How I escaped from a serial cheater, part 1

TW: domestic abuse, stalking, & cheating

Well, it’s kind of a long story, but here we go. This is the story of how I ended up escaping from what turned out to be my very dangerous, stalkery ex.

My ex was/is a serial cheater, but I was always his ‘main squeeze.’ He always wanted to stay married to me, though, while cheating on the side. I was part of his artificial ‘family’ that he liked to project out into society. (It didn’t feel like we were ever a family after I found out he was cheating, though, because our relationship was built on a lie.) We had a stupid fancy wedding because it was ‘important to him’ (pffft.)

He cheated on me our entire relationship, but I loved him very much and was trusting and naive, so I never knew it. (We’re kind of young so I didn’t have a lot of experience with cheaters or even relationships, really.) He hid it extremely well, too, and put a ridiculous amount of effort into living a double life. Secret P.O. boxes, and all that.

Anyhow, I was always the one he took out in public, it was really like he had compartmentalized his life: life as my husband, and life as a serial cheater. I think some of his APs got pretty upset and jealous about that, because he never took them to any of those events, or on worldwide vacations, and he never planned on leaving me. I was always what I call his ‘false priority.’ (I know all this because I later found a bunch of burner phones and he would just discard these women once he was done with whoever it was he was with at the time. He’s a bad person. Some of them are, too.)

Most of his affairs didn’t seem to last very long, probably because he only ever intended to use these women. Also he seemed to use prostitutes more than anything, lots of them, and I believe that he even met up with some porn stars. He also sexted a bunch, had online affairs, cam girls, Only Fans and lots more, etc. It was really like he lived in a fantasy world, I think he watched so much porn that it warped his brain, and he was wanting to live like this, and also felt compelled to.

He and I used to go on vacations and later I found out he would sneak out at night to go meet prostitutes. So it was actually pretty extreme, in a lot of ways, what he did to me, and how he lived.

Apparently he was going to live this way the rest of our lives, and was totally fine with it. Obviously, once I found out, I wasn’t.

What happened was, and how I found out about his cheating was pretty typical, it’s that he was acting very weird. Phone face down a lot, gone all the time, started being super angry and moodier than usual. He was angry, all. the. time. Which was his default state anyway, but this was much worse than usual. He got very careless, came home smelling like perfume a couple of times, showered immediately, I found a long hair in the house, my bedsheets were off my bed after vacation, etc., so there were suddenly lots of signs. Maybe they seemed small, but they were enough. Naturally, I grew suspicious, so I checked his work bag, and then I went through his phone, something I had never done before.

Nothing could have prepared me for what I found. Dating apps, endless porn, vaults, but a lot he left out in the open. The amount of it was so extreme that it suddenly made me realize why he owned and kept purchasing so many electronics.

What was so shocking was that there were messages to prostitutes, going years back, and apart from him requesting sexual services, they were almost all about me. ‘My wife is [x], my wife [x].’ Almost every conversation circled back to me, and everything he felt I was doing wrong. and it was all about what I wasn’t doing for him. But ironically, the things he was complaining about? I actually was doing all those things, but it wasn’t good enough for him. He was angry that he wasn’t my entire world, and that I had a life outside of him.

And it was in that moment (among many others I’ve had), that I realized my husband literally felt like he owned me, and had felt this way for years. I don’t think he knew how to cope with his emotions, so this was his way of doing that-by complaining to prostitutes about me. It really seemed like he hated me.

Usually I just tell people ‘I found some texts,’ but in reality there were hundreds of texts about me, going years back, both to people we knew and to complete strangers. And they were all angry. I don’t know if you’ve ever had someone text about you like that, but it’s terrifying. You feel like you don’t understand anything in that moment, because you suddenly realize that you don’t even know who you’re really married to. Suddenly I felt like I was in my own version of ‘Let’s Not Meet,’ and I didn’t know what to do.