while having so much time on my hands, research has become quite the hobby. this excerpt i found both incredibly interesting and scary:

Excerpted from Games Divorced People Play, by Dr. Melvyn A. Berke and Joanne B. Grant.

"Surveys and research suggest the following:

1)"If the new parent is a stepmother, the probability of the marriage surviving and marital happiness are reduced.

2)"The role of the stepmother is considerably more difficult than of the stepfather.

i know i am doing the right thing. pretty much all of these posts were right on. i found out yesterday that he had been hiding a few more conversations with his ex from the past several weeks. so more secrets, more lies. he said he has been afraid of his ex and i finally interacting because she may be cruel and tell me things that he has said, even during my relationship with him. red flag? i think so. some recent conversations with her were even about me / my personal life. also with his kids. the conversations were about information that bm should not know about me.

i have finally decided to move on once and for all. fiance came home tonight from a day at his exe's house with the kids. the tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife. i knew at that point that we had reached a point of no return. it was a hard decision and i probably should have made the decision a long time ago but sometimes you have to fall in the same hole over and over again to understand you need to walk around it. my only regret is that i gave up too much, my whole life for a man i hardly knew. never again.

so my talk with bf last night did not go so well. he started the conversation by telling me that he lied about a couple of things and that most importantly the phone incident the other night turned into a huge disaster. he tells me that bm heard me telling him 'to get off the phone, tell her we're having dinner' (this is right before i unplugged the phone because i was tired of him yelling at her). so apparently she said 'tell her to f***k off, i can talk to you whenever i want to.'