Sadly, ending a relationship

[BMB]

Hello again all who have strengthened me these past several weeks. I am slowly but surely getting my finances separated but feel that progress is being made. My home is still on the market (10 months) and NO offers have come in… St. Joseph must be on vacation!

Anyway - I am taking this evening (as I am alone with all my children gone tonight) to look over my dioceses’ Office of the Tribunal preliminary questionnaire. My priest recommended looking it over to become familiar with the type of questions asked and to search my memory for deceptions before my marriage.

A couple of questions to those who have sadly walked this path… Many questions center on my spouse’s state of mind prior to the wedding…

The questionnaire asks…
-When you married did your former spouse commit himself to marriage for life?

• Did he understand marriage and the basic responsibilities of being a spouse? etc… etc…

I obviously believed so… but judging from his behavior now and the question of whether he has BPD, depression, NPD or is just plain self-centered makes me wonder how I can possibly answer this and other like questions. Does the responding spouse answer the questions that refer to him?

Also included, a lengthy list of factors that may or may not have been serious problems before or during my marriage…
Without my spouse subjecting himself to a full psychological evaluations (no way he would agree to that. He lied the 3 times he went for marriage counseling), must I simply propose he has a personality disorder? Does he have a pornography obsession. I really doubt I know anything “real” about this man given the recent revelations. Has he been caught (and denied and been angry that I found out) with internet porn video. yes. Obsession? I don’t know.

This is very confusing to me. I cant **prove **anything except his long term adulterous affair and I know that is not grounds for annulment on its own.

Suggestions? Enlightenment?

 

[Galnextdoor]

Things you might consider are statements he made in the presence of someone else that clearly indicate that he didn’t have the maturity to make a commitment. You might consider actions that happened before and after you were married. Was he unfaithful to you before you were married and continued to be unfaithful after you married? Within the first few months of the marriage did he do anything that would indicate he had no intentions of honoring the vows you took such as did he ignore you and get angry with you because you were sick? Did he decide to not raise the children Catholic or interfered in any way with your helping them to form a good Catholic conscience? Did he have any addictions before the marriage that were not revealed to you until after you married? Did he present himself under false pretenses in order to get you to marry him? You say he is a liar. Do you know of anyone who witnessed that he lied many times before you were married and continued to do so after you were married? Was he sober when the wedding ceremony took place? Did you feel pressured to marry him for some reason? Was he open to life during the marital act? Did he physically and emotionally abuse you before and after you were married? These are things that might fit into the first two questions you asked about. These are things that would indicate that he couldn’t make a commitment or the commitment wasn’t made of his own free will. Some of these things would also indicate that he really didn’t understand what love and marriage is all about.

 

[Tietjen]

Hello again all who have strengthened me these past several weeks. I am slowly but surely getting my finances separated but feel that progress is being made. My home is still on the market (10 months) and NO offers have come in… St. Joseph must be on vacation!

Anyway - I am taking this evening (as I am alone with all my children gone tonight) to look over my dioceses’ Office of the Tribunal preliminary questionnaire. My priest recommended looking it over to become familiar with the type of questions asked and to search my memory for deceptions before my marriage.

A couple of questions to those who have sadly walked this path… Many questions center on my spouse’s state of mind prior to the wedding…

The questionnaire asks…
-When you married did your former spouse commit himself to marriage for life?

• Did he understand marriage and the basic responsibilities of being a spouse? etc… etc…

I obviously believed so… but judging from his behavior now and the question of whether he has BPD, depression, NPD or is just plain self-centered makes me wonder how I can possibly answer this and other like questions. Does the responding spouse answer the questions that refer to him?

Also included, a lengthy list of factors that may or may not have been serious problems before or during my marriage…
Without my spouse subjecting himself to a full psychological evaluations (no way he would agree to that. He lied the 3 times he went for marriage counseling), must I simply propose he has a personality disorder? Does he have a pornography obsession. I really doubt I know anything “real” about this man given the recent revelations. Has he been caught (and denied and been angry that I found out) with internet porn video. yes. Obsession? I don’t know.

This is very confusing to me. I cant **prove **anything except his long term adulterous affair and I know that is not grounds for annulment on its own.

Suggestions? Enlightenment?

This was my nightmare as well. In fact, it still is… I answered all the questions as best as I could and as honest as I could. I assumed that my wife knew and understood marriage was a life-long commitment, etc and answered as such. To make a long story short, my packet was refused before it ever reached the Tribunal. A letter was sent back with my paperwork saying that based on the answers I gave, there was not enough information to determine if a valid marriage had taken place. So, I am a married man abandoned by his wife, condemned to be a lone for the rest of my days on this mud ball. In the meantime, my “wife” who also abandoned the Church as well as our Children and me; now dates and is never a lone and by all appearances is having the time of her life. Do you sense my resentment?

Be honest when you answer the questions, but be thorough, unassuming, and factual. Give examples whenever possible. Have as many witnesses listed as possible, and PRAY, PRAY, PRAY. Because in the end, if the annulment is not declared, you may find yourself asking the same questions I did. Choosing to be Catholic or pursuing a new beginning with someone new. I obviously, made my mind up and leaving the Church is something I just cannot do. However… there are many days that I feel, I am the loneliest Catholic man in the world.

God bless.

 

[cecilia97]

BMB,

I filed for review of my former marriage about 6 months after my divorce, and I was granted my final decree of nullity l14 months later. The process is nerve wracking but healing. My secular counselor later told me that, in answering the questions, I had done a lot of therapy work by myself. It was painful but I was so THANKFUL to have decided to do it right after my divorce…who really wants to think about their divorce 8 years later when they’re getting ready to marry someone new? Get it over with now if you can stand it, that’s my in-expert advice.

Something I did, which I highly suggest to anyone…take that questionnaire and/or your computer/notepad and draft your answers in a church or chapel in the presence of the Holy Eucharist. I first tried to work on my questionnaire at home, and found that I would be angry for hours after each writing session. That anger disappeared when I worked in the adoration chapel at our parish.

The questionnaire from my diocese sounds very different than yours. My questions were not about my ex’s state of mind directly…how could I know that? I answered a series of questions about myself, family background, faith life. Then the same questions about my ex. Then a series of questions about our dating experiences, the time leading up to our wedding, and the years afterward. The questionnaire did NOT ask me to propose grounds…my parish priest reviewed my answers, forwarded them to the Tribunal, they proposed grounds, and asked me if I agreed with them. The Tribunal proposed 6 separate grounds for nullity in my case. I agreed with all. They found at least one was true…I never went to review the final decree.

Most of all, just be honest, and give as MUCH info as possible…if you make a statement about yourself or ex, back it up with an example…i.e…he said X, I did Y, etc. The testimonies of your witnesses will help the process.

Please PM me if you have any questions at all, or just if I can be of support. I have a friend I might be able to put you in touch with who advises folks on their nullity filings in our diocese.

God bless you!

 

[cecilia97]

Forgot to include…your ex can participate or not, but the Tribunal will notify him. I believe you MUST have a divorce decree before you can file for nullity.

Try not to worry about your ex’s participation. The Tribunal takes care of all the contact. And if he refuses to participate, so what. A priest told me once that the fastest way for a spouse to look immature and back up any claims made against him in a nullity filing is to refuse the process.

Edited to add: (Sorry!) I wouldn’t propose he has any specific psych issues, etc. How would you know that, you cannot diagnose him. Just state the facts that you know. Definitely include that he lied during counseling…bingo! Btw, your marriage counselors can be witnesses and send in written evaluations based on their session notes. Mine did this and I feel it was very helpful…she clearly had no vested interest in my nullity petition so she was an obvious neutral witness.

 

[Liberanosamalo]

I had to wait 6.5 years from the time he left and filed for divorce the first time and the time I finally had the divorce decree in hand. He dragged it out that long.

I had a LOT of time to think about things. Plus I was very lucky to have letters from him. Lots. And when I reread them, wow. It was all there. In his own handwriting. God bless the priest who told me not to burn them, that they may come in handy for an annulment.

The others here are correct, I also used the testimony of a marriage counselor we went to. I saw her a few times after he left too. So she had (name removed by moderator)ut. He refused to cooperate. By that point he was secretly engaged to someone else. Which I surmised in my writing. The priest told me give as much info as possible. So he got 123 single-spaced pages answering the questions.

I wish all dating and engaged couples could keep all their emails and text messages in a box. They might find rereading them years later that a disturbing pattern emerged which they didn’t see at the time. I had that feeling with the letters.

Think back to your early dating years. When you first met. How honest was he about his family. What were the first lies you caught him in? Did he ever date anyone else while you were dating or engaged? The porn thing…it’s not for you to know if he was addicted… but you can describe the nature of the kind of stuff he was looking at. (They’ve heard it all.)
How often, how much stuff did you find…

Bedroom stuff… don’t be shy or modest. If there was any way he treated you that was degrading… put it in.

Any violence. Financial shenanigans. Odd behavior in the early part of the marriage.

Stuff you only found out about him AFTER the marriage.

Be sure to be very clear and in detail about his own family upbringing. Don’t count on him to tell the truth about the good the bad and the ugly. Everything that formed him, his own parents’ marriages and attitudes toward marriage formed his. Very important for the tribunal to know.

How serious was his practice of the faith when you were dating, engaged, newly married?

In any conversation did he ever say “If my wife did this, I’d leave…” Mine wrote in a letter that if he even THOUGHT his wife was playing head games with him, or not giving herself completely to him with loyalty or devotion, he’d leave. Typical narcissist. He was the one playing head games. But right there… the engaged guy with the conditional marriage vow.

I had not researched narcissism before I did all the work to write it down. But I found in my research years later almost sentence for sentence my own ideas about how I was treated in the marriage and my own feelings about how I had to turn myself inside out just to keep the marriage going.

Any early abandonments? Emotionally, physically? Financially? Work problems? Any FEELING you got that this girlfriend wasn’t the first in the marriage?

How did he get along with others? What kind of friendships does he have? Longstanding loyal ones, or fleeting people he throws away when he doesn’t need them anymore?

This is the time to start writing down and going through your albums and thinking back to 1992 or whenever it was. Stuff you ignored then but now takes on a whole new light.

His practice of his faith, comments he made even in the early days of the marriage about things. What your first fights were about and how he handled his anger. Any drinking or drug issues. His behavior and reputation in the work place. Firings, instability, any criminal behavior.

This is not the time for shame or modesty. Every detail matters. The meetings with the priest, your original FOCCUS test can indicate stuff from where you did pre-Cana.

You need to go back to all the little a-ha moments when you first began to realize things about him weren’t quite right. The roughest thing about it is going down memory lane and realizing how hollow and fraudulent so many of those memories were. There you were thinking you had a fiancee or a husband or something and were happy and he was leading a totally different existence from you.

Answer every question as if the only information they have to go on is what you provide. Choose your witnesses carefully. People who knew you AND him in the early days preferably. Now is the time to have really honest conversations with family and friends. You’ll be surprised once it’s over to find all the people who NOW they come forward and say “I never liked him. He was a jerk.” Ask them to elaborate.

It’s a hard process. But once you go through it it’s like you’ve taken out all the emotional garbage. The tribunal was the only group that really cared what happened, the truth. The courts didn’t care about the truth.

No, you can’t diagnose him with a personality disorder, but you can detail his reactions to ordinary life experiences and his behavior in such detail that any reader comes to that conclusion. I came across a letter from mine where he literally was comparing himself to Jesus in something. Why I didn’t run screaming into the night when I read that is a question that haunts me to this day. At the time it kind of got my attention, but I ignored it as a poor metaphor. Only later did I realize he really did have a complex.

His inappropriate reactions to stress, to life, to child rearing, his inattentiveness in the early days, punitive behavior… go back and really remember the stuff. Your sworn testimony is the only evidence they have to go on. Good luck with that.

 

[Liberanosamalo]

As for the poster who thinks he’ll spend his whole life alone… trust that if God wants you with someone, HE will make it happen. And it might require your ex coming to a change of heart and applying for an annulment herself with information that only she could give. Or she could die. That sets you free too, you know.

Don’t think you’ll be alone. I got my annulment 5 years ago this spring. Haven’t had one date since. Haven’t met anyone. Too busy raising the kids. They don’t need MY romantic dramas in life. Too busy working. And who would I trust after what I went through.

But you can be sure if I do ever date it will be someone very different from the guy that I thought was great when I was only 22.

BMB, go into the details of what YOU observed over the years of his interactions with you and the people closest to him. Show how he created a facade at work or play that was opposite from what you knew. Good luck.

 

[Liberanosamalo]

Oh, and what you knew of his prior dating patterns and ways he treated relationships is helpful. If you knew any of them, they might be good to look up and talk to now.

Mine had 2 fiancees (one he gave a ring to) in the 3 years he proposed to me. Now I wonder what REALLY happened to end those relationships. I was young and stupid and believed his story when he told me then.

Your guy’s odd behavior about dealing with his illness is very important. It’s an automatic thing to do whatever you can to fix your health. His resistance to treating a debilitating disease and his lying to himself and his denial… very key. Someone who won’t even tell himself the truth won’t tell anyone else the truth either. How long has he been ill?

I really doubt I know anything “real” about this man given the recent revelations.

Tell them that. Go through all the stuff you once thought and how it was revealed to be a sham. When you remember the first lie he ever told you and where you were and how you found out… the others start coming back too. If he showed a basic pattern of deception before the wedding, that is important for them to know about him. Would you have married him if you knew these things beforehand?

 

[BMB]

THank you, thank you for all the HUGELY helpful information. I will print these posts as I begin this process of writing down my life story with dh. Some suggestions brought up thoughts / events forgotten over time.

I could just kick myself for shredding all the high school “notes” and military/Iraq letter written. I thought it would help me emotionally. Now I see that it may have been very costly. Thing is, by sheer numbers of correspondence, I wrote almost every day during his deployments. I had a handful of letters from him. - a clue in itself? I will try to dig up the Marriage Encounter notebooks we worked on during our engagement.

There are many things I look back on now and kind of shudder. The phone call from a husband of someone he worked with asking dh to “back off” his wife. I believed dh when he said the guy was crazy & jealous for no reason. Already lines were being crossed. Then there was the ski trip for high sales people at work that he said lasted 5 days. Oops… a lie, only 3 days were company paid… I let him by on that one because he told me the truth just prior to leaving. I do remember being very upset that he had even considered lying about such a thing. Very upset and he downplayed my insistance that a lie IS a LIE. Many lies of ommission. More than I could document. Oh my…

Particularly haunting is a paper he wrote for college where he described the moment he made the decision to “leave the military and come home to win back the girl.” I originally thought it romantic but now see it as a calculated decision on his part to play a role. To win what he considered an appropriate prize for the moment.

It is distressing to see so many conversations from a different vantage point. Black & White. Decietful vs honest. It makes me sad.

To gentleman poster who thinks he’ll spend his whole life alone, I hope that you will find happiness in the near future, whatever form it takes. I wish & pray that for all of us.

 

[whatevergirl]

BMB, I have found your threads insightful, and moving…It is an old cliche, but a good one, and fits here, I think. Sometimes, we just can’t see the forest through the trees. You were too close to him, the situation, to really see it all for what it was. I think your husband has serious issues with women…most likely, an unresolved childhood issue with his mom, and he now seeks out women to either punish, or he just doesn’t respect women. Either way, there are definite women issues there. I am sorry you have been put through this, but you will come out the other side, stronger and able to take on things of this life, like never before. I often wonder why we have to suffer, but if Christ did for us, then who are we to wish it away? I do pray that your suffering is minimal, however…no one deserves what you have been through. You’re a bright, articulate woman, from the sounds of things here, and your husband will really be losing a gem.

Praying for you through this, just know that.

 

[BMB]

Your guy’s odd behavior about dealing with his illness is very important. It’s an automatic thing to do whatever you can to fix your health. His resistance to treating a debilitating disease and his lying to himself and his denial… very key. Someone who won’t even tell himself the truth won’t tell anyone else the truth either. How long has he been ill?

THis truly is one of the hardest things for me to understand. He had “symptoms” for a few years prior to the emergency surgery but NEVER went to a Dr. His surgery took place 3.5 months prior to the wedding. He recovered physically, but never accepted the diagnosis. He simply believed the Dr. wrong. 2 months after we were married I begged him to go for a checkup and to take the preventative meds prescribed, but he would not. He believed that he would be kicked out of the military if they thought he had the illness. Hes had one colonoscopy in 17 years - after some new problems. The doctor came out and told me immediately that he absolutely had Crohn’s and was definitely in denial. DH blamed me for making him go… now he’ll get kicked out the the Guard. Still will NOT take meds.

Sounds sad and delusional to me. I don’t understand and it breaks my heart. I cant fix him, esp since he doesn’t need fixing because he has no health problems.

I have a great deal to think about. Thanks for the outline of events/actions to consider. This may take me months to accomplish but I feel I must start for my sanity.

 

[faithandhope]

This was my nightmare as well. In fact, it still is… I answered all the questions as best as I could and as honest as I could. I assumed that my wife knew and understood marriage was a life-long commitment, etc and answered as such. To make a long story short, my packet was refused before it ever reached the Tribunal. A letter was sent back with my paperwork saying that based on the answers I gave, there was not enough information to determine if a valid marriage had taken place. So, I am a married man abandoned by his wife, condemned to be a lone for the rest of my days on this mud ball. In the meantime, my “wife” who also abandoned the Church as well as our Children and me; now dates and is never a lone and by all appearances is having the time of her life. Do you sense my resentment?

Be honest when you answer the questions, but be thorough, unassuming, and factual. Give examples whenever possible. Have as many witnesses listed as possible, and PRAY, PRAY, PRAY. Because in the end, if the annulment is not declared, you may find yourself asking the same questions I did. Choosing to be Catholic or pursuing a new beginning with someone new. I obviously, made my mind up and leaving the Church is something I just cannot do. However… there are many days that I feel, I am the loneliest Catholic man in the world.

God bless.

I pray for you, your children and everyone that is going thru this.

In Christ,