I’ve had some good years and bad years, just like anyone else but 2023 is going to stand out as my annus horribilis, and worst still, it taints the previous years too including the good times.
It’s 31st December, 2022. 2022 was another difficult year, still trying to re-find myself after the covid pandemic and subsequent isolation of working from home plunged me into a crisis of confidence, imposter syndrome and spell of deep depression.
I had made strides over 2022 though, I started going to Andy’s Man Club and I had a plan for a change in role at work. When you’re in the mire, sometimes you just have to do something, anything to provoke a change because stagnating isn’t going to solve anything. I at least had a plan for how 2023 was going to be better.
I bought a smoke machine and a karaoke machine. I decorated the house with bunting, stocked up on spirits, ready to celebrate the dawning of 2023 in style. It was a great party, surrounded by friends and family.
As a kid I was socially awkward and didn’t enjoy the fuss of being surrounded by lots of people, even people I knew, but I had grown to value having friends and family around. This New Year was not just about me, it was a homage to my Aunty who passed in August 2022. New Year meant party’s at my Aunty Mary’s and Uncle Brian’s. A full house with laughter, alcohol, smiles and lights.
Little did I know that my world would completely collapse within less than a week of that party.
January
On 6th January, 4 days before my landmark 40th birthday, I found out that my wife was having an affair after 20 years of marriage. For her 40th, she got a party of a lifetime, I got cheated on. It didn’t seem fair. It wasn’t fair. That was the last time I drank alcohol. I knew that alcohol was a depressant and that if I didn’t stop, I’d end up as just another suicide statistic and I didn’t want that.
She did nothing but lie to me and every time, I unpicked her lies until she had no choice but to tell the truth. I wrote about it extensively at the time so I’m not going to go over it in detail again. I was devastated. She knew full well how I felt about infidelity, it caused a lot of suffering for me in my own childhood but I never believed she would do this to me, I had total faith in her, and besides, it’s not like she wanted for anything in our marriage. I gave her everything and it was a good marriage, despite the lies she now tells herself to justify her own actions.
Still, I took vows for in sickness and in health, for better for worse, forsaking all others and I took those vows seriously, so I carried on, desperately trying to save our marriage. The affair ended by the end of January all the lies were exposed. I spoke to the man whom had no idea she was married. She told me that as a child she would make up stories for attention and I told her that she needed to seek help.
February
We went to couples therapy. I was still traumatised by what she had done. It completely disoriented myself and I ended up cutting myself to cope, not deep enough to leave a scar, but it was a release. I knew I had to find a better way to handle things. We talked a lot and things got better, but every time I was intimate with her it repulsed me. I couldn’t think of anything else than what she had done and I had to physically force myself to do it.
With all this going on, I couldn’t concentrate on work and I didn’t perform well but I was lucky work were patient with me, something I am very grateful for. I could easily have lost my job as well and my marriage and home.
March
Things had improved between us. We were going on date nights and she showed some signs of remorse but I was still traumatised and fragile. Her affair made me feel very insecure about my body and it made me make stupid decisions. I still felt like she was lying to me and that she cheated because of my body. I came up with this stupid idea that I couldn’t get over the affair because it was all behind my back and that somehow I’d feel better if it happened in front of me. I guess I needed to know whether she really wanted to sleep with someone else still so I came up with the idea that I’d ask her if that’s what she wanted and I made out that I was ok with it. To my internal horror that was what she wanted and now I’d put myself in a position where I thought I couldn’t back out. It wasn’t just an open relationship, there were strict rules.
One day I caught her half naked video calling some guy. I confronted her and she pretended it didn’t happen but I had the evidence. She was shaking. I made her hand over her phone and I could see the messages. This was someone she’d done this with before. It wasn’t just a one off. The guy was a married teacher and she was gloating to him about her affair. It wasn’t just one affair, it was three different men, albeit only one face to face.
I was so angry I threw my wedding ring on the floor and started thinking about divorce. She begged me not to leave her, promised she’d do anything. I was completely disgusted by her but I didn’t want to lose my home, so in the end I decided to give her one last chance but this time there was zero trust. I installed an app on her phone, with her consent that meant she couldn’t lie to me anymore.
In hindsight that wasn’t a good idea. If I could go back, I wouldn’t have given her another chance. She’d already proven that she didn’t care about me or respect me. She was selfish and a pathological liar. She could look me right in the eyes and tell me something I knew was a lie, and it didn’t matter to her at all. To her, the truth was just whatever was convenient to her to believe. I realise that now but when you are so heavily invested in someone, when you’ve spent more of your life with that person than without, it’s a very difficult decision to walk away.
April
Things were deteriorating because there was no trust in the relationship. How could there be, she let me down every single time I showed any faith in her. She was taking sexually provocative photos of her cleavage and I had no idea who she was sending them too but the only possible reasons for photos like that were for sexual attention from men. She couldn’t see why this was a problem and when I confronted her behaviour she acted like I was being unreasonable and controlling.
It wasn’t just me that noticed her behaviour had changed. I was getting messages from other family members that had seen some of her photos, questioning her behaviour and what was going on. That was actually a relief. If other people were noticing it too, her attempt to gaslight me and pretend that she was being normal failed.
May
As part of me agreeing not to end the relationship, I told her she had to go and get counselling and as usual in this relationship, I spoon fed her. I organised the counselling through the my work BUPA cover that I was paying for. She had to ring them up, but I gave her the number and told her what to say and then I looked up a list of therapists in the area for her.
Unfortunately, some therapists are better than others and the one she picked started ringing alarm bells when she told me her therapist had told her that when women cheat, it’s ok, because it’s because they’re not getting an emotional need met but when men cheat it’s because men are bad. I’m paraphrasing.
If our relationship was going to be fixed it required her to take genuine accountability for her behaviour and address it, not look for excuses that make her feel better. Of course, a relationship is about two people and I realise that I played a role in the failure of our relationship. However, no matter how bad things were between us, I would never have gone off with another woman.
At the end of the day, she’s an adult and it is her responsibility to communicate with me if there’s some kind of issue. She is responsible for her actions just as I am mine but it’s so much more soothing and comforting to pretend you’re a delicate leaf blowing in the wind being acted upon and therefore a helpless victim. I wouldn’t let her get away with that. I held her to account, and she didn’t like it.
Her language started to change. Her new found internet friends were a bad influence on her. She threw away her upbringing and values and replaced them with a fantasy life. She was not the woman I married anymore. That woman would have been ashamed and appalled by her actions but new Mandy only cared about herself.
I listened into one of her therapy sessions via our cctv, an act completely out of character for me but it confirmed what I thought. She was playing the victim. Lying, telling half truths and missing out vital facts to make herself sound good and to make me look bad and her clearly feminist indoctrinated counsellor was lapping it up, telling her what she wanted to hear.
I ended up in hospital with a high temperature caused by gall stones that were affecting my liver. To other people she was putting on a pretence, talking about missing “her Jon” on facebook whilst being incredibly reluctant to come and visit me in hospital. Then she was sending me messages saying she missed me and couldn’t sleep without me.
As soon as I was out of hospital I got the “I love you but I’m not in love with you” bullshit. She created a toxic, hostile environment for me with silent treatment, depriving me of affection (it’s funny how if a man does that to a woman it’s considered abuse but when a woman does it to a man, it’s his fault). It got to the point where I couldn’t tolerate being in the same house as her. I went away, I spent as much time out of the house as I could.
I was in limbo. I didn’t know whether I had a relationship to save or not and the penny hadn’t yet dropped that she was not worth it. Everything I tried backfired. Talking to her resulted in her treating me like a piece of shit on her shoe. Not talking to her was not much different. I knew she was just waiting for an excuse and making her escape plan.
She dismissed my feelings as if I meant nothing, yet if we were in public, pretended things were normal. I was a nervous wreck. I had enough. I just wanted it all to stop. I made plans to take my own life but the thing is I’m a fighter. I knew I needed help. I’m so used to trying to solve everyone elses problems and suppressing my own but this time I needed support. I turned to my best friends and my aunties. I took the decision to go to A&E when I was at my worst. If I didn’t, I would have been dead the next day. They sent me to a crisis centre for a week. The first few days I could do nothing but cry. They put me on diazepam to help me calm down.
I had one on one sessions with the staff and they told me the brutal truth, she wasn’t worth dying for. I deserved better. My esteem was totally crippled. Just doing the most mundane things became a challenge but I signed up to online dating apps and got talking to people. Online dating is a nightmare. When you’re a man, you get no attention whatsoever unless you have a scattergun tactic and approach everyone. I remember talking to a mental health nurse, which was amusing given where I was, and a solicitor. Nothing came of those interactions but I started to get my confidence back a little. I believed that nobody would ever want me and that I would be on my own for good but it wasn’t true, I just had to shift my mindset and remember that there were reasons why my wife was attracted to me in the first place.
After a week in the crisis centre, I felt a bit better but I was also on edge about going back home. I just needed to know if my marriage was over. Everything was telling me that it was. I told her that I believed she’d already made up her mind and she denied it but then a few days after I came home, we went for a walk to the park to talk and she came armed with a book of all my sins. So much for someone that was pretending she hadn’t made her mind up.
It was all bullshit. She had clearly been rehearsing it all. She had completely twisted our relationship and reinvented the past to suit her own narrative, skipping over all the good times we had. She told me that there was a pattern and made out I was abusive and that I was “lovebombing” her, buying her presents after we had fallen out. Love bombing is when a partner puts someone on a pedestal and idolises that person, overwhelming them with gifts and compliments then when they do something that displeases the other person, they suddenly turn. You’re either Satan or a Saint.
That does not match our relationship at all. Have I bought her gifts? Yes, I’ve consistently been a romantic partner and made an effort for her. That’s the way I am, I get it from my mum. Back in February there was an incident where we went to Asda and there was a guy in front of me at one of the self checkout tills and he was literally counting pennies to pay for a loaf of bread and some soup and it didn’t look like he had enough, I twigged and just swiped my card. I didn’t make a big deal of it. I just did it quietly, without a fuss. There was no post about how wonderful I am on social media. It was just the right thing to do, a small act of human kindness to a stranger because that’s how I was brought up and she told me this was one of the things she loved about me but now that she had a guilty conscience to appease, that kindness had been pathologised into something it never ever way.
I’m not saying I’m perfect by any stretch of imagination. When I have been deeply depressed, I shutdown, I stop communicating and that was always very hard for her to deal with and I go through these blip periods of depression but that isn’t the normal Jon. Normal Jon is enthusiastic, witty, kind, loving. A good person. A caring person. A very moral person and a selfless person.
I was only 19 when I met my wife, she was 4 years older but I’d been through a lot more, I was already living on my own. She would often make out as if I was the older person. It suits her to see herself as the one acted upon, as if I took advantage of her when in reality I was in a vulnerable state when we started dating and for her to make out now as if I trapped her in the relationship was quite far fetched and very hurtful to me given how hard I worked to be a good partner over the years.
I’m not going to do what she’s done and pretend that she was a bad wife throughout our marriage. We had a very good relationship and it turned very quickly. I am angry at her disloyalty. I’m angry at her dishonesty and I’m angry at how she has treated me.
If we want to talk about patterns, a common theme was her lack of faith in me. Whenever I approached her with an idea her instant reaction was that it would be something bad. Anytime I didn’t finish food she had made, she assumed it meant I hated it so I had to either pretend to like it or I had explain it. It was exhausting. When she told me that she wanted to end the relationship, that she wasn’t happy, I wasn’t sad, I was relieved. A penny had dropped. She contributed to my depression. She wasn’t responsible for it but having to deal with her insecurity on top of my own feelings was tough.
One Christmas, I was convinced she would be better off if I were dead and her reaction to this was all about how it would affect her if I killed myself. She was more concerned about what would happen to her spotify playlists if I left her than she was about me.
She accused me of deliberately not getting her pregnant after she had a miscarriage. She told me I would never change but finally I could her for what she was and that wasn’t the sort of person I wanted in my life anymore.
June / July
When Mandy decided she didn’t want to be in a relationship anymore, I could have moped and felt sorry for myself. I didn’t do that. I found genuine strength, not what she called being strong, which was basically attention seeking, but I remembered who I am and what I am. A fighter. A survivor.
I leaned on my family and friends for support more. I went out more. I kept myself busy, I started losing weight again and I was active on dating sites. There was no way I was going to let her and her toxic negative perception of me win. I was going to live my life. I was going to rebuild.
She tried to provoke me. Posting things on Facebook and WhatsApp but hiding them from me. Photos of her in the bath, or dancing around a street lamp looking absolutely ridiculous. She was drinking regularly but the more she behaved like this, the more pathetic she looked in my eyes. She put photos of her and a friend that she met through tiktok on our kitchen notice board as she knew I would see it there but I didn’t react. I just laughed at how sad it was. She wanted a reaction and I wasn’t going to give her what she wanted.
I put more effort into online dating and started talking to a girl I really liked but it turned out she wasn’t real, she was a scammer. That could have broke me but it didn’t, I turned it into a laugh, scammed the scammer, tracking her down and having her profile shutdown.
It’s amazing how fast I managed to bounce back from the height of despair in early May to feeling confident and happy for the first time in a long time.
Life at home was uncomfortable, I was trapped living with a woman who hated me and the feeling was mutual but I had to do what I had to do just to get through. I wasn’t unpleasant to her, I wasn’t going to lower myself to her level. I was civil.
August
By the middle of August I was talking to three different girls, one in Rugby, one in Salford and the other in Manchester. I’d rediscovered my ability to attract people. It wasn’t easy. 99% of people reject you when you’re a man but I kept going, threw caution to the wind and met up with the girl from Rugby. She was way too keen but after months of being treated like the devil incarnate, it was nice to get some affection from somebody. I stayed over night with her 3 times and we were intimate and that helped build back my body confidence, which had been completely destroyed by Mandy’s behaviour.
I decided to take charge. I think it took Mandy by surprise. I applied for divorce and I told her we had to announce things because it was very close to our anniversary and I didn’t want people sending cards etc. I could have slagged her off and told people the truth on social media but I chose not to. I was going to be the bigger person. I wanted to tell some close family in person, we went together and I took charge and told my nephew and nieces that we were splitting up but made it clear that nothing changed from my prospective in terms of my relationship with them. It was very difficult but it was what I needed to do.
September
When I decided to divorce Mandy, I gave her two choices. Either she could buy me out of our home or I would buy her out.
This was actually a big shift from my initial position, which was she wasn’t going to keep the house at any costs but I got to the point where I didn’t really care, I just wanted to be away from her. She didn’t even understand that it would be cheaper to buy me out than rent somewhere. She’s never had to do all the financial stuff because I always sorted everything, by her choice. I looked at house prices, I looked at mortgages and I worked out that there wasn’t a big difference either way and I looked at both our finances and worked out we both could afford it.
I made her a spreadsheet showing all the maths as she really didn’t have a clue. I could have just made an offer and put her in a position where she had little choice, but I’m not that kind of person. She chose to stay, so I began looking at houses in the area.
Within days, I found a couple to look at and was ready to make an offer.
One of the girls I was talking to was reluctant to go into a relationship with someone who was still technically married and living with his ex after being burnt previously, so maybe that accelerated the timing a little as if she felt like that then others would too. That relationship was a bit hot and cold, with her changing her mind about whether she wanted to be in a relationship with me or for us just to be friends. I knew she liked me. It was very passionate when we were together and in one sense a non-serious relationship suited me at that point given I was dealing with divorce, buying a house and rebuilding my career at the same time. The less attention I gave her, the more interested she was in me.
I decided to stop seeing the girl from Rugby due to the practicality of the distance and also because I felt more like her counsellor than anything else. I’d gone from being the unstable one in a mental health crisis to being mentally strong and resilient. Not taking anti-depressants, a very busy diary and having choices.
This was not what Mandy expected. She started posting stuff feeling sorry for herself because I had moved on. That annoyed me. What did she expect? You can’t tell someone you don’t love them anymore and expect them to just sit around pining. Of course I was going to move on. My mindset totally shifted. The gloom had gone. I was doing things I’d have never have done in the past, being an extra in a music video being one such example.
I had a date with a third girl but to be honest, when I met her I was still considering the other two so I didn’t put a lot of effort in when we met and I wasn’t disappointed when nothing came of it.
October
October was mostly taken up by work and buying a house. It wasn’t straight forward. First there was an issue proving my deposit, which required Mandy getting her arse in gear and applying for a mortgage. By that stage a second and third party put bids in so I had to pay £5,000 more for it.
Then the local authority searches revealed a moderate to severe flood risk, which I investigated myself and challenged the report. The risk was downgraded to moderate. Next came the surveyors report, that suggested a whole host of possible problems so I had to get specialists in damp proofing, who asked am I sure they visited the right house. Then the buyer for another house in the chain appeared to pull out.
It was a lot of stress but I handled it well. I negotiated a divorce settlement with Mandy as she was going to be keeping the majority of our stuff and to settle our debts. I was back to my best, confidence, in control of the situation, finding solutions to problems and being cool headed.
November
November was again dominated by moving. It was a very difficult process. You accumulate a lot of stuff over 20 years. There were delays getting jobs done and it was quite stressful. It wiped out all the money from the divorce settlement but now I have something that’s all mine.
It’s smaller than the old house, but it’s also in better condition, not perfect but definitely an upgrade and I’ve been able to get things exactly how I want them here. I’ve created a home that is full of my personality, not that the old house wasn’t, I picked most of the furnishings there too but this place has a more masculine feel to it. I don’t have that nagging voice telling me I can’t do things anymore. I don’t miss that.
December
By mid-December, I had really settled in and it’s at this point that I’ve had a chance to think about this last year. I’ve either been in survival mode or planning mode for most of the year so I haven’t had a lot of time to ruminate, which is a good thing but I do still feel quite angry about how I’ve been treated by my ex.
I had plans to maintain civil contact with her. Maybe friendship would be pushing it, I have no respect left for her, but at least recognition that she’s suffering too and that had fait have played a different set of cards and had she not had a miscarriage, things would have been different. It’s no excuse for her appalling behaviour, but she has had a lot to deal with, with her mum being ill and she just isn’t really built to cope with that. I had no choice from a younger age. I didn’t have the option of seeking validation from members of the opposite sex as a distraction from the harsh realities of life, I had to live in the real world, not a fake one and she is going to pay the price for her mistakes, whether she has the self awareness to realise she brought it all on herself or not.
I am angry that now I will be paying a mortgage until I’m 70, having put us in a position where we would have had a comfortable retirement and have been mortgage free in 8 years. I’m angry about the way she’s twisted things and lied, not only to other people but worse of all to herself and I’m angry that I invested so much in our relationship for her to show zero loyalty.
I believe in karma. I know I’m a good person. Perhaps a little too honest and open for my own good (the complete opposite of her). I know I will be all right and will find love again.
I do miss the female company, particularly at night sometimes. I don’t just mean sex. I mean having someone to cuddle, someone to talk to, someone to love.
Looking forward
Sometimes you have to look back to see how far you’ve come, but it’s also important not to rubberneck on life’s highway too long, or you won’t see the car crash right in front of you.
I’ve learned to let go of the things I can’t control and instead to focus on the things I can. Next year is going to be about getting back on track with my weight, I was doing so well until the stress of divorce and buying a house took my attention. I’m going to focus on my career. And the rest, relationships, well, they tend to happen when you least expect it.
Whilst 2023 was very painful, it was also a great lesson. It taught me that I’m stronger than I thought I was, it’s taught me to be grateful for and appreciate the things you do have because one day those things will be taken away from you. It’s taught me to live in the present. To stop myself catosrophising about bad things that might happen or a yearning for the past. The past is gone, but I’ve got today to make the decisions that tomorrow’s Jon is counting on me getting right!
If nothing else, I have plenty of material for a book!
Rant Over 