Glad that's over with! And I hope you will recognise the red flags of this kind of person, should you be tempted again in the future.
We honestly should have recognized the red flags this time... we're no stranger to emotional abuse (thank you families...) but we kept explaining things away as something else. Part of the problem was that Nukes didn't want us to tell anyone we know here, so we didn't have anyone to talk to about the relationship who regularly saw and interacted with us (and therefore could have offered valuable insight). Moving forward, Mr. Pants and I are only okay with entering another poly relationship if we can be completely open or mostly open (with friends/family at least).
That sounds very much like how my friends reacted after the end of the first quad I was in - it's probably a bad sign when your friend almost spits her coffee across the table at the matter of fact description of (what I now realize was emotional abusive, or at least really wonky but I thought was) normal life at the time.
We were already kind of considering that we were being treated poorly and manipulated, but kept trying to explain it away and thought that maybe we were overreacting. Plus we didn't have anyone who personally knows all of us to talk to about it. I finally decided to tell my good friend K, and it took her pointing out the things she's noticed and the things we've told her and hearing that she thinks Nukes is emotionally abusive and, more so, that Nukes is predatory. K also pointed out how she saw Nukes behaving in ways that were meant to marginalize me and drive a wedge between me and Mr. Pants, and how her actions seemed to be designed to provoke Mr. Pants into anger and/or confuse him by saying one thing and doing another (which was constant even after Mr. Pants brought this up with Nukes several times as being confusing to him).
Re (from
PhysicsIsPants):
"She decided that she would not be a disappointment to her grandmothers and would give them whatever they wanted."
Holy wow.
Yeah, I know. Had we known that before moving in I actually think I would have put the brakes on moving in. But this only came out the night of the cheating, and it was kind of like, "Oh... well... okay then. Wish I had known that before..." I think it's incredibly unhealthy, and wouldn't have been comfortable entangling ourselves with her that way as a result. Would have been nice to know ahead of time so that we could have made more informed decisions in our relationship.
Well, it is important to note who bears what responsibility for various bits of dysfunction...and to accept that sometimes stuff simply does not work, and fault doesn't matter.
Absolutely, and I think there was some incompatibility among all of us that didn't really come to light until later that played a role; however, the key thing for me is that from my perspective, it's not so much a matter of "fault" as it is that I feel we were being emotionally abused, and there was no way for the relationship to survive that.
(EDIT: I typed the rest of the response I wrote, but forgot what part of this post I wanted to reply to...guess my mind isn't firing on all cylinders this morning...I was going to say that to some extent one might isolate from one's own friends while dating and it's not all because a partner is isolating a person, or people, but just because of where one is choosing to put one's energies. I have not made time for my friendships in recent months, and it's no one's fault but my own. /EDIT)
We did self-isolate... because she insisted that we not tell anyone we know in this town and would decline going out with us when hanging out with our friends (people with whom she was familiar with or friends with herself), so we often had to choose between her and them. She told us things about those mutual friends (which we later found were untrue) that were meant to discourage us from hanging out with them. We started making friends with a guy who Nukes works with and his wife, and Nukes only ever had bad things to say about them and made hanging out with them sound like such a chore that we stopped trying to hang out with them. We rather liked this couple, but felt that we had to choose because of how she reacted when they wanted to hang out. We've been hanging out with them again now that the relationship is over, and we are really enjoying their company. So from my perspective, it's not just a matter of us pouring all of our focus into the relationship - it's that she was actively poisoning our view of our friends.
For the record, the couple I mention above do know that our friendship with Nukes is over and that we don't wish to continue interacting with her. We do not ask about her, and they do not update us on her. We told them that if it complicates things for him at work or personally, we would understand if they didn't want to be friends with us and wouldn't bother them about it. They said no, they wanted to be our friends, and offered to not invite us and her to the same events if they're hosting, which we were grateful for (but we doubt Nukes is hanging out with them at all given how she talked about them while we were together).
I mean, yeah, Nukes and her stuff was all a mess. But I'd focus less on her wrongdoing (lying, cheating) and just put it down to the fact that she's got serious problems and you cannot suspend or sacrifice your lives in a (likely fruitless) attempt to help her. She's going to continue to suffer for her own maintenance of dysfunctional family dynamics and her own disrespectful treatment of herself and others, bad boundaries, lying and so on. She's just gonna keep right on reaping what she sows. It's sad, but some folks are like that.
The cheating itself honestly wasn't the problem. Despite being very hurt over the cheating, Mr. Pants and I were working through it and still felt love for Nukes and wanted to move forward. The lying surrounding the cheating - the details of which lead us to the conclusion that it was calculated and not an accident - and the apathy towards repairing the relationship were also hurtful, but it wasn't until a few people pointed out the abusive patterns that we realized we couldn't continue in the relationship. And even then, Mr. Pants was still willing to go back. I wasn't - I was done at that point.
Nukes is absolutely going to continue to suffer, and that honestly makes both of us feel terrible. Like we're supposed to be there to support her and help her. But we know we can't. We are sad and deflated about all of this, because despite how she treated us we can't find it within ourselves to sustain anger towards her. We want to move on, we don't want to hear from her again (too tempting to allow ourselves to get pulled back in), we just want this chapter to be over and closed. We'd like to go back and reflect as needed, of course, but don't want to reopen old wounds.
I'd suggest not going too far down the rabbit hole on post mortem analysis, and to be more careful, take things far more slowly and cautiously in the future with any new partners. Especially in the life-entanglement department. But I suspect that is probably pretty clear in your minds at this point. I'm glad to hear you got back into your old housing just in the nick of time.
Hah, that's easier said than done. We keep thinking of "what if" moments about the relationship. But ultimately we conclude that we'll never know for sure. We'll never know what was really going on behind the scenes or the motives behind it all. I'm pretty close to being okay with that, but Mr. Pants still has cogs turning, wondering what he could have done differently. We're trying to move forward and not dwell on things too much, but we haven't even had much time to really process it all to begin with, so I'm sure we'll still be working through it over the winter break while we have a week or so off of work.
The only reason things moved so quickly with Nukes is because we already had 3 years of friendship to build on. We are now aware that even that isn't necessarily a good reason to move so fast; it is indeed very clear to us that we want to move slowly and avoid large entanglements like living together. Mr. Pants and I already agreed that neither of us want to give up our established home again, and will probably maintain a household separate from any other partners in the future.
All of this has been a terribly painful experience. I think for me what hurts the most is feeling like the emotional abuse was intentional and meant to damage the relationship between me and Mr. Pants. I don't understand why someone would do that, especially someone I loved (and who I believed loved me). It doesn't make sense to me. But the evidence is overwhelming. There's not another way to explain it that isn't doing mental gymnastics to explain it away.
But we're both continuing to work with our therapists on this (and ourselves) and I know we're going to be okay. One good thing is that Mr. Pants and I now know that we are open to a poly relationship. We will probably attempt poly differently next time, but we know that the relationship between the two of us is solid and strong. We suffered in this triad, individually and together, but the end result was that we still offered support to each other and our relationship (the two of us) was still intact. We're resilient.
Thanks to all who have replied. It's good to get different perspectives and ideas and sometimes just to have someone say they understand.