Ex emotionally cheated with woman whose husband has cancer

[Kombucha]

My ex boyfriend (he’s 32M) and I (31F) dated for nine years. He was head over heels for me. He would have done anything for me. We were very good for each other and made a great team. I’ve never meshed with somebody so well in my entire life. He was a REALLY good guy for a long time. So sweet and kind. And we had our own little world. 

About six years into the relationship, I experienced an unknown health issue that kept me from achieving a lifelong dream I had been working towards. Luckily I am fine now, but it is a condition that I have to keep under control. I was devastated. I was depressed. Felt like a zombie from the depression. Had suicidal thoughts all the time. I did a lot of things to get my life back on track. It was traumatic, but I am a fighter. My ex started to say that I was not the same. It’s not like I was sitting around crying all the time, but I was in a survival mode kind of situation for a few years. I was traumatized and needed to focus on healing so that we could live happily ever after and put it all behind us. He was very supportive at first, but then he started to resent me because I was putting so much effort into meeting my educational goals. He wanted more attention. I wasn’t as care-free as I had been before my health issue. If you knew the specific details, you would understand why I was scared to death to fail at my goal again. I did talk more about my problems with him than he wanted, but I really had no other support systems at the time. I was in an impossible situation. But he made me out to be a monster for talking about my stresses. He started to change when his job became overwhelming.

I knew something was wrong when he told me that he didn’t want to sacrifice for me any longer. He didn’t want to help me solve my life problem. He didn’t have the energy to help me with little things around the apartment like hanging up a picture. He said that he was drained and that we needed to be apart so that he could fill up his cup. I feel like it's my fault. He didn’t like that I put so much of my energy into getting my life back together. He knew it would take me awhile before I got it all sorted out, because part of my plan involved going back to grad school. It was taking me a few years to get things back on track, but I was putting so much more effort into my self-development than he was. Mind you, I did this all while pretty f-ing depressed. We still had great times when I was depressed, don’t get me wrong.

His new role at work was stressing him out. He complained about money more. If I didn’t give into what he wanted he called me selfish and put me down instead of compromising. He was around people at work who were more full of themselves, and I noticed it changed him so much. He finally “fit in” with the cool guys at work and it showed. He would come home so stressed at night though about his new duties at work. I used to be the person that “calmed his inner demons” he said, but when I needed to survive, I just wasn’t as available as I used to be. And that is when he slowly detached from me emotionally.

About seven years into our relationship (2017), I noticed he was flirting with a married woman on snapchat that he knew from college. This was not the first time I caught him flirting online with another girl. I found out that her husband had cancer at the time they were talking. I do not know if this girl knew about me. And I don’t know much about what they talked about, but I saw a message from one of them that said “I wonder what things would have been like had we dated.” I don’t know who said it though. I told him what I saw and he stopped talking to her and we figured it out. He was a jerk to me about it though. He got mad at me for getting mad about her. And that was my first instance in our relationship when he was cruel to me.

He broke up with me in a cruel way out of the blue earlier this year. He was upset with me for expecting him to do normal boyfriend things that other people do with no issue. I asked him to be home from his friend’s house by a certain time (that he agreed to) in order to help me clean our messes. He was late. When I expressed my frustration, he insulted me and made it out to be my fault. He said that he didn’t feel connected with me for the past year and that this was really hard on him. But that he doesn’t want to sacrifice himself to help me anymore. This made me feel like a complete monster. I still cry thinking about that comment. I didn’t feel like I asked too much of him. And if I was, I would have changed my behavior if he calmly explained things to me instead of bickering with me. A few weeks after we broke up, the married girl from a few years before was liking his newly posted photos on instagram. I looked her up, and saw on her social media that she donated part of her liver to her husband not long ago to help with his cancer. I asked my ex (we were still living together) about this and he said she is just a friend. I looked at him and said “she is married and her husband has cancer.” He looked up at me and then down at the floor to avoid talking about it. After I moved out, he said I could continue to use our disney plus account. I logged in one night, and he deleted my account and added one for the married girl. And then he deleted my spotify account on our family plan without warning, and I believe he added her. I saw her spotify account, and she has a playlist called “make out sessions” that she subscribed to. I asked my ex about it and he said that he was “hurt that I suspected he was doing something nefarious.” And that he is just trying to help her out because he is one of the few people that isn’t also friends with her husband. It sounds like whatever happened with them… that people are taking her husband’s side I guess. But my ex said that she moved out from her house with her husband. So she is still technically married, but still has photos of her with her husband on her social media, and still has her mother-in-law listed on her facebook profile in the family section. And her husband is going through chemo again for the second time right now (I know somebody who knows her husband). I guess they are separated. Almost positive they’re not divorced and have not even filed for divorce.

I need serious support. What is it about her that I don’t have? Maybe she supports my ex better emotionally because she is a therapist? But this girl is not somebody I could ever see my ex being with due to so many critical differences between them. From what I understand, she likes attention, and my ex tends to have some of that in him as well. If you didn’t know this about her, you would probably like her. That is what is so insane. She seems nice and like she cares about people, but then she is being shady behind her husband’s back. I feel like I screwed our whole relationship up because I was unable to manage getting my life back together fast enough and kept from making my ex happy. I was going too slow. He blamed everything on me pretty much, and would then be nice and say this was so hard for him, but then back to being cruel to me when I would question him about how he went about all of this. I feel like a total monster. And hurt because he wouldn’t go to couple’s counseling with me, but he is somehow involved with this woman, who is a therapist. Why do I hate myself so much for all of this? It feels like all my fault. I feel like he will live happily ever after and that I will always be in shock that he did this.

[kendahke]

5 hours ago, Kombucha said:

I feel like he will live happily ever after and that I will always be in shock that he did this.

you'll be in shock long enough to get through the first round of "omg! So that's what that was about!"; then it'll be anger and on through the rest of what one feels when their paradigms have shifted.

Then you'll decide one day to keep on riding that or you're going to be kinder to yourself and just let all the "why"'s go.

Don't fall into comparison traps... what he did really had nothing to do with you. He made a decision: you didn't make him make it.