I started this blog because I needed an outlet for the pain and anger I've been struggling with ever since my married boyfriend of two years dumped me two weeks ago. If you read my first two posts, you know that the break-up took place after his wife found out that we were seeing each other, confronted him, and he was suddenly overcome with the realization that he loved her more than he loved me and that saving the marriage he had left to flounder for years was "the right thing to do", even if it meant breaking every promise he had ever made to me, completely rewriting our emotional history in order to cast himself in a more favorable light, and agreeing to never see or speak to me again. And if you
haven't read my first two posts, I suggest that you do so before you continue reading this one, otherwise I'll probably just come off like a raving, ranting lunatic. But pain and anger don't just well up inside a person for no reason. Heartbreak doesn't just happen. Someone has to actually reach inside your chest, rip out your most vital and delicate organ, and then crack it like an eggshell while you stand there and watch. And then turn and walk out the door as you stagger around in a daze trying to remember where you put the duct tape.
In my last post I wrote about the five chambers (i.e. stages) of heartbreak. One of them was anger. For the last two weeks, I've been enmeshed in a grieving process, so paralyzed and overwhelmed by pain that my friends keep calling me just to make sure that I'm still alive and in pain, and not swinging at the end of a rope. That's one of the unfortunate side effects of heartbreak. You may be the one whose heart is hurting, but the hurt colors everything you do and, if it stays around long enough, it starts to affect the people around you as well. The people who really care about you, the ones who are closest to you, do their best to understand what you're going through and try as hard as they can to support you in your (extended) moment of despair. But no matter how many times they hug you and say, "Now, remmber,
call me if you need to talk. I'm here for you", you still feel guilty for having dragged them into your personal hell pit of misery and making them worry about you when they already have more than enough worries of their own. And because neither I nor my friends have access to a heartbreak handbook that can tell us how long this acute stage of pain can be expected to last, I've started to become very self-conscious about verbalizing what I'm feeling. Two weeks is nowhere near enough time to get over the loss of a man who was such a huge part of my life for two years, but it's much too long to hold my friends hostage to endless recountings of what he did to me, spontaneous rants that would be better directed at him in person, and sorrowful sighs followed by a fresh flow of tears.
That's why I was heartened when I awoke this morning with a vague awareness of something new stirring beneath the cloak of despair I had worn to bed. After a moment or two of introspection I realized that it was...anger! Yes, I'm still sad and wish with everything in me that I could just cease to exist without actually committing suicide, but now I'm starting to get pissed-off as well. This isn't the first time I've felt anger in regard to the situation. I felt it on the day he made his selfish, unmanly exit from my life, but it was only a fleeting emotion, no match for the all encompassing sense of personal devastation that has characterized most of my waking moments since then. But this new version definitely has some punch to it. Instead of tearing up whenever I picture him, I've started thinking of how undeserving he was of the time and love and unfailing devotion I lavished on him for the last two years. One thing in particular that sets off my newfound sense of rage is the memory of him telling me that his wife had made him promise not to write to me ever again and that he had agreed to the injunction.
For the past two weeks, I've done nothing but mourn my loss, obsess over how much I miss him, and weep in despair at the thought of never seeing him again. But I swear to you, right here, right now, with God is my witness, that if he actually had enough manhood in him to walk through my door and attempt to make amends with me in a face to face kind of way, my first instinct would
not be to fling myself into his arms and plead with him to make me feel loved and desired again. Not even close. My
first instinct would be to walk up to him, jab my finger into his chest and tilt my head back so that I was looking directly into his eyes (he's very tall), and tell him that as much as it hurts to have a broken heart, it hurts even more to realize that the man who broke it is a gutless, self-serving coward who was so desperate to assuage his wife's anger when she found out about our relationship, that when she demanded that he promise to never see me or even write to me ever again, he simply nodded his head and promised. And the reason he did it was that he wasn't man enough to tell her that even if he was willing to never see me again, after two years of writing to one another for two to three hours nearly every single night, he was at least going to do me the courtesy of sending an email explaining what had happened so that I wouldn't lie awake all night wondering if he was sick, or dead, or had been abducted by aliens. But he was too focused on making things easier on himself to remember that in the two years we had been together, we only saw each other once or twice, occasionally three times a week, and for only a few hours at a time, which meant that the bulk of our relationship had actually been spent online, exchanging emails, sending one another links, and watching Patriots games "together" during football season. If he truly cared about me as much as he let me believe he did, he would have told her all of this, sent the email, and
then gone back to groveling his way out of guilt. He
should have told her because it was the right and manly thing to do. But he didn't. He just stood there and let everything that had been important and precious between us wither and die and become nothing. And of all the things he did or didn't do that contributed to the gigantic fissure that broke my heart in two and turned my love for him into the pain that I am still trying yo get through, it was
this one that made me so angry that the sheer force of it had pushed aside the mist-coated memories of our aborted love and allowed me to finally see the stark, ugly truth that I should have seen all along.
And as for his wife...well, if she was so utterly devoid of even the tiniest shred of compassion it would take to understand that despite my technical status as the "other woman", I was still a flesh and blood human being with feelings that were every bit as important and genuine as hers, then maybe he and she deserved each other and
should spend the rest of their lives working on a marriage that they could have been working on all along instead of letting it lie there like an old rug that they had forgotten to even notice until someone happened to mention to her that they'd seen her husband in the company of another woman, which sent her into a territorial tizzy, which led to the confrontation, which, in turn, set off his long-dormant sense of commitment to their marriage and the concept of fidelity in general, as well as the sudden awareness that his relationship with me had been "wrong", even though its alleged "wrongness" had never bothered him before she found out about it. But now, faced with the possible disintergration of his comfortable home life and familiar daily routine, the wrongness of othe relationship that had until that night been the best and most cherished aspect of my existence became the driving force behind the equally sudden awareness that he was hopelessly and irrevocably in love with the wife whom he been ignoring every night for the past two years, if not longer, just as she had been ignorning him, but instead of attempting to bridge the gap which had led to their mutual ignorning of one another, he had preferred to spend his evenings enjoying extended email conversations with me. (And being the sentimental idiot that I am, I still have every single email.)
That's what I would tell him
if he were man enough to acknowledge that there are two women who have been "wronged" in this situation and that it was his responsibility to assuage my pain as well as hers. But all I got for my trouble was a quick Saturday morning kiss off, a follow-up email in which he "wished me well", and a heart that will never beat quite the same way again. In recompense for the time she spent living in oblivion,
she got the man she never even knew she'd almost lost without having to work anywhere near as hard as I did to try to hold onto him. But that's the way the man-shaped cookie crumbles. And there's no more sense in crying over crumbled cookies than there is in crying over spilled Heineken (
see first post). Of course, knowing that doesn't necessarily mean I'm past the tears and banshee wails quite yet, but I think being pissed off at the unjust way he's treated me since that night is a good sign and may even be the harbinger of a time in the not too
too distant future when I'll get up one morning and not feel that awful sensation of tightness in my chest and throat. And maybe, after that, I'll start to have an appetite again and won't have to force myself to eat a slice of bread or a handful of M & M's every eight hours or so just to take the burn off the emptiness in my stomach. I feel almost giddy just thinking of it. Imagine! A day without tears and anguish as my constant companions. A week without the image of his face blocking out the sunlight and the echo of his crushing final words reverberating like the buzz of a killer bee inside my brain. Who knows? Maybe, if this anger thing sticks around a while, I'll even be able to sleep for more than a few hours before waking up all alone in the bed where we used to make love and where...no matter how many times I change the sheets...I can still sometimes catch the scent of his stupid patchouli soap.
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