Feeling schadenfreude over his divorce

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I should be a better person than to find satisfaction in someone's misery. After all, my resolution to problem I had with him was that I broke up with him. But his disrespect and wrongs carried on beyond that since we share a daughter. The relationship was disastrous for me psychologically. What's worse is that he went out of his way to paint his wife as better than me in every way possible. It was as if his low self-esteem needed to pummel what was left of my withering self-esteem as a desperate attempt to claim victory. Victory for what? I still don't know!

He's a slimy, dirty dog with STDs that cheats non-stop. While I disagree that his wife is better than me in every way, I did think she was a good match for him since she, also, is a slimy, dirty dog with STDs. Lord only knows how I escaped that relationship without a single disease but I did. I swear to you, he lied to me about everything until after I'd had a child with him. THEN he told me the truth about his history. He started cheating with her before we broke up and she gave him herpes!

Well, despite them having an open relationship "where all is permitted", she still caught him cheating. When he was with me, he cheated constantly with women and men. He hasn't changed a bit. So she's thrown him out and even her kids know about the divorce. She's already moving stuff into a new place and sorting out the things that belong to him and my daughter.

This wasn't an isolated incident of marital distress. They'd been having problems for a while. Every thing I would hear would give me just a bit of joy, a bit of reassurance. It wasn't me. It was him. It wasn't me.

I am married to a man who appreciates me as his wife and the mother of his child. If I got hurt, he would drop everything to see if I was alright, regardless of how little the injury may be. If I call for him, he will be here because I'm his wife. This should be enough, especially since being diagnosed with AS and knowing that I'm really not lazy or careless at all (and having a husband who validates that diagnosis). But I feel it... I feel satisfaction in knowing all the trouble my ex caused me is because he's a failure, he's flawed, he's a loser. It's not that I wasn't good enough, it's that he's not good enough.

And all the trouble she caused me. She did the parental alienation shtick to anyone who would listen, telling them I'm a horrible mother and so on. She even introduced herself at my daughter's school as my daughter's mother (not step-mother, but actually pretended to be ME) and demanded that my daughter call her "Mom" in front of my ex's family. The school has banned her from the grounds and from having any contact with the teacher. My ex's family has been confused by her complaints and manipulations because every moment they've spent with me, I've always been very caring and attentive to my children. My daughter has seen both the school counselor and a private psychologist about the parental alienation.

I think about how she manipulated and lied so much to get with my ex when he was with me. And you know that I broke up with him? He would have been content to have kept me while doing as he pleased. But I realized that my husband (who was just a friend in a group of friends at that time) was treating me better than my live-in boyfriend, that I wanted to try standing on my own. The potential that was there meant more to me than years of that relationship. He stalked me for months afterward. He looked through my kitchen window and watched my husband (then my boyfriend) and I making out on my living room couch, and sent me a very long email about it the next morning. But she waited out his psycho phase and kept on him. Finally, he started telling me how much better she was than me and how happy he is to be without me.

And now I think, You wanted him. You got him. She spent an obscene amount of money on a wedding that was flaunted in my face by both of them in emails to me. She wanted so badly to replace me, thinking he was a poor victim in our relationship. She wanted to give him sexual freedom and all his kinks so he wouldn't be forced to cheat because of mean, frigid b*****s like me. She's spent so much money trying to buy my daughter's affection.

How can I not smile now that she's caught him cheating and has filed for divorce?
How is this not just deserved?

I know I shouldn't, but damn it, I'm feeling pretty good about this. Serves them right!

I think your feelings are acceptable given what you've been put through. And also very human.

I remember a woman I used to know as friends in my early 20's. I now know she has a histrionic personality disorder, she is manipulative, some of her disorder revolved around romance/sexual issues, and the night I accidentally triggered a panic attack, she called several male friends and police, and when I returned from the local shop with a snack for us her friends nearly attacked me (it was only the police stepping in that stopped that). She had told them I had threatened to molest her. I explained my side of the story, and the cops let me go but warned me to stay away from her. They didn't need to warn me after all that. They should have seen her after a night out binging - running around flashing bystanders and screaming "a*** sex, a*** sex, for ****** sake SOMEONE R*** ME IN THE A**! :O

Much later I learned she had moved to another town to meet a "boyfriend" she encountered online. She broke her promise to her parents by having sex before marriage, got pregnant, and her behaviour ruined the relationship and she was dumped. She ended up back home with her parents. I feel schadenfreude for what she got herself into, but feel pity about her child and what it may be exposed to as it grows up.

I'd be more concerned about you if you DIDN'T feel a sense of satisfaction about this. His experience would seem to vaildate your stand. It would be quite humiliating to find that somebody you couldn't live with had no such trouble with anybody else. That would suggest it was your fault, but what happened shows that it wasn't. Of course you probably knew it was his fault before that, but it's good to have such hard evidence.

I wouldn't feel too guilty about any sense of revenge either. You're only human.

I thought I knew it was his fault until I started hearing about all the trouble he was having and how it was getting progressively worse (now divorce). I never realized how much I'd let myself internalize the hurt, as if he was right and I wasn't good enough, until it became apparent that he was the one who isn't good enough. It's weird to explain.

No, I think I understand that. I'm pretty sure that one of my ex-partners had some serious problems with relationships, and that it was largely her fault that I had to leave her. But I cut off all contact with her, and wouldn't let mutual acquaintances tell me of her adventures post-separation, because for a long time I still loved her, and couldn't bear the idea of her being with another man. So I never got the validation of seeing her fail with subsequent relationships. She wasn't unfaithful as such, but seemed to delight in making me think she was about to be, or that she was in danger of getting physically hurt, or that she didn't particularly need me. These things were often too subtle and nebulous to draw any firm conclusions, and what haunted me was that if she was really "OK," the only explanation for the failure of the relationship was that I was possessive, paranoid and claustrophobically needy. And with those "accusations" in my head, I tried to compensate for them in my behaviour - the problem with that is, a totally non-possessive, non-paranoid, non-needy person just comes over as if they don't give a damn. That's what I think happened to me, and just one piece of strong external evidence that she had been playing hard games with me might have saved me from some very counterproductive and unnecessary "correction" of my behaviour.

Thing is, it would be easy for me to create a strong-looking case for her being wrong and me being right. But the result would be unavailing.....as soon as I allow for my likely unconscious need to validate my position, I can't view the result as a "safe conviction," and neither would anybody else who understood anything about human nature. I'd just feel like a bad workman blaming my tools. The heartache of losing that relationship is long gone, and I don't wish her any harm, but I would benefit greatly from learning that she messed up every subsequent relationship she's had. It's like seeing a ghost - you doubt the evidence of your own senses until somebody else says "it's OK, I saw it too." Hope this makes sense.

You make sense, too, ToughDiamond. If I'd had my preference, I would have never seen him or heard from him again, either. That's how I handled my previous break-ups. Unfortunately, we share a daughter so he's in my life and I have to cooperate civilly with him for the rest of my life. It works a little like closure to see these things come into being.

If this wasn't enough, every ex has come out of the woodwork thanks to Facebook. My first boyfriend, my first serious boyfriend, little trists... anyone who remembers my name looks me up. I remember why exes are exes!

I had that problem with the mother of my son, though in that case her bad behaviour was so clear-cut that I didn't need validation for it (though she herself didn't acknowledge it). She made matters worse by trying to make small talk with me as if none of it had ever happened. I always co-operated with her when it was a matter of our son's welfare, including a time when he'd got something in his eye and we both worked together perfectly to fix the problem, even though we weren't supposed to be on speaking terms with each other. She still tries to make small talk with me when she happens to meet me, which I find embarrassing because I just can't do that with her any more. I just think "how can you talk like that, as if none of the bad stuff ever happened?"

I'm very glad Facebook wasn't invented when I was having my worst separation problems! I'm on Facebook these days but luckily I haven't been noticed by my ex-partners. It seems strange to me that ex-lovers bother to get back in touch - I don't think it's entirely fair on existing partners, and I don't understand what they're after.