So, I don’t want to write about this but I know that I have to. I have to get this story out of me and leave it there. During one of my “practice what you preach” therapy sessions, I told my therapist this story and her response was “hell no!” Now, as a therapist, I know that moment of genuine empathy where you cross the proverbial professional line and just have a real reaction with a client. Just this time, it was for me. It is a “hell no” story and even as I start to type it now, I can’t believe I still stayed with her for months afterward and I can’t believe I pined for her for so long since. This says more about my self-worth than any amount of desirability for her. I know some of you have been waiting for this post, as I’ve gotten your emails and your comments and yes, I promise it will be a good one but I would ask of all of you that you please not judge me for my actions or for staying. M is a great gaslighter and I genuinely felt like I deserved a lot of the shit she did to me but also, I truly loved her and believed it was “for better or worse”. This just so happens to be the worst.

A little background so that you understand the emotional tsunami this caused in me. Like I’ve said before, M and I never lived together. This was a source of constant tension between us for the last 5 years of our relationship. I didn’t want to be long distance anymore and I wanted the relationship to progress in a normal way. I wanted my girlfriend to live with me. M would call this “expectations” on her. In fact, when she told me about her new girlfriend, one of her selling points was that she “doesn’t have expectations of me”. I know, I know, so romantic. Insert sarcasm here. M truly thinks that’s a good thing and normal. I fought this hard, I fought it until the end. The thing she disliked the most about me was my expectations of her. You know, that I wanted to live with her, get married, and have a life. How terrible of me! I might not be able to discontinue the sarcasm in this one. In the beginning, she still lived with her husband. Then her husband moved out and she moved someone in. This was another awful story but it’s not the one for today. She moved in a friend who I never met and lived with her for a very long time. More on that later. Then she moved into a townhouse on her own and then to another one a couple houses down. In the first move, I was happy she was finally starting fresh – I thought this would just be a transition until we found a place or lived together. On the second move, I started to get antsier. I didn’t want to be alone anymore and even though we did spend every day together via video chat and saw each other as often as possible, it just wasn’t feasible long-term. It made me angry that it was for her and that she was so hot and cold with whether she could make the long-term commitment. In the end, it continuously broke my heart. I am not over-exaggerating that I cried almost every night for the last few years of our relationship. It was so painful being alone every night and missing her. It sounds pathetic now that I know the truth.

M has always been a social butterfly but she also (as you can tell) has really poor boundaries with people. She started friendships that became very intense very quick often and it wasn’t unusual for her to cross boundaries like moving someone in that her girlfriend never met without talking to her about it. She was always extremely narcissistic and my feelings were last on the list when it came to her doing what she wanted. She started a friendship with this man that lived in another townhouse on the street. He was very awkward and strange, to say the least. The 40 something virgin who was probably ecstatic that a woman like M would pay him any attention. I remember the first time I met him and we were going to one of her friend’s party and he led her in the door with his hand on her lower back. I know what you are thinking and no, she didn’t have sex with him. I said before that I wish she could have just had an ordinary affair, that’s not where this is going. At this point, he didn’t know about me or that she was gay so when I saw this small act that spoke so loud, I knew he had a crush on her. Throughout the party, he sat next to her, offered to hold her drink, went to get her things, and only spoke to her. I watched M looking for any type of reaction to what was going on and that it was going on in front of me. She had no clue and when I brought it up and said I was upset about it, she got furious with me, called me jealous, and later used it as an excuse for why I could never be around him. I actually don’t know if he ever knew that I was her girlfriend or that she is gay because I only interacted with him one more time after that and it was brief. She hung out with him often, even though it bothered me. She would say things about him just being awkward or on the spectrum as if that made up for the fact that she constantly disrespected me and our relationship. Those damn expectations that I have.

Anyways, on one of our break-up-get back together incidents where she broke up with me in the summer so she didn’t have to move in with me around four years ago, we met in our normal half-way city to “talk” which always was us never talking and just making up with sex which would lead to us being back together. On the last day of the weekend, she told me she had something to tell me. She told me that she had been helping R (the guy) find a new place and that she had decided to move in with him as a roommate. I knew that she had been helping him find a place and for awhile she had actually been eyeing these newly built townhomes that were in the same area and even made me stop with her once while they were being built to look at them. Yep, that’s the townhouse he decided to buy “on his own” and she was moving into with him. Sighs. I was devastated. Now that I think about it, her manipulation of everyone around her is an incredible talent. We both got played. I cried uncontrollably in that moment. Not only did she lie to me and make this big decision without me, she was moving in with someone else again, and once again it wasn’t me. I was inconsolable in that moment. She looked shocked that I was so upset and she tried to hold me and calm me down. Saying that she couldn’t afford her rent and this would help her out so much, it didn’t matter. I was so hurt. When she couldn’t calm me down and I just stopped talking, she literally showered and then left. This very much mirrored our final moment as a couple. She literally showered in a hotel room and left me. Wow, full circle. As I type this, I am astounded how many chances that I gave her. Anyways, I don’t remember how we got back together that time but I did what I always did and I tried to overlook it, hoping that maybe she would move the next time. For the next years, I was never allowed at that townhouse because I “would cause a scene”. I never caused a scene with one of her friends, in fact, she did quite a few times but that’s also other stories. It went so far, that for some period of time, I questioned if she was having sex with him, I even questioned if he actually lived there. Why? Because I never even heard his voice in all that time. M would only Skype me upstairs in her bedroom, which was the master bedroom by the way. Yes, he gave her the master bedroom of his newly bought house and he also gave a bedroom to the boys. She always slept in her bedroom usually on Skype with me and I never saw him or heard his voice in all of those years. In fact, the one time I went there in the end was when I took her to Paris for her birthday last January. Insert Laugh. Yes, we were just in Paris January of 2016. That’s how little time has passed and look how much has happened. I said this would be unedited and right now, I have to stop writing this because it is making me emotional.

Ok, after an hour break, I am back to trying to get this out. In that moment, I flashbacked to all the wonderful moments in Paris last year and thought about how much has changed and I missed her. It’s amazing how I can still miss her after all of this. Anyways back to the story, so that was the only time I had ever been to the townhouse was January of last year and I remember walking in, everything was her. It was all decorated by her. He wasn’t there for that night, of course, and I actually didn’t see one thing that resembled a piece of him in that house except when she pointed out where his closed bedroom was. One time I asked her how much she paid in rent there and she said a ridiculous number, I want to say under $300 a month for the master bedroom, her kid’s room, a rec room for them downstairs, and all furnished by her. For all purposes, it was her house and he just happened to live there from time to time. She used him. I don’t believe M ever had sex with him, even when she did date men they did not look/behave like him and she’s not the type to just have sex with someone. She just manipulated him and took advantage of an awkward person who might have developed feelings for her and she could just play. It disgusts me. I am not that type of a person. I hated her living arrangement, I hated that she controlled everything, and I hated that I allowed it to go on for so long.

Then, in January of last year, everything changed. It seemed like M and I were on the right track again. We had gotten back from Paris, had a beautiful time, reconnected in a lot of ways, and she was even talking about moving in and getting married again. One of her friends had told her that if she didn’t marry me, she would and because M only cares what other people think (not including her partner) she of course, started ring shopping after that or at least, that’s what she told me she did. The shitty part of that is I’m pretty sure that’s the friend who she met the new girlfriend through. I never liked her for another incident that happened but more on that later. So, yes just last January M was ring shopping for me and moved more clothes into my house, filling her first drawer in close to a decade. Things were beautiful, until on one visit she had something else she needed to tell me. We had gone to a graduate school event of mine and gotten into a fight on the ride home. I remember what started the argument but it was one of those times where it just spiraled out of control and M actually ended up leaving. She left my house and said she was driving home late at night after drinking. She turned off her phone so I couldn’t even call her. After I calmed down and realized this was stupid and she was unsafe, I kept trying to call her. She finally answered and after awhile, I convinced her to come back. She was already an hour away. I truly regret all of the stupid fights we had, some of which were fueled by alcohol and my anger. With all the terribleness she did to me, I wish I could at least look back and know that I had the integrity to not be mean to her but I can’t because I was mean. Sometimes I was really mean. I punished her for not keeping any of her promises and I really regret that. She didn’t deserve the meanness. When she finally got back, we went to bed. The next morning, she woke me up with sex. I wanted it and her, I wanted the night before to be erased so we could start over. When we were done, she rolled over to her side of the bed and maybe a minute later said she had something she needed to tell me so that we could go forward with our future plans. Literally, she fucked me, rolled off of me, and told me she had something serious to tell me. At first, I was terrified. I thought she slept with someone else. I was pissed that she had something that seemed potentially break-up worthy but she got her last fuck in first. I just said ok and waited for the blow. She said it was something from three years prior.

Three years prior, she had done her normal break up with me week in the summer. This time, it was right before I started my graduate program and I was in a bad car accident. It was not a good time in my life or my family’s lives and the accident was just the cherry on top of a bad summer. M did what she always did, she didn’t come to see me, she didn’t come to the hospital, and when I brought it up, she broke up with me. Typical for her. We were broken up for one week before getting back together. Apparently, this thing she needed to tell me happened during that week off. I thought for sure she slept with someone else now. During that time, it was also stressful for M. She has two chronic illnesses and her insurance had dropped her. In fact, I spent the entire fall semester of my first year in graduate school trying to sign her up on the marketplace when the affordable care act went into effect. If you remember that time, it was awful trying to sign up. If you are outside of the US than just know the US healthcare system sucks. I remember that time period because she was stressed out over this and I felt out of control in being able to help her. She had a large 401k and we talked about her taking money out of that for a little bit to pay for her healthcare until we knew what the medical system would look like after the ACA. I offered to help her pay for it with some of my school loan money. I wanted to help her, I always helped her.

So she began with reminding me of that time period and if you haven’t figured it out yet, she dropped a bomb on me that I can honestly say, I will never recover from. She told me that she married R for his insurance benefits. She married a man, was living with him, and had lied to me about it for three years. That’s why she couldn’t move in with me. That’s why she couldn’t marry me. All of the fights and break-ups accusing me of pushing her too hard or having too many expectations were really all covers for the fact that she couldn’t be with me like I wanted. She was married. She IS married. She then told me that she had talked to her friend (the one that wanted her to marry me) and her ex-sister-in-law about it and they both said that if I loved her enough, if I cared about her health, then I would understand. Fucking bullshit! That’s the type of shit that is said to women all of the time that leads to abuse. If I was just a good woman, an understanding woman, I would let it go because she is more important. Fuck that! She then told me that we could still have a “ceremony” but she needed to stay married to him for his insurance. At this point, no she didn’t. The healthcare system was better and she makes good money. Figure it out yourself, like I do! Like we all do! It all started to set in what she had done and just like in that hotel room when she told me she moved in with him, I was inconsolable. It started to set in that I spent all of that time trying to find her insurance that fall and she had already been married. It was so awful. I have been cheated on, I’ve been abused, I’ve been hit, I’ve had pretty much every bad thing a woman can have done to her done to me, and this was the biggest betrayal I’ve ever experienced. My former fiance was married again but she wanted me to be her third spouse but not legally, and she lied to me about it for years. What the fuck was I supposed to do with that?! At one point I asked if the kids knew, yes they did and they thought I was ok with it. Even worse. I asked if her Mom or family knew, no they didn’t. On some plane, she knew this was bad enough she couldn’t even tell her parents. I asked, what would have happened if you went into the hospital for one of your illnesses and I found out that way? No answer. I said, you do realize he is your legal spouse and he can make all end of life decisions for you over your kids and me. She hadn’t thought of that. You haven’t thought of that? What the fuck?! In fact, she never had a good reason for doing this except she’s too incapable of taking care of herself. Someone else always has to do it for her. She destroyed our relationship that week three years prior and it was never going to be ok. If I would have had a choice at the time, I would have felt differently but she also took my consent away. She showed how much she loved me with one signature and she did it while I had been in the hospital and could have died in a car accident.

I tried to forgive her. I tried to move on from it. I tried to stay in love with her. It is the single worst thing anyone has ever done to me and she didn’t even give me time to be angry. She broke up with me a few months later. Now, she’s moved on but still married to a man. Yes, this is offensive to me. I’ve been out for 20 years and she had the nerve as a self-identified gay woman to use the heterosexual system that I’ve been marching, advocating, and fighting for the same rights with since I was 15 years old. Through this, I saw how much of a coward she really is and it became incredibly unattractive. Through even this, I still loved her. I know you probably think I’m crazy but I had nothing to compare this too. I couldn’t pick up a self-help book on the topic nor had anyone I’ve ever known gone through this. There was nothing to do but try to cope on my own. It makes me sick that her family has no idea what she did to me. That everyone sees me as some evil bitch that hurt M. They have no idea what I endured and now she’s just able to move on. I wonder if the new girlfriend knows what she did to me. I wonder if she’s ok with that situation. She must be and if she is, then they must be perfect together because this goes against every moral fiber of my being. It’s not about the insurance thing, in fact, I don’t care why people get married and if they are twisting the system, good for them. This is about her manipulating, lying, cheating, all while being in a monogamous relationship with me. Multiple times after that, she had made statements to the effect that she has never cheated on me. Are you kidding?! This is the ultimate cheating. You are married. I just literally laughed out loud out about how insane it is. How insane my life was for so so long. How insane it is that this was just last year. How insane it is that she still gets to control everything by blocking and unblocking me at her whim. How insane it is that I still miss and love her.

Well, there it is. The bombshell. I can’t say writing about this is helping in this moment. I’m actually having a panic attack as I write this. The amount of pain these incidents caused me is insurmountable and anyone out there that is also going through an emotionally abusive relationship, please know you are not alone and you can choose you. Don’t stay for as long as I did.

Lesson 24: There was no lesson in this. I’m trying to unlearn not trusting people now. Nothing is impossible.