Someone Needs To Know

Sometimes yeah, I’m still sad about it.

He inserted himself into my life disguised as a friend. Showed so much interest in me and things I liked. Listened to me and seemed to understand. Was “there for me” during a tough time.

But at the same time, it seems now that he was really just playing a game. A game where the goal was to win: to win me, and then to win everything he could get from me. 

How this registered in me was not that I got angry, not that I got grabby and tried to win things back or fight over them. I mean a bit, yeah, but that wasn’t the prevailing thing. I was, it turned out, an adult, and I just couldn’t comprehend how someone two years older than me could act like a child. So it just registered as confusion. Massive confusion.

Whenever he didn’t like what I had to say, or what I wanted, I was “wrong”. According to him I was wrong about my own feelings, what I enjoyed or didn’t enjoy, small choices, big choices, and how I reacted to his actions. When I objected to certain things he did and raised concerns, he said he “didn’t like my tone.”

He took everything he wanted, including physical and emotional intimacy with other girls and women, the time and freedom to travel no matter what was going on at home with me and our two young kids, opportunities to expand a business that was not just his, but ours, built with both of our energy and hard work. And also, the cash in my wallet when we was leaving the house, because it was more convenient than stopping at an ATM (I’d have to be the one to do that), and pens from my desk so I could never find one when I needed one. 

He brought in legal trouble, serious criminal offenses, disputes with business partners, samples of pillows, linens, and other hotel supplies that just sat in boxes cluttering our house. He brought in a sense of urgency to everything, a single-minded mentality that determined the course of our life and then set out in that direction without even pausing for me to catch up and give my input.

In the beginning, after several months of friendship that was also kind of flirty on his part, he tried to get me to date him, several times, and before I said yes I had already said no more than once. While we were dating he used the line “I was going to ask you to marry me tonight” as a punishment on a night when he didn‘t approve of something I did in a social situation that didn’t even involve him. 

After we were married, it came out that he had cheated on me while we were dating, and while I had had my suspicions about this, I didn’t know. Once married, I felt I was supposed to forgive him, because I took my commitment to marriage seriously. He also got really drunk on red wine at a social event, during a week when I had had to help my dad who was going through a crisis. That night I was woken up to the sound of him hurling all over the bedroom. While he slept off his drunkenness, I cleaned red puke off of our bedroom rug, knowing that in a few hours I’d have to be up and at work.

All of these things hurt me, and hurt me a lot. 

All along, he just kind of acted like “What? What’s wrong with this?” 

Before you say something like, it was my choice to date him, to marry him, to stay with him… I want to say that I’m a strong person, and a smart person. I held it together through a lot, and I was taught to look out for my friends and family and people around me. I was taught that you don’t just leave someone when they are down, and he was frequently down. Each time something came up, he was the victim. It was a girl making up lies about a relationship he had with her, a business partner who was totally insane and had awful ideas and took advantage of him, it was me raising objections when I should have been grateful. 

And yeah, he had come into my life when I was newly on my own, and at the end of my first serious relationship. I was scared and I was heartbroken. I needed a friend and he appeared. I wasn’t exactly on my A game for scrutinizing a future partner. I just needed a friend. And so I trusted him.

I’ll also add that many other people have also been taken on a ride with his lies and manipulation. So I have the knowledge that if I was foolish to trust him, I wasn’t the only one. 

Yes, it’s true I wanted out of that marriage. I don’t think I can blame myself for this. I tried to stick it out, because marriage is tough sometimes and that’s what I believed in doing. But with two young kids, and a heavy workload with our business, and his large amounts of travel, and an aging dog, and a lawn to water when he wasn’t there, and countless other household, family and business tasks, I was at my physical and emotional limit. Thinking back on this time, I’m really sad. I‘m really sad… for myself. I shouldn’t have had to go through this. I shouldn’t have had to carry all that alone. It was so unbelievable, so incomprehensible, that my logical brain just kept telling me that it had to be temporary; things like this just couldn’t go on forever. It would get better.

But as things did continue to go on like that, soon I told him that *I* couldn’t go on like this, and we fought about it. He said that we just had to keep doing it a little longer, but I blurted out “I don’t trust you anymore.” Six months later, after a work meeting that we hosted at our house, I had gone to bed when I woke up and heard whispering. I felt extremely anxious. I got out of bed, and started to head downstairs. I felt like I was out of my body, floating down the hallways and down the stairs. I quietly walked through our dining room and into our kitchen, as our two children slept upstairs. I saw him standing face to face with a female colleague of ours, the same one who he had been traveling with for months. I had been asking him if anything was going on between them, and he repeatedly said no. Even told me once that he “was sad for us, and sad for our family, that I thought he would do something like this.” But there they were, standing inches apart, probably had been kissing or whatever, and all I said, calmly, was “So everything I’ve been asking you about was true, huh.”

That was 10 years ago, almost to the day, from when I am writing this. I wish I could say it got easier after that. I can say that I regained my freedom, and I gained some separation from this person, and got the chance to clean up my life. But with shared kids, who I care deeply about, the struggles continued. Divorcing a person may end the physical relationship, the shared finances, the shared home, but it doesn’t do much in and of itself to change the dynamic between two people. So I don’t need to describe what it‘s been like. 

The other day, as I sat in the waiting room of a doctor’s office next to my older daughter and my ex-whatever-he-was, I just stopped trying to understand. He was asking for a third time, through gritted teeth, for the sole health insurance card that we all share for the kids - “we” being me, him and his second-wife-soon-to-be-ex-wife. The insurance card that had been lost in his house for a good amount of time until last week, the insurance card that I needed in about another week to take my other daughter to an appointment with a new specialist. 

He asked if I had the card. I looked at him but didn’t say anything.

”We’ve asked several times,” he said, with tension in his voice. 

It’s unclear who “we” was. Maybe he and our daughter, who sat between us, with her eyebrows starting to rise, like an animal pricking up its ears. I’m not going to get involved in this, those eyebrows seemed to say, but I’m sure interested in what’s going to happen.

”Yes.” I said.

”Can I have it?” he said.

”Oh, you mean like give it to you?” I said. I had thought he had asked me to bring it because it was needed for the appointment we were waiting for that morning.

”Yeah,” he said, looking at me like I was some kind of idiot.

”Well,“ I started to say, “I’m going to need it next week for that upcoming appointment.” 

Now, I am susceptible to being shamed… it floods my body with anxiety and I get flustered. At that moment, sensing my confusion, he usually made his move - turning up the authoritative vibes and getting what he wanted, knowing that I can’t tolerate being “wrong”, or, in this case, his creation of the impression that I’m completely nuts and making no sense by objecting to him.

“I need it too,“ he interrupted, “There are other children,” referring to his son, whom he shares with his second wife/sort-of-wife (I don’t know their exact status).

I started to ask him if he would need the card between then and next week, because if he did, I would have given it to him. But as I’m talking, he just started muttering to himself, something about “ridiculous”. That about ends it, and we sat in silence until being called into the doctor’s office.

As I drove home after the appointment, I thought to myself, ”Wow.” That was probably the first time I was able to fully disarm him, and the first time I realized just how utterly ridiculous he is. He wants to bicker with me over an insurance card, while our daughter sits between us, having had her track season disappointedly ended by an injury (the reason for the appointment). After I left the appointment, I was going to my dad’s house to drive him to his therapy appointment. And next week I have my mom’s funeral, as she passed away earlier this year. It’s not an easy time for me. There are many ways that even just being reasonable and getting through the appointment with no drama - if he could do it - would be a help to me. But no, there’s something to win - a blue, laminated insurance card with his second wife’s name on it - and he’s not going to pass up the opportunity to try to get it.