I sometimes joke that, opportunity permitting, my last words are going to be, “Tell my wife I love her”, the joke of course being I’m not actually married.
Just the thought of people scratching their heads and wondering amuses me. I don’t however have a secret life and/or identity (or do I?) yet you keep hearing of people who keep sides of the personalities or lives entirely secret from their friends and families (ie you occassionally hear of people with two seperate families utterly unknown to each other)
My questions is do you know anyone like that or even something more mundane but which you’d have never expected or suspected of the person in question?
When a stranger tells me I look awfully familiar, and (s)he struggles to thing how they may know me, I often quip, “ever done time?” with a totally straight face.
Although I haven’t, the question freaks some folks.
During his second marriage to my mom, my stepdad had another woman and child in another state who thought that they were his only family. The kid was about seven when it all blew up.
I don’t know anything about it really. Of course, Mom divorced him with great speed. Apparently the other woman was trying some blackmail scheme on Stepdad, so I’m sure they didn’t patch things up either. Kid, wherever you are, thank your lucky stars.
Yes. I know someone who came out of the closet - after having been married for more than 20 years. That was a WTF moment for sure, as there was no indication whatsoever prior to that time that something like that would happen.
Oh yeah - that too, sort of. Coworker of my husband’s was arrested for trying to get it on with a minor and kiddie porn was later found on his computer. Prior to that time, the guy had always had a stellar reputation. We’d been to his house and considered him a friend. Now he’s in federal prison.
A really good friend of my sister got married years and years ago to a man who turned out to have another wife and family somewhere. He was such a mousy guy, it was bizarre.
A widow I met through grief group found out after his death that her husband wasn’t who he said he was. He had a job as an engineer and claimed to have a degree, but he never attended any college courses at all. He lied about his age, his family, all sorts of things.
Some GLBT people still in the closet but the wildest was someone with two wives and families. I caught on because I would see them, and talk with them often, at two different amusement parks 350 miles apart. Don’t know if he ever got caught or not.
Hadn’t seen a friend for a while and asked her how it was going with the boyfriend. He got married. Wow! That was quick, when did you guys split up? They didn’t, he managed to marry another woman while continuing a relationship with her, until she found out.
A good friend found out that her husband was already married. She said before she married him, his mother didn’t like her at all. Now she knows that this was because, to her, my friend was the American slut who was trying to break up his son’s marriage. He’s Mexican and she doens’t speak Spanish, so no telling what he was telling his mother.
He finally got busted when his wife called my friend. You gotta hand it to him, though. He tried to convince my friend that they could still work it out, that he considered her his real wife.
I had a friend in Hawaii who lived on one island and found out his dad had another family on one of the other islands. The dad had business dealings on both islands, so it was normal for him to spend 3-4 days each week on one island or the other.
My friend found out about it when he and another kid were both chosen for some sort of All-Hawaii High School football team, and they both thought it was cool that they shared the same last name.
On kind of the flip side of this, I know a girl whose boyfriend faked his *father’s *death to get her to get back with him. She found out when she called his house to find out where to send flowers, and his father answered.
I have a feeling that this was a plan the guy didn’t really think through.
A guy I knew slightly in high school, two years behind me, went on to graduate and become a coach at a neighboring county’s school system. Got married.
One day his wife got an anonymous tip that caused her to visit a local porno shop. There, amongst the gay-themed DVDs, she discovered that her husband was also known as Ty Fox, porn film star.
Neither his marriage nor his other occupation survived the disclosure.
Man, I have never understood this guy. They were in a long-distance relationship since she’d left town to go to college. They weren’t really DATING, I don’t think. She talked about him fondly but they were starting to grow apart.
Then she got the phone call saying he’d been killed, I think in some awful accident in Arizona or something. I remember that day and her sobbing on my shoulder.
Then I remember the day about a year and a half later we found out from a family member of his that he’d been alive the whole time. She was understandably pissed.
The fact that they started dating again a few years later still blows my mind.
For most of my first marriage, only my wife and I knew of the marriage. We kept it a secret because we were sure that my family wouldn’t approve. Even today, the number of people who know about that marriage numbers less than ten.
A woman I worked with had her teen-hood ruined by the discovery that her father had an entirely other wife and children in another province. She married young (18) and the only rule she had for her husband was that she could never be in a relationship that wasn’t faithful. Fast forward 30 years and she receives a call from a pregnant woman - who is of course “married” to her husband - this is their second child together. Poor thing.
My father had a cousin who grew up an only child. After his mother died the cousin began putting together a family tree. He called a man with the same surname to see if it was lead. The cousin said, “I’m Norma B.'s son and I’m researching for the family tree”. The other man said, “I’m Norma B.'s son too”.
As it turned out Norma became pregnant (in the 30’s) by a married man. The married man asked his wife for a divorce who flatly refused (wives could do that back then in Canada). So Norma gave the baby to the married man and his wife and they raised him.
Norma went on and married a wonderful man and had my cousin. Interestingly the cousin remembered several summers of his youth spent with that family. Apparently his father had known all about the situation and allowed the families to get together so that Norma could watch her other son grow.
Everyone concerned had passed away by the time the story came out.
I found out that my uncle was a Mason… at his funeral.
I wonder how many of these types of fraudulent situations could be avoided if people were open to the idea of having more than two pwople in a marriage? And if that was legal?