Just when you think you know someone

So the other day I'm at lunch with a mutual friend I had with a recent ex. She split up with his best friend in what appeared to be a hasty and surprising move just a couple of months after they bought a brand new house together. My ex seemed to think it was a petty reaction on her part to his friend's occasional bouts of hot temper and impulsive nature. I could hear him rolling his eyes when he told me about it during a phone call he made to me one night to cancel our plans because he had to help his friend 'deal' with the situation.

During our lunch conversation my friend asked me what happened to me and my ex. She told me that her boyfriend didn't like me and was very jealous of me, and she had wondered if he secretly had feelings for my ex. She found it interesting that my ex had broken up with me at the same time that everything went down with her and his friend.

It was then that she gave me the shock of my life.

All four of us had gone out for a nice dinner one evening, during which my ex's friend had a sudden and quite random temper tantrum over something so obscure that no one seemed to know why he was exploding in the first place. She explained to me that that was just a tiny taste of what she tolerated from him on a daily basis. They were seeing a counselor to help them with their relationship. It was required that they attend some of the sessions alone instead of as a couple. On a day when she was required to meet the counselor individually, he sat her down and looked her square in the eye. He told her that she needed to do exactly as he said and get out of the house immediately. He instructed her to get as far away from him as she could as soon as she could and as quietly as she could. He told her he wasn't joking. Her life was in danger.

As if it wasn't surprising enough to learn that this man, who seemed nothing more than a lovable buffoon to me, was actually a ticking time bomb, she then tells me something even more terrible. We knew that she had a problem with him falling asleep in his kids' bed when he tucked them in, and felt it was very inappropriate. My ex and I just figured she didn't understand because she didn't have kids of her own. It's not uncommon for a parent to crash at the child's beside out of sheer exhaustion. She then told me that on one occasion she walked into his daughter's bedroom and found him on the bed with her, his daughter was playing with his genitals.

"This is what we do when we're bored," was the explanation the daughter offered her.

I am thanking the Universe, God, Buddha, Ganesh and whoever else is out there that my ex did me the favour of ending our relationship, and thus my connection with this sick freak. I just hope his kids get the help they are desperately going to need.