Dear Carolin Lim:

I read all your recent posts: you read like an intelligent, thoughtful, gracious woman, answering all respondents in such detail and attention to all that was suggested to you. Quite impressive and far from the norm.

I understand your point to me, that in your original post, you inserted into the telling of the beginning of the account what you knew only after the beginning. There is no way I know to edit the original post after this much time, and I don’t think it is necessary. It is very difficult to tell a story without later understandings and interpretations.

You wrote: “I’ve witnessed more lies than I think I should in a supposedly healthy married couple. What do you think?”

And this is what I think: Too many lies, too many fabrications. There are people, and he is one of them, whose verbal output is a MIX of truths and lies (untrue statements they KNOW are untrue, as opposed to delusions). When the number of true statements the number of lies in a person’s output is about equal, and there are a lot of these two kinds of statements, it is impossible, at one point on, to keep track of what was true and what was a lie.

It is like you are given a cake which is a mix of chocolate (the truth) and mud (lies). If there was one piece of mud in the whole cake, then maybe you can choose to remove that one piece and eat the rest of the cake. But if the cake has a lot of chocolate and a lot of mud all through the cake, removing the mud is impossible, not effective, will take a lot of time and you will be tasting a lot of mud.

He is like a chocolate-and-mud cake. You have to throw it away if you don’t want to eat mud.

And so, it will be too much of a headache for me to try, here, to figure him out.

You wrote: “When I asked him why he didn’t marry the supermodel girl,,, he answered with just: ‘No. I just don’t.’,,,
Then when I asked the same thing to the supermodel girl, she said that ‘….”

When you confronted him with his story (chocolate and mud), he didn’t have an answer because he didn’t have a way at the time to present to you a reconciliation between his true and false statements. So he said nothing.

When you asked her, the “supermodel girl”- you asked a woman, it reads to me, who doesn’t know the difference between chocolate and mud. She has been eating both, not knowing the difference. She probably makes-believe the mud is chocolate. I followed what she said with “…” because what she says has no relevance to the truth.

When people are presented with too many lies, they fill in the gaps, the contradictions, with their own cognitive creativity. And so, it is of no relevance to me, looking for the truth.

And, of course, you (or I, or anyone) has no chance to help in the healing of a person who knowingly lies so much.

Regarding his wife: if you are considering telling her, maybe find out more about her in the process of figuring IF it is a good idea to tell her. If you have the opportunity to talk to her, in a book store, maybe, ask her what she thinks about infidelity, maybe as a topic in one of the books you both read. You can find out, maybe, if she already knows or suspects but is heavily invested in turning a blind eye to it.

Hope you post again (and I appreciate your Update note to me some time ago. I answered it when I discovered it).

anita