I used to be such a romantic. I’d cry at love songs and sappy romcoms. I used to love it when a boy made me a mixed tape, listing all the songs that made him think of me.
I used to believe in fairy tales. And I honestly thought they could happen in real life.
Now, some days I feel like a zombie, operating in full-on survival mode, functioning with a smile on my face that is only surface deep. Faking it ’till I make it, not daring to show those around me the insurmountable pain I feel, for fear of it consuming me if I acknowledge it exists.
Other days, I legitimately feel like a freaking rock star. Like I have everything under control. And on those days, in those moments, my smile stretches widely across my face and travels deep into my soul.
I’m living in two worlds, with a foot planted firmly in each.
I’ve thought a lot about why I have my zombie days. I mean, it’s not like my marriage was great before he cheated. It sucked. And it had sucked for years. I had told those closest to me that it felt like I was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. It was never going to happen; it wasn’t ever supposed to fit.
So, why am I so affected by this? I’m free from a lousy marriage! The things that annoyed me about my ex are no longer anything I have to put up with anymore! I can stay in Colorado, for Pete’s sake!! (For those that do not know, the plan was for us to retire in FL. I do not like FL and was absolutely not looking forward to having to move from my Utopian CO to live there. Bleh.)
I think the thing that really gets to me is how it all went down. I don’t quit. Especially something like a family. I would never abandon my family like he did. When I was chatting with a good friend about the possibility of divorce, my friend asked me if I’d done everything in my power to save the marriage. Could I walk away with a clear conscience that every avenue was pursued, a good fight was fought, but just lost.
And I couldn’t. I couldn’t say that I’d put forth any effort into saving the marriage, to be quite honest. So, in that moment, I decided to try. Like, really try. I wrote a 3 page letter, front and back, and cried as I read it to him. I owned all my faults. I made myself so vulnerable. I thought, if I laid it all out on the table, if I admitted to all the moments I was an awful wife, we could grow together from there.
I read him the letter this last fall. He’d been cheating on my since the previous spring. I was too late – he was already gone.
I made myself so embarrassingly vulnerable to him, and I genuinely thought he had heard me. How preciously naive I was. And then 6 months later I found out he’d been cheating on me for a ridiculously long time. What a fool! I was lied to for almost a year and I ignored my gut when I had a feeling something was off. The levels of betrayal run so deep.
I was humiliated.
That’s where my anger is coming from, I think. That’s why I hurt straight down to my core.
I put everything out there. Left my heart unprotected, let my guard completely down. So that I could try to save my family and if I failed, I could at least say I did everything I could to keep us together.
But he can’t say that. Rather than expose his soul to me so we could grow together, he withdrew emotionally and fell into the arms of woman after woman. For months and months. Then came home and complained about what an awful wife I was.
Oh, I can feel the rage building right now.
And this makes me so mad because if I can be played for a fool so easily by the one person that I thought I knew so well, how on earth could I ever trust anyone to not do the exact same thing?
I’m jaded. And I hate it. I don’t want to feel this way. I mean, I don’t think I even believe in monogamy anymore! Everyone I know has a story. EVERYONE. I’ll never allow someone to make me feel this way again. Which means, I have to remain guarded. I can’t be vulnerable. It’s inevitable that I’ll just get hurt.
So why bother?
I know, I know. Two months. It’s been 70 days. I get it. I know what you’re going to say. The road to healing has only just begun to be traveled. I get I’m still in the early stages. And it’s impossible to really make any progress with him still living in the basement, still here to lose his ever loving mind around me whenever I do or say something that upsets him.
He’s not the easiest person to deal with. And now that I am so emotionally closed off, neither am I. Vulnerability, especially around him, is obviously not safe. I have to guard my emotions, guard my heart. I’ve already been a fool for the last year. I won’t allow that anymore.
But that means I come across as cold. Unfeeling. Uncaring.
Well, duh. *face palm*
I have to protect myself now from the person he’s shown himself to be. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
There won’t be a second time.
So when I want to escape, when I want to run away, I think it’s coming from a place of shame more than hurt. Shame that I didn’t know. Shame that I opened up, accepted blame, and put my heart tenderly in his hands – only for him to spit on it before throwing it away, tossing it haphazardly over his shoulder.
The hard truth? Our marriage, in my opinion, was inevitably going to end. He’d asked for a divorce about 9 or 10 months before he cheated. I told him no, I wasn’t going to quit the family. I didn’t believe in just giving up. I didn’t believe in abandoning the family (because that’s what I equated it to) just because we didn’t want to get our hands dirty and try to make the marriage better. I told him that we needed to work on our marriage, that I believed we could have a happy life together. So I denied him the divorce.
And then neither one of us chose to work. Neither of us tried. We both waited for the other one to change. It took me well over a year to finally get to a place where I was all in. But it took him 9 or so months to decide to throw us away and sign up for Ashley Madison.
I was too late.
I loved him. He can be such an amazing human. I married him for a reason.
And now I don’t know him. I don’t trust him. I have no clue where his morals lie.
So on the hardest of days, I completely shut down. I go out with my girls, probably drink a little too much, and try so hard to erase the shame of being such a fool, for being so hopeful and vulnerable, for being so extremely naive.
Because I had no clue, when I exposed my heart to him, that he was looking at me with eyes that had looked deep into another woman’s. That when he hugged me, he was hugging me with the same arms that had been wrapped around another woman’s body. Many other women’s bodies. And this had been going on for months and months.
How could I have missed it???
I’ll never miss it again.
Because vulnerability is too risky.
There is no fairy tale. No Cinderella story. Perhaps there’s no such thing even as true love.
I’m sure the days of operating like a zombie will pass. I’ll find a new normal and thrive there. I’ll have fun and make connections with others, but it’ll be a long time, perhaps never, before I place my heart in someone else’s hands.
I just don’t trust that they wouldn’t eventually spit on it, too.
I’ll never allow myself to walk into another relationship with eyes naively closed, blinded by love. Another person will never throw me away again.
My days of being a blindly trusting, naive little fool are over.
Walls up. Guards up. My castle is well protected. And will remain that way indefinitely.
Because those precious fairy tales I grew up watching? The ones my daughter watches and then, at the happily ever after, smiles through her tears and gives a little sigh?
They don’t exist.
It’s not better to have loved and lost. It’s better to not love at all so you can never be betrayed or hurt.
Because fairy tales, quite simply, are all just a bunch of nonsense.
A Graceful Catastrophe 