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Hey GL,

For your ex to be a covert narcissist, he would either have to be an introverted kind of person

GL, I do believe him to be more introverted than extroverted. Remember that he has no real male friends? He only goes to socials because of networking opportunities and normally leaves early.

 or someone who keeps victimizing himself, blaming others for his failure.

Well, I can’t say that he explicitly blames others for his failures, but he does feel that he gets the short end of the stick because his background is different from that of the majority (not overwhelming, but still a majority) of his peers at work. And that majority basically sets the rules. Now, say, his immediate supervisor (and that of his peers) is from the same background as he is, and that didn’t prevent him (the supervisor) to reach all that he wanted in his career, but my ex often used to say that it was no wonder that such and such got this and that while he has to twist and turn and to make do.

Since he felt wronged by her, he would have raged against her.

Why would he have felt wronged by her if it was he who committed that blunder? He wanted to get what he wanted to get (her), and for that all means were equally good. Being angry wouldn’t have gotten him anywhere so he turned into a sheep instead with a sorrowful look in his eyes. Exactly the same thing he did when I shut down all communication with him at the beginning of our romance.

If he lacked empathy, he wouldn’t have thought of anyone, especially in his actions.

I don’t see how him showing me his wedding pictures when knowing that I was on antidepressants because of him for the presence of empathy???

Besides, have you noticed that people often say sorry without actually feeling sorry, but just because politeness requires them to say sorry under the given circumstances? So even if people say sorry, that doesn’t mean that they have empathy.

Everyone has a sense of entitlement, but it didn’t seem that he took it too far, not like those who have stalked other people.

That is why I thought that the description of a covert narcissist fit him to the letter. Of course, one may say that I see him as such because I want to see him as such, but my point is exactly that one finds what one is looking for.

Doesn’t seem that he has too much of a grandiose sense of ego yet.

“Yet” is the key word here. He told me that before his promotion he could not allow himself to be late for work; after it, he didn’t care that much about being on time.

Similarly, he thought he could skip work and leave earlier in order to make the train to that other city where his new love interest lived.

I worked with his supervisor, and he told me that he (the supervisor) didn’t think that high at all about my ex.

You predicted that he would divorced and married you. But he didn’t.

I didn’t “predict.” If I had “predicted,” I would have been telling everybody around me that I was dating him. I guess I was wiser here.

It was just from what I had read and witnessed, I surmised that the probability of him divorcing her and marrying me was very high.

I didn’t know that love and passion in him wouldn’t go steady, at the same high level, forever.

Kind of what I saw in the timeline of his current wife in Facebook. I told you about how he gave her a balloon and a plush toy for two birthdays in a row. There is not a single picture from this year where he explicitly holds her by the hand or hugs her (and no picture of what he gave her for birthday this year – none at all). Of course, it is too early to say, but his body language in the photos is now the same it was when he and I were together and he showed distance from his now exwife. I really wouldn’t be surprised at all if he already has got himself somebody else on the side or is about to. After all, they have been together for over four years now.

It’s not about being special, but about making the choice to commit and work on that commitment or don’t commit and let the relationship fall apart. They had a choice and your ex had a choice.

The key word here is “work on that commitment.” I felt that in my relationship with my ex there was an ingredient of “I’ll show them all what true love looks like.” “Them all” meaning his now ex-wife, his parents (“My parents, he said once kissing me after having talked to them on the phone in my presence, will not accept you at once, but are sure to do so once they get to know you better”), etc. Somehow that desire waned along the way. By the way, last time his now wife posted a lovey-dovey idyllic picture of herself and his parents was three years ago. It is almost as if his desire to prove it all to others starts lacking luster, along with his feelings for the person in question.

Actually, it’s about value. A person can only ‘like’ something for so long and not all the time. Your friend valued motherhood while your aunt valued her career. While they have decided that those situation make them happy, it won’t be happy all the time. There will be problems that they will encountered, but the meaning and value behind choosing being a mother or having a good career is something they chose to value so they can work hard towards it, problems and all. So what’s your value?

I disagree. I can value something, but I can not like it (but maybe still do it, because I value it). Say, I value being able to cook, but no matter how much I would try, my heart is just not in it. I may wake up, feeling empowered and willing to cook something for those I love, and halfway along the way, it gets so much down on me that I cannot stand it any longer. I can hardly finish. But yes, absolutely, being able to cook is a wonderful skill that is both useful (often saves a ton of money!) and attractive in a woman (isn’t the way to a man’s heart through his stomach?)

Where does your belief in ‘forever’ relationships come from?

From where everybody’s belief in “forever” comes from, no matter whether they acknowledge it or not. Fairy-tales read in one’s childhood reinforced by romantic novels (also classic ones!) and films not to mention human dislike of uncertainty.

It is not only my own belief. Not so long ago I was a silent participant in a discussion between my peers, a single girl in her mid-20s and a young man my age (who has been married for a decade and is awaiting his third child). The girl was advocating for marriage contracts, “because people change.” The guy was saying that if you marry, you marry because you want to be with that person “forever.” Exactly like they say – who marries thinking about divorce? (We are not talking about marrying for money here.)

So I am far from being the only one believing (or who used to believe) – wanting to believe would be more appropriate now – in “forever.”

Enjoy the starting holiday fever!

Hello, hello,

How was your holidays?

Hello, GL,

The holidays went well, thank you. How have yours been?

And how does that relate to his choice of not committing in the end? Also, how were you so confidence that he wouldn’t cheat on you? For him to cheat on his wife with you, there was always the possibility of him cheating on you. Sure, you can choose to trust him, but it would have said more of his character if he decided to wait until he was divorced or at least in the process of it to woo and then date you. But he jumped ship and chose to court you before actually even beginning the steps to getting divorce. He did not discuss with his wife the possibility of an open marriage and instead, chose to keep you a secret. He chose to hurt his wife because cheating is a breach of trust between them, it had nothing to do with you. Then he chose to cheat on you, breaching the trust you had in him. What a pattern. And would you really broadcast to your network that you were dating a married man? On that note, what were your thoughts on his wife? What were you thinking when you decided that it was okay for you to helped this woman’s, whom you’ve never met, husband cheat on her?

Wow, what an outburst! One would think you were the one cheated upon, not his wife or me!

I wrote to you at least two times explicitly underscoring that he did NOT keep our affair in secret from his wife, yet you are here again venting about how horrendously he was behaving. I would consider talking to his wife about keeping up appearances until able to divorce a first step to divorce, wouldn’t you? It was the very first question I raised when we first met in this country after having confessed our love for each other on Skype.

As for “opening a new account with me without closing the old one [with his wife],” he said that he could not afford somebody else snatching me, so he had to move fast. Apparently, he was not eager to leave this to fate, just as he wouldn’t leave to fate how he would be treated at work if he did the right thing – divorced his wife. I am more of a fatalist, but he is not, and I didn’t feel that I could blame him for it.

You say that I am set in my ways, but aren’t you, intentionally or not, entrenched in the classic notion of a man cheating on his wife with a young mistress in secret just for the fun of it, no matter what I am revealing about our relationship? I can’t prevent you from doing it, but it does seem that you don’t care what I write, plain and simple. Then why reply to my posts at all? It is annoying to say the least to have to repeat the same things over and over again. And if you don’t believe what I am writing, then again, what is the sense in having this discussion at all?

More than that, you are writing again that I was confident that he wouldn’t cheat on me whereas I, as recently as in my post before this one, wrote that I had not been that all confident in him after he didn’t divorce his wife when agreed.

Besides, there is always a possibility of cheating – there are millions of people who cheat and who have never cheated before just as there are millions of people who cheated once or twice in the past, but don’t do it in the current relationship. Let me ask you again: are you predicting that he will cheat on his current wife with two women (just because when he met her, he was still married and in a relationship with me)? Okay, with one 😉 ???

Furthermore, I did bring the example of my cousin who was openly together for four years with his girlfriend while still technically married to his now ex-wife. And yes, they were admitted as a couple to my family’s social gatherings. More than that, they lived and worked together in a different country as a cohabiting couple.

My halfsister lived openly with a married man who was separated from his wife. He never divorced his wife, and my halfsister returned to her husband to my home country (she moved out, while still married, just to be with her lover) after a year or a year and a half. She never hid that he was technically married.

So I didn’t see a problem with telling my family and friends where things were standing, as long as he was really undertaking real steps to divorce.

And then you keep comparing yourself to other woman. You keep highlighting your great features against thousands of faceless women, crying that you ARE desirable so why aren’t you so lucky in love? You even asked for others assurance that you’re okay, look-wise with a good resume. Even now, you still try to check off the box of desirable traits that make men into you when each and every one of those men are their own person who will have different kind of taste. Makes me feel as if you were a dress up barbie sometimes; dressing yourself as the dream of every heterosexual guy out in the world.

Excuse me, GL, but my impression is that you are the one having an outburst, “crying” in what sounds like a theatrical fit, not me.

And thank you, you confirmed one more time that “each and every one of those men are their own person who will have different kind of taste,” which means that meeting one for whom I would be the ideal, with my warts and all, is just a matter of time and luck.

And no, you are the one contradicting yourself here. If I were, figuratively speaking, “the dream of every heterosexual guy out in the world” as you put it, I would be a homecoming queen, cooking as a chef, keeping my place without a speck of dust, just dying to have children and to comply with every whim of my man like a harem slave. Which, clearly, I am not.

I can’t tell if you’re dodging the question of ‘value’ because you don’t know yourself well enough to respond or if it’s something else.

This is funny. I say that I disagree that this is an issue about values, and you say that I am dodging answering about my values.

Would you like me to make a list of instances when you either didn’t answer a direct question that I posed to you or didn’t bother to clarify your statements when I specifically asked for clarification or when you seized upon some minute detail in my counterargument and made a new point out of it not bothering to comment on the original subject any more?

I understand that English is not your mother tongue. However, there is MS Word that checks not only spelling but also grammar for you. When pointed out that my sentences are too huge and too convoluted, I started to make an extra effort to break them up and reread what I wrote so that my thoughts are clear and unambiguous. At least I value myself and others enough to do it.

I afraid that you do not.

So in the end, it’s a selfish demand that the other person exist to keep them company? A “marriage contract” because people change? Then is she not willing to change alongside them? And then every decade, every cells that is a part of her body would have been replaced by a new cell.

Hmmm, you were the one who explained to me just a couple of posts back that people change irrespective of whether they want it or not, irrespective of how tuned into each other’s needs and desires they are in a partnership. And now you are criticizing the perfectly normal idea to safeguard oneself from that when marrying by having a nuptial agreement (or “marriage contract” as it is sometimes called). Aren’t you again contradicting yourself?

But you haven’t tried to let go of that control, nor does it seem that you want to. Have you ever tried living in that uncertainty?

GL, you put yourself, just before the sentence above that humans had too much of a demand to control everything that happens in their life, that humans by definition lived in uncertainty. I realised just how our life is uncertain to the point that we can’t be sure of what will happen in the next hour, if not in the next minute when I was 13 or 14. I live in uncertainty even now. I told you that the job that I have can be terminated any time, there is not set duration of contract. Actually, just last week, a rumour was spread that our company has this current contract for just one more year only. I spent a night tossing and turning thinking what my course of action would be. After a day of figuring what I would be doing and where and to whom I could turn in search of a job, I was okay. Thankfully, that rumour turned out to be just a rumour. But it is true that this current contract is renewed every year, and may not be renewed at some point.

GL, when reading your previous post, in November, I became aware that we are going in circles, your asking the same questions or making the same accusations over and over again, and me referring you to what I had already written. I had exactly the same feeling reading this post of yours. It seems to me that there is no point in us continuing this discussion. I thank you for your insights and wish you only the best in the upcoming year. Thank you for your contribution, it has been useful in certain aspects. But I sure hope you are never going to become a psychotherapist – I doubt your patients are going to appreciate your rudeness, snide remarks and lack of empathy vital when dealing with living people.

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