We live in the era of advertising, where we regularly feed on sugar-sweetened reality dispensed from biased sources. Though we know not to believe everything we see and hear, some possibilities tempt us to accept them as true.
I moved across the country to escape the adoration of a one-way relationship, a harmless but shiftless fellow he was, full of good intentions but bereft of motivation. Resolving to solitude in a windswept shack on the Pacific Coast I quickly fell into the grips of my own imagination, capitalized upon by a guy who must have read my transparent mind and dressed himself in my fantasies.
He sold himself well, aligning similarities to suit me and sprinkling them casually throughout our conversation for me to piece together, and when he knew he had me convinced he would ‘confess’ what I had ‘guessed,’ confirming the whole soul mate theory. Now I can see my naiveté, but back then it seemed so natural that I began to believe the stuff of movies.
Our idiot hearts would pump themselves into exhaustion over a squid without our brains to tame them. But brains have their own deceits. Generations of people in less than perfect situations convince themselves into happiness with the help of certain mantras that mingle through society like viruses. Love, an intangible, also attracts other intangibles like Fate, Serendipity, and other higher powers which we can conjure up to support it when it grows weak. For four years I fed myself this balderdash. With such a steady diet I waltzed like a Thriller zombie to the altar.
Myth 1. “The rush of love we felt when we first meet is the most genuine, unadulterated indication of compatibility.” The ‘love at first sight’ myth sounds so noble. “I knew right away,” we hear people say. These people also tend to say things like, “whenever Bob pisses me off I think about the way he approached me when he asked me out for the first time, and I’m reminded of how much I love him.”
If you love more deeply the more you know the person then you can claim love at first sight, but not if you need to recall those days in order to feel the love again. I loved my new purse too until I learned it always slipped off my shoulder and jammed at the zipper and had such a strange shape no combination of stuff could fit into it but I didn’t keep it just because I remembered how good it looked in the store.
Myth 2. “Because we defied the odds it must be meant to be.” Because we happened to meet at such an unlikely place; because we happened across each other at unlikely places three times before he asked me out; because we share the same anomaly; because we shared the same unusual situation or experience…We like to believe that love glues us to others for a reason. Until other reasons appear to the contrary.
Myth 3. “We’ve been through so much together.” Couples who have tangled up too much of their lives together say things like, “Bob is the only person who understands me, I don’t know if I would have survived all this stress without Bob at my side.” In truth they would have persevered on their own and not used the stress of life as an excuse to stay with a husband they no longer love.
Myth 4. “We weathered so many challenges, it must mean we have the strength to last.” This is usually followed by, “we just need to get past this bad patch.” I was not a quitter. I made a promise. I needed to validate all the other times I soldiered through. In retrospect I couldn’t believe I had wasted so much time/money/love on this reject… so I constantly fed myself on #3, #2, & #1
My only previous relationship being with a benign guy, I clung to the rush of love when it hit me, and hopped on that train buying a full priced ticket for the end of the line. I concentrated on arranging my cabin to avoid looking at the warning signs that passed outside.
Stop 1. All his great accomplishments took place in the past.
Stop 2. All the hobbies and interests he claimed to participate in also became dormant short after we got together.
Stop 3. He had fallen out with his family and they didn’t attend our wedding or contribute anything to it.
Stop 4. He used his nickname rather than his given name on official documents.
Stop 5. I found official documents with his name misspelled or with an incorrect birthdate.
Stop 6. He didn’t have a driver’s license and wouldn’t use any plastic form of payment for anything, preferring cash only. He had a garnishment for failing to pay his student loans.
Stop 7. He couldn’t recall the chronology of past events. He had lots of stories but they seemed disjointed in time.
Stop 8. He had trouble keeping a job and cited a variety of extenuating circumstances that caused his termination or prevented him from finding work.
Stop 9. When he did have a job I could never pin down his work schedule; he appeared home at odd hours.
Stop 10. Though he described himself as a superstar in his field when we first met, he settled for work far inferior to his stated abilities. He claimed to have preferred to ‘opt out of the rat race.’
Stop 11. He casually asked, ‘they haven’t cut us off yet, have they?’ when I expressed concern about having enough money to pay the bills. (We lived at the edge of our means due to his lofty projections but low income.)
Stop 12. He lied about inconsequential things, silly things, like when I asked if he had eaten the leftovers he would say yes but I would find them in the fridge untouched, and when I would ask him why he would lie about that he accused me of making a big deal out of nothing when I was just asking a question and not making a big deal of anything.
Stop 13. I found out that he lied about big things too, like having a job rather than pretending to go to work. He only confessed this when rent was due and I asked him for his contribution. Begging for forgiveness, he said that he found out his mother was dying of cancer and was so distraught he didn’t show up for work one day and got fired.
End of the Road. I discovered he lied about anything he wished to avoid, like work, bills, taxes, and accountability in general. I gave him $500 to leave and put him on the train to Seattle.