m against the US military killing innocent people” to “I’m going to bomb a recruiting station (and kill innocent people)”. You’re thinking she did this because she didn’t love me, when in reality she did this AND she loved you’
Think about it this way, if she didn’t love you she wouldn’t be the mess that she is right now, instead she would have just walked away and soaked you for all the money she could get. Now that everything has been exposed, not just to you, but to her, it’s impossible to reconcile these two contradicting ideas anymore, she can’t love you and betray you at the same time. That’s where the breakdown and emotional collapse come from, because without the self deception the lie can’t survive.
Now that the affair has been revealed she has to admit that she loves you, and her affair was a betrayal of that love. There’s no place to hide now. She has to come to grips with the realization that she isn’t the good guy here. She was never the hero. She’s been the monster all along. The image of herself she’s built up over her whole life, the thing that drives her sense of self worth and purpose, that is collapsing. Every lie, ever deceit, every act of sex she performed with that POS, tears down the whole rotten thing. She isn’t a good wife, as your looming divorce proves. She isn’t a good mother, as her angry, disappointed children can swear to. She certainly isn’t a God fearing, bible reading woman. Her friendships, her business, her dreams of travel and exploration are all gone. She wasn’t a smart, worldly, sophisticated woman; she let herself get tricked and lied to by a senior citizen for more than a year. Even her family is slipping away. Instead of all those things she told herself, now she has to admit that she’s a liar, a hypocrite, a cheater, a fraud and a fool, and quite Biblically, a sinner. She has alienated the people who love her and care for her. Her whole life has been a waste. She is nothing, and has nothing. These are her real truths now. Every self deluding lie that collapses brings her closer to this awful admission, so she clings to the few scraps of illusion she has left and hopes you don’t force her to fully admit the truth of what she’s done. Like a drunk or a junkie though, she needs to hit rock bottom before she can start getting better.
I’m not saying this so that you feel pity for her, she brought all this down on herself. She found herself in a hole, and instead of climbing out, or asking for help, just starting digging harder. She needs a kick in the proverbial balls, which is why I think you going the route that you have, however unwittingly, was the best one to take. Bit by bit her lies and self absolutions are being stripped away, and as awful as that is for her psyche, it is the best thing for her and your relationship with her. Like your pastor said, it takes time, and work, but if she really is committed, she’ll eventually get there. I really do wish you the best. Even if you two never reconcile, this is still the best thing for her (and I do hope that you two eventually reach some sort of forgiveness and understanding)
As for you, you really need to cut back on the drinking my friend and start taking care of yourself. This isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. I didn’t know anything was going on with my brother and his wife until he really started drinking hard and literally wound up in a ditch. Other than some scrapes and bruises and a dented fender everything was okay, but it could have been a lot worse. Go to the doctor, tell them you’ve been under a lot of stress, you’re having trouble sleeping, eating, and you’ve been drinking a lot. Get your heart checked out. Men our age are more likely to die from a heart attack than just about anything else. Stress, lack of sleep, a bad diet, and heavy drinking just increase the risks. Yes I know you’re quarantined but you can do video conferences/appointments, or maybe something else. Start talking to someone now. It would suck for you to have gone through all of this just go tits up at the finish line.
Also, it sounds like you have an awesome support network to rely on, lean on that. Your mother in law has been through this, as had the older gentlemen the church sent to talk to you. There are also support groups for people who’ve been betrayed, though you may have to drive to a larger city for meetings. I’ve had my share of issues and honestly sometimes talking to people in person who have been in the same situation can be really helpful in shedding some of the pain you’re feeling.
That’s all I got man. Get some rest and take care of yourself.
Good luck and God Bless.
