Married to a Cheater — Why Did I Stay So Long?

The Way It Happened To Me

Almost two years ago, my marriage of 42 years ended in divorce. Well, there was a divorce and remarriage in there, but I was never away from my ex. That is a long time to be with one person — a lifetime. So now that the dust has settled, I sit and ponder how it all happened, and where do I go from here? I loved my ex-husband very much. But he was incapable of loving me, at least the way I wanted him to. He was a serial cheater.

There are lots of definitions of serial cheater, but this one is my favorite, as it describes my ex to a T: A person who cheats not only once, but multiple times within a relationship, across relationships, or both. In other words, it’s chronic. There isn’t a code for it in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) but there should be. People who do this are generally selfish, abusive, and have narcissistic tendencies. The damage they do to the innocent people who care about them cannot be measured and has fallout that crosses generations.

But what about the people who love them and stay with them? What is the matter with them that they will allow this to continue in their lives? Here we go with the victim shaming/blaming, but that is not what I am doing. I am one of those people. I do not believe that I deserve either blame or shame. I did the best I could with the cards I was dealt. I did what I could stand. And I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

Background

I was a small-town girl, born in the mid-1950’s, from a relatively prominent family. My father was an English professor, and my mother was a librarian. They were very non-confrontational, so I did not learn to stand up and fight for myself since that was a bad thing. Intelligence and academic achievement were everything. The town is in the mountains of North Carolina. School consisted of mountain kids who were very poor and professors’ kids who were the “important” kids. No in-between. I had a foot in both worlds since my mother’s family was from there. Some had gotten educated starting with my grandparents’ generation and were the doctors, lawyers, preachers, and teachers. My school was very small, a university laboratory school for students at the university who were studying to be teachers. We always had college kids in our classes either teaching or observing.

I was the quintessential nerd girl. Thick glasses, kind of chubby, bad clothes, acne in high school, but a good student. I was bullied until I became a very shy people pleaser to make it stop. I did not get asked out on dates much. During my senior year of high school, I got contacts and my whole world changed in an instant. Suddenly I was “beautiful,” although by that time, and even now, I couldn’t believe it.

My friends and I had started looking to college guys for dating purposes, since we were on campus every day for school and the guys at our school had no interest in us, having known us all their lives. We called ourselves “the dateless turd club.” I met my ex-husband on January 11, 1974. He agreed to be my date to our homecoming dance when I literally picked him up in a parking lot. My two friends and I had told everyone we had dates with college guys and couldn’t find any. We had given up and were going to do the walk of shame alone into the dance when three guys walked into view. He called me a couple of days later and that was it for me.

First Marriage — Cheating Begins

We got married on August 12, 1978, when I had graduated from my hometown university with a degree that guaranteed a job. Ex had mainly gone to college to be an athlete. He did manage to graduate. He was quite gifted athletically but not so much academically although he is extremely intelligent. He had lost his eye in a freak accident and that has plagued him all his life. He decided he wanted to be a pilot, even though that was not easy with one eye. The plan was for him to get an Airframe & Powerplant (A&P) license in the hopes of getting a pilot/mechanic job. That required a lot of money that he didn’t have. But he had me, the nerd with the guaranteed job degree, so marriage was the plan to make this happen. I didn’t see it that way at the time, but I do now.

Miraculously, pilot jobs eventually did materialize. Ex was very determined, and it worked. We moved around a lot, starting in Los Angeles, and ending up in southeast Florida, with stops in Houston and Atlanta. Quite a change for a small-town girl, but I loved the cities after I got used to being anonymous, something I never am in my hometown to this day.

I am not sure when the real cheating started. It could easily have been going on from the time we started dating. The first proven affairs started around the time we had our first child, a girl, after being married for eight years. She was about three weeks old, and he walked by as I was nursing her and said: “I don’t want to be married anymore.” He moved into his grandparents’ house in downtown Atlanta, leaving me with the house in the suburbs that we had just bought. He had just gotten his first airline job which didn’t pay well, so I was also left with the house payment and everything else. We got divorced, I sold the house, and continued to see him whenever he wanted to come around, which was often.

We did try therapy but the therapist got angry at him for something he said. She said he “triggered” her so that did not last long. One thing she said did resonate with me and still does: “In my experience, people do what they can stand.”

After a trip to Africa to visit an old school buddy, my ex called and told me he had “found God” and wanted his wife and family back. I was overjoyed.

We were in bed one night when the phone rang. This was long before cell phones and even caller ID, but the woman on the other end identified herself as Sherry and asked to speak with my ex. I handed him the phone and he promptly hung up. We got in a huge fight, and he left. I knew about *67 so I did that, got the number, and called Sherry back. And what a story she had for me! She had been his girlfriend for quite a while, during the time that I was pregnant. She was a flight attendant with his airline and had thought he was divorced. And there had been another one before her.

I was blindsided and devastated. I think everyone else had suspected this, but I really had not. I was not schooled in infidelity at that point and could not believe that he would do this to me and to our daughter. Sherry and I confronted him together at his grandparents’ house. I wouldn’t talk to him for a long time, but he was persistent, and I thought he had learned his lesson and changed.

Second Marriage — Cheating Continues

We got remarried. I didn’t tell anybody for a while, but I did wear my ring and the guys at work figured it out and were very upset with me. They knew better than I what kind of a person he is. He got a job with no overnight travel, and we had another child, a boy. And then he started overnights again and another discovery happened.

He had a beeper. A number from Michigan beeped in while he was out, and I called it in case it was something important. An answering machine at a job with someone named Wendy. A bit later another beep with the same area code came in. Wendy at home this time. And I KNEW. He called her and confessed to being married. She was devastated because she thought he was divorced. A pattern emerges, right?

He crawled on the floor and begged me not to leave. I was pretty invested by then, and I didn’t. It is hard when there are children involved, houses, money (or lack thereof), bills, and time invested. I grilled his friends, all pilots, and got an inkling that Wendy might not be the only one (they were all cheaters too), but nothing big came to light for many years. The worst was yet to come.

Addiction — Attention Diverted

Ex got his dream job in the year 2000. Flying 747 jets around the world for a cargo company. He even made captain after several years. We eventually had to move to Florida to be closer to his base in Miami, but about a year before that our daughter, who was 14 at that time, was severely mangled in a boat accident. We are lucky she is still with us, but the resulting surgeries and recovery were horrific. In all there were 22 surgeries with a lot of rehab. During all this we moved to southeast Florida. Home of drugs and the emerging pill mill scene. Combine that with recovery from terribly painful surgeries and opioid addiction happened.

The chaos is indescribable and took almost all my attention for many, many years. She was one of the worst (overdoses, arrests, jail, rehab after rehab), and I am very lucky that she is still here and doing OK. I worked hard in Al-Anon, Nar-Anon, doing protests, radio shows, podcasts and whatever I could do to call attention to the problem. And my ex was gone a lot flying around the world. My life was much easier when he was gone so I didn’t complain much. Our son eventually succumbed to addiction as well, but he is now sober for 16 months. Addiction is a family disease. Ex’s mom was a recovering alcoholic, she was in recovery by the time I met her, and his brother is an addict.

D-Day(s) — Cheating Continues

And then it happened. I was cleaning our desk one day and found an external drive that I didn’t recognize. I plugged it into my computer to see what it was and OH MY. There was my ex, having sex with multiple women in Brazil. Oh, and there was also one of me! I had no idea he was filming us. Therein started my journey of insanity. And reconnaissance. I found a LOT of evidence. Secret computers, secret cell phones, files of pictures of his women (all pretty sleazy looking), dating sites (including Ashley Madison), emails, chats. You name it, he was doing it. His MO is a main girl (usually poor and uneducated) and a bunch of sides. And, at that time, a wife. It was, in a word, gross.

We tried therapy. It wasn’t the first time but he just went along to appease me. The therapist saw us together and separately. He was a nice guy and eventually told me that “he likes the way he is and he won’t change.” Apparently they talked about rugby during ex’s sessions. At $400 per hour!

I filed for divorce and then his mother got sick and died. He was gone dealing with that. He surprised me one morning at 2:00 am with tickets to Las Vegas and a planned Elvis wedding for a vow renewal. He had found God — again. I had to make a quick decision whether to go or not. Like right that very minute because the plane was leaving in about three hours. I had been pretty crazy after all that discovery. I had lost a lot of weight. I was madly sleuthing to see what he was up to all the time. I started taking antidepressants that my doctor decided I badly needed, I had arranged to be let go from my job (but paid for a year), I got breast implants. I was a mess mentally and physically. We talked all the time and fought a lot. He always blamed me for his cheating. I could never get over it, so he had to keep on and all that double talk. I really, really, really just wanted him to STOP and commit fully to me forever. We had been through so much and there was a lot on the line. He would talk the talk but then I would discover something else through my sleuthing. I wanted to win once and for all. This looked like it might just be what I was hoping for. A life/heart change based on the loss of his mother. So, I made the wrong decision, as usual, and went. Much to the dismay of my family and friends.

Fast forward 10 years or so. Ex was coming up on mandatory retirement from the airline at age 65. We had sold our beloved waterfront house, were living in a temporary rental, in the process of buying a smaller one when it happened — again. I got a butt dial from Hong Kong. He had called earlier and said he was going to bed. But he hadn’t. He was in a taxi with a woman, and I could tell that he was grooming her just from the tone of his voice. I eventually called his work phone which he always carried and told him to look at his phone. He did and promptly hung up. He called back a little later with a stupid story about meeting some people in the elevator and deciding to go out with them, and I knew.

But I didn’t leave. The shock was horrible. You’d think I would have been used to it by then but I was still on hopium thinking somehow that he loved me the same way I loved him. I remember sitting on the lanai of the temporary rental house we were living in and had to be out of in less than a week. Smoking lots of cigarettes, talking sympathetic friends, and wondering what to do. Where would I go on such short notice? What would happen to the large deposit we had made on the house we were going to buy? All the arrangements for the move were already made. At this age could I just wait it out and keep enjoying the money as some friends advised? There was no time to make the drastic changes that would be required and I was emotionally devastated. I was paralyzed by the fear, hurt, and ANGER. That is a lot to process. So I took the easy way and we bought the house.

About two months later I got a recording of him having sex with two different women in one day in a hotel in Brazil. And talking to me on the phone while they were in the room! I didn’t leave, yet, but I did retain an attorney.

I knew that it was just a matter of time before I was going to have to make a change. I could make excuses forever for taking the easy way. And it really wasn’t easy. My friends were getting compassion fatigue. They didn’t want to hear it anymore. Accept it and shut up or do what I should have done years ago. Why was I such a pathetic person? And I value integrity. He had none. I was angry at him but even angrier at ME.

The final straw was finding out that he had a new “main girl” in Hong Kong. She was from the Philippines and had a job as a domestic worker there. She had announced their “love” on Facebook. He had traveled to her home country with her while he was still working to meet her family and they were planning to buy a coconut plantation IF she could ever get divorced. Well, I guess that is what they told each other, but it never happened. Another woman who needs an old American man to save her.

That was finally it for me and I did divorce him. What did he say to me? “How can you do this? I really was planning to stop when I retired and we were going to ride off into the sunset together.” Say what?? The stupid things that cheaters say…

He is still with that woman and several others that I am sure she doesn’t know about. They live on different continents and can’t see each other, and he will never be alone. Narcissists need supply. Not my problem anymore.

The End

Ex is retired and moved to his father’s large farm in Georgia that he inherited. Soft landing for him although he does have terrible health issues. I had to buy a house but at least it is mine. I stayed in Florida, and I am trying to rebuild but it is difficult. I don’t like the dating scene at age 66. I have some funny stories about that! I worry about money since I got none of his inheritance and we had to split everything else. I won’t inherit anything, so it is all up to me. I am still working and just hoping that I don’t “age out.” I don’t think I will ever get over this. I just want to be normal, whatever that is.

I do go out a lot. I have a lot of activities. I’m NOT dating. I’m hoping that normal will creep up on me one day.