Hey 22tango! Thank you so much for the support. It is such a help. *hugs*
It's so funny how they rewrite history, isn't it? It's so much easier to rewrite it than to face the music. I can at least say for myself that even when I had my dalliances, I did not rewrite history the way he is rewriting it. I looked at both relationships and asked myself the difficult question, "Do I want long-term love or this fantasy, fleeting thing." It was hard, but I chose the long-term, and in the end I knew I'd done the right thing.
It's so funny, but I look back on the history of our relationship and I see so many little warning signs that I always wrote off for one reason or another.
When we were kids (I was 15, he was 16), I remember our courtship phase. We wrote so many long, long notes and letters. I knew he liked another girl at the time - a girl he worked with. She was nothing like me, more of the average girl from Savannah. Literally, she was almost indistinguishable from other people. He'd dated other girls like this before me, and they'd all broken his heart. He'd had these short, two or three week relationships with average girls that walked all over him. And so when he met me, I was different.
Really different.
I was a challenge, and I was nothing like him or those other girls. And so the day we started dating - eleven years ago, on Pearl Harbor Day - before we began dating he'd confessed that he sort of liked two girls and was making a decision between them. I knew at the time he was deciding between me and that other girl he worked with, but I was a kid and let it go. We started dating that day.
A couple of years later, as I was considering breaking up with him as high school was over and college was on the near horizon, I found out that he'd kissed that other girl three weeks after we'd started dating. At the time, I'd been upset, but I'd also written it off as youth. We'd only been dating for three weeks, so really it was almost a non-issue. I found out that alot of girls we'd been friends with at that time had tried to initiate things with him during the early stages of our relationship, but it hadn't really mattered because I'd also had alot of guys that were interested in me.
Years after finding out, I brought it up once and asked why he'd chosen me over those other girls. He'd told me it was because I was different - I was beautiful and smart and when he'd looked at me, he'd known I'd be loyal. That I wouldn't just up and leave.
That loyalty thing always bothered me. I never truly felt that he was with me because I was 100% absolutely what he wanted. Whenever I would think on that, though, I would remind myself of all the sacrifices he'd made for me - about how he never stopped looking at me like I was his whole universe. and I would remind myself that an adult should not base their feelings in the fleeting emotions and logic of children.
But still, it nagged at me a little, now and then.
While I was in college, he was in the Marine Corps. For four years we lived completely separate lives. When he was stateside, I would see him about once a month. When we saw eachother, we'd ML practically all day, and we'd have lots of fun - and yet it never felt 100% like we fit into eachother's lives at the time. We were on compeltely different paths. Looking back on that time, I see myself avoiding class - avoiding reality and responsibility in some ways, but also feeling very free. During that time, I did resent sometimes that I was in a committed, long-distance relationship. I told myself that if opportunities came, I would seize them, otherwise I would never know if I was settling. Looking back on his choices, he was straying a bit as well, especially after his mother died in what was my junior year of college. After that, he became a little wilder. He drove drunk and totalled his truck. He bought a motorcycle that he purchased with his inheritance and that he sold during the first year of our marriage. He was still devoted and still a wonderful guy, but there were signs. Even though he chose to relocate to Paris Island to be closer to his father and help him out, he resented not being deployed to Iraq qith his former friends.
So senior year of college rolls around and I start bringing up plans for the future. I was terrified by the future. I had no work history, no plan to fall back on other than moving home with my parent's, and it only felt logical that we get married.
I will admit wholeheartedly that I probably wasn't ready. Many people tried to tell me that, but I wouldn't listen. I knew that they made valid points, but in my mind, I was unwilling to give up on a great relationship simply because of timing, because all the people I knew said I had to be on my own for awhile. So yes, I did pressure him. He kept wanting to discuss our differences, and I brushed them off. Our differences made us stronger - I believed that then and I believe it now.
When he proposed, I remember being disappointed. I knew it was coming, but when it happened there were many flaws. I didn't feel like he put the effort into it that I'd expected. He proposed on Valentine's Day (partially because I'd unknowingly foiled his plans to propose on another day), which I hated. He proposed at a restaurant. He did not get down on one knee. I hated the ring, even though I told him I loved it. He'd tried really hard - it was the nicest thing he could buy: platinum and high quality stones and a princess cut. But it wasn't my style, and I felt like he should have known that.
So, in February we got engaged. In May, I came home for a month before returning to finish my last two classes in summer school. He was out of the Marine Corps and in the police academy. We argued alot. He had cold feet, was saying maybe we should live together before getting married, that we had barely seen eachother in the past four years and that maybe we needed to see how things would work together before taking the leap. He even mentioned at one point that maybe we should think about dating other people just to see if we really knew what we wanted. I was jealous and angry and suspicious. At some point, we got into a huge argument, and he stormed out of my parent's house saying the wedding was off and we were through. I sobbed and ran after him. He came back, comforted me, and we made up.
I found out after we were married that at that time he was having an EA (supposedly) with a girl that attended the police academy with him.
So, I went back to school. I'd been forming a strong friendship with a grad student that was in one of my writer's groups. He was brilliant - ridiculously intelligent, extremely driven, had a complete plan for his life. He was outgoing - everyone in town knew him, and he was a brother in a frat. He was a sum of contradictions, and I loved it - a bouncer at a strip club that was a virgin, a tough guy that was street smart yet extremely book smart as well. And he wanted me. Badly. I was the only woman in the room when I was with him despite the fact that girls threw themselves at him left and right. I was exactly what he wanted. In fact, he told me that he went after me despite my engagement because he'd told himself that for once in his life he wanted to have the one thing that he wanted most. He hadn't thought my engagement was all that serious, that I was settling into it.
I say we had an EA, but the truth is we had a sort of PA. No sex of any sort, but we kissed quite heavily. In the end, I broke it off because he couldn't live with the guilt - and because I knew in my heart that my not-yet-H and I had something lasting, something real.
So, we got married and I never spoke with my EA again. During the first year of our marriage, I was wrapped up in my grief over losing my "EA". I partied with coworkers whenever my husband was working nights. I had a true PA with a coworker that really only amounted to two encounters and then ended. Around that time, my H and I got into a huge argument about my activities - I was running up to my old college town almost every weekend, and I was constantly going out. He confronted me with his feelings - that I was not behaving as a wife, that I didn't respect anythign he did, etc. After my intial anger, I calmed down and resolved to be more supportive about his career (which I really did make a huge improvement), to stop going out (I also did that), and to live like a married woman. That same night, after we'd made up and calmed down, we talked for hours.
We felt closer than we'd ever felt. And that's why, in that moment, he told me something that I never expected. He said, "I'm going to tell you something, and I don't want you to get mad and freak out."
I bristled, and then he said the words that comepletely threw me: "I was in love with another woman."
Well, I did freak out. I was sobbing and my whole world collapsed in on itself. He rushed to comfort me, saying it had been nothing - just talking. He said that he'd had cold feet, and he'd felt that I never listened to him. That girl had things in common with him, and she listened.
When I asked why he'd chosen me, he said it was because he loved me, and because he knew I was the one for him. It was our history and our bond. I was beautiful, smart, funny, classy etc.
After the initial shock wore off, I almost felt comforted. I told him about my EA, and in the end we laughed and came back together, feeling good that we'd both gone through the same thing at almost the exact smae time and that we'd chosen eachother. I felt stronger in our love after that. We'd been tested, and we'd chosen eachother.
After that day, we rarely talked about the EAs, but it always bothered me that he'd said he loved her. He would deny ever saying it, or would say that "it just came out the worng way." But it nagged at me. About two years ago, we'd been at a friend's house, and I'd made a teasing comment about where he'd be without me - and he'd said, "probably in Iowa" (the girl was from Iowa). I'd freaked out, we'd argued, and the next day I'd said every nasty thing I could imagine about her in the car. He'd said, "she really wasn't a bad person," and I'd lost my mind.
He agreed to never speak of her again.
A little less than a year ago, he'd randomly brought up my EA. He'd asked me to tell him about the guy; he felt like he knew nothing about that part of my life. I'd dodged the question as I felt it could only stir up ugliness.
Then, in October of this year, I'd found he'd done a myspace search for that girl. It was after we'd had a particularily bad argument in which we hadn't spoken for a couple of days. I was hurt, and confronted him. He'd said it was just curiosity, and I let it go as I still check my EA's website from time to time out of curiosity.
So yes, there were many signs.
Anyways, not to write my entire life's story (felt good, though).
History, history - in the end, it's only determined by those that record it.
So yeah, like your H, the fog has got my H. Somehow, because they aren't truly ready for the finality of what they are doing, they try to live in that fantasy world where they don't truly lose anything.
But, life doesn't work that way. There's nothing to be done about it. I try to take comfort in the fact that one day, the fog will clear. Hopefully, that will be a day when I know what I want as well.
