Posted this on /r/Relationships yesterday. Post got locked for some reason, but before that someone suggested posting here. Hoping to get some more specific advice other than "Get a lawyer", specifically because I said I don't have a lot of money to spare. I now understand I DO need a lawyer, but the HOW of affording one is one of things I'm looking to find out from this group. I also realize I (and she) will need therapy, but as individuals (her for mental health reasons, I for trust issues, kids for coping). I'm not sold on the idea of a DNA test. Extremely long read, but it's also an extremely fucked up situation. TIA...
I've decided to finally divorce my wife...it's hard to say those words. But I know this is my only option at this point. I'll try to layout the situation here and then wait patiently for your advice on how best to proceed. This is not a decision I've come to lightly, it's been building for many years.
Basically, my wife has lied to me about everything from the moment I met her. When I say everything, I do mean everything. About who she is, events that have happened in her life, her infidelities, and her commitment to change. I've confronted her about some of these things before and even then, when I've had her at her most vulnerable and she confessed some of her lies to me and told me the "truth", I've since found out that they were just more lies. I'm not a psychologist by any means, but I am pretty certain she has Histrionic Personality Disorder mixed with a good helping of pathlogical lying. She seems to match every symptom listed. The tale I'm about to tell here contains some sexual language, so if you're not comfortable with that just be forewarned.
When I first met her, I was getting out of a long term relationship so I admittedly was just looking for a quick hookup. This was before Tinder and I didn't know about Craigslist personals section, so I turned to AdultFriendFinder. I was a cheapskate and didn't want to pay for the service, so I searched around a bit using her AFF handle and eventually found her IM name. I sent her a message and we began chatting. A few weeks later we decided to meet for lunch. Lunch was a success and followed that up with dinner, and a few more dates, etc. etc. She'd call me over in the morning for sex before work and we were hitting it off pretty well. She told me she lived with a male roommate so she'd wait to call me until he left so we could be alone. I never met the guy, but I didn't care. I had no reason to and in my naivete just let it slide. She did mention she was previously married and when that marriage ended (because he cheated on her repeatedly) she needed a place to stay and couldn't afford to live on her own, so hence the roommate.
One night not long into our relationship I was out getting dinner with some co-workers while we were working on an overnight project, I got a call from her in hysterics. She called me seemingly inconsolable. She said she found out that the man who raised her (we'll call him Italian dad) was not her real father. He was a man her mother had been dating while her real father was in prison. When her father got out of prison he was introduced to her (as a child) as her uncle. Real dad stayed out of the picture while Italian dad played the role of father figure. Italian dad got angry at mom and the whole situation and couldn't handle it anymore and let it slip that he was not her real father, etc. etc. and that Uncle Dad was her real dad. I had not met any of her family at this point, even though she'd met all of mine and most of my extended family as well. Sidenote: I call him Italian dad because she said she spent summers in Italy with Italian Dad's parents (who lived in Italy) when she was old enough to travel as an unaccompanied minor through her high school years. I'll revisit this one later.
I was impressed with this woman. She had a bachelor's degree from the same university I went to (though from a different campus) and then went on to get her master's from Columbia in NYC. She worked in her field for a few years before getting burned out and just fell back to working in retail because it was so much less stressful. She loved me and I loved her. She decided she would go on the pill because sex without a condom is so much better for both of us. And then....she's pregnant.
I am nothing if not loyal and honorable. What I didn't tell her was that I had already mentally decided I would ask her to marry me, but I wanted it to be romantic and so was going to wait for the perfect time to ask. But as her pregnancy hormones raged a few months into the pregnancy she was sobbing uncontrollably and convinced I was going to leave her. After learning of the drama with her dad I could certainly understand her feelings of being alone or abandoned. Add to that her Catholic guilt of being an unmarried single mother and she broke down. And so to rescue her, I decided I couldn't wait any longer. I had to calm her, and so I asked her to marry me that night she had this breakdown. I didn't have a ring, we were in our living room, she was sobbing out of her mind, and I felt bad for her. No romance there. Oh well....
Our son was born and we were getting our new life established. It was a hectic time as any new parent can attest, but we still made time for each other whenever we could manage. Throughout the early days of our relationship she was active in an online chat system that was predominantly sex oriented. She explained that she'd been part of that community for so long and had made some really good friends through there. I could understand that sense of belonging, as I had my own online "community" I was a part of, although not sex chat related. I had no reason to distrust her and told her that was fine. I even helped her make some sexy avatars to go along with the site's theme. She was really into sex and that really turned me on, so I wasn't complaining.
But then...things started to cross boundaries. I wanted to keep my wife happy, so I stayed quiet and just pretended I didn't notice certain things. One of the first of these incidences happened a few months after our son was born. I came home from work and found her masturbating in our bedroom. My first thought was, "Wow, this is hot. Time to get it on." As I stepped into the room I could see her slyly put away her phone and as she's doing so I hear a male voice on the other end. She was having phone sex with some guy. Ok, play it cool, she's amped up and ready, just ignore it, so I did. But I couldn't forget it. Over the next several years (including the present) there would be several more instances of strange phone calls I overheard when she thought no one was listening. She would tell these guys fantastical made up stories, inventing elaborate alternate lives for herself and her family. One conversation in particular I heard her having through a closed door was telling how she was a widow and that she was spending some time with her family at their ski cottage in the mountains to just get away from everything for awhile after the stress of burying her husband. And this was normal for her! Every time (and there have been many times!) she has an entire alternate persona that she keeps up with these men. Sometimes using real names, sometimes made up. Sometimes using partially true information for her story, but typically completely made up. I have no idea how she can keep these dozens of plot lines straight from one day to the next and often with multiple people at once; it's mind boggling!
I realize I'm getting a bit long-winded here, but I wanted to establish how fucked up she is. I'll skip ahead to some of the more recent and more aggregious violations of our marriage. So three years ago I was away for the weekend, but not terribly far away, visiting friends. Typically when I do this (a couple times a year) I just stay overnight there because they are generally very late nights and I'm too tired to drive. But this night I had a nagging feeling that she was up to no good; by the way she was acting and texting me, offering up details for things I hadn't asked about, being overly verbose about everything going on with her night. She's not like that with me normally, so something was off. It was 1:30 or 2:00AM and I decided I needed to go home that night. It was only about an hour's drive, but I'd get some coffee and be fine. One of the details she offered up was that one of her friends (who I'll call Jane) had come over that night and she had brought some pot with her that they were going to smoke (I've never done any drugs ever and am vehemently opposed to taking anything illegal and she knows this). She texted again later and let me know that Jane would be staying the night because she was in no condition to drive. So I get home around 3:00AM and there's no other car in the driveway. I look around and there are no cars parked on the street near our house either. Where's Jane's car? So I go inside quietly just in case I didn't see the car or my wife picked up Jane earlier in the evening, expecting to find Jane asleep on the couch. What I found on the couch instead is what appeared to be a dried semen stain and a very loud snoring sound coming from upstairs in the bedroom. I quietly made my way upstairs to our bedroom and confirmed my hunch that drove me to come home that evening. Lying there in my bed next to my wife was a strange man that I'd never seen before. I was in complete shock and felt like my world was ending. I went across the hall to my daughter's bedroom (we have a daughter at this point as well, but both kids were spending the weekend at my in-law's, another red flag since I was away that weekend, why also unload the kids on them when they don't exactly live nearby?) and just sit there with my head in my hands for what must have been at least 30 minutes or more contemplating what to do next. For as calm as my initial response was, I decided I couldn't be calm any longer. I went in the bedroom, flipped the light on, and punched the guy in the head as hard as I could. In fact I punched so hard my wedding ring flew off of my other hand (a sign perhaps?). I grabbed him by the legs and pulled him out of my bed telling him to get the fuck out of my house. I'll skip some of the details here, but looking back on it, I don't think he knew she was married. He seemed generally surprised that I was there. To top it off, he didn't drive there (hence the lack of another car) and so I had to reluctantly allow my wife to drive him home. I wasn't thinking clearly at that point or I'd have made him walk home or get a cab. When she returned home we sat in the kitchen and talked until the sun came up. She swore up and down that nothing happened and they just got high and fell asleep. The thing was I didn't catch them in the act, I couldn't prove anything. Magically the stain on the couch disappeared after I finally fell asleep later that day, a picture of us on our honeymoon that I pointed out was missing from our refrigerator re-appeared.
I had many doubts about her, even before this, of details of her life that I just never brought up because I felt they weren't important or worth starting a fight over. But at this point, I had to ask her flat out just to see if she'd tell me the truth. One insignificant thing was the high school she attended. She's always claimed to have gone to a certain Catholic school in her town but I couldn't find any evidence of this, and actually believed she went to the public school district she would have lived in (one of the worst districts in the state). I didn't care what school she went to, I just wanted to know the truth. She maintained that she went to the Catholic school. Ok, whatever, that isn't really important. What I really wanted to get some truth to was her roommate when we met. Over the years I picked up little tidbits about the roommate that never added up. Things that coincided too much with details of her ex-husband. I said, "I don't think [roommate] is a real person. I think [roommate] is actually [ex-husband] and you were married when I met you. I think I was the other man that ended your marriage!" Denial. She had a story for this too...some of the details changed slightly, others elaborated on, but she had the bases covered and I had no proof other than a hunch. Eventually, I forgave her and told myself I needed to trust her again for our relationship to survive and for the sake of our kids, so with our foundation shaken but not broken, we moved on.
About six-eight months later is when I heard her conversation/phone call with the guy claiming to spend time with her family in the imaginary ski cottage, etc. (she's never skied in her life, her family is poor, there is no ski cottage). When she hung up that call I was standing outside our closed bedroom door where she was taking it and told her to go back inside. I warned her that I heard everything she was saying and I wanted it to stop. She at first denied that the call ever took place. I mentioned specific details of the call and then she knew she'd been caught. Always a lie with her, that's her first and only self-defense mechanism. Another six-eight months go by (this day happens to be my birthday) and I'm working from home. She's also off that day for some reason so we're both at home and she's been feverishly texting all day with yet another guy. How do I discover this one? She handed me her phone. Yep, she's also not very good at hiding her tracks. We've had separate cell phone accounts for awhile and we finally decided to combine them onto one service. My carrier was the better deal, so she would port her number to my account. While we're both home we decide it's a good time to do the port since her phone would be out of commission while we wait for the port to complete over to her new phone. She hands me her old phone, I do a backup of it so she can maintain contacts, pictures, etc. While I have the phone in my hands I receive a few txts from a number I don't recognize and it's not saved in her contacts either. The port is taking a few hours (as it always does when switching carriers) and she's growing increasingly impatient (obvi she didn't want to stop chatting with this new guy). Port eventually completes and all of the queued text messages come pouring in. She takes her phone and starts repsonding....hundreds and hundreds of them in a single day. On my plan (that she's now a part of) there is no unlimited texting, you pay for each message. I check our account usage the next day and I see the hundreds of messages and ask her about them. I tell her to knock it off, it's costing us a hell of a lot more money than it should. Eventually find out it's yet another guy, I can't remember the resolution because frankly, it's happened so many times they all blur together at this point. Confront her about it yet again, she promises to stop...again.
Three more months go by and now I'm in full paranoia mode. I check her phone whenever I'm able to, reading e-mails, texts, looking at pictures she's taken...find a few nudes that she sure as hell never sent to me. Long story short (haha, yeah right) she ends up meeting a guy for lunch and then they later go to a nearby park. A message sent after their lunch date has her wishing there weren't so many people around in the park so they could have done more. That's it! I've had it! She calls me for something later and I can't hide the fact that I'm pissed with her. I leave my office so I can talk in private and I let her have it. I know what she's been up to, I know about the lunch date, the park, everything. Flirting with someone through texts/e-mails/phone calls is one thing, but it's entirely different when you're going on dates with these guys. She breaks down crying, fearful that our marriage is over. I relent...yet again (I said I was loyal), but warn her that there will be no more chances. This is it.
That last chance took approximately eight months (at least until I caught her, maybe sooner) but that nearly brings us to present time. Did you know you could message people through Yelp? She did apparently, and was chatting up some local guy through that. That's where I found her first most recent round of shenanigans. From there she moved onto using Kik Messenger. She posted on Reddit looking for Kik Pals, and it didn't take long for her to snare a few. I haven't been able to closely follow her activities on Kik but I know she's been in regular communication with at least two and their messages are not exactly "just friends". Again, the other day she needed me to do some things with her phone because of problems she's been having and I quickly found a folder containing all pictures and videos she's sent through Kik...extremely explicit material. But this discovery was after I decided to divorce her.
You see...ever since that night I came home early and found her in bed with another man, I've never been able to truly forgive her. It's always been there eating away at me. No matter what I tell myself, that I can trust her, that I need to trust her, that she really does love me...I know she would always fall back to lying and mistrust. The last several weeks for no specific reason (other than the culmination of the years of lies), I finally decided I couldn't take it any longer. I debated back and forth on whether this was the right thing to do and then, I pressed Send...I wrote a "letter" that I sent to her ex-husband via Facebook messenger. I had no idea if he'd even see it, let alone respond. But I had questions that I needed answers to before I made my divorce decision and he had nothing to gain or lose by being honest with me. Within 30 seconds, I got the "Seen" notice. Another minute or two go by and he reponds, "Well I am sure she has lied to you about me and my past too. Let me just say that right from the top." Holy shit, this is happening. We proceeded to chat for the next hour and a half about everything. He even wants to meet me in person so we can talk more. We have a quid pro quo conversation about everything I've ever wondered about her and things he's wondered about me.
To summarize:
- I was the other man! They were still married and living together when I met her.
- The roommate is a complete fabrication. I did a public records search on Spokeo and did find someone with the same name as [Roommate] who lived on the same street as one of my wife's old addresses, but [ex-husband] didn't know who he was so, weird coincidence or neighbor that he didn't know?
- She knew who her father was all along. Italian dad was completely made up. Those summer trips to Italy? Never happened. She visited there once on a school trip, that's it.
- Speaking of school, yes, she went to the public shool I had suspected for quite some time. She's not even a Catholic! Where'd she go during that period she claimed to be going to Sunday mass? Probably on more dates with random dudes! Oh and the two degrees she claimed to have? After catching her with lunch date dude, I demanded to know truths to the lies she's been telling me. One that she offered up willingly was that she had no degrees. She said she attended both schools, but never finihsed either one. [Ex-husband] informed me that she never even attended either of those schools, just one semester at a local college and that's it. So even when "confessing" some truth to me, she just told me different lies!
- She's pulled this same shit with [ex-husband] repeatedly!
- Ran up his credit cards and left them unpaid (relatedly, basically drained my 401(k) through loans and early withdrawals she talked me into doing)
- Do I need to keep going on!? Everything is a lie! All of it I've said here and I've only begun to scratch the surface! There's more, but I don't have time in my life to go over the dozens and dozens of transgressions. Well, maybe one more. One story she's told countless times is that she lived in New York City during 9/11 (you know, while not attending Columbia). She told of how the attack happened while she was in class and the fear and panic everyone in class experienced as it happened. About how she knew a few people working at the WTC as interns for various companies and that some of them never made it out alive. To go along with this, she's told me a few times that she worked as an intern at the New York Times and the day after the attack she got a shared byline on one of the front page stories that ran on the 12th, even going so far as to once say that story was nominated for a Pulitzer prize. All of it lies...[ex-husband] informed me that they never lived in NYC. They visited a few times for some fun weekends, but never lived there. That is insulting to every New Yorker who DID experience the tragedies of 9/11 and it makes me sick.
So, I'm going to divorce my wife. There will be no trial seperation, I've already given her enough opportunity to change to no effect. There will be no counseling, I've had all I can take. I can never trust her again. I wish it didn't have to be this way for the kids' sake, but it has to be this way. I know that in the long run this is the right thing to do, but I'm frankly scared to death of the storm that's brewing and what hell we will all have to go through in the interim. I love my kids more than anything in this world and I want nothing but the best for both of them.
So now I've concluded my tale of woe and I come to my next chapter. Where do I go from here? How can I make this process proceed as best as possible? I don't have a lot of money, we've always lived week to week. If we can do this without involving lawyers that would be best I think...neither one of us could afford one anyway. Will she try to screw me over with the kids? I don't know. This is the uncertainty I'm facing and I don't like it. As weird as it may sound, I don't want anything bad to happen to her either. I have every right to wish her ill will, but I don't want to fight with her after this is all done. I need us to have a mature parenting only relationship after I tell her I want to divorce her and I need her to work with me to make as smooth a transition as possible.
Some hitches in this: Neither one of us has any family very close by. They're not too far away, but far enough that neither one of us could conceivably stay with them if needed. She is a work-at-home employee for her company and she's going to need to address that situation; I don't want her to be fired because she has no place to work from. Because she is a work-from-home employee, she's currently able to get our kids to and from school as needed. Any change in our living arrangement needs to take that into account.
I have been advised from a close friend who went through a divorce last year to wait until after the holidays just for emotional support reasons. Holidays alone really suck.... Plus this will give me some time to get things planned for (I hope).
So I ask everyone for your advice on what to do from here, any resources that could help guide me through this, and anything I can do to help my kids cope. I was 19 when my parents split so I could handle things as an adult. My brother was only 13 though and he really declined after. My kids are 5 and 8...I'm scared of how this is going to affect them more than anything.
Help me....please.
P.S. Before anyone asks, yes, she had an Ashely Madison account but I didn't need their big data breach to tell me that. I found that out during the debacle on my birthday. Just one of the e-mails I saw while I had the phone.
tl;dr: I've been lied to from the very beginning of my relationship about literally everything and been cheated on repeatedly over the course of 9 years. I've decided to divorce my wife but have no idea how to proceed with little to no money to spare for a lawyer. What should I do?
Submitted October 08, 2015 at 06:41PM by bubba_abobo http://ift.tt/1LB5rQG Divorce
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