He and his wife were high school sweethearts, dated from age 16. He wasn’t a virgin (verified by his ex-gf) but they functioned like a teen married couple as soon as they got together, including going on multiple annual vacations with her family. He inherited his father’s lucrative business not long after they married post-college. Everyone thought they were a solid couple; she was certainly in love with him and he “simped” for her with cars, jewelry, vacation homes, you name it — but he also drank more and more as time went on. Turns out he thought showering his wife with gifts made him look like a baller; it had nothing to do with loving her.
One day, he came home and informed her that he had sold their home (which was owned by a trust) and was moving in with his secretary, with whom he’d been having an affair for months, but hoped they could still be “best friends.” Dude was so delusional he actually thought that was possible. What happened is that everyone froze him out, including all of us who’d been friends with him since we were teenagers. He was aghast that we were being “so judgmental” and “uptight” (he and his wife were outwardly dutiful Catholics up to that point but he’d decided religion was “gay” because it didn’t give him a blank check to do whatever he wanted).
I asked his ex-wife if she’d ever felt like she had missed out on anything, marrying her first serious boyfriend and never getting to date around. She said no, but that he felt that he had sacrificed something valuable by forgoing all that and was always trying to “spice up” their sex lives with various kinds of degeneracy. She was far from a prude (had a reputation as a bit of a nympho within our friend group since high school) but she said he was pushing her toward progressively more objectionable “experimentation” that she was not comfortable with, including group sex parties and swinging. This was happening concurrently with him outright cheating, it later emerged.
Today she’s married to a great guy and is relieved the drunk perv ended things before he wasted more of her prime years. He’s not even 50 years old but lives life as a lonely drunk who ran the family business into the ground and has no friends except whoever is sitting on the next barstool at any given moment. (He remains baffled that the women who were eager to fuck him all disappeared as soon as the money did.)
One by one his kids turned 18 and every one stopped having anything to do with him. He now has grandchildren he’s never met who live just a few miles away; he can only hope to meet them by running into them at the grocery store someday, as he wouldn’t be caught dead at church. And of course he’ll tell anyone who will listen how “uptight religious dogma” ended his marriage, because God forbid these types ever own any of their actions.