The community’s unpacking of my WF’s letter was precisely the cold shower I required to read my WF’s words with the insight required to overleap all of the nonsense, manipulations and prevarications within.
My challenge was to somehow retrieve the engagement ring whilst maintaining my NC with WF. So, late on Tuesday night, I emailed WF’s father to say that I had received his daughter’s letter and that while I appreciated it (ha), I felt that by not returning the ring she wasn’t really respecting the boundaries and parameters I had established. He wrote back first thing yesterday morning and agreed to this, asking me to meet him for lunch at an (unsurprisingly!) exclusive restaurant.
Boy oh boy what a family. So, for one, while he did have the ring in his possession, he neither showed it to me nor even confirmed its presence until about halfway through the meal – which I found manipulative. The first half of the lunch was spent talking about quite literally everything but the 700-foot iceberg lurking beneath the surface of the waters. But then, as said, he did produce the ring and gave it back to me with great ceremony.
He then continued with blaming himself for his daughter’s problems, whilst telling me that her mental health is under great threat due to the complete shock she is experiencing at being ‘denied something she wants’ (me, apparently) for, ‘truly, the first time in her life’.
Things turned sour between us, though, when right near the end I leaned back in my chair, appraised him carefully for 10-15 seconds (which made him impressively uncomfortable), and then said, “You know … let me tell you something. By the time I was 13—and its possible I was even younger—my mother had inscribed in me a powerful mantra: ‘Take responsibility for your actions’. Because, when I was younger—as in: not even an adult—I was gifted at finding ways to shift responsibility for things I did wrong onto other people or other excuses. My mother taught me before I was in high school that it is very good, very liberating, to own up to our mistakes. Indeed, it is even empowering.”
He seemed torn between anger and embarrassment, and there was a long silence between us. I then gently nudged across a photocopy of his daughter’s letter to me, saying, “I am sure you haven’t read this.”
It was clear to me that there is no way he could have read it in its entirety. He just crumpled it up and rolled it back across the table at me. Then, in easily the most sinister voice possible, he said, “If you can’t take your fiancée’s truths at face value, then you two have no hope of reconciling this unfortunate temporary situation.” When I looked at him, totally gobsmacked, and said nothing, he then said, getting up to leave, “It will please me to see you two back together. I don’t appreciate the way you have spoken to me this afternoon and, frankly, I thought you had considerably more class than this, but I underwrite it to the grief you are experiencing. You need to do the right thing, here.”
And so I asked, “And that is …?”
And he just stared at me for about 5 seconds, said nothing, went to pay the bill at the front, and left.
So that could have been my father-in-law …
Back in actual reality, I had an amazing coffee with OBS a few hours ago.
It was tough because I told her about my WF’s letter (I chose not to show it to her for a wide variety of reasons I am happy with), and she then proceeded to tell me her (AP) husband’s version of events. And it was … incredible. It was ostensibly my WF’s letter, but with the blame shifted onto her: he, the victim, she the aggressive predator! Oh, and that she (WF) was justifying it all because I am ‘emotionally abusive’.
Beyond the brutality of that, it was clear from her timeline, the affair was probably well underway as early as June 2020. He (AP) had certainly fessed up to little things from around that time – though each event being under the banner of my WF acting as the predatorial agent of influence and temptation.
When we both got through each others’ tales from the crypt (!), something amazing happened: we both just started laughing: nervously, at first, then sort of immature giggling, then actual crying laughter. It was … beautiful. Cathartic. It was, honestly, the most freeing and light a feeling I have had in months.
She then started crying a bit, though, just saying she had no clue what she was going to do. But she knows that he is as sick as my WF and that she has to extricate herself from him, somehow.
So that’s it.
I don’t know … as uplifting and empowering as the last 48 hours or so have been, as I sit and write this and conclude this post, I am nonetheless suddenly engulfed in sadness, loneliness and a sense that I will never properly recover from this and will never be able to trust again.
I am not taking my WF back; that is for sure. I am in the process of drafting a once-and-for-all final letter to her, politely asking her to leave my life forever.
What a mess.
And, as I have asked before, and again and again: ‘What was all this for?’
