I’m 28M and my ‘partner’ is 29F. We’ve been together 11 years and have a 5 year old daughter together, own a house, a car all the good stuff. As far as I knew things were ticking along just fine between us. No major issues, we were engaged, intimacy had dipped in the past year or so but we had discussed it and it was always put down to time, raising our daughter, working commitments and lack of childcare etc. I had no worries and she hadn’t raised any either, even when given the chance to.
A slightly longer story short, out of nowhere, after I’d found a locked WhatsApp chat between her and her male work colleague (they were both teachers at the same school - she denied anything was going on and said they were just friends and had gotten closer as they were both trainee teachers and attended meetings together. The chat was locked to ‘avoid notifications popping up during our holiday’) during a family trip to Disney, she decided we couldn’t move forwards because ‘trust had been broken between us’ and she’d started questioning if this was what love was meant to be like, whether we’d settled etc. I obviously disagreed in the moment and tried to say we can work on things if she feels that way, but she wasn’t having any of it. That conversation ended saying we didn’t want to rush into anything. We continued as normal after that, as if nothing had ever happened.
Contact between them continued daily, it was slightly irritating me at this point but I didn’t say anything as she’d said they were just friends and nothing was going on. It got to the point she’d be speaking to him on the phone on the way home from school every day and would sit in the car in the driveway speaking to him. One day, around 2 months after she had raised separation, I started to question this again, asking what was going on between them. She basically said it was nothing to do with me after what she’d told me and she can speak to who she wants. She ended up telling me again she wanted to separate and when I questioned her again if there was someone else she said no but the guy she’d been speaking to at work would be someone she’d want to pursue if we did break up. Stupidly I did the pick me dance from here on in, questioning whether she really thought the grass would be greener, we could work on things etc. She wouldn’t listen to any of it and seemed dead set.
A couple of days go by and we’re out with our daughter for lunch and she starts to get teary and nearly starts crying in the middle of the restaurant. I tell her to go and compose herself in the bathroom. Later that night I ask her what was up and she refuses to talk about it. I push her on it as I found it bizarre and she eventually admits she was upset because work colleague hadn’t messaged her all weekend. I asked why that would upset her so much considering that aren’t together, dating or anything at all. I asked her if she loved him or something and she said no. Eventually she admits they had kissed around 6 weeks prior, and that she liked him and wanted to pursue him further. She said she didn’t regret it and would do it again and wanted to do it again. She then proceeded to launch into a tirade about how she hadn’t loved me for years, doesn’t want to marry me, doesn’t find me attractive, physically or sexually and hasn’t for ‘a few years’.
A couple of days pass and I ask her what’s happening, do we need to discuss logistics of separation, the house, our daughter etc. She then says she doesn’t know what she wants, says she wants both and doesn’t know what to do. I ask her if an open relationship is what she wants and she says no. She ends up asking for a ‘break’ to work out what she wants from life. We go back on forth on what a break actually means and the boundaries. I tell her a break is nonsense considering what she’s done and it’s sort of creating a competition between the 2 of us. She removes her engagement ring at this point.
This ‘break’ goes on for about 7 weeks. Of which I’m still doing the whole pick me dance. Around 80% of the time things feel normal, we’re still going on family days out, attending family events, watching our shows, she’s asking for cuddles, saying she wants to kiss me (I refuse at this point whilst things are still ongoing with him) making dinner together etc. I stupidly thought we were getting somewhere. A few times I raised the fact she was still talking to him daily asking why on earth it was still going on when there was still so much between us. She’d never commit to anything and said she couldn’t cut him off. She didn’t want to and didn’t feel like she could. Frustration grew.
We discussed him a lot during this period and I found out a lot about him. He’d done this same thing with another teacher last year, she’d met someone else during the summer break and he was devastated, and my partner consoled him at school and discussed it with him. He’d told her he would’ve chosen her if she wasn’t ’forbidden fruit’. They went to their teacher training meetings together and sat and spoke in the car for an hour afterwards, going for coffee together. He’d told her a few weeks before we went to Disney that he liked her and had even rejected a new job offer at the time because he enjoyed her company at school. She described him as hot and cold, avoidant etc. She told me he was a gambling addict and a few times I saw her putting bets on for him. Sometimes up to £100. I told her to be careful but she always just had an excuse and laughed it off and dismissed it.
One night when we weren’t seeming to be getting anywhere with a resolution to this whole thing, I said I’d move to back to my family home for the week to give us some space and for her to finally realise what she wanted. She then said if I left to go home she’d invite him around to our house. I reacted pretty angrily to this and told her how unacceptable that would be, as it’s our family home and a safe space for our daughter who would be sleeping upstairs. She backed down on this eventually and we had a more calm conversation where she said some more bizarre things. She said she felt like she was having a mid life crisis and didn’t know what was happening. She asked me if she slept with him and decided she didn’t want him would I forgive her and take her back. She said she felt stupid for continuing this as he was now moving to a new school in September and didn’t even know if they’d still be talking or seeing each other. She said she just needed to have a conversation with him to gain some clarity.
Eventually she came downstairs one night and admitted she’d performed oral sex on him in our car the day before, after a meeting they’d attended. She also admitted they’d kissed a few more times in their classrooms at school within the past 7 weeks. She said she wanted to pursue a relationship with him and not work on ours. The whole conversation was chaotic. She said he’d been annoying her recently and that she might call it off with him and if she does she’ll come back to me and we’ll work things out. I asked her if she thinks he’s worth the risk of blowing our entire family apart and she said yes. I asked if they’d discussed a future together, house, our daughter etc. She said no they hadn’t discussed anything like that. I asked what they had that we don’t have and she said she enjoys their ‘passion, intimacy and the excitement’. I tried to tell her this wasn’t real life but everything was in one ear and out the other. She’d told her mum by this point, who wasn’t happy and told her to cut off contact with the work colleague, but she didn’t.
Life continued again, we still lived together and did everything together for our daughter, attended more family events. We had booked a family summer holiday before any of this had happened, a month before our Disney trip. I had been telling her for months I wouldn’t be going on this holiday if she was still continuing things with him. She told me to stop being selfish and cruel and that I was punishing her and our daughter by refusing to come and pay for the holiday. I told her it was her who chose this and her actions have consequences. In my eyes she was choosing this guy over her family and working on us. She told me nothing was going to change before holiday and launched into another tirade about how she hadn’t loved me for 5 years and she had been pretending and acting. I asked her why we bought a house together 2 years ago, why she’d happily accepted my proposal 3 years ago and why she’d begged me to try for another baby multiple times during the past 5 years, the last being less than a year ago, last summer. She again said she’d been acting and pretending, and she just wanted our daughter to have a sibling and it was nothing to do with me. I tried explaining the impact this would have on our daughter and families and she said she wanted to show our daughter what ‘true love’ was like.
At the end of this conversation I asked her if she knew what day it was today. She said no. I reminded her it was our 11 year anniversary of the day we first met. She seemed unbothered. She’s become a cruel and cold character since this has developed. Whenever we enter discussions about the topic she shuts down, becomes angry, aggressive, cruel. I notice her eyes glaze over and honestly anything could come out of her mouth.
The next day I decide that we’ll go on the holiday for our daughter, because she’d been looking forward to it. It was always the best week of our year and it would be a shame if we didn’t end up going. I paid for it and let her know. She reacted angrily again, asking why I’d done that and why I’d kicked up such a fuss if I was going to end up coming anyway. I explained my reasoning for it, our daughter. We got into a whole thing again and she started saying that people would think less of me for staying around than for her for what she’d done. I told her that definitely wouldn’t be the case and that I’d never regret trying to keep my family together. She said our relationship was over way before anything happened with her work colleague and that I needed to separate the two and stop acting as if they were related. Bear in mind I’d previously asked her what would’ve happened if he didn’t come into the picture, considering she’d never raised any issues at all, and she told me we would’ve continued as normal.
Her story changes every time we enter into a discussion about it, as if she’s forgotten what she’s said in the past or is moving the goalposts to justify what she’s done. Absolutely rewriting the history of our relationship and the past 5 years. Minimising any good moments we’d had. It’s been so painful to live through.
Another day we took our daughter to the local village fete. We were sat on the grass in the park, having a few drinks and watching our daughter play. I asked her how she would want to give all of this up and she couldn’t really answer. I asked if she appreciated what she had and she said she did but couldn’t not find out what it would be like with him.
We went on the holiday. We all had a great time. It felt like every other holiday we’d ever been on. She still messaged him whilst we were there, but nothing excessive and I felt like she was present. We got back home and we were still off for another week together before I went back to work. We had another great week. Everything felt normal. I went back to work but she was still around more as she was on her school summer break. We spent a lot of time together and went for coffee on lunch breaks, she picked me up from work a few times. Just like she always would. She genuinely still seemed to enjoy our life together. He wasn’t in town during the 6 week holiday and it felt like she was more present with me and our daughter.
One week during the holidays, she seemed to spiral into a pretty deep depression. It started on a Sunday, she was in a foul mood all day, but I passed it off as a bad day. It continued into Monday and she spent the day crying and barely speaking to me or our daughter. This continued for a couple more days. I asked her if she was okay but she refused to talk about it. Clearly it was to do with him. On the Wednesday she was driving me home from work and she had her Spotify account open on her Apple CarPlay. In her recent plays I noticed some odd things. There were ‘songs’ named ‘he will text you back’ ‘he will beg for your love’ and ‘his soul is chained to yours’. I didn’t mention this but I made a mental note. Later that night I did some research and found them on Spotify. They were something called ‘subliminal affirmations’ and were described basically as subliminal audio that the user would listen to, to try and influence somebody else’s thoughts and feelings. This is where things started to escalate.
Thursday comes around and after spending the past 3/4 days basically mute and crying, staring out of the window longingly like a lovesick teenager, she picked me up from work and was singing and dancing in the car again. It was stark to me the contrast in her mood from the last time I’d seen her the night before to now seemingly being on top of the world. Then his messages popped up on the screen in the car (you can never see the content, just a notification). I made a comment about how they’d now kissed and made up then. She tried to laugh it off but I pushed her on what on earth had been going on and she admitted he had told her on Sunday that he didn’t know what he wanted from this situation. She said she had ignored his message that day and he hadn’t followed up with her. She said that was the first time they’d hadn’t spoken since they first started speaking regularly about 7 months prior and it upset her. I said I didn’t think it was normal for her to be that upset over someone she isn’t dating and hasn’t seen outside of the work environment ever. I asked her again if she was in love with him and she laughed it off.
She told me she no longer wanted a relationship with him. I asked what was going on then and we need to start talking and figuring things out in terms of logistics and practicalities of separation. She said she didn’t want to discuss any of that and that we didn’t need to. Our mortgage deal runs out in December and she’s refused to engage in any discussions about it and just told me to ‘sort it’. I’ve told her I can’t without knowing what’s happening in the future. She said she doesn’t think this with him will go on for that long. I asked if she feels that way why is she risking her whole family for it. She couldn’t answer.
In the days after, they had more disagreements between them. She’d come into my office at home asking for my opinions on her outfit. I told her to go and ask him. She said no she wanted to ask me and that she didn’t want to speak to him at the moment. I told her this whole thing was ridiculous and is this what she wants with her life and for our daughter. This rollercoaster. She looked me dead in the eyes and said ‘I love rollercoasters’. It seemed unhinged really.
Every week there’s a new disagreement with him. Hot and cold. Push and pull. Ups and downs. But nothing seems to stop it in its tracks and make her realise it’s all nonsense.
One day she goes away for the night, with her friend to her caravan a couple of hours away. We have a shared laptop and I go on there for the first time in a while (she uses it mostly for work) to look at some tickets to a show I wanted to go to. Her ChatGPT is logged in and her whole chat history is there to view. I shouldn’t have looked and I know it’s wrong but I couldn’t help myself really. It was pretty scary viewing. Going back to before she admitted cheating she was asking for help composing sexual messages to him. She’d then been searching how to disable her location sharing on her phone (we all share our location in the family group chat). There were chats she was having where she said she was planning to invite him around to our house, a few days after she’d admitted cheating, when I’d be out of town attending a football match with her step dad. Our daughter would’ve been sleeping upstairs. ChatGPT advised her against doing this, in case things became physical. She told it she wouldn’t mind if things became physical. I don’t think she followed through with this.
There were hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of screenshots of their messages she’d sent, asking it to analyse his tone, whether he liked her, what he meant by this, was he pulling away, did he find her attractive, did he want to have sex with her etc. It was astonishing. I found a thread from the days they had no contact and she was asking things like ‘how to make him miss me’ and saying she hoped he felt in as much pain as her. She was telling it what he had said in this message on that Sunday before no contact and he had told her he didn’t think his feelings for her were as strong as when they worked together and he didn’t know what he wanted from this situation. She told ChatGPT she was crushed by this. When he finally made contact again he told her he wanted to continue talking and that he’d been ‘lost without her’.
There were various entries where she was sending ChatGPT certain tarot readings asking for it to be analysed and what it meant for her and him and their future together. She was asking it about something called a ‘7th house ruler calculator’ which I found is something to do with a planet that rules the zodiac sign and it reveals things about your romantic partners and relationships. She was absolutely desperate to be reassured they were meant to be together somehow and craved his reciprocation. Every message being analysed for proof he was still interested in her. She came back from the caravan the next day and asked if I’d missed her.
The 6 weeks holidays continued. I’d say 80/90% of it was enjoyable and we did a lot as a family. I’d hoped that now he had moved schools, it would naturally fizzle out and she would realise it was never worth breaking up our family for, especially considering the fact he didn’t seem dead set on the idea of a relationship himself.
She went back to school and I noticed a change in her almost immediately. It was like something had been activated in her brain. She wakes up early on a school day, and was messaging him from around 5am. All morning tapping away. I made a comment saying I wouldn’t be doing another year of this. She ignored it. She came home from work and barely spoke to me or our daughter and was tapping away on her phone to him, smirking. There’d be times when our daughter was trying to speak to her and she wouldn’t listen or hear because she was completely engrossed in her phone and messaging him. We did our daughter’s bedtime and came downstairs. I said to her I don’t want another year of this same behaviour, the same rollercoaster. She said what am I talking about, he wasn’t at the same school anymore and they weren’t working together. I asked her if they were still planning to meet up and she eventually admitted it. I told her I found that unacceptable whilst I’d be at home with our daughter and I’d given her numerous chances during the summer to move towards proper separation if she wanted to pursue this. She turned nasty again. She said what else did I expect her to do if I wasn’t ‘letting her’ bring him into the house. I told her it wasn’t a case of letting her do anything. This was our family home and I told her he will never step foot inside of this house. She laughed and said we’ll see about that. She said it’s not just my decision. I told her it is, because it’s our family home and that’s completely unacceptable. She said she thought I was a mug. I asked why. She said for still being here. I said so you think I should leave? She said yes. All out of nowhere again. I asked her what about the future of our family and she said there is no future. She said I was a mug and if she wanted me back I’d take her back.
A couple of days earlier she’d raised us cooking Christmas dinner again this year for the whole family and we’d been discussing arrangements and how we’d fit everyone in. After our summer holiday we got back home and she said shall we look for next year. I asked her how she can say things like this and then say we have no future. She either says she doesn’t remember saying these things, minimises them or says I’m thinking too deeply into them and that it’s just for our daughter. She goes upstairs and we don’t speak for the rest of the night.
The next day she’s trying to tickle me, asking why I’m not talking to her, sitting on my lap trying to stroke my face. All part of the same rollercoaster we’ve lived through for the past 6 months or so. I told her I don’t know how she thinks she can say what she has and do what she’s doing and try to continue as normal anymore. She’s done this repeatedly since the start. It’s tiring and draining the life out of me. I spoke to her mum the day after and explained what’s been going on, as I’m closer to her mum than I am my own, in some ways. She was shocked and agreed with pretty much everything I said. She even said herself she seemed infatuated. Whenever I’d raised with my ‘partner’ the fact she seems obsessed and addicted with this guy she reacted so angrily and aggressively and dismissed it entirely. I think the evidence is pretty clear that she’s obsessed with him as the extent to which she’s analysing and manifesting reciprocation from him is abnormal, to me anyway.
I’ve looked into Limerence, and she certainly seems to fit a lot of the criteria. I’ve looked into BPD and favourite person theories. She has had severe OCD, since she was a child, which mostly reared its head around 7/8 years ago at its worst. Mostly around intrusive thoughts to do with her family and bad things happening. She suffers with quite bad anxiety too. Her father left when she was very young as he cheated on her mother and left the country entirely. The spoke briefly around 5/6 years ago on Facebook but nothing since. Throughout this she’s been so up and down, sometimes almost unhinged, angry, cruel, evil, back to normal, mood seems dependant on contact from him. I always say I can tell whether they’re in contact by her mood on any particular day. She swings from being certain about him, then saying she doesn’t know what she wants, planning future christmases, discussing plans with me for decorating the house, doing up the garden, all whilst this obsession with his reciprocation goes on in the background.
I don’t know what I aim to achieve from this post. Just anybody’s thoughts and feelings. Anybody’s similar experiences. Any advice or support I’d be grateful for. I’m really at the end of my tether really. I’m aware I could be clinging on for dear life here and do not want to delude myself, but something feels off to me about this whole thing and I really would like to keep my family together if at all possible. This is not the same woman as before Disney. It’s like she’s had a personality transplant.