My DH really did love his ex, but he really was gullible and believed her when she told him she was on BC and had no clue how she got pregnant. He really did believe her when she swore up and down she never cheated on him, even though all of his friends knew it and hid it from him.

I admit I had nothing but lust for my ex, once that wore off I realized that no amount of lust was going to stop him from abusing me or our child so I left.

I know DH loved BM. They were HS sweethearts. I’m fine with that.

I also know that at some point the love faded but that he stayed because that’s how he was raised. You are married, you made a commitment and you stay married. If you are lucky you’ll fall in love with them again, if not you live with the person and try to get along.

Now, he wonders how he could have ever loved her at all. When he looks back on their life together he’s embarrassed at what he put up with. It’s easy to say he didn’t love her now because we all know hindsight is 20/20.

My husband has never said those things BUT I believe they are possible because I myself was in a long-term relationship with a guy I never really had any feelings for. I guess I stuck around because it was convenient, easier than changing my circumstances, and he was nice after a string of jerks. But eventually he read into my feelings that while I liked him, I never really loved him and he broke up with me. Would I have married him if he didn’t eventually call us quits? Maybe. I’m not a huge fan of change and like my comfort zone. Eventually it may have created problems between us the longer we were married though

BM1 was a one night stand. Marriage because he grew up in seriously religious family. His mom has even told me all about it. BM was 16 he was 18. Yep... cornfields and booze. BM also lied about her age... so she has always been classy.

Marriage was over within 2 months of SS being born. BM never had custody.

BM2... he tired, he loved her. It is over now and she is a giant b!tch and I have witnessed it all 1st hand for the last almost 3 years.

DH constantly says that Medusa was a different person back then. I have no idea about that because I only met her once she became a see you next Tuesday.

What I do know is that Asshat was a different person when we were married, too. I was also a different person so I am sure Asshat would say that about me, too.

While I detest his very being these days, there was a time when I loved Asshat very deeply. It only makes sense to me that others feel the same way about their former spouses, too.

For what it's worth, both Medusa and Asshat cheated, and that was the end of the marriage for me the first time it happened. For DH, he believed her when she said it wouldn't happen again. When it did happen again, he left.

I stayed married to BM, because of the child... thankfully, while my DH was dumb AF to put his unwrapped junk in some white trash funk... he NEVER married them. Good Lort I can't even imagine!

I never loved her, she got pregnant without me knowing. (She said she's on BC)... DH does use this excuse. He says that BM2 said she was on BC but they hadn't been dating that long when she got pregnant, so he's an idiot for falling for that crap from someone he barely knew and also someone he met at the jail when he was a CO and she was there visiting some relative or something. DUH!

She was a one night stand and got pregnant the first time thus I wanted to do the honorable thing and I married her, says the man who has 2 children with her. this one always cracks me up. why anyone would marry a person they didn't love and then continue to have enough sex with that person, (that they supposedly don't love) to create MORE children. :?

My DH has never tried to excuse his actions. He freely admits that he was a dumb ass young 20 something who didn't think about the consequences of his actions... and he paid dearly for it.

DH and BM were dating, she got pregnant(?), they got married, she had miscarriage and then OSD was born, then SS and so on...

I know that DH loved BM. And once they were raising a family and committed that is what his priority was. He didn't know any different. He just knew he had a family and that this is what you did. He grew up in a very shitty home environment himself so he wasn't aware of what a healthy relationship looked liked. I don't think that DH was the best husband to BM either. He was young, immature and in the street life.

They broke up a lot and he would leave and come back and it would go on and on for MANY years. It was partly because they had 4 kids and it was easier for them and it was comfortable.

It wasn't until DH moved to our state now that he started to get clearer eyes. BM initially wasn't supposed to come, but she and the skids did eventually and they tried to make a go of it again and again it didn't work out. However now they were in a new state and place and had new people and circumstances around to make them finally see that they didn't need to stay married and then they finally got a divorce.

SO never said any of those. He dipped with no wrap, got pregnant, moved in together but didn't get married until SS19 was 4. She was heavy into partying so him and his mother raised SS19. DBDB then wanted a divorce but he really wanted it to work. She thought that having SS15 would make her love SO. It only lasted 6 months and she wanted divorce. She told him she never loved him, her mother and brothers told him she never loved him and only stayed because of SS19.

He was never unaware of the type of person she was and she has only gotten more selfish and dramatic over the years. He is one that would have stayed forever and faithful because of his boys.

SO was a young dumb high schooler when he got BM pregnant with the first. He lusted for her, had sex, didn’t use protection, and didn’t think it could happen to him so the first was a surprise we’ll say.

When he found out he “did the right thing” and married her because he didn’t want his kid to grow up without a father like he did. He joined the military and she cheated A LOT but like most idiots he thought having a second would make it better. They had made sure to use precautions to not have another so the second was completely planned.

Even with her cheating a lot he has never questioned if the kids are his. He’s raised them as his from the moment they were born and though he could have gone for DNA a year ago he chose not to because they are his no matter what that says. That’s his choice and I respect it.

Throughout his marriage he basically was the work horse to try and make her happy while she did whatever she wanted. She was physically abusive and like I said cheated on him multiple times. She left him when the grass looked greener then tried multiple times to come running back because like I said he was the work horse.

Yes I believe he stayed with her for the kids because that’s what my mother did. I heard her say almost every other day that the second me and my sister were grown she would leave my dad… and that’s what she did.

Do I believe he never loved her? Love is too complicated. I believe he lusted then did what he could to make it work because like I said he didn’t want his kids to go without a father and where we live you “man up.”

I’ve been offered evidence to show she cheated multiple times and we still find her on all sorts of dating sites as well as having insiders telling us she’s apart of “swinger groups.” Though that’s not cheating it shows a lot about her in my mind. She also can’t keep a partner for more than a handful of months at the best.

He didn’t ask for a divorce. He never wanted one. My partner was so beat down that he really did feel he wasn’t worth anything. Thankfully his military life insurance expired recently because he flat out told me after she kicked him out he thought about “offing” himself for the kids to get the money.

My partner will admit what he did wrong in his marriage. He’s not tried to absolve himself of his part. Basically his biggest crime was he allowed it.

My DH never says any of those things. He was never married to BM. She did cheat on him a few times, but he knew about it and stayed with her. His parents told him that he was doing the right thing by looking the other way.

The only thing he ever says where I actually laugh and call him out is when someone references his relationship with her and he will shudder and say she is disgusting. I always respond, well you have two kids so you must not have found her too disgusting.

But in all honesty, he will tell me that he did care about her back then and that he really didn't have any standards so its his own fault that he ended up dealing with the nightmare that is BM. I think his disgust with BM started after they were living together and he was working 12+ hours a day and coming home to his kids not being fed and the house being destroyed. I tend to believe him on this, as BM's last house was condemned and SD12 tells us that she only eats 1 meal a day at BM's house, usually after her SF gets home from work.

I think you should do a poll on ...How many of us look at our SOs/DHs and think ... Damn, no wonder BM divorced his crazy butt. lol

I don't believe those lines. I think the men who toss out those lies are simply saying what they think women want to hear.

DH says he doesn’t know if he really loved her or his idea of who she was. He did love her at one time, enough to ignore his family and friends telling him to run. If BM hadn’t threatened to divorce him and make sure he’d never see his kids again, DH would probably still be married to BM and enduring the verbal abuse. DH was raised the scapegoat and still sometimes feels like the world is resting on his shoulders and that he deserves all the bad sh*t thrown at him.

I think in most cases when people are trying to deny that they cared about the EX it's because they are embarrassed to admit it.

I know my DH cared for his EX's when he got into relationships with them... I know over time and experience that waned... I'm sure like most people he probably stayed in relationships longer than needed, but it's because we usually avoid conflict and put our heads in the sand a bit.

I think sometimes the people who say these things believe them. The trust issues they had in the past plus the dislike they have now combined make them think like this.

My dh calls bm a rebound. But he’s really not that kind of guy so I think how he feels now colors his memories of the past.

I don't think they loved each other but they made it work until BM got caught cheating. Their situation worked because DH paid the bills and got to see SD everyday. DH "suspected" the cheating and claims he hadn't touched her in quite awhile. I want to believe him but he has a high sex drive, so.. Hopefully BM denied him sex because she was spreading it around.

I can't get a solid answer about the pregnancy. They were 22ish and were party buddies. He "doesn't remember" if she lied about BC or if he was just too drunk to pull out. All he'll say is he was stupid and made a mistake. But SD was the best mistake he's made and there's no changing the past.

They never married (thank the Lord) and they weren't hanging out anymore when she called and said she was pregnant. He said her crazy didn't come out until after the pregnancy and they even stayed separated until she was about 7 months pregnant. BM didn't allow SD to have DH's last name. It's some weird tradition in her family for the women to keep her last name. She is also a diagnosed bipolar.

I know DH loved BM. They got married and even planned SS. But they changed, as people do, especially when they get together so young. And BM is an idiot and terrible mother, so they split when SS was a year old. DH says that he never loved her like he loves me though, I don't know if that's true but it's nice to think it is.

Now for me, I never did love my ex, like I should anyway. I wanted to fall passionately in love with him because he was a decent guy, a good friend and he kept pursuing me. We dated off and on, then I ended up pregnant. We were actually apart when I found out and stayed apart until a couple months before DD13 was born. I got scared of being a single mother, so we got back together because he still wanted to be with me and I was scared.

I had no intentions of leaving and wanted another kid so we planned DD9. Then on DD13 7th birthday, he proposed. I couldn't do it. I could stay for my girls even though I wasn't happy, but I couldn't marry him for my girls. Marriage is for the couple and I didn't love him like that. So we broke up instead.

Do you really believe every child is born of a committed, loving relationship and due to mutual decision making? LOL THAT is the harder story to sell in my book.

Some people have a really messed up past, but I dont think that there is so many sluts, whores, stupid one night stands as people are led to believe.
If this was your current spouse and his ex, I really think you need to look closely at the decision making patterns in their life. It sounds like a warning bell to me.

My STBX and his ex had a decent marriage for a time. They both changed to some extent and got divorced. There is blame on both sides. Of course BM is weird to me: new agey, tarot reading, conspiracy theory everybody is out to get you kind of person now. This is who she has become.
It is NOT normal. But then neither is my STBX, but he is none of THAT crazy.

See, I think the opposite. I think DH thinks BM was more innocent than she actually was.

He admits they were stupid when they got pregnant with OSS. Given what I know of BM, I think she wanted to get pregnant and pushed for unprotected sex. Knowing my DH, it doesn't take much for him to feel comfy going bareback with someone he love/trusts. It's not that DH is innocent (he was a moron), but I don't think it was as much of an "oops" as he makes it out to be, either.

Similar to YSS. Their marriage wasn't great, but they wanted two kids. They talked about it, and BM found out she was already pregnant. This is a woman that has on her LIVING ROOM WALL CALENDAR when she gets her Depo shot (fourth Thursday every 3 months; I don't want to know that). You're telling me that the timing of YSS was an "oops", too? That she was "accidentally" pregnant when they had just started talking about having another baby? Yeah...no. Then again, I'm not 100% convinced that YSS is DH's, but that's a story for another day.

Regarding the end of their marriage? I have shared this story before, but BM served DH with separation papers 4 DAYS after he got a vasectomy. A vasectomy she knew about. A vasectomy they discussed specifically because their marriage was in a bad place, they didn't want any more children, and couldn't afford any more child. He doesn't think she was being malicious when she served him and that the timing was bad. Are you kidding me?! She would have had to had those papers drawn up BEFORE he had the vasectomy, but didn't once say "hey, I'm leaving you, so you may want to take that into consideration before you defang the snake at 24." She didn't want him having other kids and splitting his loyalty (that was clear when she met me). She didn't want her kids having half siblings unless she produced them. She had HER family, and she wasn't going to let someone else screw that up.

BM is a master manipulator (chip off the ol' GBM block). DH freely admits that. Yet, he can't even begin to believe that she would have orchestrated any of this. To be fair to him, though, I'm not entirely convinced that BM had the cognitive capability to orchestrate all this, but I certainly wouldn't put it past her given the evidence.

I stayed married to BM, because of the child ~ I buy this. Married in the first place because of it. He tried to delay/cancel the wedding twice... second she got pregnant she was demanding military benefits... Then after the delay/cancels BM and BM's BM started threatening to take the child far away where he'd never be able to see it again if he didn't marry her... With all that going on... I can't blame him for marrying the psycho.... IN the same situation I might have done the same... He TRUELY loves the girls... And SD4 happened after he forgave her for like the 10th time for cheating... She thought he'd NEVER leave her if she had another kid...

I never loved her, she got pregnant without me knowing. (She said she's on BC) ~ I buy it. She wanted the military benefits. It was high school lust. Is what it is now. But he very nearly didn't go military for the baby and she had a breakdown and apparently it got violent because she was "having his kid and deserves the benefits."

I wanted to do the honorable thing and I married her, says the man who has 2 children with her. ~ Yes and no. His exact words on marrying her was that "I ruined her life, so I felt like I had to at least provide..." Considering two delays/attempted cancels, it makes me wonder what she said to guilt him... I won't dig further on that though, some things are best left in the past. But he also stayed partially because he didn't want SD8 to come from a "broken home." Which I can get... MIL comes from the MOST dysfunctional situation... DH takes things personally, so him feeling like it was crumbling, I'd imagine made him feel like HE was the one failing... And seeing MIL's situation where her mom has like 10 baby daddy's and some abuse from some of them, probably worried him and made him feel even more like he HAD to stay.

She cheated on me all the time, I never touched her again ~ I KNOW she cheated, for a fact. I can tell you from what she wrote in his yearbook she was a completely slutty wh0re (SD9 found it... That was fun...). She drove TWO states over a few days after she finally convinced him to marry her to hook up... And even had a skype relationship with someone while both him and the man she had relations with were deployed together. If that all tells you about her morals... I know DH though... His policy, he forgives, but he never forgets... So while I think things may have been limited, and I know right after the last straw he burned the mattress and then slept on the couch for a year before she ditched and moved in with a bf, I don't think that they never touched prior to that regardless of what she was doing to him. They were married after all, and she's a demanding beastie. She still tries to get physical contact from him.

you married her cause you loved her once ~ My definition of love is VERY different. Personally I don't think actual love ever fades. If it faded, then it was simply infatuation or lust mis-defined as love. That's just me. I think love is partially a choice, and partially a feeling. But anything that doesn't last, and that both people don't work to keep, wasn't ever love to begin with. That's been my rule of thumb since high school, probably why I thought all the dating in high school was so ridiculous. Because half of them broke up a week later, so stop wasting your time.

So it's a lot of mixed, I don't think it was ever really love (from what I gather, mostly cuz MIL loves to talk, DH says a little here and there, and FIL tells me things if he feels I should know) in fact it seemed like a lot of blackmail. I REALLY believe DH worked hard because he personally felt like a failure with her always sleeping around and with not wanting the Skids to be from a broken home... But I also believe he was an idiot. A child doesn't make a marriage, kids are from 'broken homes" and can still feel loved, and while teenage him didn't realize, I doubt she could have just completely barred him from SD9. He himself has said though that he "really really believed that she was the one and that he loved her." He's not stupid enough to pretend he never thought he had feelings either. And he's not the type to speak poorly of someone. But he also has mentioned that because of it all he doesn't know about love. Like he loves me, but he thinks that love is miscommunicated and used to much that he can't really call the feelings he has for me love because he knows it's not the same feelings as with his ex. If that makes sense? They're VERY different. He says it's better with me and smoother and he feels he can actually trust me and isn't having to tiptoe around and that he genuinely feels connected. But he really believed that was love at the time and now he doesn't want to put what we have in the same category because of that. LOL, I'm probably not even making sense.

DH has never told me he never loved BM. I'm sure he did - or rather, he thought he did. I think really he was in love with the idea of getting married and felt that being 25, he should be married already (in part because MIL told him that he should be married already at that age).

I think that happens to a lot of people, they are in love with the idea of being in love and being married and they can't differentiate between that and actually loving the person they are marrying.

I do believe him when he tells me he stayed married for his children, but I think he also stayed married out of the shame of feeling that he failed at marriage. If he has spent more time thinking about whether or not he and BM actually got along enough in the first place to have a successful marriage, he could have saved himself a lot of heartache.

He told me that he thought about divorce 2 years into his marriage to BM - before they had children - but ultimately didn't want to seem like a failure. He also thought - groan - that having children would "improve" their relationship. He told me that when he divorced, he wasn't sad to not be in a relationship with BM anymore, because he knew he didn't love her anymore, he was sad about the impact on his children.

I know that they would have stayed unhappily married if BM hadn't met someone else, because even though BM repeatedly tells DH how miserable she was when they were married, she presented herself as a happy wife with the perfect family to the world. She would not have been able to handle everyone thinking that she "failed" at marriage, unless of course, she could present herself as "trading up" (which she didn't, her "husband" (in quotes because even though they had a wedding ceremony, they did not legally marry) looks like a total creep and is "self-employed" selling scams on the internet).

I think there are a lot of people who are unhappily married and who got married for the wrong reasons, but I also think there are people who don't want to work at marriage.

I'm now of the age when my friends are roughly split in equal proportions of married, divorced, and single. I have several friends who got married for the second time this year. Both married in their mid-20s and seemed happy and in love with their husbands. Neither had children, nothing major happened, and both were married for around 7 years. Their marriages just ended. I haven't asked too many personal questions, so I don't know why, specifically, but I think you don't hear much about those marriages that ended, because those people just move on. Neither one really speaks to their ex and neither one really hates their ex. But it's easy to forget that either one of them was married before, because they no longer have any ties to their ex.

DH tells me all the time that I'm the love of his life and our relationship makes him feel so much happier and so much more loved than he ever felt with BM, but I still think part of the reason he was eager to get married is that he's in love with the idea of being married. You'd think being miserable in his first marriage would have made him realize that "marriage" is not a solution and doesn't create a happy relationship, but he tells me "I'm an optimist". I also think he's in love with the idea of being in love. I don't doubt that he loves me and he dated many other women before he met me (as he says, he wasn't picky the first time around, so he was going to be picky the second time around), so I know he did a bit of shopping around, but I also know that he's a total sap and I'm sure some of that sappiness was also present in his marriage to BM, no matter how much she drove him crazy (or emotionally abused him).

DH married BM only because he knocked her up when they were 20. He thought it was noble to do the right thing. He takes full responsibility for the lack of birth control. He THOUGHT YSS was a "save the marriage" baby; alas, it turns out she got knocked up by her now-husband.

Nope. I don't believe them. I think in a lot of cases the men tell themselves and their future SOs these little nuggets because they try to convince themselves that's the truth. They were suckered into it. I am glad my DH didn't try to use any of these lines on me. He was honest. He loved BM. They were high school sweethearts. She just cheated on him one too many times. The last time she had no remorse. She tried to tell him she had to do it because he was never home and it was the only way to get his attention. He also was very clear that SS was NOT an accident. They had him to try to fix their relationship and remind each other what they loved about they other. They thought they were in a rut and they needed the next step (a baby) to solidify their feelings for each other which had turned into nothing because they are different people with different ambitions and on different paths.