A long post but it still does not cover all sides of the story.
The whole thing has more to it, both positive and negative, but the foundation is there.
I wrote a long rant in Notes and got ChatGPT to correct the spelling as i'm not a native English speaker and when you are writing an emotional text like this, then you just barf it all out and dont care that much about correct spelling at that moment…
So here goes…
If a woman has lied to you about her sexual past at the beginning of a 10-year relationship, later marriage, and having kids—by saying the number of people she had slept with was 4 or 5 (she asked first at the beginning of our relationship) and then told that it was same for her from that information—and then later gets caught keeping in touch with her ex, her first love, who she was obsessed over for years and years, behind your back for the whole duration of our relationship and from there you find out that the actual number of partners was 20+, including a man who was 30 years older than her when she was 20, a threesome, and 5 one-night stands, with the last one happening 1.5 months before you met…
We met at a party, i saw her and asked her to join me on the dance floor, after a few hours of dancing, we kissed, and spent the night just talking and hangin' out. When it was already morning, I suggested going to her place but with no actual motive to sleep with her but i just liked her so much that i would have loved to have that extra time together, but she told me that she never sleeps with people on the first night even though i did not suggest that. (she would have been my first one night stand experience, if she would have made a move, as i truly liked her and to be honest that after she told me that "she never does one night stands" it got me to respect her even more) After 8 years of marriage and having two kids together, I found out that all of that was a lie. I also found out that during the first months of our relationship, she had told friends—and even some of the men she had slept with—that she had lied to me about her past and about having slept with them and told them that i can't find out. Also treating it all like it was funny.
Over the years, there were about many times when I had a strong intuition about different people and situations and asked her about them directly, and every single time she lied to me very convincingly.
After 8 years together, when I first found out that she had lied to me—but still didn’t know the full extent of it yet—she started treating me horribly for the next 2.5 years by belittling me, criticizing my manhood, and so forth. During that time, I felt worse than I had ever felt before, and she continued lying by giving me half-truths and slowly dropping names until the number eventually reached 20+.
There is much more to the story. Throughout the years, she had been controlling and very jealous at times, setting boundaries in our relationship, only for me to later find out that she never followed those same boundaries herself and was able to lie and deceive without remorse.
I also found out that she sometimes talked to her friends and family about her “special someone/ex,” in nostalgic/romanticized way.
She was emotionally cheating on me, and because I am no longer able to trust her, I can’t be sure how many other boundaries she may have crossed throughout our relationship or whether she physically cheated on me as well. At this point, it feels like anything is possible because her words no longer mean anything to me.
I feel betrayed and deceived. I feel stupid, naive, and like an idiot and a joke, because I feel like I was the only one who didn’t know any of this. It makes me feel like I was left out of some joke, only to later realize that I was the joke. My mind sometimes makes me feel like all the people from her past—and the people who knew she was lying to me—were somehow all in on it.
That last part is more about the psychological impact this has had on me.
I told her that i`m not tolerating that kind of disrespect and was living separately in a rental for about 6 months. I set concrete boundaries and a zero tolerance terms and I decided to try go back home for the sake of my children's wellbeing and see what the future brings.
For the last 5 months, my wife has been trying to convince me that she has changed, that she finally understands what she has done, and she is acting exactly like the partner I always wanted her to be. She keeps telling me that I now know the whole truth, but she has sworn that to me probably 30 times before, only for me to later find out she was lying again.
I now have deep trust issues, C-PTSD, a broken heart, and a lot of grief. I honestly don’t know what to do with these feelings. Living separately made me feel more in control and i feel that i have grown a lot as a person and as a man during these times but at the cost of losing some of the good sides about me that made me who i was.
In the last few months, she has been great in many ways—supportive and finally taking accountability—but I don’t trust her anymore. Seven years of deceit versus 5 months of "finally understanding" makes me constantly alert that this could just be another mask that will fall off as soon as I “go back.” Because i mean…
Before moving to the rental I told her that we are separated, that i want a divorce but she insisted that we should try couples therapy and try to come out stronger from this. I agreed to try, but I made no promises. I have also made it clear that I am still deeply hurt and disappointed, and I honestly have no idea if or when I could ever get over this.
I have no idea what i'm hoping to get from posting this here. I have talked about all of this with people close to me but i think i just needed to get it out in writing or something…