Did you really trust the N in your life?

[pearlsb4swine]

More!!!!  He left you alone with a newborn and another son three weeks after a cesarean section?!!!!!  To go on VACATION?!!!!!! 

That takes the cake all right.  How you didn't kill him when he finally returned is beyond me.  What a horrible little Hobbit. 

I remember being mad at my xnh when he went out "for a drive" the day I came home from the hospital with my second baby.  He said he needed to be alone or something but really it was to get high.  And that was just a drive!  not freakin Japan!!!

And Legs,
I think my xnh was enjoying how blatantly he was fooling me......how dumb I was that he could be so brazen as to leave the evidence where I could find it with a click or two.  And he was so shocked when I told him what I had done!  It was kinda funny.  I actually feel a little sorry for his current gf.  She is in the same profession that I am in, and I am sure he zeroed in on her because of that.  Because he knew she probably had a relatively secure job and made a living wage.  Unlike him.  He likes his women to support him.

[MoreMyself]

More!!!!  He left you alone with a newborn and another son three weeks after a cesarean section?!!!!!  To go on VACATION?!!!!!! 

That takes the cake all right.  How you didn't kill him when he finally returned is beyond me.  What a horrible little Hobbit. 

Pearls, I did kill him, in an emotional sense.  There were times of calm after that when I'd drift along in the marriage , but during the bad times I was planning my escape.  I remember so clearly how I'd go into my garden, take out my anger on the weeds, and be thinking that I could wait it out, I could be patient, and someday I'd be able to get away and have a life separate from his.

Interesting commonality about the running away that our Xs did.  When my first son was born it was also a C-section but after 48 hours of labour.  My back was really bothering me in the hospital so on the third day I persuaded the doctor to let me go home, on condition that somebody would be with me at all times.  No sooner did the Hobbit deposit us on the downstairs couch than he announced he was going out - to a party!  Somebody at work was leaving.  Unbelievable.  I was too weak to walk up stairs to the kitchen to even get a drink of water.  The Hobbit was gone several hours.  If the internet had been around back then I might have been able to connect with people who would have confirmed my suspicions - this was not normal, loving, new-father behaviour.  But I was alone and had no concept of how wrong it was.

[Legs]

Omigosh........when I think about stuff like this that happened with Lucifer it makes me CRAZY! But what *really* makes me crazy is the way I concocted "excuses" for his behavior.....like "maybe he was really worried about losing me so he acted so removed", and etc................I could tell some stories but it would just be bitching and you all already know exactly what it's like.


I still think there's like a home-course they all sent away for with some box tops and a quarter...maybe like an encoder ring where you could input some normal behavior and then turn the ring and it spits out the proper n behavior


Legs

[rossignolchante]

"It's like you think you're a member of a team, but actually you're the only one on the team!"

I remember telling exNbf "You need to learn to cooperate!!!" if only I knew who I was talking to!

About the trust, I never felt fully relaxed around him, and I think that was my subconscious wariness.  I didn't sleep well, that was one big clue.

There were definitely signs before the big 'revelation' about his double life, things that I challenged, times that I actually begged him to just tell me the truth, I didn't care what it was, and he would lie and I would believe him.  And other things that I only remembered after the fact, like finding a lipstick in his car after he had gone back to his hometown for a visit, and asking about it, and him reacting defensively when I had assumed it was one of his female friends or his buddy's gf.  He actually said to me once that if I didn't trust him, then there couldn't be a relationship.  Which is totally true, and which, for some reason, had the effect on me of making me feel guilty that I didn't really trust him, so I put my distrust to the side and kept treating him as someone trustworthy.

As for the thrill of doing it right under my nose...well, my theory is that the only way he could be semi-normal in a relationship with me was if he could secretly know have that "I'll show her!" feeling of pulling one on over me.  Otherwise, I'm sure the r would have been completely unbearable because he wouldn't be able to tolerate a lot of what I expected from him (You need to learn to cooperate!) without showing some behaviour I would have found unacceptable.  So, talking to the OW in Arabic right in front of me, saying it was his buddy (and I would strangely feel jealous of this buddy, that is interesting to think about now), or sending her a text msg while sitting with me in Starbucks (saying that I was his religious cousin, and we were having tea...), or using my work computer to look at porn, posing in a romantic shot with me, wearing the ring that OW gave him, that one kind of symbolized the situation to me. 

He is so sick and I am so glad he is totally out of my life now.

[MoreMyself]

Notakennedy, warning bells are ringing as I read your post.  The pattern with the Hobbit was first the excuse of having to go on business trips.  Strange that he always looked for jobs that required travel or somehow persuaded his employers to send him on business trips.  The running away (as I came to think of it) accelerated and became more blatant over the years.  Once he even took a job without my agreement in the Gold Coast, only an hour and a half drive which is just a commute to a lot of people.  But he said it was too far and rented a place there for a year and a half.  In the last year of our marriage he announced he was going to live half of every year back in Canada near his real family.

Do you see an accelerating p0attern in your NH's trips?  And the Hobbit always refuted my argument that he shouldn't leave me alone by talking only about him, and how he hadn't been anywhere for a while, and how stressful HIS life was...  As I said, warning bells.

[alatariel]

Oh, geeze, girls, is it an N-pattern to leave after you have a baby or what?  dickhead bought himself a pair of x-country skis when our oldest was born, he planned to use his "paternity leave" to ski, by himself.  And he did.  Leaving me alone and completely isolated with a newborn.  No family, no friends, no internet.

[RB22]

I trusted him, and had to convince myself on many occasions he was trustworthy. 

Any time he dropped the ball regarding caring for me or our kids, his parents were all too willing to step up and help.  I like them, But I  see their role in his life as mess-picker-uppers, he was never told no. Well until he asked them for money to divorce me, that was when he got his 'No'.  At that point he was living with them, telling them he was supporting us, but we had no food, electric, water and gas (all from one company) had been turned off and they gave me the money to turn it on.  They also heard from me that this was a temporary separation, but he was asking for money to divorce me.  They also knew (cause he was living with them) that he was out late, overnight, and from what they heard from me.. started putting 2 and 2 together and it was coming up to 4 even though he was telling them it was 5.

I had things turned around on me... I didn't trust easily... and at some point in my marriage I stopped sleeping at night... I never thought it was because I didn't trust him... will need to think about that one.

 

[pearlsb4swine]

As for the thrill of doing it right under my nose...well, my theory is that the only way he could be semi-normal in a relationship with me was if he could secretly know have that "I'll show her!" feeling of pulling one on over me.  Otherwise, I'm sure the r would have been completely unbearable because he wouldn't be able to tolerate a lot of what I expected from him (You need to learn to cooperate!) without showing some behaviour I would have found unacceptable.

That's exactly it.  I think the whole dynamic with my xnh was that I would demand that he be human, he didn't want to be, but knew that he could not always argue the point--he knew I was right.  So he would acquiesce to a limited degree, but be filled with rage about it, and a lot of the lies and cheating and stealing stemmed from that.  He was a three year old child inside and I expected him to act like a man.

If I can hold onto that idea, everything else makes more sense. 

[Bruna]

Did I trust him?
Not completely, never 100%, always had doubts in the form of dreams.
In the beginning I trusted him enough to estabilish a relationship, soon enogh my trust instead  of growing, diminished over time. He's a sleazy slimebag so the reasons of my lack of trust weren't clear to me. They hang there, nameless, in my subconcious, I had a gut feeling at times of his deception, that was frightening, so frightening in fact that I chased it away from my head. Yet I contined to mistrust him never could make myself be totally open to him, self preservation prevailed and I never revealed my deepest secrets to him.
Due to his shallow nature he would use everything I had told him against me. Every little thing that he knew would hurt me would become his weapon during the silliest of arguments. Under such circumstances my trust eroded slowly. He was very convincing in his subtle games, but the tone of his voice or the expression on his face would betray something. Something I didn't have the words for: deception. That was a frightening thought, so frightening in fact that I chased it in the back of my head for a long time. But that mistrust hang there nameless nonetheless. He would declare his love to my face and stab me in the back. He raped my trust when I wasn't looking but I could smell a rat.
My heart hopefully is in the right place, unlike his... I loved Slimebag.
Love
Bruna

[lavender]

Early on I never used to trust him and clearly, yes sadly, very clearly remember saying to him that i had a very hard time telling if he was lying to me (I previously had no problems ever figuring out if I was being lied to).  Somewhere in my silly young mind I decided that to save myself the bother of trying to figure out if it was a lie or not I would just believe him.  Besides, he ALWAYS came up with an explanation blaming someone-else for  whatever it was that was bothering me about what he had done etc....and the rest is history...except now its my turn to string him along....