23.
“When I met my future husband, we were making small talk at a Saturday night gathering for single people. I was in my early 20s. He was 10 years older than me, incredibly handsome, and seemed kind. I asked him if he had plans for the upcoming week. He said his friend was having a baby, and he was going to see them sometime that week. It sounded normal enough. I innocently assumed he meant a guy friend, and the friend’s wife was having a baby, and my dude was being supportive. Two years later, we were engaged. After we were married, he told me the ‘friend’ he had mentioned the night we met was actually his ex-girlfriend.”
“They were going through a breakup when I met him; the baby was his. That pregnancy had ended due to a stillbirth the week we met. I was amazed that he thought he couldn’t tell me the truth about that situation at some reasonable point before we married. I would not have married him if they’d had a baby, but I chalked it all up to ‘live and learn.’ I was trying to do the ‘right thing’ and honor my marriage vows by forgiving him and putting that in the past.
I divorced him 24 years later when I gradually found out he had racked up many thousands of dollars in debt over the years without telling me and had hidden that from me by eventually taking over the financial ‘management’ of our shared bank account, a task I had openly done for us for years. He had also invested his pension from early retirement, which was a substantial sum of money that could have sustained a humble but secure lifestyle for us for the rest of our lives, into a business venture with an acquaintance against my adamant disagreement.
The acquaintance turned out to be a crook who had convinced my ex to allow him to ‘manage the finances’ since they were business partners. The guy stole all of my ex’s (our) money and disappeared with all of the equipment, files, and computers from the business. The acquaintance was operating under an alias and wanted in another state for doing the same thing to somebody else. I am so relieved to be out of that tough marriage. I am much poorer, wiser, and not impressed with the quality of men my age I’ve met. The bar now is so incredibly low. I don’t know if I want to be with anyone again.”
—Anonymous
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