No one is going to like my answer to your question, Shining Star.
My story is pretty much summed up in my post signature, but here's the basics: BD March 2015, he had been blowing all our money on get rich quick schemes for months, left in July 2015, finally moved 1100 miles to live with OW in June 2016, her friend got him an entry level government job, he's absolutely thrived and built his way up since then. Lives with OW (and her kids part time) in a cute rented house, has made lots of new friends, is seen as a respected member of his new community. No one knows they were an affair and everyone thinks we are divorced. He would communicate with me intermittently but after I got cancer in June 2017 he stopped all communication and at some point changed his phone number.
Took me 10 months to get him to even send me his financial paperwork to get legal process started in 2016. He paid me the agreed upon support for 2 months in 2016 and then just stopped paying me and walked away from all of his debt in fall 2016. I haven't gotten a dime of support since Oct 2016. He has not made a single payment on his massive debt since then, including a $30,000 loan that somehow has never been sent to collections.
Even with that unpaid loan and a few small collections accounts on his credit report, his credit score has actually gone up like 100 points in the past few months.
He just keeps swan diving into piles of sh!t and coming out covered in gold. No consequences for his supremely despicable behavior.
Anyway, to answer your questions of why do they get to have success and do all of them come through - I think the following:
1. They get to have success and no consequences because karma doesn't really exist and unfortunately, people who are willing to screw over innocent people to get what they want very often get what they want.
2. Not all of them come through and I truly believe that they only look at themselves if/when their new life fails...and even then, they either don't look at themselves or they just have pity parties. Nah's exH is a prime example of an MLCer who saw a colossal fall in wealth and status and quality of life, and yet still marches on, married his mistake and still unable to admit that nothing he did made him "happy."
I think they don't look at themselves unless something adversely affects them enough. The consequences have to be so great that they are forced to acknowledge that they hurt people. As long as they are getting what they want or at least not completely failing or losing too much, they just keep on going without ever thinking about what they've done.
Even if we look at the relatively small sample of reconciliation/return stories we have, in almost every case, the MLCer returns because they lost something. The OP cheated on them/dumped them, or in some cases the OP died. They had nowhere else to live. They're out of money.
After BD, I signed up for pretty much ever MLC forum I could find. On another forum very recently, not one but two LBSs confessed that the 30-year marriages they are standing for started as affairs.
I'll be honest, that shook me and really brought reality home for me. One of the LBSs said her H is in an affair now with an OW and it has caused him to think about what they did to his first wife.
30 years later. It took him 30 years to face it.
She wrote that she started hanging around him and his wife and then the affair started, and when her H presented his first wife with D papers, she sobbed and begged him not to divorce her.
This LBS had been posting for a long time before making this admission, and like most LBSs, she described her 30-year marriage as very happy until BD. So they had 30 great years in which neither this LBS nor her MLC H thought about his first wife. Her H was a cheater and she was an OW and they didn't spent 30 years consumed with guilt. They got married and built a great life together.
She wrote that she was crying while typing her confession because she had caused the first wife such great pain. But she never mentioned wanting to make amends, she only mentioned wanting God to forgive her for the hurt she caused. She never addressed the contradiction that she's standing and prays to God to restore her marriage because she loves her H and doesn't want a divorce, but his first wife loved him and didn't want a divorce either and God didn't restore her marriage.
I read her story and just felt like my eyes were opened even more to the stark reality: People don't feel guilt as long as things are going well, when they are getting what they want.
I don't think my H is lying awake every night wracked with guilt. I don't think he thinks of me every day. I think when confronted with a reminder of me, he feels a twinge of guilt that can quickly be squashed. When forced to interact with me, like when the dog died in July, he feels guilt in the moment, but then disappears again and the guilt once again sinks back down somewhere deep inside of him where it won't come out full force unless and until some day in the future when he faces a loss of something important to him. One day IF he is faced with something overwhelmingly painful, something that hurts
him, only then will he truly face the full force of his guilt.
Anyone else have a vanisher? 19
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