My wife shares custody—50/50—of her sixteen-year-old son with her narcissist ex-husband. He is much older than her, about fifteen years. They are both teachers, so he knows exactly what she earns since public school salaries are public information.
I am not a teacher, and I make good money, along with having investments that have done well, including real estate, stocks, and business ventures.
Last season, he refused to split the cost for their son’s traveling volleyball fees and costs, which amounted to over $1,000. My wife wanted to give him a chance to split it, just to show he supported his son’s interests. But he refused, claiming he had already paid for a summer pass to the community center for the boy—a $200 expense!—so he was done with his part and would not split the volleyball cost. For us, it was never really about the money, so we said, “Fine, we will cover it.”
This season, my wife offered him the same opportunity. This time, he responded with a long, drawn-out dissertation. It went back fifteen years, detailing all the expenses he had supposedly covered and all the things he had done. He complained about the costs he had to pay when my wife divorced him because he cheated, and the list went on and on.
When we first started dating and the children were younger, my wife would often try to respond point by point to every single thing he wrote. Most of it was nonsense, but she felt the need to refute it all. I had to train her to stop responding to anything irrelevant, because otherwise, it just became a non-stop back and forth argument. I taught her that simply saying “No” was a complete response. I think that small change drove him absolutely nuts.
His behavior calmed down for a while when he met his current fiancé, but we hear from my stepson that they get into some pretty nasty fights. I think that is exactly when he starts sending my wife these whiny and nasty emails, complaining about some perceived grievance and how we victimize him just by living our own lives.
We still do not respond to anything that is irrelevant to the actual topic at hand. For this latest issue, my wife responded to his lengthy, whiny email with a single sentence. She wrote, “No problem, since you seem to be in a precarious financial situation, my husband and I will cover the cost for [son’s name]’s volleyball costs.”
Now, let me be clear, he is a teacher, but his mother is genuinely wealthy. For example, she bought him a $500k house in cash before he was even married. She pays for everything for the children, even though he constantly claims he paid his fair share.
We think he is spiraling now because of trouble on the home front with his much younger fiancé—she is in her late thirties, divorced with two young daughters, a twenty-plus year age difference with him. But another reason is because I just bought my wife a brand-new Lexus RX to replace her old minivan, and he saw it for the first time during the last child exchange.
In his furious, rage email, he brought up how we are constantly doing home renovations and taking multiple overseas vacations. He even complained that she bought her own mother a new car. (I bought her mother that car for $11,000 because her old car died, and she regularly does school duty for our seven-year-old). He repeated the same accusations multiple times in different paragraphs—the dude was truly rage-emailing!
My wife and I discussed it, and we concluded he is basically just deeply pissed off because I am much younger than him yet I earn significantly more and can treat my family to nice things. He is a narcissist and simply cannot stand it. It makes us so happy how unhappy he is.
We realize we don’t owe him a single thing, especially since we have built a real life with real love. We live our best life, and we let him drown in his own angst. I did not just replace him as a husband; I proved that my wife and my stepson deserve better. I truly could not be happier that he is furious with me.
