How To Better Understand Your Partner

"My wife doesn't understand me." is an old corny male cliche. And whilst there might well be an element of truth in that saying, it is more often than not the case that it is the man who doesn't understand the woman. I speak from personal experience.

I can all too well remember both of my two ex-wives telling me "You have to change." The problem was they never specified in which way I had to change. And when I asked how, all I got was "Well if you don't know, I'm not telling you." Well, I guess my mind reading skills just weren't up to par on those days, and so on we went, none the wiser.

With the passage of time, I think I have it finally figured out. What they wanted was for me to be more like the guy they were cheating on me with. What they were saying, in effect, was...

"I don't want to be with you, I want to be with him, he excites me, you don't. In other words, I'm bored with you, the sparkle has gone. But if I could get you to be like him, I wouldn't want to be with him, I'd want to be with you and everything would be fine."

However, they could not say that without confessing to the affair, and that would be risking everything. I once overheard my first ex-wife telling her sister her fears "If I leave Ralph, I might end up with nobody." And the reason she said that was because she was not sure her lover would leave his wife for her. She was his bit on the side, as he was hers.

From my observations over the years, in situations like theirs, a wife is more prepared to leave her husband than a man is to leave his wife. The reason for this is that both sides know, it is nearly always the woman who gets the children. My ex-wife would not lose hers, but he would lose his. Ergo, it was much easier for her to make the transition than it was for him.

In the end, I forced the issue and demanded a divorce. Then her lover's wife found out about the affair and kicked him out. I did hear that he was something of a serial, wife cheating, philanderer. Did he get together with my ex-wife? Nope, he married somebody else. A year later he wanted to cheat on his new wife by trying to get back with my ex-wife, who rejected him. So then he tried it on with my eldest daughter. What a disgusting animal.

With my second ex-wife, one night in the wee small hours she attacked me in my sleep and beat the crap out of me, quite seriously injuring me in the process. When I asked her why all I got was I got the self-same stock reply "If you don't know I'm not telling you." Once again, my mind reading skills deserted me. I have to say, that one I have never to this day managed to figure out. Lord only knows what goes through evil twisted minds.

There was a time with my first ex-wife when she demanded I change and without knowing exactly what was wanted from me, I did make an effort to change the way I did things, the way I dressed and behaved, all stabs in the dark I must say.

The changes I made had been noticed, but the only feedback I got was "I don't think I love you anymore, you've changed, you're not the same. I preferred you the way you used to be." Go figure that one out if you can.

Moving on, in the aftermath of both of my marriages breaking down, post-divorce, both of my ex-wives went ballistic when they saw me with another woman, even if the woman was nothing more than a female client. I must say I was totally flummoxed by this type of behaviour. I would have thought that they would have been as happy to see the back of me as I was to see them out of my life. Seems I was wrong about that one as well.

My third, present wife thinks she has it figured, she says that it was because they did love me after all and did not want to see somebody else get what they had once had. Well if that was a demonstration of love, it was a pretty strange way to go about things.

It was like a kid throwing away what was once his favourite toy, only to see it being picked up by another kid who took a shine to it. The first kid gets so pissed off that some other snot-nosed kid is going to enjoy what used to be a toy he doted on, he decides to wreck the toy.

Well, the first ex-wife did succeed in making so many problems that it led to the breakdown of my second marriage. However, I have managed to avoid a repeat of that sort of behaviour from the second ex-wife by moving to live on another continent on the other side of the world, well away from the devil incarnate.

However, I should point out that the second ex-wife did manage to totally destroy me financially, as well as personally, long before my third wife arrived on the scene. The upside of that is that I know my third wife loves me for me, not for my money, since that has all long since gone.

In all, I passed twenty horrendous years, from 1995 to 2015, having to deal with all of that crap, and it is only now I feel able to speak openly about it. I lost everything that ever meant anything to me, including four beautiful children who no longer want anything to do with me because of all the horrible lies they were told about me. And when I tried to tell them the truth they got angry and told me they did not want to know. They did not want me to burst their bubble.

They have not spoken to me since, some thirteen years in the case of two daughters from my first marriage and eight years in the case of my son from my second marriage. I have very recently managed to salvage a little contact with my son from my first marriage, but that involves stepping on an awful lot of eggshells. That's life I guess, and there is nothing more I can do except try to make the best of what time I have left and enjoy the wonderful present life I am extremely lucky to have with my third lovely wife.

My final thought on the subject for today is, could I have done anything at all to avoid all that dramatic unpleasantness and human suffering arising from all of that nonsense? The answer is a resounding YES. I could have got out a lot sooner, And YES, I could have learned to read female minds a lot better. The only problem is that, as I said in the headings above, it's not rocket science, it's a dark art.