Dim, distant past come back to haunt me

Apologies for the length of this diatribe and how far into the past it delves, but the reasons for both will hopefully become apparent to anyone who perseveres to the end.

I've always been a disaster with women. My one and only marriage was a fiasco from before it began until it's over-due end. A few months before our wedding she infected me with an STD, but a combination of her her guile and my naivety meant she was able to convince me there was an innocent explanation. Then, when we'd been married just three months, I spent what ought to have been 'our' first Christmas alone because she was off with someone else on the first (at least, I think it was the first) of many extra-marital affairs. Again, a combination of her guile and my naivety enabled her to talk her way out of it.
Our marriage lasted exactly three years. In that time I know she had three affairs. I was far less naïve by then, but knowing something is going on is not the same as being able to prove it and I had to catch her in the act before I was finally able to end our marriage.
For a while I worked on the theory that for every affair I knew about, there was probably another one I didn't know about. Then, a year or so after we'd divorced, I ran into a former friend of hers who reckoned a more realistic figure would be that for every affair I'd known about, there were two more I hadn't known about. Not long after that I happened across another former friend who'd also worked with her for a while and she was confident even that already high, revised figure was on the conservative side. So, a minimum of nine affairs in just three years!
It was about then that my mother admitted that she had caught her in the act a long time before I did, but simply hadn't known how to tell me. My mother was the best anyone could possibly wish for, but that hurt a lot – even more than being betrayed so many times – and although I was eventually able to forgive her for it I never forgot it.

I'd not long been divorced when I met the next woman in my life. Her own marriage had just collapsed and she and her four-year-old daughter had moved in with her mother, who happened to live next-door-but-one to me. She had known her husband had been playing away from home for a while and I assumed that a combination of us having similar recent histories and me being conveniently close by were factors in her selecting me to be part of the new chapter in her life. I might not have been so naïve by then, but I still wasn't anything like as cynical as she eventually made me so no alarm bells rang when within a few months of moving in with me she declared that she wanted us to sell 'our' rather nice hill-top flat with a park behind it and fabulous views across London and move to a much bigger house in the country.
It took a while, but the new house we eventually moved into was four times the size of my flat and came with a gigantic garden. There was no way I could afford the mortgage on a place like that, so we had to take out a joint mortgage – which I later realised was exactly what she wanted because it gave her a foot on the property ladder and meant I couldn't chuck her out when her true nature became apparent.
It wasn't long before our relationship began to deteriorate. I was trying to save it but I was fighting a losing battle. We had only been together a few years when I complained that she appeared to regard me as nothing more than her live-in handyman and childminder. She didn't even attempt to deny it. A handful of years after that I overheard a conversation she was having with a friend of hers. The friend was in the process of getting divorced and candidly admitted that she'd only taken up with her soon-to-be-ex in the first place because she'd found herself suddenly single with a young child so had an urgent need of someone to provide support, stability and a place to live. A 'relationship' was neither needed nor wanted but pretending otherwise was a price she'd been willing to pay. I don't think my partner realised I was close enough to overhear their conversation and her cynical laugh as she admitted her reasons for being with me were identical.
The difference was that her friend's situation had since improved to the point where her husband had become surplus to requirements – hence the divorce - while my partner's quite definitely hadn't. For a long time her favourite hobby had been getting into debt and, even though she had a well-paid job, by then she owed so much to so many that the very suggestion she might raise enough to buy out my half of the mortgage was laughable. A more likely scenario was that we would have to sell the house in order to clear her debts. It didn't help that my parents were amongst the many people she owed money to.
If that wasn't bad enough, she then lost that well-paid job - she fell out with her boss in a big way, took the company to an Industrial Tribunal and, predictably, lost badly, in the process incurring massive legal bills that only added to her debt problems. She'd always been neurotic, but that episode triggered a mental breakdown and she became such a mess that she found it impossible to hold down any kind of job for more than a few months. Most only lasted a few weeks, some only lasted a few days and all were on minimum wage. She became consumed by hate and because I was the easiest target most of it was directed at me.
Things had been miserable for years, but that signalled the start of the worst period in my entire life. Our relationship was long-since dead but we were chained together by a mortgage that neither of us could afford to get out of. Her hatred of me grew and grew and she never missed an opportunity to add considerable amounts of spite to the hatred. I'm convinced that for a long period she was doing her best to get rid of me by trying to drive me to suicide, and she came oh so close to succeeding on many, many occasions.
If things weren't bad enough at home, they were no better at work because my employers had been taken over by a company that operated so far outside the law it was scary. For a while I thought they didn't dare sack me because I knew too much, but when the company was raided by Scotland Yard's Organised Crime Squad I discovered they were in league with the Russian Mafia and realised that by knowing too much my life might well be in danger. At the very least, I needed support and sympathy when I got home but the atmosphere there was so toxic instead I ended up working every minute of overtime I could, partly so I didn't have to go home and partly because someone had to pay the bills and every penny she earned was going on either her debts or her escalating drink habit.
It was about then that she was offered a job as a barmaid at our local pub. I wasn't sure that her working in that kind of environment was a good idea because as well as her drink problem she was still mentally unstable, but by then I couldn't have persuaded her to come in out of the rain so she took the job anyway. It was, therefore, something of a relief when after just a couple of days in the job she came home from work making contemptuous remarks about people who spent half their lives drunk and whose entire lives revolved around the pub. My relief was short-lived, though, because within two weeks she'd joined their ranks. She was even spending many of what were supposed to be her days off in the pub, with the result that I was regularly going for days on end without ever seeing her sober. I went down the pub with her one evening on her day off. She'd already had one too many when she got up to get another one. I pleaded with her not to get drunk again. She gave me a look of absolute contempt, turned to the barman and said "Make that a double".
We had been together for about 15 years by then and every day was a nightmare, but suddenly thing got even worse.
Despite her undisguised hatred of me, I still cared for her and when she was working a late shift I would still go down the pub shortly after closing time to make sure she got home safely. Then one night she wasn't there. The clearly embarrassed pub landlord and landlady awkwardly admitted that she'd departed a while before but claimed not to know where she'd gone or who she'd gone with. She hadn't come home by the time I went to work next morning and had already gone back down the pub by the time I finished work. That started to happen on a regular basis. Mid morning one day I found her stumbling homewards, still drunk. She wouldn't answer when I asked where she'd been but she didn't really need to, because where I found her made it obvious who she'd spent the night with. He had been the prime suspect for a while, but I think he was actually just the most frequent of several men she had spent nights with. But, as with my ex-wife, knowing something and being able to prove it are not the same thing.
Oh, and while we're on the subject of my ex-wife, remember how my mother couldn't tell me she'd caught her red-handed because she didn't know how? I came to know how she felt. My partner's daughter was spending her gap year in Australia while this final chapter was unfolding and I've never been able to bring myself to tell her that while she was away her boyfriend (later partner) was one of the men her mother – her own mother ffs! - spent at least one night with.
Anyway, we'd reached breaking point and her behaviour meant I was able to claim the moral high-ground when she announced that she wanted us to part. Forget paying off her debts from the proceeds of selling the house; we'd just sell it, pay off the mortgage, split what little was left 50/50 (better than she deserved, but I didn't want yet another fight) and go our separate ways. Result!
A few days later things got even better when she asked if I'd be willing to sell my half of the house to her and the Prime Suspect. That meant no chain and the problems that inevitably accompany one, so I agreed readily and within a couple of months I'd moved into a house of my own; my very own! Okay, so it was less than half the size of the old one and at the rough end of town, but so what? The icing on the cake was that I got another job that was not only much better, it paid much better, too.
As for her, seldom can anyone have shot themself in the foot with such accuracy. Her relationship with the Prime Suspect only lasted a few months. Apparently he robbed her of thousands (not sure where someone as heavily in debt as she supposedly was got thousands to be robbed of) and left her with a massive mortgage she couldn't afford so she had to sell the house and spent the next couple of years sofa-surfing. I'm not sure if she left or lost the job at the pub but she ended up getting barred from there, too, after having a meltdown and screaming all kinds of accusations and abuse at a few of the regulars because they'd invited me down to take part in the pub quiz.
We'd been together for over 15 years and 12 of those years had been the most miserable of my entire life. I felt nothing but relief when we finally parted.

A few months later I began a tentative relationship with a woman at work, but I quickly realised that my ability to trust had been permanently destroyed. Ironically, she was probably the only woman I've ever been involved with who I really could have trusted, but I couldn't convince myself to believe that and every single day I reminded myself that if she wasn't with me, she could be with anyone. Not surprisingly, the relationship didn't last.
Since then I've kept women at arms length. I've had four women come on to me since the end of that last relationship and all four were married, which has done nothing but reinforce my by now extremely cynical views on loyalty, trust and betrayal. All four were given short shrift.

Then, a few months ago, I was in town one day when I happened to run into a guy I'd worked with not long before lockdown. We hadn't worked together for very long but we'd got on well enough for me to feel able to make a guarded comment about his appearance, which was dreadful. Turned out that after suspecting for some months that his wife was having an affair, installing spy cameras in their home enabled him to both confirm his suspicions and discover that the man she was having the affair with was his own father!
Betrayed from two directions at once, I've never seen anyone so obviously on the verge of suicide.
I should have been sympathetic but instead I was instantly taken back to the nightmare of my ex and her attempts to drive me to suicide. The build-up to the end had been extremely traumatic but I'd always believed that when the end finally came I'd dealt with it very well. Instead I now realised that I'd not dealt with it at all. All I'd done was bury it and clamp a lid on it, and it had been festering ever since. That chance meeting with the former work colleague ripped the lid off and I've fallen into the deep, dark hole beneath and cannot escape.
I've been trying to deal with it but failing. The friends I've tried to speak to about it come in one of two categories; the "It happened 20 years ago. Get over it" group and the "I'm always here if you need someone to talk to" group. The majority are in the first group. What I've found when trying to talk to the few in the second group is that what I need to talk about is far, far heavier than they are prepared to deal with and that within a couple of sentences of starting a conversation they are looking for an escape route. Instead I tried self-help, which ended up as little more than scouring the internet, trying to make myself feel better by finding people with worse stories than mine. The trouble with doing that is having found one story, you then look for another that is even worse, then another, and another and the vicious circle you've created quickly takes you to some very dark places indeed that only makes things far worse. I'm slightly worried that I find myself looking through threads on forums like this for the same purpose, with the same results. I did consider getting professional counselling but too many of the comments posted on line by people who'd been that route were dissatisfied with the experience, a frequent complaint being that the counsellor appeared to be doing little more than reciting a script of trite platitudes while offering barely a word of actual advice. These therapists aren't cheap, so it sounds like a case of throwing good money after bad.
So here I am. I have to admit that I'd hoped that writing this would be cathartic, but instead it's just reawakened memories of other episodes in those two nightmare relationships that I could quite happily have done without being reminded of. But now I'm here, where do I go next and how do I get there?

10 comments posted: Tuesday, January 14th, 2025