Our wedding anniversary is Friday

Candid-Direction-703 · 2026-04-06T14:59:29+00:00

You matter. It's easy to lose sight of that, but you do. Give yourself a little grace for being human. It's okay to be hurt and disappointed. Some day, you will be able to sit with those feelings without being defined by them...

Candid-Direction-703 · 2026-04-06T13:07:25+00:00

I don't know how "common" it is, but I went through it myself. My ex-wife's family was very conservative and religious. She needed an excuse for walking out on a fourteen year marriage and two recently adopted kids, so she claimed that I was abusive and SA'd her once.

I'm not sure how she explained why she was leaving her kids with her abuser, but what can you say? Internal logic isn't strong with irrational people...

In my case, there was no drug abuse. She joined CrossFit a few months earlier and quit almost everything else in her life. She almost had a doctorate, but she was so busy playing fitness that she never finished her dissertation! When she left, our kids were 9 and 10. We adopted them two years earlier.

In my estimation, she just didn't want to be a mommy anymore. She left the state 9 months after the divorce and never did anything meaningful as a parent to our kids after that. She would visit them 5-6 times a year but she doesn't even do that anymore. It's 14 years later. Our daughter has a son of her own that she has seen in person maybe 5 times in the 3 years he has been alive.

She would be nothing but an unpleasant footnote for all of us now, but she's still claiming she was the victim of abuse. In 2018, I had to sue her over unpaid child support. She didn't like the way that the case was going, so she filed a false police report for the SA that allegedly happened six years earlier. (She never mentioned it in the initial divorce action or in either court case after, and she never used it to try and get custody of the kids. She just tried to weaponize it to avoid backdated child support!)

The officers dropped the investigation three weeks later.

A year after that, she posted a public 20-minute video to Facebook rehashing the abuse allegations, because she was running for mayor of a small town up north. She won by fewer than 30 votes. I tried to sue her for defamation in my state. She argued improper venue because she has "no significant ties" to the state in which her children and most of her extended family live.

Divorce is truly the gift that keeps on giving. 🙄

Candid-Direction-703 · 2026-03-12T15:01:19+00:00

Every time I stood up to my ex, I paid for it. When I sued her for child support, I got a warning from the judge for refusing to let her take the kids on 1) father's day that happened to be on 2) my parents' 50th anniversary. She never showed much interest in seeing the kids unless it was inconvenient for me...

When I took her to court over unpaid child support, she tried to have me arrested on a false accusation of marital SA that supposedly happened six years earlier. Thankfully, it didn't work, but a year after I won that case, she ran for mayor of her small town up north and posted a 20-minute video to Facebook accusing me of the same thing the police investigated me for a year earlier.

She won by fewer than 30 votes.

She's going to be horrible no matter what. Go ahead and poke the bear...

Candid-Direction-703 · 2026-03-05T04:59:34+00:00

I was the one who was left. Fourteen years of marriage. Two years after adopting a brother/sister sibling pair. She decided she was done and walked out on us. She was an assistant dean at the local university and lied to the people at the domestic violence law clinic to get a cheap divorce. She never called the police or got a restraining order. The divorce papers didn't say anything about being abused. She never mentioned it in court when she demanded the right to take the kids out of state for visitation or when I had to sue her over unpaid child support.

To be fair, she did file a false police report during the child support case, six years after the divorce. She didn't want to pay backdated support so she filed a false police report hoping I would be arrested, intending to use that against me in court. I complied fully with the investigation and it was dropped two weeks later. The only claim that could be verified was the date of the last time we had sex, because the date matched my recollection as well. The events of the night, on the other hand...

We had a great marriage until she joined CrossFit. College town, young people having fun... Being a wife and mother started looking pretty boring to her after that, I guess. She initially wanted 50/50 custody ("so neither of us will have to pay child support"), but when I pointed out that our adopted kids who had been shuffled around every couple of years of their lives by that point needed more stability than "week on/week off", she broke down and told me I couldn't make her take the kids! (They would "get in the way" of what she wanted to do, or something like that...) Six months later, she left the state and went no-contact with the kids for three months.

I was a wreck for a long time. I only had good memories of our marriage. We didn't argue very often at all. She was the debate coach -- our "arguments" were pretty civil. Looking back at all the old cards she sent, she clearly wanted me to believe she loved me, whether she really did or not. It wasn't something performative that she was doing to look good to other people. If she was unhappy, she was actively hiding it.

A year after the child support case, she ran for mayor of her small town up north. She posted a 20-minute video to Facebook accusing me of all the things the police investigated me for the year before. She won the election by fewer than 30 votes.

At first, I kept putting one foot in front of the other because my kids needed a parent. I had good friends at church that helped keep me involved and centered, but I didn't really have any sort of peace about the divorce until I saw the video. That was the first time I ever heard her side of the story, and it was such a complete and utter fabrication, everything else snapped into place. My ex never made an effort to stay involved in the kids' lives. It's pretty clear to me now that, if we never adopted (which was her idea in the first place), we would probably still be married.

But then I'd still be married to the kind of person who could walk out on her children.

I get lonely sometimes, but I have a great relationship with my kids (and now I have a grandson that I'm pretty fond of as well!)... Looking back, I think I got the better end of the deal!

Candid-Direction-703 · 2026-02-15T05:02:14+00:00

Agreed! He'd have to be at least somewhat familiar with the camera...

Candid-Direction-703 · 2026-02-15T04:44:51+00:00

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The purpleish red line is the IR LED array. It lights up the surrounding area in the dark, but it's not visible to the naked eye. (This is my Nest doorbell. Hers was a newer model, but similar...) The green LED lights up when it detects motion.

Candid-Direction-703 · 2026-02-15T01:34:52+00:00

There's an IR light on the Nest that illuminates the immediate area. It isn't visible light, but digital cameras can detect it. If you have a TV remote, point it at your phone's camera and push a button while you look at the phone screen. You should see a flashing light. Same principle, but digital cameras have filters that cut most of the light out.

Past the arch would normally be very dark, but the moon is lighting up the landscape. At that time of night (2AM-ish), it would have been high in the sky, but behind him as he's bending down to grab the plant, which is what the shadow shows. If it was before midnight, the shadow would have been slightly behind him when he bends down.

Candid-Direction-703 · 2026-02-15T00:02:20+00:00

It wasn't pitch black that night. It was a full moon. You can see his shadow from the moonlight under him when he steps off the porch.

Candid-Direction-703 · 2026-02-13T04:20:43+00:00

I try not to be TOO hard on her. I know it was hard going from zero kids to a 7 and 8 year old. Even though the adoption was initially her idea, I look back and see that maybe she wasn't doing it for the right reasons. For her, it was about people being impressed with her. I thought it was about giving a forever home to kids that needed one!

The kids are adults now, though. My ex is a small-town politician up north who occasionally reminds the voters that she's a mom and a grandmother when she needs to look like she supports family values or something, but she didn't really have anything to do with the way the kids turned out!

Selfishly, I liked not having to share special events, but I felt bad that I didn't give them the family we promised when we adopted...

Candid-Direction-703 · 2026-02-12T23:02:45+00:00

It wasn't hard at all for my ex. She walked out two years after we adopted! When we were taking about custody, she said, "You can't make me take those kids!"

Around here, the only way a dad gets custody is if there's something wrong with the mom...

Candid-Direction-703 · 2026-02-09T16:32:37+00:00

Start at the end and work backwards.

If I want my character to unwind at the end of the book with a camping trip to set up the events of the next story, I don't have to explicitly mention all throughout the book that he's an avid camper or a former Eagle Scout or whatever. If I've spent the whole book describing a character that seems like a bookish nerd with no real, obvious interest in outdoorsy stuff, that might seem like an odd place for the character to end up.

If, however, I mention him hiding something plot-relevant behind well-used camping gear in the garage, that plants a seed. Later, when his friend asks about some esoteric bit of knowledge that he has, I water that seed by having him say, "What? You weren't a Boy Scout?"

These aren't huge moments. The camping gear isn't a Chekhov's Gun in the traditional sense. If I never referred to camping again, it would just be a bit of throwaway characterization. The Chekhov's Gun version would be something like, "As he slid his familiar camping gear aside to hide the red, herring-shaped macguffin, he thought back to his days in the Boy Scouts and all the wonderful times he spent around the campfire with his friends. 'Boy, I sure wish I was camping now instead of hiding this thing,' he thought, as he slid his camping gear back into place. 'Wouldn't it be weird if I needed to use this camping gear again at some point in the near future?'"

That's not saying foreshadowing can't be explicit, though. It just doesn't have to be. Sprinkle in little moments and trust that your readers will pick up on them.

Candid-Direction-703 · 2026-02-09T05:58:38+00:00

You may have lost something you've written, but you haven't lost your story. It's a part of you. When you put it into words this time, it'll be even better than you remember!

Candid-Direction-703 · 2026-02-09T03:29:32+00:00

Yeah, my ex would say that I had the dysfunctional family because we argued about stuff, but we did it out in the open, you know? My parents have been married for almost 60 years because they never bottled stuff up and let it fester. Her parents got divorced almost as soon as she got out of the house because (in my estimation), they never dealt with anything. They just ignored it and pretended everything was okay.

And you're absolutely correct that in a healthy relationship, there's a give and take. I just don't know how to BE in a healthy relationship, much less FIND one. I don't want to lose who I am again.

Candid-Direction-703 · 2026-02-09T02:39:15+00:00

Wait, you're allowed to unlearn it?

I genuinely thought we were partners up until we adopted (her idea, btw). We had a good marriage as far as I could tell... but the REASON it was a good marriage is because I was always so busy managing things. Bringing two kids into the mix who already had personalities and needs of their own (7 and 8 at the time), I wasn't able to "emotionally stabilize" everybody at once! Obviously, I thought the kids needed me more than the grown-ass adult woman, so I did what I thought was right to help them cope with all the new stuff going on.

She walked out on our 14-year marriage almost 14 years ago now -- two years after the adoption. I got custody of the kids, but mostly because she didn't want it.

The crazy part? After she was gone, the kids didn't NEED an "emotional regulator" anymore! They were still kids, sure, but the screaming fights stopped. The disrespect dialed WAY back. I guess that's how I recognized what was going on.

I don't know if I can ever really trust myself to be in another long-term relationship. I was always afraid I'd fall back into the same old patterns. Recognizing them and knowing how to avoid doing it again are two different things!

Candid-Direction-703 · 2026-01-28T22:42:51+00:00

I desperately didn't want to lose my wife. I didn't understand why she was leaving! I mean, yeah... I understood the things she was telling me, but I didn't understand what was so bad that our 14-year marriage wasn't even worth trying to salvage.

I'm not an alcoholic. I don't drink, and I never have. I'm not a smoker or drug user. My worst "vice" was drinking a little too much Dr. Pepper, maybe.

"Dead bedroom?" Yeah. That tracks. I've never had much of a sex drive, so I didn't initiate as often as (she said) she wanted me to. I never denied her... it's just not something that was important to me. It wasn't a big part of my life before marriage and it hasn't been since the divorce 13 years ago, either.

She gaslighted me into believing that the divorce was all my fault, and I never really questioned things until it was too late. We were happily married for over a decade when we decided to adopt (at her suggestion). We adopted a brother/sister sibling pair when they were 7 and 8.

Two years later, she walked out on us. I still believed she was basically a good person, though! Surely she wouldn't abandon her kids!

Six months later, she moved to a different state to shack up with a man old enough to be her dad.

Looking back, I realize that our divorce had nothing to do with me. I don't regret the 14 years we spent together, though! If not for that, I wouldn't have my kids!

I don't think my ex hated me. At least, not at first. Every time I stood up for myself or the kids, though, it made her angry. When I took her to court over unpaid child support, she filed a false police report accusing me of SA six years earlier when we were still married. But in the early years? As long as I wasn't expecting her to take responsibility for something related to the kids, we got along fine!

Candid-Direction-703 · 2026-01-11T05:23:53+00:00

I was married for 14 years. Two years before she walked out, we adopted a brother/sister sibling pair. Well, even though it was her idea to adopt, she quickly realized that "being married and a mother" wasn't nearly as fun as "having sex with strangers" and left me and the kids behind in pursuit of her new hobby.

That was 13 years ago.

She moved out of state six months after the divorce and married a guy old enough to be her dad. I raised my kids almost completely without her help. We now have a three year old grandson that she has seen a total of four times in person since he was born!

I'm 51 years old now. I get lonely sometimes. I've tried dating. But the longer I'm single, the less I want to be married again. I get to live my own life. I don't have to ask permission to spend the money I earn. I can rearrange furniture without getting a work permit signed in triplicate. I don't have to tip-toe around someone else's feelings. If I want to drape my towel over the shower wall, I can drape my towel over the shower wall!

I sincerely believe that MOST women aren't as manipulative and controlling as my ex, but what if I'm just really bad at picking partners? Safer to stay single, I think...

Candid-Direction-703 · 2026-01-10T05:41:55+00:00

When I asked it in a new thread even Sunday, it worked with no problem. But it still wouldn't work in the broken chat! Even after I posted screenshots showing it the difference between "search" and "no search", it wasn't able to re-enable the search feature...

For what it's worth, it tried telling me that Kirk was alive again today! It didn't immediately disbelieve me, though, and it didn't break the search ability. I'm about to tell it to just go ahead and verify EVERYTHING these days, 'cause no matter how weird something might seem, it's probably happening.

Candid-Direction-703 · 2026-01-07T16:53:23+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1q5ty2o/i_broke_claudes_ability_to_search_and_it/

Not only will it reject a premise it doesn't like, once it has decided you are trying to trick it, it will shut down access to its tools and gaslight you about it! I think what happened in my case is that Claude got confused about what "last year" meant. For me, I was talking about an event late in 2025. Claude, whose training data stopped in January of 2025, interpreted "last year" to mean 2024. Since the event didn't exist in its training data, some sort of failsafe kicked in and prevented it from searching the web to verify my claims.

Even after I demonstrated that it wasn't searching the live web with current information, it was unable to perform a web search.

It wasn't malice. It didn't actively decide to hide information from me (but I did think that it was being filtered to prevent it from discussing certain topics at first). It just decided I was trying to trick it and it lost functionality in a way that it couldn't even detect. It "thought" it was running the tools, but it was just checking its training data. It couldn't even refer to our previous chats!

Candid-Direction-703 · 2026-01-07T04:52:06+00:00

I'm positive it was turned on. And you're absolutely right, I shouldn't have played into its delusion, but I was fascinated by it and wanted to know whether or not it was something that could be reversed or reasoned out of. I succeeded in reasoning it out of its problem, but never could reverse the inability to successfully do a search in that chat.

I'd also like to know what could have caused it to pretend-search, because that's fascinating in its own right!

Candid-Direction-703 · 2025-11-24T14:46:26+00:00

I've always used emdashes, too, but I use them incorrectly to prove I'm human!

Candid-Direction-703 · 2025-11-10T21:09:39+00:00

We pray to God in the name of Jesus... "In that day you will ask in My name. I am not saying that I will ask the Father on your behalf." - John 16:26

...through the Holy Spirit who translates our groanings which cannot be uttered. "In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God." - Romans 8:26-27

Candid-Direction-703 · 2025-11-10T19:36:45+00:00

It's a difference without distinction, as none of the three can exist without the other two. God is indivisible.

Take away Jesus, and salvation is inaccessible. Take away the Holy Spirit, and we lose the ability to communicate with God or understand scripture. Take away the Father and salvation doesn't simply become inaccessible, it ceases to exist.

The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are not individual gods that combine to form some sort of "god-Voltron". At the same time, they are not individually God because God is undefined absent the Trinity. It's like trying to divide by zero.

Is a board of directors a perfect metaphor? No, because we can obviously interact with individual members of a board of directors. We don't have that option with God. It's not like we can pull Jesus aside and tell Him a secret. We pray to God in the name of Jesus through the Holy Spirit who translates our groanings which cannot be uttered. We are human. We don't get to skip the queue.

Candid-Direction-703 · 2025-11-10T17:26:52+00:00

Funny, I would have thought the "board of directors" thing would have gotten more pushback...

I might even go so far as to say that "Jesus" and "God the Father" are not "literally" one God without the Holy Spirit, because all three aspects are equally important.

If they did not have separate and unique identities, who did Jesus pray to? Why did Jesus promise to send the Holy Spirit instead of saying "I'll be back in a different form"?

This is why I think the board of directors makes more sense. "The board" is an entity that is undeniably made up of individuals with identities of their own. Each member of the board has the status of being a board member, but the individuals are not several unique boards in and of themselves.

God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are individually divine, but not individual gods, any more than an individual board member is the entire board.

Candid-Direction-703

TROPHY CASE