Not sure if I´m welcome here since I´m German and have no kids, but please allow me this one statement: I found this site y complete fluke ... and it´s been the biggest eyeopener of my entire life! So much so, that I spent the last 12 hours or so reading on this site and others about what I had sensed all along, yet had no name for it:EA! THANK YOU, I might not be crazy after all, and I´m still shaking and smiling and crying all at once about this revelation.
I try to be as short as I can:
I was studying Musical in Vienna 18 years ago when I was asked to join a group of young people who planed to create a theatre festival. Well, it was in the summer hols, my first real acting job, so I said yes. I travelled to this small town in Bavaria - and fell in love. With the guy who directed the play, seven years older zhan me, charming, sensitive, loved by everyone. He had a girlfriend, but that didn´t scare me off - unfortunately.
He fell in "love" with me, too, we ended up having an affair. Well, the affair didn´t end, and neither did his relationship. I knew this wasn´t right, but I just couldn´t help it. So he had his GF, he had me, constantly told me that he loved me, yet he got a child with his GF and started even more affairs simultaneously because I "had opened the doors for him", he said. I felt terrile but I kept coming back. I forgot my friends and threw my own career in Vienna over board.
Then he failed me miserably when my sister was killed whom I had loved like an old child. I was so traumatised that I ended up in rehab for catastrophic alcohol abuse. No word or sign from him. Resumed seeing me regularly again purely for sex but waited for more than a year before he offeres me another job to see if I was "safe". I finally became his GF when his former one decided to leave him. Things got even worse. He relied on me for everything, sexually, jobwise, being his best friend. (He had managed to scare away everyone of the group who started out with him. All their own fault, obviously!)
The festival was gaining some reputtation, I stood firmly beside him - but no rewards. On the contrary: I thougt I was going crazy. Verbal abuse, mind-numbing insults, huge fights that came out of nowhere but which were all my fault. I could´t talk to anyone because everybody adored him, nobody had ever seen him like this, noone would have believed me.
Finally i became so desperate that I decided to tape one of our fights via dictaphone, 4hours of his crazy yelling and me trying to bring reason into it. I just wanted to prove to myself the next morning that I did not make it up as he used to insist. He detected the diphone ... and went berserk! Pried it out of my hands and smashed it to pieces with a huge hammer with a phisical violence I had never, ever seen before.
That was it. I HAD to go now! HAD to, if I wanted to maintain an ounce of self-respect! ... But I didn´t. By then (summer 2011), I had become completely dependent on my job there. I was not married, I had no rights, I had invested 17 years in this "thing" without any safetynet.
HE on the other hand knew that I´d never be able to forgive him, that it was over. And he acted: called a former affair of his who happende to be single and willing (and French, the b*h). Well, and she became his new GF. Quasi overnight. Without so much as a short wink. I was left to find that out for myself. After 18 years he preferes not to talk about the 18 years, the end of them, nor his new relationship. I supposed to smile, act nicely and do may job - as long as he has the grace to let me do it.
I tell you, I was completely and utterly in ruins - until last night.
I know it´s difficult with kids in the game, but for those of you who expressed feeling guilty because of FW: DON`T! Just GO! For believe you me: most of these FWs won´t hesitate 1sec if a chance presents itself. New victim, new game! GOOOO!
Forgive for the überlong post, won´t happen again! THANK YOU, STAY STRONG!!! love