Found out fiancé is married to someone else

[limewonder]

Hi
I found out my DP of 4 years is married
The way I found out is his ex (not his wife, the one after her but before me) messaged me on facebook and told me as she’d seen our engagement post.

I’ve met his wife loads as they share kids (age 12&14 together). They split 9 years ago but apparently never sorted the divorce out.

Not sure what to make of this, i don’t know why he kept this from me. His excuse is that he forgot.? AIBU to demand he get a divorce or we’re over? I’m not even sure what his plan was here, marry me while still married to his ex?

He forgot he was married my arse 😂
He had no intention of marrying you. Because it would be illegal. What you have is a shut up ring.

do not get pregnant.

He's either an idiot or stringing you along. My money is on the latter. I would leave him in all honesty. Shut up ring is a good way of putting it.

Could they have 'forgotten' for financial reasons i.e. to protect their estates for the shared children's benefit if something should happen to either of them? Is he worth enough money for inheritance tax to be a valid concern?

Not sure what to make of this, i don’t know why he kept this from me. His excuse is that he forgot.?

Have you been moving forward with wedding plans or are you 'just' engaged? As either he is a total idiot who didn't realise that you can't marry 2 people legally.....
Or more likely imo he agreed to get engaged to keep you on the hook but has never had any real intention of following through.

If you weren't engaged I could forgive it as a dumbass move and an admin issue. Buy I just don't see how he could be at a proposal stage in your relationship and just 'forget' that he is already legally married. It doesn't add up.

He's either an idiot or a manipulative liar. Neither are great qualities imo.

@Devianinc - not sure why you tagged my post?

I’m assuming engagement is recent and wife probably assumed Op knew (and wasn’t bothered about living with a married man as they were separated) and then saw engagement post on sm and realised?

I would think the woman who told you so much. She has saved you from enduring this shit any longer and so much potential crap over your lifetime.

He's full of crap. If he didn't tell you something as big as this, you can't trust him with anything. I hope you have no financial ties with him and can have a complete clean break immediately.

He doesn't want to marry you. He would be getting a divorce already if he did.

Ok so the other side of the story......

I split up with exh, we had two expenses to resolve- paying to take him off the mortgage and paying for a divorce both around £500 (this was a long time ago)
I wanted exh off the mortgage so I paid for that and he agreed to pay for the divorce. Except he didn't, I asked him several times and eventually left it to him to initiate.

A couple of years later I met a new dp, by then exh had a new partner he lived with and we had minimal contact (just pick ups and drop offs of kids) I dated my partner and after about 9 months he met my kids, we moved in together after two years.

One day exh wanted a word at drop off, he wanted a divorce as he and his dp were planning on getting married. Be this point we had been separated about 5 years, I mentioned to dp that we were going to start the divorce, turns out I never mentioned we were still married! Dp had assumed we were divorced and I had forgotten to mention it. Thankfully dp wasn't concerned, we got divorced very easily and a year later dp proposed.

Only you know if this was a genuine error/ lack of concern on your dp part or if he was deliberately keeping it from you.

Has he lied to his kids too? Presumably they think he’s divorced or they would have said something when you showed them your ring. Not a good sign.

Is he a paleontologist named Ross?

How is this her fault? 😂

No one forgets they are still married! That is nothing more than a shitty excuse. Has his wife seen your engagement posts on social media?!! I would have thought she might have mention to you that he is still legally married to her! Others are absolutely correct too, with regards to a Will, if he hasn't bothered divorcing his ex, then if he has a Will has that been changed? If he doesn't have a Will, and died without one, his wife would automatically inherit, you'd get nothing. I would be handing back the engagement ring, and telling him he needs to start divorce proceedings immediately. How he chooses to react to that, will determine how you go forward.

Did he also forget tell you he’s a waste of space scum bag?

This is a very odd set up. It's highly unlikely that he forgot in the time from being with the ex that informed you to when he actually met and proposed to you. This wasn't a short, green card type marriage, they have children together and are still involved in eachothers lives. That's not something you generally forget. Unless of course he's had a significant memory decline or brain injury in this time frame that might excuse it.

You'd be a fool to forgive this, I personally couldn't commit my life any further to a man who could keep something this big from me. He's a liar, it doesn't matter whether it was by omission or not. Sorry OP 💐

Well, let that be a warning to you. This man has marriage amnesia. So if a day comes where he gets divorced and legally marries you, are you sure you can trust he won’t forget he’s married again?

I think the difference with your case is you didn’t propose to him (so didn’t pretend you were legally single)
Presumably you had separate finances too or it would have come up when doing wills/mortgage/financial management type stuff.

@Cakeandusername True, he wasn't on the mortgage at that point and we had separate finances. I guess that does make a difference.

@limewonder

Well, as far as I'm concerned he can't be your 'fiancé' if he's someone else's husband with no divorce in sight.

And you don't 'forget' you're still married, unless you have some kind of actual memory problem. He knew he was still married and is not free to marry you. So I call bullshit on that one.

As far as the future goes, you can't trust this man any farther than you can spit in the wind in a hurricane. He either was going to marry you whilst he was still married or he never intended to marry you at all. Either one is a dealbreaker.

Just out of curiosity, had the two of you set an actual marriage date? Or is this one of those nebulous 'engagements in name only' where the actual marriage keeps getting put off for one reason or another?

This ☝️.

Divorce is very expensive and ''adversarial''.

He wouldn't have been able to marry you, @limewonder as surely they check for bigamy beforehand.

I forgot to put the milk bottles out last night. That's not unusual and doesn't have any implications (unless I forget for months and months).

You'd think the act of getting engaged might have reminded him he still needed to get divorced.

Similar happened to my sister. Her DP hadn't sorted his divorce out as the ex refused to pay the legal fees. So he waited until his daughter was too old to be used as a 'hostage' then paid it all himself and put the papers in front of her to sign. But my sister was with a 'married man' for years 🤣

This.

Divorce isn't something anyone forgets.
Especially if there are children involved.

The man is a liar and not very bright- This wouldn't fly in U.K.

There are registers for this kind of thing.

My mother was about to marry someone who’d been split from ex for ages. Turned out he also forgot that you actually had to divorce someone if you married someone else. No malice on his part. He was just really really thick (are we allowed to say that on here?) Like, badly under educated couldn’t read much, had manual labour jobs.