Yes, contacting his prospective dates/partners is crazy. It makes you looks like a bitter, vindictive, psycho. I speak from experience (I was on the receiving end of this). Bite your tongue and move-on. The feeling will pass (unless you really are a bitter, vindictive, psycho).

Everyone has their psycho moments....the thought of stapling his feet together while he's sleeping and setting off the smoke alarm is not without a certain temptation.

The best revenge is inviting them to your wedding. At a resort in Hawaii.

Classy and spiteful all at the same time!

Don't do it. Just move on. You'll just look nuts and hateful.

wtf is right. The last time I spoke to my still-single ex-husband, I mentioned how happy I am with my husband and our new baby.

Being that bitchy felt good.

Wow. For a few flash seconds I was feeling somewhat sorry for you. As Amy said, we all try to conform reality to us on occasion and finding Mr. Husband can be difficult. Sad, we shouldn't but hey, it happens. Then you got to the part about reading his email, then emailing the other woman, and finally wanting to email all the "other" women! You have leaped way past him in the sociopath game.

Sure, he's a cheat. Sure, he's a marginal liar - you played a part in that one sorry. Seriously wondering though where you get sex addict...

Many years ago, I started seeing a guy who ended up being a liar and a cheat (and married). My response was to tell him to get lost, and then I went on about my life and the rest of my business.

About eight months later, his NEW wife (in the meantime he had divorced the wife he had back then and married a new one) e-mails me and a bunch of other people he used to date, all hysterical and upset.

Because after (and before) marrying the NEXT wife, he kept cheating, and one of the girlfriends ended up being just as nuts as he was. She hacked into his e-mail and provided his new wife with a list of all the women he'd been involved with during the time he had been dating her. (I didn't even know about her at the time - I thought the original wife thing was bad enough and didn't know there were one or more girlfriends besides.)

I was really irritated, having put all that drama and nonsense behind me, to have the new wife e-mailing me (and, apparently, a bunch of other people) in hysterics.

Yet I was also secretly amused, to some extent, because the guy got blown TOTALLY out of the water. Everyone found out about it - a whole bunch of people he worked with - just about everyone he knew - and everyone was laughing at him, both behind his back and to his face.

Last I heard, he'd put on about 50 pounds and never leaves the house. Wifey keeps him on a tight leash now.

Yes to what everyone else said here. I just wanted to pop in and admire Amy.

My god. Great answer! Touched every sore point, needle sharp, laser-like precision, funny and acidic enough to give LW just the exact amount of dope-slap needed to bring her to her senses. Stitch this gal up, surgery is over!

All that can be done has been done. LW will either recover, or learn the hard way. Meanwhile, archive that answer in the "Best of..." file.

There are two reasons why the LW should not pursue the action she proposes:

1. It's unlikely to achieve the desired result. Let's say that you're at home one day, minding your own business, and you get an email from someone you've never heard of claiming that your spouse is cheating on you. There are emails that "prove" it attached, but emails are easy to forge. You have a good relationship with your spouse and have never suspected him/her of cheating. What are you going to do? Probably blow it off. And if it continues, you'll file a harassment report. Unless it comes from someone you know and trust, you're unlikely to give it any credibility.

2. It does nothing to help clear the event from your own mind. "Moving on" may be a cliche, but it's still important. You can't move on when your evenings revolve around plotting ongoing vengence. And that sort of thing tends to not have a limit: once you convince yourself that you are justified in taking that kind of action, you are already flirting with the edges of law and morality. It's not that hard to fall off.

So she falls hard for a player, writes him into her "Happily Ever After" play after just a short time, blindly skips over all the red flags (BTW, how did she KNOW he was checking his dating site daily?), snoops and finds bitter reality, and somehow this is all indication that HE is the anti-Christ?!!? Accountabilty Avoidance Measures engage, in 3-2-1...

bkmale - I missed that completely!! How does she know that he's on the dating site daily unless she is too? Doesn't her presence on the same site cancel everything out? You can't be mad at me for being in the porn store when you ran into me..... IN THE PORN STORE!

I was curious about the sex addict accusation too. Maybe her parameters are the same as CDC's alcohol consumption parameters.

How do guys like that get women to respond to dating emails? They just ignore mine! He seems to have quite a line, I'd like to learn from him...

I disagree that it was snoopy of her to read his email when he left it open on HER computer. I suspect that unconsciously, or maybe not so unconsciously, he wanted her to find out.

Per the LW: I contacted her and told her he's contacting numerous other women so she'd know he's a sociopath, a sex addict, a liar, and a cheat. Now I'm thinking about warning other women he's contacted. Is that crazy?

What's crazy is to think of this as a public service, warning other women of this dangerous cad. It looks to me like revenge, not only against the guy, but against all the other women who were taking attention away from her. As other commenters have pointed out, his simple departure should have been relief enough. There's no need to poison one's mind by plotting to get back at him.

Per Our Gracious Hostess: You can only control whether you do -- and whether you treat reality like the 50-foot brick wall it is or pretend, for as long as you can, that it comes with an elastic waistband like fat men's pants. That's a pretty colorful metaphor!

"It makes you looks like a bitter, vindictive, psycho."

It also makes you FEEL like a bitter, vindictive psycho.

"You likewise don't have the right to rip through your partner's mail"

I am curious though, if privacy is that serious an issue in a long term marriage with children? At that point, your lives are so intertwined that I think having access to each other's mail, etc would be a convenience thing.

My husband I would ring some serious alarm bells if I/he opened the others mail and the other objected. But we're also constantly in each other's emails, facebooks, voicemai, etc. If I got angry with my husband for going through my purse, the first thing he would ask is "Whatcha hidin?"

No, go ahead and contact all these women.

Piss away your own reputation, and gain that of the crazy pyscho woman who lives with 37 cats and can't get a boyfriend.

You know why? because you're stark raving loonie toons and no guy with more than two brain cells to rub together will be willing to deal with that level of drama.

So do yourself a favor, and forget this guy. Let him be someone else's problem.

testing

(Changed the comment challenge below due to scumbag spammers getting through -- so note that new answer required.)

Wow, and the women he contacts are writing back? I get a reply to maybe 1 out of 50 emails on the dating site I am on.

Re: the sex addict thing

I've run across a number of women who view any man who masterbates, or want sex more often than she does as a sex addict

All healthy men are sex addicts. Good ones just have better manners than to hump your leg in public.

Oh my God I love you Amy.