Good morning TRP, it’s been a while.

Summary

My last field report covered my marriage to my now ex-wife and how this ended with adultery at the end of 2011. I touched a little on where things were leading in the months following my split from my ex-wife and this post will dig into the details of my next LTR. I’ll cover how I met my next LTR (lets call her Vicky), my discovery of TRP two years into this relationship and how it ended recently. I will also cover what has happened over the last 4 weeks and my intentions going forward. My objective for this post is to highlight some of the red flags I saw come up during my LTR, red flags that were well hidden until I was “in too deep”. My hope is that my experience over the last 4 years will provide TRP members that are currently in the same situation or considering an LTR some guidance on what to look out for. Brace yourselves, it’s a long one again.

Part 1 – She was the most amazing woman I had ever met.

I was in the process of selling the family home, looking for an apartment in the old town and made an appointment to see a place that looked interesting. I sat there waiting for the real estate agent playing on my phone when Vicky walked up to me, she had long black hair, piercing blue eyes, was slim and athletic and she smiled with her eyes. We exchanged some pleasantries and then headed upstairs to look at the apartment. I looked around for three minutes when she asked why I was moving, I explained that I was getting divorced and selling the family home, she mentioned that she had also been divorced and we spent the next hour talking about our failed relationships. What went wrong and why…she was a single mother and was brutally honest about why she divorced her husband, he was boring, had no ambition, had let himself go, her life had become mundane and she wanted more, she was ambitious and new what she wanted out of life. We connected…but I had to get going so we said our goodbyes and I told her I wanted the apartment, I would send me paperwork through to her later that day.

After having sent her my paperwork (including payslips reflecting my above average salary), I noticed she was on Whatsapp so I sent her a message letting her know that the email had been sent. She responded immediately, so did I, then she and on it went …my messages were witty, flirting, joking with a IDGAF attitude (as I was doing with most women at this point). The flirting escalated and a week later, we were essentially talking about sex, fantasies, what positions we both enjoyed and what we would do to each when we met again. Over the next couple of weeks, I started focusing my attention on her and dropped the other five woman I was gaming at the time.

Her English was excellent; she said she had previously taken a year off to be an au-pair in the US where she learned English. This was just prior to coming back to Germany and meeting her ex-husband, getting pregnant and then married.

A couple of weeks later, we organised to meet for drinks in the old town. At this point, we both knew where this was heading. We met at a local bar, had a couple of cocktails before moving onto the next. We were sitting at our 3rd bar, laughing, flirting, kissing when she suddenly become a little cold and distant, I asked her what was wrong and she mentioned that one of her recent ex boyfriends was sitting at the end of the bar, drunk and eyeballing us. We left, went to the apartment and started kissing / undressing the second we walked in the door. I won’t go into detail here but after being starved of sex for years, I was unleashed. We did not make “love”…we fucked…hard…for hours...over and over. I could not get enough and she had an equal appetite. I only found out later that apparently her drunk ex-boyfriend had followed us back to the apartment and was listening in on her moans at our front door (he emailed her the next day).

The ex-boyfriend, I found out later lived across from me in the same apartment block, he was my neighbour, she had met him the same way she had met me. He was a good looking pilot, a player apparently that had “used and abused” her (Chad). He was the guy that showed up “shortly” after she left her husband…I had my suspicions.

After a couple of months of dating her, I introduced her to my kids and they got along great. She was amazing with them and they loved her. She was funny and there was always a party when she was around. She created “patchwork” family collages with the five of us, found activities for the kids, looked after them when work pulled me away…the patchwork family dream.

For the next twelve months, I was the happiest I had ever been. I had my independence, I was dating a good looking woman with an insatiable appetite for sex, she never complained, she was always understanding, had the same values and hobbies I did, was great with my kids and made no demands of me. We did skiing holidays together, mountain biking, running, we did weekend trips to various European cities and cruises in the Atlantic. We spoke about everything and she seemed perfect. She adored me and after my fifteen year marriage to a HB5 who I knew was repulsed by me….this was intoxicating.

After living in the rented apartment for 12 months, I decided to invest the capital I had from the sale of the family home and bought a large apartment in the old town, it was new, selling below market value and large enough for me and my two kids (when they were with me). I moved in there in December 2012. Life continued to be good and things were moving in the right direction.

Part 2 – She was (also) not who she appeared to be

After a few months, some minor shit tests started, “where is this going?”, “do you really love me?”, “do we have a future together”. She wanted more commitment; she was insecure and wanted me to prove that we had a future together. After being together for just over a year, she suggested moving in together. I had not discovered TRP at this point and while some red flags were there…I was still naïve (NAWALT). In principle, I had no problems moving in together with her at this point, she was perfect and truly enriching my life. We spoke about moving in together but I made it clear that I did not want to financially support her and her daughter, I wanted her to be with me because of who I am and not because I provided a financial security blanket (like my ex-wife). Even though I had not discovered TRP, I had made the clear delineation in my head between BB/AF and there was no chance I was ever going to allow myself to be a full BB again, I thought that I could walk that fine balancing line between AF/BB. She said she would pay “some” rent and cover her own costs. Three months later, she and her daughter moved in.

At first, life continued as normal but the shit tests intensified and slowly started to escalate, she started testing my boundaries:

  • While heading to an upmarket get together in our town, in passing she says to me “Don’t embarrass me”. My reaction was WTF and I let her know it. If anything, I told her not to embarrass me. Argument ensued.

  • Heading to dinner one night after I had a long and stressful day at work, out of the blue she said “One day, you will come home and I won’t be there anymore because you don’t love me enough”. After having dealt with major stress at work, I was not in the mood for this…argument ensued.

  • She started nit picking at minor issues with my kids, blowing everything out of proportion and making my kids feel unwelcome in my house.

  • Meeting up with my friends for a couple of drinks once a week became a problem. Apparently I would rather go out with my friends than be with her.

  • She would add every random guy she met on Facebook, good looking waiters, bartenders, ex boyfriends, etc. When I added an old female colleague, she flipped out.

  • After a long day at work, we sat down for a glass of wine, she overdid it, got drunk and started going on about how my kids are rotten, I am a shit father and it was a good thing my ex-wife had cheated on me to teach me a lesson. I sat there in stunned silence, she had gone for the throat and she had hit bullseye…I sat there looked at her calmly and said “…there is no way that someone would say something like that to a person they care about”…and walked away.

  • One weekend, I wanted to arrange a boys weekend. I had not spent much quality time with just my kids so thought it would be good for us, an idea she initially supported early in our relationships. When I told her I wanted to do this, she got aggressive claiming I was cutting her out of my life, she physically attacked me. Something she did several times over the coming months.

I was starting to see Vicky for who she really was and there was a slow decline in the value she added to my life. She was manipulative, aggressive, abusive and unable to take responsibility for what came out of her mouth or her decisions (solipsism). When confronted with logical reasoning during an argument, she would attempt to change the direction of the argument or rewrite history.

Over the course of our relationship, I learned about her past, through various conversations with her…unfortunately too late:

  • Her parents were divorced when she was 14 years old; her father was a financially successful drunk and had cheated on her mother with mistresses and prostitutes.

  • Due to the divorce and her father having to declare bankruptcy, they went from living a wealthy lifestyle to having nothing.

  • She started having sex when she was 15 years old

  • She was very sexually active (ONS, FWB’s, etc) but claimed to have never made real connections to her past boyfriends. She said she easily walked away from relationships. I never got an exact number but I estimated her N Count was into the 30’s or 40’s.

  • After her schooling, she was working a menial job when she decided to “find herself” and go to the US for 1 year as an au pair. It would appear that while in the US, she rode the CC hard, having several ONS while out partying and having 6 to 7 “boyfriends” over a period of 8 months…some married men.

  • When she came back from the US, she met her ex-husband and got pregnant, this was an accident apparently. I later discovered that it was only an accident for her ex-husband. She had stopped taking the pill without telling him and got pregnant on purpose. She tried to justify this by saying she loved him so much she wanted to give him a family….I knew better.

  • She told me that towards the end of her marriage, her ex-husband disgusted her, he had no backbone. She would start arguments for no reason and in order to calm her down, he would apologise and grovel. This behaviour made her even more repulsed by him.

  • The “pilot” ex-boyfriend was already around when her and her ex-husband started splitting up, the timing was very close. It would appear that she branch swung from her ex-husband to the dashing Pilot (hypergamy)

I learned all of the above over a period of about year and I realised, there were issues beyond my control. Some of the common interests we had had faded into the background, she no longer wanted to go snowboarding, mountain biking or running together. Her true “hobbies” included sitting on the couch, eating cake and watching Vampire Diarrhea. I questioned her once on why she never wanted to do the things that attracted me to her in the first place, she admitted that she only did them because she wanted me to like her; she wanted to connect with me.

Towards the start of 2014 I discovered TRP. It immediately hit home, I consumed the sidebar ravenously and learned as much as I could, I understood that my behaviour was actually causing some of her behaviour (to an extent). TRP became daily reading for me. I started running again and signed up for a Gym contract. I started modifying my behaviour with her; I started holding frame, reduced commitment and started asserting myself, dealing with daily and ever escalating shit tests. At one point, she was escalating a usual shit test…I sat there watching her for a while...silent, I then pulled my cock out and turned around to her saying “can you repeat that?” Flabbergasted, it immediately took the wind out of her sails and she started laughing…shit test handled (I actually read this from TRP that morning).

After reading TRP for a few months, I felt that I was better equipped to deal with her, I understood why she was doing certain things but being the scientific guy that I am, I wanted to test TRP theory. I would go two weeks behaving “Alpha” and see how her behaviour changed towards me and then two weeks being an absolute Beta (buy her chocolate, gushing, lots of “I love you”, hearts and smiles in messages, over communication, etc). Behaving Alpha usually led to mild respect, less shit tests and more affection. During the Beta phase, she would be aggressive, abusive and demeaning…regardless of how nice I was being to her, arguments would get manufactured.

Towards the end of 2014, my work situation changed (a very good thing in hindsight). I got a large severance package and 3 months of “garden leave”. We decided to rent a place further out of town and I rented out my apartment in the old town. She had not paid me a single cent of rent at that point and moving into a rental apartment would not only be cheaper for me but would also put the onus on her to pay her share to the landlord (and not me).

My previous employment had been very stressful and I looked forward to unwinding in those 3 months. I ran, went to the gym, socialised with my friends and focused on myself. I quickly found a job but decided to only start after the 3 months were up. In her eyes though, I had lost status…I was “unemployed” and my perceived utility had declined (Brifaults Law). Things started escalating with her again regardless of what I did…this was now looking beyond recovery.

One night, my kids were over...my youngest (8 years) suffers from Asthma and had a chest infection. He was struggling to breath and we had an inhaler machine that he would use prior to bed to clear his chest. Vicky had been her usual self that day, screaming at my children, disrespecting me and generally abusive. I am panicking as my son is struggling to breath, trying to get the inhaler machine setup, its 9pm and Vicky is in bed. I turn on the machine which emits a low humming noise, I hear screaming from Vickys room…she comes into the kids room and screams “TURN THAT FUCKING MACHINE OFF….I’VE GOT TO FUCKING WORK TOMORROW AND I AM TRYING TO SLEEP!” and then goes back to the bedroom. That was it, that was the trigger that finally pushed me over the edge...I was out. I walked into the bedroom and said calmly “You know, we come from two very different worlds…in my world, if your daughter was lying there sick, struggling to breath…there is no fucking way in hell I would have said that to you…you are a truly rotten human being” and then left and from that day forward, I slept in the guest bedroom. I did not want to be near this woman anymore.

From that point forward, I was focused on getting out. I told her I would be moving out…she in her rage agreed and told me to get the fuck out and take my kids with me. I terminated my side of the lease with landlord which she happily signed in her anger. I started looking for a place back in town which I found very quickly. I had started working again and tried to reduce my time at home, left early, came home late. On my kids weekends, we would go away for the weekend. She started to realise that this was serious and I was really leaving and made several attempts to patch things up. I listened, we talked but I was resolute that we could no longer live together, my kids were priority one and she was toxic towards them. I had cancelled my side of the lease and signed the contract for the new apartment, she tried everything…from sex, crying, manipulation, anger…I stayed the course.

Part 3 – Single life aint that bad (again)

About a month ago, I moved into my new apartment, I took 2 weeks off work and in those two weeks had the apartment fully furnished and setup. Vicky was still trying to keep the relationship with me alive even though we did not live together. Up to a month ago I considered downgrading her to a plate but did I really want to deal with her drama? I felt liberated again, a feeling I had not had since the end of my divorce, and it felt good.

Vicky is still floating around in the background, this week she suggested a FWB as she also gets horny and with me, she knows what she gets. I know she just wants to use this as another avenue to keep the relationship alive, hoping that someday she can get me back. I think she truly regrets some of her behaviour towards me and my kids but it’s too little, too late. I also genuinely think she believes that I was “the one”, and is desperately trying to fix things and hold onto any strand of connection between us…I may inadvertently have Alpha Widowed her. Like with my ex-wife, the switch has gone off in my head and I have no emotion for her. She apparently had a breakdown a couple of weeks ago…crying into my voicemail drunk…sigh.

From all the running and lifting I had been doing (thanks TRP), I have again lost more fat and gaining muscle. I have started getting compliments. I was out for a drink with a friend recently, sitting at an outside café sipping on my vodka Tonic, happy in the fact that I was single again when I start getting IOI’s from an HB9 sitting next to me in a group of 5 girls. At one point she loudly laughs after reading something on her phone, I lean over and ask “You gotta let me read what the fuck was so funny”….she hears I am not German and immediately turns her chair towards me and starts leaning in, asking me where I am from, what do I do, how did I land up here…etc. I was in IDGAF mode and my answer to where I come from was pointing down at my crotch and saying “I come from here, where do you come from?” She laughed and then asked what do I do? I told her I work in the adult entertainment business. I played with her, she was amusing.

My friend and I ended up leaving the bar to meet a common friend at another; we had a couple of drinks there then moved onto one of the more popular places. Turns out she is there as well and as soon as she sees me, she comes over and gets uncomfortably close…without saying a word, I grab her hip with my left hand, my right hand holding her being the ear/head and I pull her in for a long, long French kiss…she reciprocated and look delirious when I finally stopped. Then, again...without saying word…I left and got a round of drinks for my friends. She hung around but I did not give her too much attention until she finally stood in front of me with her back against me and grinding her ass against my crotch. The place was crowded, she was wearing a dress, I ran my hand up her leg and felt her naked ass, and she did not stop me. We kissed a couple of more times…some groping but my friends wanted to head off. I called it a night as well but I gave her my number…I did not care to get hers.

The next morning, she texts me that she so badly wants to fuck me…I smile, not because it will be nice to fuck her but because I actually don’t care. I think I have got to the point of truly internalising some TRP principles, I am not putting her on a pedestal and I really think, if it’s not her…there are another ten lined up (abundance mentality)…I am the prize. She has been on holiday for 2 weeks, during that time we have been texting each other, always sexual in nature. She has told me a little about herself and sent shots of herself in a bikini and underwear (yes, definitely HB9). It’s clear that she is just DTF, neither her or I am looking for a relationship, she is 21...I am 42, we won’t be doing family dinners together. She will make a good first plate.

Part 4 – Where to now?

I will enjoy the single life for a while, acquire a plate or two and see how it goes. My primary priority is my kids and their wellbeing. Women take a 4th place next to my kids, work and hobbies. I am resolute about not bringing another woman into my kids life until they are of age (if ever).

I am doing the whole Tinder thing but honestly, my impression is those dating apps are full of desperate betas that are constantly stroking the egos of narcissistic women…I will play the game but I am no chasing very hard.

A TRP member who was the same age as me recently wrote that he prefers to go for medium term relationships. A couple of years and when the drama starts, she gets nexted. This sounded interesting but any sort of semi-serious relationship would require and introduction to my kids…I will not do this.

Where to next, I don’t know…but its feels good having all options available.

Lessons learned:

There are many above and I am sure some of you will pick out more lessons than the ones I have listed below:

  • Don't, under any circumstances, cohabitate. Always be ready to walk away from the situation at the drop of a hat.

  • Again, whether you go into an LTR or are considering marriage, make sure you are not being “gamed” by a woman. My experience is they will camouflage their true nature in an attempt to get you to commit. From pretending to like the same things you do to hiding some of their past. What you know about her is what she wants you to know…don’t rely on her to tell you the truth.

  • You are the prize! This is the attitude you should have when meeting woman. You are the one that holds all the value, she can come along for the ride if she wants but you are driving.

  • When meeting a woman, flirt and escalate immediately. This makes you “fun” and interesting, as opposed to “nice” but boring.

  • Lift, Work on your career and yourself. She is the side dish, not the main course. Do not put her on a pedestal.

  • You can’t fix her

  • Regularly evaluate what value she adds to your life, when there is nothing worth staying for then it’s time to leave. “Love” is a female construct, it has no place in our rational and logical minds. Evaluate rationally, think logically.

  • For those that have kids, your progeny is priority 1…make sure nobody gets between you and them

Stay frosty Gentlemen

Edit - Added some excellent additional lessons learned from the comments.