How the First Stage Looked in My Experience
Initially, my ex and I connected (of all places!) on Myspace sometime during 2006.
We had mutual online friends and eventually, we ended up chatting. Fortunately for him, I was very eager to divulge my vulnerabilities. I viewed the concept of online-only friends as a safe place. You could tell them absolutely anything without fear of repercussion because you'd never meet them in real life... Well, let this be a lesson for all of us.
Our relationship kicked into high gear around 2009 as my mom was dying. I was traveling back and forth between Illinois and Florida to spend time with her. This was truly an awful time in my life. While all of that was going on, I was also breaking up with someone. As I posted little updates about my mother's condition and things of that nature I'd get a lot of responses. However, the most encouraging were all from him.
It got to a point where I'd wait for those responses; the banter. His words were so encouraging and sweet. He would call me on occasion, always pretending to be a military recruiter of some sort, and just crack me up. He was amazing.
Someone asked me something about my relationship with him and it struck me... I don't remember the question exactly, but I remember (although we weren't together at the time) my response perfectly. I said our relationship was great at the beginning. He was so sweet and kind. It wasn't always terrible. That's why I kept coming back to it. I had never felt so loved in my life.
Our relationship progressed so quickly - we had only met in person two times before we decided he was going to move in. It was a weird time, honestly. I had two teenage boys, one of which had some dad issues, and was under the impression that he had a say in what happened in my personal life. He didn't want to see his mom get hurt so behaved like a little jerk to any man who got within 40 ft of me. I think both my son and my ex saw right through one another. This set the stage for a lot of conflicts.
It was hard to determine a lot of the little pokes he made. We were both drinking for quite a bit initially, I stopped when it was time for normal life to resume, he continued. This created a lot of conflicts as well. He drank way too much.
He disclosed a fair amount of information on past relationships; in which every single one he was abused or otherwise victimized, The women were horrible creatures who took advantage of him, were spiteful, even violent. He'd always end the tail with the same lines - How he feels so bad for those women, how he just tried to help. At least all but one - his most recent ex.
She would call constantly, most often when she was drinking, leaving long, crazy, and angry voicemails. One day I decided enough was enough. I answered the phone and confronted her. What she said haunts me to his day.
"What do you do for a living? A biologist? A CEO? It must be something really interesting, that's the kind of girls he dates. He says I'm crazy. Well, I'm not." She started kind of crying at that point. She kept asking me, again and again, to ask him "how is your soul?"It was actually rather disturbing.
We did everything together. We built an entire life together. We even planned to have a child. I took the extra income from my promotion and rented us a 3BR house. Meanwhile, he isolated himself almost completely. He didn't want to meet my friends, so anytime I wanted to socialize, he'd tell me to go on ahead, he'd fine keeping himself busy at home. If I made a quick call to 'check-in' he would get a little annoyed and tell me to go have fun and don't keep calling - he wanted quiet.
It wasn't too long after that I'd realized I was living with a complete stranger.
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