This is the continuation of “I think I dated a Sociopath…” which expounds on the experience of meeting and maintaining an unhealthy romantic relationship with “Sugar”; a soldier, a husband, a father, and a cheater.
Hello readers! Thank you for coming back for the second part of my roller coaster relationship with Sugar. To pick up where I left off, after speaking with his wife about his treatment of her and confessing my participation in his infidelity, I resolved to report Sugar to his leadership based on the Uniform Code of Military Justice – Article 134.
Fun fact: I grew up as a military brat and I joined the military when I was 19. I never made it through Basic Training due to my history with Migraines. I was discharged under the “General Discharge” classification with the option to request an “Honorable Discharge” after 6 months because my ability to serve was precluded by this pre-existing medical condition. I was told migraine medication was not combat ready and I could become a liability to other soldiers when deployed. (I tell you this to relay that I have personal knowledge of the Values and Codes that U.S. soldiers are expected to live by.)
Tattletale
After spending a full day catching flights back home, I land in Oklahoma City and get picked up at the airport by my best friend. Almost as soon as I sat down in the passenger seat and shut the door, I broke into pieces. I cried harder over this entire ordeal than I ever did over my divorce, over any breakup ever. What cut me deepest were the lies I believed because I didn’t want to see the truth.
Before I even unpacked, I reached out to Sugar’s Battalion Facebook page to ascertain contact info for his direct superiors. I had been unable to sleep for another full day after arriving home due to a stress induced manic episode, and began to feel myself losing grip on my sanity. Upon receiving the email from his leadership inquiring to the nature of my relationship with Sugar, it all came pouring out.
Paragraph after paragraph of every crazy thing that occurred was regurgitated into this email, much of which I have omitted here due to the sheer volume, so my reply was quite long and even more convoluted. I realized much later just how disjointed my message may have come across. I didn’t hear much of anything from his leadership afterward.
Sugar, after realizing I had reported him, proceeded to send a message to my father through Facebook accusing me of horrific intentions with my sister (whom I’ve had a very maternal love for her entire life, being 17 years her senior). Luckily, my father never read it but Sugar was thoughtful enough to send me a screencap of what he had sent: *WARNING: Not for the faint of heart*
I will admit that we did have some taboo conversations and I will also admit that I disclosed thoughts and ideas that were damning to me out of context. But let me assure you, the context of those conversations were merely to placate his need for dirty talk, purely fantasy and nothing more. I didn’t enforce my boundary to not engage in uncomfortable conversations with him and this was my karma.
Sugar also threatened to continue messaging those in my life, naming my roommate at the time as his next target. I forwarded this screencap to his leadership and his messages stating he was going to contact more people in my life, and I warned my family and friends to pay no mind to any efforts on Sugar’s part to contact them. And I blocked him on Messenger … for a time.
After not hearing back from his command and feeling guilty that I may have ruined his career out of a sense of revenge as opposed to justice, I initiated conversation with Sugar again. I had also made contact with his mother for guidance on how to engage him and to ask her about some of the things Sugar had told me about his childhood. I wanted to make sense of everything and see if this entire ordeal had made him reflect at all, as it had made me do.
I maintained a tenuous friendship with him. Due to his ability to weave truth into his lies, I was concerned that some of the things he had confessed to me were real, and they were concerning to me. He had spoken often that he didn’t have anyone to talk to about his problems, he felt so desperately alone, he was depressed and made many threats to act recklessly on the impulses of his death wish. I resolved to be his friend, because he seemed to need one.
We continued to talk for several months, only sometimes flirting with the romantic line. Mostly, I was living my life and struggling to boot. I have always had a somewhat tumultuous and precarious life, being dependent on others to provide necessities for me. I am not proud that I require so much care, but I am grateful to have found so many wonderful and generous people to have helped me along the way and I try my hardest not to take advantage.
During this friendship period, he would give me updates on the progress of his divorce, told me about going out with friends he met through a hiking/exploring group, and even told me about going out on Halloween with the girl he had seen before me. They were seeing each other again and he seemed happy. I would tell him about the goings on in my life as so many things kept shifting. He told me he was going to counselling as a result of my reporting him and that he felt it was really helping, and I did my best not to pry too much and let him share what he was comfortable with. I was proud that he seemed to be heading in the right direction to becoming a healthier version of himself.
During the 2017 Holiday season, Sugar told me his wife and son had come back overseas unexpectedly in hopes of reconciling. He complained that he felt trapped by her presence and that she was continuing to beg and plead for him to take her back. He felt she only came back to reconnect with some men she had been seeing before their separation. He was grateful for the time with his son and said his wife was considering letting Sugar take full custody due to her living situation being less than ideal for their son’s well-being (there was mention of drugs and filth in the house she was staying in, too many people under one roof, and his son was suffering because of it). He felt used and without options. Sometimes we would game together online, sometimes we would just reminisce about the good times we had. His wife eventually left to return stateside with their son. And then he told me he was being stationed at the post where we met.
Fast Forward
With Sugar getting stationed so near to me, I couldn’t help but feel this was some sort of cosmic sign. I thought that we had both grown in our time apart and that we might be able to give a relationship another shot. So, at the beginning of August 2018, when he offered to meet me for coffee to catch up, I accepted.
Seeing him again made me long for the life we promised each other. I asked him about the other girl he had been seeing overseas and he told me that he ended it with her due to his relocation. I asked him about his divorce and he said that it was submitted to the court and he only needed to wait the designated period for it to be granted. I asked him if he wanted to be with me again. He drove me back to his house that night.
Fully within the throes of rekindled love, I felt like things had changed for both of us. I hoped for it to be true. And then I got evicted with very short notice to vacate the apartment. Sugar offered to take in my roommate and myself, along with my dog. I accepted, but knowing that my roommate and Sugar did not get along in the slightest and it being incredibly inconvenient for my roommate, I didn’t relay the offer. There was some talk between Sugar and I about whether or not it was a good time for me to move in with him. We decided it would be best for both of us to take it slow. Eventually, my roommate and I were able to acquire another apartment better suited to our combined incomes.
At the time, I had been working for a call center. I hated the environment but enjoyed the nature of the work. Sugar would message me daily asking if I was planning to come down and stay with him, he’d say how much he wanted me there with him, and I’d ask him to be considerate of my choice to be more responsible with my time. Compound that atop missing my sweet canine companion so much during the week (whom I left at his house because he has a Golden Retriever, our dogs got along well, and he had a backyard for them), I began spending more time at his place than at my own.
The commute to work was almost an hour and a half one way and I eventually started to stress about my car’s ability to make the commute. He assured me that he wanted me in his life so I started looking for other employment options that didn’t require me to drive back to the city on a daily basis. Taking it slow went out the window and I was basically living with him by the first week of September.
I had the good sense not to abandon my roommate in the new apartment. I knew I was moving fast but felt compelled to try anyways. I didn’t want to put my roommate into a financial bind so soon after our eviction, which we were both recovering from, so I planned to continue to pay half the rent even while being at Sugar’s full time.
While down there, I managed to land a job working from home. I quit my call center job and spent the next few weeks waiting for my training to start with the new company and setting up one of his spare rooms as my office. This was a monumental task as he had yet to unpack his belongings from when he transferred.
Baggage Check
I began unpacking so that the storage unit of a house felt more like a home. I craved to sleep on sheets. I knew he had to have more dishes, if you recall from my adventure last year, I had packed his house before. I was tired of sitting on a futon, and knew he had a sectional sofa. The room to become my office was jam packed with boxes and furniture from floor to ceiling. He had managed to make a dent in the mountain of butcher papered belongings but it was still quite full.
Often, Sugar would protest when I’d tell him I planned to go through the boxes and separate his things from his wife and son’s. He told me he would get to it when he wasn’t so busy and I would refrain and just keep the livable areas clean. But when it became a matter of me being able to work, I did it anyways.
Upon rifling through boxes to determine whose stuff was whose, I came across quite a few boxes belonging to someone else. The clothing was unfamiliar and a totally different size from his wife’s. And I remembered he told me he had gotten back together with the local girl overseas. But the more belongings of hers I found, the more I realized he must have conveniently forgotten to tell me that she moved in with him.
I immediately contacted my best friend and told her my realization. After rationalizing a few different possibilities, I decided I was just going to approach it from a casual place. Upon his return home, I asked for his help to move the boxes to the other room and I told him which boxes were whose. He didn’t bat an eye when I identified the local girl’s pile. I wanted to ask him why he hadn’t told me how serious their relationship had been. I wanted to ask him why he had so many of her things if they had broken up because of his transfer. But I didn’t.
Instead, I asked him when he intended to ship her things back to her. He told me he had been meaning to but just hadn’t gotten to it. He had also been having some money troubles, getting paid less and not being reimbursed for moving expenses. He had mechanical troubles with both of his vehicles. It was like the universe was totally taking a massive dump on his life all at once.
So I let it lie. We’d get it sent back eventually, I could assume some of his responsibilities if we were to spend our lives together. I got the office setup and enjoyed the comforts of a home. But things still weren’t right between us. The atmosphere felt hollow to me. He told me so little and I had only assumptions.
We were having intimacy issues. I really wanted to be able to enjoy the sexual benefits of being with him again. It had once been so steamy, passionate, and thoroughly enjoyable. But this time around, he was always so tired, or stressed, or not in the mood. When I would bring up to him that I needed more sex, we’d argue.
Upon reconciling, I was open to the idea of trying out his fetish again to make him happy, but soon realized that I was moving my own boundary again. So I told him I was not comfortable exploring that with him yet, not until we were in a better place in our relationship. My needs weren’t being met and I needed him to try to meet me in the middle first. His words said he would try, his actions proved them wrong.
I was willing to continue to send him naughty pictures and make up naughty stories as long as I could frame them as fiction. He said he needed that to get in the mood. We constantly communicated through Messenger because he was too shy to say dirty things out loud. I made efforts, but sometimes he would send me pornographic gifs and screencaps of his fetishes. When I told him that those sorts of things make me insecure and I wasn’t going to condone it, he began to freeze me out entirely.
Abandon All Hope
After feeling neglected and used and suspicious and, all the while trying to communicate openly and honestly with Sugar, feeling unheard, I made one last stand for the love I felt for him. I opened the floodgates of what I was feeling about our relationship and the path it was taking. If we couldn’t learn to communicate to each other, we were doomed. And each of his responses twisted my feelings as his own, blamed me for doing the very same things to him, accused me of overreacting to my emotions.
It got heated and I got ugly. And I realized that I hated who I was becoming with him. I couldn’t continue arguing with him anymore and I’m fairly certain I suffered a bout of dissociation for a few minutes. He left the house on the premise of going to cool off at a fellow soldier’s house and told me to let him know when I was ready to talk again. I messaged him 2 hours later to tell him he could come home whenever. At hour 9 I asked him when he’d be coming home (he had parked behind me in the driveway and drove off in his other vehicle, taking the keys with him). At hour 11, I wondered if I could drive through the yard. At hour 14, he arrived to find me packing my things.
As I made the drive back up to the city, he began apologizing. I told him there was no need. I had my closure. We simply were incompatible people. He refused to listen to me when all I ever wanted was his love and his trust. And I won’t continue to torture either of us trying to make it work.
The first weekend of October 2018, I felt such relief leaving him this time, for the last time. To be free of of the hold that hope had over me. Over the next few days I processed where I had fucked up:
- “What do I need to change about my perspective to find a healthy partner?”
- “I need to stop jumping headfirst into relationships with people and slow down the getting acquainted process. It’s not wrong to trust people, but respect is far more important and deserves to be earned.”
- “I need to come back to a more realistic view of the world. In my efforts to see the good in people, I saw only the good and ignored the bad, rationalized red flags, and rarely accepted people for who they are. Just because I know I’m a good and moral person does not mean it is my responsibility, nor right, to fix them.”
- “I need to stop letting sexual chemistry be the primary criteria for a life partner. It’s definitely a factor for me and I own that I’m more adventurous than most, but it can’t surpass the majority of my values in a partner.”
- “I need to stop being in love with the idea of being in love and learn to accept people as they are, and accept myself as I am. Only then can I have a healthy love to give.”
Sugar continued to message me, saying sweet things in hopes of getting back in my good graces. I had every intention to cut all contact and erase him from my memory as best as I could, once I was able to get off his cell phone plan. I needed to be reachable for my job and I didn’t have enough to separate my line. So I attempted to remain civil and tried to be friendly.
It didn’t last very long, my friendliness. His attempts to seek sympathy and his callous tones and jokes were too much to tolerate anymore. After yet another argument with this man, I blocked him. He texted instead and just asked when and where he could retrieve my phone. (He claimed it was his phone because he paid for it and the account was under his name, it belonged to him. Nevermind the fact that he bought it for me under the agreement that I would purchase the accessories and pay half of the bill, more than adding the line to his solo plan would cost.)
I told him he could come the next day, he knows where I live. He asked me if it would actually jeopardize my job and I told him it was highly probable. I asked him the next day when he intended to come by, he said he wouldn’t be coming. I assured him I would honor paying my half of the bill and getting off his plan as soon as I was able.
Truth Will Out
I woke the next morning to messages from the local girl overseas. Not only had they been dating the entire time he was with me (he had never broken up with her before coming to Oklahoma, nor were they broken up when I was over there with him) but they were also engaged! She presented him as her fiance to her family. He told her he was working on a fiancee visa for her. Her things were in the house because she intended to move here with him but had to remain behind until she got the paperwork.
She had already made contact with his wife and she began to believe what his wife had told her the year before, Sugar was triple dipping. She needed me to confirm when everything happened between us and she did with me what I had done with his wife so long ago. We figured out which lies and which truths he told us. We figured out he pushed his fetish onto us both. We commiserated our inability to see the truth of his behavior because he was so good at lying.
I then start getting messages from his wife. I explain to her what happened again, she explained his interactions with her. He had been making efforts to get her back still but she had had enough of his insanity. She deserved to be free of him too. And their son deserved a father and he had been sorely lacking in that department.
In the process of courting the local girl and me and attempting to reconcile with his wife, Sugar managed to get himself into quite a lot of debt. He paid for a trip to Disney as an engagement present to the local girl. He paid for trips and food and gas and plane tickets for all of us. He bought extravagant presents and romantic gestures. He bought our phones. When considering the expenditures on just me, the figure was significant. But take that figure and multiply it by 3 and it becomes outright irresponsible. And that was the reason he had to start donating plasma to be able to report for duty everyday. He was drowning financially.
So, I then wrestled with the idea of reporting him to his command. Again. The last time didn’t seem to make any difference. It was his word against mine with a smattering of screencaps from a questionable source. But this time, if the local girl would be willing to report him too, and knowing his wife would be moving forward seeking legal counsel, maybe it would serve him right.
And I don’t mean that in the sense of Sugar getting what’s coming to him, even though the thought does appeal to me. I mean it in the sense that he needs serious help to get out of this place he’s found himself in. His wife needs to be able to count on him to coparent. His son needs a responsible and caring father. The military needs an honorable, brave, loyal, and selfless soldier. And finally, the other women he may seek to prey upon for his selfish purposes need to not have their lives derailed by his lies and deceit.
While contemplating my options, Sugar asked me if I planned on reporting him. Here is how that conversation went:
So, dear readers, what do you think I should do?
Please read the final installment of the Sugar Saga, “Why I believe I dated a Sociopath: An Analysis“.
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Grow TF Up 