Carrying trauma to future relationships
I’m struggling. My XWH was a serial cheater and I stupidly put up with it for 14 years before divorcing.
I’ve been in a relationship with my current bf for 3 years now, and I’m struggling to feel safe from infidelity. I’m trying to determine how much of that is my trauma, and how much is from him.
We have a friend group we hang with regularly. There’s a girl in the group, my close friend…I’ll call her Kristen. Early on in our relationship, I could tell my bf got a kick out of Kristen. She’s got a good sense of humor and is usually the one acting wild. It’s entertaining for sure.
Last fall, we were all hanging out..a group inside and a group outside. I was inside, but decided to go socialize outside. I walked out to see my bf with his hand on Kristen’s shoulder massaging it and they were in conversation. I was livid. He initially acted like it was no big deal but eventually claimed to understand. He apologized and told me there’s nothing there for K, he just thinks she’s fun to hang out with like one of the guys. 
Fast forward to a month ago, we’re all together in our big group and k was taking abt getting beads at Mardi gras back in the day. And my bf made the comment of wanting to see her boobs / would give her beads. I know he was trying to be funny but it obviously struck a nerve. Still, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to fight and I’m trying not to drag my past trauma into our relationship.
Then a few weeks later we were all together again. He and k spent a better part of the night sitting at the bar chatting about somewhat personal stuff, going into the history of their families, her lamenting abt how her father was an alcoholic, blah blah blah. This time a few other ppl in our group noticed and made comments abt it. I was pissed. We argued and he basically blew it off and acted like I was being ridiculous because clearly he has no interest in K…she’s just fun to hang out with like one of the guys. 
Last night we were all out and k was bitching about her husband and being mean to him publicly for much of the night. Coincidentally, my bf also ended up mad at k’s husband for some stupid joke he made toward my bf, and was not trying to hide his anger. At this point I get pissed because it feels like he’s only mad because k was mad. So I ask him why he’s being so crabby. He gets pissed at me and says he was just mad at k’s husband for the rude comment he made (which wasn’t a big deal).. and then asks why I "came at him".
I love my bf and he claims to love me but I’m at a point now that I don’t know if this can work. In his head he doesn’t see the problem because it’s simply a friendship and we’re all friends together. He makes me feel like I’m being ridiculous and controlling, like not letting him be himself or socialize with who he wants to socialize with.
I feel so broken from my last relationship I can’t tell if I’m being reasonable or not. I don’t want to be some desperate jealous hypervigilent person the rest of my life. But that’s how I feel.
Worse, this whole k thing is in my head now… and unfortunately I’m not sure if it will ever go away. Help!
17 comments posted: Monday, February 13th, 2023
Coparenting with the person who blew up your kids’ lives
Guys, I am struggling and need some input from people who understand.
The ex was a serial cheater, who also happened to be a disaster in many other ways too. Got fired from multiple jobs, did shady shit at a few, struck up inappropriate relationships at all of them. He was diagnosed as bipolar after our divorce, but I also believe him to be a sociopath. He checks every single sociopath box.
We are 60/40 joint custody, which feels so wrong to me. But I’ve been told my multiple experts that I’ll never get sole custody unless he is an "obvious danger" to the kids.
But you guys know- just because they aren’t an obvious danger doesn’t mean they’re good for the kids. Everyone acts like they just cheated on us, not the kids. Only those who’ve been there understand the depth of destruction they cause to their kids through this behavior, and that the kids are not somehow magically independent of this.
I hate that this is the man who has to be my kids primary male role model. He’s a pathological liar and a cheat, and is incapable of putting his kids needs above his own. All decisions he makes are abt him and feeding his need for power and ego. Of course I don’t want my kids to be without a father, but damn. Is it really better to have this mentally unstable broken man in their life just so they have a father?
I know I can’t do anything abt it and will never be the one to interfere with their relationship. But I don’t see how he’s really good for them. Or how I will ever heal having to coparent with him for the next 15 years. I feel constant stress, anger and resentment abt it all. I live in constant fear that he is going to make one of his characteristic stupid impulsive decisions that once again blows up our worlds. At a minimum, it kills me to think of him having any impact at all on the kind of people they turn out to be, because he is a terrible awful person. And I already see it happening. As an example, he shoves his political views down their throats and now my 12 and 10 year olds talk about how terrible one political party is versus another. Something they shouldn’t even be worrying abt at 12 and 10… or at least should be given the space to come to their own political views. Another example is he has scared them abt the Covid vax, and refuses to let them be vaxxed. I would force the issue but he has put this in their minds now and they are scared of it too and refuse to get it. And then the ex says that he bought horse dewormer (his exact words) in case he or the boys get it. He will just give it to them to get them better. I can’t tell you the horror and fear this filled me with and the fury which I unleashed on him for even thinking abt it.
Just looking for words of advice on how to navigate this utter insanity and ridiculousness for the next 15 years and yet still find happiness and peace.
Help!
7 comments posted: Sunday, January 23rd, 2022
Is my new beginning a dead end?
I’m hoping for advice about my new beginning.
We’ve been seeing each other 14 months, and have so many good things in our relationship. Amazing chemistry, similar humor, similar interests...and trust!
We both have kids. I have 3 from my marriage. He has two. His oldest was an oops when he was younger, and his youngest is from his marriage. His oldest lives in our area, his youngest lives 5 hours away, due to his ex moving her and the child away while they were still in the middle of their divorce. She told him she’d go broke fighting him in courts to be able to move their child. He didn’t feel like this was in anyone’s best interest, including his child... so he let her move him. He has a lot of regret and inner conflict there constantly from this.
At the 11 month mark, we introduced our families — with the exception of his son who lives out of state. It went way better than we could’ve hoped and we’ve since had several great weekends together with our families (his oldest + my 3).
It’s very difficult to see each other during any given week/wkd, because of two things. 1- he works nights and I work days and 2-we live 45 minutes apart. For the distance thing alone, it really only makes sense to see each other if we’re going be stay the night here or there.
After several times of us getting our families together, we finally did a sleepover with all of us. The kids had been asking a lot to do it. I slept with my kids in a different room than him and his kids. They had a blast. It was so refreshing and nice after what we went through with my exWH for all of us to feel some joy again.
With summer coming up, he’ll have his youngest visiting for all the holiday wkds, including a 2 week stretch in July. I tried to plan with him on doing fun stuff together with our families during some of these times, and he is ... reluctant. I invited him to bring his kids up to stay at my house on 4th of July, and said we could make a big day out of it with swimming and bbq, etc.. and they could stay the night here (again, each of us sleeping with our own kids and not each other).
He then basically told me that was out of the question, because his ex wife wouldn’t be ok with that. And didn’t give me much enthusiasm about getting together with us in general. This has come up before and at one point he said “youngest kid doesn’t even ever have to know about you, because I barely have him”
I told him that I respected his need to handle the intro with youngest at his own pace.. but it can’t be that we NEVER meet. That’s not ok with me, and if that’s how he needs things to be then.. again- I respect it but can’t have a relationship like that. He agreed that it wouldn’t be never. But also basically told me that he’s afraid of youngest being upset, and he feels guilty doing anything but concentrating on youngest while he’s here, because he doesn’t get him that often,
I totally respect those feelings and can 1000% empathize, but I’m struggling with my own needs for our relationship and don’t know how to handle it. SO only gets 10 days off a year, and uses them all on these long visits with youngest. They also happen to be on all the holiday weekends. So what I’m looking at is basically never getting to spend time with my SO on holiday weekends or on the one long stretch of vacation time he gets, because his youngest will be visiting. It just feels... crummy. I was so excited thinking we’d all have so much fun together this summer... and he has a totally different view on it.
I feel like he’s letting his guilt hold him hostage. And he’s not allowing himself to really truly move on. I will flip this and say that as a mom myself, I will not like it at all when exwh brings a serious girlfriend around my kids, and especially overnight. But I also recognize that we’re divorced now, and as long as I don’t feel like the woman is a threat to my kids, I don’t really have much choice. We didn’t divorce and make a vow to never date again (exwh didn’t even honor our married vows!)
I’m struggling big time with all this. I feel like part of being in a relationship is living life together. Not that you should be each other’s ONLY life by any means. But it’s depressing thinking of all these long wkds going by this summer and not even getting to see each other and enjoy any of them together. I’m not asking for the whole wkd or whole 2 wk vacation, but a day or two out of each doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.
Kids are always first priority, and I would never ask him to do something he wasn’t comfortable with ...But also feel like In a normal healthy relationship, I’d be looking so forward to doing these kinds of things together with him and our families. But in this relationship, I don’t feel that way. Just sad that we’re going to spend nearly every holiday apart until if/when he decides to let youngest be around us.
I know this is ridiculously long, but I’m just looking for advice: am I being a brat? Or justified in my feelings?
20 comments posted: Wednesday, May 5th, 2021
Intuition and radar
I went through my divorce in January. It was unexpected, sudden and traumatic (due to the infidelity, lies, disrespect, etc). By March, I was tired of feeling so despondent and focused on my XWH and what he was doing. I was tired of feeling depressed and down and awful.
So I signed up for match. As a way to distract myself and slowly get back out there. I didn’t do it thinking I’d jump into another committed relationship by any means. Just thought it would be good to get out and meet new people, date, etc.
Well unexpectedly, I met a guy I really like. I fell for him pretty fast and hard, and same for him with me. He told me he loves me fairly early on... maybe a month into seeing each other. We see each other when we can, which is about 1-2 a week. It can’t be more just yet, due to us both having kids. Things have been really good in every way. On wkds we don’t have the kids, we spend the entire wkd at one of our houses. We text all day and talk 1-2 hours every night after our kids go to bed.
Recently though, there have been a few things that raised my radar. One was this past Friday. I texted him at 9 telling him I had just gotten ready for bed, and let me know when he wanted to talk. He didn’t respond. As it got closer to 10, my eyes got heavy, so I texted again and said I was probably not going to be able to stay awake much longer. Still no response. Then finally at 10:15, I texted and said I was going to bed and would just talk the next day. That’s when he called, and said he had been talking to an old friend. We talked for an hour, and he said I sounded tired and he was going to let me go so I could sleep and he could call another old friend that he supposedly talks to all the time. It was 11:30 at night by this point. It seemed super suspicious to me, and I had a bad feeling he was talking to another girl rather than old guy friends. It just felt that way. Intuition.
I brought it up the next day, and he seemed annoyed that I would think that. But also did try to be reassuring that he thinks I’m his person, he loves me and only wants to see me, etc. I let it go, and decided it was just my shitty history making me paranoid.
Then last night we talked and afterwards texted good night and I love you. Then about 20 minutes after that final text from him, I got another text that said “a motorcycle ride or a beach somewhere. I want to see as much skin as possible”. It was completely random, as we hadn’t been talking about a vacation, and we had ended our conversation for the night with good nights and I love you’s. It felt very much like he accidentally sent me a text meant for someone else. So I called him and asked him who the text was meant for. He acted confused. I asked what the last text he sent me was, and he said it was the goodnight / I love u text. I said nope, you sent me a text about going on a vacation.. and it obviously wasn’t meant for me.
He then proceeded to get mad and tell me I was being crazy.. and asked if I was purposely trying to sabotage our relationship. He asked why I was reading so much into a text, and said he’s been thinking about going somewhere with me and really wants to, and reminded me that we’ve talked about doing both those things together (which is true). He said he’d been drinking a lot while he was out doing yard work all night (he did sound drunk for sure), and guessed he sent a drunk text, basically. It sounded like bullshit.
But the thing is, he is super reliable and texts me all day. He talks to me every single night at bed for hours. He wants me to meet his kids soon, and says he knows I’m the one for him and he wants me in his future forever. He spends every kid free moment with me.
So why would he do all that and put so much time and energy into me and our relationship, if he were cheating and talking to someone else too? Especially this early into our relationship, when we have no shared obligations or responsibilities..?? Would he really introduce me to his kids knowing I was one of many women he was seeing??
I’m so broken and dysfunctional with my radar and trust I don’t know what to think anymore.
17 comments posted: Tuesday, May 19th, 2020
Crash course on “Match”
Ok guys..this is a depressing week for me. Divorce settlement is ready, which means we’re about a week or two away from it being final.
So. In my depression, I signed up for 6mo on match! Very impulsively. And I have NO idea what I’m doing!
I’ve gotten 50 likes or so, and a dozen messages. Most of the messages are basic, with little effort out into them. Just “hi” or “how was your day?”
How on earth does this work? Am I supposed to go through and like some of my likes back?? Is it worth responding to the messages with no effort?
How quickly should I respond? How does this usually go?
Help!
28 comments posted: Tuesday, March 3rd, 2020
