Life on Cut acknowledges the traditional custodians of country whose lands were never seated. We pay our respects to their elders past and present.
Always was, always will be Aboriginal Land. This episode was recorded on Gadigal Land.
Hi guys, and welcome back to another episode of Life on Cut. I'm Laura, I'm Brittany.
Now I have a question for you, and this I think will have a few of you having some conflicting answers to this. Imagine meeting the love of your life, the man who you have been waiting for your whole life to come along and sweep you off your feet. We don't wait for men, remember no, we don't. But like you know, you don't pin yourself up to it. You're ready for it, and he really does. You just think that there is no one more incredible than this man.
You have a well wind romance, you get engaged, you get married, and then very shortly afterwards, you find out that your husband has terminal cancer.
You become his carer.
You pour your love and your adoration into this man, only to find out whilst they are terminal and suffering with that diagnosis, that they've also been cheating on you throughout your entire relationship.
I genuinely couldn't imagine being in this situation. It's one thing, and I feel like most people sitting at home right now have been in this situation.
It's one thing to be cheated on, right.
And to feel that ultimate betrayal, to have to work through that trust because some people do work through it, some people absolutely don't. But then to add the layer of do I have to then look after this person and care for them until they die because there might not be anyone else to look after them?
Like?
Do I put that betrayal to the side? I cannot fathom that question.
Yeah, I mean this is the big one, right, Like, what would you do if this was your situation? And it's not even just put it to the side because they don't have anyone to care for them. This is would you willingly still be that person's palliative care? Would you still willingly take care of that person until their end of life knowing that they have betrayed you throughout your entire relationship? And the reason why I asked this question is because this is exactly the situation that Kirsten
Pills found herself in. She's written an incredible book. It is called Loving My Lying, dying, Cheating Husband.
Really drove that home in the title, didn't she.
Yeah.
I mean, there's definitely there's no ambiguity in this one.
But Kirsten talks about the reasons why she made the decisions to stay, the reasons why she made the decisions to forgive, and this conversation so deeply centers around the idea of forgiveness, but not just forgiveness for her ex husband, but also for her own healing journey as well.
Yeah, and it's also about the complex relationship surrounding cheating. We've often spoken about the fact that it's not straightforward and there's not one black and white answer. We also delve into the fact that she loved a narcissist. And one thing that I found so surprising that we do get into at the end is not only how she handled the entire situation, but how she handled the end
when he passed away. And I won't get too much into that, but for me, there were some really incredible pivotal moments that I don't know if I would have done the same thing.
Yeah, And I think that that's what a lot of people are going to be left when they leave. This conversation today is going to be wondering what would you do if you found yourself in this situation? Let's get into the chat with Kirsten. I came across Kirsten via social media and when I saw the title of her book, Loving My Lying, dying, Cheating Husband, I was so intrigued by what this entails. And I think your story is one that it will pull on so many people's heart strings.
But like I said, it will really make your question what would you do in this situation? Kirsten, Welcome to the podcast.
Thank you very much for having me.
It's our absolute pleasure and I cannot wait to dive into this conversation. But before we do, everybody that comes on the podcast gives us their accident, unfiltered, their embarrassing story, and I know the conversation is about to get pretty heavy, but before we get into that, please embarrass yourself oh and humbling.
Yeah, exactly. So when you told me to prepare embarrassing the story, I thought there's so many but I couldn't think of what because I'm a walking embarrass very often. But I did. I don't believe it, but I did think about the time that I volunteered to give up TED talk, and it was the pandemic and I was stranded in Australia. I was living in Vietnam at the time, and my wardrobe was very reduced. So what to wear?
So I found a dress in the op shop and I spent the entire month rehearsing my talk, not really thinking about the dress. I had it dry cleaned because I looked in every shop, so in the end it came from the op shop, and so I went to the venue put it on, and I realized I hadn't really checked whether the brass straps would be showing or not. This is like half an hour before going on stage. I finally checked and it looked like an op shop dress with brass straps showing. So I thought, what do
you do? You know, I'm a woman of a certain age, so I can't really go on there looking like this. So I thought, okay, I went backstage. I went to the room where the workers have the props, and I found a roll of duct tape and took the braw and I taped my nipples down.
You've all been there, I reckon, I've been.
So that I was thinking in this context is probably not really embarrassing, but for me it was highly embarrassing because then I had to go into the room and the guy had to mic me up, and I was like, ah, well, I can't really open my dress because I'm not wearing a bra, but I couldn't tell him either, so I sort of.
He's like trying to find somebody to clip a microphone onto, and you can, like, you can stick it in my duct tape.
I said, I'm very private, I'll do it myself.
So can I say if you put the roll duct tape or you put duct tape, if you put the wrong tape on your nipples, you will know about it because they've they've got special nipple tape, right, But if you're putting it down with some like hardcore hardware, when you've ripped that off, you know about.
Duct tape can rip paint off the walls alone. What it can do to you when you try and take that stuff off.
Well, that was the next part of the embarrassment, because I was so hyped up after the talk because it was a TED talk, so it was like one of this once in a lifetime opportunities I forget to take it off. So the next morning, the pain and the embarrassment.
What have I done?
I had forgotten Casin.
I would love to know before we get into your story, who you were before you met your husband. How does a German who is an expert in Italian end up in Australia.
Yeah, well, good question. I grew up in Germany in the seventies. It was a very grim place. It was post war. It was very cold. I mean it's still cold. And I just had this feeling I was born in the wrong country. So I had this strong calling. As soon as I finished school, I needed to get out of there. And for some reason I was brave enough to just book a typic on my own. This is before we had phones, you know, mobile phones, early eighties. To Jakarta, of all places, and I ended up there
by myself. I spent a year in Bali in eighty seven.
Wow, what a different place then.
I don't think there was any yoga in or what then I can't remember. And then I thought, Okay, Australia is the next destination. So yeah, and so then I came to Sydney and I saw the blue sky and that was it. I needed to live in Australia.
In your description about yourself, and it was one of the things that I thought, it really jumped out of me. And it's kind of a sidestep from what we're going to be talking about. But you described yoursel as childless by choice. Yeah, what does that mean to you? And I guess like of a time and of an age when there was almost the expectation that women just have children. When you say it was your choice, was it something that you always knew that you were like, kids are not for me.
I think it was my mother who put that idea into my head very early on, because she, I think, got frustrated that she got stuck in a marriage at you know, twenty three. I mean it was a different generation when, and that meant she had to then look after these unmanageable kids.
Who just ran off and left her once they reached a certain age exactly.
But it was also once I lived in Australia, I realized, you know, I was doing all of this on my own. So I was putting myself through university on my own because I'd sort of basically run away from home. I thought, if I have kids, then everything's going to cost me double as in going back to Germany, because in those days it was air travel, you know, it wasn't so common, you know, to just jump on a plane. And also I think my mother's experience, she said, oh, you know, marriages,
I don't know they're trapped. I don't get trapped. And I just thought, I haven't yet found the right man, and I want to be that I can imagine being with until this human being I put into the world will be twenty or ready to be on their own. Yeah.
Can I ask you very personal, but do you now, in hindsight, have any regrets about not having children or do you still feel wholeheartedly that you made the right decision.
Yeah. Interesting. I have quite a lot of younger friends who are still in their sort of thirties who asked me, you know, should I have a kid? Maybe not, because.
Yeah, I'm asking for me basically.
Yeah, so my good friends, I do boot camp with them, we go on you know, these bike rides and so on, and I say, no, don't have kids. Just enjoy your life that way you can. You know, you can enjoy it. You can do whatever you want. You're not beholden. But now that I'm at this point in my life. I do miss the company of adult children. I have my nephew and niece. They were very intelligent, lovely human beings, and if I had kids of my own, I think I would enjoy being around them.
That's the thing that's so hard is because like kids don't say kids forever, but it's a very big part of the parenting experience.
As having little children.
Well, it's like saying, yeah, I want to have kids and get through the first twenty five years so that I could have a couple of years as adults.
It doesn't really make sense. It's like just get a friend, you know, you're an adult friend totally.
But I mean it's really important, and I think it's really interesting because we've definitely had big conversations on this podcast about being childless by choice, but it's always been from people who have been within this age group, so they're currently going through that process in that period of
like when all their friends have little kids. But it's so interesting to hear about what's that like when all of your friends and their little kids are our adults and you can have a conversation with them and you can have a relationship which goes beyond just wiping asses and getting screened at all night exactly.
But you know, I was lucky enough.
I did take my niece traveling, and so I had this girl, you know I've had I had it and she came out from Germany and lived with me for five months and went to school in Australia. So I did have it. But I have to say I do like little kids. I love them. And so I have lots of friends who are in their thirties who needs surrogate Grandma's.
And You're like, yeah, I'm here, and then I'll hand them back. When I need to hand them back.
I'm gonna say you love them because you can hand them exactly. So what was your life like you had moved here and how old were you when you met your husband Gianni.
Yeah, so I moved here in my twenties and then I had a career and I lived here and lots of things, and then we met when I was forty three and I had actually just gone through early menopause. I was at work and suddenly I had this cruciating pain in my abdomen and I went to the doctor and she said, we need to take you over tomorrow otherwise you'll love the comblem. Yeah, I had assist. I mean, it happens, it's quite common. And then she said, you
have to now be prepared to enter meno. Pause. I'm like, wow, I'm barely forty two. Maybe I was forty three, and I was in denial. And then it throws you into this depression because it was just came totally expected, and also it meant I had to be at home. I was living on my own and I was single. I had just moved to Sydney. I was enjoying my single life. I kept saying, I'm in love with the city, not a man. I don't need a man. I'm love with
the city. Love that. But you know, Sydney is a hard city sometimes in that it's very large, so you can get quite lonely when you're a workaholic, and then you come home and your friends live on the other side of the city and you know it takes hours to catch up. So yeah, then that loneliness suddenly came and I thought, hang on a minute, I think I got everything the wrong way. I've forgot to have children.
I forgot to have a family, even though it was never really in my plan what life should have been like at that moment, I thought, I have given everything this career and where is it now bringing me chicken soup while I'm on the couch.
You know, Yeah, this is why you need that adult.
Kid exactly in that did you have a moment afterwards where you decided to actively date or was meeting Johnny a moment of like Sarah indipity almost.
Yeah, I didn't go on to I guess it was r swoop in at the Yeah, but only as a lurker, Like I didn't actually upload my profocus. What about if my students see me and it's like as if they would have checked out?
But no, that was a time when like online dating was still a bit taboo and people kind of poop poo died a little bit, and so it was kind of hard to go online dating.
Poo pootera you can tell who has a little child?
Yeah, yeah, yes, But really, coming back to your question, it was certain dipity. I was actually giving a talk in front of an audience, and afterwards there was this.
Man who was exciting and different talk to me about chemistry, because I think sometimes chemistry, we have spoken about it so much. Chemistry can make you feel as though you've met your soulmate, that you and this person against the world. What was the chemistry that you experienced when you met Johnny?
Yeah, I think it was instant, as in he had these green eyes, which for an Italian is unusual, and they were really sparkling, and they were sparkling with mischief. And I still remember we were at the buffet after I had given this talk, in this lovely venue with a you know, view of the harbor, so everything was like very glamorous in the sense it was a typical sort of Sydney moment. And he poured me a glass
of wine from the bottle of the buffet. But the way he looked at me, it was like as if he had stolen it, like a little boy.
He had this.
Boyishness about him, and yet he was actually thirteen years older than me. But that boyish energy also meant he was full of excitement and he wanted adventure, as in we both shared a love for travel. And he told me he had just come off a bike ride all around Australia on a yellow Harley Davidson. I was like, oh, okay, you're different.
You're a bad boy.
You're a bad boy, and I love riding motorbikes too. I'd never written a Hali Davidson, but you know, I grew up on bikes, something smaller bikes. But I still I thought, oh, yeah, I'd do that with you, no worries.
I thought you gonna say I would do that like him. Yeah I did that. That's the same thing, the same thought. Yeah, So how long did you date for him? Was this a well win romance?
Like?
What was the initial dating period like with him?
Yeah, it was a whirlwind. I guess I was ready for a whirlwind because I felt like, okay, you know that sort of experience of that early it was perimenopause, could say, but I wasn't expecting it because it was early. My doctor said it's ten years too early. Had sort of made me feel like, what's happening here? Am I old? This is it? And then suddenly I was feeling completely
seen and heard. And he was the kind of person who showered me in compliments, in attention and in gifts, and he also did all those things, you know, taking me to beautiful dinners, to I don't know, the opera house, all of those things, and it just made me feel like magic, like i'd suddenly swapped this role from sitting on the couch, you know, moping, and then suddenly I am the lead in an Italian rom com.
This is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow burst.
You hear that actually so often, and we've talked about doing a hire episode around it. But women in their forties and fifties where they feel like they're being replaced by the younger generation and they don't feel seen anymore or heard, or desired or wanted, and all of a sudden, this man swoops in. Who and I'm jumping ahead here. Who sounds from the characteristics a bit like a narcissist
love bombing. Are going to give them everything they want, going to make them feel like they're the only person in the world. And we find out soon that you weren't, unfortunately the only person. Can you say, now, in hindsight, do you think.
He was a narcissist?
Yes, definitely.
I mean I was trying to ease into that. Oh yeah, well, I think.
I could write a PhD about narcissism by not because I have researched it thoroughly, I wasn't really aware of the narcissistic personality profile at that time, and I just couldn't see it. I just thought, I mean, yes, I thought, well, he's a bit over the top, but you know, he was Italian. He was meant to be melodramatic. It sort of came with the territory, you know, that was part of his persona. So I did not see it for a long time. Obviously, now I know what love bombing is.
Back then, I didn't know. I just thought, wow, you know, he feels like he's found you know, for both of us. We were saying, oh, this is a second chance, you know, in love, and we're both older second time around.
You know.
I think that this conversation, though, like your story is so different to anything that we've spoken about. When we've spoken about narcissism or narcissistic personality disorder or anyone who has like traits within the scale of it, the response is always to leave like that it's not possible to have a relationship with someone who's a narcissist. That you
need to create as much distance as possible. But the very real reality is is that there are people who fall in love with narcissists and then spend their life trying to make that work. Or discovering things about them that don't necessarily meet up to the person that you think that they were or that they are. You were together for was it only two years?
All up? I think it was four or five?
Two years of being married, was it? And then he received a diagnosis?
Yes, yes, that's right, yes, yeah, Well so how did we get to engagement in the wedding?
So how many years were you together before that happened?
Everything happened very quickly in the sense I think in hindsight he probably talked about marriage from the minute we met, but only in that exuberance, Oh my god, you know you're the woman I marry you. I'm going to marry you. You know you're the person I want to spend the rest of what's left of my life with. Now I got off at the dream job. I was an academic at a university in Sydney, and we had entered a study abroad program with seven other universities aboard a floating
university camp as a cruise ship. In other words, it was actually an American study broad program. And I was the Macquarie University representative. And I said to them, can I bring my partner? And I said of course do. So he came along, and so we had these four months about this ship traveling around the world teaching. Wow, just two weeks into the voyage, we were in Thailand when he dislocated his shoulder aboard the ship. We had to then have, you know, see the doctor in Bangkok
go to the hospital. So then he was in a pretty bad shape from the morphin. It was very, very painful. So we just took a room after the hospital and said, right, well stay here for two nights, three nights, and then go back to the hospital. And I had a friend with me from the ship, and she said, well, while he's dozing conked out on painkillers, let's go, you know,
and check out the tailors downstairs. And so there's all these tailor shops that make you bespoke anything you want, and these particular ones were specialized in wedding dresses, and so they hit my friend, who was a forty five year old single American up with these wedding stressfolders. She said, no, not me, definitely not me, but maybe her. Anyway, we found this incredible piece of fabric which incorporated all of
Johnny's favorite colors. He loved colors, especially sort of yellow orange, bright, you know, pink, and we just took a fabric sample back to the room and by then the painkillers had worn off. Was still in pain, but the smile was back on his face. He saw the phoebik, he said, that's fabric for a wedding day. Let's just do it. Let's just get married on the ship. And because he was in this state, it sort of felt like, Okay, it's a moment of celebration, and you know, why not.
And we knew we had a sea passage coming up of two weeks at sea, and my students were getting very antsy doing you know, cabin fever. So we all decided it's a great party. Let's just have a great party.
So that married with the students on the sea. Yes, shoulder, Yes.
I can only imagine after this, after getting married, spending this time overseas, and you know, even the relationship itself being in a four year mark, like you're still in this there's still this like bubble of just love and adoration. And then you found out that Johnny was actually quite sick. What happened there? When did you get that diagnosis? And I guess like when you did find out that he
was very unwell. Was it something that they they were trying to treat it first, or was it a termin diagnosi this straight away?
Yeah, no, it wasn't terminal straight away. So we actually had signed up to go on that ship for another voyage. So the idea was, we'll just keep, you know, traveling around the world on this ship forever until I retire or whatever. But then it was the global financial crisis and the first thing that the Royal Caribbean Company took off their schedule was, of course our not profit making a study abroad program, and so that was very sad. But I had a year of long service leave up
my sleeve. So immediately he said, right, we'll just keep traveling anyway, Let's just hatch another plan. So we spent many many weekends coming up with this amazing plan and we booked everything down. I mean, I'm not normally like this, but somehow we got into it, and we booked this trip around the world. You know. It included I don't know, two months in Buenos Aires studying Spanish and all sorts
of incredible stuff. The night before we were meant to go to the next destination, so a week before this incredible trip was starting. He found a pea sized lump behind his right ear and he said, I think I may have a problem. I said what, because he was a bit of a hypochondriac, so I didn't actually take it seriously. I had once had a little enlarged lymph node in the Doctorum, yeah, don't worry about it.
It's nothing.
It's nothing. So we were then in cans, far away from Sydney, far away from our stuff which we had sort of put in storage, and there was no diagnosis, and so that took a while before we got the diagnosis and it was okay, you basically have to go back to Sydney and have this looked at by a specialist. We can't do it up here. And then by the time we got the diagnosis, it was the cancer has spread to the lungs and to the lymph nodes. It wasn't yet declared terminal, was stage three. I mean, I
didn't know anything about the staging of cancer. He was a trained medical doctor and he knew that this is really serious.
I can only imagine when you are in a loving relationship and you married, the diagnosis of cancer is something that it would bind you together in terms of like wanting to support each other, but the diagnosis in itself would be so much for the two of you to work through, and the treatments and everything else that goes with it. But the thing that makes your story so interesting is what you discovered whilst your partner was so unwell.
And I mean I would love to get into how that came about, but basically, at this point in time, you discovered that your partner, who you're committed to, who you're working through this cancer diagnosis, was also having affairs outside of the relationship.
How did you discover that?
Yeah, So that was I think a year after this operation to the lunk. So he did actually recover, got his strength back, and you know, you never know. You can't see the cancer, so you don't know. A year later we were actually going on he had sort of this idea because you've been you know, you had to put your hold on life because of me. We had to cancel all these travel plans because of me. Let me take you to this beautiful eco lodge, you know,
north of cans and we'll have a lovely weekend. As we were driving there, we stopped in the shopping center just to run a few errands, and suddenly he dropped the newspaper, and I thought, that's odd, and I could see suddenly there was no strength in his hands, and suddenly he could even no longer walk. His gait was funny. But even a few days earlier, already I had noticed that his voice started sounding like he'd swallowed a helium balloon.
And I thought, that's really odd. And food got stuck in the corner of his mouth, but of course I tried to ignore it, thinking I was just tired. Yeah, And then he said he was a trained doctor. He said, we need to go immediately to the emergency department. This is an emergency. He said. Look, before we go in there, we need to download the medical files so that we can show them that I actually have this history of cancer,
so that they will take us seriously. But he couldn't at that point, he couldn't really operate his own inbox, and of course all his passwords had always been off limits, which in hindsight of course red flag. In that moment, he had not choice but to give me his passwords so that I could download them for him, And as I did, I noticed a strange subject line on my way out of that inbox, and I thought, that's very odd.
What was it was?
What a beautiful woman? But it wasn't from me or to me, and I thought, it's about some other beautiful woman. Then also when he was in the hospital, it emerged this was actually the cancer had spread to the brain. It was now a stage four and he needed immediate urgent brain surgery. So of course there was all this you know, drama, as in, they didn't provide an ambulance to drive all the way from Cans to the next hospital where he could be operated, which was five hundred
kilometers further south. It was raining, tropical wet season, so I became the untrained ambulance driver because there was no transfer, and it was all highly dramatic and extremely stressful, I mean, of course for both of us really. So when we got there, to child's will, we had to take I
had to just take a hotel room. And I noticed the night before the operation there were a lot of women on his Facebook page appeared wishing him well, and there was a lot of sort of traffic going on by people I had never heard of, and I thought, hang on, what's going on here? And that was the password he wouldn't share with me. He shared that with his brother and he said, look, I'll put my brother in charge of the Facebook. And I thought, I'm in charge of everything here.
Were at that point you were like, there's something or.
Something behind it. Yes, I'm your wife, and not only you know have I been driving you in as an ambulance driver. I have been cooking for you. I've been doing everything for you. So it felt like I was being left out. And that's when I realized there's something that's not right anyway. I waited for three weeks because I thought, who am I to do this while he is in this very vulnerable state?
And also there's two massive things that are going on at this point in time. There's your partner. When you've been given a stage four diagnosis, you know that this is terminal now, and so you're like, okay, well, on the scale of severity, is infidelity worth me having a conversation with right now when right now we're fighting to try and maintain as much longevity in life. It must have been such a challenging thing to go, well, when's the right time to bring up a conversation in that But.
The curiosity of just trying to find out exactly what was in that email, how many emails there were? When was the time that you thought I've had enough, I'm going to go investigate this more and log back into the emails, because I would have been straight in there, like you're a better woman than I, Because if I had have seen that email and I had his password same, I would have gone back in later that night.
Yes, but it was exactly like you just said, It was that conundrum. It's not really on his mind right now. You know, the man is looking death into the you know, staring at death. So who am I to bring this up right now?
And the conversation is never going to go down the way it would go down if death wasn't on the doorstep.
That's the thing.
If you had that conversation around infidelity with anyone else, there would be the groveling, there would be the apology, but I would only assume that there's bigger things on his.
Mind in that moment.
Exactly.
I was thinking about this on my way to work today and I was speaking to my partner Ben about it, like I was running the conundrum by him and also asked him what he would do. You know, if I
was dying and I had cheated on you. But he raised a really good point that was He's like, well, it's not necessarily about having the conversation with your partner, but it's just about you understanding and knowing and deciding if you want to ask those questions, because if the time comes where he passes away and you never got the chance to ask who, what, why, when you're the one that needs to be able to live the rest
of your life without knowing. So when did you decide to go back in to the emails?
That's exactly what was going through my mind, exactly that I just wanted to have that clarity because I knew that he would change the password the minute he had recovered enough to go back, you know. So I well, it was the night before. I mean I had thought about it for three weeks, but I had distracted myself. I went to yogat Dorn think about it, you know, be mindful or you can think about it. All I could think about was it. So then the last night
I thought, Okay, I've just got to do it. I'm just going to have to have a quick look just to put my mind at ease, because, like you just said, what if he dies and I never have this clarity. So I bought myself a bottle of wine, of course, to have enough courage to be reckless enough to actually do this. And I remember sitting there thinking, oh my god, I should have got two bottles because what if, and a gin and a gin and some whiskey, because what happens.
If I'll find something that'll be devastating, I'll definitely need some more. Anyway, when I heard the doors of the bottle shop downstairs go down, I thought, that's it. I'm just going to press interer nout and just get it over and done with and yeah, and so then what I found was actually a lot worse than what I
could have imagined. He had gone back to women that he had known before we got together and resumed those relationships physically physically, and yes, I mean they were overseas, and he traveled overseas frequently, so a lot of it was also not physically. Because he was an incredible and that's how I felt for him. He was incredibly charming writer of letters or emails. He was addicted to his keyboard.
And yeah, when you found that, like when we say, worse than you ever could imagine, do you have an idea of how many women it was, how many other relationship he was managing to maintain at the same time.
I guess how serious they were too?
Yeah, I think serious, quite serious. Some of them sort of offered to take him in or look after him should the cancer become I mean this is you know, once the cancer was known or the diagnosis was known, so quite serious. Yeah, maybe about five active.
When you found that out and you did have a conversation with him. How did he react?
So I initially thought, Okay, maybe I just don't tell him because his mind is right now, he's probably he might not even want to see them ever again, if he's just focused on his survival on you know, this moment. Because I'm in a brain surgery and then having a stage four diagnosis, it's massive, So who am I to spoil that for him? But I just couldn't hold it in.
I just couldn't. So eventually I thought, okay, I'll write him a letter, and I actually said, look, it's not for me now to let's not have an argument about it. It happened. Okay, I'll stay by you because this is a different situation. Obviously, if he hadn't been ill, there would have been only one way to go about this, and that was to divorce, to not stay together. So I told him, and the way he reacted was to say, well, if it's all your fault, And first of all, he said, okay,
how many do you know about? Okay? And I could see he's probably thinking, oh, my god, how much of it does she know? What else doesn't she know?
But also probably like, how can I minimize the damage?
Where can I lie?
Like?
Where can I cover up some of it?
It just made me flash back to my trauma.
I was also dating a doctor for a couple of years and we were getting married. We had the whole lot, this whole thing, and he ended up having a double life with multiple multiple women and he was marrying someone else as well, not just like lighthearted cheating and word for word. When it came out and I discovered it and confronted him, he also blamed me and said this is your fault, Like, this is your fault what you've done.
You're ruining my life.
Like everything that you just said is classic narcissism. When you were reading these emails for the first time, how did you feel in that moment? Because it sounds like that you made a really quite a quick decision to say, well, I'm going to stand by him regardless. Was it as quick as you're making out and as easy as you're making out?
No, it wasn't. The first thing, of course, is I was frantically trying to reconstruct the timelines. When did he actually see them? Hang on, where was I in that moment? And then when I did reconstruct some of it, I was devastated, thinking, so here I am prepared his you know, green smoothie or whatever, or working on the ship, working really hard. Because we had had this conversation before we went on the ship. I said, Tim, you might get bored because I would be having to work very hard,
as in it's very intense. You live with your students, it's all new stuff. And they did have an opening for a mental health or a doctor or whatever, and he said, no, you know what, I'll just come as a student and I'll just study. But clearly, and that's one of the things he said, one of the reasons why I had to resume some of these affairs is because you were always focused on your work and you weren't there for me. You were always tired, you were
always busy, a load of rubbish. It's like, yeah, well we could have maybe had that conversation rather than just going off. So that was one of the things. But yeah, coming back to how did I rect Obviously I didn't immediately make that decision. We actually both said okay, we need time out. But we couldn't have time out immediately because he needed to after that brain surgery. He needed then to have seven weeks of radiation therapy, and I
was there. I was there to be his chauffeur again, in his cook and we just got on with the job. It just was like, okay, let's just get on with that. Let's not talk about what I found. Let's just because it was confronting for him. I mean, the radiation therapy was terrible.
Yeah, there's this reaction that happens, Like your reaction when you find out something that's awful is often anger. It's often very like harsh and very like very visceral. And then as time goes by, O, when it is, your feelings often migrate into something else. When you say that you then had so many so much time because he needed to still be cared for, could you feel your anger or your upset and you're hurt. Could you feel that softening? Could you feel yourself forgiving him?
In that period?
Not so much. In that period, I kept myself very busy as physical exercise. I like became this runner. I just ran away from it all and I exhausted myself physically. But then what we did is we said, okay, let's have a month out. We need time out. And then he went back to Italy. I'm sure he well. I said to him, do whatever you have to do in Italy. I don't care. And I went and checked myself into a ten days silent meditation retreat in Thailand because I
thought I needed a crash cause in forgiveness. And I thought, if I live with real monks in a real monastery, maybe I become spiritually awakened, you know, by osmosis, and able to keep my heart open when it's broken. But what that experience did for me, I don't recommend it for everybody. It did work for me. And you know, I was sitting I was actually the only white Western woman in that monastery at that time, and you know, sitting there in my white robes at dawn in the
deserted meditation hall at Ah. I thought, gee, am I going mad? What am I doing? But then I also thought, okay, what will the future look like? And one of the helpful things, and that is I think why I had turned to Buddhism, because I thought maybe they have tools to teach me about forgiveness and compassion. One of the monks said to me, okay, he shared with me the parable of the second arrow, and I still love this parable. He said, the first arrow we cannot control. We all
experience suffering. In fact, that is the first noble truth of Buddhism. But the second arrow is our choice. And I took that to mean that why we can't avoid pain, we can choose our suffering. In other words, I could go on and just drink a bottle of wine every night and call him the body bastard in a slurred voice. Or I could maybe find another way. And I thought, maybe there is a way I could actually grow from this experience rather than be erased by it and so
broken by it. Exactly, I didn't want to be that broken, And I, you know, is sitting there in that meditation hall I had a very good idea by the end, what my second arrow could look like.
When you came back from that, did you ever get to sit down and talk to Gianni and actually just make him answer these questions tell you everything? I mean, did you want to know the intricacies in the details of these affairs? Or for you was easier to just accept that it happened but not want to know anything, because I know for me, I wanted to know everything. I wanted to know how many people, how he did it, when he did it, why.
He did it, and did that help you?
It actually did, because I realized he was so crazy that I dodged a bullet, like by knowing the details, I was like, Oh, this is so much easier for me to walk away from now. But if I just knew that there was an affair and I didn't know the details, I would have I think I would have found it harder to move on.
I think by then I had pieced together a lot of the details already and the timelines, and so because of course, by the time we got back together, I think, in hindsight, what was it? Maybe he had another six months after that I felt like, do we really need to go? I mean, we tried, and then it was just too painful. You know what, it's not relevant. The man is dying, what's the poor cares really and he
was no longer interested in them by that stage. He was really just interested in well, he only had the energy to be in the here and now, and so it we didn't know, we didn't do what you did. I think, of course, if the scenario had been different, and perhaps if it had been that scenario where he wasn't obviously dying and so on, I probably would have wanted to know all the details. But in this context, no, it didn't matter anymore.
A lot of people when they go through cheating, when infidelity is present in the relationship, is often this feeling of like, well, what we had wasn't real, like that didn't exist. Did you think that or were you able to kind of realize that some people are able to compartmentalize feelings and that they're able to feel real for you in this respect, but still able to do these things that are incredibly hurtful and almost live side by side themselves.
Yeah. I think a lot of our experiences were real simply because also they were so unique, you know, like this trip around the world on the ship and so on, and also because a lot of those women were actually married, so he could never have the things that we did together with them, Like even I guess sleeping together overnight would have been difficult. In fact, I know it was because they had to obviously go out of you know, work out ways to do that. So that was real.
But what I found really hard to tolerate is or to get my head around or to find peace with, was the fact that he would lie in bed next to me, and had done so before I found out texting these women yeah all the time, And I was like, but you know, here I am helping you with your especially once he had relied on me already on the ship. He was relying on me to help him dress him after he had the operation in Cape Town for the shoulder.
So there I was, you know, pulling up his pants, going to work on the ship, and the next thing he would spend all morning just chatting with his women, and perhaps at night when I was lying in bed, I mean not so much on the ship because the internet was terrible.
That didn't worry. That might have been the only thing stopping at the time.
But there's this idea, and like people used to say to me exactly that, But was it real?
Then?
Do you feel like those years weren't real or that he didn't love you? And I still to this day say the same thing. I say, Oh he loved me, he just loved other people too, and his love wasn't normal, And like, you have to believe that because otherwise you think, well, I've just wasted all these years of my life.
I have to.
And I know a lot of people are going to be in their cars or whatever right now saying bullshit, that's not love.
And I get it.
I understand that, but I know what those years were like. And whilst I think he is a fuck with for what he did, you have to hold onto this fact of well, he did the wrong thing, but he still loved you in whatever way. You need to understand that.
That's right. And I agree with that. I think that was exactly the case for us too. I do believe, and I also believe that he really wanted to, you know, break his patterns perhaps and not go back to these women. I do believe that when he said to me, you know, this is a fresh start, he really believed it. But he just couldn't pull it off. And I think, as you would know, the problem with narcissists is they can't love themselves, so therefore they can't really love others in
the way that we expect them to. And they need this constant validation from the outside. And so that's yeah, And it almost makes you feel like you have to have empathy or compassion for somebody who is that incapable of having that love fully?
Yeah, what have you learned about forgiveness?
Oh so just where do I start? Yeah? Look, I really realized, as I was saying before, when I was sitting there, you know, as that woman who was looking towards a broken woman working too hard, drinking too much, to forget that she had left the man she had loved when he was dying, I thought, okay, forgiveness could be the opposite to that. I didn't want to be that broken, you know, woman Haggard. You know, I thought forgiveness could perhaps be that antidote. And what I've realized
it's really a form of radical self care. It's a form of self healing because it gives you agency by letting go and by setting them free, and you're setting yourself free. And I think that's what it really It's empowering. That's what I learned about it. Yeah, did he ever apologize to you? No, you know, narcissists can't say sorry really, but he did say he acknowledged that he had hurt me and that he made me suffer, and that was
good enough. That was his way of apologizing. And again we're talking about a man who was dying and a few months after that he did die, So from that perspective, that was good enough for me, and that was his form of apologizing.
Yeah, it's really beautiful to hear you speak about this because your empathy for someone who we are taught to have no empathy for because they lack empathy themselves. I think the thing that is such a standout is the fact that the reason why the person who's like the victim of a narcissist gets hurt so bad is because
we still have empathy for them. We have empathy for the fact that, as you said, they're not able to love themselves, or they are that broken bird, or they do the things that are incomprehensible to people who don't have or don't live within this spectrum of narcissism or behavioral sort of narcissistic personality disorder. Because we would never treat people like that, but yet you still manage to not only forgive, but have the empathy for the why
in how he does it. And I think that that's just such a testament to what a kind hearted person you are.
That's right.
I mean, the empathy is lacking in the narcissist, and in the hypersensitive person it's in abundance, sometimes too much.
Also often why they're attracted to you as well.
Exactly.
Yes, you've wrote in.
Your book about as Jarnie was dying, finding a different kind of intimacy.
What did you mean by that?
Yeah, So it occurred to me when it was only the two of us at the end, like literally there we were, you know, in finals Queensland. The weather was doing its thing as in dramatic tropical weather. We did actually have a category five cyclone.
He heah, and then we had it followed by a real one.
It felt very precious and it felt like that was such a unique intimacy that obviously he could only I mean, that wasn't replicable, like you can you know, share your in your sexual intimacy with multiple partners as he did, but there was only me that he shared that intimacy with. So it felt like a privilege, and it really felt like a gift. And there's this wonderful quote by ram das the American Guru, who says, we're all just walking
each other home. And it felt like my role then was to walk him home to his final destination and to be there to hold his and and to make peace with him, because I think he also it was a beautiful Yeah, it was a beautiful time being there with him in this that was real intimacy in his most vulnerable state, in his most vulnerable state, when he you know, I could have I mean I could have just I don't know, kicked him out of the bed or whatever, like he was completely vulnerable, and to be
there and to honor that that was a real privilege. Yeah.
How do you feel like your thoughts around relationships and love and intimacy now have changed?
Has it affected you.
I don't know, are you? Are you dating again?
Has it affected what you want from your relationships?
Yeah? I think I remain a trusting person and that I always say jokingly, and now I work more on the relationship I have with myself that is actually much more important. I mean it sounds maybe selfish, but really you have to work on the self love and especially the EmPATH amongst us need to also foreground that a
little bit, And it's another sort of survival strategy. You know, you can't really others if you're not having a nurturing relationship with yourself, which also means knowing what your boundaries are and honoring them. So I think I'm getting better at the head sort of honoring my boundaries and just saying, Okay, this is what I need.
And Yeah, this might be a really hard question to answer because the alternate you can't really compare to because you didn't experience it. But do you think finding out and like living through this time away from him, this forgiveness, this acceptance, do you think that ultimately it made dealing with his death easier or do you think it was
still as hard. Did you still feel as in love with him at the end, or was it almost as though there was a sense of not obligation because you wanted to be there as well, but just a sense that you could make closure with it easier than had you had this blissful relationship right until the end.
Yeah, I mean, obviously we can't know these things, but I definitely think yes, in the sense that already, when on the ship, I had to look after him, and it was that was really hard too, because the ship was swaying, we got into you know, storms and so on. I had somehow taken on that maternal love, or rather I was forced to also this well of maternal love sort of sprang forth, which sort of mixed with the
romantic love. And so that maternal love, the caring, the looking after him, the day to day business of cooking the meals for him, making sure he ate that anti cancer that helped. Yes, shifted, Yes, it shifted, It definitely shifted. But I also thought about, you know, what would it have been like had I not known before he died? What would it have been like find out after he had died? And I think that would have been so hard.
Oh worse, yes, worse, But there's no resolution, that's right, And at least this way that you had, I guess a level of closure.
I agree, because you would literally be like the man I loved I didn't know. You wouldn't have a chance to even have those grounding conversations around the why.
Yes, I know.
A lot of people would be asking or thinking to themselves right now, did he have another option for someone to look after him?
Did he have other.
Family or friends or like, could you have made the decision to walk away knowing he would have been cared for.
Yes, yes, and you still chose to stay. Yeah. I mean his brother was overseas, so technically it would have. But yes, it could have. Yes, definitely.
I just there's a part of me.
I mean when I put myself in this position and I had this conversation with Laura, and I had it with my partner Ben straight away. Ben was like, I'd give you to someone else to look after, and he was like, if you've been doing the dirty on me? And I thought about it, and I thought, there's a part of you that can't. There's no closure if you walk away, and if there's no forgiveness, And this forgiveness is the most powerful thing.
And you often don't forgive someone for them.
You forgive someone for yourself so that you can move on with your life and not have this hatred cloud hanging over your head constantly. And I think people get mixed up with that the reason for forgiveness, and people would judge you for forgiving someone, like how could that person stay and look after someone when he did that to her.
But it's not necessarily for him.
That's right, You do it also for yourself, because I wanted to be able to live with the echoes of my deeds, as in, I wanted to be able to know that I've done. I wanted to be able to live with it. And also when I was eighteen, I dropped out of high school and I ended up working in an old people's home, actually looking after the dying, completely untrained. They didn't have any hi, you know, measures then, and I knew it was very sacred to be able
to hold space. These were often people who didn't have family, so I was the person holding their hands, and I was eighteen, but I just felt it was such a privilege and it was so sacred, and so I knew that if I stayed with him until the end, we would have this wonderful closure, or we could, and we did. And also a friend had said to me, narcissists very rarely changed, but it is possible sometimes at the end of their lives, like when they're staring death in the face,
they can sometimes change. And I believe that there was and the Buddhas saying, you know, can clean up a lot of karma in those last moments. I do believe that he did change that none of that was any more important. And the other thing he did, which was he kept saying thank you a lot, and I had the feeling that he was healing himself with gratitude.
And I couldn't heal it with apologies.
Yeah.
Do you think the other women knew that you existed, that he was married?
Yes? They did, Yes. Yes.
Did you ever feel like you wanted to reach out to any of them in contact?
I did?
Oh, please do tell So the night before.
The funeral, I had to write the eulogy, and I put, you know, we put this lovely flyer together with all these collash of photos and there was us, you know, all over the world and all these photos and him as a younger man and so on and off his family of course, and then I was so angry. I
don't know. The anger came up in a way because perhaps it was the reason for that, maybe because I could never really yell at him, say you fucking bastard, because you can't yell at a dying person with those words. So I had to swallow that, and it came up that night. I just thought Jesus. And that was the other night I drank an entire bottle of red wine. I didn't make a habit of.
It, but I always send bad emails on a few where a few ones don't we.
And I was looking at this frog perched on the rand on a chair. Thing that's him, Oh my god. And I was yelling at the frog, you know, in his slurred voice, and you know. Then I made a pot of tea, soaped up. And then I thought, okay, there's only one thing I can do to get over this, and I rang his lovers. I had the numbers in his diary. And the first one answered, and she knew immediately who I was, and she already knew that he.
Yeah, it's not him calling, is it. He's underground now?
And it was from his phone. I guess, I guess I can't remember now. And I said to her, look, I knew he meant a lot to you, because this woman had been in his life for longer than I had been, because he had known her for much longer. I wanted to let you know that the film is tomorrow, and I wanted you to somehow be able to be part of that, even though that you're over there, and she just said, You've just taken this huge weight off me.
I feel so relieved. I felt so terrible. And then I rang another one and she said the same.
Sorry, Robbie is she was doing.
She was married and she knew that you existed. She's sorry and has the weight on her shoulder because you've called her out on it. But you did that so nicely, Like were you ever did you ever call any of these women and not be such a beautiful person, Like did you ever call them and say no? Yeah, but like like you really hurt me, like you should be ashamed?
Did you ever ever take that tactic?
No? I didn't. There was one I really actually had empathy for her because her husband had just also died very terrible circumstances, and she I really believe that she genuinely felt terrible for me, and we were basically in the same boat. Suddenly here we are widows. So we actually kept writing to each other for a while back and forth. But then she just kept telling me about her problems with her husband. I thought, yeah, that's enough. Now that's what I'm not you know, I'm not podcast Yeah,
that's right. But it was sort of like, well, we're all in this together, so we all loved the same man. Yeah, And I think the first one I rang, I think she would just really embarrassed me. Could hear the embarrassment, and that was enough. She was really embarrassed, Yeah, and annoying that you cousin. Thank you so much for coming
and for sharing your story. I mean, I think everyone who listens to this is going to go home and if they're in a relationship, is going to have that conversation with their partner.
What would you do?
It was the first thing I thought when I saw your book and I saw the title, and your generosity, your empathy, your kindness absolutely exudes out of you, Like it is such a beautiful thing. And I don't think that everybody would respond in the way that you have, that's for sure, you know. I think there is a lot of people out there who would hold onto that anger and hold on to that fury.
Yeah, but that's actually thank you for saying that. But I think of it as I say, I had to save my own life, and if I had stayed that angry woman, that wouldn't have served me, you know. And I was getting old. I was looking in the mirror going Do I want to look like? Do I want all these lines? These anger lines?
Know?
What can I do? So well?
It is called Loving My Lying, dying, cheating Husband, and it is available at Awkward bookstores. We'll put a link in the show notes as well. For you, Thank you so much for coming and being part of the pod.
Thank you so much for having me.