Why is it considered impolite to talk badly of your ex?

Trish said:
No worries. Sorry for pressing you on it. I hope you are okay. 🤗
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sometimes I think I've got over all the crying.. and I'm moving on... and then I see the reminders ( pictures).. and I step back 3 steps... in my recovery...my fault entirely. I should just wait until the divorce is all over, before talking about it...

I'll be ok.. I just have to remember that I'm allowing him to continue to cause me upset even after almost 3 years
 

dilettante said:
Abuse is almost a separate topic. It can take many forms and range from relationship power plays to the horrific.
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I totally agree, abuse is completely different from two people just deciding to get a divorce, for whatever reason. Unfortunately, many abused people are afraid to leave the abusive person, and even though they should get a divorce, they stay in the abusive relationship.
 
VintageBetter said:
I have heard about relationships like you have with your ex-wives, but I have never witnessed such. I'm not going to say, "You must be a great guy". I'm going to say, "The 3 or 4 of you must have had a quality of relationship that I am not familiar with." In other words, you don't get all the credit. These women must get credit too.
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I will give them credit. #1 had all the right in the world to despise me BUT she realized early on she let me down as much as I let her down. We had a wonderful time last summer at the big beach house our daughter rented in St Augustine. We went up on the roof with a glass of wine and talked about old times. I mean, hell, we were together 30 yrs. I still love her and she is a remarkable woman. I told her if Dennis ever dies (her husband) I would ask her ask her out. She said she would go.

My second wife had a HORRIBLE childhood and she was fifteen yrs younger. I thought I could "fix" her. 17 yrs later she moved out. I bought her a house with my IRA. We got a great deal. I kept helping her along when #3 came along. She didn't like me helping #2 even though we had minor children so I am alone now. All three women are great people. I wish I wasn't alone but I will make it. They still care about me. I will always care and pray for them. Our children certainly benefit from our closeness....
 
Let me add that I know of horrible marriages where abuse was involved. I have a good friend now who was treated badly by her first husband, She was very young and naive and believed him. She is very happy now and the marriage produced a wonderful daughter. I worked with a woman who was abused. I wanted to kill the man. She had brothers and I always wondered why they didn't go after him. My mom was an alcoholic so I saw a difficult marriage with my parents. There are many of you with every right to be angry and sad about spouses that were awful. I was just lucky. Always have been lucky. Or blessed. Judging someone is easy.

When I first got married we had a couple as friends. She was beautiful, he was a geek. One day he and I went exploring in a creek for fossils (he ended up with a PhD in that field). The next day his wife asked me what he said. He had left her. His response later was "you don't know what goes on behind a person's front door". And we don't but I still think she was a great person.
 
hollydolly said:
try 20.. ! terrible isn't it ?

Mine got away with it..for several reasons..
1..because I'm generally a very trusting person
2..because he worked long hours.. aside from some weekends and holidays.. I only saw him 1/2 an hour a day max...he'd come home, speak for 10 minutes, shower and bed..
3.. because when alarm bells did ring.. and I would ask questions I was accused of being insanely jealous. psychotic, need psychiatric help. etc .. so I would keep quiet about my suspicions..

I once...just one picked my husband up from work....it was meant as a surprise because his car was being repaired and he said he was going to get a cab home.. so I thought Id surprise him... and drove 30 miles to his work to pick him up..

He acted surprised, and all was fine so it seemed but much later I heard he was telling people that I was a stalker..

A stalker ! ? My own husband ?..one time in 20 years I surprise him...

It was only after we separated that I was able to put 2 & 2 together... and realise what was really going on.. that in fact he'd been telling co-workers that he and I lived separately in the same house.. and that was how he was able to get away with taking so many women out to lunch or dinner, and flirting at work...
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@hollydolly your husband thinks you are/were the problem in your marriage and by leaving you, the issue no longer exists for him. Plus he has some young thing fawning all over him now which further inflates his ego. Truth is, he has a severe personality defect and this has been a pattern in his life. Was he married before you and he met? I'd wager that whatever he did to you, he did to her, too. And as for the newbie in his life, he'll eventually find fault with her. It's just a matter of time.

The reason I write this to you is because it's an exact page out of my own life book. I lived it, too. It's a difficult road to walk but the only way out is through. You'll recover and you'll find a new version of your life that will abound with peace. This is promise you.
 
Leann said:
@hollydolly your husband thinks you are/were the problem in your marriage and by leaving you, the issue no longer exists for him. Plus he has some young thing fawning all over him now which further inflates his ego. Truth is, he has a severe personality defect and this has been a pattern in his life. Was he married before you and he met? I'd wager that whatever he did to you, he did to her, too. And as for the newbie in his life, he'll eventually find fault with her. It's just a matter of time.

The reason I write this to you is because it's an exact page out of my own life book. I lived it, too. It's a difficult road to walk but the only way out is through. You'll recover and you'll find a new version of your life that will abound with peace. This is promise you.
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yes he was married before me.. but many years before and it only lasted a year. Of course in his telling of it.. she was to blame. he went on to have a couple more live-in relationships... ..and the one before me , was volatile.. but again he explained it away by saying she's Argentinian she had a Latino temper, .. and I believed him because he's very quietly spoken... and anyone meeting him for the first or even several times would think he was harmless..

Leann why am I not surprised you lived that life too?.:(. Our lives have had so many similarities it's uncanny...
 
hollydolly said:
yes he was married before me.. but many years before and it only lasted a year. Of course in his telling of it.. she was to blame. he went on to have a couple more live-in relationships... ..and the one before me , was volatile.. but again he explained it away by saying she's Argentinian she had a Latino temper, .. and I believed him because he's very quietly spoken... and anyone meeting him for the first or even several times would think he was harmless..

Leann why am I not surprised you lived that life too?.:(. Our lives have had so many similarities it's uncanny...
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I don't know, @hollydolly but it is uncanny. We grew up in different parts of the world and yet we have traveled similar, almost parallel, life paths.

My ex-husband was married before he and I married and, at the time, I completely sided with him when he told me that his ex-wife had psychological issues, that she did things that were flat out crazy and he included examples. I had no reason to doubt him. Until.....

Within the first year of our marriage he had an affair. I found out, he begged (literally on his knees) for forgiveness, swearing it would never happen again. I was young and I wanted this to be true. Of course it wasn't. There were many more affairs to follow. And the abuse escalated, too. There might be some on this site that would ask why didn't I just leave. It's far too complicated to divulge here and honestly, I don't want to relive it.

I started having serious doubts about his stories concerning his ex-wife. I thought about contacting her to find out her side but we had never met and I worried that he would find out that I had spoken to her. At the time, I worked for a large corporation and somehow she found my work number. Actually, it was my pager number (back in the days when we carried pagers). I didn't recognize the number that came up on my pager so I it was a cold call when I dialed the number. A woman answered and I said "hi, you paged me?". She went on to identify herself and then apologized for contacting me at work but there were things she wanted to tell me.

I don't recall if we spoke for 5 minutes or for hours because time just froze at that point. She was as sane and coherent as anyone so I started thinking that his description of her being mentally unbalanced was inaccurate. The life she was describing that she had with him was exactly the life I was experiencing with him. It was his pattern.

He remarried soon after we divorced and moved to Central America with his wife. I've had no contact with him for 15 years or more but I don't think it would be much of a leap to assume that he is behaving the same way towards her as he did towards me and his other ex-wife and the many other women in his life.

Which circles this back around to you, @hollydolly. Your soon-to-be ex husband has a damaging pattern of behavior like my ex does. I know you didn't envision yourself going through this divorce but was your life really that happy with him?

You deserve better and it will come in due time.
 
@Leann, I am curious. Were you an abuse survivor growing up? I've been noticing a pattern of people abused as children who unconsciously seem to seek same as adults. If a person starts out with this type of 'love' is that what they think love is? That this is how life is? Violent, untrustworthy?
 
In a previous nursing home where I worked, there was a nurse, who every so often in a conversation, would say, "Don't get me started on my ex-husband!" I always had the same thought when I heard her say that. Somewhere there is a man (her ex-husband), who is saying, "Don't get me started on my ex-wife!" She always seemed to have issues with us men. If we didn't like her in a certain way, she would get vindictive with us, in the way she spoke to us. Usually insults. Got to the point where we men wouldn't speak to her unless really had to.
 
Pepper said:
@Leann, I am curious. Were you an abuse survivor growing up? I've been noticing a pattern of people abused as children who unconsciously seem to seek same as adults. If a person starts out with this type of 'love' is that what they think love is? That this is how life is? Violent, untrustworthy?
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You’re absolutely right. Unconsciously abuse survivors pick partners that will abuse them. They don’t feel like they deserve any better. Most abuse survivors turn into automatic people pleasers so attract the most narcissistic people.
 
besides all of the above very valid accounts and discussions there is another reason and that is a legal one. If you speak badly about your ex to others then that can be considered a prosecutory action of one person against another in a court of law. Whether you are right or not that is what you are doing - prosecuting - fine - but it should be done under legal conditions in a court of law in which your spouse and his/her lawyers are able to present their defencive account of the of the person being accused?
 


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