Remember that this site is dedicated to women over fifty whose husbands plan to throw them away.  Men like to say we get ‘traded in on a younger model’, but that is an horrific description of absolute devastation and humiliation we face this late in life.   It is also a huge sign of their lack of ability to care one whit about what they are doing to us.  Please don’t try to appeal to the ‘years we have had together’ or ‘everything we’ve built together’.  They do not CARE. They have become someone else, someone unrecognizable to us.  A LOT of these men actually KILL their spouse to make way for the girlfriend (there’s a better word for that).  You need to get that, girls.  Some women don’t survive their husbands’ midlife infidelity.

We are thrown away like garbage, with about the same regard for us as what happens to the trash after ‘the throw’.   Men who do this have zero ability to consider the pain they cause us.  They are often psychopaths, and even sociopaths, definitely narcissists, and God help us, we lived long enough to get wrinkles.  That, in their minds, makes us unwanted and unlovable, and more importantly, in the WAY.  We see a lot of crime shows about men who kill their wives, and even their CHILDREN to clear the way for the bitch they pursue.  That may sound harsh, but these women know EXACTLY what THEY are doing to you.  They know.  That makes them equally evil and worthy of the B word.  And you can bet your ass that there are WAY more dead wives than anyone knows about.  This is serious.  I think I’m alive because I discovered the affair early enough to survive it.  I never could have imagined the cold evil behavior of a husband who once ‘loved’ me.  Love…we can talk about that ALL DAY.

Most of us don’t see it coming. That’s why I write to you.  First, in our ‘society’, we SHOULD expect it.  This is what American men do.  Yeah, that’s a stereotype, but if you just look at statistics, I’m right more than I’m wrong about that.  So.  There are signs.  Not that we can stop this from happening; but we CAN be prepared…particularly financially…to survive it.  Wake up, watch what is happening in your marriage, and don’t ever think you’re safe from the combination of predatory women who want what you have worked for your whole life, and husbands who are shallow narcissists.

You know these men.  Nothing is ever their fault; it’s always your fault.  They drag you through their life, rather than forging one that the two of you design together.  They take your life and suddenly you’re living theirs.  They are spoiled and entitled; in their mind, you live to provide their needs to them.  Your finances become theirs and go down the drain as fast as they can make it happen without you noticing too quickly.  YOU are the responsible one in the relationship, the steady hard working one, the fiscally stable one.  You know this stuff.

If the man is the primary or sole wage earner and you do not have a secret account they can’t access, you’re nuts.  And that goes for ALL age groups of women.  At least, for God’s sake, save enough to pay an attorney.

First and foremost, men getting ready to dump us begin to be hyper focused on their appearance.  Why?  Because that’s their nexus.  They view women VISUALLY.  Period.  No regard for our spirit, our intelligence, our heart…forget that.  It’s ALL about how we look; therefore that’s how they think women view THEM.  So they start jogging.  They start shopping for that little teensy sports car that make them look ‘cute’.  Often that car belongs to their WIFE, the one who worked for and bought it, but I digress.  They change how they dress, even get a different hair cut.  They buy different glasses, start going out more with ‘the guys’.  They start working out.  You can spot them a mile away, jogging with their big belly leading the way.  I see them and I say, “Midlife crisis!”

Men start working on arm strength.  This is hilarious.  Mine got an arm tension bar and started using that.  Why?  Think about it.  When was the last time this guy needed arm strength in YOUR life?  Well with the young person they are pursuing, they’re going to be doing a lot of pushups.  Understand? So if any arm strength paraphernalia show up in your home, immediately go see an attorney. hahaha.  And hire a detective to follow them and get evidence of the affair.  That’s THE most important thing.  Evidence.

Listen, this often happens very suddenly.  These husbands see a target who actually gave them the time of day, and they start the plan to destroy YOUR LIFE.  They don’t see it that way because they no longer see YOU.  They never consider at all what they are about to do to you!  You need to understand that.  Usually they are so single-minded about their new goal that they don’t realize how transparent their prep work is.  Don’t do like I did and just think it’s a harmless attempt to thwart aging.  Men are NOT that deep.  If these behaviors start, you are about to become garbage.  Prepare for it.

Don’t get the impression that I despise all men.  I don’t.  Just the ones who are cold-hearted predators.  But the thing is, these assholes are EVERYWHERE, and we women don’t know it because we’ve never been over fifty before!  Only in the aftermath of our life being destroyed can we even process what happened to us!  And that’s if we survive.  Many do not.  And get this: It’s going to take you TEN YEARS to get upright again after they knock you into the pit.  How old will you be in ten years, girls?  See what I mean?

Do I hate what these men do to us, late in life?  ABSOLUTELY.  It is diabolical, unforgivable, makes me wish for them to burn in Hell for eternity.  I met SO many women suffering in the aftermath of this phenomenon when I was going through mine, that I became furious.  I can now see this monster roaming among us.  See it all the time.  Wish I didn’t know about it, because I had more respect for men before I knew this stuff.  Now I know:  WE are NOT the weaker sex.  THEY are.  There are websites, lawyers, youtube videos, support groups, that teach men how to do this to us.  So, WAKE UP, fight back. You, by the way, are the smarter planner, the one who can multitask to the extreme.  Protect yourself in ADVANCE.  If it doesn’t happen?  Wonderful.  I’m just giving you some advance warning about marriage in middle age in America.  Heck, we’re lucky we don’t have stoning in America.  Many of us would die under a pile of rocks.

Kindred spirits keep rolling in.  More and more women tell me they experienced being thrown away, and I”m GLAD to hear from them.  Some women are buried or burned or thrown overboard and have no voice now.  So be glad you are here, even when it seems harder to be.

I told you in my book that the ONLY way I survived was through my relationship with God.  It was prayer and the presence of the Holy Spirit that helped me through.  Had I depended on people, I hate to think.  In my world, needy people are annoying, costly and even mentally ill.  Nobody wants to reach out and help, and the ones who do, almost always do it very grudgingly.  So the bottom line is that this is on you.  YOU must survive.

There are angels out there who will help you. One girlfriend saved my life.  She’d pack a suitcase and come my measly apartment, where she would cook for me and sit with me while I slept.  I could sleep when she came, and I could eat.  It was the only time I could.  She’s one of the angels.  There were others.

The GOOD news is that you can do it.  You might have to work three jobs for a while, as I did.  You might never have time to actually rest.  But you can do it.  And you SHOULD do it, because the women this happen to are usually the strong ones in the relationship, the one who made things happen.  So remember that.  And remember that this is a journey, one you didn’t sign up for, but a journey, NOT a destination.  So stand up, take a deep breath, and start over.  One day you will be better off than the asshole who threw you away…in MANY ways, not the least of which is that you are rid of him and his addictive, parasitic, dishonest, cheating, fiscally irresponsible ways.  Did I leave anything out?

It is hard when you think you’ve reached a comfortable place in life, to then have to think about working a menial job…or three of them…and living in a space that would fit into your prior home three times.  But it’s better than being murdered.  It’s better than what many women end up facing. It’s harder when you were the one with assets that the loser stole from you to give to someone else.  But hey, that other woman will get what she deserves and for you?  Life gets way better.  Revenge?  That’s not our job.

And listen.  You are strong; that’s why he targeted you in the first place.  You can survive and when you HAVE, you will feel SO good about yourself, realizing, probably for the first time, your own strength.

You will actually laugh again, and you will reevaluate your entire life.  It takes a long time.  Ten years!  I know. I didn’t believe it either, but it is true.  You will look at ‘love’ for a very long time, and you will realize that men always see love and lust as being the same; women almost never do.  You will realize that ANYBODY who does you harm CANNOT love you, no matter how many times they say it.  And you will realize that any man who starts a checklist of the things you can do for, or offer, him, need to be kicked…really kicked…out the door. And by the way, men who evaluate the appearance of body fat content of a woman are shallow assholes who truly are not worthy of you.  And that’s most of them, by the way.

So for me it has been ten years and I’ve cut so many cords I can’t count them.  I don’t have many people in my life from the past because I had no idea what love and friendship looked like.  I really was not loved in that life.  And I didn’t have many friends.   I thought I did.  Thought I had a lot.  But in actuality, I had a few, and they are with me now, but hey. life is good! It really is.  I am more centered than ever, know myself better than ever, take less shit than ever, and I have survived.  And I am happy.  I live MY life now, doing things I like to do, and NOT doing things I don’t want to do.  And…I eat ice cream right out of the carton, sometimes for dinner.

You will survive.  You can do it.  This will pass.  You will be happy again.  You will laugh again.  I promise.

It has been a while since I posted, but it hasn’t been a lazy time.  I am still healing, still battling financial obstacles, still alone.  These are typical activities/situations, for wives who are thrown away in middle age.  And I continue to be shocked and horrified at how many of us are tossed aside by men, just because we lived a long time.

My purpose for this blog was to make women aware of what their future could (and statistically WILL) hold for them, and to prepare them for it.  This is important information, but most women won’t entertain it until it is too late, meaning they are on the trash heap of older women, in shock, trying to figure out how to survive.  That’s not a good place from which to plan our survival.  Take it from one who knows.

I keep seeing reports of ‘missing women’ who ‘ran off with another man’.  First, they’re not missing.  The killer knows exactly where they are, and second, WHY are we always described as ‘running’ off with a man.  I have yet to meet the man who could make me ‘run off’ with him.  The important thing is that women are being killed by their husbands.  WOMEN ARE BEING MURDERED BY THEIR HUSBANDS.  And many are getting away with it.

Something seems to happen to the minds of men who have an affair in mid life, which makes them completely cold and hostile to the women who bore their children and stood by their side through many of life’s challenges.  A younger woman appears to be the brass ring.  Fine.  Be prepared for this to happen.  It’s that simple.

Yeah, maybe your husband is one of the good guys.  But I’M SAYING, “Don’t take that chance.”  If I could go back, I would raise my daughter to never mingle her finances with a man (husband or otherwise), never trust completely (verify everything), and keep a reserve of funds for attorney, private investigator, a new place to live and moving expenses.  That’s just plain GOOD SENSE in present society.

And this may sound overly dramatic, but it’s still true:  Your life could very well be in danger (and the lives of your children), if your husband goes off the tracks in midlife.  You’ve seen the news.  There are a lot of dead women who didn’t know about, nor care to be prepared for, this HUGE phenomenon.  You say, “My husband would never hurt me.”  Well, your husband will be a completely different animal if he goes down this path.  It’s quite scary, the change in their persona.

Girls, it’s a whole different ballgame when you get older and don’t look so hot in a bikini. Particularly if your husband thinks love is lust.

It’s been a while since I wrote to you out there.  That’s, in part, because I’m getting my life back.  I feel more like me than I have in years.  I was told it would take ten years to shake off the trauma of being thrown away, and that turns out to be pretty accurate.  This metric was given to me by a veteran thrown away wife.  She nailed it.   In another year, it will be 10 years since my ‘armageddon’, and I believe that by that time, I might even be better than I am today.

I feel like me again, finally.  It’s good to be back with my sense of humor, my confidence, my feeling that nothing is beyond my reach.  Remember when I couldn’t remember whether my precious pet was male or female when I went to buy a leash?  When I stood before two bathroom doors, one for men and one for women, being unsure how to proceed?  That terrible cloud is gone forever from my life, that awful lack of ability to think straight.  I feel good again, actually good.  I feel like being around people again.  Remember when I wanted to curl up in a ball and disappear?  Yes, nine years ago, and for many years after I felt that way, that I wanted never to have existed in the universe; it wasn’t enough to hide.

The worst and longest lasting side effect of being thrown away is the broken relationships AROUND the marriage, the collateral damage.  Sometimes those relationships heal in the requisite decade, but not always and not all.  I once wrote that every single relationship in my life was broken, and they were.  Some few are knitting back together and some never will…and some that never will are gladly gone.  I’m a different person now, and some of the people I cared about and whom I believed cared about me…were just fakes.  I can see that now, and can’t believe I couldn’t see it all along. I was surrounded by people who didn’t care about me.  Why? Because I ‘invited’ them in. I didn’t expect to be treated with love and respect, because I had no clue what love really looked like.

But, fellow throw-aways, it is true that healing happens.  It is true that you are not forever gone, you are not worthless, you are not unloved.  It is also true that some of your relationships are gone forever. And that is okay!  Here’s why.

See, when you are broken into so many pieces, even when you are reassembled, you might look like you, but you’re a scarred you, and in some ways, surprisingly, a stronger you.  You are also damned determined never to be broken to that extent again.  If you paid attention along the recovering journey, you have realized some important things about yourself that you never knew before…like how strong you really are.  And I’d bet that you were once a person who gave people a LOT of passes, people who didn’t treat you well.  It’s easy to rationalize away bad behavior when you ‘love’ someone.  But just know, or learn, that giving people passes also gives them permission to treat you badly.  Eventually they learn that they can ‘dis’ you and get away with it, and human nature means that they will continue that behavior and even escalate it.

You teach people how to treat you.

Among the wreckage of my armageddon are fake friendships revealed, traitors and betrayers brought into the light, people’s true feelings about me revealed, and a lot of surprised people who can’t believe I won’t associate with them anymore.  After all, I always let them treat me like crap before!  What’s different now?   Here’s what’s different:  I learned what love it and what it is NOT.  I learned that trust is earned, not handed out freely, and I have learned that an untrustworthy person is….not to be trusted.  Seems simple, doesn’t it?  How many times, though, have you allowed a person to lie to you and still stick around?

The biggest revelation for me was finally understanding what love is.  I questioned it a lot, remember?  How can anyone who EVER loved me do this to me?  Why do people who ‘love’ me, treat me like a virus now, when I need them?  Remember?  Well here’s how:  What they showed me was not love, even though among all of them, they must have said, “I love you!” a thousands of times.  Some of them still do, by the way.  Amazingly, they do.  And I shake my head, partly out of sheer disbelief.  Why?  They really think they do love me.  But I, on the other hand, do not love them.  They do not deserve my love.  They might be around, but will never get within arms length of me again.  Their loss, by the way.

I agonized over love, prayed about it. What IS love that it can be so horrible, so damaging, so hurtful?  Where can I find it, the real thing?  Well, first, love is never horrible, damaging or hurtful.  Love is never any of the negatives.  It’s just not.  Love is good, kind, protective, safe.  In answer to a thousand prayers, I learned that to some, love is possession.  These are the people who bully and badger you into being what they insist you be. To them, you are not good enough the way God created you.  To some, love is abuse.  To them, you are their personal punching bag, there to provide an abusive way for them to destress.  To some, you are a host.  You are there to support them, pay their way in life, feed them and their ego.  They are parasites.

Well, then, what IS love?

Remember when I said it was God, only God, who got me through?  Well that, my friends, is where you find love.  You find the definition of it, literally, and you see the illustration of it, in God’s word.  In answer to a prayer, I was told to stop looking at the wrong illustration of it, and look to God.  If you want to know what love is, read God’s definition. Seems simple, doesn’t it?  But we who are thrown away do not love ourselves enough to understand love.  So yes, look to God’s word. Read the definition.  And start looking away from the ones who do not embody that definition.  Look instead to the ones who live the kind of love day in and day out, and open the door and your heart to them.

And keep walking through the valley.  There is sunshine ahead!

It has been years, now, since I posted my first blog about being thrown away by a husband who lost his mind in mid life crisis mode.  At first, my focus was on survival, and that was all.  Just get through the days and somehow make ends meet.  Along the way, I wrote other things, things about what you will encounter financially that you won’t realize during the armageddon, reminders about expenses you won’t even know are coming.  And now, I’m in another stretch of the valley.  I’m in the part where I can view most of the carnage from the other side of the battle, and where the last of my wounds are still bleeding, but trying to heal.  No, not trying, healing.

I can now see the carnage in HIS life as well: another marriage and another divorce in just a few short years…big surprise.  And cancer.  His, not mine.  I do my best not to let him into my spirit, but occasionally tidbits get dropped in my lap, unsolicited.  One was that he was no longer a ‘star’ in his company, and I didn’t try to get any info about that.  I assumed his behavior had manifested itself again and he’d been called on it.  Maybe; maybe not.  And one was that he has cancer…the bad kind.  That news rattled me a bit, but I can’t make myself feel bad for him.  I think I just don’t feel anything at all…which is amazing considering what I went through because of his indecent behavior.  One would think I would be glad, but I am not.   I believe that what you sow, you reap.  I believe that you cannot sow evil and really expect to reap goodness, though many men do think that.  That would be like planting an orange seed and expecting to grow an elephant.  This is just another story of proof; I’m sorry once again, that it is people whom I know…or thought I knew…who are the protagonists.  I don’t like to see anybody suffer.  But justice will come.  Not through me, but it will always come.  Is that so hard to grasp, when we see it day after day after day right in front of us?  Or am I the only one who notices?

I’m standing high on the banks of the swirling mass of destruction left in the wakes of the ones who came after me with unimaginable vengeance and glee, the ones who took major joy in destroying my life with lies and cheating and underhandedness.  And now I’m thinking about the deaths of loved ones they lost in the process, illnesses they endured and still endure, and even potentially the ending of the main character.  I think about the horrible woman who moved into my home, into my life, thinking it was hers, only to get kicked out herself after a short while.  Evil begets evil.  All I wanted for her was for her to feel the kind of pain you cannot escape, and that surely happened to her.  She knows that  kind of pain and will feel it forever.  Was it worth it, the evil she sowed?  I wonder whether it ever even crosses her mind.  But if it ever did, I’m absolutely sure she would say, “No, it was not worth it.”

And I wonder why people ever dare to step into such evil doings, why they endeavor to heap such pain and humiliation on another human being, let alone someone they once claimed to ‘love’.  I can almost understand how cheating women can try to destroy the wife in the marriage they are trying to break.  That degree of separation must feel safe to them somehow.  But this woman found out she was not only not safe, she was about to face life altering justice in her life.  But men? Do you ever think at all?  Do you ever weigh the pull of lust against the Justice (capital J) promised by God?  It may take time, even years, but you will pay for the harm you sow.  That’s just how it goes.  God is a just God, and he warns against doing harm to his own.  Does anybody notice that?

And I think it just does not make sense, the damage men do to middle aged women.  And then I started watching a movie called King David, and of course there’s the scene where he sees Bathsheba in her bath.  From that second on, David was a man devoid of logic, of heart, of sense, of memory of his love for his wife.  He loved his her!  But that love was gone in the time it took for him to spot Bathsheba.  And he worked it out so that her husband would be killed in battle, bringing justice down on his own head in the form of the death of his first child and consequences that existed for the rest of his life.  Was it worth it?  What happens to men when lust takes over their lives?

Is it so hard to understand that you ruin people’s lives for the sake of it?  Is it really worth it, the carnage you leave in your wake?  When you face your maker, are you going to feel any shame at all about it?  Do you know that you break the hearts of your children, your family members; that you bring shame into your own life an onto your head?  Is that urge so strong that you will really throw everything away for it?  Every single relationship in my life was damaged by the actions of my ex husband and the women, and the men who helped them.  I wonder about their marriages, the other cheaters.  I wonder if they learned anything about the horror of my marriage being set afire by all of them.  It was a huge fire.  I know they saw the flames leaping skyward.  I hope it frightened them to death.  I hope that because they destroyed my life, people who never knew me, and I was a faithful wife, a loyal wife, a real support for my husband.  In other words, I did not deserve what happened to me.  Unless you want to blame me for birthdays.

We hear it every day: Men are visual creatures.  So I say again to women: If you are in middle age, you had better be aware of what is going on in your life.  Don’t be ambushed, as I was, because your once loving and loyal husband becomes an entirely different animal (using that term on purpose) in the throes of lust.  You won’t recognize the person inhabiting your husband’s body; and women today have no qualms about stepping into your marriage, because society doesn’t mind it at all.  And I say again, also, that we are not animals; God gave us dominion over animals, gave us the ability to reason and think through things.  In lust, men become animals, behaving as though they have no power over their base urges.

I think the key is for people to understand the nature of love, and to realize that lust and love are antithetic, if you’re using lust as a representative of love.  Love really has nothing to do with lust.  Think about that.  And I ask you to do that because if you don’t, you are vulnerable.

Notice what your potential spouse thinks love is all about.  If it’s all about the bedroom, run like hell.  You will surely be in danger one day if you don’t, one day along about your fiftieth birthday.