How I know that is that I was married to a man who told me a catalogue of lies even when he was making a confession of adultery to me, and was stupid enough to leave a trail of evidence that contradicted everything he said, even though the only thing that would have saved our marriage was for him to tell me the truth right from the start. (Though actually as it turned out I wouldn't have married him if he had told me the truth about himself).
What happened:
Broke the news to me that he had had a fling with some trollop he had met in a chatroom and insisted she wasn't a prostitute. He emphasised this point.
Something made me prick up my ears and pay attention to this insistence. I now see it as an effort to emphasise that he was in his own eyes a person who had standards (he had to look good in his own eyes) and also to obliquely emphasise that he had been carrying on with a woman. In other words, it was something he needed to tell himself, and at the same time a deliberate effort to prevent me from getting at what I suspect was the real truth.
They met in a hotel and went to her room where she started to give him a bj but he was stricken by shame and remorse before he finished the deed and he fled from her room.
I was 
. He had never let me give him a bj as apparently he didn't like that. When he was upset with me at a later date for not getting over myself fast enough and getting back into wife mode he claimed they had met in a corridor behind a bar and that he had not in fact gone to her room. Denied ever saying he had fled from her room, in her hotel.
Was in the chatroom in the first place discussing legal business with a client.
I was because legal business is by nature confidential and he was always very pompous about his professional ethics and other things that he considered sacred, including never even telling me who he had voted for.
Urged me to get a therapist or counsellor or confessor -- he had been talking with a priest for a year, since the incident, and really, really urged me to find a good confessor because it had done him a world of good.
I was at this 'I'm all right with god' baloney and found it deeply repellent. I also found utterly repellent the concomittent idea he strongly presented to me during that day that this was a matter between him and god primarily.
He had told me because although he had been told by the priest and by his parents, whom he had told immediately after this fling had allegedly happened, that he must never tell me, and just be a better husband as long as he lived, he could not live without my forgiveness.
Oh the utter humiliation that I felt when he told me that. I felt myself cringing and my cheeks burning and a wave of complete shame passed over me. I had spent Easter in the exILs' house and they had never even given me a hint. I know his mother and I know her mouth and I know that every single person who sat down and chatted with me or ate a meal with me had known what he had done or had allegedly done and there I was like a bloody fool, the last one to know. Telling me was utter selfishness on his part. Telling anyone was utter selfishness on his part. I still have no idea what he had told them though, or when. I have only his word that he told them right there and only his word that he told them what he had told me. He may have told them something completely different, even that he had consorted with a prostitute.
He phoned his pet priest a few hours after he had told me, when I was sitting on the couch in a state of shock and refusing to let him hold my hand, and told the priest he had told me, implying to the priest and to me listening in that the priest and I had both heard the same story, and added that I was upset because she is so sensitive -- his words.
Bloody hell. This man had not let my alleged 'sensitivity' inhibit him from calling me a bitch and a slob and a few other choice names over the years, nor had it held him back from threatening me with physical violence or carrying out his threats, or from his constant criticism daily, soul destroying criticism of me on matters ranging from baby weight, to dust, to how I worked in the kitchen cooking him his dinner (it was unacceptable that I would take out ingredients to have them ready and then not put them back until the meal was ready), to toys on the floor when he got home in the evening, to 'benign neglect' of the children, to what I had packed for the family for holidays. He had ground me down to a shadow of my former self over the years with his verbal abuse and the financial chaos we lived in due to his halfarsed pursuit of his dream of having his own legal practice, and now he was presenting himself as Mr Desperately Concerned Loving Husband who was delicately aware of his beloved wife's 'sensitivity' to this priest over the phone. I really got a very clear idea of who he was when I overheard that phone conversation.
I asked him for details: What was her name, what did she look like, what hotel was it; he shook his head and told me I didn't want to know. He told me to slap him instead. Again he restated the idea that it was a sin primarily and not a relationship matter.
I told him I didn't want to touch him and that if I did attempt a violent act it would be to stab him to death. He point blank refused to answer even the most basic questions I asked that same day or ever afterwards. I saw in this his unshakeable grandiosity, related closely to his religiosity.
Well it turned out that he had developed a rash, and had an appointment with a dermatologist a few days from the date he had told me, and over the course of the nest few months it emerged that he had been tested for HIV during the period between the alleged fling and the revelation. He said seven tests and then he said five tests. The dermatologist sent him home with some cream for his rash. It was a shaving-related rash -- he had taken to shaving himself all over, head to toe. exH is a hypochondriac on top of everything else and was sure he had AIDS.
That was just the start. After a continuous trickle of evidence on the internet that exH really liked porn and had joined hookup sites and dating sites, interspersed with doomed attempts at counselling, confessions by exH when I confronted him with specific items I had found but no volunteering of information or admissions on his part when I withheld information I had discovered, I came upon gay porn and realised that all the dating and hookup sites offered the opportunity to meet either men or women. Piecing it all together I began to suspect that exH had withheld some vital information from me right from the start.
Everything made sense in light of that stomach churning discovery, from his aversion to sex (sex with me anyway), to his hero worship of every older man he had ever worked for (the porn I found featured 'bears' and 'daddies'), to the body shaving, the depression and constant anger that lurked right under the surface, to his taste in clothing and his addiction to running and maintaining an ideal weight (I had wondered if he was bulimic but had told myself he was just keeping fit and who can argue with keeping fit). I never confronted him about the gay porn I found and he never told me anything about it. I realised that I would never get the truth out of him.
It took me years to stop obsessing and trying to dig out details from the computer and years to get through the grief and the guilt. Grief because I felt I had had my life stolen from me, and guilt that I had brought children into our horrible marriage while under the thrall of optimism that I could make things better. There was anger too, because I had been a sahm and had five children to think of, the youngest aged one when he broke his devastating news to me and the oldest 12, and how do you find a job and restart your life when your skills are rusty and you will need to provide childcare for children aged 1, 4, 7, 9 and 12? How will the children cope with divorce and losing their home? How could he have been so far distanced from our lives with our children that he could have thrown us all into the hell he threw us all into? The answer came to me as I read and read and read, that he was the sort of man who could only count as far as one, who genuinely felt that the world revolved around him, and that he was too far gone in his illusions to even try to hide this basic and horrifically ugly truth about himself while guarding the secret truth that he thought was the only thing that mattered.
The books I read described him to a tee. I was gobsmacked that he had behaved exactly to form and that even some of the things he said could have been predicted. There are people walking around in this world who lack some basic elements in their makeup and nobody and nothing can fix them.