articles
China Elevator Stories
What A Hoover Sounds Like
Both my ex-husband and my ex-boyfriend hoovered me frequently.
19/07/2024
Ruth Silbermayr
Author
One of my ex-husband’s favorite hoovers was to tell me that he would only divorce me if we had ten children together. He usually used this hoover when we were having a fight where I was asking for him to tell me the truth of what was really going on so he could stop the fight and I would stop asking him for the truth.
One of the singer’s favorite hoovers was to tell me that I am “the one”. One example for a hoover where he uses a tactic called “love bombing” is this concert in Halle, where he says “that we are meant to be together, like yin and yang”—this was a few years before we had started dating, but a few years after he had started reading my blog. He doesn’t mention my name and to outsiders, it wouldn’t be obvious that he is talking about me. My oldest sister lives in Halle, Germany, with her husband and their son.
He put me into a lot of his songs, which in his eyes would prove his point, but in my eyes, it does not. It is simply one of his strategies. Initially, I thought one of the beautiful women sitting right next to him in one of his songs singing a song with him would be the person he was singing about, but I found out later that she was not (as far as I understand they were dating at the time of the video). Now, certainly, this is very creative and the songs are beautiful, but there are other things that are needed for a relationship to work.
Is this a hoover that works? I believe it probably depends on the individual.
For me, initially, a hoover like this was hard to withstand and a few of his hoovers worked in the beginning in getting me back into a relationship with him.
He used to be my favorite singer before he had started to pursue me.
When I first found a few of his songs in 2017, which was the first time I got to know about him, I immediately fell in love with the songs and the lyrics. I thought he had a unique voice, and I absolutely loved his lyrics. He became famous in 2015, but I had been living in China and hadn’t heard about him at all until 2017, which was the year in which I found a few of his songs. I was looking for German songs I could use in class so my students could translate them from German to Chinese.
In my eyes, he would have had to treat me better to prove that I was “the one”, and he would have proven by actions, not by words, that I was important to him, and that our relationship was important to him. Telling this to someone who is naive about relationships and romantic love may work better than telling it to someone who is not. In the process of having experienced an abusive marriage and a divorce, I have gained a lot of life experience and I am therefore better able to distinguish real love from feigned love. I am also not a fan of being called “the one”.
Publicly, he hasn’t acknowledged we were having a relationship. My guess would be that he would probably say he doesn’t even know who I am or that I am not telling the truth. In my eyes, a man not acknowledging that he had a relationship with someone is a “relationship killer”.
He wanted to immediately engage with me after we had just met. He had read my blog and knew that my ex-husband and I had become engaged within two weeks after getting together.
The messages read:
Ruth: “What does that mean?”
Joris: “It means, it would be nice if we could get engaged in the future.”
Ruth: “Do we know each other?”
Ruth: “How do you envision that?”
Joris: “I’m just looking for someone who will stay with me.”
Ruth: “Are there any detailed plans?”
Ruth: “You want to get engaged just like that?”
Ruth: “And then have a wedding?”
Joris: “I don’t know, but with genuine intent, I would like to meet you for a coffee.”
Ruth: “Is there a ring for the engagement?”
Ruth: “Or a proposal?”
Ruth: “Well, actually, I don’t know you well enough.”
Joris: “I can get you a ring.”
He told me it would only take him a week to get me to engage with him. Of course, I didn’t believe him when he said he wanted marry me after having just gotten to know him!
He has shared very little about him with me. I have asked him to draw a timeline of all the women he has dated and to include any affairs and sexual encounters he has had with other women. However, if you think he will be honest about his affairs (or his relationships), you are mistaken; he will likely try to hide them. He has shown me a few pictures and videos of him with ex-girlfriends’, but he hasn’t told me if he still meets them or how long the relationships lasted, for example.
And to answer your question, Joris, which—hallelujah! Thanks god—you have finally stopped asking for a few days in a row now: “Yes, we will marry. Let me also tell you our wedding date: The date is NEVER!” (I am mentioning this here, in case it is not understood: I am using humor when I say that we will marry, certainly we will not).
(I am publishing this post not because I want to publish posts about Joris but because he has violated my boundaries again. A boundary violation means I’ll post something).
Has someone ever tried to coerce you into staying with him even after you already separated?