Married to Chaos: 20+ Years With a Borderline Wife (A Brutal True Story)

Okay, if you're a frequent listener of the Dad Starting Over podcast and you find yourself saying, "Yeah, that sounds like me," well, you don't need another podcast episode. What you need is support. The Help for Men Brotherhood is where men go when they're done pretending that they got it all handled. You know, your dead bedrooms, your divorce, your loneliness, your rebuilding life. We have private forums, frequent live Zoom meetings, one-on-one coaching, courses, all my books at no additional charge. And yes, we get together in person. Real men and real conversations. So stop doing this alone and join the Help for Men Brotherhood today at help4men.com/join. I look forward to seeing you in the next member meeting. All right, folks, we have a new Dear DSO entry on the website. You can submit your own story or question at deardso.com. That's deardso.com. Fill out the form, and if your story or your question is a good one, I will make a video out of it for the whole world to see. This one comes from a guy who calls himself Ant. I assume short for Anthony, not the bug. But he says, met my wife, my ex-wife, at age 19 on my work night, my work's night out. She was the designated driver for a work colleague as she was 2 months pregnant, so she wasn't drinking. We got on well and she got my number and she asked me out the following day. I was hesitant, but I really liked her and was very shy and a bit unapproachable, so hadn't been approached and I thought I'd see. Anyway, we spent a lot of time talking and hanging out, and when the baby came, I was right there in the delivery room and have treated him as my own for 24 years. In fact, I forget that he's not mine until someone will mention it, and she didn't want him to know, but secretly I think he does. Uh, he has a different surname, he says in parentheses, and it's just not like our other kids. So he has a different— yeah, it's a good giveaway. Different name and looks different. Um, anyway, I had another kid of my own with her a few years later and then we got married. I was quite an anxious guy and I didn't drive at the time due to my anxiety, and I was lazy around the house, but she didn't work, so everything got done that needed to be. She's not working, you're not working anyway. But shortly after marriage, she started a part-time job in a bar and she had a mini affair with a customer, parentheses, idiot with neck tattoos. Uh, she said she only kissed him, and I do believe that. Uh, I caught on really quickly to what was going on, and I caused Mary hell, calling her mom and shaming her, really. We had a holiday booked the week after I found out, and she said that we can just go anyway and forget all about it. And so we did. 'We had a nice time and she moved on, and we moved on, and she said I needed to help more around the house.' I'm sorry, I'm not laughing at you, dude. It's just like this is like every cliché all rolled into one story, but it gets better, folks. 'And then we went to counseling and I upped my game, parentheses, took responsibility for it all. She started her nursing degree shortly after that.' I don't know if this is real or not, but this is pretty good because it's like every cliché all rolled. But you know what, guys, I'm laughing. I'm not laughing at the guy. You have to laugh at things like this. It's like, what do you call it, gallows humor? You know, guys in war laugh about certain things or whatever. But it's just that, um, I guarantee this is not made up. There's a reason I make videos about like each of these little scenarios that this guy is talking about here. The nursing thing, the very anxious guy thing. And bartenders, even the bartender thing in there so far. But it's because, you know, it's like a— the human condition is universal. But I digress. Let's continue on, shall we, because we're not even anywhere near done yet here. Um, so she started the nursing degree, and after that we had various problems. In that time, she was sneaking off to a beach with a student friend, uh, contacting old boyfriends, kissing some guy on a random night home. All of which I sussed really quickly because I was in high alert due to the mini affair. So again, she had, she said nothing happened and she just wanted to move on. And so we had an incident with a couple of mates where we went out for my birthday with them and my family and I wanted to go home and she wanted to stay out. She ended up staying the night, parentheses, on my birthday in their house. Parentheses again. She pretty much walked past my house to go to their house. Again, all parties were agreed that nothing happened, although she was clearly very into them. One of them, I think, uh, I got kicked out and went to stay with my brother for a bit. You think? I guess this happened a while back. You're trying to remember. I think I got kicked out and I went to stay with my brother for a bit, and when the friend of mine got a girlfriend, she came and made up with me and wanted me back. 'Around this time she lost her gram,' and grandma, I guess, 'and her job, and went on antidepressants. And while she was taking them, I can say that we had the happiest, easiest 7 years of our whole relationship. So much so that we extended our house and had another child. She asked to try,' oh, parentheses, 'she asked to try,' meaning to try have another kid, as she desperately wanted a girl. Then she came off the antidepressants and she didn't like that they numbed every feeling that she had. Anyway, shortly after, we were doing the kitchen and a guy that I used to play football against was doing the plumbing. I asked what she thought of him. Sleazy was her response. Anyway, she invited him out for coffee without my knowledge the next weekend and would invite him over to the house to fix stuff without telling me, pretty regularly and just wouldn't accept that keeping stuff from me doesn't help with the trust. She would change the password on her phone and say that she doesn't believe in marriage and I should have let her leave after the first mini affair and she hasn't loved me for 15 years, that I don't own her, that she could do what she wants with whoever. But whenever I would say I can't do this no more, I would get told, I'm sorry, I self-sabotage. I don't know why I do this. I would go back and tell her that she needs to get it sorted, and after a few months, I'm the arsehole for telling her that she's crazy. Her words. Anyway, by this point, I'm researching like crazy. I continue my life. My whole identity is in psychology, relationships, and nutrition. By now, I'm pretty knowledgeable about psychology, and it helped me sort out my anxiety and come out of my shell. I changed jobs and it could be this new me, a me I wanted to be and was, uh, sorry, the— if you can't tell, it's a little garbled, the writing here. It's tough to decipher in some spots. I was surrounded by females. This is at his new work, and they were loving how smart I was, how funny I was, how approachable and empathetic. I think I had 10 colleagues refer to me as their therapist or their counselor. Where I would listen to their problems non-judgmentally, but would go home and be told I'm selfish, parentheses, if I didn't do what she wanted. Yeah, I'm an idiot, I'm unattractive, I'm bad at sex, bad at kissing. It was complete night and day for me. So over the course of time, I was never allowed to bring up old problems and unresolved issues. I was the problem for doing so. And with her being so secretive and sneaky, so off with my conflict. Um, again, a little garbled here. So off with me. Conflict would occur often as my state of anxiety with the relationship had me on high alert pretty constantly. Anyway, one of the girls at work, half my age and maybe the prettiest girl I knew in real life, started flirting with me really hard, messaging all the time, scheduling her breaks with mine, chatting about her relationship problems. Parentheses, she had a boyfriend and I knew about it, so I ended up sleeping with her multiple times. It's massively out of character for me, he says, to do anything like that. I've been loyal for 20 years and I'm still very risk-averse. I lost my job. I fessed up— wait, okay— I fessed up to my wife, whose initial reaction was, I see you more as a brother, so you can go be with her. And so I did. And then 2 days later, shit hit the fan for doing so. Anyway, I'm divorced and I got my own place. Thank God. My middle son lives with me and I have my daughter 40% of the time. It didn't pan out with my affair partner. Surprise. And I'm with a really lovely woman who adores me, and it really feels like she loves my humor, my intelligence, my looks. She treats me as if she won the lotto every day. But there's still this part of me that's bitter about why my marriage had to be like that. And any interaction between me and the ex, I will usually give her a mouthful or have sly little digs because it still hurts that all I wanted was my family together. And both of my other people since my wife have shown me that I am in fact very lovable and I have a lot to offer. So why could she not take it? Why did it go that way? And now obviously I'm the villain in the story for the affair, which really pisses me off. I think my last video I did— that's the end of his message, by the way. I think in the last, um, one of these Dear DSOs I did, I said something to the effect of, I don't even know where to begin with this. Same kind of thing here. Um, the Dear DSO submissions, I I don't know if this is an indication of the type of people I'm attracting to me, the culture at large, but they're getting more and more dramatic and more dysfunctional and unhealthy and scary, frankly. Um, this falls under all those categories, doesn't it? I was laughing because it's just so laughably over-the-top ridiculous, but that's not very nice of me, and it's not fair. But this is, um, this whole message, this whole situation is very illustrative of an overall theme that I get from a lot of men. And you talk about, you pride yourself on, you've just researched like hell this whole psychology thing, you become a quasi-therapist to people and so forth, yet you're still not getting it. I mean, at the end here, it's very obvious you're very, um, I guess naive is the word I'm looking for. Um, where to go with this? It's, uh, you know, life has all these little forks in the road, fork in the road moments where I can either do this or I can do this. And you came to a dozen so fork in the road moments, and, um, you took the wrong choice every single time. And you see where it leads you. And the very first fork in the road— that's hard to say— um, that was sticking around with this gal. No, no, no, let's, let's back up. The first fork, the first decision was, hey, this pregnant gal that your friend knows reaches out to you and says, I like you, let's get together. That's where you would have— should have said, hey, it was great knowing you, I really appreciate it, had a great time, but sorry, that's gonna have to pass. Why? Because she was pregnant. Don't go around hitting up pregnant women. And well, Ralph, that's not fair, she could have been a perfectly lovely pregnant woman. If she was a perfectly lovely pregnant woman, she would have said, no time to go dating and do these other things, I got to worry about me and this infant and building a life for myself and taking care of me. And so we see it just led to chaos. But you had— and here, here's the thing, before— let me stop my train of thought there. I run into this a lot with a lot of men. Um, there has to be some semblance of ultimate responsibility at some point here, right? Meaning you have to look at yourself in the mirror and go, dude, what are you doing? Like, you had all these opportunities to make a left turn, but you took a right again and again and again. We can demonize these women. Let me just flat out say that this woman obviously has a mental illness. Uh, it sounds like at the very least something akin to a personality disorder, such as borderline personality disorder. That's something that's thrown around a lot. A lot of men like me, you know, in the relationship talk sphere, like to throw that word around, or, you know, like we know what we're talking about. But this This checks a lot of boxes. The, you know, love bombing and then, you know, discarding and all this other good stuff and jumping from man to man. And yes, by the way, and those were all full-blown affairs. How do I know? I've been doing this a long time. I'm, you know, not as naive as you are and whatever. I don't have this Pollyannaish view of her. I just look at it as an objective observer, outside observer. And yeah, she's been doing the dirty with a lot of different men. Over the course of your relationship. Sorry. So much so that those children that you are calling your children may in fact not be yours. Let's just put that out there. That's a horrible thing for me to say, you know, to a guy who is admittedly very anxious, um, to throw that, you know, piece of dynamite in there. But I, I can't be the only person to ever bring this up to you, my friend. All right, surely this thought has come into your head at some point. Does that matter? I don't know, that's up to you. But, um, Ah, what a mess. You're still hanging on. I mean, you're jumping right into different relationships. You jumped into, you know, this workplace affair, and you've jumped into immediately this other relationship and another one, if I'm remembering right. You talk about how that's so out of character for you to jump into affair. No, this is textbook, my friend. Super anxious guy in an abusive relationship with this narcissistic borderline person who treats him like dirt. He's too naive to make right decisions, and here comes someone, makes him feel really good. And yeah, you are primed for an affair at that point. Do you even call it an affair? But you're primed with doing stuff with people outside of your relationship, and you're also primed to not want to be alone. You jump from relationship to relationship, or you hang on as tight as you can, which is what you did with your ex-wife there. You— I hope you know that you should have left that a long time ago, but you didn't, and it caused you just all kinds of chaos, as I often say. So here you are in what you call a very loving relationship with this, we'll say, this new gal, and, um, but you still have one foot in the old relationship with the ex. She's still occupying a great deal of space in your brain, and you still have a lot of animosity towards her and anger, and this whole theme of, you know, I can't believe that this went the way it did, dude. Since day freaking one, pregnant woman reaching out to you, possibly super naive. You possibly may have some issues yourself. I've thrown this out a lot, and I don't mean to over— um, I don't want to say, uh, what's the word I'm looking for— diagnose, because I am not a medical practitioner of any shape, size, form, whatever. But it's just that my, my perception is colored somewhat by all the men that I speak one-on-one to. And I've said this many, many times. Bear with me if you've heard me say it 100 or so times, but, um, a disproportionately large number of men that I speak to fall under the category of what we call neurodivergent. And some of that neurodivergency, or diversity if you want to call it that, um, can be, uh, um, under the umbrella of, uh, the autism spectrum. A lot of men that I speak to are autistic, and they have a very difficult time navigating the relationship waters. It's all very turbulent to them. Because there's a lot of emotion and there's a lot of things that they don't process as well as a neurotypical guy would. And so a lot of us sit back and watch them and go, dude, what are you doing? And then as you get to know them and you understand their diagnosis and the what they're dealing with and how they process things differently, you say, oh, it makes more sense now. And you're kind of checking some of those boxes here. This is a lot of, you know, I left this situation because it was so bad, because you were making, you know, when we stick to the fork in the road metaphor, you keep making the left turn, left turn, left turn, when all of us were like, no dude, go right, go right. And nope, left, left, left. And it's all under the, um, kind of category of naivete. You don't know any better, presumably, is what I'm seeing. And some people just don't get that. Like, what are you doing, dude? And why are you continuing to think this way? And why did you think that way in the past? And it may be because, um, of the way you're wired. Is that something that's ever occurred to you? Is that something that, um, ever been brought to your attention that you may be of that neurospicy, is what the people these days call it, um, variety? Um, a lot of those men tend to connect with women who, all of the more neurotypical, much more confident, less anxious, much more relationship experience type of men, put the hand up and go, hey, nice meeting you. Thanks, but no thanks. But if you have very little experience, very little self-confidence, a lot of anxiety, and potentially neurodivergent, you're just like, yes, please, more, go ahead. And then you make all these turns because you're like, I guess this is what I'm supposed to do. I'm supposed to say yes. I'm supposed to overlook these things. I'm supposed to ignore the possible affair. She says they didn't. I guess they didn't. I don't know any better. It just sounds like overall you just don't know any better. And now you're a grown-ass man and you should know better. And if you don't, you need some help with that. Um, I certainly suggest hanging around men more, men who have experience in this world more. Uh, for example, I'm not trying to sell you on something that you don't need. I mentioned this because I think it would be a huge help to you, my friend. Um, you need to be in some kind of fraternal organization of men, some type of support community for men. And I happen to run one. It's called the Brotherhood. You can learn more at help4men.com. Go jump right to the page to join. It's called help4men.com/join is the website address, and you can join the Help for Men Brotherhood. A lot of cool things involved, you know, get a lot of benefits, but the biggest benefit of all is that you get to talk to hundreds and hundreds of men from around the world. By virtue of the way you speak, so to speak, in your email, I'm gonna assume you are a Brit from the UK. You know, you're throwing mums around and all this other stuff and blokes and everything. We have a lot of guys from the UK in there, so you're not alone. And, you know, maybe even meet up in person with a lot of these guys. You need the old proverbial hand around your shoulder saying, it's okay, brother, we've all made mistakes, but let's not make any more. You need an active mentor, coach if you will, along the way, or else, my friend, you're gonna do this again. There's no ifs, ands, or buts. I know you've learned all you can about the psychology world and all that good stuff, but, um, Yeah, you're gonna do it again. I bet you $1,000, because I can see at the end of your message here, you're still not getting it. You're still not getting how you contributed to this and how you need to change things to stop contributing to this mess. I am not victim blaming. That's the thing I was trying to get at earlier. This is something I hear from a lot of men is the second you say, hey buddy, what are you doing hanging out with people like that? They're like, see, you're just like everybody else. You're blaming the victim. You're taking the woman's side. No, dude, I've already said stay the hell away from women like this. Bad freaking news. Sorry, ladies, if this rings a bell and this is like, this is my story, well, you ain't ready for relationships. You may not ever be. And men, you don't need to be the savior here, um, the knight in shining armor, as it were. Uh, leave those gals be. But at the same time, you gotta look at yourself and say, how am I contributing to this? Why do I keep attracting women like this? Why do I stick around when they so obviously need to be avoided? That, my friend, is what you need to figure out. You need to concentrate on— in a big way to expedite that process is working with other dudes. All right, so check out the Brotherhood, help4men.com. And thank you for reaching out. I apologize for the laughter earlier, but you have to understand my perspective on this and how this is almost like a soap opera. It was almost, you know, written in— the nurse and the this and that is just The bartender, you just hit every single solitary story point that I've ever experienced in the 10+ years of doing this. So thank you for reaching out. I appreciate it, and, and thank you guys for watching or listening on the podcast. I appreciate it. Uh, follow Dad Starting Over social media, Facebook, YouTube, uh, Help for Men. That's our larger organization. Dad Starting Over, in case you don't know, is part of a larger organization called Help for Men, helpformen.com, and our community, the Brotherhood. And at helpformen.com, you can buy books, courses, all kinds of cool stuff, and join our group. All right guys, thank you for watching, thank you for listening, and Ant, thank you for reaching out. Appreciate it, brother.