Editor’s note: The following story was sent to Lovefraud by a man whom we’ll call “Anthony.” He believes his ex-wife is a sociopath. This is part 2 of 4. The story refers to spiritual concepts. Please read Lovefraud’s statement on Spiritual Recovery.
Read: Part 1
Early Bird Gets “The Worm”
When we met, in late January of 2008, Jezabel’s morning schedule was to report to the office at 6am, She said that she liked getting her work done while it was quiet. Her alarm would go off at 5am, and she would leave for the office by 5:45, to arrive by 6:00. From 6am until probably about 8:00am, there were no co-workers in the state government building at all. Most of the other workers started to report to work around 8:00 or later, so for about 2 hours every morning there was basically nobody else in the office. I believed what she said about her preference to get into the office early, and did not question it. I had no reason to question it. I was still clueless.
Looking back now, I have to wonder what kind of a blind idiot I must have been to just believe that she was innocently reporting to work when there wasn’t a soul in the building for hours, and especially after experiencing the red flag event of the personal phone call. How could anyone be so blind? It was so obvious that things needed to be checked out and verified, but I did nothing, and saw no reason to question her. I guess I desperately wanted it to be real, and I am sure that she knew this.
We married during the summer of 2008 in the mountains of Tennessee, and immediately after returning from getting married in late July of 2008, I noticed that she just started reporting to work at 7:30. I didn’t think twice about it, and enjoyed getting to see her for a few minutes until she left for work, usually at 7:15am. When I mentioned the fact that she wasn’t reporting to the office as early as she was, she just responded that she liked to stay in a little bit later with me, but that she may start going back to her old 6am schedule. It was not until many months passed, and until the other signs indicated that something was very wrong in our “relationship,” that I realized the significance of her work schedule changing just after we married.
Several months after I was enlightened to the reality of my “relationship,” and after I was so devastated from the abuse that I was near suicide, I finally spoke to her previous husband, and he confirmed that she always reported to work at 7:30. They were together for many years. He stated that she never went in the office early. So, sometime in the 8 months between her separation from her second husband sometime around February or March of 2007, and us meeting in February of 2008, she started reporting to work at 6am, and strangely enough, she continued to report to work at 6am, only until we were married. We came home after our wedding, and she began going in at a much more normal time, and when many other people would also be getting into the office for the day. I did not pay any attention to this at all. I had no reason to. I blindly trusted her.
Something else worth mentioning: When I spoke to her previous husband, he told me that, after many unsuccessful attempts to reach her and get her to try to make changes (he was not feeling loved at all), he finally left her. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, but I did not tell him the completely different story that she told me, that he was being irresponsible, so she had enough, and she left him. I wasn’t meeting him to play he-said she-said, but I was caught by surprise with that revelation. Given what I had already learned about her character, I was not really all that surprised.
Relational Emptiness beneath the Charade
I deeply loved this woman, and throughout our “relationship,” I constantly reached for her emotionally, trying to show her how much I loved her, and what she meant to me. There isn’t a person who spent any time around us that would not attest to how much I doted and loved on the woman. I was constantly thinking about her, trying to find ways to show her how I felt, showing her genuine affection and care, and finding ways to serve her. I know others easily saw this, because on several occasions, men who spent time with us complemented me saying that they admired the way that I loved and served my wife.
I am certain that I spent literally hundreds of hours rubbing her from head to toe until my forearms could not take it anymore. I could not wait to get home in the evenings to see her, and to find out how her day went. I was a faithful, kind, and loving husband who was devoted to my wife, and who cherished her as the most incredible woman that I had ever met. The sad thing about this is that, looking back, I see that there was basically nothing reciprocated from her. She just existed in my life, and that was her “gift” to me.
A good example of this was a time at church when we were with our Sunday School class of 3 other couples. We had been meeting with 3 to 5 other couples for probably a few years at this point, so we knew them pretty well. It was a small group, and this day it was suggested that we each say a little bit about our spouse to build them up. We were supposed to praise them for something that we liked about them, just to express how much they meant to us. The other couples went first, and they each said a few things about their spouse, which were typical things that you’d expect to hear. When it was our turn, she wanted to pass, so we passed. I could have stood up and praised her for as long as they would let me talk, and I wanted to, but I was let down that she did not want to say just something,”¦anything good about me.
I initially chalked this up to her being shy or something, even though we were in a very small and well known group. What really made me question what had happened with this was the fact that she wanted to change classes after this event. At this time in our “relationship” I had already began to put the pieces together, and I felt like it was not that she was shy, or any other reason that kept her from doing something so simple as saying something nice about her loving husband in front of a few friends, but that she did not want to do this because she did not know how. I couldn’t understand this, but it was like she did not feel safe in this small group of friends after this event. I was still very ignorant of personality disorders, so it was very strange to me, but I knew that this was only a symptom of a much bigger problem. At any given time, I could have praised her for one of a hundreds things that I truly loved about her, but she couldn’t find a few things to say within a few minutes? It was just another very odd behavior that I observed, scratched my head, and made a mental note of.
Another example of relational emptiness was around our sex life. There was never a single time that we were together, after the initial few months, that she showed any emotional connection to me, in spite of the fact that I constantly reached for her, and tried to connect with her on an emotional level. Being physically intimate with your spouse (that you love) is supposed to be about an emotional and spiritual connection and sharing, not just the physical pleasure from the physical act. Sure it is a physical act, and it is physically very pleasurable, but if you love your spouse, you should have a much deeper connection during sex, at least sometimes. I tried and tried, but never could connect with her.
Actually, she was physically present, and I always focused on her pleasure, including the marathon full body rubs almost every time we were intimate, but she barely even participated in even the physical act. She barely held her legs open sometimes. There were a few rare times when she did something like passionately kiss me, but I cannot remember a single time when she made love to me, and hardly ever looked me in the eyes or even touched me without being prompted or asked to. It was like having sex with a warm blow up doll. Still, I continued to reach for a connection that was never there.
After the first few months, there was absolutely no spontaneity. We were intimate about 2 times per week, but it was obviously a duty to her, as she was never really present emotionally. I believe we were intimate twice a week only because she did not want me to question the relationship. I bet one of the problems with her second husband was a lack of sex. I wanted to ask him when we talked, but decided not to get into his personal business with her. I did point him to the fact that she is disordered, and that her problems are not because she has been damaged through life, as he thought. I explained that it may seem that she was more and more damaged as time went on for them, but that this was only because he was able to see more and more of the true woman, and not the mask. She has been this damaged since her childhood, and she was probably born this way.
It took me a while to break my denial, and it was after I began to put the pieces together, but I could eventually see that she was not there emotionally, and that my “relationship” was likely not what I thought it was. It became obvious to me that something was very wrong, yet on the surface, she was careful that things seemed to be just fine. I could feel that she was only playing along in the “relationship.” As hard as I tried to rationalize and deny the truth, as much as I did not want to face it, and as much as she tried to make me think that things were normal, and that it was me with the problem, I simply could not ignore all of the glaring signs. I knew that I was intelligent, sane, and fairly in tune with my surroundings. I knew that the behavior that I saw in her was very odd. I eventually knew that things were very different under the surface in our “relationship.”
Another glaring red flag that I chose to ignore was around her other relationships. She had really no friends that she was close to. There were co-workers and ex co-workers that she would get together for lunch from time to time, but not a single friend that she was obviously close to. What’s more, was the fact that her oldest daughter basically had no relationship with her, her mother’s relationship had been strained for years before we met (they had just started “talking” again, but it was very superficial, and mostly via email), her 2 brother’s families were local, with 5 nieces and nephews, but all had basically no relationship to speak of with her.
Her mother was aging, and at this point in her life, basically was alone. She had obvious life-long issues with relationships, moving the family every few years when she’d have a problem with a boss or a neighbor. I did not spend enough time with her mother to really tell how she is, but to look at her life as Jezebel described it, and to see how she lived today, I feel pretty sure that she is also psychopathic, or seriously disordered in some other way. She seemed nice, but a very odd lady.
Her youngest daughter was 16 when we met, and in the 3 years that we were together, it was obvious that she too had serious social issues, and very few friends. I would only later learn from living with her, that she is also highly manipulative, deceptive, and self-centered. After studying psychopathy, and how it runs in families, because of genetics, and also because dysfunction breeds dysfunction, I can clearly see 3 generations of disordered women in her family.
It sounds incredible now to me that I would just ignore this mess, thinking that it didn’t really mean anything. Something was very wrong with me. I was hooked early on, and did not want to consider anything else except that I somehow found the most incredible woman, and was lucky enough to have her all to myself.,”¦.. What a fool I chose to be.