https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/an-hero

He was such an hero, to take it all away. We miss him so, That you should know, And we honor him this day. He was an hero, to take that shot, to leave us all behind.

It was 2006: typos made by grieving people had a chance to become memes.

Okay, I'll unpack a bit. It's clear that some things I said can be taken the wrong way and perhaps it's not clear what was me making general statements about what seems to happen in people's heads in some scenarios vs what was my personal anecdote and such. This happens a lot, I have ADHD and sometimes seemingly obvious leaps between different points are not very obvious to others.

But if a woman cheats and has a baby, that baby always becomes part of the family. If a man cheats and has a baby… Either it comes out immediately when the woman in question asks for child support or tells the man’s wife/girlfriend, or it doesn’t really come out because that woman is also in a relationship and wants to pass the child off as her man’s. Plus even if 10 years down the line the woman comes out and says “hey you remember that time you cheated on your wife? Well I’d like you to meet our child”, that’s a lot less personal than raising someone else’s kid as your own and then finding out 10, 20 or maybe 40 years later.

What?

This I meant as to why there are more stories of women cheating and getting caught a long time after the fact (besides the obvious gender bias and double standards where women are just held to a higher standard when family and relationship stuff is concerned). It can just come out in a DNA test of your own child that you've been raising for decades. No, I personally have not experienced this. I didn't mean to insinuate that women cheat on purpose or that women cheating is worse than men cheating. Just that raising someone else's child as your own can be very traumatic to find out decades later and this is more likely to happen when women cheat, because... well... by the miracle of childbirth we always know exactly who the baby's mom is, but not who the dad is. And if a man cheats and it comes out decades later when the kid reaches out, for an example, the man is often forgiven - both because we tend to hold men to lesser standards regarding relationships and because the child that was conceived wasn't raised by the woman that was cheated on, so it might feel a bit less personal and traumatic. It's an event that happened long ago vs something you've been living with the entire time.

I’m hoping no surprises despite my slut of an ex having been with what I’m guessing may be dozens of other dudes in the <2 years we were together. The whole “pill baby” was so perfectly planned though, that I’m pretty sure she took a break from whoring until she was pregnant. In fact it’s what she did with her first kid’s father - quick break from whoring when she found a nice target, boom, pregnant, and then she was free to sleep with everyone again while he was at work.

There is a ton to unpack here that I’m afraid I simply do not have the strength for. What I can say is that your perspective is skewed.

This part is my personal anecdote. It wasn't meant to insinuate that this is common at all. It doesn't even change how I view women in general, it only makes me very careful about sex and relationships in the future. This is one very special woman, in that when she finally goes to hell, the devil's out of a job - and I'm not even religious. Allow me to elaborate. I'm the second victim and the first victim's story is similar to mine. In both cases, she got pregnant very early in a relationship (in my case after she found out I was having doubts about having a relationship with her in the first place, because to me it was just a fling at first, but I was stupid and believed her when she said she was on the pill. I'm a fucking idiot). Look, I'll skip most of the trauma dump. She was violent towards me, always threatened suicide, yada yada, boring. Put me at least 70k EUR in debt, spent my dad's inheritance, and we had nothing to show for it. At peak I made so much money on a monthly basis that I could've had 3 mortgages and 2 car payments and still feed the family and go on vacations - except instead it all went to her shit and consumer loans for shit that had no real value. She never worked a single day in the time we were in a relationship, she immediately took sick leave after we met and then quit her job a bit later. At peak I worked 250 hours a month AND took care of the children most of the time. This means that for like half a year I got 2-3 hours of sleep per night and she kept telling me I wasn't helping with the children enough, I wasn't working enough, I was always sleeping, while SHE was sleeping 12 hours a day and the rest of the time she was usually out (like I said, whoring). In less than 2 years, we had over 50 strollers. 6 or 7 cars. She had me buy 15 winter jackets during her pregnancy. Now the bitch is trying to get me to pay child support, so she kidnapped our toddler and immediately demanded money - while I'd been raising said child alone for 4 months and GIVING HER money instead of asking for child support that I was literally entitled to. Well I got my child back and things are fine now, except she's threatening me with court twice a day (without ever actually suing me because she has no money and she knows she'd lose if she did, because I haven't done anything wrong). Oh, and the cheating I mentioned earlier? She doesn't even do it because of horny. She literally does it because she enjoys being in control, having more freedom than her partner. That's also why she accuses every single partner of hers of cheating, while she's cheated on every single partner she's had.

So my case for thinking I should get a DNA test done is to see if all this has at least been for my own child. Because after the shit I've personally gone through, after I've wasted a quarter million and almost ruined all my friendships over 2 years because of someone who never actually even LIKED me, I'd like to know the reason I endured all this instead of telling her to fuck off was at least really for my own child, not someone else's. Yes, I'm selfish like that. What will I do if I find out it's not mine? Probably nothing, because I can't ruin an innocent young life by sentencing them to live with someone who actually thinks hitting a 3 year old with a belt for not eating is reasonable. But if she ever manages to get custody somehow, I'll at least know I can dodge child support, which is the only thing she's actually after.

But I do not think this is common. The "have a child to keep a man" crowd can't be very big because it's not a very successful strategy. And literally every woman I know that isn't retired has a job, I literally don't know anyone else coasting by on an indentured man like that. Besides my ex of course. But she's not getting hit by a karma freight train, she's getting hit by a karma oil tanker really soon.

That being said, people also cheat because they’re horny impulsive idiots that seem to think STDs don’t exist, let alone the biggest STD of them all : pregnancy (I’m kidding, childbirth is a beautiful thing — typically).

Yes, I agree, this is the actual more common reason for cheating. That, or the relationship being dead already. In the above described relationship, I came real close to cheating at one point. Like "if we'd had some time alone, it would've happened" close, with a mutual friend who also despised her by then - my ex abused her too. It didn't happen so I can still proudly say I've never cheated on anyone in my life, but I can see how an unhealthy relationship can drive someone to cheat too.

And I mean, I am still happy to be a father. My child's amazing. I've never felt such love from anyone except perhaps my own mother. But I'll never be able to explain why mommy and daddy really aren't together, or why daddy's fighting so hard to keep mommy away. I'll have to lie, because nobody should ever find out that this shit was how and why they were born.

Not everyone is a criminal mastermind nymphomaniac roping unsuspecting men into… whatever the fuck her goal was.

Literally money. I drove a nice car when we met, I had a well-paid job where I could slack off a bit while working at home and she liked that I had both money AND time to give her the attention she wanted. Her other baby daddy similarly is very hard working and was well-off financially, though he worked a very different type of job, with strict schedules and such. Makes for very easy cheating of course.

Seriously, you can’t let yourself think like that.

Eh, look, I don't. This anecdote wasn't meant to convey that I think cheating women get pregnant on purpose. My ex did, twice, but she's a special kind of evil. It was more of a "this is a thing that can happen ... I should check if my child is actually my own, because if anyone's likely to knowingly hide a child's true parentage, it's my ex" jump to a related topic because, again, I have ADHD and make weird connections in my head and sometimes the leaps I make aren't clear and I also don't describe them clearly enough.

I am actually still hoping to find "the one". By which I mean a sane person I have interests in common with that actually likes me not my ability to make money appear out of thin air when the need is dire, and is willing to stay employed when in a relationship. After all this fuckery, I do still think there's someone out there for me to enjoy the rest of my life with. It's because I'm lucky enough to have awesome female friends. If I didn't have any, I'd probably be an extreme misogynist by now.