You have to realize this is packed with raw sharp emotion, its hard for me to tell this. To put this into order. To see how fucking stupid I was. But I have to put it into order so I can defang it. I don’t want to walk around, just another person addicted to a pattern of stupidity. Who pretends that he was a victim of fate. Ha!

Yeah, I was a secret agent. Get over it. It's really not that cool. And it doesn't make you impervious to deception. God knows, my ex-wife pulled one over on me that make me look like a joke and make you question if I was ever really any good at my job.

My first wife. When we met, I was her student. She was part of a team of professors assigned to teach my military unit the Korean language. I was 21 and she was 37. So many problems right there. Maybe we shouldn’t move on until we address all that shit first. Well, we have to skip ahead because I still haven’t straightened out that age difference shit yet. Yeah, she’s 16 years older than me. Yeah, that’s fucked up. Gross, actually. Now that its over, I can’t imagine having sex with someone 16 years older than me. Yuck! But lets move on. Let me tell you what she told me when we were in speaking practice together. I think learning a foreign language with someone is the best way to date. Go through your story, birth to present with a person.

So her story when we met... She said that her first marriage was an arranged marriage. She said her parents are very conservative Korean Catholics. Very rich. Very domineering. She said they forced her to marry her first husband. She said her first husband was very abusive. Physically and emotionally. She said that he raped her. She said when she couldn’t take anymore, she begged her parents to let her get a divorce. But they refused to support her if she got a divorce. She was in the US with her husband. They were both PhD candidate students. If her parents pulled their support, then she wouldn’t be able to make it through her program. If her parents disowned her, she wouldn’t be able to continue on with life because she was such a loving faithful daughter.

So she endured. Then she got pregnant with this abusive asshole’s baby. He got even more abusive. The police had to be called. Finally, she couldn’t take it. She made a big decision, to go against her parent’s wishes and get a divorce.

When she got her divorce, her parents disinherited her. They pulled their support. They disowned her. She was all alone in the US trying to raise a baby and finish a PhD.

She did it though. With shear guts and determination. She became Doctor “common Korean last name”. She got a job at the military college to teach Korean. She survived. She brought her son with her and they started their new life. Then she met me at the college.

What a load of bull shit.

The truth.

Her first marriage was not an arranged marriage. She met her first husband at college in Korea where they fell in love. She wanted to go to the US to study. Her parents did not want her to go to the US to study. Her first husband, when he was still only her boy friend, he was studying so he could leave Korea and do a political science PhD program in the US. She and he had dreams of going to the US together. Her first husband got into a PhD program. She got married to this guy. She convinced her parents to support them when she went with him to the US. They went to the US, with her parents paying the bills. Once in the US, she got into a PhD program. She got pregnant. Her first husband did not want to have a baby, not until he finished his study. He wanted her to take care of the baby while he studied. He wanted her to go back to Korea to stay with her parents to raise the baby until he finished study.

She stayed, had the baby and started her PhD program. She and her first husband had tons of arguments. She had the trump card saying he was nothing without her, nothing without her parent’s support. The police came to the house a few times. Her English is native level. She is a small cute Asian woman. Her husband had bad English. The police came and found a foreign man, pushed to his breaking point by a woman’s verbal abuse. The conservative mid western American police blamed the man.

They eventually got a divorce. The guy returned to Korea and couldn’t finish his PhD. She stayed in the US and to finish her PhD, still using her parent’s support. She shacked up with a nice conservative but boring white guy who loved her and her baby. She convinced the baby boy that this nice white guy was his dad.

She graduated. Her parents came to the graduation and took tons of happy proud pictures.

She got a job at the US military college, her first professor job. She left the nice white guy but kept calling him every night and stringing him along. He was her insurance policy.

She had everything she wanted, except the baby. She didn’t know how to be a mom. She didn’t want the constant reminder of her first husband right there all the time.

She sent the baby to live with a male cousin. She paid the male cousin. This guy tried to care for the baby because he needed the money. Eventually, this guy admitted he couldn’t take care of the baby. She wanted the money back. He couldn’t give her the money back. She took the baby back.

She started working. She found a fellow teacher who was not doing well financially. She offered the fellow teacher money to adopt her son. The fellow teacher said she could only be a baby sitter, not a surrogate mother.

My first wife met a black air force major. She dated him. He thought he was in love with her because she is a freak in bed. She was still visiting her boring white guy boyfriend from back in the college town. The boring white guy thought he was in love with her. She kept stringing him along. She slept with a few students at the military college.

She was my teacher. My best friend told me I should stay away from her. He said that she grabbed his ass when he bent over in front of her. I didn’t believe my best friend.

I didn’t care for her much at first. I thought that she was one of the worst teachers at the school. She wasn’t ever prepared for class. She didn’t follow the instruction materials. She wanted to play games and waste time. I was a serious student. I had the top grades in the class. I was a soldier above all other things.

My best friend and I had a falling out. Without his friendship, my life only had two things, studying and working out. I spent most of my time on my own. I had leadership positions in the school and in my unit so I didn’t feel like I could let my hair down.

At the half way point in the school, we had a one week class break. I went home for two days to attend my grand parent’s 50th anniversary. At the party, I was about to crack. I felt so out of place at home. I felt like it was the opposite of a break. I went back to school to study before the break was over, to get further ahead while everyone else was wasting their time on vacation.

I went into the school each day like it was work call. The teachers wanted a vacation. They didn’t want to deal with me. I asked for speaking practice. My wife, still just a teacher that I didn’t particularly respect, volunteered to be my speaking teacher.

During speaking practice, she told me her bull shit life story; the forced marriage, the perseverance through the abuse, the divorce and her parents disowning her, and her getting the ultimate success with this military college professorship. She asked me what I like to do. I told her I like to watch movies. Which is true. I like movies so much I often times like to watch them alone because I feel like the person I am with doesn’t get half as much out of the performance. I tell her I am going to the movies that night.

I go to the movies. She is there. She goes to the same movie as me. We sit next to each other. We hold hands at some point.

We got married about 8 months later.

We stayed married for 16 years.

I found out her parents never disinherited her. I found this out because I did our taxes for the first 13 years of our marriage. For each of those 13 years, at tax time, she let me believe that she did not have any assets to report so I only told the IRS about our modest upper middle class incomes. When she got US citizenship and we had to redo our taxes, that’s when I found out that she had millions and millions of dollars that she never told me about. Of course the IRS was not happy. My wife blamed me for doing the taxes wrong. Violently blamed me. I stupidly thought that I could fast forward the healing by always being the first one to apologize. I thought that eventually her anger would subside and she would come clean about her dishonesty. Her rage just got worse as it became more and more obvious that she created the tax problem with her lies.

Eventually, I found out her first marriage was not an arranged marriage. I found this out when I was trying to become Catholic. 15 years into our marriage, when things were so bad because of the tax problem that she created by trying to hide her inheritance, I was desperately trying to save our marriage. Trying to make her happy. I finished my year of Catechism but I couldn’t get baptized because my wife had already been married in the Catholic church. The priest explained this wouldn’t be a problem because the Catholic church would easily annul her first marriage if it was an arranged marriage. My wife and I met with the priest and my wife told the priest that her first marriage wasn’t an arranged marriage.

I found out her first husband was not an evil abusive demon when the Korean police were questioning me. When I was dealing with my wife’s bullshit abuse accusations. When I was a foreign man stumbling with my weak Korean language skills dealing with a team of investigators who didn’t need evidence to believe that I did it. When I was gathering evidence to prove my innocence. When I finally read my wife’s divorce decree from her first marriage. When I saw that she accused me of the same exact shit that she accused her first husband of. Almost used the same language. That’s when I figured her first husband probably didn’t hit her either.

All those times that I arranged for couples therapy and she didn’t show up. The few times that she did show up and she used the entire hour to berate me. To try to convince the therapist that it was all my fault. Her losing her temper when the therapist remained neutral and didn’t agree with her.

Me begging her to give me some space. Let me stay at the YMCA type bath house for a few days, as long as it took for her to cool down. For things to settle down. Me telling her I didn’t want a divorce.

Her filing for divorce in secret. Her telling the kids that I wanted the divorce. That she didn’t want the divorce. Her filing the false police reports at the same time as the divorce to help her protect her assets and get me kicked out of the country.

Now I see she is just following the same playbook that she used with her first husband.

I love my daughter. But fuck man, I wish I didn’t have a kid with this lady.

I see why the first guy left. I see why he didn’t want anything to do with his son if it meant having to deal with this lady. I see why he signed that lopsided stupid fucking divorce agreement. He just wanted to get it over with, get away from her manipulation. Anything to be free from her suffocating web of lies.