A Self-Proclaimed Master Manipulator

This post has been edited as of 11/10/11, see below. I’ve removed or changed nothing, merely added commentary and strikeouts. 

Earlier this evening, I found a Facebook message from him, that had apparently been sent this past Saturday. In it, he said that I’d been “caught in the web of lies of a master manipulator” and that he never meant anything he ever said to me, but used me for “pleasure without responsibility”. He also said that I had contacted his wife in order to tell her that he loved me, which either means that he did not read what I wrote or he is being deliberately obtuse. To be clear, I actually replied to his wife’s contact, which is a minor point but still worth mentioning. As for the conversation, I’ve certainly been over that whole bad idea enough in previous posts, and as I have painstakingly attempted to explain, at that point I was still trying to figure out a way where he could be a good person who made a major mistake. The only way I could manage to make what he did to me and to his wife reconcile with a mistake an otherwise decent person might make was if he did, in fact, feel about me as he repeatedly said he did during our time together. At that time, I felt that it was better for everyone’s future if he could be viewed as a good person.

Since then, I’ve been slowly and painfully coming to my own realizations about the state of his character, and with this latest contact I think I can safely put to rest my uncertainty as to whether or not he is a good person. The answer is “no”. Not only is he not a good person, I think . . . well, I wonder if he might actually be evil. I simply cannot wrap my mind around the type of person you would have to be in order to deliberately and systematically manipulate someone to the extent that he claims to have manipulated me. And then to create a Facebook account for the sole purpose of finding me there and sending me a message bragging about his skills as a manipulator? What the fuck? He was never on FB, and he has my address, emails, phone numbers, any number of ways to contact me other than creating an account to deliberately hurt me even more than he already has. Not that contact was even necessary. Clearly his only purpose here was to hurt me.

To say I am not doing well would be a drastic understatement. I wasn’t doing well before this, but now . . . I don’t know. I have a lot to think about, a lot to process, but I don’t want to think. I want to disappear. I don’t think I can do this on my own. I need help. My soul is screaming in pain right now, and I’d like to go to sleep and not wake up for a very long time. I think I might be in shock.

I’ll write more later. Probably. Or not. This is so beyond wrong and hard and painful. He’s going to do this again, eventually. He’s going to be bored in his life, and find another woman at a crossroad in her life, and he’s going to amuse himself by destroying her faith in human decency. Let alone her belief in love.

Edited 11/10/11 – I don’t want to completely censor things I’ve written, but I also have a strong belief in the power of words. I like his wife, she is a good and kind person who he’s treated extremely poorly, and I don’t want to inadvertently mess with the universal flow of things by making definitive statements about what he will or will not do in the future. I wish her nothing but happiness, whether it is with him or off on her own.

The same goes for the sentiment expressed below. I admit that the word I chose is perhaps a bit stronger than actually warranted, and I don’t want that negative energy following her around via her husband. 

Shame on you, Dan. My god, your poor wife. Your poor child! You are an evil and cruel man, Daniel Adrian Jimenez. Or Adrian Daniel Jimenez, since that was how your new FB account listed your name. Just one more lie, I suppose. We met online. Escritorio1978, that was his screen name. I imagine he’ll change it for the next victim, but in case he doesn’t, I hope the next woman is smart enough to Google him before she loses her heart.

I am too fucking stupid to exist. Gullible. Naive. Hopeless, hurt and bleeding. Too trusting, entirely too trusting.

It’s OK To Feel The Way I Feel

Maybe there are certain things that are fine to be sad about, fine to mourn, and certain things that are not. I don’t know exactly, I’m more trying to explore a thought here. Is it possible to separate what happened from the person who caused it? Is it possible to have a broken heart, to have a spirit and a soul which need time to heal, time to grieve, and yet NOT give more attention than required to the person who caused my pain?

I think I’m struggling with whether the difficulties I am having are giving too much, I’m not sure of the exact word I’m looking for here . . . power, significance, leverage to him. Him being a person who perhaps or even definitely does not deserve my care, my time, my emotional outlay. Although, it’s like there are two versions of him. The version I knew and loved, who inexplicably morphed into the cheating asshole version who lied to me, lied to his wife, generally behaved in a despicable manner. It’s like the evil him rose up and killed the him I loved, the him that was kind, considerate, funny, smart, passionate and loving. The man I loved no longer exists.  And yes, I know some would say that the man I loved never actually existed in the first place, simply because he was actively lying and omitting, but I don’t know that I agree with that. Reality is subjective. I believed him, loved him, trusted and respected him, and he existed in my life, in my version of reality. I think that is a reasonable thing to mourn.

Again, I’m not exactly sure what, if anything, I’m going for here. Just an aimless exploration of my current thoughts, I suppose.

 

Disillusionment

Apparently while I slept, my subconscious began to entertain the possibility that he is simply not a good person. That makes me sad. As a matter of fact, I’m just kind of sad in general this morning. Although, it seems to be mixed with a bit of resignation as well, so maybe that’s a good thing.

I’ve been thinking about the things he said about his wife when she was in the guise of “the ex”. That is his phrase, not mine. The ex, not my ex. He also called her “the bearer of my child”. He never used her name. Which at the time I didn’t give much thought to, assuming that what he’d told me was true and she’d kept the impending existence of his daughter from him. I could understand a bit of resentment existing. But thinking back over things with the knowledge I have now, his dismissive attitude towards her is disturbing. This is a woman he was deliberately and consciously cheating on. They lived together the entire time he and I were together. So that means that during times we stayed up late talking, she was there. Everything he said to me, did with me, promised me, during those talks, he did while she slept in the next room, gestating their child. Every day she assumed he was hard at work earning their livelihood, he was doing it while spending every single moment with me, while planning a future with me. That’s just wrong. There’s no way to spin it any other way. And honestly, it makes me angry. How dare he treat a woman he professes to love in that way? How could he? How could he treat me the way he did, someone he also professed to love? But even more so how could he treat her, the woman he’s been with for eight years, a woman he married, a woman who carried his child, in such a completely heartless way?

So I’m back to my dilema. I want to keep the idea of him as a man who made a serious mistake, but who is a decent, caring and kind person in general. I want this, I think, because I don’t want to admit that my ability to tell a nice guy from a lying jerk is so seriously flawed, and also because I’m scared that if I go down that road I will turn jaded and lose my belief in love and a true and passionate man existing somewhere for me.

It’s really just insanely frustrating. And I guess I’m still at the point where I believe that he did mean the things he said to me. But I’m also willing to admit that he has an impressive capacity to compartmentalize the different areas of his life. Last night, she said she didn’t believe he could love two people at the same time, and that therefore one of us was seriously stupid. And yeah, I’m willing to admit the possibility that it’s me. I’ve said that from the beginning. But I’d rather neither of us was stupid, that this was just an unfortunate thing, that they fix things, really and truly fix things, not merely stay together unhappily, and that I move on, happy and wiser. So that’s what I was getting at, with choosing to believe that he did love me. A decent man, capable of love, capable of fixing the gigantic mistake he made and remaining true to his wife, that’s a good thing. A manipulative sociopath, not a good thing and not at all worth staying with. The first is fine and understandable for me to have fallen in love with, the second is not.

I feel like screaming, I really do.

I Just Keep Messing Up

I logged back into my other account, planning to deactivate it if possible. Only to discover that she’d actually replied to my earlier IM, was, in fact, actually in the act of replying. I wasn’t expecting that, for sure.

She either completely misread what I wrote or just took the wrong things from it. She thought I was saying I was choosing to believe that he was still in love with me, and wanted to know why on earth I’d say something like that to her. I do not even remotely believe that, trust me! What do I believe, let’s see. I believe that the love he did feel for me was pretty quickly snuffed by the realization that he was about to lose his family. And yes, I’ve considered whether that means it was a less than true love to begin with. It was a lesser love by definition, because it was a secondary love. I know this. Real and true love does not cheat. Doesn’t that sound reasonable? I don’t even know anymore, I don’t. No, I can’t say that, because that would imply that he couldn’t have a real and true love for her, since he was cheating on her with me. God, this is so confusing!

I am trying very hard to come to a place in my thinking where he can remain a nice person. I want to believe he is a good person who made a serious mistake. But maybe that is the wrong approach. Maybe he really is an asshole. Maybe THAT is the right approach. How can you tell? And why do I care so much that he stay a decent person? Some of it is because I am truly scared that this whole fiasco will make me jaded, will crush the me that believes passionate love exists, is attainable, is sustainable. That’s probably the main reason. Although as I said, I do want them to work things out. But why? Is it really because I want the man I love/d to be happy? Is it because his wife is a genuinely nice person and has been treated extremely unfairly by him, and therefore deserves to be happy? Is it because it is easier for me to pretend that he chose his wife and daughter over me, that circumstances and doing-the-right-thing are what keep us apart, than to believe he is an asshole who gets off on manipulating the emotions of women? And is there a happy medium between those two points?

If nothing he ever said to me was true, then he is a seriously and deeply damaged individual. And that’s scary to me. Because I did care for him, did love him, and because of what it would say about me, that I am completely unable to discern a man who truly and lastingly loves me from a sociopath. It is past my ability to believe that someone could be so manipulative and emotionless as to fake our entire relationship. If that is pathetic and desperate of me, so be it. I don’t know what else to think.

Earlier she’d said that she knew he had feelings for me. Just now, she said he never loved me. Totally understandable. She has her own ways of dealing with things, and her way is not necessarily my way. I am guilty of assuming that she would understand that my need to believe he did love me stems from a need to believe he is a good person, and that my desire to believe he is a good person is for her benefit as well. It was a mistake, and I am deeply sorry to have caused her additional pain. If you ever find this blog, I am truly sorry, Iliana. But dammit, I WANT him to be a good person, and I can’t figure out how he can be a good person without having meant the things he said to me. Cheating on your wife is a huge mistake, it is wrong, and he was clearly not being a good husband at all when he went down that road. But cheating on your wife while deliberately and methodically manipulating the emotions of a vulnerable woman, pretending to love her, making all that up just for what . . . kicks, I guess, that is beyond a mistake, that is borderline evil.

Is all this just random justifications on my part? Am I crazy? Maybe I am.

So damn confusing!

On the plus side, while I still suffer from my fantasy of wishing everything he said about her being the ex and us being in love was true, I think I’ve managed to get past the thought that I might actually take him back if time had passed and they were no longer together. I think. So that’s sort of something, right? Oh, that’s another thing. She took my wishful thinking as my saying I wanted her to be “the ex”, like he said she was. I tried to explain that I didn’t want that NOW, that I wanted what I thought was true before to still be true. There is a difference there, subtle but important. I would never wish pain and loss on her. But again, I totally see how that could be taken wrong and I am truly sorry. I apologized to her, and I’ll apologize again here.

I would NEVER wish the pain I’ve been through on anyone, ever. Heartache is bullshit, plain and simple bullshit.

Ahh, Hell

As I was lying with my son, rubbing his back to help him fall asleep, it hit me . . . everything I deleted is more than likely safely backed up because of my automatic online backup. Damn.

Now what?

I guess I just leave it there for now. If I go look, I run the risk of sitting around listening to songs and mooning over his pictures for the rest of the night, at a minimum. And again, it’s not like I can’t recall every detail at will anyway.

And I was feeling so virtuous for managing to delete everything, too. Bets on how long until I crack?

Full Disclosure

I kept things from him as well. I am also married. My marriage is at the “we haven’t had sex in over two years and I’ve asked for a divorce” stage. Different, I feel, from his “my wife is about to give birth to our first child” stage of marriage. I also ultimately told him everything, as we moved deeper and deeper into our relationship. I couldn’t stand the thought that I’d been less than completely open with him.

He had so many chances to end things with me, had he wanted to, and every single time he instead used the opportunity to take our relationship even farther. “Finding out” about the baby was a perfect opportunity, I even gave him the door to walk though and still he choose not to take it. When I told him about my marriage, he could have ended things and even come out looking like the injured party, had he chosen to do so. But he didn’t. He kept right on loving me, building me up, setting me up for a fall he HAD to know would eventually arrive. He called us two trains on the same track, said it was destiny that we’d met and fell in love, that there was no stopping it. He assured me over and over that “we’d have ours”, meaning our time, our life, the life together that we talked about. We ended every conversation with “never goodbye” and tossed about the word “always” like it actually meant something. Just typing that now made my heart drop and my pulse race.

My current relationship with my husband is complicated, in that he wants us to work things out and I want us to get divorced. He doesn’t believe in passionate love, the type of love I thought I had found with Dan. He thinks I’m a fool to believe that it can exist. Again, this is why I am fighting. I do not want to end up bitter and unfulfilled. Worse yet, I don’t want to let my current feelings of devastation and pain weaken me to the point where I go back to my old life, just because it is there for the taking.

I’m going to take a break from writing for a bit. The pain comes out of the blue and takes my breath away, several times a day. I need to cry, and then I need to function in my life for a while.

Just How Gullible Am I?

Even in hindsight, it’s difficult for me to see any signs that he was lying to me about his availability. Although, I do think I can see signs of how easily I was led along a certain path. He was clearly giving me something that I needed. Undivided attention. Unconditional acceptance. Encouragement. Sex, obviously. But even more important to me than the admittedly intense sexual attraction was the simple fact that he liked me and wanted to be with me. To the exclusion of other needs and obligations, even. We would talk all day long, while we each worked and attended to the day. All day long. He made me feel special and he made me feel loved, and I needed that. I still do. Not from him, although if I’m being honest I’d have to admit that I would still be with him, if I could. Barring the lies and the wife, of course. So basically, if I could make everything perfect, I would. Not a very original or practical thought, but there it is.

Backstory is probably necessary at this point, on the off chance that anyone ends up reading this. All the better to evaluate my true levels of blind idiocy and gullibility. We met in May. At the end of July, he “found out” that his ex-girlfriend was having his baby. Obviously, this was his wife, who he knew damn good and well was pregnant with his child. But the story I got was that they’d broken up and been out of contact, and that this was a huge surprise to him. We were out of contact for two days, with me completely frantic for his well-being because all he’d told me as he stood me up was that he couldn’t meet me, he was scared and please pray for him.

That was a Saturday night. On Monday, he sent me an email telling me he’d just found out about the baby and he was confused, excited and scared. Angry, as well, at his “ex” for withholding this information from him. Tuesday, we talked during the day, while we were at work. It was a sweetly sad conversation, with discussion about poor timing and what this would do to our blossoming romance. Nothing was decided, and we agreed to talk again that night. That night, he told me that he did not want to lose me, that he couldn’t imagine not having me in his life. He told me for the first time that he loved me and that he wanted us to be together.

My concerns, which I told him, were that his ex still loved him, that he might still have feelings for her, thoughts that he should be with her for the baby’s sake, and so on. I specifically told him that his happiness was of the utmost importance to me, even if it turned out that I was not meant to be in his life. I also made it clear that I’d rather know this now, than move on down this love road and potentially get hurt worse later on. He assured me that they’d broken up for a reason, that he did not want to be with her, that all he wanted was to be the best father possible to his little girl.

I believed him. I said I loved him, too, and we went forward from there.

I’m writing this, and I am somewhat embarrassed by my naivety. I do think I have reasons for it, which I’ll get into in another post. But mostly, I think that I had hope. I know I did. Hope and a belief in the possibility of true love. THAT is what I don’t want to lose as a result of all this and all the pain I am feeling. And to be honest, I am scared that I will. So that is why I am fighting, and why I am writing rambling things for the world to see. I’ve got to work through this, or I will lose my hope. I don’t want that.