What part of your intuition/red flags did you ignore when you married her?
“Ignore” is definitely the right way to describe it.
She was overly needy for one thing. All women are emotionally needy to some extent, but this was beyond normal. I was also much younger and less wise. And neither of us were probably in an optimal mental state when we met, which didn’t help. Anyhow, I overlooked it and attributed it to something along the lines of “poor girl..she’s really sweet and has just had a bad run with men, so she’s fragile..she just wants to be loved”… blah blah blah etc.
No, she’s batshit insane.
We met online..she lived in a different city..we talked for about a month before I actually met her in person. It’s not that I think meeting people online is inherently bad, because it’s not. It’s definitely different and should carry it’s own set of rules and best practices, but it’s not “worse” than meeting any other way. Anyhow, I think (in hindsight) that in her mind, she equated the “talking for a month” to actually dating for a month. So when we actually met in person, she was ready to jump in bed with me. I traveled to her city and got a hotel room precisely because I didn’t plan to be presumptuous and try to stay at her place. I was in no way planning to sleep with her that trip. But she basically threw her pussy at me and it happened. Now, I remember thinking at the time “well that’s it, she isn’t worth a damn because she’s so easy.” And yet, I let the relationship continue, still trying to think the best of her.
I had mentioned that I didn’t want to marry anyone without at least dating for a year. And I really meant it. However, she pressured me and basically guilted me into marrying her after about 7 months of dating. I can’t blame her entirely for that, I should have stuck to my guns..well, the relationship should have never made it to 7 months in the first place. But anyway..
So, there were plenty of red flags at the beginning..but because she had never acted volatile or hostile to me during that time, I took it as meaning that we got along well and (which was super important to me as a person who grew up in a home where the parents fought all the time..and usually over stupid shit). But the truth was that she was conflict avoidant and I misdiagnosed what was really going on..which is dangerous AF in a relationship..a lot of people don’t realize that, but it is, big time..the conflict avoidant, passive types usually have zero boundaries, as well..which presents a whole other set of issues..
Oh, and she mentioned that she had been bulimic for a time in the past, but she was over that now..so, she turned out to also be a control freak, and that should have been a signal to me early on, but like I said, I was young and dumb, and thought I was in love.
She was previously divorced once.. and I never pried much about the divorce or the bulimia…which I should have.
Anyhow, by year one and especially year two, the chickens started coming home to roost…I realized that I had married someone who I had thought was intelligent, but who was actually just an educated idiot. Masters degree, but couldn’t even make the simplest of decisions by herself and had zero common sense. And then because of the neediness, I was expected to be a 24/7 emotional tampon. So between losing respect for her because I figured out she’s an idiot, and soaking up all of her emotional bullshit, I became miserable slowly, but surely. We got divorced right after 7 years. But probably by year 5 and increasingly the longer we were together, I didn’t even really want to talk to her at all. I didn’t want to hang out with her, either. I couldn’t talk myself into wanting to, as hard as I tried. I’d feel bad for feeling that way, but the way I felt was the way I felt. Well, women don’t take too kindly to being ignored and avoided, LOL. Forget the fact that she had earned it all on her own, that never got a passing consideration. No, if I didn’t want much of anything to do with her, it had to be because I’m an asshole..it certainly couldn’t be because she sucked as a human LOL.
Add on top of those things that she wasn’t at all trustworthy. For example, she would make our business everyone else’s business habitually. I’m a private person, so I don’t really appreciate that shit. Again, this was due to the lack of boundaries issue that she has, but I just didn’t put 2 and 2 together until much later..so I’d make it known that our business stays between us and that it is unacceptable to bring other people into it..instead of altering her behavior, she just tried to be more sneaky about it..well, I’m an INTP. You do not lie to an INTP. It’s the absolute worst thing you can possibly do. So, I already thought she sucked, but the sneakiness and dishonesty sealed the deal. I was officially married to someone who I despised only slightly less than your garden variety liberal. And so I just drank and smoked weed..and then did the things I wanted to do whenever I wanted to. Played guitar, recorded music, fished, played video games. I thought I was happy and content. I didn’t realize that I was just high and/or drunk all the time as a means of coping with the fact that I was married to a lying, batshit insane cunt, who in my heart of hearts, I despised.
And there were a couple of seminal moments in that vein that made me understand that she’s just not trustworthy. I should have ended as soon as I realized that, if not before. At one point. I was dead set on divorce but then I let my moral sensibilities get the better of me.. I wanted to fulfill the commitment I made on our wedding day.. but it just blew up in my face anyway.
So there you go. I’d like to say that I should have known better from the red flags early on..but then I was too young and inexperienced to know better in a lot of ways.. the things I perceived as possibly problematic, I simply didn’t understand just how problematic they actually were until much later. So it’s not that I didn’t pick up on the red flags, it’s more that I assigned a much lower value to them than I should have.
It’s weird how shit can work out, though. There was good to come from it. I really was forced to dig and critique myself, and make some changes. Also, nothing is a better teacher than experience..so when I started dating again, my filter was stringent as fuck. I can’t tell you how many women I gave the boot to. Suddenly, I was an expert at seeing problematic traits with very little to go on. The young me and the current me couldn’t be more different in terms of standards and the ability to sniff out deal breakers. It’s kind of fucked up. On one hand, you want to be picky so to avoid getting involved with someone who you shouldn’t..on the other hand, learning to be appropriately picky only comes with having made mistakes and learning from them…at least for me that’s how it was.
I did eventually find a good woman, and I’m much more confident in that now because she had to pass a set of very stringent and precise standards…standards that I probably wouldn’t have known to have had I not been through the shit I went through. Not to mention, I probably would have never met my current woman had everything not happened exactly like it did.
We dated for over a year before I proposed. I was not pressured into getting married, either. This woman has boundaries, will enforce them, and is the opposite of conflict avoidant. She wouldn’t kiss me on the first date, much less sleep with me. She’s an actual Christian woman, not a pretender like the ex. I didn’t have to redpill her, she’s already redpilled. She’s smart and has common sense both. I don’t have to explain to her why our business stays between us, because she already has the same policy. She’s literally the opposite of my ex in almost every conceivable way and I couldn’t be happier. Oh, and she’s waaay better looking than my ex-wife. Comparatively, it’s like I traded a Pinto for a Ferrari.
Sounds like you learned a lot and congrats on your hard-fought happiness.
Since you were so deep in your self-medicating routine with her, what finally rocked you into action?
Or maybe another way of putting it is: why aren’t you still in that situation, but just drinking and smoking more?
What finally made you realize you hit bottom and that you had to save yourself and you were going to take action?
Also, what were the steps you took to do it?
The relationship finally fell apart completely. Like I said before, if you totally ignore a woman, she's going to notice and she's not going to like it.
Eventually, she had enough of the emotional distance between us and started having an affair, with a married guy nonetheless (another result of not having boundaries; see a trend emerging?) Of course, she is completely incapable of any self-reflection and always has been. So, she's not intelligent enough to realize that if I despise you and don't trust you, then there's not going to be any emotional connection between us. The very emotional connection she longed for and I deprived her of, she destroyed over years with a pattern of behavior. She's like a person who likes eggs, but then kills every chicken on the farm...and then blames the farmer because there are no eggs.
I don't blame her for wanting out of the marriage. Hell, like I said, I wanted out long before she did. But I was torn between what I felt was my moral obligation to the marriage covenant and God, and the fact that I really came to despise her deep down. The truth is that had I divorced her long before when I should have, I would have been painted as "the bad guy". Well, I was sort of painted as that anyhow...at least she attempted to do that. But, at the end she was the unfaithful spouse, not me. And that will have it's own repercussions if it hasn't already. So, wanting out is one thing. Cheating is another thing entirely. It's a gutless move and only weak people without morals do shit like that. I could have cheated on her a thousand times over. I had plenty of opportunities. But I never even entertained the idea, much less followed through with such a thing.
I learned through this that if you can't trust people with small things, you damn sure don't trust them with big ones. And of course, she proved to be untrustworthy at the end by doing the worst thing you can possibly do in a marriage. So if nothing else, it just validated to me that I was right along: she's not trustworthy and never was.
All that to say, the entire collapse brought me to rock bottom. Even though I despised her, I didn't fully realize it at the point of separation and ensuing divorce. Her shitty patterns of behavior and my emotional distance from her became the norm over a long period of time. And so when it's considered "normal", it's easy not to realize how you really feel and what the problems really are. And then of course, if you're painting over everything with alcohol and pot, it's even more difficult to discern.
I don't blame her entirely for the relationship going sour, though I will not take responsibility for the infidelity aspect. Like I said, it is possible to just get a divorce and not be a cheater. One of her complaints initially when we separated was that I drank and smoked too much. Although she never had a problem with the smoking for 7 years prior. She knew I did it before we were married. I later figured out that she needed "reasons" for wanting a divorce, and those reasons certainly couldn't include that she was unfaithful. She didn't want anyone to know about that..afterall, she had a paper mache reputation to uphold as being a "moral, Christian woman"..but I figured it out anyway. So, she found other "reasons" which conveniently enough for her, had nothing to do with her own actions over the previous years or their results. So, there was a fairly aggressive blameshifting and gaslighting campaign that occurred, but once I figured out she was cheating that shit became rather ineffective.
Now, the truth was that she was right, I was drinking too much and smoking pot. Even though she made me miserable and that was the real reason I was doing it, it still wasn't good for me. And even though it was the reason she gave for wanting out and it wasn't even the truth (or at best it was only partially the reason), it didn't change the fact that I was doing it and shouldn't have been. It didn't affect me at my job or anything, so because I was a functional it made it easy for me to dismiss the notion that I had any problem.
So, I quit cold turkey. That was two years ago and I haven't smoked pot since. I don't even have the desire. As for alcohol, I laid off completely for about 8 months. I did blame it exclusively for the relationship coming apart at the beginning, which made it very easy to quit.
It wasn't until many months later and a lot of counseling that I realized how much she had truly sucked as a wife and that it wasn't so much that I was addicted to alcohol or pot as I was just choosing those substances as my way of escaping a miserable relationship while still being physically present.
The first drink I had after that was with the woman who I am now with, and will marry in two months. She didn't pressure me or anything. We were on vacation and I decided to have a good time with her. So, I do drink some, but it's nothing like it used to be. I certainly don't feel like I need to in order to be happy. And that's the big difference between then and now. I am glad that I took the long hiatus from the bottle. My road to recovery from that awful relationship would have been much tougher - if not impossible - had I continued to drink during the separation and divorce.
Anyhow, back to my original point: if you can figure out why you feel compelled to abuse alcohol or do drugs, that's half the battle at least. Because then you can attack the root of the problem. Granted, some people have a legitimate addiction, so that may be the "reason" they do it, I guess. Though I still think that below the surface, there is likely another reason or reasons that compel them to want to be drunk or high all the time.
In my case, dealing with the "why" would have taken the form of confronting my ex-wife and basically giving her an ultimatum: "stop being a shitty person or I'm filing for divorce." Which, I did confront her about the behavior issues many times before. But then there's nothing that she could have done to be "less stupid" or to have common sense. That's just who she is. So ultimately, I should have never married her to begin with. Barring that, I should have left early on in the marriage once I started figuring out that there was no way I could feign being emotionally close to her and once I had lost respect for her. Because all I did was prolong the inevitable by thinking that I could fulfill my moral obligation by being there physically and not being there emotionally. I would say that counseling could have been another option to fix the "why", but we had already done that. It became apparent that she went in to counseling assuming that the counselor would put all of the onus on me and basically reinforce what she already believed: that she was a perfect wife and any problems we had were because of me. Well, that's not how it went. But of course, she just ignored any unflattering things that were said about her. If anything, the counseling only made her angrier because it didn't go the way she wanted it to. So, I already knew that counseling would be useless because for it to work, requires that the people attending the session actually listen to the counselor.. and she was either unwilling or incapable of doing that. I think what REALLY got her goat was that they had us take a personality test.. on this particular test, there are basically four personality extremes, represented as quadrants. So, four squares within a big square. Ideally, you wouldn't want to be too extreme in any particular direction because that would indicate an extreme personality type that isn't very balanced. A little offset from the center is OK, but if you're way up in the corner in any of the four quadrants, it means you probably have mental and/or emotional issues. I was right smack dab in the middle. She was skewed off in one of the corners. But did it make any difference to know that? Naaaa, not really. Because she was never attending the counseling to improve anything about herself in the first place.
(post is archived)