Editor’s note: The following letter was written by a Lovefraud reader whom we’ll call “Gwendolyn.”
I was married to a sociopath and addict for four years. He did the love bombing thing with me and pushed for moving in and marriage very early, within the first few months. I was afraid of the consequences of refusing him, so I foolishly went along and moved into his house then married him. I only lived with him for two and a half years. It was a twisted game of lies, addiction and emotional abuse. It was a long and damaging period of time.
At first it was intoxicating. He said we were destined for each other, that I was “the one,” and that he couldn’t stand to be apart from me so I needed me to move in. But they were all lies.
Finding the truth
I moved out and spent two years on my own during my divorce and separation. I’d found out that during the portion of our separation when we were going to marriage counseling, my husband was already in another relationship, but he was too “afraid” to tell me. He said he was a sex addict and went to meetings.
During the marriage, I found texts from hookers on his phone. He was registered for a web site that allows men to find and rate local prostitutes. He watched porn constantly, including at work, in his sister’s bathroom while visiting there with several other relatives in the house, and also on his iPhone while driving. He used cocaine behind my back after swearing up and down he’d been “sober” from alcohol and drugs for many years.
He spent money foolishly and left me to pay bills, including credit card bills he had run up with his ex-girlfriend. He was in $55,000 in credit card debt. He bragged about his house, but the truth was it was neglected and in a shambles.
He blamed everyone else for his problems, including his exes, his employers, his family, and of course, me.
It took me a long time to let go, heal and move on from that marriage. But I learned the signs of a sociopathic personality. That became evident in my next relationship. It didn’t last long. But that was the point. I saw the signs. I dealt with my emotions and attachment. I broke it off before too much damage was done.
Here is the story of my next dating experience with a man I will call “Dan.”
High school friend
Several months ago, I ran into Dan, an old friend from high school. I was feeling strong and much smarter about matters of the heart. And it seemed magical that I’d known “Dan” for more than 25 years. When we were kids he used to have a mad crush on me. It was fun to talk about the good old days and the fond memories we shared. He told me he worked about five minutes from where I lived. So we met for lunch at a restaurant and had a nice talk. We hadn’t seen each other in years.
Dan was full on with the love bombing, rollercoaster romance, the fast “I love you,” and calling me his soul mate. My alarms were going off and my anxiety levels were skyrocketing. I wanted to believe everything was going to be okay. Surely, after all these years and this magical reunion, I must be wrong.
Of course, I wasn’t wrong. Dan broke into my email and Facebook on my computer within two weeks. He lied for two additional weeks about it and swore he would never do such a thing. Finally, I told him I had the history on my computer that showed he’d spent hours and hours digging through my messages. He confessed, only when I had the evidence.
He was controlling and paranoid about who I talked to. He asked me to delete people from my Facebook friends. He constantly badgered me about who I had dated and who I talked to. In the end it turned out he was calling and texting his ex-girlfriend all along. And God knows what else he was doing. He had freaked out and scrutinized everything I did while he himself did as he pleased and simply deleted the evidence. I did catch him in the end, and I left.
Red flags
When I look back on this nine-week relationship, here are a few red flags I didn’t want to pay attention to at first. Thankfully, I eventually did listen to my gut instinct. There were signs of his real character, which he revealed in what he said to me. Here are some examples.
1. Every ex he mentioned (his three wives and some others) had cheated on him sexually and/or emotionally. He said he only cheated on one of them. He was always the victim in the break ups.
2. He said when he was younger, one of his first girlfriends made him feel suspicious. So he cheated on her constantly and then came home and questioned her about EVERY male she had any contact with that day. He did this to her every day.
3. He said I should move in with him after we were dating for about three weeks. When I said, “I have a lease.” He said, “Just get evicted.” (Shows he does not honor his word or promises.)
4. He said he knew a guy who could connect him with welfare recipients who would sell their food stamps or food cards to him at a cheap rate for groceries. This was something he was interested in pursuing. (Shows his willingness to break laws and exploit others for a relatively small gain.)
5. Even though he was financially overextended and had a high interest rate on it, he purchased an expensive sports car with a $650 per month car payment and very high maintenance, gas and insurance costs, because “he deserved a nice car.” (Shows he is irresponsible and cannot delay gratification.)
6. He said he had to move out of his ex-girlfriend’s condo in a rush, so he borrowed $1600 from a friend. Five or six months later he still had not paid the friend a single dime back and planned to get an expensive full arm tattoo (over $1000) before he paid his friend.
7. He said he was only acting friendly to the tattoo artist so he could “get back in with him” to get an appointment.
8. He said a woman he never met was sending him naked photos via text message on his phone for five or six months and he swore he never encouraged her or requested that the activity continue.
9. He took out all of his 401K and failed to pay the taxes on it. So the IRS came after him, and now he is paying the back taxes and interest each month.
10. He bragged to me that he never worried about money. Then we went to a pizza place where his debit card was declined because he had eight dollars in his checking account. I ended up paying for dinner (again).
11. His finances were a mess. He never paid his bills on time and simply didn’t care to get his credit in order or get on a budget. He once paid more than $500 to take an ex-drug addict girlfriend on a hot air balloon ride. One night I was at his house when he purchased a $55 cable TV feature fight, and he cannot afford to pay his utility bills on time.
12. He would often protest about me offering to pay for a meal or coffee or groceries AFTER the fact. He’d allow me to pay then act like he had intended to pay for things. It was all very phony.
13. When he broke into my computer and searched all of my emails and messages from BEFORE he was with me, he said he was going to find the men I had been talking to and “curb stomp” them, which means putting the mouth and teeth of a person against a cement curb and smashing a shoe or boot against the back of their head. I was not familiar with this term before. I found this to be excessively violent.
14. While he was on his jealous warpath, he was part of a sex-related web site that was so stupid it was embarrassing. They had his (clothed) picture on the site and also on social media with a fake name. I cringed when I saw it. He said there was nothing wrong with him putting up photos of naked women and corresponding with them “for the web site.” This man is 44 years old and trying to be part of an amateur web site that mostly features 20-year-olds.
15. He once said out of the blue that he used to look at his third wife when she was engaged in a sexual act with him and think she was nothing more than a “receptacle.” (Shows a blatant disrespect for women and a general hostility toward women.)
16. He claims to love his children. I believe he does feel attached to them. But he breaks promises to them and interacts with them very little when he has them for visits. I heard him speaking very abusively to one of them the day before I walked out and never returned.
17. When I caught him with a text message on his phone from his ex, he lied and said he didn’t know who the number was. Then he lied and said he thought it was her but didn’t know why she would be texting. Then he finally admitted he had been texting her and had been deleting everything. Then he admitted to talking to her on the phone. This started right around the time I asked for a night off from him because I needed to sleep and get things done at home. He was very resentful. I believe contacting her was a way to fill his desperate need to NEVER feel alone and also to punish me for daring to take a night off.
18. He has a scar that looks like a cut or abrasion shaped in a very distinct initial or letter of the alphabet. It looks like the first initial of his ex-wife who left him. He kept telling this rehearsed sounding story over and over again about the scar. He said, “I reached into the refrigerator to get something and when I pulled my hand out, there was this cut there. I have no idea how it happened.” He would tell this story over and over, as if he finally had it perfected.
19. He lied about many other things including drinking, how often he went to the bar before, etc.
20. When I broke up with him, he went and posted the SAME old messages on his Facebook page he’d posted in January when his ex-girlfriend broke up with him. They were things like “It’s your loss; I’m awesome” or “If someone doesn’t appreciate me, watch me walk away.” I noticed he also posted a lot of the same songs by the same band when he was with her and when he was with me. It seems like he runs his game, and it doesn’t matter who he is with. It’s the same old story.
21. He has lung problems and he smokes excessively. He said he didn’t smoke as much when he was around me. Therefore, it was my responsibility to be around all the time so he didn’t destroy his health. But even though he tried to take up ALL my time whenever he could, he mentioned that during the summer he was going for a long weekend with his buddies to drink beer. So I guess it was okay for him to take a break when he wanted. (Shows a double standard and unrealistic expectations.)
I should have listened to my gut when I noticed these signs. But eventually, I got wise and got out. He has stopped texting and messaging me for the past few days. He will go between saying he is a “failure” to defending himself and saying he is an honest man who is being treated unfairly. There is much more I could say. But his character was showing through from very early on. I only had to be willing to see it and act on it.
Thank you for reading. Please watch out of signs of poor character.
Way to go, Gwendolyn. Maybe you still gave him the benefit of the doubt for a little while, but you got rid of the creep within a few weeks. You’ve pointed out some really terrific warning signs.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard stories like this – people who have reconnected with someone they knew from high school, who turned out to be disordered. We may feel safe because we knew the person long ago – and they take advantage of that.
Thank you, Donna. It’s a powerful story we can tell ourselves about the relationship. “We’ve known each other for so long.” The truth is we have to evaluate what is happening now. And I am thankful for tools like your web site that help us to do that.
Before I knew what sociopathy really is and how common it is in the people we encounter, someone I dated in high school contacted me 38 years later, claiming he had never stopped loving me, and yes, I fell for it. Turned out he was a deadbeat who used me, who wouldn’t work, and was online with other women day and night. (Five years later, I still receive an occasional email from him telling me he still loves me, but I stopped responding to him after kicking him out of my life 4 years ago.) This was right before my experience with the pathological liar, the one who opened my eyes and taught me the true meaning of a sociopath when I was very vulnerable. He took advantage of my situation by pretending to be the man I wanted him to be, but he was cheating on me within a month after getting married. It may seem rude, but we can’t give anyone the benefit of the doubt or blindly trust someone until they’ve proven themselves. I learned a lot after leaving him, but most importantly, I learned to recognize the signs which aren’t always obvious to the untrained eye. That’s why we need to educate each other by sharing our stories and by deeply evaluating the people we meet to discover their true agenda.
Nora, I agree. Too many people have an angle and it’s up to us to figure out what it is before we get in too deep. I have also had to examine what “too deep” is for me. It used to be that if I had sex with someone, it was monumental and I was raised to believe that I really had to stay with someone EVEN if I found out they were a horrible person IF I had sex with them. I don’t see myself having any future relationships that involve sex, but if I do, I am going to work at not considering that a lifetime contract. “Too deep” for me is going to be as soon as I see a shallow, empty person in front of me mistreating me or others.
Gwendolyn, I wish I had you to help me organize my brain! Impressive.
The showy car not only showed reliability problems, but also excessive attachment to appearances and signs of status. Over and over this one comes up among stories of people who physically harmed their partners, and it factored into my own personal experience.
I want to congratulate you on removing this person from your life!
My ex, who was on again off again for 18 months after 4 years of marriage, looked at me one day and said, “You know, if we got back together, I could get a Porsche.”
Seriously.
I may have been naive enough to put up with his lying sociopathic
a___ for a year and a half but I’m sure not stupid. Buh bye.
I have such an angry sense of humor sometimes. I probably would have looked at him and said, “Yes. And if I ran over you with it ‘by accident’, I could get some life insurance money!”
Thank you, Donna, Raggedy Ann and Roberta. You all sound like strong women. It would have been easy to believe the unlikely stories and ignore the warning signs if I hadn’t just gone through years of hell with my ex-husband. I guess I finally learned my lesson.
It’s hard to see the truth when there is still fun, excitement and newness in the relationship. But honestly, that is the time to get out. Otherwise, it would have been my money he was throwing out the window and my credit that was being ruined. That and a laundry list of other problems I would have had if I allowed his toxicity to enter my life on a deeper level.
Thanks again and good luck to all of you.
‘ It’s your loss I’m awesome’??!! You can’t make them up! Congratulations Gwendoline on your self protection skills, very encouraging post. Best wishes to you
Very concise and helpful story. It shows that you can get your strength back after one of them taking over and end it quickly when another one comes along. It also shows how very much alike they all are. Always borrowing money. I loaned this same one money all of the time. Three years ago, he owed me $1,500 over a “waiting time” for him to get back on his feet which never happened. However, in an unusual twist, I got paid back and more from mine because he had nowhere else to go and wanted to move back to my rental property. He gave me half the money he got from a VA pension backpay check and, for the first time in my life, I took a large gift from someone. It was hard and I even tried to give some of it back. But, now that I have been putting up with him, it makes me feel better to realize that I am not the one he is borrowing money from any more. I don’t think he has anyone who would give him a thing any more. AND, I finally got paid back for more than I loaned him technically. I DID give him a very cheap rent when he was renting from me the first time. THIS time, he is overpaying. I have never taken care of myself like that before. I’ve always loaned them money, paid for meals, felt sorry for them because they had such “bad luck.”
This is a very good list in this article and proves we can stay away from them and get away from them much more quickly when we pay attention to the often overlooked signs that leak out of them while they are love bombing.
Spaths from the grave. If they hurt us deep enough, the damage doesn’t go away when they die.
Sometimes old friends can still be best friends. Old loves are not all to be red flagged. I also reconnected with my first love from high school. We broke up over external situations that neither of us had control over, especially as 18 year olds, a time before the internet and phones call cost real money. A few years ago, my sweetheart contacted me through a ‘social’ site an attorney suggested I join for purposes of the law suit. I hadn’t been near a computer in days as my mom was in ICU, and when I finally logged on and I saw his email I was yelling and screaming like the 15 year old I was when we first dated. More important for me, it was the first emotion I had in decades as the spath destroyed all my feelings for everything. A person with feelings is a strong person and the spath couldn’t have that.
I never forgot ‘my love’ and as it turns out he never forgot me either. On my side, I always spoke of him to my son, I even named a meal after him. When my mother was hospitalized, which was too often, she asked for him. As I was to learn his aunt and step mother (his mom died before I met him) asked about me and when he told them he found me again they wanted to know all about me. He evidently wanted to contact me over the years but had no idea how to so as my family moved out of state and the people living in my old house had no idea of where we were. I had no internet presence, nor did my parents, and we have unlisted phone number, he said that it was like we disappeared into thin air. He, like me, married a college classmate, it was short lived and he never married again, she wasn’t a spath, just a bad match.
He is a very successful figure in his business life but still is the honest open person he always was. Family means a lot to him, he is non judgmental, down to earth, no airs, and a gentleman. Maybe that’s why he made something of himself.
In the real estate world, it’s location, location, location. For me, in the aftermath of the spath, its timing, timing, timing.
Fortunately, my high school sweetheart ‘found’ me; unfortunately he ‘found’ me 4 months after the spath died. At that time, I was still the process of finding out what the spath did and how others ‘gave’ him the right to do it. I couldn’t even get a grasp on his crimes and how he used my family’s crisis to implement and get away with them. I could not understand why the third party even spoke to him. Nor did I have a full understanding of the financial damages and the ensuing law suits necessary to even attempt to get my family’s money back. My mother had many medical problems, which as her sole caregiver, with some help from my son, I was dealing with. Then there were the physical scars the spath left on my body, the facial damage and leg injuries.
I spoke to my friend on the phone and we emailed. Eventually he asked to see me. I needed an escape from the reality hell I was living, so I agreed. It was the first time I had gone out anywhere, without someone other than my parents and son in many, many years (not even coffee with another gal) and literally unsure how to act. I met him at his apartment and we talked for hours and then had dinner at a great restaurant. Then I had to get to hospital to see my mom. He gave me a kiss and I was on my way. We continued to talk and email always asking about my son and hinting that he wanted to come over. No love bombing, just appreciation of the gift of getting together after 30 plus years. I couldn’t bring myself to invite him because of all of the spath’s damage that happened in this house It was my parent’s home, and I always lived with them; the spath never saw the need to get a place and my parents were afraid of what would happen to me and my son if we were alone with him. I wish my parents were the kind of people who ‘talked’ but they weren’t.
My mother died a few months later and my forever ago boyfriend could not come to the funeral due to a long made commitment that he couldn’t get out of; I knew about that trip before she passed away. I told him I took no offense, as we had just come into each other lives again. He felt guilty about not being there and we went through an awkward stage.
We still email, sometimes several times a day, and talk all the time, but have not gotten together since that one ‘date’. I have told him all about the spath and he has told me his life too. We have something that never existed with the spath – mutual trust. I never thought about it with the spath, but I have learned, trust is a very important ingredient in any relationship.
My therapist, who has spoken to him, yes, he is a big part of our sessions, tells me that I am afraid of face to face contact with this gentleman. The unseen scars that spath inflicted have left me afraid of even real people in the real world. We are working on breaking down the walls in my sessions. Donna and everyone here are also helping by letting me tell my story, disjointed as it is.
lost: I found your story very touching and helpful.
I haven’t even wanted to date anyone, but a couple of years ago, an old boss of mine came to town. He and his wife had divorced. I met him and some of our other past co-workers for a visit. He made it pretty clear he had an attraction for me. He had been married when he was my boss and was very respectful of that as was I so we kept it professional all those years ago.
The next time he came to town, he called and asked me to dinner. He was very nervous and I felt I saw red flags (IE: He kept telling me about all of the women on a web site that were wanting to date him.) or at least what I felt were red flags. But, I’m not sure any more who I am or if it was a red flag or just a nervous guy trying to prove his worth. I was able to joke with him and I listened to him, but, I was just “OK.” The restaurant was noisy to me. I felt overwhelmed. I knew he was hoping for something more, but I just didn’t have it in me. By the end of the evening, I was exhausted. He seemed angry at himself. It was tough. I cried all the way home because this was a man whom I had thought the world of when he was my boss. I felt like if I wasn’t so “abnormal” after my experiences, we would have been a good match all those years later. He called me a couple of times in the years since to let me know he was in town and I found excuses not to get together. Now, we just email a few times a year.
It sounds like you have a nice therapist. Time may bring something to you. I hope so…for all of us.
Another great and informative article to bring back up.
Gwen’s stories are pretty typical.
The common denominator in ALL of our stories is the number of women. Although they lie about everything else in their life I think that they like to share with us all of their “conquests.”
Here is my new anthem. Anyone that has had THREE wives is a big NO.
Proceed cautiously with someone that has had TWO. Another RED flag is moving in together within one year AND saying “I love you” within six months. BIG RED FLAG.
Women should run not walk from these men. Problem is that every woman I have ever known that ends up with these jerks is very interested in a relationship and will ignore these signs.
Sadly, these concerning RED flags are only the TIP of the iceberg.
I chose to ignore my red flags and it cost me 30 years of my life.
Don’t do it.
I just found out my hubbys is a sp, he ahs fathered 2 children with the pst 2 years and wants to blame me for all this, and I cant get out of this marriage so hard, we have kids, he is what seems to be bullying me. I really cant believe he did this to us, who have I married?