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A year ago today, I was supposed to get married to the man
I’d loved for seven years. I was never
one of those little girls who dreamed of her wedding day – in fact, it
wasn’t until we hit a visa dead end and realized marriage was the best way out
that I even let myself believe in the idea of ‘I do’.
I grew up with a solid feeling that I would probably wind up
married with kids because most people do.
I never allowed myself to dream of a Prince Charming, a love of my life,
because I was deeply afraid that if I could find someone to love that much, he
would never love me back. In fact, I
wasn’t even sure someone I didn’t love
that much would ever love me back. The
best I could allow myself to hope for was to meet someone I liked, who liked me
as well, and who would overlook my physical appearance (which I considered to
be my biggest flaw) and agree to spend his adult life with me. We would be content, if not googly-eyed in
love. Wedding dreams don’t really work
with the vision of my future that I allowed myself, so I simply didn’t have
them.
Then I met my ex. He
swept me off my feet by simply adoring me from the start – I was so
accustomed to the narrative in my own mind that his intensity actually put me
off a bit. I figured it had to be a
cruel trick; no handsome young man could ever really be that interested in me. For
years I held a small piece of myself back, brushing him off when he spoke of
marriage, joking that he would ‘wake up’ one day and realize what he’d signed
himself up for, claiming to break out in hives because I was afraid of commitment.
But I wasn’t afraid of the commitment – after all, I moved across
the world to be with him, twice. I was
afraid of the potential inconsistency of his commitment, afraid that for all
his outspoken passion and certainty he really would wake up one morning and see
me for what I was: ugly, fat, older, just not good enough for the rest of his
life.
Around the five-year point, though, I started to mellow out. I figured if he was going to suddenly realize
his mistake he would have done it when I was an unemployed mess, or when I was
carrying 20 extra pounds and counting every calorie out loud, or when we had to
be long distance again and he was
surrounded by girls his own age whom he saw every day. Once all those things had passed, and we were
living together happily, and I was publishing a book and working in a literary
field and looking pretty good and had conquered a lot of my neuroses – I
figured if the obvious flaws in my body and personality hadn’t made him run
yet, and things were so much better, objectively, then maybe I could start to
relax into a semblance of security.
Maybe we really were that good together, really could make it in the
long term.
During our sixth year together, he made a new friend, and
suddenly there was a new threat to our happiness. Of all the girls he’d had as friends
throughout our relationship (and there were a lot), this was the only one who'd ever
made me feel nervous. Something about
her seemed disingenuous.
Calculating. I told myself (and
he agreed) that I was being silly. He
still fawned over me, still talked eagerly about marriage and kids and growing
old together. I told myself that
jealousy was unbecoming, and worked hard to be ‘the cool girlfriend’, never
asking him to stop talking to her, except once, on Valentine’s Day, when I
asked him to turn off his phone – the minute he turned it back on, he was
texting her, and he lied to me when I asked who he was talking to. That first lie was the beginning of the end.
For the life of me, I still can’t understand why he did
it. That is, I can come up with a lot of
oversimplified reasons: he’s a shitty person and an idiot, he’s devoid of empathy,
he was stressed and she made him feel special, he was lonely and she showed up
at his door, he was horny and she had condoms in hand… the list goes on and it
raises my blood pressure as I write it down, so let’s stop there. The bottom line is that I do believe she was
predatory, and I do believe he wouldn’t have cheated if she hadn’t been part of
his life. However, I also know for
certain that the cheating, the lies, the torture, and the way he destroyed every last inch of my life – all
of those things were his choices alone, and after a year and a half I don’t
think even he understands those choices.
I certainly don’t.
What I do know is that sometimes I wish for the old
narrative, to accept calmly the idea that I will meet someone good enough, and
he will also think I am good enough, and we will live a good enough life
together. The majority of the pain my ex
put me through is, I think, down to how hard he worked to get me to believe
– in him, in passionate love, in trusting the same person for the rest of
my life. If only he hadn’t succeeded, if
I’d just stayed cynical, I would never have been so destroyed by what he did.
But I was. And now I’m
doing my best to rebuild, and every day I’m uncertain which material to use: do
I build up a hard, cynical shell and resolve never to let anyone dismantle it in
future, thus ensuring that I never hurt in such an inside-out, howling animal
kind of way ever again? Or do I hold on
as tightly as I can to that scrap of vulnerability that wasn’t eviscerated in
the crisis, and allow myself to hope that the next person I love will nurture
it instead of seeing it as a target?
I don’t know the answer.
Right now I’m using whatever scraps I can find to build a makeshift
emotional shelter. I guess I’ll decide
about the strength of the walls once I’ve figured out how to keep the rain out.
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