Photo Finished

I met Ray 4 months ago while on a girls night out. He chatted up a friend Sarah who declined his invite home. So later he hit on me just outside the ladies. He is cute, short and sexy. Being drunk and horny I went home with him. In the morning he made breakfast and we showered and Ray took me home. And asked me to go out with him again.

We dated about twice a week he bought me gifts and lingerie. He wanted to take pictures of me in my new “clothes”. I agreed to some sexy/intimate pix but did not expose myself. Every weekend he push Me to expose more. With the just between us comments. In a few weeks he had me posing nude, something I had never thought of doing. He made me feel sexy and loved.

Soon after I moved into his place I noticed how much Ray was spending a lot of time on the internet. He also wanted more graphic pictures. We got really drunk one night, I went to change into a babydoll for him. He followed with his camera & said it be really sexy if you do some strip poses. Ray kept filling my glass with wine and took more pictures.
A week later I used his computer to get my Email. Ray had left open an email window. So I looked and I saw some nudes of a woman. She was posed in the same way I posed for Ray! The mail saved showed Ray sending some guy pictures of me. Turns out he was swapping pictures of me!!! He posted some on a website too.

I deleted all my pictures on his computer., Then made that nude woman his background. I packed up all my belongings up and left.

Once a Cheater, Always a Cheater

So, the title of this may be a bit misleading, but it’s still all the same to me…
I’ll call this guy JL; I thought he was the one for me. We started dating halfway through my sophomore year, and continued to do so until about a month ago, when I ended it. Why did I do that? Well, multiple reasons. The biggest factor was that I let him get away with cheating not once, but three times. To this day, I’m not sure why. I guess I thought he loved me, and he always seemed so sorry after I found out (which, by the way, I found out from other people, never him). Him cheating on me left me with no self-esteem. I’m not the best with relationships, because I get hurt easily. But, I also made a mistake last month, and that made me realize that I deserve better, and maybe he does too. I still can’t figure out why it’s so easy to cheat on me. Maybe because they know how easily I fall for people, and just like JL, they all run all over me and my hurting heart.

A Knife to the Back

During my deployment to Iraq in 2004 I had already been married for 2 years to my girlfriend of 5 years. She supported me joining the Army in 2001 after 9/11 and we had a very close relationship. Before I joined we were both bigger people and I dropped 30 lbs to join. She supported me by working out and dieting with me and lost 50 lbs! I was incredibly proud of her and she went from 170 to 125 over the next couple years. While I was at Basic Training and AIT for four months she kept busy with college, exercise, and hanging out with her new female friends.

My wife and I were always shy and introverted. We preferred to stay in with other friends and D&D and video games. When she made the move down to Fort Belvior, VA from Maine my once shy wife quickly made friends at her gym and college. However, these friends looked at me as a wet blanket. I don’t drink alcohol and my wife wanted to regularly go clubbing with them and their husbands/boyfriends. I hated being out past midnight and it went from one night a week to being Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. She was able to keep on top of school, but I couldn’t be out that much and still be up for long strenuous days at 5am the next morning. We also weren’t spending much time with it just being her and I. I would sit and maybe dance a bit with my drunk wife and be quiet while they all spoke. They had all sorts of inside jokes and talked liberally about getting wasted, high, chasing women/men… Opening my mouth would get me teased about playing D&D and my wife would just laugh and join in.

We’d argue about how much time she was spending out and it would turn into her screaming at me and crying. Hours later she would return to bed or wake me up on the couch apologetic saying we’d cut back. We never did. I’d talk to her about planning nights just for us that she would initially agree to where we would go play Magic The Gathering at a hobby shop or go to a convention. We used to love doing cosplay together at conventions and she was less and less interested in me. Usually the night before or the day of when we were supposed to go out together something would come up. Either one of her friends had a fight with their boyfriend and we would instead go to the club, she didn’t feel well and wanted to stay home and nap, and twice I caught her in a lie saying she was studying with her friends but was really at the bar with them drinking and playing pool.

Deployment was coming up for me and I was pushing her to spend more time with me before I left for the year. Just getting her to go on a one week vacation with me down to Florida was like pulling teeth. She spent the entire trip snapping at me annoyed with being away and talking to her friends on her phone. I knew we’d have to have a big talk when I came home after she asked if we could pay for her female friend to come down just a day into our trip and I refused… She didn’t talk to me for an entire day.

I deployed in the fall of 2004 and didn’t come home until mid-tour leave that April. We talked regularly at the same time almost every day which was evening for me, but around lunch for her. She was entering her final year of studies and would tell me stories about her friends and the old gang. I really missed her. In November I got a strange feeling for the first time when she mentioned a guy named Kevin who sat behind her and spent a lot of their course projects teasing her. In time she invited him to hang out with her and her friends. I hadn’t really been jealous before, but she was talking about this guy all whimsy and making comments about him being able to get any girl he wanted and being a ‘manslut’.

I made a MySpace account to communicate with Army friends and found my wife had one. It was mostly her and her friends hanging out. I sent her a friend request and then went to her friends list to invite some of them. Her best friend she spent the most time with had a profile photo of her giving a thumbs up and holding a shot as my wife was passionately kissing some other guy in the background on what looked like New Year’s Eve.

I immediately called her and asked her what the picture was. At first she said the photo couldn’t be her as she hasn’t kissed anyone but me ever. I pointed out the photo clearly showed her tattoo below her wrist. She stayed quiet for about 30 seconds and then told me that on New Year’s Eve she was drunk and when the ball dropped this Kevin guy grabbed her and kissed her against her will.

I was fuming, but then I got messages from her friends and Kevin saying that’s what happened and it wasn’t her fault. I gave her the benefit of the doubt.

Coming home in April for midtour leave things seemed normal with her and we were cuddly and loving at home. I went out with her in the couple weeks I was home and the moment we entered the club and were surrounded by her friends she wouldn’t even hold my hand. I put my arm around her and noticed Kevin staring daggers at me. On the nights I came out they were strangely quiet around me.

Aside from one night during midtour where she begged to go to ladies’ night and I relented we had a good time. It was wonderful to be home. I didn’t know it would never be like that again.

I returned to Iraq and we started rolling things up a couple months later preparing to redeploy. We had a serious IED attack on our convoy that killed a very close friend of mine just a month before returning home. I was devastated.
Talking with my wife on the phone the week of it happening I was crying each evening and just pouring my heart out as she remained quiet and listened. After a week I had poured out so many tears I had none left. I called her one night the usual time and she didn’t pick up her cell which was not typical. I tried a few more times that night to no answer. It was the same the next night. I called her parents to ask if everything was okay and all her mother would say was a cryptic, “She’ll talk to you in a couple days.”

I talked to my squad leader and they had Rear Detachment do a welfare check and confirmed she was at the house and okay. She told them she just didn’t want to talk to me at the moment. This was stunning, and I was definitely hurt I was still mourning and she wouldn’t tell me why we weren’t talking, but just 12 days before redeployment she sent me an e-mail telling me to call.

I called and she told me she was going to be brief as there was no room for discussion. She fell out of love with me a while ago. She fell in love with Kevin. She made a mistake marrying the first guy she had a serious relationship with. She said I was always a wet blanket and a kid because I still indulged in the geeky things we used to. She told me when I came home she would have my stuff out front and the house was in her name and she was taking it despite the fact I was the sole breadwinner for years paying the mortgage. She said it was to my advantage to stay legally married to her as I could collect a married housing allowance and extra pay and she could still have health insurance. She said she already moved all the money out of our joint account and into her personal savings account and was not going to split it unless I complied. I sucked back my anger and sadness and told her I wasn’t in a place to make that decision right now and I would make it when I got home. She hung up and would no longer take my calls.

I spoke to JAG and got a divorce lawyer even before leaving Iraq. I did what I could to secure the assets in my name. The divorce lawyer knew what she was doing and had me cancel the credit cards and terminate the power of attorney I gave her before she could pull credit in my name. She even got a local judge to order the savings account be frozen for 30 days so I could get home and not have that money spent.

Returning home my Platoon Sergeant drove me to our home to get my car. It was full of trash and had receipts with Kevin’s name on them showing he was driving my car. My stuff was placed in garbage bags and put at the curb with a little sign saying it wasn’t trash so the garbage man wouldn’t take it away. Everything was just tossed into the garbage bags and left in the rain.

The divorce went easier than I thought it would with the judge being very kind. I thought I would just leave with my clothes and my car, but she was ordered to give me half of the profits from the house when she sold it and to return the entire savings nest egg to me or repay me for her student loan I had been paying for a few years.

I left her in VA and decided to not go home. I decided to go to Texas where I could visit my late friend’s kids and be there for them. I knew I always wanted my own and their grandparents welcomed me being a big part of their lives. Saturday and Wednesday are the days I take them out or they hang out. They are the only part of my friend I have left and I cherish being their uncle. I used my VA loan to buy a little house and got a grant to open up a fiber optic installation company. After years of subcontracting we finally have taken on a few million dollar contracts. I spent a couple years manslutting myself, but think I have a really good girl in my life. I think I may take a long time to decide if I ever want to marry again as I was cut so deep.

The hardest aspect of the entire thing is the level of betrayal. After dropping weight and doing regular exercise I became fairly attractive and got plenty of female attention that I shrugged off. I can’t fathom why I wasn’t special enough to not do all of those things to.

The Lying Game

In 2009 I met who I thought was the love of my life. I will call her ‘Jamie’. I was working in Boston on my internship and met her at a local gym. It started as us talking while running on the treadmill each day and evolved into us going running together in the spring. At the time I was still committed to a former classmate and colleague and were still deciding if I was going to follow her to a job in Arizona. Instead of uprooting my internship or making her decline her job we amicably decided to part ways and be friends.

Two months after the relationship ended I was jogging with Jamie three days during the week and one day during the weekend. She had a lot of guys she dated and I only decided to take her out after she asked me if I was interested in hanging out some evening. From then on we began the transition of being work out buddies to dating. We loved hiking and visited most of the big trails on the east coast. Both of us regularly used creatine working out, but she also was taking hormones from what she claimed was due to a deficiency. I thought nothing of it as she did have prescriptions for them.

She told me she lost her parents in a car accident and grew up an only child with her grandmother before she passed. This turned out to be a lie.
I bought Jamie a ring eight months ago after living together since mid-2010. Her and I made the move to Annapolis so I could accept a good entry level position and she could be close to some of her cousins that lived in Baltimore. I was planning to ask her to marry me in August 2012.

I have seen Jamie’s driver’s license, social security card, and everything else with her name. I work in the financial sector and had her information as we had begun to share a bank account. I work in financial planning and ran a credit report on her (with her permission she gave me over the phone). She didn’t know what it would tell me as she had never checked it before…

The first thing I noticed was charges back in 2006-2008 for financing companies with cosmetic surgery names. She had taken out 25k that she was still paying back. This surprised me as she didn’t seem the type that would opt for plastic surgery. I looked at her information and found her parents’ names who co-signed for the loans. Then I looked at the column for ‘former name’.

Her name used to be Jake.

I was shocked. The hormones are the first thing I thought about.

Our company has an investigative officer who has a lot of paid database accesses on public information and I asked her to run Jamie’s name, his real name, and his parents’. He told me he could get to it in a couple days as a favor to me for helping him fix his car last summer.

Parents were alive, he had a brother, and he was indeed a man. Same city as he was born. I even got a copy of the record of live birth. I put all of it in an envelope and confronted him that Friday evening.

I was so angry this person I had known for years and trusted so fully had deceived me. He knew I was fairly liberal and never confided in me at any point to his original gender.

Jamie cried and I yelled. He begged me not to tell anyone and begged to stay, but I told him I wanted out and left for a couple days. We had to share housing for another month and a half of the lease, but after a couple weeks of begging me to talk to him he gave up broken-hearted.

We both moved out of the big apartment we made our home for the last couple years. There was no tearful goodbyes on my end. I was far too cruel due to my anger.

Now in the last three months my anger has softened. I did love Jamie. But, the moment I found out who Jamie originally was I couldn’t see him as Jamie anymore. He became a different person I couldn’t be attracted to.

Sometimes Things Work Out for the Best

Dated a girl in high school, she was 2 years younger, my senior year I asked her to go to the prom she said no. Another boy asked her and she said yes, I took the hint. He later dumped her and she came back and begged for forgiveness, that was my second year of college. She and I both the went to college in another city and we got married before my college senior year and her sophomore year. I worked that year and paid for us both to go to college (she didn’t work). After I graduated I got a great job and paid all of the bills and for her final two years of college tuition, nice house, new clothes and a new car (she did not have a car before we married). 2 months after she graduated she had an affair. She said she had paid some bills but had instead kept the money and drained our saving account. We got a divorce and I paid all the bills off. She later married the same guy and she went on to teach. I found out later that her “boyfriend/lover/husband” got muscular dystrophy and is confined to a wheel chair but will have a normal life span and she has a neurological disorder and is routinely hospitalized.
Sometimes things workout for the best!

History Repeats Itself

this won’t be short, and it is in no way sweet…

i met him back in ’05… let’s call him “R”… he started working where i did at the end of October/beginning of November as extra help for the holidays… we hit it off quite well, but he was married and i was seeing someone so we were happy with our awesome friendship… we worked together for two years before i found a job more in my field of study and when i left we kept in touch…

now it’s 2007, and i’ve been on again off again with the guy i was seeing, and it was TERRIBLE; but that’s another story for another time… i ended up leaving that guy for good and moved in with a friend of mine… now R and i had been keeping in touch and i’d gone to see his band play gigs around town when i could… one Friday night in ’08 i decide to go see R’s band play somewhere downtown… i get to the show and hang out with another old coworker of mine who had come to see R play too… after the show was over, i was hanging around because R asked me to so we could catch up… we end up hanging out until four in the morning (the show ended around eleven)… he told me how he’d wanted to leave his wife for a long time now (first i’d heard that they were having problems) and how he wished he’d been with me… i was 24 at the time, he was 28… the age difference was no big deal, and he had always thought he’d gotten married too young… anyway, at about four am, i drop him off at his house… the rest of the band had already left hours ago and i’d offered to take him home anyway… the next morning he calls me and says that he stayed up the rest of the night after i’d dropped him off thinking, and that when his wife had woken up to go to work he’d told her that he wanted a divorce and that he was going to live with his drummer… he was already at this drummer’s house when he called me to tell me he’d left his wife, and he asked me to come over… i did, and we talked for a while and went out to lunch, and he asked me if we could date… i said yes, even though it hadn’t even been twelve hours since he’d left his wife of six years… first red flag…

things are good for a year; no major fights, we move in together, his divorce is finalized, we get engaged and start planning a wedding… all this time i’m going to shows, band practices, helping with bills, buying things for the band (light equipment, switchboards, picks, strings, etc.) and i’m loving the fact that i’m with a musician… life is good… i start to notice that he’s a little distant more often than not, but i just figure it’s from the stress of being in a band and trying to produce albums and trying to get signed and whatnot… then they all decide that, because the scene in our state isn’t what they want, they should move up north to their singer’s home state because it’s (supposedly) better up there… i agree to quit my office job with awesome benefits and great pay to move up north with R and his band… superb idea…

we last a month up there before we just can’t make it anymore… best part is, only three members of the band actually made the move up north, and the third one didn’t move until halfway through the month we were up there… making the phone call to my parents that we were out of money and couldn’t even make it one more day was the hardest thing i’ve ever had to do… they were there the next morning (drove all night) and helped get us home… i’ll never be able to thank them enough… after we got back, R and i were having arguments all the time about money and the fact that we never had any anymore and tons of other bullsh!t things… i went to work for a friend of ours as an office manager/receptionist, and hated every minute of it but suffered through because of R… we moved in with a friend of his that i wasn’t too fond of, but again i suffered through because of R… by this time we’d been together for almost two years, engaged for almost one, and no forward progress on the wedding planning has been made in that year… he’d even told me that he wanted to put the wedding off a year from the date we’d already chosen… red flag… we were also working opposing shifts at our respective jobs and hardly ever saw one another…

now, this relationship hadn’t been abusive or full of knock-down drag-out fights… i didn’t cheat on him, and he didn’t cheat on me – that i know of… now, however, i have my suspicions… anyway… two days after Christmas 2009, he tells me that he just doesn’t want to do it anymore… he doesn’t want to be engaged to me, he doesn’t want to be in a relationship with me at all… he gave me a laundry list of reasons that i’ve long since forgotten because they were all bullsh!t anyway… i move back in with my parents, we divide up our stuff, i try to put on a brave face but at the time i was devastated beyond belief… R and i had planned on a life together, and one night it was shattered like cheap glass… we tried to stay friends and work some things out after we split… but by April of 2010 he says he wants to see where things go with this 19-year-old girl that’s been following his band around to gigs like she’s a groupie or something… he was 30 at the time… effectively, i got left for a 19-year-old… just like he left his wife for me when i was 24… history repeats itself… for months after we split i was depressed and near suicidal… my only saving grace was my family and true friends… finally i moved out of my hometown and in with my sister an hour and a half away… i got a new job – eventually two new jobs – and rebuilt my life… three years after i was dropped like a hot rock for some 19-year-old groupie, i have found the man i was truly supposed to be with for the rest of my life… we’re living together, talking about getting married and adding to the family (he already has two awesome boys)… i couldn’t be happier…

i actually heard from R – well, more specifically, R’s girlfriend – a few months ago… she sent me two horrible emails designed to get under my skin after i had asked R to pay me for the computer i had bought with my money while we were together that he ended up with because it had all his songwriting materials and his recording software on it and it “just wasn’t my computer anymore”… i won’t see a penny for that 25″ iMac that i bought brand new, but i got a piece of her juvenile mind instead… and she just furthered my belief that she’s nothing but a vapid, shallow, vindictive, manipulative, back-stabbing, cunt and an absolute waste of space and oxygen… i never responded to her emails, and my knee-jerk reaction used to be to immediately say something back and start shit… i hope the fact that i didn’t drives both of them up a wall… i won’t stoop to their level… they can have each other, and welcome to it… how they’ve lasted this long when they don’t trust each other at all is beyond me… but, i guess, misery truly does love company