Everything was a lie??? Authentic Feelings

kat,

that is so understandable!! i found with time (i’m 8 months in i guess), after about 6 months that i had a pretty good picture of what things were and what things could be.

their heads are so screwed up, it takes a while for them (if they make efforts) to untangle themselves a bit.

part of what i learned is that there is a large portion of who he is that i will never understand. i do understand parts of him though.

i understand that he is a narcissist. so that under the good guy facade, pretty much everything he does is to make himself feel better. which includes ‘loving’ me. he honestly does love me, in his way. his caring and tenderness were real to him.

but not real to me, because what is love for him, is not love for me. so sad.

give yourself time, kat, if you can stand it, it will become clearer…sigh.

Kat, this is one of those issues where there is going to be a lot of difference among the opinions you get from the sisters. There are so many variables. In my own case, no, I do not believe that I was his prey and I do not believe that the emotions he expressed over the course of our relationship were fake. My H and I were friends, even best friends for several years before we started dating so we knew each other at a level where there is none of the “acting or posturing” that goes on in the early stages of romantic relationships. We dated for 5 years, were engaged for 2 years and have been married for 23 years. There is no way that I will ever believe that he was faking it all that time, particularly during the time we were just friends. He has done terrible damage to our marriage, our family and our finances but he has also acknowledged that everything is his fault alone and is working to repair the damage. Will it work, is it fixable? I don’t know the answer to that but I do know and believe that there were many years of good, genuine love between us before things went wrong.

IMO part of what determines whether his emotions were fake or genuine depends on how he is acting now that his addiction or problem or whatever you want to call it is out in the open. Is he willing to admit he has a problem, has caused you harm and expressed a willingness to get help and to make amends or is he just blithely carrying on with no regard to you at all? A person with genuine love and caring for you will want to stop causing you pain. A person who wants to be in a healthy marriage will do what needs to be done to make it healthy. If he isn’t doing those things then you need to take a good hard look at your shared past to see if it WAS real or not. And also take a good hard look at whether you have set appropriate boundaries for yourself. Are YOU allowing him to continue do to things that hurt you without enforcing any consequences? Even if he genuinely loves you he will continue his sick behavior if you are not going to make it painful for him to do so.

Yes Bev, it is hard to forget all the bad stuff. Hard to forgive it too. That’s the part I’m struggling with right now. For me, we just aren’t far enough down the road yet for me to be able to know for sure whether he’s really walking the walk or just talking the talk. As I said, time will tell one way or the other. In the meantime, we are living apart and I’ve become used to being on my own. He’s working on his stuff and I’m working on mine. There’s no monitoring going on. I’ve told him I want the ability to check any of his electronics at any time and he’s agreed to that but since we are living apart I haven’t done so. Some days I feel like I can’t live without him and some days I feel like I can’t live with him so I’m just living day to day. Like you said – stay tuned.

We’ll day to day together Daisy! My money is on us:)

I have wondered if treating my 29 (divorced at 32) years with this man as all a lie was unfair. I want to be able to salvage something that is real. It just keeps turning out to be a impossible task.
Like when I found out that in our first year of marriage, after he dropped me off downtown at the cathedral for choir practice, he would go down to the east end and cruise the prostitutes (just to look, as he said). It just begins to be impossible to carve out any “chunk” of the relationship and not find the behaviours leaking into it, or underneath it.

This is why I can’t convince myself any longer that any of it was true and real and authentic. When he participated in those moments that I might try to hold onto, it was only for himself–for propping up his appearance, and for convincing himself that he was in a real relationship. Then, apparently, it was on to a public parking lot somewhere to masturbate.

I also believe in a person’s ability to change, and in forgiveness and second chances. I also believe that as long as we have played a key part in the lie–the con, I think it may be impossible for them to have a real and honest relationship with us. We may have become a piece of the crazy. It’s just another way to look at it.

But losing all those years spent together, with me investing all of myself in our present and our future, it overwhelms me at times. I can still tear up thinking about how all I wanted was to walk to the end with him, and have that shared life as the greatest treasure, next to our sons. I didn’t want or need anything else. No giant successes. No huge house. No pile of jewellry. No great vacations. No fancy cars. I just wanted us. It was all I ever wanted and ever asked for it. I just wanted us. And I don’t have it. I didn’t even know what it really was.

32 years ago in downtown Vancouver I jumped in the car after cathedral choir practice all excited about the new Mag and Nunc, the Rutter anthem, the Howells introit, and was driving home with an utter stranger pretending to be my husband. After thirty years if that, he became very good at the deceit.

What I have now, is knowing that my feelings were true. My moments with our boys were authentic. My times with our friends and family were real. But the moments I had with him, even when they were beautiful, were all a part his big con. I was alone in this marriage. I was alone.

I wish I could have stayed. A part of me truly wishes I could have figured out how to do it and stay sane. And being out from under his cloud of doom and gloom, his arrogance especially in his recovery, and his parameters for enjoying life and having pleasure—-it’s just way better this way. I can live my own life as if it actually was something that could count, that wasn’t just here on this earth to be sacrificed to the narcissist’s appetite.

So, while I may be called “negative”, I’m actually positive, but I’m positive for our lives. I think that’s how we find the way. We honour our lives, our worth, our place in the world, our gifts, our abilities, our dreams, our call to be good stewards of our life.

Do your best with life, sisters. We only get one.

Love what you wrote Diane. I feel much the same about my xh in our marriage, the marriage that I was only in. The marriage that really wasn’t. The marriage he faked for what he wanted, the narcissist meal. I love my kids with all my heart.

“I just wanted us.”

Me, too, Diane. And it hurts that I wanted most, what I put my whole heart and soul into, he cared the least about. And it never even existed. Pretty humiliating when you get right down to it.

Such a sad, sad post, Diane. I am sorry. “sacrificed to the narcissist’s appetite”…hmmm. How did you find out it went that far back? I so want to know how far back my husband’s stuff goes, but don’t know how to get that information. We are now at four years of disclosure, but I think it may go back much further. Definitely the height was the last 2.5 years and that’s when I noticed something was wrong, but I thought it was pornography.

I almost posted this on the “hanging around with prostitutes” thread but it goes here just as well. Being unable to accept that we married damaged, predatory men is one of the reasons we are all on this forum. Many are desperately seeking other explanations for behavior so vile it actually results in a woman developing PSTD.Have any of you REALLY stopped to ask yourself just how much one person has to violate another in order to create symptoms similar to what a solider of war experiences… what a earthquake victim develops…. what a rape victim endures???? Just WTF are these best friends, life partners, model fathers, executives and pillars of the community doing to us that our hearts are broken, our lives in disarray, our trust shattered and our homes in turmoil??? What does it really take to bring a person down to the point they no longer wish to get out of bed..to the point they do not want to go to work, see friends or feel able to care for their children?? What do you have to do to a woman to destroy her so completely she needs anti-depressants, anti anxiety meds, sleeping pills ,therapists, lawyers and a permanent spot in a support group to cope with the pain and grief??? When will we STOP minimizing what they have done? When will we STOP droning on endlessly about benign theories for why our husbands decimate our lives and families? When will we STOP accepting their crumbs as proof that they really are trying and “gee they had such a rough childhood too” ?? When will it not matter how things appeared through out our marriages…and when will it matter what actually happened throughout our marriages?? What kind of men want to fuck their mothers, fuck your friends, fuck other men, fuck in groups, fuck paid sex workers and fuck themselves while they stare at everything from child porn to beastiality to the walmart parking lot?? And more importantly…what kind of women are struggling to save relationships with these kind of men?? What’s up with the analyzing, the probing, the obsessing and the INCESSANT rationalizing of out and out deviance?? Big talks, long walks, separate houses, second chances, leaving and coming back, kicking him out and taking him back in, castigating him and coddling him, screwing him and rejecting him, eblaster and private detectives and furtive, midnight searching when we already KNOW what he has done and on and on and on and on…..
Bev said Kat has issues. I am saying we ALL have issues because being driven to the point of PSTD by the man you love and sticking around searching for a good explanation for it, is insanity by any definition. Wake up. These men chose us as their patsy and you can be damn sure they want to keep us as their patsy. We are what they hide behind, what they build their endless resentments on, what they use as their beard and where they lay their toxic blame. How much does someone have to hurt us before we grasp that pain is not love? How much does someone have to deceive us before we know they are untrustworthy? How much does someone have to betray us before we understand they don’t honor comittment? How much does someone have to knock us down before we recognize they will not be helping us back up. How much does someone have to treat us with disregard before we see we are not and never have been valued? The answer to these questions is…. “Apparently a great deal.” 🙁 This is the reason we are labelled as co EVERYTHING, because we refuse to accept that we could have got it all wrong…that the charming man we married is not charming. He lies and cheats and manipulates and hurts us to the point we feel we are going crazy. Do we leave? God NO. Do we get it. NOPE. Do we trust our gut? NO. Do we think our H is different…YES, YES, and YES. That is magical thinking ladies. How can they be different when they all do the same f–king things ( not talking about sex here)?? We are exactly like domestic abuse victims with our, “Well, mine was always nice to me while he was cheating on me. Well, at least mine is accepting responsibility. Well, at least mine is becoming a better father. Well, at least mine is being really understanding with me now. Well, at least mine always had hot sex with me too. Well, at least mine finally had std testing. Well, at least mine puts his paycheck in the joint account (thats mine), Well, at least mine only uses porn, doesn’t hit me, takes the kids to soccer and mows the lawn”…..Good grief …..None of it is even close to making reparations for the enormous cost to our mental and physical health, our loss of self esteem and worth, our shattered dreams and broken sexuality and damaged children. Their pathetic Johnny come lately recoveries, post discovery epiphanies and post kicked out of house crocodile blubbering cannot make up for their pathological selfishness….cannot make up for the years they stole. Can they?? And even if they act like saints, we have NO way of knowing what is true or what is just another charade.We delude ourselves if we think we can judge their current actions when we are incapable of judging their past actions.( and the significance of that behavior) If we cannot fully recognize the harm done to us, how can we protect ourselves from further harm? If our entire mandate is to vent while we search for new ways to just suck it up and keep going with them… we are dead in the water anyway. Acceptance of the reality of what they did is the key to surviving and moving on from this experience. As long as we sugar coat their behavior they have us where they need us to be. Myself, I don’t have any special clarity…none at all. I just accept what is right in front of my eyes. I KNOW that knights don’t breath fire and dragons don’t ride horses. These things are only possible deep down in the rabbit hole….a hole that we would all be well advised to steer clear of. Take what you need Karen xx

PS Penny a sms is a text message

Karen,
I agree with every word you wrote. It’s the raw hard truth. We can’t deny what we know to be true. Very heart felt and brilliant post. Thank you.
Love, Nap

God, Karen,
that was almost better than great sex with someone you love and can trust.

YES!!!!!!!