Messages By: monhol

Quote From: pamela1965

I have been married to my husband for 9 years. We have two boys, ages 11 and 7, both ours. About 3 years into the marriage I began to notice signs of him cheating on me. He is an alcoholic and his addiction had progressed to the point where he would not come home sometimes and I wouldn't even know where he was. One night when he was in Florida by himself (we live in California) he didn't answer his phone all night and I didn't know what hotel he was staying in. I was immediately angry at him because I had caught him in so many lies before and I suspected he was cheating on me. Six months later (it took me that long to get the courage) I looked at his cell phone bill from the night he was in Florida alone and on his bill was 2 phone calls made to a woman named Claudia at 12:00 a.m. and 1:00 a.m. in the morning. When I confronted him he lied, lied, lied. So I called her and spoke to her. She told me she was a stripper and it's most likely she met him at work. I later found her on an escort service website. He of course denied that he did anything with her. I insisted we go to counseling and the counselor pretty much took his side and said men are visual and that's why they go to strip clubs, and that she knew someone who was a stripper and they're not allowed to touch them, and that I was being insecure.

A couple years later I caught him looking up prostitutes on the computer. (I'd love to give that marriage counselor a piece of my mind now for calling me insecure. Staying with him didn't help my self-esteem at all.) He again denied doing anything with the prostitutes. When I asked to see his cell phone and office bills he refused. I said, let me see the bills and if you didn't call them, this conversation will be over. His response, "Well, I might have called a couple of them." I was so shattered.

At that point, I detached from him. I moved to another house, but we remained married. He kept telling me he was working and couldn't come up for the weekend. We spent more and more time apart. I tried my best to live my own life. When summertime came, I brought the kids down to the house he was staying in to see him. He immediately took off for another "boys" trip to Florida. I prayed about it. I asked God to let me know if he was cheating on me. When he came home, I walked in the bathroom and saw a new hairbrush on the counter that he had purchased for the trip. When I picked it up to put it away, it had a long black hair hanging from it, twice as long as mine. My hair and his hair is blonde. Instead of confronting him about it, I decided to wait a couple weeks for his cell phone bill. The cell phone bill again had a woman's number on it. He claimed his friend was the one who called her. I stayed at the house for the summer and then took the kids back to our other home for school in September. All this time I had asked him to go to counseling and he refused. I just figured it was part of his alcoholism, and that it was progressing.

Two years later it really got bad (as if it wasn't bad enough already.) One Friday night he would not answer his phone. I called him again Saturday morning, he didn't answer. Then I called him a half hour later, he finally answers. Says he's at his buddy's house on the couch. I said, if you're at Rudy's house, hang up and call me from his phone. Then he said, well, I already left, I'm in the car. He just kept stumbling over himself and it was blatantly obvious he was lying again (as Dr. Phil says, you'll know he's lying if his mouth is open.) Again, I went through his phone bill, looked at a weekend he went to the river (on his son's 10th birthday) and found not one but 6 or 7 girl's numbers on the phone. That was it. I called him up, said you're calling whores again, I'm taking the money out of the account and filing for divorce. Then I got on the phone and started calling the girls. One of them told me she was a stripper from the Hustler Club in Redlands, and that he and her friend went to the River with him and that they were supposed to pay them $1600 and didn't. She told me he had a girlfriend. I got angry at her and called her a whore. She screamed and yelled at me and I hung up. Not my highest moment in my life. I really felt like dirt. The next day (after having a hooker party in our home with all of his married friends) he called me all apologetic. He told me he was doing this because I kept telling him I wanted to get divorced. I said, what am I supposed to do? You won't get help, you keep blaming me. For the first time he told me, "Obviously there's something wrong with me. I'll do whatever you want, I'll go to counseling."

And he did go, maybe 3 times at the most. He did seem to change at that point, though. For one thing, our home was broken into about a week after I yelled at the stripper on the phone, and a safe cut out of the wall and his Rolex was stolen, along with autographed memorabilia. I think he realized at that point how crappy these people were he was bringing into his home, His BMW was also keyed up and down the entire car. He moved everything in with me and really made quite an effort in making me and our children happy. All during the time he was cheating he would buy me wonderful gifts, a home in an exclusive neighborhood (Will Smith used to live up the street) a Range Rover for Christmas, $50,000 diamond bracelet. After finding out about all the whores, it dawned on me that that's the way he was treating me as well.

I have since spent months in counseling on my own, and read book after book and everything I can find online. My counselor says he's narcissistic. I kept telling her he did this on purpose, that he's extremely controlling with money (I never have more than $1,000 in my name and he shuts off my credit card when he gets mad at me) and that I really feel this is a punishment to me, that he knows exactly how to hurt me. She said she believes he's trying to fulfill his needs and why would he intentionally want to hurt me, that would be cruel. But I've always felt like this was extremely personal, a payback for something he was angry about.

Then I picked up a book, living with the passive-aggressive man. And I read stuff online. That book describes my husband to a T. It describes how a passive-aggressive man will be angry at his wife, and instead of voicing it, he will withhold sex from her. And after years of resentment, he will cheat on his wife and actually take pleasure in her knowing something is going on but never quite being able to pin him to anything, and that he actually gets pleasure out of her pain.

The latest news is his girlfriend from the strip club got pregnant around the time he was still seeing her. The baby is a few months old now and I looked at her myspace page and saw a pic of the baby and was concerned it could be my husband's. He denied it. Then I talked to my sister-in-law and find out he called the stripper because I scared him, and she told him he had nothing to worry about that the dad made her get a paternity test and that it's not my husband's kid. He neglected to tell me that, though. He had to relieve his own worries about it, but neglected to tell me and instead let me suffer.

So why haven't I left? At first I thought the fear of losing his family would straighten him out. Then there was the fact my lawyer wanted $12,000 and I didn't have money to give him. My kids were young at the time and I couldn't stand the thought of splitting time with them, being away from them for long periods like my nephew. So I stayed and detached from him so that I could have complete control over the kids as he would allow me to do as long as we were together. Then after finding out he had a stripper/whore girlfriend, I knew if I filed for divorce she would move in with him, and she would be the one watching my boys when they were supposed to be visiting their dad, while they're dad is out drinking. I wasn't about to let that happen and sacrificed myself for my kids.

It's a huge sacrifice, though. I cry every day, every day for 2 years I've cried. Usually in the shower or after the kids have gone to sleep, after I drop them off at school in the car. It's excruciatingly painful.