Was your ex unrecognisqble by the end?

[BlastedPimples]

I am often struck that I simply do not know my stbxh at all and I find it frightening that I have to deal with this person for co-parenting.

We meet in 2001. Married in 2004. In 2013, he stated to change. Had hysterics a lot and I later found out an affair.

From 2015-2019, he was ok again but never quite the same. Relatively normal. Then absolutely went off piste from 2019 onwards. Screaming abuse, at least three affairs that I have since found about and he pissed away hundreds of thousands of pounds from the sale of our house. We split in Jan 2023 after he was violent. And I found out about his extensive adultery.

I just do not know who he is. The person I married is long dead. I am just amazed at the extent of the change. Or maybe the very slow revealing of his true character. I am afraid of him.

I mean, people say why did you marry him if he was abusive but my stbxh showed nothing of this. Nothing. Was attentive. Kind. Generous. Overly so perhaps.

Anyone experience this type of transformation throughout a long marriage?

Yes. My ex is unrecognisable from the man I first knew.

The bit after discard is hoovering
Not fully letting go
The reason? Narcissistic supply. If you are still around you can still provide it in some shape or form.
Even if there is an OW around - also providing narcissistic supply
There can never be enough supply for a narc

Like a PP said - watch Dr Ramani on youtube
or she has just had a new book come out

It's the shock when you finally see the monster they've been hiding. I remember it well. Staring at him wondering who the hell he was. I felt sick.

And once he'd stopped any sort of pretence, he really scared me. I didn't know what he was capable of. I thought he might kill me once or twice.

I have managed to get to a stage 10 years later where we can chat for sake or our child. Bu I have to always remember the monster is in there. He comes out now and again still. It doesn't take my breath away like it used to.

He looked me in the eye and told me he never cheated. A month later admitted he'd had prostitues in our bed.

He used to always call me a pet name, which I didn't like especially but it was him so just accepted it. I later realised it's same name he calls every woman. We're just filling a role. Not quite a whole person.

You do recover but I don't think it leaves you. It does take time to find and trust yourself again.

Yes, he changed completely but we met very young (17 &18). Seemed loving and kind at first, compassionate with family and friends and animals, there were flashes of selfishness but explained away by him with reasons and excuses.

We then moved away from family and friends and he became a bit worse. We had one dc by this time and he was earning a bit more and often worked late and weekends for his career so I despite still working ft was mostly responsible for all housework and our dc but I thought we were both respectively working harm for a joint end goal.

We then moved areas again for his promotion. At the start still earned proportionally around the same but I had gone pt when we had our second DC and he then became a much higher earner and that in his eyes meant he could do whatever he wanted. That was really when his true character seemed to come through though with hindsight the fundamental flaws were always there but it was definitely a case of being a boiled frog.

It came out when I was stuck distant from family and financially dependent that he'd cheated several times with ONS and then he had an affair with one of his employees. He asked for a temporary separation and by that time I was so ready to be done with the relationship. He actually said one day in an argument during our divorce that he'd never intended it to be permanent. He had actually thought he could go off shag the OW for a bit then come back to his life.

He was always all about making people think he was a nice guy but by the end he was horrible controlling and financially abusive tome and the DC. He fought tooth and nail during the divorce and it took 5 years mostly because despite us having been together for 27 years by that time and having been pretty much even contributors for the first 12 years or so and it was only through me shouldering most of the family and household stuff which allowed his career to progress he didn't think I should get half of the joint assets. I did in the end but it was a fight I shouldn't have had to have.

He has almost no relationship with our youngest dc now and none at all with the older one. I'd have never have thought when I met him that he'd end up the bitter angry and deeply unhappy man he's turned out to be.

Yes I fell in love with a sober, non-smoking, Christian man. I divorced an alcoholic, vaping (and then smoking) atheist.
I was love bombed. We married fairly quickly. In retrospect, I missed red flags because I was buying in to the fairy tale. I learned the hard way. I genuinely think every day ‘I’m so glad we split up’. I’m with someone else now but 18 months in we are in no rush to move beyond dating.

ExH turned into a man none of us now recognise (after 30 years of marriage). I call him Jekyll and Hyde.

Based on your concerns about co-parenting, depending on your DCs ages I would get child care arrangements formalised by court order and consider parallel parenting so you don't have to interact with him. Use the DCs schools as the drop off and pick up points.

My story is very similar to so many of you on this thread. I didn't know what a healthy relationship looked like so I didn't see any flags let alone recognise that they were red. Even when he did something to me that I really didn't think was okay, I didn't do anything about it because I loved him already and didn't know how to deal with it.

We were married very quickly and moved far away from all my friends and family. Many things happened over many years but it was the last ten years of our marriage, when he started his other serious relationship, that his behaviour became more overt. And by that time I had discovered MN and started to realise that he was abusive. A combination of me trying to enforce boundaries and him becoming more unstable lead to an absolute headfuck of a time for me.

When he eventually left ("Do you want me to leave?" - he still couldn't even take responsibility for leaving) the help I had from Women's Aid and being able to look at whatever I needed to on the computer (now that I knew it was safe to do so), taught me that all of his behaviour, from the very start, was by the narcissist's/abuser's handbook. That was when I became afraid of him, when I had the clarity to see his behaviour for what it was and I realised what I'd been enduring.

One of the questions Rape Crisis asks when you sign up with them for help is "Do you have fibromyalgia?". It's no coincidence that so many abused women have so many health problems, even if the abuse hasn't been physical.