The Prince Charming Mask

Sept4 – You are absolutely right. Many people struggle to understand how someone who was so wonderful becomes so evil. The key is to realize that the Prince Charming personna was an act. A charade designed to seduce you. The evil cheating liar is the real person.

I got married on February 2nd 2019. My first marriage at 38 years old. I rushed it because I wanted to start a family before it was too late. Robert new this and promised me a future and a family. He promised so many things. I met him at church and he asked me out. I found out he did 7 years in prison and this concerned me but he assured me that this was his past and that God had changed him. He was not that person anymore. He never really was clear about why he went in. I still don’t really know for sure. He was very charming and I had been desperately waiting for the “right” guy for years so I could start a family. I just really wanted to believe him. Despite his disturbing past he was everything I had been waiting for. We were married less than a year later.

Well fast forward to after the wedding and things fell apart extremely quickly. He is the exact opposite of who he said he was. I won’t go into details now because you already know. The last year and a half of my life has been complete hell and I didn’t understand what was happening. I finally mustered the courage to get away from him because I just had to. I thought I was going crazy. I told him I was just going to visit family for a week but I actually got a one way ticket to MN where I grew up. This was back in May. I remember walking into my mom’s house with my suitcase and just collapsing in her arms, sobbing. I didn’t realize what the past year had done to me. I was a shell of a person and emotionally and financially depleted. He took everything from me. Even my dreams of having children because shortly after the wedding he said he changed his mind and didn’t want them anymore.

I am FINALLY home. I am safe.
When I got here in May I did not have a clue what a psychopath was. I actually thought we would eventually work things out and I started paying for therapy sessions for each of us separately in hopes we could eventually do marriage counseling together and reconcile. Recently, I had a weird feeling in my guts and guessed his passwords for Facebook and Google. I now know that he has a major porn addiction and more specifically “young skinny teen xxx” kind of porn and this has been going on the whole time we’ve been married. Robert and I have not had sex since a month after our wedding. We have had no sexual intimacy whatsoever since then and it has been devastating and so confusing for me to deal with. He told me he loved me but just had low testosterone. So much for that theory. After finding the porn I found a note on his Facebook messenger where his buddy says, “Dude, go pork your wife” and his response is “ish too fat”. Then why did he marry me if he thinks I’m gross?!! So he has never even really been attracted to me. And by the way I am a 5 foot 6 inch tall female and I look good for 40! I guess he wants a 115 pound teenager. I am SO shocked to uncover this. He is a total pig! How did I not know? What else has he been lying about?

The lies I’ve uncovered over the past few weeks have set me on a desperate search for truth. I had to figure out how he could be so cruel to the woman who has given him everything! How did I fall for this?! On my quest for answers I came across this website and read a few articles and the realization of what I am dealing with literally dropped me to my knees. I married a Psychopath! My husband is a fraud and has completely used me, manipulated me and conned me. I can’t work on a fantasy marriage! What we had was never real! I canceled his therapy appointments. He can pay for them himself if he wants. I am now mourning the loss of a man who doesn’t even exist and it totally knocks the wind out of me. It is so hard to accept. I am so scared but now that my eyes are open, I am slowly taking my power back. So glad I found truth after drowning in lies for the past 2 years.

To that list of how the disordered first present themselves especially in a romantic/sexual relationship context I would add:
-excessive / non-stop communication, especially if the relationship starts online / virtually or in a long-distance fashion.
If you do texting, there will be dozens to hundreds of these per day, if not there will be lots of phone calls, emails & other types of messages (think Facebook Messenger, Twitter direct messages or DMs, etc)

Thank goodness I made the disordered guy I dealt with go slow, he was infuriated with me (too bad) but I suspect he was also strangely turned on, I don’t think most women (or men, I suspect he’s confused about his sexual orientation &/or a sex addict who isn’t that picky about people approaching him) he encounters are willing to stand up for themselves & stand up to him, but I’m not most women.

The biggest red flag I saw but didn’t know how to interpret was the words he used initially were all what most people fantasize about hearing from a prospective partner, but they come at you too fast, too frequent & the sincere depth of feeling that should go with them is likely lacking. It’s a bear when your preferred love language is words (look up the Gary Chapman 5 Love Languages), you have to be extra-careful around people you don’t know who might con you by saying what you want to hear (& be careful what you say online that they could look up & parrot back to you).

That Love Fraud documentary on Showtime has a younger woman who worked at the Krab Kingz restaurant in Wichita named Tammy (Episode 2, about 27 minutes in, Tammy was apparently Smith’s choice for the replacement girlfriend for Karla, whom Smith basically lured away from Karla’s husband Jim so he can get his hands on the money from Jim’s 401(k) to start the Crab Kingz restaurant in Wichita). Tammy’s experience of Smith very closely resembled my experience with a disordered guy, the big difference was my contact with the disordered guy who came into my life was all virtual (online & over the phone) & long-distance (while Tammy had a 3 day in person marathon ‘relationship’.

So of course there were lots of calls & emails from him fast, they all seemed to say the right things, if I was thinking rationally, the words seemed appealing, but to me it felt weird, odd, creepy & confusing, especially the timing. I asked my friends of both genders & all kinds of ages for advice but unfortunately none of them were experts in disordered people, but they did agree that it was odd & confusing to them as well & to the women older than me, they were suspicious. Why so fast with the ‘loving feelings declarations’ from so far away?

There was an ‘I want to marry you’ comment (semi-joking / semi-sincere) in my second phone call from him (day 2), he had a supposed intense interest in something I do as a hobby that most men find esoteric & off-putting (astrology & New Age spiritual practices). Ostensibly he reached out to me because he wanted to teach me his (ripped-off) version of Qi Gong breathing he gave a slightly different name to it & claimed to have invented the method. Little did he know I had a book on Qi Gong that had the same exercises in it that I had never done but I remembered flipping through before I ever met him & all that he taught me is conventional Qi Gong breathing & even the endurance exercises to reinforce it sounded like they came straight out of this book.

He’s a martial artist & an actor with minor celebrity status, at the time I ‘virtually met’ him, he was working on a somewhat successful Amazon web series & I got to have the unique experience of hearing him rage not only about being fired / let go from it (his contract was not renewed for the 4th & final season) but also from the grudge he still held ~25 years later for helping choreograph some martial arts fight displays for an international press tour promoting a movie he acted in that he didn’t get to go on, he was still seething that the director & the actor who played the hero got to go around the world on the studio’s dime, but he, the villain, was wrongly left behind. He literally raged over the phone for *longer* than the run time of the movie (the movie is based on a dumb violent video arcade game in which I have zero interest, I hadn’t ever seen the movie at that point & only knew a little about the game because male friends of mine from college had played it, after his rant I watched the movie & was utterly bored & unimpressed, my tastes run to documentaries, British comedies & historical dramas these days, PBS & BBC fare). But yeah, that was weird too.

Good thing I could hold the phone receiver out from my ear & had a book on hand to skim through while he ranted about the injustices done him throughout his career (poor baby). He was so caught up in himself, he had no idea I wasn’t listening to the tirade. When his voice finally got quieter, I began listening again, but I took his yelling to mean that expressing anger verbally was okay in the relationship. My parents sometimes yelled at each other (not for over an hour at a time though) so that didn’t bother me all that much. I prefer calm rational discussion, but wasn’t totally freaked out by anything other than how long he kept up his yelling.

Of course months later when I lost my cool & raged at him for about the same length of time over the phone over his mounting unaddressed laundry list of awfulnesses towards me (the disordered are good at this), his family & others, well, I got told I needed ‘anger management’ therapy or classes. I already didn’t like how extremely negatively I reacted to him, I had already done some research online into my situation (I guessed he might be a narcissist) & reached out to some online therapists & they said they thought as I was telling them about the craziness that he was probably Cluster-B disordered (one guessed sociopath, one said he could be narcissistic, borderline, sociopathic or psychopathic) & luckily both thought I should get him out of my life.

Bless them, they were both right, though I have had the rare experience of getting to let a disordered person have all the crap I endured back verbally, I yelled & went over the top with my anger, strangely he never hung up on me (now I know that my extreme negativity fueled / excited him, normal people won’t take such intense verbal abuse from other people for so long & in utter silence, they would hang up when they reached their limits) & I continued until I was not only literally physically exhausted from my grievances, but I felt like if whatever was between us ended then, it would be a *blessing*.

Somehow, he didn’t try to get even with or get ‘one up’ on me. I’m just super lucky he didn’t come after me in person. I’m not surprised that ~10 years ago he pled ‘no contest’ to a domestic violence / abuse charge filed by a then-girlfriend in Hawaii.

Other than an occasional hang-up call which might be him or his long estranged wife (I told his wife, she has my contact information & she had a right to know, as near as I know they’re still married & she’s still at great risk from him harming her with whatever he gets up to, I would never tolerate what she does even if it got me hurt or killed or infected with an STI, but I guess I’m either more resilient or more stubborn than she is). I have run a risk assessment on him (Gavin DeBecker has a site online where you can see how much risk you are at from someone like this for abuse or violence or killing), there is a possibility, though not a strong one, of him retaliating physically but one of the ways I protect myself is by telling my story to others. Two of his cast mates from the Amazon web series know, so does a male writer-showrunner friend of mine from college (he’s now less likely to get hired for certain kinds of work, my college friend is a real ally of the #MeToo movement), so do all my other close friends, several of my acquaintances, a distant but good acquaintance of mine who was a domestic violence victim whose life became the basis for a book & then a movie about the Wonderland murders, she is a newly minted social worker & advocates for ending sex trafficking & helping domestic violence victims.

This disordered guy has no idea of all the people I know in my social network who could make his life not worth living if he tried something, he couldn’t be bothered to figure out who my friends & other contacts are when I was still in contact with him & that would be his downfall.

Anyway, the disordered have to work fast, they’re going to screw up, either because emotionally they can’t keep up the ‘soul mate’ facade and/or they need to get something from you (money, jewelry, property, credit, a place to live, transportation, help, advice, caregiving/nursing, affection, fascination, ego strokes or something else) F-A-S-T fast.

Slow them down, ask questions, check in with your feelings, check in with others & see if they too find this person’s behaviors confusing. And consider going 100% no contact as soon as possible. Also like the women in the Love Fraud documentary on Showtime, do not let secrecy or shame silence you. Band together with others who have dealt with the disordered & stand up for yourselves.

@sept4 Love-bombing when it’s virtual or over the phone is just weird & I think it’s possible it’s a little less effective than love-bombing face to face.

In person though, well, it’s hard to say.

I’ve never been love-bombed in person, but I think the younger & more naive you are, the less you like your own company, the more social/cultural/familial pressure you are vulnerable to from others asking you ‘Why aren’t you married or partnered?’ or ‘Why don’t you have kids?”, & the more the person love-bombing you fits your physical type or your internal picture of what a partner or a spouse should look like, well, the faster it will work.

Again the more you drag things out & slow them down, the better your chance of seeing love-bombing as the ploy it is.

In my case what I had going for me
-My age. I’m over 50, not an ignorant teenager or 20-something
-My only childhood. I loved it, I’m sure siblings are cool when everything is going well in a family & with life in general, but it truly sucks when there are family fights or life crises & someone feels like they’re not being seen, heard, understood, valued, appreciated, respected, admired, liked for who they are or loved for the same. I got a lot of what I needed & wanted emotionally as a child.
-My values. My father never pressured me to get married or have kids, my mother did once, late in my life, I was in my late 30s, she wanted grandkids but when I reminded her of the values she & my father raised me with, i.e. first you find a decent guy, then you fall in love, then you get married, then you spend enjoyable quality time together just the two of you before you have a planned pregnancy & then & only then have a genuinely wanted reasonably well-timed child. Did she want me to deviate from that example of hers?

She laughed & then she admitted the ‘pressure’ for her to be an ‘instant grandma’ was coming from her female peers, all of whom had at least 1 grandchild already. With further thought, no, she wouldn’t really want me pregnant & partnerless etc. My mom just wanted the ‘fun’ part of her grandmother fantasy but when I gave her a reality check, she relented & apologized to me.

Also my mother knew it wasn’t ever my life goal to have kids, we started having that discussion when I was 8 years old, I knew myself well then & even better now. I stuck up for myself there, even to her. It was a boundary I’m glad I enforced, it has rarely been challenged by someone who matters to me. I was very celebratory when I hit menopause (& thankfully mine has been mild). In fact I feel like a huge burden I never wanted around being an adult woman (getting pregnant) has been lifted off my shoulders. Not that I’m going to go out there & be totally indiscriminate about having sex (STIs are still a thing & I’d really rather only have sex with someone I consider long-term partner material), but it’s a bullet dodged & a dilemma that I’ll never have to deal with.

I’m fine with a man who has kids, just please let them be older (teen-aged or beyond, best if they’re adult, independent & not living in his home) & let *someone else* be their mom. I am happy to be their friend, I’ll mentor or role-model for them if that’s something they’d like me to do, I might occasionally babysit or buy gifts or spoil their offspring, just don’t assume I want that responsibility 24/7/365.

I largely stayed out of the dating pool in my fertile years because I knew most guys expected their wives to want to have children with them at some point, become mothers, give up the primacy of their careers & other interests outside of marriage, raising kids, & running the domestic sphere. I knew I wasn’t suited for that ‘conventional’ kind of life & I didn’t want to toy with or deceive some innocent other person about my uncompromising out of the ordinary desires or fall in love then have to painfully break up over any avoidable drama about my values. And in the interim, when I wasn’t dating (& while others dated, married & had kids & sometimes got divorced or became widows/widowers) I led an interesting life that suited me. That life choice meant I was totally free to give care to my parents when they had chronic health issues up until each in turn died (ages 34-46 were my parental care years). I didn’t have to negotiate this phase of my life with a spouse or children & that was a blessing for which I am grateful.

I think on balance both my parents would have rather had me as the best possible 100% available & devoted caregiver at the scariest time of their lives rather than as a harried unhappy wife/ex-wife/mom/single mom/household runner/worker for pay/etc who had to somehow fit in giving them the quality & quantity of care they wanted & needed without getting sick myself and/or having a nervous breakdown because I was being pulled in too many different directions at the same time.

-My upbringing. It was unconventional. I was a military brat, an only child & a ‘smart kid’. I moved around a lot, my parents were so glad I loved & valued learning & school & wanted to go to college & beyond, I got plenty of attention from them (the downside to being an only is when you get caught doing something wrong, there’s no sibling to blame!), though in retrospect I wish my father had had a career where he could have been home more or grown up in times where we are freer to question ‘traditional’ patriarchy (he missed out on my toddlerhood thanks to the Vietnam War, he came back from that okay-sh, but he was distant from me, there may have been some undisclosed PTSD & survivor guilt there, I think he had a hard time with the ‘softer, feminine’ emotions as many in his WWII era baby generation did (even as an elder with dementia he found babies & toddlers fascinating), my mother being brilliant in mathematics had a hard time when she was the full-time wife, mom & head of household, she compromised on her career early (she graduated college when most women didn’t go or dropped out to get married before they got their degrees, despite switching her major from mathematics to the more female friendly education, she could have been a ‘computress’ or female computer programmer at an early 1960s era IBM (they offered her the job, she turned them down, she didn’t see how she could have a husband and a child or children in that position, perhaps the world lost an Ada Lovelace or Admiral Grace Hopper, we’ll never know). I always felt my mother’s vague disappointment in being ‘just a high school math teacher’ because that was her only way to ‘have it all’ aka paid work, a husband & a child. She was brilliant but only Dad & I knew that well. And she was always adventurous, rather than stay in rural Idaho where she was born & raised, she taught in US military schools around the world, first in Okinawa & then West Germany, where she met & married my father, a young up & coming field artilleryman officer (& a thwarted architect & chemical engineer, he chose ROTC to pay for college even though the probability he would have to go to war in Vietnam was high). I was raised to go out there & ‘get more’ than what my Mother (or Father) could have. I did, I have, but I also learned you can’t & probably don’t want to ‘have it all’ simultaneously. It’s easier to focus on an area of life, thoroughly enjoy it, then when it’s time, shift focus to the next area of life that intrigues you. But if you can, you should never ever discard or leave behind good people & if you do have to leave them, you should leave them on the best possible terms you can. I had to give up a lot of friends in childhood, the ones I have had since college I cherish, they’re my chosen family now. It’s totally okay though to have nothing to do with unrepentant awful people, they take up the valuable space a good person (yourself or someone else) should have in your one wild & precious life.

-Even though I did not meet this disordered pathological guy in person, I never saw him as boyfriend/partner/husband material. I thought of him as a potentially interesting acquaintance, possibly a future friend, possibly someone I would work with. He did his best to try to convince me on playing his girlfriend, but it was a con/sales job. He is literally an actor (also a martial artist), it’s how he makes his living (which he squanders on his real life disordered behaviors). He gave me a performative version of his best self, but he couldn’t keep it up for long, he’s not a good writer (actors generally don’t write their own roles) & besides as a scientist then an attorney, I can out-write, out-reason & out-argue him any day, at least so long as I don’t let my emotions carry the majority. Honestly he’s not that good an actor with or without a screen, in his later years he’s had a role or two where he did what I thought was good work, but I have high standards & different tastes in entertainment than what he usually worked in (action/martial arts/adventure movies).

Being disordered, he thinks he’s a better actor than he is. He’s seething mad he never got the roles of my favorites, but he simply doesn’t have that kind of talent. He blames race (he is Asian-American) but honestly, he long ago conveniently bought into the fiction & even says in front of the cameras filming a documentary on Asian-American actors that his only 2 options for roles to play were either ‘smart geeky touristy foreigner with camera’ or villain & he chose the villain roles because they weren’t ‘feminine’ (I won’t use the epithet for female genitalia he used, but it tells you how he sees women, we’re not even fully human to him, we’re less than a male, we’re only valued for a part you can also call a house-cat by. Plus all my male college friends are geeks like me, their races & ethnicities vary, but to a person they’re all better than this disordered ungrateful jerk). From that same documentary, I can name 3 men of his exact same ethnic extraction who had good diverse movie, TV & acting careers before he was acting, in far less tolerant times, they cleared the way for him. The first was a universal female heartthrob in silent films of the even more racist 1920s, he’s been in Academy Award nominated films, the last was The Bridge On The River Kwai, an Oscar nominated performance. The second did great in numerous TV series & movies & has a Golden Globe for his first movie performance. The third is a sci-fi TV series legend & outspoken gay icon who survived the WWII era internment camps (oh my!), They all preceded the disordered pathological actor who reached out to me online & they all did more than choose ‘villain or geek’, but yeah, sure, tell me how in the 1980s & beyond disordered actor couldn’t hold out for better roles, how villains were the only way he could make it, how being dastardly by choice on screen & in real life for decades makes him the (convenient, perpetual) victim. He could have just spent the time he spent in disordered pathological behaviors towards the people who most cared about him off-screen taking acting lessons, honing his craft, getting people who wrote better stuff to write him better material for auditions or things you could produce & perform in himself, maybe even learning to write for himself.

That Amazon web series I first saw him in, he rose to the acting challenge, but he didn’t have to wait until ~5/6 years ago to have done better work than that. And I expect he got fired from that web series (said firing about which I got an earful in an angry phone call) because of some behavior of his that was pathological or disordered. Even though he was playing the deceased sci-fi author’s favorite character. Did he piss off the deceased author’s daughter, the administrator of the estate & all the legendary lucrative visionary sci-fi books, the show’s producer, or was it someone else who decided this actor wasn’t worth the bother (or the money) so they (weirdly & abruptly) killed off his leading character for the 4th & final season?

And when I got around to watching it, I thought ‘okay, the series did fine without him, the writers figured out how to un-enmesh his character from the story, just like I figured out how to extract him from my life. And I was fine with the on-screen funeral, it felt karmically right, ‘dead-to-me’ on so many satisfying levels.

Healthy people are really clever that way, huh?

Sorry, I digress…

Where I was vulnerable
-I was naive. I was fortunate to never have a pathological or disordered person approach or try to win me over in person or online before this actor. I guess we’re all naive like this to start. It’s hard to learn these people exist, they can cause pain & chaos at any age of our lives & this lesson came later in life for me. But at least I thought something was weird about this toxic aging bro-dude. I get half credit for hearing my intuition pinging out the message ‘something’s not right here, go slow, make your own decisions’.
-Words are my love language. Yes I want to hear the right words. Not that this guy did it perfectly, not that he totally convinced me, but he initially made the effort. I still want to hear those words from time to time, but when the time is right & when the speaker is willing to back them up with genuine sentiment & the right actions. And maybe they should come in a flow over time not an initial flood that without warning suddenly evaporates like a mirage.
-I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. And I used to believe ‘everyone deserves a second chance’. With the emphasis on *used to*. Now that I know pathological disordered people exist, I need to see that someone is not pathological or disordered in order to offer a healthy person that benefit of the doubt, the second chance.
-I didn’t know about intermittent rewards or mental/behavioral conditioning. Love bombing is a kind of verbal strategy a casino would use if they thought they could make it pay off for them. If you are walking through a casino past the slot machines & you see someone’s machine spit out a big pile of coins with a lot of noise & lights & people happy & celebrating their good luck, you’re going to be tempted to put a coin in a machine & see if you can’t have the same experience. And if your first pull gets you a payoff, you’re going to keep feeding coins into the machine, trying to repeat the jackpot experience.

People who love-bomb are emotional/psychological one-armed bandits. Knowing they exist & knowing that the big initial payoff of words you want to hear (or focused attention or gifts or acts of service or fun times spent with you, whatever symbolizes love to you) is nothing more than the same technique that a casino uses to hook you to a slot machine in order to feed it all your money & credit. The love bomber will take whatever resources you have to give them. Understanding this process is what will help you to get the disordered person out of your life as well as never gamble in casinos.

The odds are never in your favor in either situation. Frankly it’s easier to lose your shirt than to risk losing your faith in the goodness of most of humanity. You could more easily work off a gambling debt, you really can’t rationally work off the emotional indebtedness in which the pathological disordered person wants to get you caught up. Best to understand how you are being emotionally hacked or hijacked by the pathological disordered person & save anything you have for yourself & for healthy people. Though as the women of the Showtime Love Fraud documentary have said, revenge is the most satisfying way to get over a con-artist. Assuming of course you can take your revenge safely & most cannot. The other option is to be patient & let life (& karma) catch up to the aging con / love bomber.

Unfortunately most people learn about the manipulation of intermittent rewarding of behavior in the hardest way possible, through personal experience, though Donna & others are doing their best to get the word out about this. If nothing else they mitigate the pain people who have experienced love-bombing have felt, by making it make some sense.

-My rational side rules me. Sometimes, especially in matters of the heart, my logical rational educated side wins. It’s not that I don’t have emotions, of course I do. It’s just that I should have 100% trusted my intuitive side sooner, not worried about appearing irrational to some unimportant stranger (even if he is a minor celebrity or is slightly intriguing) & as soon as I got the message from my intuitive side about ‘Something’s not right with this guy’, I could have ‘flaked’ ASAP & gone what I now know to call ‘no contact’. Younger people might have called this ‘ghosting’. But I needed a rational reason to say no. This is of course exactly opposite of the desires of the pathological person who is disordered, they need a ‘yes’ & they need it yesterday already. If you could see my many ‘I’m not sure about this’ emails to him over the weeks & months, you would see my intuition & my reason at war with each other, doing his crazy-making job for him.

Feelings aren’t rational, they just are. And life with feelings is simpler than we make it. It is up to each of us as adults to secure for ourselves a threshold level of happiness (or contentment if you like). Several things in life have given me this head start, I knew I was already there before the guy popped up in my life via social media. This was not my problem, this would not be a problem for the vast majority of healthy people.
The second part of having a feeling life comes in when adding in other people. If these people are optional and within our choice as dating, marriage & life partners are to adults in cultures where arranged marriages or relationships are not a thing, there’s a really simple test they need to pass: They need to ADD to our happiness.

If they don’t move the happiness meter higher, that’s not a terrible thing (you’re not in danger but you probably don’t need to spend much time with them), but if they make you UNHAPPIER than you are when you are alone, they need to go. And my poor happiness meter was swinging wildly towards the negative. It didn’t make sense to me, it wasn’t rational, but my internal happiness meter wasn’t broken or acting up. This guy was not right for me.
On a good day, he barely made my happiness go up, the good days were all early on, then when they vanished, they were gone for good & my happiness meter was stuck in the angry resentful red of unhappiness & frustration with the disordered pathological actor. His truth came out eventually, but I didn’t need to stick around for that. Yes my rational curious side liked finally understanding what was really happening, but it was at the expense of my emotional side. I could have been happier alone again sooner, possibly even had room for being even happier than I ever was around this disordered terminally unhappy pathological guy because without him around I wouldn’t have been preoccupied with a pathological disordered actor who was occupying space & draining resources of mine that could have been appreciated by a good healthy already happy enough on his own man. The disordered & pathological can NEVER GET TO HAPPY / CONTENTED, all they can do is drain happiness off of others & no amount of other people’s happiness will ever make them even minimally happy. That’s their life curse. It’s incurable. As they age, all they have to show for their lives is ever increasing UNHAPPINESS in everyone around them.

So let them go ASAP. If you have to be around them because you’re co-parents or there are family obligations or contracts, minimize your time with them & LOCK UP YOUR HAPPINESS. And if & when you can get away, do so ASAP.

That’s it. That’s how it really works. Hopefully others pay less than I did to figure this out though compared to some I got my lesson pretty cheap (at a distance, total time spent on him was less than a year, money spent on him, minimal, most of these guys get at least a little money, you might have bought them token gifts like I did, though I was expecting to be paid back for what I bought him, I believed his 2 promises to pay me for memorabilia I found & ordered related to his career, thank goodness his career & fame levels are so low, the memorabilia was cheap & it was sent to his wife’s house because that was some safe low-level discomfort / revenge I could cause him & since he’s already unhappy & will never get happy, why not give him back his unhappiness along with the evidence of his not so illustrious career? And if his wife questions him about it, so much the better, honestly she’s got knowledge of stuff directly from me that happened between me & this miserable wretched guy she & he really should be talking about, a box of entertainment memorabilia is the least of his worries, his consistently unacceptable behavior towards her (not to mention others) while there is still a valid marriage contract between them would be where I would start, if I were her, although frankly I would already have a good divorce attorney schooling him even more expensively in decent adult human male behavior.

As a former wife of the current (probably pathological & disordered) President of The United States would say: “Don’t get mad, get everything!”