Estimated reading time: 15 minutes
Dear Dr. NerdLove,
I (f) was with my ex (m) for nearly a decade, and together, we had a satisfying social life with a number of other couples. One of them in particular I grew to really love– we were nerdy in all the same ways, and when we were hanging out with each other, we’d introduce each other to all of our new favorite foods and favorite shows. They were about ten years older than us, so they also served as mentor figures when it came to career issues, running a household, and politics/good citizenship sorts of things. I really thought they were the best, and that I could rely on them for anything.
Then, my ex started abusing me.
I turned to the wife of the couple for support, and told her about the worrying behavior. She more or less gave me a brush-off, and told me she didn’t know what to do with anything that I’d told her. Later, my ex punched a wall so hard during a fight that he broke his hand. She and my ex continued their hours-long weekend phone conversations, and she gave him all sorts of support and props for going to anger management therapy. My ex never addressed the ongoing verbal and emotional abuse, however, and later there was another episode where my ex abused me so badly, I landed in the hospital for a week. All that time the wife was comforting my ex about how bad he felt that this had happened to me.
Neither one of that couple ever reached out to me to see if I was okay.
Okay, so, clearly they (or, at least the wife) were exceptionally crappy people who were never on my team and didn’t care about me very much. When I moved out and initiated a divorce, I blocked their numbers on my phone, unfriended them on Steam, and blocked them on all my social media everywhere. But the memory of the good times still burns bright, Doc. Now, years on down the road, I have begun to harbor wishful thinking hopes that maybe they’ve finally realized how crappy my ex was and broken ties with him, and we can reconnect and have the same really enjoyable friendship we had before. But this is wishful thinking!!! The overwhelming majority of my brain does not want to get re-involved with the crappy people they showed themselves to be at the end. How do I get over this dead friendship and move on like I got over my ex?
Signed,
Take Me To the Store Because I Would Like To Buy One Dustbin of History, Please
Jesus, TMTS, that was rough and I am so, so sorry you went through this. Not just the abuse, which was bad enough, but watching people you thought were your friends reveal themselves to be anything but.
Let’s take this from the top: one of the more unpleasant aspects of ending a relationship with someone that we don’t talk about often is how it can affect our other relationships. The ramifications of a break up can sometimes echo in our social circles, especially if the break up is acrimonious or ugly. People tend to pick sides, usually (but not always) based on who they were closer to. It’s very rare that people who try to not choose sides actually manage to accomplish this; frequently they will ultimately drift towards one person or the other.
This can especially feel weird when you are talking about “couple friends”; that is, the friends you made while you were a couple. The ones who, presumably, were friends with the gestalt identity that is the couple. They weren’t just friends with Gilmore or Darius but Gilmore-and-Darius. But when the relationship ends, people are often surprised to find that their couple-friends end up drifting towards one or the other. It may be immediate or it may happen gradually over time… but it happens often enough that plenty of people have experienced this. And the breakdowns of who goes where can be surprising; it doesn’t always cleave based on who knew who longer or who had a pre-existing relationship. Family may ultimately end up being closer with the non-familial part of the couple, while friends one had prior to the relationship side with the partner they got to know later on.
It’s hard not to take it personally, even if it genuinely isn’t personal or conscious, but rather a question of whose personalities or the nature of the friendship has them more enmeshed with one rather than the other. But then there are the times when the cleavage reveals rather more about one’s former friends. Sometimes, the way the friendships split can say more about the friends than people realized or intended.
So it is with the wife of the couple you used to be friends with. You thought you had a friend and mentor. What you didn’t know, which you know now, is that at the very least, she’s someone who was willing to ignore, diminish and dismiss abuse. At worst, she’s enabling it, which is horrific, and she inadvertently did you a favor when she ended her “friendship” with you.
And yes, the scare-quotes are deliberate. At first, I questioned whether she was someone who didn’t see emotional or verbal abuse as abuse or that it was “that bad” in comparison. Even the punching-the-wall incident – one of the reddest of red flags – could be hand-waved away with enough motivated reasoning and a desire to not see one’s friend as an abuser.
Once your ex put you in the hospital, however, and she sided with your ex, that was the point where it was clear that she was not, and never had been your friend. And… ok, look, I’m just going to say it: I’m not convinced that she was just “comforting” your ex. Mayhe she was, maybe she wasn’t, but at the end of the day, that’s just a decorative detail, rotten flowers on a garbage cake. Her behavior was not that of a friend who ultimately picked the other side. This is the behavior of someone who was a friend of convenience, whose “friendship” was apparently entirely contingent on your presence in your ex’s life.
The fact that she was able to overlook abuse, to see your ex as someone who deserves comfort after he put you in the fucking hospital… honestly, that should tell you what you need to know about her.
Except it doesn’t feel that way. And that hurts.
This contradiction between what you believed about your former friends versus what you know now can be hard to reconcile, especially when you have good memories, happy memories of your relationship with them. People in general are very quick to categorize and label others, and we often have a very hard time when those categories aren’t as clean as we think they were. Everyone tends to do very badly with moments of cognitive dissonance, and there’s a natural tendency to almost deliberately choose to resolve that dissonance by ignoring it or rationalizing it away.
This is why, for example, people who are the most convinced that they are “good” by definition are capable of doing heinous shit to others without losing a wink of sleep. They see themselves as being “good”, therefore whatever they do is “good”, and if what they do was bad… well, the person they did it to probably deserved it somehow.
It’s also why we can have a hard time reconciling how people we care about, people who are supposed to care about us, can treat us with contempt or cruelty. It’s very hard to look at someone who was important to your life – a parent or caregiver, a friend or lover – and accept that they treated us badly. We don’t want to believe that’s possible, especially if the good memories feel like they outweigh the bad. We don’t want to have those memories colored or changed by what we now know about them, and so it can be hard to accept what we now know. It’s why people will give second and third chances to people who hurt them, or who don’t cut abusive parents out of their lives entirely. There’s always that hope that the pain, cruelty, neglect or even indifference was a mistake. A glitch in the Matrix. They may have fallen to the Dark Side, but surely they could still come back from it, right?
It doesn’t help that we live in a culture that wants to believe that there aren’t shades of gray; the false dichotomy of “good people are completely good, bad people are completely bad” is appealing in its simplicity. It’s hard to reconcile that we have good memories of our time with someone who hurt us. It’shard to fully accept that someone’s good behavior doesn’t negate the effects of the bad, or vice versa.
This is part of why it can be hard to reconcile your feelings about your ex-friends with what you know about them. The pain they caused wasn’t as direct as what your ex did to you, so it may not be as immediate or personal, so the balance of your memories with them tilt towards the good times, rather than the bad.
Now, I realize it sounds like I’m leading up to telling you that you need to focus on this new information and remind yourself that your ex-friend is a shitty person until it sinks in and you stop missing your friendship. But I’m not. I don’t think that’s realistic, or even particularly helpful. Trying to pretend that the good memories never happened is futile and frankly, dishonest.
What I would suggest is to treat this as what it is: a loss. You are feeling the way you feel, hoping against reason that this was all a mistake and your friend will come back to you, because you’re mourning your loss. It’s no different from hoping that the news you got was a mistake, that the person you loved didn’t pass away and that there’s still a chance that they’ll come walking through that door with a smile and a crazy story to tell. It’s your heart and mind wanting to hold onto what had been there, because the negative space where they used to be is just so… empty.
What you’re missing isn’t the person you know now. You’re missing the person you knew before. They may have been the same person the entire time… but that’s not who you knew. You knew who they were when the mask was on, when they weren’t so callous and willing to choose an abuser over the abused. Now that person is gone and you miss them, dearly. The memories you have are tinged with sorrow, not because they weren’t real, but because the person you made them with is no longer there to make new memories with.
You lost someone when they revealed who they were, as surely as if they had died or vanished from the face of the Earth, never to be seen again.
You could choose to leave your ex. You didn’t choose to lose your friends. They were taken from you. That the hand that took them away was their own doesn’t change that it was a loss. So let yourself mourn that loss. Cry for what you had and what you can’t have again. Lament that those good people aren’t a part of your life and never will be again, through no fault of your own. That’s a tragedy and it deserves to be treated as such. So mourn for them and who you thought them to be. This will help make it easier for you to give yourself closure on that chapter of your life.
While that pain may never fully leave – no pain following the loss of loved ones ever truly does – it will become easier with time and acceptance.
I’m so sorry that it came to this. But I promise you: it will get better.
All will be well.
My boyfriend of seven years and I were very close. Always cuddling, talking of marriage, family close too, lived together, then one night he didn’t come home.
He begged for my forgiveness. I let him know I’m not into this. You could have at least called.
About 6 months ago, he was leaving for work on Friday morning and would show up Sunday night to sleep- every weekend. Then, weeknights, too. Once for 8 days! …with no explanation of his whereabouts for the weekend.
Then I saw many new numbers on his phone as we shared it until I received mine.
I saw a name and thought no way. A ton of messages from a chick 30 years younger than me, who he had previously dismissed as a friend.
These messages weren’t dirty. They were thoughts of love, like “I want to give you the world” and “you looked beautiful last night, but no blow up mattress ever again.”.
He even took her to his mother’s memorial service two weeks ago and never mentioned it to me.
He has been gone for a week and I haven’t reached out and neither has he.. This is not the first time BTW.
At least 25 women that he has messaged, feigning concern and flirting.
I believe that he has not ever stopped seeing other women, even though he gets mad and defensive and says I would never do that to you. But I beg to differ. The love he expressed hurt worse than sexting did, if that makes any sense.
The point is I still love him.
How do I get past the rage, hurt and betrayal, while they make me look bad and laugh at me?
He says that I drove him to her- right!
I am humiliated, scorned and so embarrassed. I don’t think I’ll be doing that again. I may just become a hermit.
I just want to stop loving him.
In reality I don’t even know him, so how can I love him?????
Who Is This Stranger?
I will admit, WITS, I am just mystified that he could disappear for days at a time with no word, but without triggering worlds of drama at the same time. If someone I was living with just didn’t come home for an entire weekend with no warning, I would be blowing up the phone of everyone who knew them and then filing a missing person’s report.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not blaming you for not catching him sooner. This is just something that would be so far out of my own experience that my first thought would be that something truly horrible had happened.
(It also makes me wonder what the fuck he was thinking and why he thought this was something he could just do.)
None of that is important though. What is important is what you asked: how do you get past all of this? How do you deal with the fact that you still love him?
Because you do love him. You may not have known everything about him, he may have hidden so much from you that it was like he was a different person… but you did love him. Or rather: you loved the person he was showing to you. Some of that was probably authentically him; it is exceedingly rare to the point of nigh non-existence for someone to be so sociopathic as to be able to create a persona so different from who they are and maintain it for years, day in and day out. It may not have been all of him… but it was him.
It’s understandable that you’re questioning this now, just as it’s understandable that he not only broke your heart but wounded your pride. How could you not see this? How could you let him trick you?
Well, that’s the thing: you didn’t let him do anything. You loved him in good faith, you trusted him because he presented himself as being trustworthy. All of that speaks well of you; you have a loving and trusting heart. That’s not a bad thing by any measure.
This isn’t your fault. There is no shame in being deceived by a deceiver. Nobody reasonable would expect you to treat every potential lover like they were a liar until proven otherwise; that way lies madness, where the lack of evidence only becomes proof of how skilled they are in their perfidy.
Nor does this mean you were stupid, foolish or otherwise responsible for not finding him out sooner. A con artist is successful, not because his marks are dumb, but because he is very good at what he does – he plays on the hopes, dreams and desires of his mark. And everyone can be conned; if you haven’t yet, that is only because you haven’t encountered the con that would work on you.
A love con – whether for money or simply for keeping a lover in the dark – relies on the mark trying to find love in good faith. You had no reason to believe this man who shared your heart and hearth was concealing secrets like this; it’s the sort of behavior that’s so bizarre as to seem like fiction, a b-plot in a hacky telenovela. To expect you to be on guard for this sort of behavior would be like a high-school teacher needing to be on guard for Russian spies looking to seduce him for some nebulous advantage.
This doesn’t make you look bad, and it doesn’t make you foolish. The sin and shame that accumulates is on him, not you. If other people are laughing, that’s only because they think they’re in on the joke, not realizing that they’re just the punchline in a joke on them.
The important thing to remember here isn’t that he lied to you, it’s that you caught him lying. He may have been able to fool you for longer than you would like, but not forever. Your pride may sting, your heart may be broken, but at the end of the day you found him out. That, I think, is something you should give yourself credit for, not beating yourself up for not catching him sooner.
I think what you need, more than trying to stop loving him, is forgiveness. Specifically, you need to forgive yourself. You were trusting of someone who ultimately didn’t deserve your trust. You loved someone in good faith, who exploited that faith for his own advantage. Your only sin here was to love someone who chose to deceive you, someone who hid significant parts of who he was and presented you with a false face that you had no reason to believe was false. So, like others before you, the best thing you can do is forgive yourself for, as the blue-eyed bard sang, loving not wisely but too well.
As with others who learned that the person or people they loved weren’t who they claimed to be, this is a loss. You loved someone, only to lose them; now their doppelgänger sits in their place. Mourn the man you loved, even as you despise the person who took his place. But forgive yourself for loving someone who chose to let you love him under false pretenses. That’s his sin and his fault, not yours.
All will be well.
