Our letter this week comes from one of our beautiful readers, Renee, who just found out last week that the man she was planning her future with, lied to her. She's heartbroken and doesn't know where to start with moving on with her life. Here's what she had to say along with my response.
Her story:
Hello Jane,
I found your blog while searching for an answer to my question in Google.
I have been dating this guy for almost 4 months. I introduced him to my friends and family. My friends and family accepted him; he is the first guy I introduced to them. We planned our future and decided to get married this summer. I know people are questioning us why it's so quick when we just met.
Last week, I found out that he was married.
When I called him and asked him if it is true, he said yes, that he got married 6 years ago but that they already separated and his wife has her own family now.
I asked him why he lied not just to me, he lied to all the people around us.
He said he is single, and he doesn't want to talk about his past anymore.
I told him that we need to talk about it. I waited for him to call me or come over to my place to explain, but he never did.
I texted him and called him, but he never got back to me. It's been a week now.
I'm hurt and heartbroken about what's happened. I feel betrayed, used and I have a lot of questions for him. I don't know what I'm going to do now.
I know I need to move on with my life without him, but I don't know where to start.
Thank you.
-Renee
My Response:
I feel your broken heart, Renee. I'm so sorry it turned out this way.
No matter what anyone else may say, I know how hard this is even though you only knew him for a few months. It's because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from all my own life-size heartbreak that came no matter the length of time I spent with a guy, it’s that the amount of pain we feel is never in proportion to the amount of time we spend with someone, but has everything to do with the depths in which we lost ourselves in the relationship with him.
Go read my post on why something like this always happens around the 3 to 4-month mark. It may help you to understand the timing of this, as it’s not a coincidence that now is when you found this out about him.
As painful as it is to know the truth – and more importantly, that he lied to you about it - you had to find out, because this information saved you from making a mistake that would be far worse if you had already married him. Even more telling is the fact that this guy you were going to make a commitment to spend the rest of your life with, completely disappeared when you pressed him on something as basic as whether or not he's still married!
This isn’t a small detail. This is something you deserve to know.
And I hope you can see now why people would be questioning why you would jump into something as serious as marriage when you’ve only just met. It’s because you can’t fully know who someone is and what they might be hiding from you in this short time of knowing them.
I want to give you a crystal clear picture of who this man is, because even though I don’t know him personally, I’m all too familiar with his type and it's only when you can fully understand why he behaves the way he does, that you can move on and find peace within yourself.
By "type", I mean the type that recognizes in you something magical. The type that sees something so different in you than his ex-wife, he can’t wait to replace her memory with you so that he can start all over again with someone new.
The problem is, Renee, this is more about him redeeming himself than anything else, much less how his lying could affect you. This is about him having a second chance with someone so completely different from his ex, you’re going to make everything in his life better for him.
Can you see why he wants to rush into marriage with you so fast?
Of course he doesn’t want to tell you about his past; he’s embarrassed, ashamed of it, and wants to brush it aside or pretend it never happened because he thinks he was only with the wrong woman, and now that he’s with you, everything will change for the better.
But he forgot one thing; he brings himself along. This isn’t about finding the perfect woman (who he thought was you and that’s why he moved it along so fast) to make him capable of being in a successful, happy, healthy relationship, or whatever defines as a success. This is what he believes but it’s not going to hold true for him unless he has the ability to look within at himself.
That’s the part he missed and that’s why you haven’t heard anything more from him.
He’s embarrassed and ashamed, but hiding it with anger because that’s the only emotion most men are comfortable with. He’s mad you found out, he’s angry someone told you, and deep down, he’s mostly upset with himself for messing things up so badly.
But he won’t tell you that.
He’ll disappear instead just like he’s done.
Leaving you to pick up the pieces, to find your own answers, to muddle through what happened, to find yourself again after becoming lost in this whirlwind of a relationship.
Go easy on yourself here.
Sure, you got caught up in it. We all do. For all the judgment and blame you might find people have for you, you can be assured that almost every woman on here reading this has, at one time or another, trusted too soon, got caught up in someone’s lies, and found themselves making excuses or covering up bad or formerly unacceptable behaviors.
Why? because we always want to believe we can love someone enough to make every wrong right.
Don’t be harder on yourself than you would be with someone else who thought this too. It’s only the degree to which we do this to ourselves that differs from story to story, but we’ve all felt what you felt when you started making plans for the future.
We want to believe him!
Look at what this new information tells you to see who this guy became capable of being. He refused to have a conversation of this, he dismissed your concerns, he minimized the fact that it was more than a technical definition of marriage that was the issue, but the bigger issue of broken trust.
Who does this?
I ask this question all the time because we get so caught up in what he’s done to us and how we feel about it that we forget to ask about the character of someone who’s capable of behaving like this.
Is it this guy you imagined you’d be spending the rest of your life with? Is this a guy you would ever agree to spend the rest of your life with? Is this a guy you’d want to have children with and go through the rough times in life with?
No, of course not.
Trust matters. He even had an out to tell you he was separated and not just married but he didn’t. That matters!
And if he wouldn’t tell you he was separated, what else hasn’t he told you? That's something you'll never know for sure.
Start right here where you are.
You loved this man. You loved the idea of who he was and what he represented to you. You loved every one of the plans you made and the promise of the future you were counting on. Your hopes and dreams came crashing down right along with this reality check. Yes, it’s going to feel as sad as it does right now.
Until your tomorrow comes.
It’s not the measurement of time that helps us through this, it’s what you do with that time. Right now, you’re going to feel everything akin to the stages of grief that include denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, and, finally, when you’ve gone through all the rest - acceptance of a reality you can’t change.
There’s a post I wrote about what to do to get over someone, and I hope you find the practical tips in there helpful.
But along with those, I want to say something to you.
It’s how gentle you can be with yourself in this process that matters. It’s how much self-care and self-nourishment that you can give yourself that makes all the difference in the world. It’s how much you can give the gift of compassion and grace and understanding to yourself right now that matters more than anything else.
Someday soon, the sun’s going to shine for you again, Renee. He’s going to be a distant memory and you’ll see him in the light of who he really was, and who he only wished he could be, and that you were what he was pinning his hopes on to make that happen for him.
And yes, you’ll wonder if it was all but a dream.
You’ll wake up and realize the sun was always there behind those dark, stormy clouds, and that a life for you still exists and is waiting for you to reach out and grasp it.
You can do this!
Sure it hurts. Sure, it’s painful and heartbreaking and everything else right now. But you chose you. Can you see that?
You chose yourself over someone who you couldn’t trust, and you recognized where that path would lead if you didn’t speak up and say something.
Renee, I receive so many emails from women who couldn’t speak up, who couldn’t bear for their fantasy to end with the reality of new information like this, who went ahead with their plans for marriage and a family even though they knew the truth.
I hear from them now, heartbroken with more pieces to pick up than they ever had at a mere 4 months, and they’d give anything to go back in time to when they could have made a different choice than the one they did.
You’re at the place now, and you chose what you knew you needed to do for you.
Be proud of yourself, Renee. One step at a time. One day at a time. And somewhere along the way you’re going to find a life worth living to its fullest again.
Yours.
Love,
Jane
How about you? Do you have something you want to say or share with Renee? Share it with her in the comments below.
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