Not remotely true. She had a long, long history of cheating… before and after me. She had a history of behaviors that precede and promote cheating. See the full fact-check for details.
The Fact Check
Ohhh… this post. This is a long one. A beast, nearly a book. So long that I have broken it down into mini chapters. There are so many bends and turns that it is quite a read. This fact-checking segment is where the concept of “godluvingal” becomes a complete and utter fallacy; evidence of a mask worn to dupe morons like me into believing they had found a “good” person.
But to be on track with the posts title, and completely blunt about it, there was no cheating going on against her. Period. There are no shades of meaning about it, there was no cheating.
As a matter of fact, the period of 2015-2019 were the best years of our relationship, save the first two years… or I thought so and she led me to believe it was so… through both words and action, even telling our “friends” at least a dozen times “we’ve never been happier. We’ve never been so close.” and bullsh*t phrases such as “when you die I’m going to get your ashes made into a diamond so I can keep you on a necklace near my heart”
Of course, this statement is barring the utter hell she put me through during 2018 and 2019, worse in 2020; but since I spent that time trying to break and bend myself into a shape that made her happy, convincing myself that it wasn’t unhappiness…it was just me being difficult… I won’t claim that period (Excluding 2020) as an objectively “bad” phase in our relationship. But we’ll get to that story when we get to it, and I promise you, your stomach will turn.
So ever onward…
From 2015 to the end, I was going way out of my way, and doing things I did not like, will not like, and will forever wear as a bag of bricks, just to make her feel special, feel loved, get enough attention… all this… during the time that she claims she was being “cheated on”. This was my mission.
But I don’t register it as a bad time in our relationship, per se, it registered with me as “doing what you need to do to make your wife happy”… the mission I had undertaken in 2015, and sometimes doing what you need to do is painful. That was my logic. And wow… that logic was stupid, idealistic, and disastrously selfless.
There were no “rocky times”, at least not in the classical sense, in the 3-4 years leading up to our divorce. There were rocky situations…very, very rocky, painful situations (she’d do a thing, I’d get vastly hurt by it; I’d call that out, we’d talk. We’d reach a “compromise” where I’d come further in her direction and she’d vow to change… She’d do the same thing again, or worse and I’d be convinced I was in the wrong and try to bend myself more and more toward ‘her way’… .this is the loop)
I may or may not get to some of those in this fact-checking segment, but there was no overarching lack of a relationship, fighting, or general relationship detachment. No sexual issues. Just some ups and downs brought on by social situations. The “forbidden story” is where I’ll explain this concept more fully… and I apologize I can’t address it here.
But needless to say, there was only one person cheating in the relationship, and it was NOT me.
As a matter of fact, I can’t see at all when I would even have been able to undertake such a thing. I was always at work, which is verifiable, or at home with the kids, which is verifiable, or with Amanda. There absolutely was no other time, except late at night… but even with that, the alarm system would have logged my goings and comings.
I couldn’t even go outside into my own yard without Amanda giving me a tongue-lashing, much less disappear somewhere to have an affair…a fact which we will get to later in another fact-check.
Anyways, for all intents and purposes, I thought everything was good (in its own way… but going through some growing pains) and going to better places. The mantra is “happy wife, happy life”
Except in this case.
I will try not to describe our marriage in too much detail in this post… or at least not the last nearly half a decade of it, as it is going to be a series of fact-checking subjects later on, but I will lean heavily into our relationship in the years leading up to 2015 as it is a critical factor in the end.
I will also be blunt and say that prior to 2015, specifically between 2012 and 2015 our marriage was on life support and I will admit having a great deal to do with that… I want to embrace my shortcomings and culpability where I can; a one-sided truth cannot be trusted.. Though it will be well understood why it was as it was.
And it is directly related to this cheating issue.
So let’s start where things normally start… at the beginning.
Born of Sin
In the beginning, I was a quiet guy working at Walmart. I was a fulltime student and a fulltime wally employee, blue smock and all. I had 12-17 hours of CIS/CS classes to attend while pulling a 40 hour work week. College has a m-w-f and a t-tr class schedule. Since I worked 5 days, I banked the majority of my classes on the t-tr schedule; worked the other 5 days. This meant I had no real downtime; so to blow off steam I declared Tuesday nights to be “party night”.
It started out small, just myself, my roommate and some close-by neighbors firing up the grill, knocking back some beers and playing cards with loud music. But it evolved quickly, as things like that do in college, and before long it was a party…20-30 people showing up at random… hundreds of dollars in liquor in the fridge…every Tuesday.
And honestly, it was a lot of fun.
Now at work, I did not really speak to anyone. But Amanda Montgomery, she was young; she worked in my area, so naturally some conversation did occur.
For about a year, it was very slight. I didn’t care much for her, and she didn’t care much for me. I was absolutely not attracted to her. Not that she was unattractive, per se… she was simply not attractive to me, she was married with kids, and she was part of the machine. For my part, what was at Walmart stayed at Walmart. I hated the job, hated the place, and had no interest in carrying any part of that home with me into my “real” life.
But over time, we became somewhat more friendly; and one day we were discussing our “partying ways.”
She told me of her exploits with her “b.f.f. Scarlet” and I told her of my Tuesday nights. Offhandedly I invited her. Very offhandedly, I didn’t expect attendance…it was more of “hey, this goes on. You’re welcome to come over”
The more the merrier, right?
Of course, I knew she was married. If I had thought about it, I would have assumed she and her husband would come over. But I did not think about it…I did not expect any motion on the invite. A married woman with two kids does not have time to come from Maben…30 minutes or whatever away from Starkville, to attend a Tuesday night college party. So in my mind that was the end of that road. I would also say that the invite was for her AND her husband, as the thought that she’d come without him if at all, was completely not in my head. There were lots of couples at my Tuesday nights, it was not a big deal.
But it was not the way it would work out. She did come. And she came without her husband – Jason R. Montgomery.
Long story short, she came, the liquor was flowing. She ended up performing… an act…which I’d rather not name… on me; right in the stairwell of my apartment at Canterbury Estates at some point during the night, with a whole gaggle of people just around the corner in the livingroom 10 feet away. (we WERE out of sight, mind you)
I was blown away by how forceful she was in “coming on” to me. I was also a drunk, irresponsible, somewhat hedonistic college guy. So there’s that.
It should have been a red flag. A huge red flag. A red flag right in my eye. And it was to a small degree…though she later dispelled the flag by building me up and convincing me that she just “found me so attractive” she “couldn’t help herself”
So our relationship started when she cheated on her husband, and massaged my ego.
Issue 1, square in the bin at this point.
Red Flags, Red Roses
From that point we started talking more, work became exciting, and a full-on affair grew out of it. I visited her house in Maben a number of times while her husband was away working offshore, with her invitation; and she visited my apartment a number of times as well. The cheating was strong with this one, and the cares were few.
Moving on, and moving on with the story. We talked for hours, things were good. We were bad. She figured me out very quickly. And I thought I figured her out. We were apparently the same… same taste in music (later proved a lie), same sleep habits (later proved an act). The mask was on. We both wanted the same things in life. Me, a family, some stability and a decent income. Her…in her words “a good man that will take care of me and my girls, who doesn’t cheat and $1000 in a savings account. Who’s stable and doesn’t have me running to the quickcash every week to get ahead of bounced checks”
She led me to believe she was a victim, always, always a victim, even to this day… and she wanted the true good things in life, and that her husband was a troll under the bridge. She was just a poor woman… a good woman, godluvingal… who’d had some hard knocks, a bad childhood, a disadvantaged start and some horrible luck with men. We were the same. At this point, I’ll tell you… do not discount the adage “If it’s too good to be true, it probably is”
And that’s why she cheated on him… because he was horrible. She had mirrored me well, and I started to fall in love with mysel… umm.. her.
In my old-school, chivalrous-but-misogynistic mind… she and her girls needed a rescue, he was supposedly a monster. Coincidentally, I wanted a family. So it was a match. And he was evil. Bad guys deserve what they get, right?
I only found out much later, after we’d moved in together that she had actually ended her first marriage the same way… by cheating on her first husband with her second. That definitely would’ve been a flag; and it definitely was a portent of the future.
That aside, she was cheating on her second husband with me… and things were getting deeper.
So now lets take a jump out of these details and look at another cheater red-flag.
One day I was leaving work at the Ol’ Blue Box. It was no secret among the people that knew me that she and I were seeing each other.
This guy Aubrey, who I didn’t like to begin with but who actually thought he was a friend of mine…somehow… strolled up beside me as I was walking out the door.
“hey man, you know that girl Amanda…I think shes got a thing for me too. She’s all flirting me up all the time. We oughtta run a train on this b*tch” were the words. Aubrey was not the master of a civil vocabulary, so I do apologize for the words…
I saw red. Not red flags but anger at Aubrey and I let him know.
The next day, sitting in my little red Ford Aspire at break like she and I often did, I told her straight… “this is what Aubrey is saying about you. Why do you flirt with everyone you work with?? This is how people talk about you!”
I probably had no right to be angry at Aubrey, as it was true that she would flirt with every guy at Walmart, no matter the person; and I knew it.
But no, she’s the poor angelic “godluvingal”; there’s no way she intends anything negative…. Right? That was my thought.
Her response to me was “I do it for the attention. Because my husband is so bad to me. I feel unloved.”
To which I responded “you have me now, you don’t need that”
And so that conversation went, with her promising she wouldn’t do that anymore and agreeing she didn’t need it…she was changed.
Now we can go to cheater flag number 3. Her mother…
Amanda invited me to a “party” at her mother’s house. It really wasn’t a party, it was just 6 or 7 people hanging out on her mother’s porch in the middle of the country. Through the course of the evening the topic came up that the porch light wasn’t working. Me, trying to impress her mother and having a background in electrician work told her I’d fix it.
So a day or two later, I show up at her mother’s house with a new switch for the light. While I’m out there working on it, her mom comes outside to smoke. She spends the entire time I’m there replacing the switch at the table behind me talking. She goes through great lengths to describe the “stripper pole” she had in a small trailer behind her house.
To this day, that part still creeps me out.
She went from talking about the stripper pole to saying a phrase that has stuck with me all these years… “It’s like I’ve always told Amanda Gayle… You gotta keep you a good man on the siiiiide!”
It bothered me then, and it bothers me now. I was weirded out by it, and I approached Amanda about it. She used the opportunity to not only dispel the flag, but also to more closely bond me to her.
She knew about my troubled family life and said something that reached into me and nearly snapped a lock on me with an audible click. “Oh, that’s just my Mother. She’s crazy. You can’t listen to her. I’m not like that, I’m not like her. I grew up around that kind of stuff and I don’t want to be anything like that.”
And there you have it, red flag turned into a red rose. Because that was the precise feelings I had about where I had come from.
The next cheater red flag happened around this time…
Amanda invited me to another “party” at this place in West Point called “the Little Pig.” Apparently it was a barbeque place that served double duty as a hole-in-the-wall bar. I went over there… and was promptly ignored the whole night.
Amanda sat next to some tall, skinny guy with long hair. Danced with him, talked to him, sat with him. I didn’t know any better, I assumed he was a friend of the family, or a cousin or something. It turned out that he was not. He was just a guy…
But anyway, I sat at the Little Pig bored to death, and completely not liking the place, feeling like I needed a shower from the atmosphere. When everybody started to leave, Amanda invited me to an “after party” at some trailer park in West Point. I figured we’d hang out there…so I went home, grabbed my roommate, and we went to the after party…
… where we sat in my car bored to death while I drank screwdrivers. Because Amanda had left the after party with the guy from the Little Pig, and was gone for like two hours, and we knew NO ONE there.
I did not see or speak to her for more than 3 minutes at the “after party”, and only then just to say “bye” because it was late and I’d been hanging out for two or three hours…
This was a flag, so the next day at work I talked to Amanda about it. Her words were… “I didn’t spend any time with you because I like you so much and I was afraid someone would notice”
Very clever lie, speaking directly to ego, with a smattering of “good sense” thrown in. I do not want to speculate on what happened between her and “the guy”; and given her nature during our marriage, I can only guess-
Anyway, things progress the way they progress, and now we’re on to the next red flag.
In my previous post I said we were married in May of 2008. In 2007 we were supposedly happily cohabitating in Ridgeland and had been for about a year.
Attention, Attention, Attention
Back then myspace was all the rage. I have never been a fan of social media. But one day I did look at her myspace page. And this is the type of stuff she was posting.
Of course, these are not risqué. They’re not bad or an indication of cheating. This is not proof of cheating. At all. But to understand, you’d have to have context. You would have to know Amanda. It’s an indicator of a deeper issue.
This was Amanda Carter, at the time still Amanda Montgomery. A woman with massive insecurity. At this time, fully 3 years into our relationship…
I had still not seen her with her clothes off and a light on; short of showering (I guess soapy bubbles is a substitute for clothes? She always told me it was about stretch marks…but who knows)
Not one. Single. Time.
This was the girl who almost exclusively wore jeans and t-shirts, with her hair in a ponytail and believed that “dressing like a guy” was a source for bragging rights.
But somehow, she was taking the time to do herself up and take sultry pictures. It was alien and completely out of the norm for her.
So we had a discussion. I was not mad, nor accusing. But I was mightily curious and really just wanted to know what the deal was.
And… to answer what she was doing… and for the second time in our relationship…just like the flirting conversation in my Aspire in the Walmart parking lot over a year earlier, she gave this reason: “I don’t know why I do that. I just like the attention. But I don’t need to do that anymore… I’ve changed”
I did the stupid thing I kept doing for the next 14 years or so, and believed her.
She was self admittedly posting for male attention on myspace. Less than one year before we were to be married, and less than two years into our relationship.
So let’s keep this train moving. It’s a long post, and we have a whole lot of ground yet to cover. This stuff is just the foundation. We’re about to get into the heart of the lie.
Instantly Responsible and Stressed to Kill
In 2008-2009 we were pregnant. We were buying a house. Amanda had pre-eclampsia and had to reside downstairs in the living room for several months and required care. My mother stayed with us to help. We also had a scare with the doctor saying our baby was miscarried… or more precisely “an empty sac.”
Proudly, that empty sac is now a wonderful 13 year old girl.
Work was worse than a nightmare. We were expanding into 3 additional states. I had 54 clinics under my belt and no help. I was travelling a lot more, and working a lot more. There was no time off, period. Things were hard. Very, very hard. My diabetes was uncontrolled (I had no pump at this time) and in just a few short years I had gone from being a college student with few obligations…to a married father of three, in debt, with a hellish monstrosity of a job that I was trapped with, having no degree and a wife and kids to take care of… with a new baby… I was on my way to becoming this:
I was quite literally dying.
We had our baby girl; and not only were those things mentioned already going on… but when the baby came, I started getting only about 4 hours of sleep. Lack of sleep is normal with a new baby, but not to this extent. The reason I got no sleep, is because as I said in a previous post… I was making sure Amanda could get 7 or more hours in bed a night. To do this, I could only get 4. And there was no relief. No support. No escaping the pressure. If I said anything about work, or problems to Amanda… I would get answers such as “gaaah. Shut up about your work. I don’t wanna hear it”.
Yes. I was dying. And it was during this time that things in the bedroom cooled off. 2010 was the year…
It started out as “delayed ej*.” Not a lack of intimacy. Not a failure to mechanically operate. Just a simple case of things taking too long…to the point that I would physically give out and just stop.
In my opinion, it wasn’t a big deal. If anything, it meant she was well taken care of in this respect because it was taking so long. And me, being worn, sickly and exhausted… It just didn’t bother me that I did not “finish”
But no… no indeed. To her, it was a very big deal. And this is where things really took a turn. And it would be 2015 before I found out the full extent of the turn.
And this is how it played out. For almost a year, from just after the baby until 2010, I was having these problems. Understandably.
At first, I was not concerned. I am not, and have never been known to be an overly sexual creature… as a matter of fact, I’m known to be a lot more reserved than most in this respect.
I’m more cerebral than anything. So I was very unconcerned that I wasn’t “getting mine” and was content that she was. But she was not content. I figured this out, as increasingly…when I would “give up” she would look at me as if I had murdered her favorite puppy. For a few months this would go on, and I would ask her if she was ok…and she would say “nothing is wrong. I’m fine.” And go to sleep.
But one day she finally broke and said that not finishing meant… that I didn’t love her.
Now maybe I’m strange. Maybe I’m dense. But I do not and did not understand this concept, to this day… that a biologic process was the litmus indicator of whether or not I loved someone.
But whether I understood it or not… we were now officially having relationship issues and it was on my shoulders…my fault. (Even though she would take no steps to support the relationship, even in that capacity, actually taking active steps to break things and make the problems worse; I was to come the full distance else I was derelict)
Life did not get easier. My health did not get better. Stress compounded on stress, and I had added another brick to my bag. My support person, my wife, would not hear me; everything was about her and her feelings. And sex became an achievement test… a high pressure performance exam. As everyone knows, stress is the nemesis of good bedroom performance, counted triple if you are a sickly, uncontrolled juvenile diabetic.
I couldn’t stand disappointing her. I couldn’t stand making her unhappy. But I couldn’t force anything. It went from delayed… to difficulty with function. And then things happened with her that completely changed the dynamic.
The First “known” Smear Campaign
She began humiliating me. She would keep a calendar and put little hearts on it for each day she had sex. She started passing this information to anyone that would listen… My sister. Her friends. God-Knows who all. It was awful. I felt a huge amount of shame. I talked to her about it, to absolutely no avail. So now we add intense shame and humiliation to the bag. Things were not getting better.
I will note here, that even if things were great behind closed doors… I still would have been mortified that she was logging and sharing my private life like this. I am extremely private, and introverted.
As this was going on, she was consistently angry with me. Guilting me. Humiliating me. Then moved on to intimidation tactics and threats. One day she described how much she wanted to “jump on” a guy that she passed her on the chili aisle at the grocery store. Things got more and more difficult.
My performance became exponentially worse… I sought more and more to avoid sex entirely if I could. I felt guilty, and low, and my esteem began to crack. Stress piled onto more stress. It was the fabled “vicious cycle”.
In hindsight, I recognize that things could have been better from her side. She could have tried… she was notorious for not initiating anything, not doing anything at all and expecting me to come the full distance to make things happen. Heck, I still couldn’t even see her without clothes…
Or at the very least… try to be decent, and patient with me. She could have done very easy things to support me… maybe even as simple as providing a sympathetic ear when I needed to talk to someone instead of shutting me down and telling me to shut up with my problems. Would it have provided the answer? I don’t know, because it never happened. It was 100% derision, criticism, humiliation and threats. The things she said and did worked in opposition to positive change.
But at the time, I took full responsibility. It was ALL my fault.
Finally, she took what I consider now to be a step too far. She blew up at me and said “If you won’t handle it, I will find someone that will!!!!”
I thought we had dealt with the issue at the time she said this. I had explained that I loved her deeply and that it was health; stress; lack of sleep. Nothing more. Addressable things. Temporary things. She seemed to be content with that answer.
But the wings of the butterfly were touched at this point, and by 2012 the frequency of our encounters dropped to less than once a month… and one time during 2012… we went 11 months without that sort of contact. But she pretended it was fine, and me….knowing my shortcomings tried to make up for it by showing how much I loved her in other ways. Building things, buying things, doing special things… cooking, remodeling, taking trips. I continued to internalize everything, feeling guilt to my core. We were officially in the dark ages. But here I’m going to point out an important thing… this was in 2012. We will be jumping forward in time to 2015 and then backwards in time to 2010 very soon…when the ONLY issue I had was being… delayed.
Emptiness
So the marriage was a desolate wasteland for the next 3 years (2012-2015). She insisted she was fine, that toys were good enough; the rare times that things happened they were difficult and unsatisfactory. But again, she insisted everything was fine. From time to time the issue would still crop up, entirely in an accusatory and critical manner… but we would “work through” it, and things would supposedly go back to “fine”.
And still… never once was there a word of encouragement, or even a modicum of support, understanding or empathy. Actually, in our marriage, the problem of sexuality became a non-issue and the more glaring issues from my perspective were the psychological attacks she was waging on me – everything I said was wrong. Everything I did was stupid. Everything about my appearance, habits in general EVERYTHING about me was a target. And my God, if I heard the words “well Brian says…” less than 3000 times, then I’m a flying zebra. (I still don’t know what that was about, but it was a very impactful thing that caused a lot of damage)
And then there was the fact that I was nearly always alone. She was working and going to school. I was still working almost 80 hours a week and trying to take care of everything that she could not while she was in school. Babies. Toddlers. Elementary school kids. A Highschooler. 4 kids, and just me. I did not have the energy, emotional fortitutude, time, or stamina to fix things. It was survival mode, each and every day.
But I did not complain…much. Occasionally I’d ask why she was so mean and her answer was always the same and remained the same for years… it’s the stress of the move. Or the stress of the baby. Or the stress of school. Or sexual issues (made worse by the constant emotional abuse). I would allow the can to be kicked on down the road… one day, one day, one day, one day we will be over the stressful parts of our life. Things will get better. Amanda will get out of school. I can get a job that makes sense. The kids will be older. But the present then, was a nightmare.
A simple example of the relationship life I lived was this…
I always, whenever I went to a convenience store, would pickup what was her favorite candy at the time. Reeses cups. But then in 2010 she went through a stage where diet and weight loss became extremely important to her (for a reason we’ll see in a minute). So when I brought her candy… she would get very upset and accuse me of blowing her diet and ruining her progress. So I stopped getting the candy. But when I stopped, she began throwing it at me “you don’t love me, you never buy me candy anymore” If I bought it, I was bad, I was sabotaging her, I didn’t want her to be fit….etc etc. If I didn’t buy it, I was bad, I didn’t care about her, I didn’t love her, I ignored her. This no-win theme was a constant throughout, and we will see it again later.
It was a zero sum game for me, with no way to win, in every respect of my life starting in 2010. I cannot fully explain how awful it was.
Anyways, this is the background; and hopefully it shows the nature of things, exposes any culpability I had, and keeps me honest. There were two sides to the coin in the beginning, and I was not completely devoid of responsibility. But as you’ll see… I did not cause the cheating.
The Depth of a Cheat
So now, lets skip forward to 2015. By this time, Amanda was a nurse. We had switch hit so I could finish school too and I was graduating. Also, I was making a job change now that her job brought more stability to our finances and I could afford to risk rocking the boat to change some things. Everything seemed to be on the “up and up”
But then one day, as I was sitting at the computer in the office that she used for school. I don’t recall why I was there, but I remember I was working on something FOR her which was the norm.
She comes in from the grocery store and says she wants to go upstairs and take a shower. She goes up, and the computer starts dinging. I look at it and there are several tabs open… one to her email. One to her facebook messenger.
She’s talking to an extremely unsavory looking individual, with a penchant for Ed Hardy gear… from West Point. He’s asking her to give him a “shower show” and she is explaining using the messenger app on her phone how she can’t “right now” because her husband was home.
This prompted me to start digging. I looked at her email, I looked at her fb messenger. And I found she had been cheating since 2010; nearly continuously. With at least 4 guys.
After I did my research, I confronted her about it. I was not angry. I was sad. And broken. I wasn’t angry because I had long since determined everything was my fault, and she had ground that concept into my bones. And I had been the one avoiding intimacy. I was the one who had experienced performance issues. So, I took it all in. I asked her what she’d been doing.
She said it was all “online.” Just pictures, video and live chat. My heart wanted to believe, but my brain did not. She had started talking to one of her ex boyfriends… Neal (who I did not know)…way back in 2010. Within a week of talking to him, he sent her this video asking her to meet him for sex. Mind you… this is in 2010, when the only issues I’m having is delay. When this started, she was not at a loss for intimacy. (save while she was pregnant. I’d never had a child, and the empty sac scare really threw me off the idea of pregnant sex)
She sent him back this video, with my infant daughter in the tub.
They continued to talk, trade pictures…. videos, sexting, mutual M, and whatever at the very least…for another 6 months at that time (at least 6 months. The last message I could find was her sending him the lyrics to Guns-N-Roses “Patience”, a full 6 months after they’d started talking.) I could not get the true extent of their relationship as much evidence was missing, deleted or lost to time. This was 5 years after their affair, when I discovered it, and the stuff I found was basically a few things she’d neglected to clear from her deleted items and a couple of odd things she missed when clearing the evidence… But there were suspicious tie ins.
One tie in, was this was around the time she started being ungodly cruel to me on a cycle. Cruel for a week, nice for a day. Cruel for a month, nice for a week. It was also around the same time that she became obsessed with her physique, as I stated earlier.
Also, around this time… she had taken a trip to her mother’s in Pheba for her birthday – which she had never done prior, and has not done since.
Notice in the first picture below, that it’s “No Subject” (175) on the patience email screenshot below. I can only assume that’s yahoo mails way of saying this is message 175 with no subject, sent to this recipient…
Here are the highlights (I had more pictures, and I do wish I had taken better ones, but I was overwrought. And It was just to show her I’d seen them…not to use later or show anyone. That’s not how I think or how I operate):
This guy was near Starkville, and only 3 hours away from my house. I worked a predictable schedule and 10-12 hour days back then. He was married and with children while their affair was going on, as was she. The other stuff with the three other guys was FB messenger cybersex, as far as I could gather. But I will never know. She had time, motive and opportunity. So that’s the closest I can get to knowing.
But again… I was not angry. I had long ago internalized the guilt of “not being enough.” It had been driven into me, and my nature is to assume responsibility. In my mind, I deserved it. So instead of fighting, or divorcing… yelling or screaming. (I was definitely put off by the who and what was going on; shocked is more the word…godluvingal, indeed.) But I simply asked her “why?” and “What do you need to not destroy our family?”
Again… the same thing came back, full circle to the beginning. The justification she gave, is that she “did it for attention.” (Well, that and she said she did what she did with her ex because “he had a big d*ck, so I was curious” but we’ll discount that excuse and not mention it again.)
So I made the resolution, then and there. I had a new job that was far less demanding, and 1/10 as stressful. I was done with school, she was supposedly done with school. I had time and she had time, so it was our time to fix the things that were broken. And I set into it with passion.
Now… the reality of the situation, in the 20/20 vision of hindsight… Is that I had a simple problem in late 2009, early 2010 brought on by health, stress, long work hours with years of no real time off, emotional and physical exhaustion, emotional abuse, new babies, lack of sleep, buying a house, dealing with my wife’s divorce debt, dealing with having to replace her car (see post 1), and being alone most of the time, all while being an uncontrolled diabetic on pen insulin and having no emotional support at all.
And going from being a college student to an IT director with 54 clinics to keep operating and all the other things, instantly with two young-ish children and a wife to take care of. All this while being threatened, emotionally kicked, humiliated and bashed on a regular basis by very the person I was doing it for.
But it was my fault, right? I definitely convinced myself it was.
These are the things. And I had traded my education, preferred career path, easy start at life, friends, family..everything…quitting school, dropping everything, heading to Ridgeland to make it all happen and to take care of my new family and provide Amanda with the opportunity to “better herself”, for us, our family and her.
She reciprocated with selfishness (One of her biggest concerns was that I did not rub her feet enough, her second biggest concern prior to my issue was that I did not light candles and make sex a hallmark special event enough), absence, lack of support, cruelty, emotional abuse, manipulation, guilting, humiliation, intimidation, threats and cheating.
But in 2015 all I felt was guilt. It was my fault so I deserved it, right? I even rationalized myself into understanding it. You’re not good enough, guy… what do you expect???
And I felt guilty because I had resented her after she threatened and humiliated me, intentionally avoided the stress and bad feelings of intimacy, and this just further made me believe it was all my fault. Everything was going to blow up, simply because I wasn’t enough, couldn’t push through enough, shake off enough, do enough. It was all on me, in my own mind.
Me, the great ruiner of my own family.
Was I blameless, guiltless, an angel and a victim? I will have to say definitively no. Others may disagree. There is ample justification for a lot of my ways.
But ultimately, I did slip into resentment. I did slip into pacification instead of repair. I did allow the marriage to be a no-man’s land that I avoided intimacy in for three entire years. But would it have changed anything had I not? This is the question that I wonder sometimes, but I leave it be… because it is very close to slipping into my old ways of absorbing fault. Could anyone have done better, with the threats, criticism, anger, intentional humiliation? I don’t know.
But She was already cheating… If I look at it with objectivity… I’d have to say that there wasn’t a year’s time that there wasn’t someone else hiding in the background in some capacity or another for the entire time I knew her.
First, it was me, her, and her still married husband. Then it was us, him, and every male at Walmart. Or us, and some guy at the Little Pig. Then it was us, him, and random men on myspace. Then it was us, and an issue with one of her friends husband’s…Jon Michael Self who’d helped us move (I didn’t put him in the story because it was very minor and more simply classified as “weird behavior”). Then it was us, and Neal, and then other West Point guys through facebook. And later, it was even more of a crowd. Us, A Doctor, A guy named Dustin, at one point a Justin, a Jeff, a Michael, a David… and just…
Let’s let this description go for now, or we’ll be here all day. Needless to say, the multi-men thing has continued with her; even til now…though I am fortunately no longer a part of it.
Now at this time, before we move into the period from 2015-2019 and the insanely f*cked up mess that became, I will take this opportunity to point out some other strange things during our relationship.
When she was pregnant with my full blooded first born, back in 2009… she came home crying. In complete despair. I asked her why, and it was because some guy she worked with at Walmart made a cow joke to her.
In retrospect, I have to wonder why they were that familiar, and why his comments got to her so badly? I jumped to her defense, when I should’ve been looking at the situation from a different perspective.
But who’s to say.
Another strange thing… one time around 2011, we went to a Halloween party at her b.f.f. Scarlet’s house. And there was this guy there… Jamie, who was one of Amanda’s nursing classmates. And wow, he was hitting on Amanda hard. He was hitting hard, and trying to impress her; hovering and being very inappropriate. So much so that I had to call her to the side and say “What’s the story with this guy?” and suggest to her that we avoid him. Her answer was “Ohhhh, that’s just Jaime!”
I let it go. But recently this photo emerged from one of her school things.
So in retrospect…what was really going on? Reserve your judgement until you get all the information; but I already lived through her, so I can guess. (although I might not be able to provide enough information for you to reason out a conclusion, since I’m still planning at this time to reserve the worst stories for later)
So lets move on through to 2015 and get to the real cheating horrors. The ones I have not, and cannot write off.
(Ok, so I split the post here as it was getting very very long, and continued it in Part 2. Continue to Part 2 to get to the most interesting, awful, devious, and deplorable parts.)
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