Morty's Story

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#1 Aug 10 - 11PM
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Morty's Story

I am an intelligent and successful woman with a strong career, a lovely 8 year-old daughter and a loving husband. I am artistic, energetic and a typical "Type A" over-achiever. My mother has been living with us for 3 years. She has been under the care of psychiatrists intermittently during her adulthood and I suspect she has BPD. She is recovering from PTSD because my father committed suicide 3 years ago. They were married for 45 years. For a BPD, whose greatest fear is abandonment, spousal suicide is about the worst thing possible. While I have a lot of sympathy for my mother, I also feel anger because her disorder partly led my father to de-value himself and do what he did. He experienced long-term manipulation during his marriage. While that was bad enough, he also had a utilitarian philosophy and after being diagnosed with emphysema at age 69, he decided that it was time to put himself and his family out of misery. He always told us he would not be dependent on others and that a person has a right to choose when to die. I have no anger toward him other than the method he chose because it meant that my mother was the person to find him dead. His final act was a big F You to her for the years of emotional abuse. While he didn’t have NPD, he was introverted and had a rebellious streak that didn’t often come out. He loved casinos and sneaking cigars but always within limits and never to the point of irresponsibility. His parents were stalwarts of the community and he was raised to be responsible for his family. His ingrained sense of duty is why he never left my mother even though he would have been much happier if he had. Because of my Dad’s upbringing and my Mom’s BPD, I was raised to be a dutiful, supportive person who was expected to take care of everything and put my needs second, especially to my mother's. I was her little ballerina doll. I was taught to squelch my intuition so that I wouldn’t question manipulation. I’ve always been able to see red flags but I wasn’t taught to act on them because that would have meant calling my mother out when she was manipulating us. I was expected to go along with her mind games, to be her best friend and to listen to her woeful stories about the problems in my parents’ marriage. When I hit puberty, she started sharing inappropriate details about their sex life and manipulated me into taking her side against my Dad. When I became interested in boys, she encouraged relationships that were inappropriate. In high school, an older married teacher had a crush on me and she encouraged me to flirt with him. My first serious boyfriend (who is an N) had another girlfriend and, despite that, my mother encouraged me to pursue him. It wasn’t until I was 18 and chose a college major that didn’t align with my mother’s plans for me to be a ballerina that I started the long process of breaking out from under her spell. My parents’ difficulties and their impact on me were exacerbated by the fact that I was sexually molested by an older neighbor from age 6 to 9. Because I was so young, I didn’t understand what was happening and I didn’t know enough to defend myself or ask for help. There was no violence so I was never fearful although I didn’t like it. I just thought it was something gross that 16 year old boys did. When I was 9, I told my parents but I think I was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome and I blamed another boy. I was also unclear about the details and while my parents tried to talk to the neighbors and protect me, I wasn’t able to give them enough information to do anything about it.
When I went to college, I was expected to fund my own education so I carried a full course load in addition to working 30 hours a week. I never got to have much fun. I dated a Normal Guy until I met the guy who would turn out to be my first husband. Normal Guy was dull in comparison. Future Ex-H needed someone to take care of him and I fell right in. I’m not sure what personality disorder he had but he had something wrong. He was verbally and physically abusive, addicted to pornography, had ED and I suspect was a latent homosexual. We were married for 6 years but spent the last year separated. During that time, my current husband H befriended me at work. I’m an introvert and don’t share my deepest feelings with people unless I know and trust them. H was a long-time friend of my brother’s and Bro always spoke highly of him. Once I got to know him, I spilled my guts about the embarrassing details of my marriage. H encouraged me to get out immediately for fear of my safety. I fell in love with him, seeing him as my knight in shining armor. We started dating and quickly made plans to get married once my divorce was final. H had a medical condition that limited what he could do and required him to spend a lot of time alone in a dark room. I knew this would be a challenge in our marriage, however I was so ready to have what I thought would finally be a healthy romantic relationship, that I downplayed the reality of the situation. Our courtship was less than 12 months and there was lots of great sex however it started to dwindle by the time of the wedding because of H’s condition. A couple of days before the wedding, he came home from work and I could tell he felt really sick. I knew that I would spend the evening alone because he’d have to be in the dark by himself. I had a Moment of Clarity and a big warning bell rang in my head saying that this was how my life was going to be most of the time.
We got married and immediately started making plans for a child. He was 42 and I was 29. He had 3 grown children and had a vesectomy. I had severe endometriosis. We went through various assisted infertility treatments and nothing worked. Eventually, we became the parents of a baby girl through adoption. It took a long time for me to become a mom (at age 34) and the pain of infertility, the lenghty adoption process and the fact that all of that occurred at the time of 9/11 were wounds that scabbed over pretty well but were still always there under the surface. By the time my daughter was 2 (and I was 36), H’s condition had deteriorated but plateaued to a point where there were severe limitations on what he could do physically. To this day, he can’t work outside the home, can’t watch T.V., can’t drive at night, can’t read, and can’t have sex. When he began experiencing ED, he was too embarrassed to discuss it and couldn't tolerate medications to fix it. So sex became a taboo topic and because I had been programmed to put my needs behind those of others, I bottled everything up and denied my own pain and sense of abandonment.
My career, meanwhile, was progressing well. I earned an MBA and was earning a six-figure salary that kept us very comfortable. Six years ago, I was introduced to a new co-worker, my N. I was attracted to him immediately. He was different than anyone else I had ever known. He exuded a charm that was hard to pinpoint – a bit of a bad boy but simultaneously sweet and interested. We worked in a conservative company, both of us in Information Technology, and both involved outside work in the performing arts. The first day I met him, surrounded by corporate IT jocks in their polo shirts and khakis, N was wearing all black, had a ponytail, wore a thick silver bracelet, had a penetrating, intelligent gaze and demonstrated a sincere interest in a picture of a ballerina I had on my desk. I was smitten but didn't think much about it other than to be slightly amused. For the next 3 years, we worked closely together, established a firm professional respect for one another’s intellect and abilities and had a lot in common despite outward appearances. While I live a healthy lifestyle, he smokes 2 packs a day, drinks a minimum of 20 cups of coffee a day and portrays a hard-living rock star image that would have made us seem incompatible. While we always got along well with each other, I never sensed anything beyond friendly professional respect from him and I kept my attraction to myself.
Three years ago, my Dad committed suicide. By then, H and I no longer slept in the same bedroom because he couldn’t lie flat in a bed. I slept alone and there had been no intimacy between us for 7 years. The night after my Dad died, I asked H to please come to bed with me and hold me because I didn’t want to be alone. He lasted in bed next to me for about an hour and then he said he wasn’t physically comfortable and needed to go back to his room. I was devastated. I felt so abandoned and angry. I wanted my needs for once to come before his condition. I was so hurt but said nothing and suffered in silence.
Four months after my dad died, N gave his resignation at work. By this time, we were close professionally and our conversations had expanded to include some personal topics as well. He had married the previous summer. He and his wife had met while they were both living in a large city at the other end of the state. They dated for a very short time before moving in together. She was a part-time student who had held low-paying jobs and needed a place to live. He told her he was going to pack up everything and move to the other end of the state to a small country town in the middle of nowhere. He bought a huge, antique home designed by a famous architect and told her that he expected her to be its caretaker while he worked all day. She could go to school and work if she wanted but he also expected her to cook for him and run the house. After he had been married for 6 months, we were going through a stressful project at work and he confided to me that his marriage was rocky. He was a workaholic and his wife was starting to put pressure on him for not paying enough attention to her. They were not getting along well because they had promised each other when they got married, they would quit smoking so that when they started a family, their home would be healthier. His attempt at quitting lasted about 2 weeks and then he broke his promise and told her he simply wouldn’t stop. When he told me about how much stress he was under, he had tears in his eyes. I felt sorry for him. Being a workaholic myself, but also having learned how important family was, I told him that no job was worth the sacrifice of his marriage. A couple of months later, the weekend before my dad died, we had to work on a weekend. I arrived in the parking lot a couple of minutes before him. As I walked in, I saw him pull into the lot. I could hear him yelling at someone on the phone and my impression was that he was yelling at her. That was the first red flag. The yelling wasn’t in the same kind of tone spouses use when they squabble. There was something sinister about it.
Four months later, when N resigned, he told management that I would be a good person to replace him in his managerial position. I was promoted based on his recommendation. During the 2 weeks he served out his notice, we worked closely together so he could transition his responsibilities to me. He told all of us he was resigning so he and his wife could move to her home state in order for her to be closer her mom when they started a family. He said he had a temp-to-perm contracting gig with an employer in her home-state and his plan was to prove himself and hope for the offer of a full-time job. It was during those 2 weeks that I became aware of a very strong attraction to him and I also sensed that perhaps he had a little bit of a crush on me. I downplayed it because I’m five years older and figured that someone as cool and smart as him could never be attracted to someone like me. (What a joke – “me” is a size-4, athletic, smart and pretty woman who thinks that everyone sees the flaws that she sees and would therefore never be attracted to someone as un-cool as her.) On his last day at work, I treated him to lunch. He asked me whether I was nervous about assuming his position (it is a stressful, high exposure job). When I talk about something that I’m excited about, I tend to become less reserved and more effervescent than I normally am and as I was talking, I saw something in his eyes spark. He had an enamored sort of smile on his face and I could feel for the first time a mutual attraction. I know now that that was the beginning of the hoovering. After he left work, I was very sad. I missed my Dad and I missed him. I realized how important he had become to me after working together so closely for 3 years and I accepted my new position partly because I knew it would be a connection to him. I figured he was happily married and getting ready to start a family but at least we would be able to communicate once in a while. I was consoled by the fact that we would be doing the same work.
For the next four months, I immersed myself in my new job and did my damndest to prove that I was worthy of the role he used to fill. I strove to gain the respect of my new team and I wanted to be sure that whenever they spoke to him, they would tell him what a great job I was doing because I wanted him to be proud of me. 2 months after he resigned, we exchanged e-mails and he told me that he had been offered a full-time job but he had turned it down and asked if instead he could stay on as an independent contractor. A red flag went off. I asked him how his wife felt about that and he gave no reply. 2 months later, he sent me an e-mail and told me that he and his wife had separated. He said they had agreed to separate while they worked to make sure their heads were on straight. He said he was seeing a counselor at her request and was living in a small apartment while she stayed at his house to figure out her next move. In the meantime, a conference was coming up in Disney that we were both going to. We exchanged e-mails about looking forward to seeing each other there. At the same time, I was going through a hysterectomy. My endometriosis had become unmanageable and I made the decision to finally end the pain and give up the last glimmer of hope I had for giving birth to a biological child. I didn’t want another child but that little flame was an emotional one to finally snuff out. N knew I was having surgery. Before we met at Disney, we exchanged e-mails. He told me that their separation was difficult for his wife but that he wasn’t missing anything. I assumed that their separation had come after months of mutually trying to work things out in counseling. I told him a tiny bit about my first marriage and said that when a couple realizes that a mistake was made in choosing to marry, it’s best to not prolong the inevitable. In his reply, he wrote that he could easily see that but that his wife was struggling because she was “deluded into thinking we’re soul mates of sorts.” Another little red flag went off. I recalled a mutual friend who attended N’s wedding telling me that the ceremony was very touching because N, who was normally so cool, had tearfully spoken his vows and said that he was so happy to have found his soul mate. I had a flicker of intuition that I ignored. Was it her who was deluded if in fact he was the one who said they were soul mates?
We saw each other for the first time since he had resigned at the Disney conference. A group of us went to dinner one night and N hung back from the crowd to talk to me alone. He said again that he didn’t miss his wife at all. The topic of the Myers-Briggs personality type test came up because my team and I had taken it as a team-building exercise at work. He said that he believed his marriage had failed because he and his wife were incompatible personality types. He also said he was convinced that he and I probably had the same test results. I know my letters (ISTJ – Introverted, Sensing, Thinking, and Judging) by heart. I asked him what his letters were and he said he couldn’t remember the details but again said that he was pretty sure our results would be the same. At the time I was extremely flattered and I felt proud that he would consider us to be the same. I know now he intuitively sensed that I was proud of my letters (wouldn’t be too hard to figure out since I can just roll them off in conversation!) and this was another subtle act of hoovering.
For the next year, we continued to exchange intermittent e-mails and see each other sporadically socially. His divorce was final but he remained working during the week in his ex-wife’s home state. She moved out of his house to an apartment and he came home on the weekends. They became “best friends”. I settled into my new job extremely well and my team told me that I was a far better manager then he ever was. On the surface, things were good however in my head, I was growing consciously unhappy with my marriage and was more restless for sexual gratification. I had a particularly powerful sexual dream of N. Serendipitously, circumstances arose in which I had the opportunity to hire N back to work for me as an independent contractor. By that time, H and I had acknowledged to each other the significant problems in our marriage. Months earlier, we agreed to work on it however he did nothing to improve things. It was all up to me and since there was so little flexibility in what could be done due to the constraints that the medical condition introduced, nothing got better. Finally, I told H that I was attracted to N but that I had no idea whether or not he was attracted to me in a romantic way. H said that it was very unlikely that N was NOT attracted to me.
3 months after N came back to work, this time with me as his boss, he e-mailed me and said, “you don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to, but how’s your marriage?” He said that I had given him good marital advice once and if I ever wanted to talk, he would be there for me. At first I kept my feelings close because I wasn’t sure I could trust him. I knew I was risking my job by even replying in any form other than to say that topic was none of his business however I was consciously in love with him by this time and couldn’t resist. I told him that my thoughts about him weren’t “exactly pure” and that he probably wasn’t the best person to give me marital advice. I told him that if that made him uncomfortable, we should stick to work topics with no hard feelings. He made it clear that he was very attracted to me. He wrote that my “smart/sexy awesomeness was really hot”. He told me that my feelings toward him were “not at all unwelcome” but that he didn’t “do casual”. That phrase struck me as odd and I would regret later that I didn’t point blank ask him what he meant. We finally spoke directly about our feelings after 2 more weeks of intense e-mail exchange. He played it so smart. He asked about my marriage and I told him about it all – the Moment of Clarity I had, the medical problem, the lack of sex, the pain of my dad’s suicide and being abandoned the night after he died. N said all of the right things, or mostly. He told me that he had a similar Moment of Clarity even before he and his wife were married in which he said to himself, “this relationship is going to end badly.” He said he would never again ignore Moments of Clarity. At the time, I misunderstood that for learning and self-improvement and failed to see the red flag of a man who creates self-fulfilling prophecies. He said that I needed to look out for number one, that I was too catholic in my guilt over being unhappy in my marriage and that I needed to do what would make me happy even if it meant leaving my husband. He said I shouldn’t get involved with him in order to leave my husband for another man because that pattern hadn’t served me well in the past. He also said he felt uncomfortable about the possibility of being a home-wrecker. And he encouraged me to get counseling. He said that perhaps we should put our feelings on hold for now until I was able to sort things out in my own head. But he also asked me if I had ever had an affair and I told him no. (A mutual friend of ours had told me once that when he talked to N about his own marital problems -this was when N was still married- N said, “Why don’t you just go and have an affair?” This was another red flag that I ignored.) He reached for my hand, looked me in the eye with a deeply piercing gaze and said “it’s taking all of the will-power I have not to jump across this table and attack you” and I felt a jolt of electricity shoot through my body. Then he said that it would be in my best interest to focus on myself right now and not be distracted by him. He sounded so smart; so reasonable; so honorable. But then as we were leaving the restaurant, another red flag went up when he was walking behind me (I was wearing nice jeans) and he said pretend under his breath “soooooo sexy.” After having just said that I should put my feelings for him aside, I wasn’t sure I heard him right so I asked, “What did you say?” And he said coyly, “Oh nothing … nothing.” Then, he tenderly hugged me and I kissed his cheek goodbye. He followed up this exchange with an e-mail in which he wrote that he appreciated me sharing so much with him, that he thought I was super-smart and that I would figure this all out, that he didn’t feel comfortable coloring any of my decisions and we should perhaps not discuss these topics for a while but at the same time he thought I was incredibly sexy and it would be hard for him to keep his thoughts about me pure. At the time I thought that he was so honorable but now I see that this was the first blatant hoovering and he was purposely building up sexual tension and drama so that I would be completely desperate for him. And, of course, I was.
I did seek counseling and for a month, N left me alone other than send infrequent sexy e-mails or other signals. While I worked with my counselor, I also told my mother about N, at N’s suggestion. He was close to his mother and at the time I admired his relationship with her (until I was to learn more later) and I believed in him so much that I took his advice. Confiding in my mother was a mistake and I knew it in my gut before I did it. She has never liked my husband. H is a disciplinarian and tends to be reserved and severe. His pain condition exacerbates these traits. My mother is used to people walking on eggshells with her; something H refuses to do. She can’t stand the way he parents and is constantly on me for the “damage” that is being done to our daughter’s “self-esteem” by having such a “harsh” father. It is true that chronic pain can make his harshness unpleasant at times; however it’s not nearly severe enough to hamper our daughter’s emotional well-being. When I told my mother about N, she at first strongly encouraged me to have a relationship with him and said she had a similar relationship while she was married to my father only it didn’t end well. It was as if I had let her in on a little secret and she was happy to advise me to have an affair. I refused to do so. At first, I thought that perhaps an open-marriage might work and my counselor, oddly enough, encouraged that. But I didn’t truly want that. What I wanted was a real, openly committed relationship with N. And given his statement of not wanting to do casual, coupled with his messages about me working it all out so I could come to a point where I could be free, I assumed he wanted the same. H and I talked incessantly and finally he realized that he had to let me go. He knew how strongly I felt for N. H had been unfaithful in his first marriage in a secret affair and he appreciated that I hadn’t gone behind his back. We agreed to separate even though for now that meant still living in the same house for financial reasons. I promised that I would always take care of H no matter what and I meant it.
By this time, N had stopped being distant and was making it clear that he wanted to be with me. He seemed to have forgotten about his stated intent of not getting involved or coloring my decisions. He wrote a song for me and he called it “Concentric”. He said it was about two things: 1) all of the inter-twined concentric circles of relationships I had in my life and 2) about his fantasies of sex with me. Once H and I emotionally separated, N and I began our 4-month romance. By this time, his ex-wife was living with a new, heroin-addicted boyfriend. I knew that N provided her with emotional and sometimes financial support because he never hid that from me and that they spent time together either golfing or watching baseball. She would visit him at his house and bring food because he had excuses why he couldn’t get it. He ate like crap. In addition to the 20 cups of coffee each day, his lunch consisted usually of pepperoni pizza and diet coke. Dinners out usually meant red meat and French fries followed by Monster energy drinks and then ginger ale to sleep. During work week, he tried to keep somewhat normal sleep hours to be able to make it in by 9:00 a.m. but needed a full pot coffee just to wake up. On weekends, he didn’t go to bed before 2:00 a.m. and didn’t arise until 11:00 a.m. Dinners at home alone were purchased from convenience stores even though he owned a $9,000 professional Viking gas stove. On our second date, he told me that he was bi-polar. He was hospitalized twice as a teenager for mania. And he alluded to having OCPD and was a pack-rat. To treat these conditions he self-medicates by smoking pot and has done so almost every day for 15 years. He said he didn’t need any sort of professional therapy or legal medications. He said when he felt down, he wrote music which served as a sort of journal. He also said that pot made him more creative. I had no idea at the time the severity of what he was doing. I did tell my counselor about it except for one omission. I didn’t tell her about the pot and when she asked me if he took prescribed medication, I lied and said yes. I regret that because I’m sure she would have counseled me against the relationship. Not that it would have made any difference but it would have given her at least a fair shot as my counselor and it would have been more honorable of me. I was so enamored that I just didn’t want to see what in my gut I knew was wrong.
I made it clear before we got intimately involved that there were two things that I wouldn't bend on and one thing that was out of my control. Those were that I am a dedicated mother, that I would always provide support to H whether he stayed my husband or not, and that I was infertile. Additionally, I told him that I had very strong feelings for him and that they were far stronger at this early stage than his were for me. I said I didn’t know how he felt about marriage and that I wouldn’t be able to give him one any time soon nor did I know how he felt about having kids. I said I wouldn’t be able to give him a biological child and if any of that made him uncomfortable, we could stick to being friends with no hard feelings. He said that on the contrary, he admired and respected my dedication to my family. He said he was ambivalent about marriage and children and wasn’t ready to wrap his head around those topics yet. He said that he was trying to address patterns in his own life in which he jumped into relationships too quickly and he believed that the strong feelings between us were probably a sign that we should take our relationship slowly and give it time to grow healthily. He said that he was very impressed with how open and honest I was with everyone in my life and he expected me to be the same way with him. He said none of those "barriers” were enough to prevent him from taking a "shot" at a relationship with me (red flag – what was I? target practice?) and that if our needs turned out to be too different, he knew it would be a conclusion we had reached together after open and honest communication which he said was the "hallmark of a healthy relationship." He sounded so sane, so logical and so mature.
On our first date, there were some red flags. He asked me how old I was when I first had sex and how many men I had been with. I told him he was my fifth sexual partner. He said that I was the 11th serious partner he had had. He said all of the past women in his life had pursued him and he had “just gone along for the ride” (red flag – women = Ferris Wheels). He said that he first had sex when he was 17 and it was with his first serious girlfriend. He said she was a drug addict whose parents threw her out of the house. His parents allowed her to live with him, in his room, sharing a bed as if they were married. A red flag went up – this would have been not long after he was hospitalized for the second time for bi-polar and I wondered what kind of parents, either too indulgent to too neglectful, would believe that a living situation like that could be at all healthy for their mentally ill son? The other red flag was related to our sexual encounters that day. There were 4, during none of which was he able to orgasm. This was after he had abstained from sex for 18 months when he and his wife separated. 3 out of the 4 encounters were outdoors. The first was by a river in what he told me beforehand was as secluded area. Afterward, he said, “do you think anyone saw us?” And, “that’s an area known for nude sunbathers.” It struck me as a little odd because he had said it was secluded. The second encounter occurred when we got back to his house. He has a large piece of property and there’s only one area that abuts a neighbor’s property in which their house can be seen. He took me to that area and received a BJ there. As we were walking away to go into the house, he asked, “Do you think the neighbors saw us?” Our third encounter was in his bed and it wasn’t anything spectacular. He seemed far more awkward in bed than the cool, dark, mysterious persona that he exuded publically and I recall wondering just how experienced he really was. The final encounter occurred when he asked me if I wanted to climb up and sit on his rooftop. I did and up on the roof, he performed oral sex. He encouraged me to “be loud” and after we finished, he said, “I’ll bet the neighbors saw us and I know they heard you.” Later that evening, he e-mailed me and said the same thing again and said next time, he wanted to be sure the neighbors heard.
An interesting side note is that I was now managing the all-male team that N used to manage and he was in the Alpha-male position of being "in bed" with the boss.
As we continued to date, his sexual performance improved. He still was able to orgasm only 50% of the time, but he seemed less awkward although still not very creative. I was the creative one and he said that I brought out the best in him. He was not selfish as a lover, however, and he loved to cuddle. In fact, cuddling and making love with someone, who at work came across as super-intelligent and arrogant, in addition to the “man in black” guise, but in the privacy of our little world, was sweet and shy, only made me love him more. I loved what I thought was the side of his personality that only I knew and that none of our friends had ever seen. As I got to know him more and learn the details of his life, more red flags were thrown. He loved to talk about himself. He was an only child. His father was distant and suffered from depression and rarely ever spent time with him. He was exceptionally close to his mother who was a hard-working, driven musician. His parents didn’t share a bedroom. He said that he couldn’t wait to leave home for college and get out of the house. He wrote a song in which he described his family life as a “blood-bath”. He said that he made a promise to himself a long time ago to never live a life of quiet desperation like his father did and that he would always look out for number one and leave a situation if it made him feel like it might lead to a life like his father’s. When he went to college, his mother left his father to move partway across the country to live hear him. He said his dad simply gave up and decided that the last 20 years of his life had been a waste. He stopped taking care of himself and dropped dead of a heart attack on the emergency room steps. N went to college and “got into any addictive substances that [he] could that weren’t going land [him] in jail.” He was so driven, however, that he graduated with honors. After the many hours of him telling me about himself, I had an impression of a mama’s boy who was ignored by his dad and who was used by his mom as a substitute husband (and continued to be into adulthood).
Despite these warning signs, throughout the first two months of our relationship, he was attentive, in fact looking back, too attentive. At work he was his typical arrogant, irritated self (although not yet to me) but as soon as we were alone together, he switched, almost on a dime, to the wonderful boyfriend that I loved so much. He seemed as enamored with me as I was with him to the point of overly complimenting me. He constantly told me that I was amazing both at work and at home. He said I consistently blew his mind with my intelligence, my sensuality, my warm touch, and that no one else had ever understood him like I did. He said that he liked spending time with me more than anyone he had ever spent time with. He even said that his dog had never been more fascinated by another person than me and that both he and the dog thought I was the sexiest girl they had ever met. I got constant e-mails from him overflowing with superlatives. He told me he had told his mom about us, including the circumstances of my home-life and while she was cautious about that, she also told him that it was a huge deal that he had finally found someone who understood him. Not surprisingly, she didn’t like his ex-wife.
At the same time, we were working together every day, I as his boss. We were both concerned about the risks to our careers if our relationship was discovered. We knew that the company was just about to complete a re-organization. This meant that he would be moved to work directly for my boss and no longer for me. We agreed that when that happened, I would inform my boss that we were dating and that we would come out to our close friends. In the meantime, I planned to host a party at my house for our team. N told me that he didn’t feel comfortable coming since my H and I were still living together. I told him that I understood. My H wanted me to enjoy the party and he knew that I would enjoy it more with N there. So he told me that he was going to go away for the weekend. When I told N that, he quickly changed his mind and said that he wanted to come to the party. Prior to his coming to the house, he sent me an e-mail telling me that one day he wanted to come in my mouth. I thought that was a little odd, like why would you plan that in advance and not just do it when the time came naturally? On the party day, the plan was for my daughter to spend some time at the party and then for her to sleep over my brother’s house. Once the party-goers left, N stayed with me. He became very aggressive sexually (not in a bad way, just even more eager than usual). He led me upstairs and kissed me passionately in front of my daughter’s bedroom door. Again, a little odd but nothing that bothered me too much. I told him that I needed to wash up and when I came out of the bathroom, he was already undressed and under the covers in my bed. Again, another little oddity but by that point, I was just too hungry for him to care. Sure enough, he came in my mouth for the first time, that night, in my bed. Some weeks after, we were talking about his grandparent’s house at which he spent a lot of time as a child because his dad “wasn’t the baby-sitting type.” I asked him what the style of his their house was and he said, “It was eerily like your house.” That creeped me out given the way he had acted on the party night.
A couple of weeks later, the reorganization occurred and he no longer worked for me. We had talked about who we would tell. One of the guys who works for me, R, is a close friend to both of us. He is probably the most intelligent person I have ever met in my life and N was both in awe of him and he admitted to being “a little jealous” of him. When N first came back to work, he made a big production out of telling everyone that the reason he agreed to come back was because he wanted to work again with R and me because we are smartest people he’s ever worked with. We agreed that R would be the first person we told, after my boss, and we agreed that N would tell him. N took R to lunch and told him. That evening he called me and I asked how it went. He said that R had figured it out a long time ago since it was so obvious how much I came on to N all the time. Red flag – that offended me and I gently called him out on it. I said that while it would probably be no surprise to everyone when they found out given how close we had always been, I didn’t think that I blatantly came on to him. He didn’t reply. The following day, R took me aside, gave me a hug and said he was really happy for me. I giggled a bit and asked did I come on that strong? R looked surprised and said that he never noticed me coming on to N. He said he did the math years ago and figured out on his own that we both had crushes on each other not just for looks but for brains and because it was obvious that we enjoyed each other’s company. Sure enough, when our other friends were told, their reaction was what I had predicted, although a girlfriend expressed concern about the smoking and unhealthy lifestyle.
The culmination of our relationship occurred 3 months in when we spent 4 days in New York at the US Open. I have been a tennis nut my whole life. I wanted to go on this trip for so long but never could with my husband. N knew the trip held great meaning because it symbolized the start of my new life. We wrote our bucket list and this trip was the top thing on my list. Overall, New York was blissful. Yet, there were 3 red flags. The first was when he told me about his ex-wife going on a cross-country trip with her heroin boyfriend. I asked N if she had accepted the divorce and if she was truly over him and he replied that “she has multiple personalities and she’s all over the place.” He said that when they split, he had to spend time “patiently explaining to each personality why the marriage didn’t work.” That struck me as more than a little odd. The second red flag occurred when he asked me if any of the relationships I had, I regretted ending. I told him I didn’t regret ending any but that I hadn’t thoroughly resolved the hurt feelings I had over my first serious boyfriend (my first N!) dumping me to get married to someone he had just impregnated. Then he told me that he regretted dumping his second serious girlfriend, J. He told me a little bit about her and said their relationship ended traumatically and he didn’t want to be tied down when he left the Midwest for college. I wondered about the trauma but didn’t ask. The 4 days we spent were filled with great memories, great companionship, and lots and lots of excellent sex. With him, I was making up for 7 years of lost time. He knew it was a huge deal for me to be sexually active again with someone whom I loved because I told him that I didn’t have sex with someone unless I loved them. The final red flag occurred on our way home when he told me that he had “a confession to make. I wanted to keep up with you so I bought some drugs on-line to help me do that.” I thought it odd and couldn’t really fathom why someone needed so many stimulants all the time. I smoked pot for the first time in my life with him on that trip and it did nothing for me. I couldn’t understand why he just couldn’t be himself and let his body do its natural thing. When we got home, he said that it was one of the best trips he had ever taken in his life and that he would cherish the memories.
A couple of days after we came home, he called me and told me that he was really happy with the way our relationship was progressing. So happy, in fact, that he wanted to call me his girlfriend. I thought it was cute and readily agreed, even though I was a little bewildered since I thought I already was. He said we should still take it slow. He brought up the topic of my daughter. He had had a brief Skype conversation with her while we were in New York. He told me that he thought she was adorable but that he still wasn’t sure about the issue of children. I told him I understood and that we had time to figure it out and there was no reason to rush. I knew he was ambivalent but that perhaps one day we could spend a little time with her doing something stress-free like taking his dog for a walk. He agreed and followed up with an e-mail saying that might be fun. He said that he still wasn’t sure if he wanted kids or not and he wasn’t sure how he felt about me not being able to have them. I told him that I understood but that if it got to that point, we could talk about it. I told him that there are options, whether they are adoption or surrogacy and he didn’t respond. He followed up this conversation with an e-mail and reiterated that he was very happy with our relationship, that he wasn’t sure about the topic of children, but that he wanted us to go steady. He told more friends including his best male friend and ex-wife and to them he “raved about our relationship”. His e-mails became even more loving however he still had not yet said I love you. I told him that it stressed me out that we hadn’t yet said that to each other and his response what that I showed him through my actions and loving touch every day how I felt for him. Another red flag.
Up until this point, even though many red flags had been flown, I hadn’t pieced them together into a cohesive whole that caused me any serious concern. I was so very happy with him. I often told him that he was the most fascinating person I had ever met and it was true. Things started to get a bit challenging at work, however. He had always been vocal about not liking the company we worked for. He called it the Evil Empire. He constantly complained about the company, management, even some of his friends who had worked there for a long time, saying they “just don’t get it”. I had been casually toying with the idea of leaving my company to become an independent contractor for a couple of years and had even suggested to N at one point long before we were involved that perhaps we could go into business together. Once we got together, he said to me one day, “it would give me a tremendous amount of personal satisfaction if I could steal you and R away from that hellhole and screw the machine.” I talked to him about the challenges of independent contracting while trying to raise a child since most times 80% travel is required. I said I didn’t want to be so far away that I couldn’t tuck my daughter into bed at night. Around this time, he called a former colleague of ours and asked him about a gig that might be coming up. The colleague asked to meet for dinner and N told him about us and that he would bring me along. During dinner, the colleague told us about the gig, and N piped up and said, “If I were to go work for you, [Morty] would too – we would come work as a package deal, you know, two for the price of one.” This was a huge red flag. I was quite surprised seeing as I had never said changing jobs was a done deal and N knew about my hesitancy regarding travel. But I was also flattered into believing this was his way of saying he wanted to build a new life together. So I didn’t call him out on speaking for me out of turn. When we went home that night, he was exceptionally tender and sweet however he still hadn’t said, “I love you.” I hadn’t said it either, because I wanted him to say it first.
Over the next couple of weeks, the relationship was at its pinnacle. He said that we were both in a much better place now than we were 12 months ago, that he was so happy he had “kicked the psycho bitch out” (his ex-wife) and he said that he didn’t know what he had done to ever deserve someone as wonderful as me. Then, he had a birthday. I sensed a change in him but I couldn’t pinpoint it; a certain lethargy. But we both made a big deal out of his birthday. He said he had to confess that he loved birthdays because, “hey, who doesn’t like a day that’s all about me?” A couple of days after, he told me that he had felt depressed over the birthday weekend but he was over it. I asked him how he wanted me to treat him while he was depressed – did he want space or did he want me to be more loving? He said that he had never had a girlfriend offer to be so accommodating and that he really appreciated it. He said that neither of us should make a big deal out of his depression and that we would figure out what worked as the normal process of us continuing to grow closer. He said that I was exceptionally empathetic and that he appreciated that and when his mood turned negative, I should in no way feel that I was responsible. He also said that stress at work were getting him down but that we both were accomplishing so much good stuff as a team that I shouldn’t be concerned. So I wasn’t – I didn’t see a red flag at all. I figured he’d lived with his condition for so long that he knew best how to manage it and if he needed my help, he’d ask.
After the birthday weekend, more and more red flags started to wave. He complained constantly about the job, he expressed jealousy toward R and other men on my team, he told me that he sometimes felt like he was in competition with me, he told me that I was the best manager he had ever worked for and that I did a better job at his old job than he did but then was jealous when he was no longer in management conversations because he was now a contractor rather than an employee. R and I were planning to go to a conference and he expressed jealousy that we were going and he was going to be left out. The weekend before I left, I was going through a very rough time with my mother. She no longer accepted the relationship with N because she could see that it wasn’t an affair for me – that I was truly in love with N and that I might someday live with him. She began laying guilt trips on me about how in her day, people worked out problems in their marriages and that I should leave N and work it out with H. She then badmouthed H and told me that what I really should do was move out with my daughter and her. I was feeling very low and missing my father a lot. So N told me that he thought it was time for him to see my home town. He said he wanted to see the places that held the most special memories for me and he wanted to visit my father’s grave. So we did. And of course, at every single one of those special places, he held me in his arms, looked at me deeply with angelic eyes and kissed me tenderly, just so I would never, ever be able to go back to those places without remembering being there with him. And he stood on my father’s grave and held me while I cried and told me that my father would be so proud of me and that’s how he liked to remember his dad. And he said, “Someday soon, I want to go on a road trip to [my home state] and take you to all my special places and visit my dad’s grave too.” On the way home, he talked about going mattress shopping together because he wanted to buy something that I would be comfortable sleeping on for a long time and wanted to buy a $4,000 flat screen T.V. so I could enjoy watching movies at his house. My fate was sealed – if there was every any doubt, it was over and I was completely in love with him and thought that he was making plans to build our life together.
R and I traveled to the conference. N kept asking me for pictures and said he wanted to feel like he was there with me. I spoke to him every night on the phone and he seemed agitated. I had asked him to manage my team while I was gone. A couple of stressful things happened. Nothing major and certainly nothing I didn’t deal with on a daily basis without making a big deal out of them. But when I spoke to him, it was as if the sky had fallen and he railed about the Evil Machine and how everyone there was incompetent. He said each night that he missed me and he was looking forward to me coming home so he could hold me. When I came home, I spent one night at my house and then scrambled like a crazy woman to get everything done at home so I could spend the next night with N. Before I went to N’s, I spent time with my daughter, took her to a party, did my laundry, caught up with H on the week’s events, paid the bills, and did my household chores. I called N and asked him if he wanted me to bring food and he said yes because he didn’t feel like going out. When I got there, we made love in front of the fireplace. It seemed so romantic but he couldn’t orgasm. Afterward, he put his head on my chest and held me. He had barely said one word (a rarity). I lifted my head and stroked his forehead and looked him in the eyes. He sighed a little and closed his eyes, looking almost like he was going to cry. And I knew. I knew that there was something wrong with him and that he could not handle an intimate relationship. But I put on a good face and cooked him dinner. He followed my every move and I couldn’t walk anywhere without him holding my hand (this was normal). The only place I ever went in without him holding on to me in some fashion was the bathroom. And even that was weird that night. I went to pee and the toilet wouldn’t flush. I said, “Oh no! It won’t flush!” And he came in and said, “I’m sorry, but I really have to go.” And when he came out, he said, “I feel so much closer to you now that we’ve mixed pees.” That was odd but even odder – for weeks, the bathroom sink was clogged and he did nothing about it. He just let it stay clogged and the sink barely drained. This was in a bathroom he had just spent $20,000 the previous year re-doing. Another weird thing – the neighbor lady (the one who he wanted to hear us having sex) walked his dog every day. This is the dog he describes as “the best thing I ever did”. She left him a note saying that Dog had a deer tick on his neck that needed be removed. Earlier that night, I had been petting Dog and felt the tick myself. I said, “Oh, I think Doggie has a tick on his neck.” And N said, “Yeah, I don’t feel like taking it out right now.” I asked, “Do you want me to help?” “Nah.” And then later I saw the note from the neighbor (once when she reported to him that Dog had hurt his leg, N said “I think she was implying that I abuse my dog. She’s a psycho.”). And the note was dated from two days before. Another red flag – this is a dog who he supposedly loves and he couldn’t be bothered to remove a tick for over two days that might give the dog Lyme Disease?
He was fine the next week. He seemed calmer at work. We played tennis one night and made love afterward and it was very sweet. The following weekend, I went to his house the spend Saturday night, as was our pattern. That night, during dinner, he seemed a little off – slightly distant. He said he was over the urge to buy a flat screen and he brought up the topic of the Moment of Clarity he had prior to leaving the city to move to the country with his then-fiancée. He reminded me that he figured out before they even moved that the relationship was doomed, even before they got married. He then complained about work and said he was thinking of ending his contract early. I told him that I understood. I said I would be sad not to be able to work with him every day but that I knew he hated the company and, as his girlfriend, I didn’t want to see him miserable. He thanked me for that and he said he never took me for granted as a manager. He said he knew that it was a difficult topic for me because I wouldn’t want to see him leave and that he would be as sensitive to my feelings as he could. But, he said, that since we’d still end up working together when I quit and went independent, it wouldn’t last long. He then talked about his mother and said that he thought that when I finally got to meet her, I would like her, even though she’s really a “bitch”. Normally, we never went to bed separately. He might sit in bed and play his guitar or smoke pot, but he was always with me. That night, I went to bed alone and he sat out in the living room alone. He came in twice to look at me while I was dozing. He kissed me on the forehead and then went back to the living room. Finally he came to bed and held me close while he fell asleep. It was the first time since we’d been together that we didn’t have sex right before sleeping.
The next morning, we got up late and made love. My daughter had called earlier in the morning to ask to be taken to the movies when I got home. He woke up while I was on the phone and seemed annoyed at the intrusion. But he was fine when we finally got up and we had a very good conversation about work. We both agreed that it was probably best if he left and he said that he probably would stick around for the next four months to finish out his contract gracefully. He said that he was sorry for being such a negative, spoiled bitch and that he needed to develop a thicker skin. We talked again about me going independent and going to work on the same gig. When I left that morning, I felt good. I felt like he had calmed down in the night and I saw it as a good sign that we had made love twice that weekend and he was able to come both times. I didn’t feel any lessening sexual desire for me from him and I just assumed that whatever else was bothering him was something we’d work out.
After I got home that Sunday, I sent him an e-mail thanking him for the nice weekend. I also told him that I wanted to do what he said what he wanted me to do, which was to not allow him to color my decisions. I said that I wanted to go work with him on that other gig but that I would wait to make a decision until I had thought about it for a while. I said I wanted to be sure I was making the decision to quit my job because it was truly the right thing for me and not simply because I wanted to follow him. He replied with an e-mail that would haunt me. He said that he did not want to color my decisions in any way because they were too personal to me and he wouldn’t feel comfortable giving undue influence. He then wrote that he was very happy about our relationship, that the sex was “phenomenal, the best I’ve had” and that I had “brought out feelings in [him] that [he] wasn't sure [he'd] ever feel again.” He said that his “feelings for me had consistently surpassed anything [he] had ever felt for anyone before.”
Then, the following Tuesday, he took me on a dinner date and all of a sudden, I was looking into the eyes of a snake and I was the recipient of a coldness and meanness I had never experienced before. In the five years I had known him, he had never raised his voice at me, he had never looked at me with anything but kindness and he was always warm and supportive. He implied that I had roped him into working at a place that he hated. He loudly said, “What the fuck were you and R thinking, that I would come back and stay forever?” I was completely blindsided and didn't know how to react other than to cry. We exchanged heated e-mails that evening and he told me that he hated his job but that he would try to stick it out for a few more months since he made my job easier. In anger, I wrote back that he didn't make my job easier, he made R’s job easier. And I knew when I saw him the next morning that I would never be forgiven for writing that he didn't make my job easier. That evening, he called me and became hysterical. Out of the blue, he told me that he couldn't deal with the fact that I was a mother and that he wanted nothing to do with socializing with a little girl. We hadn’t talked about socializing with my daughter for over a month and I wasn’t putting any pressure on him to do it in order to protect her. I was completely dumbfounded. The next evening, we went out for coffee and it got worse. When I asked him how he felt for me, he screamed hysterically in my face that he wouldn't be manipulated into telling me how he felt about a mother. He was the one who asked me to go steady, but I as his girlfriend, didn’t have the right to ask him how he felt about me? He told me then that the real reason he left his wife was because she was pressuring him for a baby. He quit his job and became an independent contractor for his “exit strategy”. I found out later that he blindsided her in a similar way to what he was now doing to me. He never told her there was something bothering him nor did he work at marriage counseling. And he did similar to two other serious girlfriends over the topic of children. He angrily said our relationship had reached a crossroads and a decision was going to be made. I wasn't even aware that there was a decision on the table and when I asked him if we could talk about what we could together do to make it better; he said that he didn't think so but he wanted me to come to his house the next evening.
So I did. And that's when the dumping occurred. Only he didn't even have the decency to come right out and dump me. In fact, he didn't even really tell me what was wrong other than to say something nebulous about not being comfortable being with a mother and that he was ending it for my daughter's sake. I asked him if this meant that the relationship, including the intimacy was over and he said, “Well, I don’t know what to do about that since you really like making love to me and I really like fucking you.” Those words have nearly driven me crazy. Then, it got worse. He started to lose control, one minute he screamed in my face after I called him out for his duplicity and the next minute he was crying uncontrollably pleading with me not to abandon him. We were clinging to each other. Then, he stopped crying, almost on a dime, and told me that I had to understand something about him - he has many different personalities but at his core is a cold, analytical personality always doing math and looking at the endgame. And he said an endgame with me that included my daughter wasn't something he wanted. He said he wanted me to be the queen of his castle and he didn't want to share me with anyone else but that he was overwhelmed with guilt for feeling that way so he had to let me go. He said in hindsight, he felt guilty about coming to the party at my house and even guiltier about going to New York with me. I told him how much that hurt since that trip meant so much to me and that I loved him and that I couldn't fathom how I could let him go. And he said, "I love you too, and that's what makes this so hard." He said this is all for “[my daughter’s] sake”. He implied that if I truly loved him, I would put aside my feelings and be his best friend. He also said that he still wanted me to quit my job and go work with him as an independent contractor. I wanted so badly to leave his house that night because I felt trapped but I also felt that since he had finally said he loved me, that there was still a chance. So I stayed. And I slept on the couch and I had to go into his room in the morning and wake him out of his caffeine-withdrawn stupor. And he got up and fell in to my arms and cried uncontrollably again. We held each other for a long time and he finally quieted. And he said, “Don’t ever forget this feeling of you and me here together, holding each other peacefully, especially when the pressure comes from the outside for you to end contact with me. Don’t ever forget.” He told me again that he loved me. And that he wanted me to be in his life forever. But he never apologized.
After I left that morning, he wrote me a letter in which he said that the root cause of the demise of our relationship was the fact that he didn't want to have a child, but that I had a child, and if he spent time with my child, he might fall in love with her and want a child of his own, and since I couldn't give him a biological child, he didn't want to be with me. After having gone through what I did with infertility, hearing this from the man I thought I loved was almost more than I could bear. I could not believe someone who said he loved me could be so insensitive with what was a maddening circular loop. I didn’t really understand up until that day what a Mind-Fuck was. When I suggested adoption or surrogacy, he accused me of making thought-ending comments and that no matter how creative we got, there weren’t enough hours in the day for me to be a mother, a career woman and a partner who was around enough to satisfy him. He said that he had promised himself he would never live a life of quiet desperation like his father did and he wasn't willing to invest further in our intimate relationship but that he wanted me in his life forever. I asked why we couldn’t talk about these things and he said again, he wasn’t willing to invest further. When I asked him what about ten years from now when my daughter is grown - I asked if we were both single then, would he want to have a relationship with me and he said without a second’s hesitancy, "of course, because I do love you and care about you." The following day he sent me an e-mail and despite his supposed reluctance to color my decisions while we were together, now that he had ended it, he felt justified in giving me the unsolicited advice to leave my husband because he didn’t make me happy. He said he had the right to give me that advice as my friend. He admitted that he had emotionally manipulated me and he blamed it on his bi-polar. He said he has many personalities and he views the world differently each day depending on his mood. He said that he really believed all of the wonderful things he had said to me, “or, at least that part of [him] that was awake” at the time believed them. He said he knew that wasn’t an excuse that he really apologized for the hurtfulness it had caused.
We continued to work together for two months after. And that's when his manipulative behavior became almost unbearable. He handled the work environment extremely unprofessionally. And he kept saying that he wanted me to decide to be his best friend. He said he had never wanted to remain in contact with an ex before (forgetting about his wife, apparently) but did so with me because not only did I understand him, I was the only person who he had ever met who thinks like he does (Ha!). He said he knew that in order for me to be his best friend, he had to repair the trust that he had damaged, but then he continued to do be all over the place by saying and doing manipulative things that further eroded my trust in him. He finally left work the day before Christmas after declaring that we needed a three month time out. He said I needed time off to get over him, unravel all of the concentric circles in my life starting with my mother and husband, find peace so that I could be his friend and then, we could travel together again, but stay in separate rooms. I asked him to answer me once and for all if we could try again and he said, “No, we can’t try again. At least, not any time soon.” After two months of lots of introspection, reading about what NPD, I mustered up the courage to go NC. I wrote him a very disarming, non-accusatory e-mail in which I praised him but also made it clear that I needed to sever our connection because a platonic friendship with him wasn't something that was going to make me happy. And I have not heard from him since. I would have rather received an “F-You” response. Instead, the silence has been deafening and I’m afraid that for him, there’s unfinished business, and that one day he’ll contact me because he was never the one to firmly close the door.

Aug 11 - 5AM
anonymous
anonymous's picture

Sorry - My Post Didn't Work the First Time

I think it's too long. I'll have to do this piecemeal... I am an intelligent and successful woman with a strong career, a lovely 8 year-old daughter and a loving husband. I am artistic, energetic and a typical "Type A" over-achiever. My mother has been living with us for 3 years. She has been under the care of psychiatrists intermittently during her adulthood and I suspect she has BPD. She is recovering from PTSD because my father committed suicide 3 years ago. They were married for 45 years. For a BPD, whose greatest fear is abandonment, spousal suicide is about the worst thing possible. While I have a lot of sympathy for my mother, I also feel anger because her disorder partly led my father to de-value himself and do what he did. He experienced long-term manipulation during his marriage. While that was bad enough, he also had a utilitarian philosophy and after being diagnosed with emphysema at age 69, he decided that it was time to put himself and his family out of misery. He always told us he would not be dependent on others and that a person has a right to choose when to die. I have no anger toward him other than the method he chose because it meant that my mother was the person to find him dead. His final act was a big F You to her for the years of emotional abuse. While he didn’t have NPD, he was introverted and had a rebellious streak that didn’t often come out. He loved casinos and sneaking cigars but always within limits and never to the point of irresponsibility. His parents were stalwarts of the community and he was raised to be responsible for his family. His ingrained sense of duty is why he never left my mother even though he would have been much happier if he had. Because of my Dad’s upbringing and my Mom’s BPD, I was raised to be a dutiful, supportive person who was expected to take care of everything and put my needs second, especially to my mother's. I was her little ballerina doll. I was taught to squelch my intuition so that I wouldn’t question manipulation. I’ve always been able to see red flags but I wasn’t taught to act on them because that would have meant calling my mother out when she was manipulating us. I was expected to go along with her mind games, to be her best friend and to listen to her woeful stories about the problems in my parents’ marriage. When I hit puberty, she started sharing inappropriate details about their sex life and manipulated me into taking her side against my Dad. When I became interested in boys, she encouraged relationships that were inappropriate. In high school, an older married teacher had a crush on me and she encouraged me to flirt with him. My first serious boyfriend (who is an N) had another girlfriend and, despite that, my mother encouraged me to pursue him. It wasn’t until I was 18 and chose a college major that didn’t align with my mother’s plans for me to be a ballerina that I started the long process of breaking out from under her spell. My parents’ difficulties and their impact on me were exacerbated by the fact that I was sexually molested by an older neighbor from age 6 to 9. Because I was so young, I didn’t understand what was happening and I didn’t know enough to defend myself or ask for help. There was no violence so I was never fearful although I didn’t like it. I just thought it was something gross that 16 year old boys did. When I was 9, I told my parents but I think I was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome and I blamed another boy. I was also unclear about the details and while my parents tried to talk to the neighbors and protect me, I wasn’t able to give them enough information to do anything about it. When I went to college, I was expected to fund my own education so I carried a full course load in addition to working 30 hours a week. I never got to have much fun. I dated a Normal Guy until I met the guy who would turn out to be my first husband. Normal Guy was dull in comparison. Future Ex-H needed someone to take care of him and I fell right in. I’m not sure what personality disorder he had but he had something wrong. He was verbally and physically abusive, addicted to pornography, had ED and I suspect was a latent homosexual. We were married for 6 years but spent the last year separated. During that time, my current husband H befriended me at work. I’m an introvert and don’t share my deepest feelings with people unless I know and trust them. H was a long-time friend of my brother’s and Bro always spoke highly of him. Once I got to know him, I spilled my guts about the embarrassing details of my marriage. H encouraged me to get out immediately for fear of my safety. I fell in love with him, seeing him as my knight in shining armor. We started dating and quickly made plans to get married once my divorce was final. H had a medical condition that limited what he could do and required him to spend a lot of time alone in a dark room. I knew this would be a challenge in our marriage, however I was so ready to have what I thought would finally be a healthy romantic relationship, that I downplayed the reality of the situation. Our courtship was less than 12 months and there was lots of great sex however it started to dwindle by the time of the wedding because of H’s condition. A couple of days before the wedding, he came home from work and I could tell he felt really sick. I knew that I would spend the evening alone because he’d have to be in the dark by himself. I had a Moment of Clarity and a big warning bell rang in my head saying that this was how my life was going to be most of the time. We got married and immediately started making plans for a child. He was 42 and I was 29. He had 3 grown children and had a vesectomy. I had severe endometriosis. We went through various assisted infertility treatments and nothing worked. Eventually, we became the parents of a baby girl through adoption. It took a long time for me to become a mom (at age 34) and the pain of infertility, the lenghty adoption process and the fact that all of that occurred at the time of 9/11 were wounds that scabbed over pretty well but were still always there under the surface. By the time my daughter was 2 (and I was 36), H’s condition had deteriorated but plateaued to a point where there were severe limitations on what he could do physically. To this day, he can’t work outside the home, can’t watch T.V., can’t drive at night, can’t read, and can’t have sex. When he began experiencing ED, he was too embarrassed to discuss it and couldn't tolerate medications to fix it. So sex became a taboo topic and because I had been programmed to put my needs behind those of others, I bottled everything up and denied my own pain and sense of abandonment.
Aug 11 - 5AM (Reply to #2)
anonymous
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The N Comes into My Life

My career, meanwhile, was progressing well. I earned an MBA and was earning a six-figure salary that kept us very comfortable. Six years ago, I was introduced to a new co-worker, my N. I was attracted to him immediately. He was different than anyone else I had ever known. He exuded a charm that was hard to pinpoint – a bit of a bad boy but simultaneously sweet and interested. We worked in a conservative company, both of us in Information Technology, and both involved outside work in the performing arts. The first day I met him, surrounded by corporate IT jocks in their polo shirts and khakis, N was wearing all black, had a ponytail, wore a thick silver bracelet, had a penetrating, intelligent gaze and demonstrated a sincere interest in a picture of a ballerina I had on my desk. I was smitten but didn't think much about it other than to be slightly amused. For the next 3 years, we worked closely together, established a firm professional respect for one another’s intellect and abilities and had a lot in common despite outward appearances. While I live a healthy lifestyle, he smokes 2 packs a day, drinks a minimum of 20 cups of coffee a day and portrays a hard-living rock star image that would have made us seem incompatible. While we always got along well with each other, I never sensed anything beyond friendly professional respect from him and I kept my attraction to myself. Three years ago, my Dad committed suicide. By then, H and I no longer slept in the same bedroom because he couldn’t lie flat in a bed. I slept alone and there had been no intimacy between us for 7 years. The night after my Dad died, I asked H to please come to bed with me and hold me because I didn’t want to be alone. He lasted in bed next to me for about an hour and then he said he wasn’t physically comfortable and needed to go back to his room. I was devastated. I felt so abandoned and angry. I wanted my needs for once to come before his condition. I was so hurt but said nothing and suffered in silence. Four months after my dad died, N gave his resignation at work. By this time, we were close professionally and our conversations had expanded to include some personal topics as well. He had married the previous summer. He and his wife had met while they were both living in a large city at the other end of the state. They dated for a very short time before moving in together. She was a part-time student who had held low-paying jobs and needed a place to live. He told her he was going to pack up everything and move to the other end of the state to a small country town in the middle of nowhere. He bought a huge, antique home designed by a famous architect and told her that he expected her to be its caretaker while he worked all day. She could go to school and work if she wanted but he also expected her to cook for him and run the house. After he had been married for 6 months, we were going through a stressful project at work and he confided to me that his marriage was rocky. He was a workaholic and his wife was starting to put pressure on him for not paying enough attention to her. They were not getting along well because they had promised each other when they got married, they would quit smoking so that when they started a family, their home would be healthier. His attempt at quitting lasted about 2 weeks and then he broke his promise and told her he simply wouldn’t stop. When he told me about how much stress he was under, he had tears in his eyes. I felt sorry for him. Being a workaholic myself, but also having learned how important family was, I told him that no job was worth the sacrifice of his marriage. A couple of months later, the weekend before my dad died, we had to work on a weekend. I arrived in the parking lot a couple of minutes before him. As I walked in, I saw him pull into the lot. I could hear him yelling at someone on the phone and my impression was that he was yelling at her. That was the first red flag. The yelling wasn’t in the same kind of tone spouses use when they squabble. There was something sinister about it. Four months later, when N resigned, he told management that I would be a good person to replace him in his managerial position. I was promoted based on his recommendation. During the 2 weeks he served out his notice, we worked closely together so he could transition his responsibilities to me. He told all of us he was resigning so he and his wife could move to her home state in order for her to be closer her mom when they started a family. He said he had a temp-to-perm contracting gig with an employer in her home-state and his plan was to prove himself and hope for the offer of a full-time job. It was during those 2 weeks that I became aware of a very strong attraction to him and I also sensed that perhaps he had a little bit of a crush on me. I downplayed it because I’m five years older and figured that someone as cool and smart as him could never be attracted to someone like me. (What a joke – “me” is a size-4, athletic, smart and pretty woman who thinks that everyone sees the flaws that she sees and would therefore never be attracted to someone as un-cool as her.) On his last day at work, I treated him to lunch. He asked me whether I was nervous about assuming his position (it is a stressful, high exposure job). When I talk about something that I’m excited about, I tend to become less reserved and more effervescent than I normally am and as I was talking, I saw something in his eyes spark. He had an enamored sort of smile on his face and I could feel for the first time a mutual attraction. I know now that that was the beginning of the hoovering. After he left work, I was very sad. I missed my Dad and I missed him. I realized how important he had become to me after working together so closely for 3 years and I accepted my new position partly because I knew it would be a connection to him. I figured he was happily married and getting ready to start a family but at least we would be able to communicate once in a while. I was consoled by the fact that we would be doing the same work. For the next four months, I immersed myself in my new job and did my damndest to prove that I was worthy of the role he used to fill. I strove to gain the respect of my new team and I wanted to be sure that whenever they spoke to him, they would tell him what a great job I was doing because I wanted him to be proud of me. 2 months after he resigned, we exchanged e-mails and he told me that he had been offered a full-time job but he had turned it down and asked if instead he could stay on as an independent contractor. A red flag went off. I asked him how his wife felt about that and he gave no reply. 2 months later, he sent me an e-mail and told me that he and his wife had separated. He said they had agreed to separate while they worked to make sure their heads were on straight. He said he was seeing a counselor at her request and was living in a small apartment while she stayed at his house to figure out her next move. In the meantime, a conference was coming up in Disney that we were both going to. We exchanged e-mails about looking forward to seeing each other there. At the same time, I was going through a hysterectomy. My endometriosis had become unmanageable and I made the decision to finally end the pain and give up the last glimmer of hope I had for giving birth to a biological child. I didn’t want another child but that little flame was an emotional one to finally snuff out. N knew I was having surgery. Before we met at Disney, we exchanged e-mails. He told me that their separation was difficult for his wife but that he wasn’t missing anything. I assumed that their separation had come after months of mutually trying to work things out in counseling. I told him a tiny bit about my first marriage and said that when a couple realizes that a mistake was made in choosing to marry, it’s best to not prolong the inevitable. In his reply, he wrote that he could easily see that but that his wife was struggling because she was “deluded into thinking we’re soul mates of sorts.” Another little red flag went off. I recalled a mutual friend who attended N’s wedding telling me that the ceremony was very touching because N, who was normally so cool, had tearfully spoken his vows and said that he was so happy to have found his soul mate. I had a flicker of intuition that I ignored. Was it her who was deluded if in fact he was the one who said they were soul mates? We saw each other for the first time since he had resigned at the Disney conference. A group of us went to dinner one night and N hung back from the crowd to talk to me alone. He said again that he didn’t miss his wife at all. The topic of the Myers-Briggs personality type test came up because my team and I had taken it as a team-building exercise at work. He said that he believed his marriage had failed because he and his wife were incompatible personality types. He also said he was convinced that he and I probably had the same test results. I know my letters (ISTJ – Introverted, Sensing, Thinking, and Judging) by heart. I asked him what his letters were and he said he couldn’t remember the details but again said that he was pretty sure our results would be the same. At the time I was extremely flattered and I felt proud that he would consider us to be the same. I know now he intuitively sensed that I was proud of my letters (wouldn’t be too hard to figure out since I can just roll them off in conversation!) and this was another subtle act of hoovering. For the next year, we continued to exchange intermittent e-mails and see each other sporadically socially. His divorce was final but he remained working during the week in his ex-wife’s home state. She moved out of his house to an apartment and he came home on the weekends. They became “best friends”. I settled into my new job extremely well and my team told me that I was a far better manager then he ever was. On the surface, things were good however in my head, I was growing consciously unhappy with my marriage and was more restless for sexual gratification. I had a particularly powerful sexual dream of N. Serendipitously, circumstances arose in which I had the opportunity to hire N back to work for me as an independent contractor. By that time, H and I had acknowledged to each other the significant problems in our marriage. Months earlier, we agreed to work on it however he did nothing to improve things. It was all up to me and since there was so little flexibility in what could be done due to the constraints that the medical condition introduced, nothing got better. Finally, I told H that I was attracted to N but that I had no idea whether or not he was attracted to me in a romantic way. H said that it was very unlikely that N was NOT attracted to me.
Aug 11 - 5AM (Reply to #3)
anonymous
anonymous's picture

Together

3 months after N came back to work, this time with me as his boss, he e-mailed me and said, “you don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to, but how’s your marriage?” He said that I had given him good marital advice once and if I ever wanted to talk, he would be there for me. At first I kept my feelings close because I wasn’t sure I could trust him. I knew I was risking my job by even replying in any form other than to say that topic was none of his business however I was consciously in love with him by this time and couldn’t resist. I told him that my thoughts about him weren’t “exactly pure” and that he probably wasn’t the best person to give me marital advice. I told him that if that made him uncomfortable, we should stick to work topics with no hard feelings. He made it clear that he was very attracted to me. He wrote that my “smart/sexy awesomeness was really hot”. He told me that my feelings toward him were “not at all unwelcome” but that he didn’t “do casual”. That phrase struck me as odd and I would regret later that I didn’t point blank ask him what he meant. We finally spoke directly about our feelings after 2 more weeks of intense e-mail exchange. He played it so smart. He asked about my marriage and I told him about it all – the Moment of Clarity I had, the medical problem, the lack of sex, the pain of my dad’s suicide and being abandoned the night after he died. N said all of the right things, or mostly. He told me that he had a similar Moment of Clarity even before he and his wife were married in which he said to himself, “this relationship is going to end badly.” He said he would never again ignore Moments of Clarity. At the time, I misunderstood that for learning and self-improvement and failed to see the red flag of a man who creates self-fulfilling prophecies. He said that I needed to look out for number one, that I was too catholic in my guilt over being unhappy in my marriage and that I needed to do what would make me happy even if it meant leaving my husband. He said I shouldn’t get involved with him in order to leave my husband for another man because that pattern hadn’t served me well in the past. He also said he felt uncomfortable about the possibility of being a home-wrecker. And he encouraged me to get counseling. He said that perhaps we should put our feelings on hold for now until I was able to sort things out in my own head. But he also asked me if I had ever had an affair and I told him no. (A mutual friend of ours had told me once that when he talked to N about his own marital problems -this was when N was still married- N said, “Why don’t you just go and have an affair?” This was another red flag that I ignored.) He reached for my hand, looked me in the eye with a deeply piercing gaze and said “it’s taking all of the will-power I have not to jump across this table and attack you” and I felt a jolt of electricity shoot through my body. Then he said that it would be in my best interest to focus on myself right now and not be distracted by him. He sounded so smart; so reasonable; so honorable. But then as we were leaving the restaurant, another red flag went up when he was walking behind me (I was wearing nice jeans) and he said pretend under his breath “soooooo sexy.” After having just said that I should put my feelings for him aside, I wasn’t sure I heard him right so I asked, “What did you say?” And he said coyly, “Oh nothing … nothing.” Then, he tenderly hugged me and I kissed his cheek goodbye. He followed up this exchange with an e-mail in which he wrote that he appreciated me sharing so much with him, that he thought I was super-smart and that I would figure this all out, that he didn’t feel comfortable coloring any of my decisions and we should perhaps not discuss these topics for a while but at the same time he thought I was incredibly sexy and it would be hard for him to keep his thoughts about me pure. At the time I thought that he was so honorable but now I see that this was the first blatant hoovering and he was purposely building up sexual tension and drama so that I would be completely desperate for him. And, of course, I was. I did seek counseling and for a month, N left me alone other than send infrequent sexy e-mails or other signals. While I worked with my counselor, I also told my mother about N, at N’s suggestion. He was close to his mother and at the time I admired his relationship with her (until I was to learn more later) and I believed in him so much that I took his advice. Confiding in my mother was a mistake and I knew it in my gut before I did it. She has never liked my husband. H is a disciplinarian and tends to be reserved and severe. His pain condition exacerbates these traits. My mother is used to people walking on eggshells with her; something H refuses to do. She can’t stand the way he parents and is constantly on me for the “damage” that is being done to our daughter’s “self-esteem” by having such a “harsh” father. It is true that chronic pain can make his harshness unpleasant at times; however it’s not nearly severe enough to hamper our daughter’s emotional well-being. When I told my mother about N, she at first strongly encouraged me to have a relationship with him and said she had a similar relationship while she was married to my father only it didn’t end well. It was as if I had let her in on a little secret and she was happy to advise me to have an affair. I refused to do so. At first, I thought that perhaps an open-marriage might work and my counselor, oddly enough, encouraged that. But I didn’t truly want that. What I wanted was a real, openly committed relationship with N. And given his statement of not wanting to do casual, coupled with his messages about me working it all out so I could come to a point where I could be free, I assumed he wanted the same. H and I talked incessantly and finally he realized that he had to let me go. He knew how strongly I felt for N. H had been unfaithful in his first marriage in a secret affair and he appreciated that I hadn’t gone behind his back. We agreed to separate even though for now that meant still living in the same house for financial reasons. I promised that I would always take care of H no matter what and I meant it. By this time, N had stopped being distant and was making it clear that he wanted to be with me. He seemed to have forgotten about his stated intent of not getting involved or coloring my decisions. He wrote a song for me and he called it “Concentric”. He said it was about two things: 1) all of the inter-twined concentric circles of relationships I had in my life and 2) about his fantasies of sex with me. Once H and I emotionally separated, N and I began our 4-month romance. By this time, his ex-wife was living with a new, heroin-addicted boyfriend. I knew that N provided her with emotional and sometimes financial support because he never hid that from me and that they spent time together either golfing or watching baseball. She would visit him at his house and bring food because he had excuses why he couldn’t get it. He ate like crap. In addition to the 20 cups of coffee each day, his lunch consisted usually of pepperoni pizza and diet coke. Dinners out usually meant red meat and French fries followed by Monster energy drinks and then ginger ale to sleep. During work week, he tried to keep somewhat normal sleep hours to be able to make it in by 9:00 a.m. but needed a full pot coffee just to wake up. On weekends, he didn’t go to bed before 2:00 a.m. and didn’t arise until 11:00 a.m. Dinners at home alone were purchased from convenience stores even though he owned a $9,000 professional Viking gas stove. On our second date, he told me that he was bi-polar. He was hospitalized twice as a teenager for mania. And he alluded to having OCPD and was a pack-rat. To treat these conditions he self-medicates by smoking pot and has done so almost every day for 15 years. He said he didn’t need any sort of professional therapy or legal medications. He said when he felt down, he wrote music which served as a sort of journal. He also said that pot made him more creative. I had no idea at the time the severity of what he was doing. I did tell my counselor about it except for one omission. I didn’t tell her about the pot and when she asked me if he took prescribed medication, I lied and said yes. I regret that because I’m sure she would have counseled me against the relationship. Not that it would have made any difference but it would have given her at least a fair shot as my counselor and it would have been more honorable of me. I was so enamored that I just didn’t want to see what in my gut I knew was wrong. I made it clear before we got intimately involved that there were two things that I wouldn't bend on and one thing that was out of my control. Those were that I am a dedicated mother, that I would always provide support to H whether he stayed my husband or not, and that I was infertile. Additionally, I told him that I had very strong feelings for him and that they were far stronger at this early stage than his were for me. I said I didn’t know how he felt about marriage and that I wouldn’t be able to give him one any time soon nor did I know how he felt about having kids. I said I wouldn’t be able to give him a biological child and if any of that made him uncomfortable, we could stick to being friends with no hard feelings. He said that on the contrary, he admired and respected my dedication to my family. He said he was ambivalent about marriage and children and wasn’t ready to wrap his head around those topics yet. He said that he was trying to address patterns in his own life in which he jumped into relationships too quickly and he believed that the strong feelings between us were probably a sign that we should take our relationship slowly and give it time to grow healthily. He said that he was very impressed with how open and honest I was with everyone in my life and he expected me to be the same way with him. He said none of those "barriers” were enough to prevent him from taking a "shot" at a relationship with me (red flag – what was I? target practice?) and that if our needs turned out to be too different, he knew it would be a conclusion we had reached together after open and honest communication which he said was the "hallmark of a healthy relationship." He sounded so sane, so logical and so mature. On our first date, there were some red flags. He asked me how old I was when I first had sex and how many men I had been with. I told him he was my fifth sexual partner. He said that I was the 11th serious partner he had had. He said all of the past women in his life had pursued him and he had “just gone along for the ride” (red flag – women = Ferris Wheels). He said that he first had sex when he was 17 and it was with his first serious girlfriend. He said she was a drug addict whose parents threw her out of the house. His parents allowed her to live with him, in his room, sharing a bed as if they were married. A red flag went up – this would have been not long after he was hospitalized for the second time for bi-polar and I wondered what kind of parents, either too indulgent to too neglectful, would believe that a living situation like that could be at all healthy for their mentally ill son? The other red flag was related to our sexual encounters that day. There were 4, during none of which was he able to orgasm. This was after he had abstained from sex for 18 months when he and his wife separated. 3 out of the 4 encounters were outdoors. The first was by a river in what he told me beforehand was as secluded area. Afterward, he said, “do you think anyone saw us?” And, “that’s an area known for nude sunbathers.” It struck me as a little odd because he had said it was secluded. The second encounter occurred when we got back to his house. He has a large piece of property and there’s only one area that abuts a neighbor’s property in which their house can be seen. He took me to that area and received a BJ there. As we were walking away to go into the house, he asked, “Do you think the neighbors saw us?” Our third encounter was in his bed and it wasn’t anything spectacular. He seemed far more awkward in bed than the cool, dark, mysterious persona that he exuded publically and I recall wondering just how experienced he really was. The final encounter occurred when he asked me if I wanted to climb up and sit on his rooftop. I did and up on the roof, he performed oral sex. He encouraged me to “be loud” and after we finished, he said, “I’ll bet the neighbors saw us and I know they heard you.” Later that evening, he e-mailed me and said the same thing again and said next time, he wanted to be sure the neighbors heard. An interesting side note is that I was now managing the all-male team that N used to manage and he was in the Alpha-male position of being "in bed" with the boss. As we continued to date, his sexual performance improved. He still was able to orgasm only 50% of the time, but he seemed less awkward although still not very creative. I was the creative one and he said that I brought out the best in him. He was not selfish as a lover, however, and he loved to cuddle. In fact, cuddling and making love with someone, who at work came across as super-intelligent and arrogant, in addition to the “man in black” guise, but in the privacy of our little world, was sweet and shy, only made me love him more. I loved what I thought was the side of his personality that only I knew and that none of our friends had ever seen. As I got to know him more and learn the details of his life, more red flags were thrown. He loved to talk about himself. He was an only child. His father was distant and suffered from depression and rarely ever spent time with him. He was exceptionally close to his mother who was a hard-working, driven musician. His parents didn’t share a bedroom. He said that he couldn’t wait to leave home for college and get out of the house. He wrote a song in which he described his family life as a “blood-bath”. He said that he made a promise to himself a long time ago to never live a life of quiet desperation like his father did and that he would always look out for number one and leave a situation if it made him feel like it might lead to a life like his father’s. When he went to college, his mother left his father to move partway across the country to live hear him. He said his dad simply gave up and decided that the last 20 years of his life had been a waste. He stopped taking care of himself and dropped dead of a heart attack on the emergency room steps. N went to college and “got into any addictive substances that [he] could that weren’t going land [him] in jail.” He was so driven, however, that he graduated with honors. After the many hours of him telling me about himself, I had an impression of a mama’s boy who was ignored by his dad and who was used by his mom as a substitute husband (and continued to be into adulthood). Despite these warning signs, throughout the first two months of our relationship, he was attentive, in fact looking back, too attentive. At work he was his typical arrogant, irritated self (although not yet to me) but as soon as we were alone together, he switched, almost on a dime, to the wonderful boyfriend that I loved so much. He seemed as enamored with me as I was with him to the point of overly complimenting me. He constantly told me that I was amazing both at work and at home. He said I consistently blew his mind with my intelligence, my sensuality, my warm touch, and that no one else had ever understood him like I did. He said that he liked spending time with me more than anyone he had ever spent time with. He even said that his dog had never been more fascinated by another person than me and that both he and the dog thought I was the sexiest girl they had ever met. I got constant e-mails from him overflowing with superlatives. He told me he had told his mom about us, including the circumstances of my home-life and while she was cautious about that, she also told him that it was a huge deal that he had finally found someone who understood him. Not surprisingly, she didn’t like his ex-wife. At the same time, we were working together every day, I as his boss. We were both concerned about the risks to our careers if our relationship was discovered. We knew that the company was just about to complete a re-organization. This meant that he would be moved to work directly for my boss and no longer for me. We agreed that when that happened, I would inform my boss that we were dating and that we would come out to our close friends. In the meantime, I planned to host a party at my house for our team. N told me that he didn’t feel comfortable coming since my H and I were still living together. I told him that I understood. My H wanted me to enjoy the party and he knew that I would enjoy it more with N there. So he told me that he was going to go away for the weekend. When I told N that, he quickly changed his mind and said that he wanted to come to the party. Prior to his coming to the house, he sent me an e-mail telling me that one day he wanted to come in my mouth. I thought that was a little odd, like why would you plan that in advance and not just do it when the time came naturally? On the party day, the plan was for my daughter to spend some time at the party and then for her to sleep over my brother’s house. Once the party-goers left, N stayed with me. He became very aggressive sexually (not in a bad way, just even more eager than usual). He led me upstairs and kissed me passionately in front of my daughter’s bedroom door. Again, a little odd but nothing that bothered me too much. I told him that I needed to wash up and when I came out of the bathroom, he was already undressed and under the covers in my bed. Again, another little oddity but by that point, I was just too hungry for him to care. Sure enough, he came in my mouth for the first time, that night, in my bed. Some weeks after, we were talking about his grandparent’s house at which he spent a lot of time as a child because his dad “wasn’t the baby-sitting type.” I asked him what the style of his their house was and he said, “It was eerily like your house.” That creeped me out given the way he had acted on the party night. A couple of weeks later, the reorganization occurred and he no longer worked for me. We had talked about who we would tell. One of the guys who works for me, R, is a close friend to both of us. He is probably the most intelligent person I have ever met in my life and N was both in awe of him and he admitted to being “a little jealous” of him. When N first came back to work, he made a big production out of telling everyone that the reason he agreed to come back was because he wanted to work again with R and me because we are smartest people he’s ever worked with. We agreed that R would be the first person we told, after my boss, and we agreed that N would tell him. N took R to lunch and told him. That evening he called me and I asked how it went. He said that R had figured it out a long time ago since it was so obvious how much I came on to N all the time. Red flag – that offended me and I gently called him out on it. I said that while it would probably be no surprise to everyone when they found out given how close we had always been, I didn’t think that I blatantly came on to him. He didn’t reply. The following day, R took me aside, gave me a hug and said he was really happy for me. I giggled a bit and asked did I come on that strong? R looked surprised and said that he never noticed me coming on to N. He said he did the math years ago and figured out on his own that we both had crushes on each other not just for looks but for brains and because it was obvious that we enjoyed each other’s company. Sure enough, when our other friends were told, their reaction was what I had predicted, although a girlfriend expressed concern about the smoking and unhealthy lifestyle. The culmination of our relationship occurred 3 months in when we spent 4 days in New York at the US Open. I have been a tennis nut my whole life. I wanted to go on this trip for so long but never could with my husband. N knew the trip held great meaning because it symbolized the start of my new life. We wrote our bucket list and this trip was the top thing on my list. Overall, New York was blissful. Yet, there were 3 red flags. The first was when he told me about his ex-wife going on a cross-country trip with her heroin boyfriend. I asked N if she had accepted the divorce and if she was truly over him and he replied that “she has multiple personalities and she’s all over the place.” He said that when they split, he had to spend time “patiently explaining to each personality why the marriage didn’t work.” That struck me as more than a little odd. The second red flag occurred when he asked me if any of the relationships I had, I regretted ending. I told him I didn’t regret ending any but that I hadn’t thoroughly resolved the hurt feelings I had over my first serious boyfriend (my first N!) dumping me to get married to someone he had just impregnated. Then he told me that he regretted dumping his second serious girlfriend, J. He told me a little bit about her and said their relationship ended traumatically and he didn’t want to be tied down when he left the Midwest for college. I wondered about the trauma but didn’t ask. The 4 days we spent were filled with great memories, great companionship, and lots and lots of excellent sex. With him, I was making up for 7 years of lost time. He knew it was a huge deal for me to be sexually active again with someone whom I loved because I told him that I didn’t have sex with someone unless I loved them. The final red flag occurred on our way home when he told me that he had “a confession to make. I wanted to keep up with you so I bought some drugs on-line to help me do that.” I thought it odd and couldn’t really fathom why someone needed so many stimulants all the time. I smoked pot for the first time in my life with him on that trip and it did nothing for me. I couldn’t understand why he just couldn’t be himself and let his body do its natural thing. When we got home, he said that it was one of the best trips he had ever taken in his life and that he would cherish the memories. A couple of days after we came home, he called me and told me that he was really happy with the way our relationship was progressing. So happy, in fact, that he wanted to call me his girlfriend. I thought it was cute and readily agreed, even though I was a little bewildered since I thought I already was. He said we should still take it slow. He brought up the topic of my daughter. He had had a brief Skype conversation with her while we were in New York. He told me that he thought she was adorable but that he still wasn’t sure about the issue of children. I told him I understood and that we had time to figure it out and there was no reason to rush. I knew he was ambivalent but that perhaps one day we could spend a little time with her doing something stress-free like taking his dog for a walk. He agreed and followed up with an e-mail saying that might be fun. He said that he still wasn’t sure if he wanted kids or not and he wasn’t sure how he felt about me not being able to have them. I told him that I understood but that if it got to that point, we could talk about it. I told him that there are options, whether they are adoption or surrogacy and he didn’t respond. He followed up this conversation with an e-mail and reiterated that he was very happy with our relationship, that he wasn’t sure about the topic of children, but that he wanted us to go steady. He told more friends including his best male friend and ex-wife and to them he “raved about our relationship”. His e-mails became even more loving however he still had not yet said I love you. I told him that it stressed me out that we hadn’t yet said that to each other and his response what that I showed him through my actions and loving touch every day how I felt for him. Another red flag. Up until this point, even though many red flags had been flown, I hadn’t pieced them together into a cohesive whole that caused me any serious concern. I was so very happy with him. I often told him that he was the most fascinating person I had ever met and it was true. Things started to get a bit challenging at work, however. He had always been vocal about not liking the company we worked for. He called it the Evil Empire. He constantly complained about the company, management, even some of his friends who had worked there for a long time, saying they “just don’t get it”. I had been casually toying with the idea of leaving my company to become an independent contractor for a couple of years and had even suggested to N at one point long before we were involved that perhaps we could go into business together. Once we got together, he said to me one day, “it would give me a tremendous amount of personal satisfaction if I could steal you and R away from that hellhole and screw the machine.” I talked to him about the challenges of independent contracting while trying to raise a child since most times 80% travel is required. I said I didn’t want to be so far away that I couldn’t tuck my daughter into bed at night. Around this time, he called a former colleague of ours and asked him about a gig that might be coming up. The colleague asked to meet for dinner and N told him about us and that he would bring me along. During dinner, the colleague told us about the gig, and N piped up and said, “If I were to go work for you, [Morty] would too – we would come work as a package deal, you know, two for the price of one.” This was a huge red flag. I was quite surprised seeing as I had never said changing jobs was a done deal and N knew about my hesitancy regarding travel. But I was also flattered into believing this was his way of saying he wanted to build a new life together. So I didn’t call him out on speaking for me out of turn. When we went home that night, he was exceptionally tender and sweet however he still hadn’t said, “I love you.” I hadn’t said it either, because I wanted him to say it first. Over the next couple of weeks, the relationship was at its pinnacle. He said that we were both in a much better place now than we were 12 months ago, that he was so happy he had “kicked the psycho bitch out” (his ex-wife) and he said that he didn’t know what he had done to ever deserve someone as wonderful as me. Then, he had a birthday. I sensed a change in him but I couldn’t pinpoint it; a certain lethargy. But we both made a big deal out of his birthday. He said he had to confess that he loved birthdays because, “hey, who doesn’t like a day that’s all about me?” A couple of days after, he told me that he had felt depressed over the birthday weekend but he was over it. I asked him how he wanted me to treat him while he was depressed – did he want space or did he want me to be more loving? He said that he had never had a girlfriend offer to be so accommodating and that he really appreciated it. He said that neither of us should make a big deal out of his depression and that we would figure out what worked as the normal process of us continuing to grow closer. He said that I was exceptionally empathetic and that he appreciated that and when his mood turned negative, I should in no way feel that I was responsible. He also said that stress at work were getting him down but that we both were accomplishing so much good stuff as a team that I shouldn’t be concerned. So I wasn’t – I didn’t see a red flag at all. I figured he’d lived with his condition for so long that he knew best how to manage it and if he needed my help, he’d ask.
Aug 11 - 5AM (Reply to #4)
anonymous
anonymous's picture

Apart

After the birthday weekend, more and more red flags started to wave. He complained constantly about the job, he expressed jealousy toward R and other men on my team, he told me that he sometimes felt like he was in competition with me, he told me that I was the best manager he had ever worked for and that I did a better job at his old job than he did but then was jealous when he was no longer in management conversations because he was now a contractor rather than an employee. R and I were planning to go to a conference and he expressed jealousy that we were going and he was going to be left out. The weekend before I left, I was going through a very rough time with my mother. She no longer accepted the relationship with N because she could see that it wasn’t an affair for me – that I was truly in love with N and that I might someday live with him. She began laying guilt trips on me about how in her day, people worked out problems in their marriages and that I should leave N and work it out with H. She then badmouthed H and told me that what I really should do was move out with my daughter and her. I was feeling very low and missing my father a lot. So N told me that he thought it was time for him to see my home town. He said he wanted to see the places that held the most special memories for me and he wanted to visit my father’s grave. So we did. And of course, at every single one of those special places, he held me in his arms, looked at me deeply with angelic eyes and kissed me tenderly, just so I would never, ever be able to go back to those places without remembering being there with him. And he stood on my father’s grave and held me while I cried and told me that my father would be so proud of me and that’s how he liked to remember his dad. And he said, “Someday soon, I want to go on a road trip to [my home state] and take you to all my special places and visit my dad’s grave too.” On the way home, he talked about going mattress shopping together because he wanted to buy something that I would be comfortable sleeping on for a long time and wanted to buy a $4,000 flat screen T.V. so I could enjoy watching movies at his house. My fate was sealed – if there was every any doubt, it was over and I was completely in love with him and thought that he was making plans to build our life together. R and I traveled to the conference. N kept asking me for pictures and said he wanted to feel like he was there with me. I spoke to him every night on the phone and he seemed agitated. I had asked him to manage my team while I was gone. A couple of stressful things happened. Nothing major and certainly nothing I didn’t deal with on a daily basis without making a big deal out of them. But when I spoke to him, it was as if the sky had fallen and he railed about the Evil Machine and how everyone there was incompetent. He said each night that he missed me and he was looking forward to me coming home so he could hold me. When I came home, I spent one night at my house and then scrambled like a crazy woman to get everything done at home so I could spend the next night with N. Before I went to N’s, I spent time with my daughter, took her to a party, did my laundry, caught up with H on the week’s events, paid the bills, and did my household chores. I called N and asked him if he wanted me to bring food and he said yes because he didn’t feel like going out. When I got there, we made love in front of the fireplace. It seemed so romantic but he couldn’t orgasm. Afterward, he put his head on my chest and held me. He had barely said one word (a rarity). I lifted my head and stroked his forehead and looked him in the eyes. He sighed a little and closed his eyes, looking almost like he was going to cry. And I knew. I knew that there was something wrong with him and that he could not handle an intimate relationship. But I put on a good face and cooked him dinner. He followed my every move and I couldn’t walk anywhere without him holding my hand (this was normal). The only place I ever went in without him holding on to me in some fashion was the bathroom. And even that was weird that night. I went to pee and the toilet wouldn’t flush. I said, “Oh no! It won’t flush!” And he came in and said, “I’m sorry, but I really have to go.” And when he came out, he said, “I feel so much closer to you now that we’ve mixed pees.” That was odd but even odder – for weeks, the bathroom sink was clogged and he did nothing about it. He just let it stay clogged and the sink barely drained. This was in a bathroom he had just spent $20,000 the previous year re-doing. Another weird thing – the neighbor lady (the one who he wanted to hear us having sex) walked his dog every day. This is the dog he describes as “the best thing I ever did”. She left him a note saying that Dog had a deer tick on his neck that needed be removed. Earlier that night, I had been petting Dog and felt the tick myself. I said, “Oh, I think Doggie has a tick on his neck.” And N said, “Yeah, I don’t feel like taking it out right now.” I asked, “Do you want me to help?” “Nah.” And then later I saw the note from the neighbor (once when she reported to him that Dog had hurt his leg, N said “I think she was implying that I abuse my dog. She’s a psycho.”). And the note was dated from two days before. Another red flag – this is a dog who he supposedly loves and he couldn’t be bothered to remove a tick for over two days that might give the dog Lyme Disease? He was fine the next week. He seemed calmer at work. We played tennis one night and made love afterward and it was very sweet. The following weekend, I went to his house the spend Saturday night, as was our pattern. That night, during dinner, he seemed a little off – slightly distant. He said he was over the urge to buy a flat screen and he brought up the topic of the Moment of Clarity he had prior to leaving the city to move to the country with his then-fiancée. He reminded me that he figured out before they even moved that the relationship was doomed, even before they got married. He then complained about work and said he was thinking of ending his contract early. I told him that I understood. I said I would be sad not to be able to work with him every day but that I knew he hated the company and, as his girlfriend, I didn’t want to see him miserable. He thanked me for that and he said he never took me for granted as a manager. He said he knew that it was a difficult topic for me because I wouldn’t want to see him leave and that he would be as sensitive to my feelings as he could. But, he said, that since we’d still end up working together when I quit and went independent, it wouldn’t last long. He then talked about his mother and said that he thought that when I finally got to meet her, I would like her, even though she’s really a “bitch”. Normally, we never went to bed separately. He might sit in bed and play his guitar or smoke pot, but he was always with me. That night, I went to bed alone and he sat out in the living room alone. He came in twice to look at me while I was dozing. He kissed me on the forehead and then went back to the living room. Finally he came to bed and held me close while he fell asleep. It was the first time since we’d been together that we didn’t have sex right before sleeping. The next morning, we got up late and made love. My daughter had called earlier in the morning to ask to be taken to the movies when I got home. He woke up while I was on the phone and seemed annoyed at the intrusion. But he was fine when we finally got up and we had a very good conversation about work. We both agreed that it was probably best if he left and he said that he probably would stick around for the next four months to finish out his contract gracefully. He said that he was sorry for being such a negative, spoiled bitch and that he needed to develop a thicker skin. We talked again about me going independent and going to work on the same gig. When I left that morning, I felt good. I felt like he had calmed down in the night and I saw it as a good sign that we had made love twice that weekend and he was able to come both times. I didn’t feel any lessening sexual desire for me from him and I just assumed that whatever else was bothering him was something we’d work out. After I got home that Sunday, I sent him an e-mail thanking him for the nice weekend. I also told him that I wanted to do what he said what he wanted me to do, which was to not allow him to color my decisions. I said that I wanted to go work with him on that other gig but that I would wait to make a decision until I had thought about it for a while. I said I wanted to be sure I was making the decision to quit my job because it was truly the right thing for me and not simply because I wanted to follow him. He replied with an e-mail that would haunt me. He said that he did not want to color my decisions in any way because they were too personal to me and he wouldn’t feel comfortable giving undue influence. He then wrote that he was very happy about our relationship, that the sex was “phenomenal, the best I’ve had” and that I had “brought out feelings in [him] that [he] wasn't sure [he'd] ever feel again.” He said that his “feelings for me had consistently surpassed anything [he] had ever felt for anyone before.” Then, the following Tuesday, he took me on a dinner date and all of a sudden, I was looking into the eyes of a snake and I was the recipient of a coldness and meanness I had never experienced before. In the five years I had known him, he had never raised his voice at me, he had never looked at me with anything but kindness and he was always warm and supportive. He implied that I had roped him into working at a place that he hated. He loudly said, “What the fuck were you and R thinking, that I would come back and stay forever?” I was completely blindsided and didn't know how to react other than to cry. We exchanged heated e-mails that evening and he told me that he hated his job but that he would try to stick it out for a few more months since he made my job easier. In anger, I wrote back that he didn't make my job easier, he made R’s job easier. And I knew when I saw him the next morning that I would never be forgiven for writing that he didn't make my job easier. That evening, he called me and became hysterical. Out of the blue, he told me that he couldn't deal with the fact that I was a mother and that he wanted nothing to do with socializing with a little girl. We hadn’t talked about socializing with my daughter for over a month and I wasn’t putting any pressure on him to do it in order to protect her. I was completely dumbfounded. The next evening, we went out for coffee and it got worse. When I asked him how he felt for me, he screamed hysterically in my face that he wouldn't be manipulated into telling me how he felt about a mother. He was the one who asked me to go steady, but I as his girlfriend, didn’t have the right to ask him how he felt about me? He told me then that the real reason he left his wife was because she was pressuring him for a baby. He quit his job and became an independent contractor for his “exit strategy”. I found out later that he blindsided her in a similar way to what he was now doing to me. He never told her there was something bothering him nor did he work at marriage counseling. And he did similar to two other serious girlfriends over the topic of children. He angrily said our relationship had reached a crossroads and a decision was going to be made. I wasn't even aware that there was a decision on the table and when I asked him if we could talk about what we could together do to make it better; he said that he didn't think so but he wanted me to come to his house the next evening. So I did. And that's when the dumping occurred. Only he didn't even have the decency to come right out and dump me. In fact, he didn't even really tell me what was wrong other than to say something nebulous about not being comfortable being with a mother and that he was ending it for my daughter's sake. I asked him if this meant that the relationship, including the intimacy was over and he said, “Well, I don’t know what to do about that since you really like making love to me and I really like fucking you.” Those words have nearly driven me crazy. Then, it got worse. He started to lose control, one minute he screamed in my face after I called him out for his duplicity and the next minute he was crying uncontrollably pleading with me not to abandon him. We were clinging to each other. Then, he stopped crying, almost on a dime, and told me that I had to understand something about him - he has many different personalities but at his core is a cold, analytical personality always doing math and looking at the endgame. And he said an endgame with me that included my daughter wasn't something he wanted. He said he wanted me to be the queen of his castle and he didn't want to share me with anyone else but that he was overwhelmed with guilt for feeling that way so he had to let me go. He said in hindsight, he felt guilty about coming to the party at my house and even guiltier about going to New York with me. I told him how much that hurt since that trip meant so much to me and that I loved him and that I couldn't fathom how I could let him go. And he said, "I love you too, and that's what makes this so hard." He said this is all for “[my daughter’s] sake”. He implied that if I truly loved him, I would put aside my feelings and be his best friend. He also said that he still wanted me to quit my job and go work with him as an independent contractor. I wanted so badly to leave his house that night because I felt trapped but I also felt that since he had finally said he loved me, that there was still a chance. So I stayed. And I slept on the couch and I had to go into his room in the morning and wake him out of his caffeine-withdrawn stupor. And he got up and fell in to my arms and cried uncontrollably again. We held each other for a long time and he finally quieted. And he said, “Don’t ever forget this feeling of you and me here together, holding each other peacefully, especially when the pressure comes from the outside for you to end contact with me. Don’t ever forget.” He told me again that he loved me. And that he wanted me to be in his life forever. But he never apologized. After I left that morning, he wrote me a letter in which he said that the root cause of the demise of our relationship was the fact that he didn't want to have a child, but that I had a child, and if he spent time with my child, he might fall in love with her and want a child of his own, and since I couldn't give him a biological child, he didn't want to be with me. After having gone through what I did with infertility, hearing this from the man I thought I loved was almost more than I could bear. I could not believe someone who said he loved me could be so insensitive with what was a maddening circular loop. I didn’t really understand up until that day what a Mind-Fuck was. When I suggested adoption or surrogacy, he accused me of making thought-ending comments and that no matter how creative we got, there weren’t enough hours in the day for me to be a mother, a career woman and a partner who was around enough to satisfy him. He said that he had promised himself he would never live a life of quiet desperation like his father did and he wasn't willing to invest further in our intimate relationship but that he wanted me in his life forever. I asked why we couldn’t talk about these things and he said again, he wasn’t willing to invest further. When I asked him what about ten years from now when my daughter is grown - I asked if we were both single then, would he want to have a relationship with me and he said without a second’s hesitancy, "of course, because I do love you and care about you." The following day he sent me an e-mail and despite his supposed reluctance to color my decisions while we were together, now that he had ended it, he felt justified in giving me the unsolicited advice to leave my husband because he didn’t make me happy. He said he had the right to give me that advice as my friend. He admitted that he had emotionally manipulated me and he blamed it on his bi-polar. He said he has many personalities and he views the world differently each day depending on his mood. He said that he really believed all of the wonderful things he had said to me, “or, at least that part of [him] that was awake” at the time believed them. He said he knew that wasn’t an excuse that he really apologized for the hurtfulness it had caused. We continued to work together for two months after. And that's when his manipulative behavior became almost unbearable. He handled the work environment extremely unprofessionally. And he kept saying that he wanted me to decide to be his best friend. He said he had never wanted to remain in contact with an ex before (forgetting about his wife, apparently) but did so with me because not only did I understand him, I was the only person who he had ever met who thinks like he does (Ha!). He said he knew that in order for me to be his best friend, he had to repair the trust that he had damaged, but then he continued to do be all over the place by saying and doing manipulative things that further eroded my trust in him. He finally left work the day before Christmas after declaring that we needed a three month time out. He said I needed time off to get over him, unravel all of the concentric circles in my life starting with my mother and husband, find peace so that I could be his friend and then, we could travel together again, but stay in separate rooms. I asked him to answer me once and for all if we could try again and he said, “No, we can’t try again. At least, not any time soon.” After two months of lots of introspection, reading about what NPD, I mustered up the courage to go NC. I wrote him a very disarming, non-accusatory e-mail in which I praised him but also made it clear that I needed to sever our connection because a platonic friendship with him wasn't something that was going to make me happy. And I have not heard from him since. I would have rather received an “F-You” response. Instead, the silence has been deafening and I’m afraid that for him, there’s unfinished business, and that one day he’ll contact me because he was never the one to firmly close the door.
Sep 25 - 10PM (Reply to #13)
kiwi10
kiwi10's picture

a great writer for sure

and a dancer, apparently. Merry Meet Morty. :) you know, i have to say, i knew mine was a jerk from the beggining. i think it must be so much harder if you are blindsighted like you were. i mean you actually had no idea, where as i just ignored the shit i saw. anyway, i'm so glad you are here and that we can support eachother now.. XOXOX
Sep 25 - 11PM (Reply to #14)
anonymous
anonymous's picture

Thanks Fierflie

No, I never saw him as a jerk. I can't say that I didn't see red flags, because I saw lots of them. But he didn't come across as a jerk at all. He's an artist type you know. He seems to fit the cerebral N to a tee; not the somatic. I truly was blinsided. Up until the moment in the restaurant when he swore at me and looked at me with those reptilian eyes, I honestly thought that he was my life's biggest champion. That's how he always portrayed himself. My husband tells me that he was merely looking for an acolyte and I fit the bill. But I honestly never saw it at all. Anyway - Dancers rock! =)
Sep 26 - 12AM (Reply to #15)
kiwi10
kiwi10's picture

i think the cerebrals seem

i think the cerebrals seem less harmful at first. maybe there braininess makes them better at hiding it. the somatic ones are, it seems like, almost instantly 'creepy' and reptillian, mine was. but thats part of their appeal unfortunately...
Sep 26 - 11AM (Reply to #16)
anonymous
anonymous's picture

Yes - But the Cerebrals Can be Just as Dangerous if Not More

They are more covert, more sneaky, more able to get you to feel sorry for them and are brilliant as gaslighting. Not that this is a competition between who suffers more, victims of cerebrals vs somatics ... just that cerebrals target certain types of women just as somatics target certain types. Better Off suggested I read the Art of Seduction because it's a manual that describes this targeting process. Sick. Sick. Sick. But we don't HAVE to be their victims. We can stand up and collectively say NO.
Sep 26 - 4PM (Reply to #17)
kiwi10
kiwi10's picture

oh i know

and the cerebralls are more charming i think. its easy to see past the somatic bulshit. they just come off as creepy i think
Sep 26 - 6PM (Reply to #18)
anonymous
anonymous's picture

Yeah Well the Cerebrals Can Be Creepy Too

Just in less overtly sexual sort of way and in a more Ted Kazinski sort of way. I never thought the Ex N was weird until someone on this board who read my story pointed out that the guy seemed just plain weird. That was an eye-opener for me. I had this image of him so engrained in my head and to hear from an outsider that he seemed weird really helped me start to see him for what he really is.
Sep 14 - 11PM (Reply to #11)
fooled no longer
fooled no longer's picture

mortys story Ns are so alike

first of all you are an excellent writer, your recall of details and feelings is amazing. You should definately write a book about this. What struck me was how similar all N s are. The only having sex with someone you love siuation was word for word how my N hooked me in, there are other things that lead you to conclude that all these guys have such similar M O s that its almost as identifiable as the DNA of a snake. You were smart enough to not give up your xarrer and rely on him in any way 100% and that will make your escape from his future contact more possible. Dont leave a trace change no address and block his emails and get on with the life thats waiting for you. Please ask Betty for my email I have something to discuss that will help you. Sorry for your pain, I know and understand. Love and Hugs A. Excuse the writing this is on my iphone. A
Sep 15 - 3PM (Reply to #12)
anonymous
anonymous's picture

Have Been Thinking of Writing a Book

Thanks very much A. I have actually been thinking of writing a book. But I've feared that by doing so I would be staying stuck, even if only in my mind, in this pseudo-relationship and I'm really trying to move on from it. I've gone back to school to set myself up for my second career. I figure I'll be done with my master's by the time my daughter starts college and I'll be able to finally do what I want when I grow up. =) At any rate - he has not contacted me nor do I think he will try. If I give him one thing it's that when I told him I wanted no contact, he's honored that. I read on one of the posts last night that once an N knows that you're strong and on to them and no longer a good target for abuse, they begrudgingly respect you and leave you alone for good. I suspect that's what's happened with the N although he did attempt a little 3rd party hoovering a couple of months back. I didn't fall for it though. Anyway - enough about him. I appreciate you taking the time to read my story. Is your story similar? I would be interested in hearing more about your observations. Thanks A!
Aug 14 - 6PM (Reply to #9)
Kelly
Kelly's picture

Morty

First off - You are an exceptional writer! What you have experienced in your life - it makes perfect sense that you would have been attracted to this man. He really does seem to have a lot of sociopathic tendencies. The fact that he talked about looking out for number one - right out of the pages of Without Conscience. He has definitely exploited your feelings and I completely relate to so much of what you have been feeling. The mind f#@$! My last one did the same. I was very honest with him from the start about who I am, my background and discussing whether or not we were on the same page before I let the relationship get sexual. He completely lead me on and then when the time came for him to show some true emotional intimacy - He freaked out - harangued me over the phone - suddenly everything I thought he loved about me, he despised - down to my skin color! The same skin color he would go out of his way to tell me was so beautiful! Things that are very basic fundamental parts of who I am made me an incompatible partner for him! Reflecting now - I don't really know what to think - if my ex was being calculating the whole time, just to dump me this way - I believe he is definitely a sociopath - soulless slime. My heart tells me, he probably did mean what he said at the time, but he can't handle true intimacy and since I was strong enough not to play pretend and bury my head in the sand playing by his rules - he decided to hurt me. The way a child would. When a child gets mad at a parent, sometimes they say horribly cruel things - "You are not my mommy! I want a new mommy!" It's really weird to think about it in those terms because he's a grown man and you have had a sexual relationship isn't it? This guy is profoundly disturbed. There is no way you could have been able to resist him at the time. You have learned so much about yourself since then and hindsight is always 20/20. I told all my friends while I was with my last N that I see no red flags with him. When it was over, I made a list - I stopped at 50 and realized that this list could go on and on . . . That was after only being with him for 6 weeks! The sociopath I was with for nearly 6 months and he did so much damage to me. It's been two years, but I'm finally coming to understand just how much hurt he caused because of the way he exploited me sexually and emotionally. Therapy helps a lot. Just talking it out. I'm a very independent, intelligent, confident lady. I'm healthy, responsible, caring and even pretty! These guys only go for the best - I truly believe that they discard you when they realize they can't measure up to you. Thank you for writing this Morty! I hope just getting it out has helped you. Reading your story has definitely helped me. It's remarkable how alike we are as victims of these N's. It's remarkable how similar the pattern is for us with overvaluation to devaluation . . . It's definitely a coping strategy on their part that is just built in - but we can do better can't we! We grow, we advance emotionally - They stay in the same place and are destined to repeat the same pattern over and over. It's the definition of madness according to Einstein ;)
Aug 14 - 8PM (Reply to #10)
anonymous
anonymous's picture

Kelly - They Can't Measure Up

Thank you so very much Kelly. It did help to write my story and I can only hope that it helps others to read it. I'm glad it helped you. I've been helped profoundly by the people on this site just by reading about their very similar experiences. You wrote, "I truly believe that they discard you when they realize they can't measure up to you." I am of the same opinion. It took me 9 months to get there but I now realize that he simply couldn't hold a candle to me. We each have differences in our experiences - some of us with the N for *only* six weeks, and others 26 years - be we all have the same root cause and it's what you wrote - they discard you when they realize they can't measure up to you.
Aug 11 - 12PM (Reply to #5)
better off
better off's picture

Quick comment

You finished with..."Instead, the silence has been deafening and I’m afraid that for him, there’s unfinished business, and that one day he’ll contact me because he was never the one to firmly close the door." That's why you have to close the door and nail boards over it. It's not up to HIM whether there is "unfinished business." YOUR life belongs to YOU. YOU decide your business. You can ask betty for my email address, I'd be happy to share my story with you privately, because I went thru a very similar situation and am way down the road now. You do have a future...
Aug 11 - 8PM (Reply to #6)
anonymous
anonymous's picture

Better Off - I will

thanks so much
Sep 14 - 7PM (Reply to #7)
hooklineandsinker
hooklineandsinker's picture

That's shocking Morty. And

That's shocking Morty. And the fact that he groomed you for about 5 years too. Profoundly disturbed individual. And I am so sorry about your dad. You have had a lot to contend with in life and are clearly an intelligent, classy, talented and reliable woman who deserves SO much more than Twisted Boy.
Sep 14 - 8PM (Reply to #8)
anonymous
anonymous's picture

Thanks Funsize

I appreciate you reading my story. But I know I haven't been given more to contend with than I can handle - some things just take longer to heal and learn from than others. This *thing* is going to take a while. Good luck with your healing and learning and growing.