Are Lies A Terrible Foundation For A Healthy Marriage

I knew my marriage was doomed before the wedding. Looking back, I knew before I proposed. The absolute first clue should have been that I knew Sasha was a pathological liar. I knew that before we started dating. I knew that before I’d even thought about dating her. And I didn’t care because I wasn’t marrying her for her, I was marrying her because I’d wanted to be a dad.

Wait.

Before we dive in.

Let’s ground you in some context first, and then I’ll get back to the awful truths of a wasted decade.

I’m Aaron. I’m a straight, white, cisgender male, going through a divorce and custody battle that is 100% my fault (more on how that’s the case down the line). I’m stressed, I’m anxious, I’m optimistic, and I’m living a pretty decent life, with a couple of caveats.

I used to write all the time, until I was told I needed to grow up and focus on more important things. Now that I’ve grown up and can focus on more important things, I’ve found that one of those happens to be writing. In particular writing about how relationships can go wrong. Partially for catharsis, but partially because there’s a glut of articles and books, and TikToks, and IG posts, and memes, helping guide women through the process of getting over a marriage gone wrong, but the selection for men is a touch more limited.

So here we are. At the starting line of a series I hope will help me heal through this whole process of dissolving what started as a relationship and became a business transaction, while making you, dear reader, laugh, gasp, curse my name (curse her name) and, hopefully, draw comfort for your own situation; whomever you are, and whatever that situation might be.

I’ve changed names here because, well, I’m still in court at the time of writing this and, more importantly, I don’t want my kids to discover the horrible shit their parents got up to while posing as a loving example of marital bliss by accidentally having this shared to them by a deranged relative.

Aside from the name changes I’m not going to alter much else because, when you’re trying to help yourself and others, you tell the truth.

Where I have evidence to back up the stories I’m telling, I’ll share it. Where I don’t, you’ll have to take my word for it, but know that there is absolutely, positively no way for me to get in any legal shenanigans for what I’ve said, because the truth is always the best defence against claims of defamation and, well:

The Truth Is

Sasha was (is) a pathological liar.

The first lie should have been enough to keep me far, far away but, as you’ll learn as we spend time with each other, I’m not super bright about people.

The first lie was, “I didn’t know I was pregnant.”

This lie was told to me, and countless others, a week after the birth of her (now our) daughter.

I assumed it was a lie when I first heard it, but dismissed it as the kind of thing people say when they’ve wound up pregnant, don’t want other people to know about it for some reason, and haven’t figured out a way to come clean that will make sense to people. I didn’t know then about the pathological lying, or I might have assumed this was just part of that, but I was inclined to be charitable. A few years later there was a reality show titled, “I didn’t know I was pregnant.” so this is, apparently, a thing that actually happens to people.

But it hadn’t happened to Sash.

How do I know? First, we’d been friends for a few years by this point and were spending a lot of time together. The night Sasha went into labour we’d been out at the movies with friends from work and she’d complained about back pain as we were all leaving. A week later we all found out about the birth of her daughter, along with the information that “I didn’t know I was pregnant.”

This was semi-plausible because she hadn’t looked pregnant. She’d gained a touch of weight, sure. And her clothes; if you held a gun to most people’s heads and forced them to try and remember, they’d tell you that she wore clothes that were baggy enough, as a rule, that you wouldn’t have noticed unless you were really looking. But I’d definitely noticed the switch from regular old go out in public clothes to semi-tailored bags made to look like clothes.

She claimed that she’d been getting her period throughout, which can happen. I can’t swear I absolutely remember her not drinking or smoking during the nine months prior to movie night, but that could be me looking back through the lens of someone who’s now inclined to believe the absolute worst about her.

So yeah, it was a little bit possible that “I didn’t know I was pregnant” wasn’t a lie.

The second thing, though, confirmed my suspicions that this was about as authentic a claim as “I swear, I’m a virgin” has been for almost every person who’s ever used it when caught pregnant. Sasha wasn’t repeating those words to everyone.

To whit, the friends we’d gone out for movie night with, had known for months about the impending surprise baby, and they weren’t fantastic with secrets. Ditto for Sash’s parents who, one afternoon, three years into our relationship, accidentally made a comment about plans they’d had to adopt the baby when they’d found out early into the second trimester. I was still being told, at this point, that she hadn’t known.

Unsurprisingly, there were lots of lies throughout the relationship and marriage. Small lies like “I totally thought you were paying that bill!”. Big lies like “ I will totally honour the terms of this deal we’ve made to resolve a potentially marriage ending conflict”. And worse, the emotionally abusive lies like “That never happened” or “I’m sorry” or “I’ll have sex with you if you clean the kitchen.”

But that first lie? The one that I heard, recognized as a lie, and ignored? That one sticks. Because I can’t get mad about all the others when I decided to marry someone I knew had that cavalier an attitude towards the truth.

Now, sitting on the other side of the beginnings of court proceedings, after a year and a half of mental and financial abuse, and of having my illusions that “at least she’s a good mother” stripped away utterly, the first thing I lament is that it would have been the easiest thing in the world to recognize that healthy, decent human beings, don’t tell huge lies like that and maintain them for years, and to choose NOT to date, marry, and raise children with this person.

But I didn’t. And so this is the first way in which the failure of my marriage is 100% my fault.

Silver Linings

My current partner, who is lovely (even though yes, we argue, and have different ideas about how the dishes ought to be done) tells the truth. Mostly. Everyone gets a few little white lies. When we started dating we both laid out for the other all the awful things about ourselves right upfront. Turns out they weren’t awful enough for the other to be able to resist the siren call of having someone to play board games and go for walks with.

Useful court tip which is in no way legal advice because I AM NOT A LAWYER:

Cataloguing your exes’ many character failings helps you not at all in family court. All they care about (rightly) is the welfare of the children right now. You may feel that your ex is getting away with something by not being exposed in court. And maybe they are. But focus on the kids. Trust me.

A note on why I’m doing this:

Beyond the desire to, in a therapeutic way, process all the things that have happened since my marriage imploded, and to share my side of a story that I’ve been fundamentally silent on with friends and family for the last year and a half, there is an ulterior motive to the writing I’m doing here.

This platform, Vocal.media, pays me a teeny bit of money each time someone reads these articles. Given that things are getting extremely intense on the court front, and given that I don’t qualify for legal aid, but also can’t afford an attorney, this is my way of generating the revenue I need to prevent Sasha from stealing my children from me, along with the better part of my adult life that she’s already used like bargain toilet paper.

If you like what you’ve read, or if you hate it, but empathize and want to help, share this story on your social media. If something I write helps you in some way, and you reallllly want to help, please make use of the tip button below and share it on your social media!

Next Time:

What the first session in family court feels like, and how we got there when all of this was planned out and agreed to before we ever got married.