Blindsided Again
Today the man I have loved with all my heart, soul, mind, and body divorced me. The fairy tale love story that I thought would last forever ended in a courtroom in Charlotte, NC, where I was not present.
Why go when there is nothing you can do to stop the inevitable?
And just as I was blindsided by the beginning of my love for him, I was similarly blindsided by the devastating end of his love for me.
My beloved David found another woman to love. She isn’t young or “hot”—but she is worth millions of dollars (a fact he brought up constantly in the months before he chose her over me and my world came crashing down).
But I digress….
For the nearly 3 agonizing, torturous years it has taken us to reach a settlement, he has insisted quite forcefully that they are “just friends.” After all, she’s still married—to a man who was once a very prominent cardiac surgeon, but who now wanders peacefully through the world…his mind slowly being erased by the ravages of multiple sclerosis.
God knows the truth, of course.
And I know what I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears. I know that the things I was owed—love, loyalty, communication, and fidelity—were given to someone else.
And that someone else was a particularly bitter pill to swallow. While David is a grown man with free will who is responsible for the choices he’s made, I can never forget the first time I met this woman—an old friend from Jackson, MS, where he grew up—at a high school reunion in 2009, just months after we were married.
She was shockingly rude when we were introduced—I was stunned by the open hostility from this woman I had never seen before. Later in the evening, she looked me straight in the eye and, with a sly smile, brazenly told me, "I'm trying to seduce your husband." (That's a direct quote.)
In the snappiest comeback I’ve ever made, I—newly wed and secure in the knowledge that my husband adored me—smiled sweetly and said, “Well if you can do it, you can have him!”
Joke was on me, I guess.
I now know how Barack Obama feels when he remembers his fateful jokes about Donald Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner. We were both on top of the world then—and we both wrote checks with our mouths that our asses couldn’t cash.
I wonder if the former President tastes ashes whenever he thinks of that moment?
******************************
I have spent most of the last 3 years wanting to die—and a good part of that time contemplating how and when I was going to make that happen.
The reason I am still here is because—as it turns out—there are a lot of people who love me and who weren’t ready for me to punch my ticket. My beautiful, amazing children, of course—and my beloved dogs. My Warrior Princess BFF. My gaggle of amazing women friends—one or the other of whom always seemed to call me when I was rocking back and forth on the floor—the pain so deep and the sobs so hard that I could barely breathe—and talk me off the ledge.
And I can't forget my therapist, who told me “Your romantic relationships may not have been what you wanted, but MY GOD, your friends are AMAZING!” Or a group of ladies from my church who have shown up with hugs, wine, food, and enough love to keep me tethered to this life.
At least for now.
******************************
Blindsided tells the story of how I met and fell head over heels in love with the man who just divorced me. It ends with this:
I still yearn for him. After all this time, I still crave his company. Still want only to be in the same place with him, breathing the air he breathes. Still feel my heart jump into my throat every time he walks into the room or turns those grey eyes in my direction and grins at me. Still want him in ways I’ve never wanted anyone else.
I love him. I have loved him from the moment I first laid eyes on him. I will love him until I draw my last breath. There is, ultimately, no rhyme or reason to my love for him. It just is—deep as the ocean, powerful as gravity.
That remains true, even now. Even though when we met in March to sign the financial settlement, he was wearing a wedding ring—but it wasn’t the one I put on his finger.
Even though he didn’t say so much as a “Goodbye” or wish me well—just grabbed his “freedom papers” and ran out the door like the hounds of hell were chasing him.
The heart wants what it wants.
******************************
I still dream of him so frequently. In some of those dreams, he comes back to me—and those are the worst, because I have to wake up and find that I’m still alone.
It’s been almost 3 years, but I still have trouble sleeping without him spooned up next to me. I still miss him making me laugh with the stupid jokes I’ve heard a thousand times. I still miss taking communion from his hands. Still miss the family—the daughters and their spouses, our 4 grandchildren, and the sisters-in-law—I loved, but who cut me out of their lives as if I had never existed.
I guess I can’t blame them. He has apparently told all those people who used to love me that he was desperately unhappy for years. That we had nothing in common and never should have gotten married. That I was “unhinged” and made him feel alternately attacked and smothered. That I had tried to “trick” him out of “his” money and “his” house. That I am, in his words, “an emotionally unstable, explosively reactive, financially entitled, and politically extremist narcissist.”
This was news to me—since he never talked with me about any of this (other than the political issue—more on that another time). And the man who said those words was cruel and angry—not the loving man I married and spent so many happy years with.
We had our problems, of course—as all married couples do. His retirement was hard on both of us. We rented our house in Davidson, and he moved to Raleigh for the two years I needed to get my daughter out of high school. He was miserable living there—longing for Davidson and having to live in a small space with two women and multiple dogs.
After we finally moved back to Davidson, I thought things were looking up. And then the pandemic hit. He grew restless with being inside all the time—and he was annoyed that my risk propensity was much lower than his. I worked with Dr. Fauci for 20+ years—I wasn’t going out until he said it was safe to do so.
Then I lost my job of 20+ years. That was the first enormous hit that I didn't see coming, and it was a breathtaking betrayal by the boss for whom I had worked 24/7/366 for two decades. So I was spiraling into depression even before my marriage started to unravel. I know I can't have been easy to live with--stripped of my work identity, worried about money, and unsure where to even start looking for a new job.
But David never spoke of being miserable or of wanting out—until several months after the old high school friend moved to Charlotte and he started spending lots of time “helping” her with things her husband could no longer do.
In a period of a few months, I saw him changing in front of my eyes—and saw her acting increasingly as if she was his wife and I some interloper. The flirting and giggling. The increasingly intimate touching. The jokes they shared that I wasn’t a part of.
Then came the night I overheard him on the phone with her—calling her “Darling,” telling her how much he loved her, and assuring her that he felt NOTHING for me.The days afterward were so dark that I still do not understand how or why I survived them.
Later, I asked him why he never talked with me—why he never said or did anything that would have allowed me to respond and save a marriage I had no idea needed saving?
All he could say was “I was confused.”
It was news as well to all my family and friends, who were stunned that the man who for years had loudly proclaimed his love for me was suddenly just…done.
And, as an aside, it was also news to my therapist, who said she wanted to know what his credentials—and his criteria--were to form such a diagnosis about me?
She said "He knew you were passionate and opinionated when he married you, and I'm pretty sure those were among the things that attracted him to you in the first place." And she pointed out that narcissists don’t have the kind of deep family and friend relationships that I have in spades.
I guess I can take some
(freezing cold) comfort in that?
******************************
My heart has been shattered by all of this, and my mental health nearly destroyed. But, while I live, I refuse to allow myself to be bitter. To do that would make a lie of the love I know we shared, even if he now acts as if it never existed.
I have made a new life for myself in a small town in eastern North Carolina that, ironically, I discovered because David spent nine months as a supply cleric here.
I live in a beautiful 125-year-old house—the kind of house I’ve always dreamed of owning. I have dear friends here and a church community that I love. I’m not far from my children and see them often, and my dogs provide the unconditional love that keeps me going.
I am as happy as someone in my position can be. But I suspect that I will never stop grieving this love and this loss.
Grief is love with nowhere to go, and the fact that I still feel this love so intensely—in a physical, pit-of-my-stomach kind of way—after all that has happened and all the time that has passed tells me that these feelings will not die or diminish easily.
And maybe that is best. David is the only man who ever made me feel truly and completely loved—no caveats, no holds barred. He made me feel seen, and he brought a sense of joy into my life that I had never before experienced.
That is how I know what we had was real. That is what I think of—and miss—in the middle of the many nights when I can’t sleep for the pain of his absence and the grief associated with being rejected by the one person in whom I had absolute faith.
I know it was real, because—despite everything this love has cost me—I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.