“He wasn’t like this before we were married!” Is it possible to avoid this situation, even with the most deliberate deception?

Here’s the thing.

He WAS like this before you were married. He just made extra sure you never saw that part of himself when he was wooing you. Really talented manipulators always have a “reasonable” answer to those nagging doubts that something’s not quite right.

Your intuition may have told you this guy is trouble. But if you’re a woman, you’ve probably been influenced from birth to be understanding and compassionate, even to people that haven’t proven themselves to you.

In your mind, marriage should have been a continuation of all the “goodness” he was sending your way. In his mind, he felt he could drop the act once he “got” you. He was exhausted pretending to be this person he really wasn’t. If he showed you the “like this” beforehand, you rightly would have avoided him like the plague. So he came up with a mask to deceive you. He might not even be consciously aware of it as a psychological defense mechanism preventing him from doing some real introspection and initiating deep, lasting change.

It’s usually the small things: how you flinch inside when he treats service workers with contempt; how he masks his disregard for you as “help” or “jokes”; how he always seems to have a plausible answer for not meeting your reasonable desires or wants (which always leaves you dissatisfied and devoting the majority of your time trying to “understand” him—at your own expense).

You were never wrong for trusting. He was wrong for taking advantage of that trust.

if he’s a truly talented con artist, there was probably nothing you could have done to avoid this situation. In the future, though, you can avoid giving anyone the keys to your castle before they’ve been thoroughly checked out and vetted.