Dear Abde:

I didn’t thoroughly read, process and respond to your original post yesterday, so I will do so today. I will also read and respond to your following posts:

You shared (the boldfaced are your words) that you’ve been married for 21 years, since you were 28 (now 49) and have two children a 12-year-old and a 17-year-old, that your marriage has been a problem for many years and fights have been escalating lately. The two of you agreed that you are heading towards divorce,  but still living in the same home, in the U.S.

In this situation, you signed in to an Indian matrimonial website as Awaiting divorce. Online, you started communicating with a divorcee living in India, you call her Muns. Muns asked you about your marital status, and you lied and mentioned: ‘separated from my wife, she is not staying with me anymore.

By 3 weeks of communicating with you, Muns shared everything with you, everything about her kids’ sport activities and more. She messaged you Good morning, Good evening lovely messages and seemed like she got attached to you. She even introduced you to her kids, and her kids to you (online). On the 4th week of communicating with you, she was confessing her love for you, and she shared more with you, about her health background and everything.

A week or so later, 1.5 months into the online romantic relationship, Muns started avoiding you and her fewer messages turned cold. She then told you that currently she does not feel the love connection and most of the times she feels judged when she speaks to you. Some time later, you figured that Mun’s mother inquired about you in a community app and found out that you were living with your wife. Next, Muns, seeming very hurt, posted some weird messages like: ‘Would you like to share with me about something? Are you missing something that you must or should d have shared with me?’

You then loosely mentioned to her that your wife “is with me and she will go away in July“. Later, she told you that she has known for some time that you were living with your wife. You told her that your intent was not deceit. She got very angry with you and hung up on you.

Later, she shared that she felt that she opened up so much with you and shared every detail (while you didn’t share that you were living with your wife). She started questioning all stuff that you told her, and pulling up photos you shared with her, she asked if your wife was also present in that location, or in that location. Later, you texted her to say sorry and asker her forgiveness and at the end you wrote: ‘Enjoy your day’.  She got upset that you ended your text that way, saying it was insensitive of you.

At the Indian matrimonial website, you cancelled the invitation of hers and that led to further escalation, and she blocked you on what’s app. Next, you confronted her on text and she was very mean: ‘I don’t know if you deserved to even speak to me, forget about friendship.” That was 9 days ago.

You ended your original post with: “Couple of questions that come to my mind is that she really loved me or she was trying to mold herself so that she can get married, she was looking at this as an opportunity? During my final conversation when she blasted me, she never cared to ask me : ‘Why did you do this Abde’? Can you help me understand?… I feel devastated as I truly connected with her… I feel that God has punished me severely for lying to her…”

Your 2nd post: “For the last 9 days I have been dying of guilt. I am not a person with these values, I have never lied or cheated ever… Yes I did a mistake, I apologized sincerely to Muns and to my wife… I don’t know if my real intent was to fool Muns, our conversations weren’t utterly romantic… Yes, I should have been transparent to Muns that my wife is staying with me…  then she could have opted to just keep in touch and not pulled into building future with me… I am here to seek closure because deep down I am kind, honest and my values are different...”.

Your 3rd post, in regard to a suggestion that you manipulated Muns: “Manipulating Muns is a mean thing to say, I really respect her and feel for her. I understand that she is hurt and I have let her go. I have also apologized to her…  you guys seem to have misread the whole situation a bit. I have learned from this experience, I have apologized to Muns and my wife. I will move on from this, especially after this encounter. Good luck everybody.”

My reply today: imagine, Abde, that you were a divorced man, lonely and looking for a spouse in a matrimonial dating site. You get to know a woman online, you like her very much, you get very excited about her being.. The One. You share everything with her, being honest and upfront about everything because you want her to make informed decisions regarding you. You daydream about her, imagining meeting her in-person and having romantic dates and asking her to marry you, and then.. you find out that.. she is living with another man, and that she is married to him.

How would you feel?

Imagine this happens to your 17-year-old, or your 12-year-old when they grow up.. how would you feel as their father?

Empathy is the ability to place yourself in someone’s else’s shoes and imagine what they may be feeling, and then to care about how they are feeling, not wanting them hurt. It’s about considering the likely emotional consequences of your words and actions on others, before you speak and act.

When you lied to Muns about your wife not staying with you anymore, your motivation was to keep Mun interested in you, to not lose her interest. You knew that the consequence of telling her the truth, would likely be that she’d withdraw from you. You didn’t want that consequence, so you lied to her. It may have crossed your mind that if she finds out that you lied, that the consequence- to her- would be that her feelings will be hurt. If that crossed your mind, you lied anyway because, for the moment, it served your interest: she showed real interest in you, lovely, warm messages,  confessed her love, introduced her kids to you.

You told her that your intent was not deceit, and I agree that your primary  motivation was not to deceive her. Deceit was just a.. means to an end.

You texted her to say sorry and asker her forgiveness and at the end you wrote: ‘Enjoy your day’.  She got upset that you ended your text that way, saying it was insensitive of you- it was indeed insensitive. If you really felt regret for having hurt her feelings so badly, you wouldn’t think of ending your apology with wishing her joy.

You confronted her on text and “she was very mean“- if you had empathy for her, you would know that her anger was valid, not mean. You’d know that you owned the mean.

You ended your original post with: “Couple of questions that come to my mind is that she really loved me or she was trying to mold herself so that she can get married, she was looking at this as an opportunity?“- you are suspecting her of wrong intention, of being selfish, while there is no evidence- from what you shared- that she’s been selfish, while there is plenty of evidence that you own selfish.

2ndpost: “For the last 9 days I have been dying of guilt. I am not a person with these values, I have never lied or cheated ever…  deep down I am kind, honest and my values are different“- this is how you presented yourself in your 2nd post, after being criticized by responders. No mention of dealing with guilt, let alone dying of guilt for the 1.5 months or so, following the lie (original post).

3rd post: “Manipulating Muns is a mean thing to say, I really respect her and feel for her”– manipulating Muns is not a mean thing to say to you. It’s a mean thing to do to Mun.

Mun told you (original post): ”Stay happy with your Corporate IQ – that’s all I can say“- she was referring to you being an IT Professional, I imagine, and she was suggesting that (big) corporations are.. heartless, and so are you.. Was that her message?

A bit about myself: I too suffered and made others suffer because of empathy-deficiency on my part. My empathy was specific to a few others, but lacking for most. I was too troubled, feeling too guilty inside to .. avail myself to everyday empathy. As a result, I lived a very lonely life. Decades later, now that I feel and express empathy for others, what a difference it is making in my life. My emotional experience of life has greatly improved. I highly recommend that like me, you too will adopt empathy as a way of life, one day at a time, in small ways and in big ways.

anita