At what point do you stop banging your head against the same wall?

I met my wife just over 13 years ago. She was in the process of exiting her previous marriage, and I became the catalyst for her to slough off her husband like so much dead skin. I can see now that their relationship had outlived its usefulness, as his career prospects had diminished (they’d recently moved to the US with her job, and he did not have a work visa), and I had a fast-moving corporate career at the time. I had previously been in a 20-year relationship with someone with Borderline Personality Disorder, which had left me pretty broken. It took a long time for me to start dating again, and when I did, I typically ran away at the first sign of controlling behavior.

I’d grown up with a mother who had BPD (she died after a long illness, when I was 17), and had watched the way that she manipulated my father, without ever understanding it. I’d craved her love, but because I was very close to my dad (and she was jealous of our relationship), she seemed to withhold it from me. She was insanely jealous and make these wild accusations about my dad having affairs, and ask me to spy on him and report back. He ran a supermarket, which he ran like a corner store, and being the caretaker that he was (like father, like son), he’d take in these waifs and stray kids and give them jobs. They adored him (everyone adored him) and it used to really bug my mom.

Very shortly after meeting my first wife on our first day at college, I discovered that she was bulimic. She had already started the process of peeling me away from my friends, but I hadn’t really noticed it. Instead of running away, I saw her as someone I could fix (where I hadn’t been able to fix my mom), and I doubled down, promising to help her and support her. It was a classic BPD abusive relationship, and I took on the classic caretaker role. She isolated us from friends, tried (and failed, by and large) to do the same with my family, and the 20 years of typical ‘push me away / pull me back’ behavior began. I almost got away at the beginning, but she faked a pregnancy and being the kid who did the right thing, I dutifully returned and married her. Three weeks later, she had a miscarriage when she was supposedly 6 months pregnant. I’d rushed off to call the doctor, and by the time I got back, she said that she’d lost the baby. I asked where it was, and she said that she’d inadvertently flushed the fetus away, refusing any medical attention or to provide any more details. I was only 20 at the time, and had no idea (not until 20 years later) that at 6 months, a fetus is the size of a grapefruit.

I’m telling you all of this to highlight that I have a history of attracting the wrong sort of woman. I have always been very sensitive and empathic to the point of feeling others pain and joy like my own. What attracted me to the woman who became my second wife was her physical beauty (she is Filipina, with a grandfather from the part of China where people are very tall and have red skin; it makes for a very exotic combination, and few people can place where she is from) and also that she seemed totally okay with the fact that the majority of my friends were female. I have never been a guy’s guy. I don’t have the sports gene or the fast car thing. At parties, I’m usually in the kitchen with the wives, talking about relationships and swapping recipes.

Anyway, we met, we dated, after 12 months we got engaged, and after 2.5 years, we got married. On the whole it was good, but there were speed bumps that I knowingly chose to ignore along the way. Most of them related to how she felt things looked to others. When I quit my big corporate job, it somehow dented her status. When I didn’t buy her a fancy enough engagement ring, which she later refused to wear. After we married, things got both better and worse. I realize know that my first marriage had taught me to ‘forget’ the bad times, the times where she’d be vindictive and mean, doing things that would knowingly hurt me. I had various coping mechanisms. I’d put things down to the complexities of a multi-cultural relationship, that it was PMS-related, that it was her evil twin sister who did mean things to me, not her (we would even talk and joke about her evil twin sister… it was a way that we could talk about the elephant in the room). In the meantime, there were many good times, but with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I can see that they tended to be when we were focusing on meeting her wants / needs.

Up until about 5 years ago (when her mom got sick), I felt that I’d met my soul mate and thought that we were both blissfully happy. What I see now is that while we were both happy for much of that time, it was an off-balance kind of happiness. She was happy because we were fulfilling her wants and needs, and I was happy because she was happy. She was particularly happy when I funded her projects, as that is when she’s in her element. She was also good at guilting me into buying her expensive gifts, by painting me as cheap. That turned out to be a ‘rinse and repeat’ process, where the gifts got more and more expensive. Like many working-class Brits who grew up in a very rigid class system, class can be an Achilles heel for me and she’d use it to either hurt me or exploit me.

When her mom got sick, things started to deteriorate, but I put it down to the pressure that she was under. She was also very unhappy with her job and life in general. She threw herself into more projects (becoming a Zumba instructor, photography and travel). A love of travel has always been something that we’ve had in common, but I can see now that it was always about doing what she wanted (where we went, what we did). We took it in turns to arrange annual vacations for our anniversary, but after was disappointed with what I came up with, I gave up and we just did what she wanted to do.

When her mom died 3.5 years ago, things took a turn for the worse, and then 2 years ago (when her great-aunt died, who was the matriarch of the family), they went off the deep end. We missed the funeral because we were on vacation in the Caribbean, and we returned home to a flooded house. My wife sank into a deep depression, and her first day back at work, she went to see HR to resign. After learning about the deaths in her family, they instead suggested that she go on short-term disability and get help for her depression and anxiety.

While she was off work, she came up with a plan to travel. She found a website called Travelers Century Club, which is sort of a bogus organization for people who want to brag about traveling to 100 countries or territories. The reason that I call it bogus is that instead of using the United Nations list of countries, they keep their own lists and have their own rules; non-contiguous territories count (so if you’ve been to the lower 48, Alaska and Hawaii, that counts as 3 countries / territories). Also, if you land in a country en-route to your final destination, that counts, too.

Anyway, having seen this site, her mission became that of joining the Travelers Century Club. It seemed to bring her back to life, so I supported her at first, thinking she’d travel for a few weeks or 2 months at most. Instead, she found a 39-week trip that she wanted to do, circumnavigating Africa by truck and visiting 28 countries in the process. She told me that she wanted to do it, and asked me to do it with her. I explained that if I took 9 months work at my age (55), I would effectively be choosing to retire, and that I wasn’t ready to do that. I tried to get her to consider other alternatives (the trip was hard core, with the majority of it being bush camping, where if you want to go to the bathroom, you have to dig a hole first) but her mind was set, and so I reluctantly agreed.

Over the next 8 months, she became obsessed about her trip. I’d wake alone in bed, as she was already up working on her plans, and she’d still be working on them when I went to bed. I saw very little of her, and when I did see her, her trip was the only topic of conversation. If I tried to talk about something else, she took it straight back to the trip. She asked me to build a web site for her (it’s a sideline of mine, so I did) and she became my most difficult client ever. Everything had to be perfect, and if she was unhappy with any aspect of it, she became abusive.

In November 2015, I flew with her to the UK to see her off. Her trip started with a flight to Gibraltar, and then they took the ferry to Morocco. When I dropped her at the airport, she met with the other folks on the trip, and it was as if I wasn’t there. There were no sad goodbyes. She was just excited to meet everyone else and for the trip to start.

For the first couple of weeks, she was physically sick and homesick, and so I heard from her relatively frequently. Shortly after that, things started to change… she started to change. First she told me that everyone on the trip was drinking heavily, and that she was drinking too much. She’d always been a lightweight up to that point, so it really worried me, and she promised to keep things under control. Next, she started telling me about all of the risks that she was taking (again, very much out of character), like accepting a lift on the back of a motorbike from a young guy, who took her somewhere other than they’d agreed, and made it clear that he was hoping for sex. Thankfully, she was able to convince him to take her back to the campsite. She seemed to take on this feeling of being invincible and reveled in regularly dodging bullets (at one point, literally dodging bullets).

Things took a turn for the worse around Christmas time. Neither of us having family in the US, Christmas had always been a time when we’d take off on these amazing trips together (New Zealand, Arctic Circle, Panama, Costa Rica, etc.). Before she left I’d decided I wasn’t going to spend any Holidays on my own, so I’d headed to Australia to visit with relatives. I was still feeling very sad that we weren’t together, and assumed that she was feeling the same way. On Dec 27th, I signed on to Facebook to see a post on her Facebook page about how she’d had her best Xmas ever, and how she’d forgotten how good it felt to laugh and dance uncontrollably. There was no mention of me, or of how this was our first Xmas apart in 12 years. I later learned that her happiness was probably due, in no small measure, to drinking 2 bottles of wine, which she did again the following day.
Early on the trip, she’d told me about 2 guys, who both came off as incredibly self-centered and narcissistic. I got the sense that they brought out the worst in her. She kept telling how wonderful they were, and how they’d be best friends forever. Given that she’d known them for 2 weeks at this point, and what she was saying was triggering alarm bells (I was really starting to get concerned about her mental health), I asked how her friendship with them compared to our friendship. She paused for a moment and said “it’s about the same”. As I was reeling from that, she paused again before adding “no, I’m closer friends with them… you’re just my husband”.

A few days after her FB post, I was able to finally speak with her (most of our exchanges were by chat or email, as telecommunications in West Africa are so poor). Towards the end of the conversation, she sort of dropped it in that there were rudimentary hotels at many of these camp sites, and so you could upgrade to a room with a private bathroom. She then dropped the bombshell that she was sharing rooms with one or both of the single guys, and when I tried to ask her to explain, she just dropped the call. I was really worried now, and I sent her long emails and chat messages, begging her to explain. She refused to do so, saying that I was overreacting and called me a “fucking drama queen”. I tried asking her to look it from my perspective. What if I’d got depressed, quit my job, decided to travel around Africa for 2 months, tell her about these 2 wonderful single women that I’d met and then drop it into the conversation that I was sharing rooms with one or both of them? She’d put the phone down again at that point, or just disappear off chat.

This went on for 3 months and my life became a living hell. I wasn’t sleeping, I developed a stomach ulcer and still she wouldn’t tell me what was going on, other than tell me about the latest risks that they’d taken. She wouldn’t even acknowledge the pain that I was in. I would ask her to tell me about her trip, and she refused, telling me to read her blog. I told her that I was her husband, not one of her fans. She told me that every night that they would set up camp, and then sit around the campfire telling stories or jokes, and that she would end up with her two travel buddies talking about big topics. I asked her to give me some time, by going to her tent and writing to me, telling me what she’d seen, what she’d experienced. She told me that there was often no Internet. I told her to write something as a draft, and then she could send it to me the next time they had connectivity. She said that she couldn’t write and didn’t know what to say. I asked her to tell me anything and she said no. I asked her to give me one hour a week, and she reluctantly agreed. At the end of the first week, I still hadn’t received a note, and when I asked her, she said that she wasn’t going to do that. I then asked her to send me a postcard, to write one lousy sentence on the back of a card once in a while and then mail them to me. She refused to do that, to.

In the meantime, she took to Facebook advertising to grow her adoring fan base to 4500 people. She’d post something (usually a selfie with some African scene as backdrop) and within minutes, they’d be posting “Oh, you’re so brave” or “you are such an inspiration to me!” For a narcissist, it must have felt like she’d died and gone to heaven.

At some point around this time, she calmly announced that she had a new life and a new family now. When I told her how much that hurt me, and asked about her current life and current family, she told me that I was overreacting. On multiple occasions, she really pushed me to file for a divorce, almost daring me and calling me a coward for not doing so. With hindsight, I think that she was testing me to find out what she could get away with, and then detesting me for being weak enough to let her do that.

In March of last year, after a particularly tough couple of weeks (my daughter was really worried about me, so her wife decided to come over and make sure that I was okay; we took an epic road trip together (3500 miles, taking in New Orleans, Austin, Dallas, Little Rock, Nashville and Columbus) and I think that my wife got particularly nasty, because people were liking what we were posting, rather than focusing on her), I decided that enough was enough. I told her that I was acknowledging our separation and that I’d taken my wedding ring off. Part of me expected to give up her trip and come home to work on our marriage, but again she said that I was being unreasonable and was spoiling things for her, and she stayed on the trip.

I had originally planned to join the trip in April for a month, but I’d decided that I didn’t want to be in a goldfish bowl with her new best friends and the rest of the travelers. After I cancelled my trip with the travel company (I’d told her of my decision first), word got out on the trip that our marriage was in difficulty, and she was furious. She begged me to still join her (I guess it was all about keeping up appearances), and while I wouldn’t do that, I did agree to join her in South Africa for 2 weeks on three conditions (that she acknowledged that we were separated, that our marriage was very damaged, and that we might not be able to fix it), because I wanted to understand what was going on.

When I got there, she’d flown in early on her own, after a couple of days traveling solo around the country (there are a couple of landlocked territories in South Africa, that she wanted to be able to count). After some very tense conversations on my first night (where I reset things about no longer accepting verbal abuse from her), the truck arrived the following day. I got to meet the two guys, and while one seemed harmless enough, the second one couldn’t look me in the eye and couldn’t wait to get away. Cape Town is a very small city, and we just kept bumping into people from the trip, but this guy stayed out of our way. I asked about it, and I just kept getting BS excuses. I told her that it was clear that he wanted to get into her pants, and she told me that I was paranoid and that I was just imagining it.

Before I’d flown out to South Africa, I’d put together a document that I’d asked her to look at. I started with a list of the negative things that she’d done and then tried to flip them 180 degrees, ending up with a list of the positive values that I expected from a marriage. When I got there, she told me that she hadn’t read it, that she hadn’t read any of my emails or long messages, as they threatened to spoil her trip. She finally did read it, and told me that she didn’t agree with (and wouldn’t do) what I was asking. We had a very strained two weeks together. She said that she would abandon her trip and come home, but that if she did, she would hate me for the rest of her life. I told her that that would be pointless, and so after two weeks, I flew home and she flew to rejoin her trip.

A couple of weeks before my trip to South Africa, I’d had my annual ‘well man’ health check and after carrying out a digital rectal exam, my doctor had recommended a PSA test. The safe range is 0 to 4, and mine came back abnormally high (it was 5.5) and so I was referred to a urologist. He ran through a list of probable causes (prostate cancer being the scary one) and put me on a course of heavy-duty antibiotics, to first see if it was a deep-seated urinary infection. I was still taking the pills when I was in South Africa, so I had to explain to my wife. She got very upset (crocodile tears) and said if it turned out to be anything, she would return home. I told her that I was due to have a second PSA test when I got home, and she stressed that I must make sure to do that.

Once we parted ways, all thoughts of my health seemed to go out of her mind (I know see that ‘out of sight, out of mind’ behavior is very common for narcissists). By the time I got home and had the blood test, I was totally stressed out (while deep down, I knew that she wasn’t going to return home with me, I’d been hoping that once she saw me, she’d want to fight for our marriage) and my health wasn’t good. When I got the results back, my PSA level had doubled to over 11, and so I had to go back to see the urologist. In the meantime, I researched everything that I could about prostate cancer, and everything indicated that I was at the early stages of a very fast-growing form of prostrate cancer.

At this point, I happened to chat with her, and for the first time in 6 weeks she enquired about my health. I told her about my upcoming appointment with the urologist, and told her that it was likely that I’d have to have a biopsy. She offered to come home to be with me, and I told her not to bother. I told her that I was fine, and that even if it were cancer, it would be a few weeks before a treatment plan would be put together. A few hours later, she called me back and said that she’d booked a flight and would be home later in the week.

Up until her return, we had been on a path to divorce and we had had a few conversations about it. I had started pulling together all of the paperwork, had cancelled one of our joint credit cards and was thinking about changing the locks and my will. We both seemed to accept that while we loved each other, it wasn’t enough and that we were on two very different tracks. We were separated and so I went on a couple of dates, which became more like therapy sessions, as I would talk about my relationship. I wasn’t planning to do anything while she was away, but I was pretty certain that things were irretrievably broken at that point.

I was (and still am) grateful that she came home to support me. I hadn’t realized just how scared I was until I saw her walking towards me at the airport. I’d told her that I still considered us separated (I wasn’t ready to just forgive all that she’d put me through, and felt that it would take a lot of hard work on both of our parts, if we were to fix things) and she said that she was okay with that. I asked her to stay in one of the guest rooms, and she said that she wanted to sleep with me. I explained that if we had sex, it would be as ‘friends with benefits’ and she said that she was okay with that too. I told her that while I could see we both loved each other, that sometimes love isn’t enough.

On the day of the biopsy, I was too shaky to drive. The appointment was at the Helen Graham Cancer Center, and it was so hard to walk into that building. As we sat waiting for me to be called, I looked at all of the other men in there. They all looked half-dead and were very frail as they shuffled along, and I was worried that that was the fate that was awaiting me. The biopsy itself was pretty painless and over very quickly. On my way back to the waiting room, I had to make a follow-up appointment for two weeks later. My wife was surprised that I was out so quickly, and as we walked back to the car, she asked me about what was going to happen next. I told her about the follow up appointment, and on hearing the date, she said “didn’t you tell them it was important?” I said “Everyone’s in the same boat.. it’s important for everyone to get their results as soon as possible”. She cut me off and said “no, didn’t you tell them how important it was... that I have to rejoin my trip?” I flipped at that point, telling her that for once, it wasn’t always about her… that it was about me this time. She apologized, but in the 20 minutes that it took us to drive home, she said it again.

All in all, she was home for 2 weeks, and she was like a cat on a hot tin roof the whole time. She would pace up and down, telling me where the trip was, and what she was missing. Before she ever came home, we’d agreed that if I got an all clear, she would return to her trip. Over the next few days, she was pushing me to try and get my results early, so that she could book her flight. One time I called the urologist’s office and was able to move my appointment up a couple of days, and when I got off the phone, she berated me, because I hadn’t stressed how urgent it was (again, the urgency being for her to rejoin her trip). I was so angry that I swore at her, and headed out of the house, planning to drive to my office. On my way, I got a call from a different person in the urologist’s office, telling me that I didn’t have cancer. I sat by the road and sobbed with relief, before driving home. When I got in, I told her and then called my daughter and brother to tell them the good news. By the time I had got off the phone, she had booked a flight for a few days later.

One of the things that came out while she was home, was that she felt obliged on numerous occasions to tell me how many men found her attractive in Africa, and how they all believed that she was much younger than she is. Some of the stories were scary, in that she put herself in a dangerous situation on at least 3 occasions with her flirting. The pattern (and it is something that I saw early in our marriage, but that I’d put down to her naivety) was that she likes to flirt and to have men want her, but then acts all indignant when they try to act on the signals that she’s sending them. One day she started telling me this story about a younger French guy that she’d met at a bar, and who had then been sick the following day, so she’d gone with him to find a doctor and then they’d had a picnic together. It was clear from the way that she talked that she found him attractive, and she admitted that she did, going off to get her laptop to show me a picture of him. Later on, I saw an exchange between them, where he said “It is killing me, when I think about our second date ;-)” and her reply was “Oh no, why is it killing you? I think that the picnic and conversation that we had was so nice and relaxing ☺”. When I confronted her about it, she told me that it was down to his bad English and there was no way that he could have thought about it as a date… then I showed her his words.

Before she returned to Africa, she started to drop hints that she had another trip planned in the fall. She told me that her brother was about to relocate from Vietnam, and that she wanted to visit him before he left. She then added that she wanted us to go to the Philippines for Xmas, as we’d last visited with my family. I started to say that it didn’t make sense to take 2 trips to Asia, with just a few weeks in between, and then I realized that she was planning one long trip. It was also clear that she wasn’t planning to return to the US when I did. I said “it sounds like you’re planning a 4-6 month trip, and that isn’t something that I agree to”. She wouldn’t admit or deny that… she just refused to talk about. Oh, in addition to that, she told me that she planned to visit the Antarctic for 3 weeks when she got back, and was disappointed when I said that I didn’t want to go with her.

On the day she returned to Africa, she was almost skipping and jumping. She was so excited and happy. I on the other hand was absolutely gutted. I didn’t sleep the night before. We drove to the airport in silence, me with tears rolling down my face. Her only words were “I’ll be back soon”. After she left, I realized that I wasn’t really over my cancer scare, and that getting an all-clear doesn’t mean that the residual fear suddenly goes away.

I thought about her travel plans and wrote to her, telling her that I was not okay with another 4-6 month trip. The finishing line for me had always been her getting to Egypt in August, and that I wasn’t going to agree to her moving it. I asked her to take some time think about what I said, and then come back to me with a decision about her plans with the future. Over the next two weeks, she avoided the conversation (all I got was “me, me, me”) and so I raised it instead. She promised to think about it and we arranged to talk the following day. The following day came, and suddenly she was in a place with people so she couldn’t talk, and then said that she couldn’t remember what we were supposed to be talking about. Every time, I’d tried to get her to think about the future, she had told me that she was just focusing on her trip and didn’t want to think about it.

As I pushed, she told me that I wasn’t willing to help her achieve her goal. I asked her to be specific about her goal, and that is when she dropped the bombshell by saying “my near term goal is to achieve 100 countries & territories per TCC, mid term goals is to achieve 100 UN countries, long term goal is to travel to all 193 countries”. This was quite a shock as we’d only ever talked about (and I’d only ever agreed to) the Africa trip. I told her that would have a big impact on us, and suggested that she been holding things back that she knew I wouldn’t like. She asked why I wouldn’t want her to achieve her goal, and I told her that we clearly had incompatible goals, but only one of us had known that. I asked her when she’d revised her goals, and she admitted that she had been thinking about it while she was at home (without sharing that with me). I told her that she being avoiding what she knew would be a difficult conversation, and she got nasty and dropped off the chat.

This latest revelation was like being hit with a 2X4, and a couple of days later, there were even bigger revelations. While she was planning her trip, my wife had moved her iMac from her office upstairs to a more convenient spot on the central floor of our house. While she was away, I would sometime use it while I was waiting for the kettle to boil and then just end up working there (I work from home most of the time). This particular day, I’d received some form in my email, which needed to be downloaded, filled in and then mailed back. I downloaded it on her iMac, and opened up Word to edit it. When I went to open the file, I saw a filename that caught my eye. From the title, it looked like a job application, so I opened it up. It was dated while she’d been at home, and was for a company that I didn’t recognize. When I Googled the name, I found that it was an NGO based in Malaysia. This angered me, because she’d done similar things in the past without discussing it with me (like applying for a job in Geneva) and I’d told her that I didn’t want (and wouldn’t accept) a long distance relationship.

I decided to check her browser history, and found that on 4 different days while she was home, she’d been looking at this particular job opportunity, and never mentioned it to me. I also saw that she’d been looking at travel schedules for trips in Asia, and one for the Trans-Siberian Express kept popping up. Something told me to keep digging, that there was more there. My wife was on another side-trip with her travel buddies, and would be off the grid for a week, and so I couldn’t confront her with it. Before she’d left, she’d put together a document with all of her user-IDs and passwords, in case of an accident, and I decided that I needed to break that emergency glass… I needed to know what was going on.

While I’m not proud of what I did, I am glad that I did it. I looked at her email first and found a whole series of exchanges with the Brazilian guy (the one who hadn’t been able to look me in the eye). They had been planning for weeks to take an extended trip together in the fall, including sharing a cabin on the Trans-Siberian Express. Seeing this made me want to see if there was more, and so I next accessed Facebook and looked at her chat history. In the two weeks she was home with me, she had had 25 conversations with the guy, often talking about the trip they would take together, and only once (and in passing) did my health come up. The conversations would take place in the morning while I was asleep, and then she’d come back to bed, and then they’d pick back up while I was out at work. They were planning their trip while we all thought that I might have cancer.

I absolutely flipped at this point, and decided things were over. In the middle of feeling hurt and rejected, I decided to set up an account on OK Cupid and looked to start dating. Within 24 hours, and after getting a couple of notes from women via the site, I quickly decided that I wasn’t ready to date. I decided that I wasn’t ready to just sit alone at home any longer, so I went back and edited my profile, making it clear that I wasn’t interested in dating, but I would like to hang out with other like-minded individuals. I was really surprised to find that women were interested in doing that, and after checking that they really did get that I was only interested in non-date dating, I did end up meeting four different women in the week that my wife was off the grid. I can honestly say that that week was one of the highlights of the time that I was on my own.

When my wife was back on the grid, I confronted her, asking her if there was anything that she wanted to tell me. She said “no”. I asked her if there was anything that she wanted to tell me about the Brazilian guy and again she said “no”. I finally asked her if she wanted to tell me about any trips that she’d been planning, and her response was “how do you know?”

As anyone who has experience of someone with NPD, the real crime was that I had hacked her email and Facebook accounts, not her betrayal. When she’d been home, I’d asked about whether she’d heard from her travel buddies, and she very carefully told me about getting an email from the Australian guy, but omitted to tell me anything about her frequent conversations with the Brazilian guy. She told me that she hadn’t told me about the trip, because it was only a fantasy and that she’d been stringing him along, because it felt good to think about traveling. I pointed out that she had told him 3 different times that she was almost certainly going with him, and that she’d told the travel agent that, too. As for the job, she said that she hadn’t told me about that, because she had decided not to apply for it.

I told her that she was lying to me, and then followed up with an email that was intended to show her what honesty was, where I told her about my non-date dating. Now my major crime became that I “had prostituted myself on the internet” and no matter what she’d done, my actions had been much worse. I pointed out that we were separated at the time, that we had discussed divorce and that I’d recently discovered that she was planning a trip that she knew I was suspicious about. When I confronted her with facts, with the lies that I’d caught her in, her response was to call me insecure, jealous, paranoid, sick and unbearable. She made it all out to be that I was jealous of what she was doing.

Slowly, parts of her plan came into focus… the parts that she hadn’t shared with me. A week before she left for Africa, we’d been to a reunion with a lot of British friends from college days. When I got back from the UK after seeing her off, one of them called me and said that her mom was convinced that my wife had told her that she was planning to travel for 2 years. My friend told her mom that she must have misheard it, but her mom insisted that was what she’d said. Then a second person independently told me the same thing. About half way through the trip, I’d challenged her about it, but she told me that they were wrong or were lying (to get between us and break us up – that was her theory). The funny thing is that all of her actions point to the fact that she always had a 2-year travel plan… she just never shared it with me, because I wouldn’t have accepted it.

For the next couple of weeks after that, there were a lot of ugly emails flying backwards and forwards. I tried to point out that my non-date dates had been no different than her spending time with her travel buddies, but she insisted on labeling them as romantic dates and continued to play the part of the betrayed wife. Out of desperation, I even offered up trying an open marriage as a potential compromise. It wasn’t what I wanted, but it was clear to me that she wasn’t willing to give up traveling, and I didn’t want to continue to live a life without intimacy. In part, I think that I was trying to push her into making a decision, instead of keeping me dangling. In response, she suggested that everything (my pain, my hurt, how I felt betrayed) was all a pretense by me so that I could sleep with other women. Again, I tried asking her how she would have felt if she’d inadvertently stumbled on a plan for me to take an overseas trip with a woman who had tried it on with me, if I had been saying for weeks that I had no plans.

One thing that I saw (which I’d never known about her, until the trip) was her pattern of hiding things from me, and then just denying and denying it, right up until I’d confront her with the evidence… then she’d find some way to deflect it all back on me.

After that, we continued discussions around divorce. I was planning to visit to Barcelona to meet up with my daughters, and we ended up agreeing to meet there to discuss next steps. I felt that it was neutral ground, like Switzerland. As you can expect, it was difficult. I tried to set a framework for a honest discussion, to be open to compromise, to be kind to each other, but to also agree to make a decision as to what came next – whether to find a way to come together to move forwards, or to agree to an amicable divorce. I also set some boundaries around living arrangements.. I made it clear that if she opted for a long distance relationship by living somewhere else, or continued to travel, that our marriage would be over.

During the time that we were in Barcelona, I couldn’t sleep one night, and so I wrote a long note to her, which I read to her the following morning. It laid out what I was and wasn’t willing to accept, and where I was prepared to compromise. Later that day, we went for a walk, and she told me that she that she felt that we should split up, and agreed. She immediately set about planning a new life in Barcelona, meeting with some friends that she had there to see if there was a possibility to work with them (I was uninvited from the dinner).

On our return to the US, she moved into one of the guest rooms and we started to move towards separation. The agreement was that she’d stay there for up to two weeks, until she got back on her feet. Feeling that I had fulfilled my original obligation, I decided to update my OK Cupid account, because I was now ready to move on and start thinking about dating. This was when something really weird had happened. I had been using her iMac before I left for Barcelona, and I know that I had signed out of everything and shut it down before heading for the airport. Apparently, when she first went to use it, it booted up into some saved session of mine, giving her full access to my email, my Facebook account, Hangouts (which gets all of my SMS messages) and OK Cupid. She read all of the exchanges with my friends, trawled through my email and read my OK Cupid conversations. All of this came out in a big ugly conversation, where at the end of it, we somehow decided that we would work at our relationship through the end of the year. Things were wobbly, because what I didn’t know was that she’d also knew what the password was on my tablet, and so she continued to get up while I was asleep and read my email.

I continued to work with a therapist, who I’d been seeing since mid-summer and while we both kept having flashes of anger and resentment, we seemed to be working at things. I was due to go back home to the UK at Thanksgiving (after getting the all-clear, I’d looked for cheap flights to go back home and see my family), but she said that she didn’t want to go home with me, because of the conversations that I’d had with my family and friends. I can understand that they had bothered her, but the reality was that it was all factually based (when asked, I’d told the truth about what was going on, the things she’d done and said to me, etc.). Instead, she wanted to go to the Philippines to work on a condo that we’d bought there. She asked if I would join her there for Xmas, and I agreed. She pushed me to go for as long as possible, and I ended up being there for almost 6 weeks.

I’d told her that I wanted her to stay here and work on our marriage, that I was okay with the condo being unfinished and sitting empty for another year, but I ended up agreeing to what she wanted. At first, she was better at staying in touch, and there wasn’t long between for her leaving and me going to the UK, and then between me getting back and joining her in the Philippines.

When I got there, she was instantly pushing me to think about us moving there sooner rather than later. I could see that she really didn’t want to return to the US, or to share the life that I have. She kept telling me how much she hated it where we lived (near Philly) and that she wanted us to move. While I was there, we got her health checked out (she’d been having very heavy and irregular periods) and the recommendation was that she have a total hysterectomy. That took place just after Christmas, and after seeing her through the first couple of weeks of convalescence, I had to return home.

Shortly after I got home, I started to see the same old pattern of behavior emerging… the second that I was out of sight, I was also out of mind. The first time was when she forwarded me a job posting for a position in Doha (Qatar). Her message said “I'm thinking of applying for this job (Assoc Director of Technology Licensing) in Doha just to give me some options. I would do this job for 2 years to give me some experience in the medical and international field. I expect the salary to be very good with good benefits... I also need to have some spending money to be able to buy myself some nice things again. What do you think?” I replied back “I think that you should be explaining what you think would be happening to our relationship during this time. Are you expecting that I would join you in Doha, or stay on my own here for another two years? I would have preferred to see that you'd given some thought to that, rather than thinking about your renewed ability to buy nice things.” Her response was “Baby, it goes without saying that we will be together. We agreed on that. I love you.” For some reason (like the pain and hurt of the last 18 months, and the fact that she’d been okay with suggesting a long-distance relationship before), I wasn’t really buying that.

Within a couple of days, the next shoe dropped when she started talking about wanting to move again, saying how she’d been happy in Africa and she was now happy in the Philippines, and so it was clear that my current home location was the problem. A day later, she returned to the same topic, but this time she was very adamant that she would not come home until I sold my house and moved. She suggested that we should move to Philly, a compromise on her part, so that I could still commute to my work in Delaware. I told her that doing that now was crazy, as she doesn’t have a job, and so it would limit the jobs she’d be able to apply for. She disagreed, saying that she’d still apply for jobs in places other than Philly, and if she got one, we’d just have to look at moving again. I thought about all of this for about a day, and then came back and said that I would only consider moving AFTER she’d found a job.

I also started to see other familiar patterns. One of the things that we’d talked about while I was in the Philippines was her becoming certified as a yoga instructor, with a view to opening a yoga business in the Philippines at some point. She did a lot of research about options for getting certified, and she told me that the price was pretty consistent, no matter where you did it (e.g. the US vs. Costa Rica vs. the Philippines vs. Nepal). Being someone who wants to show off about things like that, she told me that she planned to do the training in Nepal (which would also give her one more country). It was only when I was back home on my home, and I started to think about that, I could see that she was choosing Nepal over the ability to train here, where we’d wake up together in the morning, have dinner together, and then go to sleep together.

Then, on February 9th, I got an email that started “sweetie, don’t be mad at me” and then went on to say that she’d booked a trip to Bali with her cousin, without ever discussing it with me. In my email response (after she dodged talking or chatting with me), I told her that I wasn’t angry, but more sad and resigned. Again, she had decided to do something that she wanted to do, without even considering my feelings. As usual, she came up with a number of lame excuses… she’d been angry with an earlier fact-based email, pointing out that she was returning to her old ways, that I didn’t want to go to Bali (in fact, it’s somewhere that I’ve always wanted to go), that it didn’t impact me (it was the same for me, whether she was in Bali or the Philippines), it was a Valentine’s trip (with her female cousin, and I don’t care for Valentine’s). She offered to cancel the trip (and actually went as far as cancelling the accommodation), but then told me that after we’d talked about it, she would just rebook it. Again, I told her that booking a trip without telling me was a familiar landmine (she’s done it a couple of times before, which has caused big problems in the past) and she’d just made a decision to step on it again. As I pointed out there would have been better ways of handling it, she quickly deflected to trying to make it about my dating. When I pointed out that we were separated at the time, it became that I’d intentionally separated, so that I could sleep with other women. I told her that I thought that she was being self-centered and thoughtless, and her response was that I was a cheater and unfaithful.

She told me that she would be away for 10 days, and I told her that I was going to take 2 weeks off to think about her actions and our future. Twice in the conversation she suggested that we split up because I was not supporting her dreams. When she got to Bali, she sent me a note saying “I just want you to know that I'm wishing you're here with me. I very much regret coming here without you. I love you. I miss you. And I'm sorry.” Of course, she managed to overcome that to deliver lots of updates to her adoring fans.

When we did talk last week, I asked her to explain why she regretted the trip and why she apologized. Her answer was that because her actions had hurt me. I asked her if she thought that her actions were reasonable and she said “oh yes”. She then added the following… words that I’ve grown used to hearing or reading, but they’re never accompanied by action: “I'll come home to you and we'll make a plan for our future. You've been patient. I want you to be happy and I want a life with you. I do love you, more than you know and more than any one else in the world. Yes, I do want it all and that includes you.” She then sent me (and posted on FB) a long article about the secrets of happy relationships. I’m not sure what she took from it, but one lined jumped out at me, and that was where the author talked about a working relationship as being one that "is happy and sustainable for both people involved".

Here’s how I responded – “I don't feel that our relationship is happy or sustainable right now, and hasn't been for the last two years. You've done (and continue to do) what you want to do, and have pretty much ignored my wants and needs. You've occasionally said that you're sorry, and that we need to find a compromise... but I feel that your actions speak much louder than your words. You say that you miss me, but I think that you actually miss the person that you'd like me to be (one who is comfortable to go along with and support your dreams, and fit in with them where possible... where we live, where we travel, what we do).

You've said that you feel that I don't know what I want in my life. I know exactly what I want and don't want in this stage of my life, and that has never been clearer to me. I want a partner to share my life with, someone who thinks and cares about my wants and needs, as much as their own. I want to be with someone who jointly makes decisions on things that affect us, rather than making decisions for themselves, and then telling me after the fact. I want to be with someone who shares my life and my home, someone who is the first person that I talk to in the morning, and the last person I speak with at night.”

The next morning I woke up to a message saying that her funk was over, that she was coming home and would live wherever I want to live, that we would travel where I want to travel. Within a few short hours of that, I got another message asking whether I was okay with her applying for a job in Southern California (so much for living where my job is, where my friends are, where my life is).

A day later I got another email, that asked me to help her make a choice between two options, but really was designed to get me to agree to the option that she wanted. That was to not finish off the condo now, and start renting it out (she doesn’t want strangers using it before us), and that we’d agree to go back some time later in the year. I was very frustrated, because that would mean that after being away for almost 5 months, she was planning to get right up to completing it and then halt everything. I think that the real reason is that it would give her another reason to try and put down roots here… it would kick the can down the road for a few more months. I told her that I wanted her to stay there until it was finished, as per the original plan, and that we would then put it on AirBnB.

She then posted a strange message on Facebook. An elderly aunt had died suddenly, and in among all of the condolence messages, she posted the following quote from Karl Marx - “There comes a time in your life when you have to let go of all the pointless drama and the people who create it and surround yourself with people who make you laugh so hard that you forget the bad and focus solely on the good. After all life is too short to be anything but happy”. I asked her if it was aimed at me, and after 20 minutes of composing and editing her answer, two letters appear on the screen – “no”. I find that hard to believe, given how much she has accused me of pointless drama over the last 18 months. I don’t buy that she was so careless with her choice of words, and also it was entirely out of context.

It doesn’t really matter, as that quote helped me make a difficult decision, and a week ago I called her, and told her that I was done. I explained that we seem to be on different paths and want different things. Since then, I’ve felt relief, not regret. I do believe that she has NPD and is pretty much a textbook case. I’m posting this here, and am reading all of the posts that other people have shared, because I want to stay strong. I don’t see a path to happiness if I stay in this relationship, because she doesn’t give a damn about my wants or needs, only her own.

Thanks for the stamina to read this far. Wish me luck!