You know how they say, "Never get down in the mud and wrestle with a pig"?
The reason, it is said, is because eventually you realize the pig loves it. And so, it is with that advice that I have worked hard to avoid slinging mud -- even if it’s the truth -- when my "pig" of a husband starts up with the character assassinations.
How hard is it to keep my mouth shut when he is disparaging me in incredibly personal terms? Well, it doesn’t matter that they are untrue statements. It doesn’t matter that he is twisting what happened to fit a narrative he created long before I realized there was cause for concern. What matters is that somehow, in some way, I know that somebody I know and care about is going to see what he wrote before I can hide it or block it or delete it.
I’ve been a spectator on the sidelines when a friend or somebody I cared about, has gone through this same thing with somebody. Trying not to respond; to avoid reacting in any way. Because it only makes it look bigger. Reacting can give the lies their own life and can potentially give them substance.
I know from what I went through with my stalker. The woman who I have long referred to as “the whackadoodle.” I know that nobody believed her insane claims against me. At least, not the people who I knew. But she was an interesting case, because she was essentially a stranger to me. She was merely a tenant in my home. But she had managed to cultivate a following of people on social media who were mostly men, because she leverages her sexuality to feed her narcissism. And they set out to do her bidding in real life, despite not having ever known or spoken to me.
But the danger with the wackadoodle was that she actually was
able to create a narrative over time that, (because I wasn’t friends with her on social media
and I didn’t
even really know her), was accepted as gospel truth by people who didn’t know me
or her.
That all started in 2016 and that was probably a time when my husband and I were still sort of poised on the precipice of the extreme long downward fall that was the ending of our marriage. I didn’t understand then, and it would be many years until I even had an inkling of what was really the problem. But even in 2016 we were having a very difficult time with intimacy between us. My husband believed that he should be able to expect such services from his wife, regardless of his treatment of me; regardless of his ability to make any reasonable use of such services; and regardless of my feelings on the matter.
And this is where wrestling with the pig comes in. It’s been a very long sad ride. Like the whackadoodle, my husband secretly began a campaign of destructive toxicity, telling anybody and everybody who would listen both in social circles personally and also on social media in our community about how miserable he was/is as a husband. He has claimed that I am frigid. He has claimed that I am not willing to have sex with him. He has claimed that I don’t like sex. He has claimed that I’m a miserable angry person. He is recently even throwing in destructive suggestions of alcoholism and other character assassinations.
And, continuing with the pig analogy, wrestling in the mud with the pig is entertaining for the pig and the pig enjoys the mud on themselves. This is the case with my husband as well. He doesn’t really care how ugly and brutal he looks when he talks about me that way. It matters not at all to him that he sounds brutal and un-loving and unsupportive. He believes that there’s no reason why he should appear to be any of those things when he tells you all of the terrible things about me. He believes that you will hear his claims about me and think to yourself that “of course he wouldn’t be loving or supportive towards her after all that she did to him.”
But the problem with that reasoning is that it’s circular. You can not hear his complaints about me without hearing the fact that he almost hates me; he’s so angry and disgusted with me. And if you hear the complaints about me, you would not expect me to be able (let alone willing) to be intimate with somebody who was so unloving and unsupportive and frankly flat out brutal. And yet the fact remains that only two people know the truth about our intimate life. So, it’s quite easy for one or the other person to tell lies about what happened in the bedroom…. or didn’t happen. Only he and I will ever know.
But for everybody who is forced to hear or read the things that he writes or says about me….
This is at the bottom of it all: my husband is gay. He’s been gay his entire life and I believe that he has had a family that has been unwelcoming to his underlying needs. I believe that he has had to suppress who he was to keep his parents happy. And I know that he’s been living a lie for his entire life.
I am his third wife. Everything about the first two wives has been very hush-hush and I haven’t really been able to get information. I know that my husband has been diagnosed with extreme narcissism and adult oppositional defiant disorder (Adult ODD). Recent information, since I discovered all of this in the last — well, really less than 12 months— is that most of the family knew about him and about his desires and his lifestyle.
In fact, think I’m the only one who didn’t know. And I stumbled on all of this information accidentally. The truly sad thing about our story is that I really loved my husband. I really, really, was so happy to be married to him and to be starting a life with him. What we built the first few years was astounding. We did wonderfully. I am a rainmaker with real estate investments and he trusted me to lead us.
And we started out with something because I had a portfolio of real estate coming into our marriage. But this isn’t about our business success. Before I close, allow me to express this. I loved my husband. I loved our life, and I felt as though we created a beautiful one. When he could not “perform,” I worked very hard to understand how difficult that must be for him. I assumed it was a mechanical function issue and not that he actually wanted somebody other than me (or that he wanted men).
And mind you, this was an issue that started from the very first time he and I were intimate, when first we began dating. It was not something that happened over time. This is something he was aware of, and he was experiencing before I met him.
When we first met, he had (I came to find out) a medicine cabinet full of drugs to help treat erectile dysfunction. And it was only because I thought to myself that somebody in their 40s could honestly be experiencing such a thing, and that since we were both in our early 40s that maybe it would be unfair of me to be ready to judge him harshly. And so, throughout our entire seven years of dating and our 10 year marriage, I quietly dealt with the fact that he couldn’t actually perform in the bedroom.
Circling back to the analogy of the pig, I suppose that there may be a little bit of mud here. I have held myself to higher standards, and tried to be gracious and understanding, and even approachable and cooperative in our relationship since I discovered all of this only about 10 months ago.
My husband was living a double life. He opened bank accounts that I was kept from knowing about and received money which has never been explained to me. He spent money on himself and failed to contribute to our marriage, while taking from our marriage. He used his accounts to pay for an exhaustive list of online sexual partner profiles which he used meet and connect with other men interested in the same activities. He repeatedly and regularly met with these men for the purposes of anonymous sex. He never even verified their identities, or determined who they were.
And because he was so public about all of his profiles, including photographs of himself, I don’t really feel as though I’m revealing anything. If you yourself were to go on AdultFriendFinder, or any number of other sites intended for connecting for strictly the purposes of casual sex you could find my husband on there and you could find his photograph there also (although you probably don’t want to do that!).
And he is not apologetic about these activities, nor has he even admitted or acknowledged that he’s doing this. He knows that I have dozens and dozens and dozens of copies of emails and screenshots and communications between him and other people. It doesn’t matter to him that I have all that. What matters to him is that he is able to continue to deny.
So that pig in the mud needs to wallow with somebody, and in this case that somebody must be me. As long as the pig can get me to wallow and get mad, and give the pig opportunities to sling it’s stinky soup of crap, the pig is able to avoid sitting there all alone in its own mud and feces.
Comments