I have been thirty for well over a month now, and if the remainder of the year goes as well as the last seven weeks have, my quest to go “From Nerdy To Thirty” will likely be deemed a success. I have seen myself go from the depths of depression a mere six months ago to a font of optimism today. And how could I not be optimistic? I am in love, and someone is in love with me!
When last I wrote, I was proclaiming that out of the blue I have a boyfriend, and now suddenly I’m in love? I guess for Ramón and me to realize what we almost missed out on makes us appreciate all the more what we have. That awareness fostered an overall openness that endeared us to each other quickly and our mutual endearment in turn begat love and its proclamation. And the best part is: he said it first. I know I am historically the type to fall too hard, too fast, so when those three little words started tempting my vocal chords, I stifled them.
I didn’t want to complicate the good thing we had going by professing my love, only to have it unreciprocated. The moments of free-fall while skydiving are far less intimidating that the ones in which the words “I love you” float unanswered in the air. Ramón is a particular mix of sensitive and sensible and I couldn’t be sure how he’d respond to the L-word, and didn’t think I could handle a negative response to my effusions. Besides, I was pretty certain that he knew how I felt about him because I felt pretty certain I knew how he felt about me, so it could safely be left unsaid.
One day we were lounging on my bed, just staring into each other’s eyes like in some Bryan Adams or Peter Gabriel song. I was enveloped by a warm and peaceful sense of contentment. As we lay there, Ramón repetitively opened his mouth and inhaled, as if starting to say something. After a few minutes of him behaving like a grouper out of water, and of me suspecting what might be on his mind, I said, “You seem like you want to say something.” He mumbled a reply to the contrary, so I left it at that.
A few moments later, my intuition was confirmed when he said, in a voice barely audible, those oh-so-sweet three little words. Even though I saw it coming, the way my body reacted was something I’ve never experienced. I am a girl who enjoys the feeling of butterflies in my stomach. They can be induced by seeing a guy I am falling for, nerves, or going over a hill in the road or apex of a roller coaster. While Wikipedia has the entry for “Butterflies in the Stomach” filed under its “Disease” category, it is something I couldn't live without.
When I was a child, my brother and I would seek out the thrill of those butterflies like junkies seeking a fix. The road behind my grandfather’s house, aptly named Hillside, was a rolling thoroughfare. At family get-togethers we would beg our Auntie Betsy to take us for a drive on that road. When you hit the crest of the hills just right, butterflies would follow. As a young woman, I found great joy in the butterflies induced by a newfound romantic infatuation. I realized one day that the only time I’d felt butterflies with James was when he intentionally sped up before the small rise in the West Side Highway near 96th Street. While this was a sweet gesture, its artificial induction was no replacement for the real thing. It was an instance when I truly should have listened to my gut.
With Ramón, my gut is telling me a different story. When I walked up to the café to meet him for our reunion in April, my stomach was all a-flutter. From that point on a simple glance or touch from him (or even a wanton thought of him while sitting at my desk) could send my stomach somersaulting. None of those errant butterflies compared to the bevy that was released upon hearing him profess his love for me. In chorus with the butterflies, my heart leapt into my throat. It was a jolt I can only compare to the time I accidentally laid my hand on the electric fence wire surrounding the paddock housing my Grandmothers horses, albeit entirely more pleasant. Oh, and in case it isn’t obvious: Once my internal organs realigned themselves, I told Ramon I loved him too.
As if in some reverse-Lenten fever, over the last forty days we have seen each other almost daily – spending well over three hundred hours in each other’s company (yes, I counted). Working a block from each other means we can meet up for a quick coffee and a kiss, lunch, or an after-work rendezvous. Our outings are varied, but generally standard date material: dinner and a movie, a hike through the woods, hanging at friends’ houses, an overnight trip to the North Fork of Long Island, brunch, and a museum visit. Ramón has been spending some weekend evenings at my house, and I have been spending an increasing number of weeknights at his place.
Throughout our adventures Ramón continues to give me reasons to fall for him. Ever the gentleman, he is quick to open the car door for me. One day I was alone in the office and could not leave for lunch, so he brought me over a sandwich. He reaches for my hand any time we are walking somewhere. He gave me the CD containing the lovely song he had set as my ringtone so I could listen to it. When he says he will call me, he always calls. The dirty clothes I leave in the drawer he emptied for my use are magically returned freshly laundered. And in a particularly charming gesture, en route to my first visit to his apartment, and in an effort to encourage future visits, he presented me with a gift. It was a “SmartLink” card that is automatically replenished with fares for the PATH train that goes to New Jersey from Manhattan. I sometimes wonder how I came to be so lucky and try to figure out ways to reciprocate.
So while I am falling head-over-heels for this man, the wounded pragmatist inside me, having been once bitten, is now sadly twice shy. I want to navigate this relationship with my eyes open and to know that, while it may be rainbows and unicorns right now, ultimately it takes work to make any relationship succeed. I recognize that “falling in love” is the easy, fully enjoyable part. It is dictated in the subconscious by a mix loneliness, lust, readiness and hormones. It is building a love-filled and loving relationship that requires the effort, and that is what I hope Ramón and I are cultivating with our exchange of affectionate gestures.
In building our relationship, Ramón and I have independently and jointly envisioned our future together. While we cannot be certain what exactly that future holds, we both enjoy relishing the possibilities. We talk about it in “ifs” not “whens,” but the mere fact that our future is an accessible topic of conversation gives me great relief. Being able to discuss what we want out of life and finding that in general we are on the same page only solidifies my feeling that this is a much different relationship than my marriage was. I wouldn’t say I am learning from my mistakes but rather learning to appreciate what a true relationship – and the actual relating that creates it – can be.
To our disservice, James and I rarely talked about the important issues that create a strong foundation for a marriage. We each filled out a brief questionnaire before meeting with the pastor who was to marry us, but beyond that we never broached subjects such as finances, children or our grand life plan. Many things that should have been hashed out well before our engagement were never discussed. Those that were brought up more often than not resulted in a disagreement. To prevent further altercations, I refrained from mentioning the difficult subjects on which I knew we had disparate viewpoints. I decided somewhere along the way that in time James would grow to be a responsible family man, and all I had to do was stick by his side until that time came. I only hoped it was sooner rather than later. One example of the different pages we were on was our views about starting a family together.
I think around high school I began harboring the desire to have my first child by the time I was thirty. My mom and dad were young parents, twenty-five and thirty respectively when I was born. Granted, it’s not prom night childbirth young, but they were always active and energetic with my brother and me. I wanted, as a parent, to have the energy to chase a toddler around; to stay up sewing the child’s Halloween costume long after she went to sleep but not be bleary eyed in the morning to feed her breakfast; to not embarrass the poor kid with my out-of-touch fashion or music preferences; and to ultimately be around when my grandkids and great-grandkids were born.
My twenty-fifth birthday came and went, along with one boyfriend after another. At twenty-seven I realized that if I were going to have a baby before I turned thirty-one, I would have to meet the father of my unborn child that year. It would leave me one year to date, one year to be engaged and one year of newlywed bliss before conceiving. Simultaneously I realized that I was in no position to be raising a child at that point. A broke waitress living in Manhattan is not exactly set up to become Mother of the Year. But I figured if the balls were in motion at least I could set my eyes on motherhood at thirty-one, thirty-two, or thirty-three.
When I met James it felt like he was the right guy coming in to my life at the right time. In retrospect, if the life plan I’d concocted was a square hole, James was the round peg I was trying to force in it. Certainly my resolve to make the relationship work, if only to fulfill some great scheme I’d concocted, did nothing to further its cause.
However, James was wary to reproduce again. Jamie was such a perfect child, he said, that he didn’t want to risk having another who turned out to be a lemon. In my eyes, I knew that having a child with James in the near future was inconceivable (excuse the pun) as he was barely a father to the one he already had. I was willing to wait until the time was right for us, when he (and I) had matured enough. Rule number one of relationships is you can’t change a man (or a woman, for that matter). Why I thought James would change on his own or under my coaxing is unclear. It wasn’t until we were in couples counseling that I was bitch-slapped with the realization of just how ridiculous my “if onlies” were.
“If only we moved in together” (I pepper my entries with links, and even if you don't click on any other , I beg you to click this one)
“If only he didn’t go out with his friends so often.”
“If only he became a better father and let me be a step-mother to his son.”
If only I hadn’t expected him to change. Just as the discussion of children was shelved, so were all others of any significance. I avoided the confrontations and therefore avoided the reality of my situation. I honestly don’t think reflecting on our future was a priority with James as, in his own words during the dissolution of our marriage, he never saw us growing old together in the first place.
In stark contrast, when Ramón and I discuss our future together, it comes very naturally as part of our everyday conversations. Nothing is forced and nothing is a battle. I think most women browbeat their men with persistent nagging to settle down and procreate, and the men do their best to avoid these discussions. In a refreshing and somewhat startling role-reversal, it is Ramón who often brings up these fairly sensitive domestic topics. His matter-of-fact way of interjecting them into our exchanges puts me at ease. As a result I generally feel comfortable telling him about my dreams and aspirations without fear of ridicule or avoidance on his part. In the last six weeks we have shared many of our considerations for our future together.
Over dinner one evening, Ramón casually asked me how many children I wanted to have. I answered, but was so surprised by the inquiry that I don’t think I posed the question back to him. The query came during a conversation about parenting, during which I asserted, “I think I’d be a good mother,” to which Ramón replied, “I wouldn’t be with you if I didn’t agree.” This was not a conversation I would have expected to have with a man who’d only that morning called himself my boyfriend for the first time, but I guess at thirty, with one child and one divorce under our respective belts, these sorts of things can be discussed matter-of-factly. Heck, the on-line dating services ask these sorts of questions, why shouldn’t the actual guy you are dating?
With the “number of children” question out there to break the ice, our discussions continue to share our visions of our shared future. I mentioned at one point that I wasn’t sure what I would do in December when my lease expired, whether I would want or be able to afford to continue living in my Inwood apartment. Ramón replied “Assuming we are still together when your lease comes up in December, I doubt I would be happy if we didn't move in together.”
We’ve even discussed what our wedding would be like. I think Ramón is in a way grateful to potentially marry a girl who has already had her dream wedding as he doesn’t seem to be one who would make a big fuss about that sort of thing. During a discussion in that vein, I quipped, “We could just walk down to the courthouse on our lunch break one day and get hitched.” True to the nature of our relationship, he responded “I was just thinking that.”
Other topical issues pop into our conversations: the use of diamonds in engagement rings, the option to terminate a fetus known to have Downs Syndrome, the idea that baby food should be homemade rather than from a jar, an individual’s right to bear arms. I think we listen to each other’s opinions knowing that the answers are more than just political but also personal. Because the conversations are started casually they are easily revisited, even if they didn’t result in us completely seeing eye-to-eye the first time around. And even if I disagree with Ramón on a topic, I definitely enjoy hearing his arguments because they are always well thought out and clearly articulated.
The crazy thing is, after three years together, I don’t think James could have articulated my stance on any of these issues. In fact, I sometimes wonder what the hell we talked about for all that time. Because of his overbearing nature, I often felt too intimidated to bring up anything of a delicate nature. And goodness knows he never bothered to ask.
In relationships past, I would normally fret for hours or even days over how best to ask the guy’s feelings on an issue, big or small, or how to tell him my own. I would become overwrought trying to build up my courage and then blindside the poor fellow with whatever it is that was weighing on my mind. With tensions thus raised on both sides, the likelihood of an argument increased dramatically.
To avoid these face-to-face conflicts (and not just in my romantic relationships), I often prefer to address my concerns in writing. The advent of word processing, e-mail, on-line chatting and text messaging has created forums far less formal than the pen-and-paper days of yore. Electronic messages can be conveyed casually, yet precisely. Often when I am angry or hurt, I feel like a frustrated child, unsure what exactly it is that is making me unhappy. I just know I am upset. Typing out and editing a letter helps me sort through my feelings (much like writing in this blog does) and ensures that I say what I mean rather than simply say something mean. Perhaps writing as a means of conflict resolution (or outright conflict avoidance) is a crutch propping up my awkward nerdiness, but it is one I value nonetheless.
My relationship with James had no written component (aside from mundane text messages about what was for dinner or when I would be home from work). Over the course of our entire relationship he sent me exactly thirteen e-mails. Most of these contained material he would normally have texted, but as I had a penchant for leaving my phone charger at home I was often rendered unable to receive texts. The very first e-mail he sent me said simply, “There, I've sent you an e-mail. Now hopefully we can a cyber couple, and go on AIM dates and play online games together when we should be working.” His opinion of e-communication was pretty clear (and frankly downright mocking), which left only our flawed verbal communication.
As nerdy as it may seem, I cherish the e-mails, texts, Facebook messages, YouTube forwards and yes, even the occasional hand-written note, which Ramón and I exchange. A simple “Thinking of you!” beamed up to a satellite and back down to the earth only a block away from the message’s origin gratifies me as either sender or recipient. On days that we can’t meet for a post-market close coffee, in Ramón’s words, these “nuggets of intraday joy … add a bounce to my step.”
I have used e-mail to ask Ramón questions that were overlooked during a tête-à-tête but later still piqued my curiosity. My nonchalant questions are met with nonchalant answers. In another example, Ramón e-mailed me one day to air a concern that was “not a big thing, small enough that I didn't want it to consume any face time together and small enough that I felt comfortable emailing about it instead of [discussing it in] an in-person conversation.” (Of course his comment was in response to a misinterpreted, poorly worded text message I had sent, so the lesson here is clearly that electronic communications lack the nuance and inflection of their verbal counterpart). Yet clearing up that misunderstanding meant that when we met up later that day, we spent the entire time enjoying each other’s company and not working out some conflict. So, despite the possible pitfalls, I value our e-lationship.
Despite our open channels of communication, Ramón has, on a few occasions, seen my unfortunate tendency to dramatize the raising of concerns. Recently I sent him a long e-mail outlining a concern I had that I feared would be a deal-breaker for him. I had spent far too long lost in my own head running over how to present it to him and what his possible responses would be. I spent hours crafting a letter to him, pasted it in to an e-mail, and clicked send. I waited nervously for his response, and when it came I was overwhelmed by the kind, calm and rational response. His reassuring reply (and I quote verbatim) included the following words of support, “Calm the f@$k down. I'm not going anywhere! We'll figure it out together ... I love you!” After breathing a huge sigh of relief, I thanked any deity who was listening that this man was in my life.
And securely in my life, he is. We are becoming more entwined with each passing day. Last weekend I met his nine year old daughter. Yes, this is the same daughter who I was told “would never meet a woman I was seeing until a ring was on her finger.” But given the fact that I have been spending time around his apartment, Ramón decided it was in everyone’s best interest if I was at least introduced to her as his “friend from the dorm at college.” I enjoyed meeting her over lunch and a couple games of “Go,” followed by ice cream. She is a thin, pretty girl, who is intelligent with a shy giggle. Upon meeting her I immediately thought of my young cousin Sierra, and making that connection left me much more at ease.
I had met Ramón’s baby mama in passing one day, and just last night Ramón and I met up with her for a little while. She is very laid back and quick to laugh, and in no way seems threatened by my presence. Next week Ramón’s parents will be in town, and he is arranging for the four of us to go to dinner. Getting to know the people in Ramón’s life is helping me understand how he lives it. He’s asked me to keep the specifics of his family life private, but I think I can say that it has taken me some getting used to, as his arrangement is not the typical “dad gets the kid on the weekends” type of deal.
Not only am I becoming immersed in Ramón’s family life, but I have welcomed him into mine. In early May I invited Ramón to go home to Chicago with me for the Fourth of July holiday. I am optimistic about our future together so felt comfortable planning for an event that was two months away when we’d only been together for one month. I am excited for our trip, but he is understandably nervous to have to follow in James' disappointing footsteps.
Our Fourth of July trip will be a pretty emotional and hectic weekend. Not only am I bringing Ramón with me, but my brother is bringing his girlfriend of over a year home for the first time. My maternal grandma will be up from Florida and will also be staying with my parents. Family from Texas is flying in to celebrate the holiday with my dad’s side of the family. Plus, my paternal grandmother is trying to convince my Great Aunt Mindy and her husband Jumpin’ Jack Flash to fly in from Vermont for the holiday. It’s been so long since I’ve seen Mindy and Jack that they never even met James!
In addition to the family events, my brother and I have decided to host a pool party at my parents’ house on third. We have invited all our local friends – from grade school through high school, and in my case the handful of college friends who landed in Chicago after graduation. Many of my childhood friends I have not seen since I was fourteen, but we have gotten back in touch through the wonderful world of Facebook. It would be such a blast to see some of them again. Many of the visiting family members will also be invited, including my aunt Crystal and the cousin we had lunch with at Christmas (along with my cousin’s mother, whom I have not seen since she divorced my mom’s now-estranged brother some fifteen years ago).
I am looking forward to being surrounded by all these friends and family. I know if I were alone that weekend, I would likely spend it on my sofa in tear-soaked flannel pajamas, as though I were some Yankee Bridget Jones. My faithful readers will recall that the upcoming Independence Day (ha!) weekend will mark one year since James told me he was leaving me. One year! Part of me can’t believe it’s been that long, since I have come so far and am so happy, and yet part of me feels like the wound is still fresh. No one is more aware of this dichotomy than Ramón, and I often wish I hadn’t been hurt the way I was, if only for his sake. Yet whether it passed quickly or arduously, one year seems significant. I hope that when that day passes I will be able to let my relationship with James go once and for all. At this point I think I have learned all I can from it, and to dwell on it only prevents my current relationship from developing organically.
I know that, as Leona Lewis sings, “it will all get better in time,” and each milestone I have passed in the last year has helped me take one more step towards happiness and success. I am so glad that those steps forward now lead me into Ramón's waiting arms. I am thrilled to bring him home this year not only to introduce him to my family and show him where I grew up, but to create some joyful new Fourth of July memories with him and to feel some fireworks under the fireworks.
Showing posts with label Ramon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ramon. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Chapter 5: Choosing Sides
After James left, I felt very alone. Too ashamed to share what was going on with the people I was closest to, I turned to the only people who knew the truth – James’ friends and family.
The first people who found out about our split were James’ brother and sister-in-law, Matt and Cammy. The first night back from our trip to Chicago, James packed a bag and went to stay with them. They had been through their own share of marital strife in their ten years together, and were working through their differences in individual and couple’s counseling. The four of us sat down on a few occasions so they could try to help us work things out, but James was adamant that he was leaving. When he tried to explain his reasons, it became harder and harder for Matt and Cammy to stay neutral. It was clear they found his explanations and accusations as absurd as I did, and tried to no avail to convince him to give me another shot. In some ways I found our talks with them more therapeutic than our sessions with the professional therapist.
After our impromptu therapy sessions, I felt closer to Cammy than I did the rest of the time I had known her. She and her husband were pretty private people, and quiet to boot. I called her regularly, and she was able to offer me great insight into my estranged husband’s actions, as her husband was definitely same cut from the same cloth as his brother. The treatment the boys received growing up verged on (or perhaps actually reached) psychological and physical abuse, and this had a similar effect on the brothers.
James once recounted an incident in which his father locked the boys out of their Queens apartment in their underwear as punishment for some misbehavior. James’ father was the youngest of many sons, and in his native Philippines he was regularly chained to the fence in front of the house or denied food while his older siblings were not. James attributed his father’s treatment as some sort of retribution for, or reenactment of, these past abuses. Despite being aware of the causality of his father’s actions, James (along with his brother) was profoundly impacted by them.
James’ mother was no picnic either, having fully emasculated her husband and run her eldest son out of the house for dating a black woman, she was left with only James to rely upon her. Her apron strings were a bondage to which James was only too willing to submit, as it meant never having to be accountable for his actions. James’ relationship with his mother was clearly in sharp contrast to his brother’s lack of one. Yet Matt and James remained close over the years because they shared the fraternal bond built in their turbulent formative years.
Cammy commiserated with my anecdotes about James’ behaviors and treatment of me. James, Matt and their father were all born under the astrological sign of Aries, which accordingly makes them all very headstrong. This trait seemed to be evident in their relationships with each other. It is also said that the Aries’ motto is “Ready, fire, aim,” meaning that those under this sign are prone to action without forethought. It is this curse of the impulsive Aries that caused Matt to up and leave his familial home in the first place and stubbornly stick with that decision for the following decade. As an Aries myself, I can think of many instances (with James or otherwise) in which I wished I could take back words or actions. Certainly with James I said things that, had I thought about it first, I should have realized would wound him.
As I talked to Cammy, who was successfully navigating a difficult relationship with my husband’s brother, I began to have hope that James and I could reconcile our differences. At my lowest moments, she offered me support and suggestions. I began to naïvely run “if only” scenarios in my head.
If only I could get him to see how sorry I was. If only I could apologize enough. If only I could start being nice to him. If only I didn’t get riled up when he picked on me. If only I could learn which of my actions triggered his anger, I could refrain from them. If only I could lose weight. If only I stop drinking. If only we could hang out and start creating new, happy memories. If only he would come and hang out at the apartment. If only we could have sex. If only I could change. If only these things could happen, I could get him back.
Cammy was as hopeful as I was, and at the time she was all I had so I went on believing it was possible.
Then I discovered the other woman in James’ life, and that was the tipping point. I told Cammy, and she was surprised, but not shocked. It helped explain to both of us that a line had been crossed and James would not be coming back to me, no matter how many “if onlies” I actualized. It meant that while something I did (or didn’t do) may have made James want to leave, nothing I could do (or not do) would bring him back. I slowly came to realize that by marrying a narcissistic Eeyore like James, I had set myself up for failure. Nothing I could do would ever be viewed as supportive, kind or loving. At some point in our relationship I had broken his trust, and unable to come back from that, he allowed every perceived slight to compound until I was the enemy.
Upon understanding this, I finally felt ready to begin outing myself to my friends and family as a future divorcée. In part I had held out because I hoped I could keep our troubles secret until they blew over. That now clearly was not going to happen. Less than a year before I had proclaimed before my friends, family and, yes, even God that I would be with James until “death do us part” and I still had a difficult time admitting to everyone that neither of us were in fact dead. I told my city girlfriends first, a pair who I am close with but were not amongst those who stood up for me in the wedding and therefore had a bit more distance and objectivity. Soon I told a few more friends, and eventually my family found out (when I removed “married” from my Facebook status, sorry Mom!).
It shouldn’t have surprised me, but of course all of my family and friends were extremely supportive. James had been so toxic as to convince me my friends and family were not the kind of people who would be there for me. James was generally on his best behavior around my friends and family, so they were certainly staggered by my news. James’ friends, however, weren’t nearly as taken aback. They had seen James’ true self, especially the way he’d been treating me.
In the months between my twenty-ninth birthday and James’ decision to move out, his treatment of me became so blatantly abusive that even his best friends felt the need to reach out to me. James worked as a bartender at his best friend’s family restaurant on the weekends. Dennis and James knew each other from high school, and Dennis was James’ best man at our wedding. One night after their shift ended at the restaurant, the three of us went out to some bars, along with Dennis’ girlfriend Shelly.
On the way home I called in a pick-up order to our favorite late-night Chinese spot. When the four of us arrived back at our apartment with the food, James realized I’d ordered him a roast pork soup instead of the roast duck soup he’d requested. It was an honest mistake on my part as both were menu items he was likely to order, but it was an error that drove James into a rage. He began one of his typical rants about how stupid I was, how I didn’t care about what he wanted, and so forth. I offered to call the restaurant and have another soup delivered at my own expense and was on the phone trying to do so when he told me not to. He ate the other dishes he’d ordered, but didn’t touch the same soup he would have happily tucked into on any other night.
On another evening when the four of us were hanging out, Shelly pulled me aside and told me that Dennis had initiated a conversation with her about James’ treatment of me. The soup incident was just one example they’d seen, and they didn’t understand why he reacted so strongly. She wondered how I was holding up. I shrugged my shoulders and wrote it off, as I tended to at that time, as just James being James. In some ways I felt callous not taking his complaints seriously, but if I did drink his Kool Aid, it meant I was in fact a mean, stupid, uncaring, fat bitch who was not loved by her husband. It was easier to assume that these words, like so many uttered by an Aries, were in the heat of a passionate moment and forgotten in the next. However their concern touched me and reassured me that I was not crazy for thinking that James had become a bit unhinged.
I don’t know what Dennis and Shelly should when they found out James was leaving me. He failed to mention to them that he’d met someone else. He was upset with me when I told them as much myself. He claimed to be taking the high road by not badmouthing me to his friends and was upset that I was “gossiping” to them. My response was that it wasn’t gossip, it was the truth, and if he didn’t think he was doing anything wrong, why would he be bothered if his friends knew about it? And frankly, I don’t think it would have mattered if he had debased me to his friends. Their opinion of me was formulated, and they had witnessed first-hand how he behaved. He was only insulting their intelligence if they assumed they would not judge him for his actions
In the months following James’ departure, I kept in touch with his friends and family. Cammy would check in via text message every now and then. James’ friend José, whose bachelor party was when James met Jacinta, lived near our marital apartment. When I was moving out, he gladly came over with his wife to help carry a few heavy things out. While they were there I plied them for information about my ex-husband. José had little to offer, telling me that James had all but disappeared. José and Dennis had tried getting in touch with him, but James didn’t respond. Bruno, James’ accomplice at the bachelor party had similarly been absent. I could only assume that James was in part so wrapped up with his new girl that he didn’t have time for his old friends and in part that he was so ashamed by his actions that he didn’t want to face them. I felt bad for an instant that I had in some way broken up a ten year friendship, until I checked myself. James made his own bed, and now he was lying in it (with another woman).
The last time I spoke to James’ mother when she came to collect a few remaining things from the apartment, she reassured me I would always be her daughter and if I ever needed anything, or wanted to visit the Philippines, to give her a call. I can’t say the same is true of my family. I was talking to my brother recently, and he recounted a conversation he’d had with my father. The two were talking about how disappointed they were in James, and my dad said that if he ever saw James again he couldn’t be responsible for his actions. My brother said he agreed with my dad, and the two used words like “lynching,” “broken kneecaps,” and “tied up and tortured in the basement.” My dad is not the most outwardly affectionate man, but I never felt more loved by him then when I heard he would handily rearrange my pretty-boy ex-husband’s face on sight.
Similarly, none of my friends have any interest in reaching out to James to inquire how he is doing. While he may have played a victim with me, they certainly don’t see it that way. To them, he is a villain to whom karma will come full circle.
José’s wife and Shelly regularly reach out to me to say hello, and while we have not met up in person, their electronic messages reassure me that I am not in fact a mean person, as James would like me to believe. José’s wife and I share the same birthday and traded wishes for happy returns on the day. When Shelly had her birthday party recently, she invited me and reassured me that James was not invited. It may be petty, but I feel vindicated that in our divorce I was left with all of our shared possessions, all of our friends, and most importantly, my dignity while his prize was the freedom to be with his female Doppelgänger.
The irony is that as I was writing this, Shelly instant messaged me, saying how she and Dennis missed me and we had to get together soon. After a few volleys of catch-up, my curiosity got the best of me, and I enquired after James. She told me she had seen him a few weeks prior when he went by Dennis’ restaurant to invite them to a party James was having at his place in New Jersey. That’s right, the same guy who refused outright to move to New Jersey, where I wanted to live, because he claimed his commute would be too long now lives even further away then I would have even wanted to. Shelly went on to tell me that James had moved into Jacinta’s place, which was no surprise to me. It made perfect sense that instead of getting his own place, as he told me he planned to do when he left me, he would move in with someone else who, like I and his mother before me, would take care of him.
Right about now James is getting ready to celebrate one year together with Jacinta. In that time, it took me five months to mourn the loss of our relationship and another three months for my heart to heal enough to let me open it up to someone else. In the process, I have learned so much about myself and who the most important people are in my life. When faced with the choice, I feel like the people I cared about sided with me. With their support, I am finally feeling optimistic about my prospects and beginning to believe what they have been telling me:
“Everything happens for a reason.”
“You are better off without him.”
“You seem like you are in a good place now.”
In my life I always find exes coming out of the woodwork at the most random times, so it will probably be my luck that since I, like James, am now dating a New Jerseyan, I will run into him in a mall or something. I hope when that time comes I am wearing my hottest new size 6 jeans, with my amazing boyfriend on my arm, and a smile on my face. I will be able to look James in the eye as I brush by him, knowing that I am improving my life not because of him but in spite of him.
The first people who found out about our split were James’ brother and sister-in-law, Matt and Cammy. The first night back from our trip to Chicago, James packed a bag and went to stay with them. They had been through their own share of marital strife in their ten years together, and were working through their differences in individual and couple’s counseling. The four of us sat down on a few occasions so they could try to help us work things out, but James was adamant that he was leaving. When he tried to explain his reasons, it became harder and harder for Matt and Cammy to stay neutral. It was clear they found his explanations and accusations as absurd as I did, and tried to no avail to convince him to give me another shot. In some ways I found our talks with them more therapeutic than our sessions with the professional therapist.
After our impromptu therapy sessions, I felt closer to Cammy than I did the rest of the time I had known her. She and her husband were pretty private people, and quiet to boot. I called her regularly, and she was able to offer me great insight into my estranged husband’s actions, as her husband was definitely same cut from the same cloth as his brother. The treatment the boys received growing up verged on (or perhaps actually reached) psychological and physical abuse, and this had a similar effect on the brothers.
James once recounted an incident in which his father locked the boys out of their Queens apartment in their underwear as punishment for some misbehavior. James’ father was the youngest of many sons, and in his native Philippines he was regularly chained to the fence in front of the house or denied food while his older siblings were not. James attributed his father’s treatment as some sort of retribution for, or reenactment of, these past abuses. Despite being aware of the causality of his father’s actions, James (along with his brother) was profoundly impacted by them.
James’ mother was no picnic either, having fully emasculated her husband and run her eldest son out of the house for dating a black woman, she was left with only James to rely upon her. Her apron strings were a bondage to which James was only too willing to submit, as it meant never having to be accountable for his actions. James’ relationship with his mother was clearly in sharp contrast to his brother’s lack of one. Yet Matt and James remained close over the years because they shared the fraternal bond built in their turbulent formative years.
Cammy commiserated with my anecdotes about James’ behaviors and treatment of me. James, Matt and their father were all born under the astrological sign of Aries, which accordingly makes them all very headstrong. This trait seemed to be evident in their relationships with each other. It is also said that the Aries’ motto is “Ready, fire, aim,” meaning that those under this sign are prone to action without forethought. It is this curse of the impulsive Aries that caused Matt to up and leave his familial home in the first place and stubbornly stick with that decision for the following decade. As an Aries myself, I can think of many instances (with James or otherwise) in which I wished I could take back words or actions. Certainly with James I said things that, had I thought about it first, I should have realized would wound him.
As I talked to Cammy, who was successfully navigating a difficult relationship with my husband’s brother, I began to have hope that James and I could reconcile our differences. At my lowest moments, she offered me support and suggestions. I began to naïvely run “if only” scenarios in my head.
If only I could get him to see how sorry I was. If only I could apologize enough. If only I could start being nice to him. If only I didn’t get riled up when he picked on me. If only I could learn which of my actions triggered his anger, I could refrain from them. If only I could lose weight. If only I stop drinking. If only we could hang out and start creating new, happy memories. If only he would come and hang out at the apartment. If only we could have sex. If only I could change. If only these things could happen, I could get him back.
Cammy was as hopeful as I was, and at the time she was all I had so I went on believing it was possible.
Then I discovered the other woman in James’ life, and that was the tipping point. I told Cammy, and she was surprised, but not shocked. It helped explain to both of us that a line had been crossed and James would not be coming back to me, no matter how many “if onlies” I actualized. It meant that while something I did (or didn’t do) may have made James want to leave, nothing I could do (or not do) would bring him back. I slowly came to realize that by marrying a narcissistic Eeyore like James, I had set myself up for failure. Nothing I could do would ever be viewed as supportive, kind or loving. At some point in our relationship I had broken his trust, and unable to come back from that, he allowed every perceived slight to compound until I was the enemy.
Upon understanding this, I finally felt ready to begin outing myself to my friends and family as a future divorcée. In part I had held out because I hoped I could keep our troubles secret until they blew over. That now clearly was not going to happen. Less than a year before I had proclaimed before my friends, family and, yes, even God that I would be with James until “death do us part” and I still had a difficult time admitting to everyone that neither of us were in fact dead. I told my city girlfriends first, a pair who I am close with but were not amongst those who stood up for me in the wedding and therefore had a bit more distance and objectivity. Soon I told a few more friends, and eventually my family found out (when I removed “married” from my Facebook status, sorry Mom!).
It shouldn’t have surprised me, but of course all of my family and friends were extremely supportive. James had been so toxic as to convince me my friends and family were not the kind of people who would be there for me. James was generally on his best behavior around my friends and family, so they were certainly staggered by my news. James’ friends, however, weren’t nearly as taken aback. They had seen James’ true self, especially the way he’d been treating me.
In the months between my twenty-ninth birthday and James’ decision to move out, his treatment of me became so blatantly abusive that even his best friends felt the need to reach out to me. James worked as a bartender at his best friend’s family restaurant on the weekends. Dennis and James knew each other from high school, and Dennis was James’ best man at our wedding. One night after their shift ended at the restaurant, the three of us went out to some bars, along with Dennis’ girlfriend Shelly.
On the way home I called in a pick-up order to our favorite late-night Chinese spot. When the four of us arrived back at our apartment with the food, James realized I’d ordered him a roast pork soup instead of the roast duck soup he’d requested. It was an honest mistake on my part as both were menu items he was likely to order, but it was an error that drove James into a rage. He began one of his typical rants about how stupid I was, how I didn’t care about what he wanted, and so forth. I offered to call the restaurant and have another soup delivered at my own expense and was on the phone trying to do so when he told me not to. He ate the other dishes he’d ordered, but didn’t touch the same soup he would have happily tucked into on any other night.
On another evening when the four of us were hanging out, Shelly pulled me aside and told me that Dennis had initiated a conversation with her about James’ treatment of me. The soup incident was just one example they’d seen, and they didn’t understand why he reacted so strongly. She wondered how I was holding up. I shrugged my shoulders and wrote it off, as I tended to at that time, as just James being James. In some ways I felt callous not taking his complaints seriously, but if I did drink his Kool Aid, it meant I was in fact a mean, stupid, uncaring, fat bitch who was not loved by her husband. It was easier to assume that these words, like so many uttered by an Aries, were in the heat of a passionate moment and forgotten in the next. However their concern touched me and reassured me that I was not crazy for thinking that James had become a bit unhinged.
I don’t know what Dennis and Shelly should when they found out James was leaving me. He failed to mention to them that he’d met someone else. He was upset with me when I told them as much myself. He claimed to be taking the high road by not badmouthing me to his friends and was upset that I was “gossiping” to them. My response was that it wasn’t gossip, it was the truth, and if he didn’t think he was doing anything wrong, why would he be bothered if his friends knew about it? And frankly, I don’t think it would have mattered if he had debased me to his friends. Their opinion of me was formulated, and they had witnessed first-hand how he behaved. He was only insulting their intelligence if they assumed they would not judge him for his actions
In the months following James’ departure, I kept in touch with his friends and family. Cammy would check in via text message every now and then. James’ friend José, whose bachelor party was when James met Jacinta, lived near our marital apartment. When I was moving out, he gladly came over with his wife to help carry a few heavy things out. While they were there I plied them for information about my ex-husband. José had little to offer, telling me that James had all but disappeared. José and Dennis had tried getting in touch with him, but James didn’t respond. Bruno, James’ accomplice at the bachelor party had similarly been absent. I could only assume that James was in part so wrapped up with his new girl that he didn’t have time for his old friends and in part that he was so ashamed by his actions that he didn’t want to face them. I felt bad for an instant that I had in some way broken up a ten year friendship, until I checked myself. James made his own bed, and now he was lying in it (with another woman).
The last time I spoke to James’ mother when she came to collect a few remaining things from the apartment, she reassured me I would always be her daughter and if I ever needed anything, or wanted to visit the Philippines, to give her a call. I can’t say the same is true of my family. I was talking to my brother recently, and he recounted a conversation he’d had with my father. The two were talking about how disappointed they were in James, and my dad said that if he ever saw James again he couldn’t be responsible for his actions. My brother said he agreed with my dad, and the two used words like “lynching,” “broken kneecaps,” and “tied up and tortured in the basement.” My dad is not the most outwardly affectionate man, but I never felt more loved by him then when I heard he would handily rearrange my pretty-boy ex-husband’s face on sight.
Similarly, none of my friends have any interest in reaching out to James to inquire how he is doing. While he may have played a victim with me, they certainly don’t see it that way. To them, he is a villain to whom karma will come full circle.
José’s wife and Shelly regularly reach out to me to say hello, and while we have not met up in person, their electronic messages reassure me that I am not in fact a mean person, as James would like me to believe. José’s wife and I share the same birthday and traded wishes for happy returns on the day. When Shelly had her birthday party recently, she invited me and reassured me that James was not invited. It may be petty, but I feel vindicated that in our divorce I was left with all of our shared possessions, all of our friends, and most importantly, my dignity while his prize was the freedom to be with his female Doppelgänger.
The irony is that as I was writing this, Shelly instant messaged me, saying how she and Dennis missed me and we had to get together soon. After a few volleys of catch-up, my curiosity got the best of me, and I enquired after James. She told me she had seen him a few weeks prior when he went by Dennis’ restaurant to invite them to a party James was having at his place in New Jersey. That’s right, the same guy who refused outright to move to New Jersey, where I wanted to live, because he claimed his commute would be too long now lives even further away then I would have even wanted to. Shelly went on to tell me that James had moved into Jacinta’s place, which was no surprise to me. It made perfect sense that instead of getting his own place, as he told me he planned to do when he left me, he would move in with someone else who, like I and his mother before me, would take care of him.
Right about now James is getting ready to celebrate one year together with Jacinta. In that time, it took me five months to mourn the loss of our relationship and another three months for my heart to heal enough to let me open it up to someone else. In the process, I have learned so much about myself and who the most important people are in my life. When faced with the choice, I feel like the people I cared about sided with me. With their support, I am finally feeling optimistic about my prospects and beginning to believe what they have been telling me:
“Everything happens for a reason.”
“You are better off without him.”
“You seem like you are in a good place now.”
In my life I always find exes coming out of the woodwork at the most random times, so it will probably be my luck that since I, like James, am now dating a New Jerseyan, I will run into him in a mall or something. I hope when that time comes I am wearing my hottest new size 6 jeans, with my amazing boyfriend on my arm, and a smile on my face. I will be able to look James in the eye as I brush by him, knowing that I am improving my life not because of him but in spite of him.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Chapter 14: Out of the Blue
I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later. At my darkest post-divorce moments, I sometimes thought it never would, or maybe that I didn’t want it to. All the cliché song lyrics reverberated in my head (“I am a rock, I am an island;” “once bitten twice shy;” “here I go again on my own”) reminding me to be a strong, independent woman. But now a different type of song lyric calls out to me because:
I have a boyfriend!
Yup, it’s true. I am dating a guy who comes complete with a bona fide title and Facebook relationship status. As silly as the term “boyfriend” (and frankly the significance I attach to the Facebook proclamation) seems at thirty years old, what else am I supposed to call him? My “suitor?” My “significant other?” My “friend?” My “lover?” The “guy I’m seeing?” Problem is, he is all of those things, and they are all embodied in the term “boyfriend,” so that’s what he is.
This whole thing may seem to have come out of the blue given the nature of what I have been writing. It certainly caught me by surprise, all starting with an e-mail message I received last Monday.
I am no stranger to an e-mail (or now text or Facebook message) popping up now and again from a “blast from the past.” I have remained cordial, if not friendly, with many of my exes, so it is not uncommon for them to check in with me once in awhile (or vice-versa). These messages are always unexpected, but are sometimes pleasing and other times jarring. One example of the latter springs immediately to mind. On the eve of our wedding, James was checking his e-mail, which he did only sporadically. In his inbox was a message from an old flame of mine, congratulating me on my upcoming nuptials. It had been sent weeks before through our wedding website, and the sender did not realize the e-mail address on the site carbon copied both of us. James was furious that someone from my past would still be e-mailing, asking why we were no longer friendly. It took quite a bit of soothing and reassurance on my part to diffuse the situation, and I questioned whether it was worth it to have these exes lurking in the background when I was about to commit my life to one man. But you can’t control who contacts you, I decided.
On the other hand, hearing from an old friend, whether it was a romantic relationship or not, can be incredibly gratifying. The advent of social networking sites has certainly helped further that cause. I have found over the years that these olive branches seem to come in bunches, without any discernable correlation. The last few weeks were one of those clusters. The week before my birthday, I received a message from Owen (of baby mama drama fame), asking if I wanted to meet up. Interested to hear what he’d been doing since New Year’s, I agreed and we went to an industry event together. It was nothing remarkable, but just interesting to see my old buddy after months of exile.
Then a few days after my birthday, I received a Facebook friend request from someone I had relationship with years ago. It was a long distance thing (he lived in Florida), and ended up not working out despite my best efforts to the contrary. During our time together I traveled to visit him, called often, e-mailed and instant messaged, but there was little in the way of reciprocity. I was at a time in my life when I was willing to come up with hypothetical situations to give a guy the benefit of the doubt (“Maybe he didn’t call because his phone battery died.”). After a particularly fervent bitch session about my absent beau, my friend Lauren once commented to me that, “your back must hurt from carrying this relationship.” Lauren’s words stuck with me, and when the phone calls from Florida started becoming fewer and farther between I realized there really was no relationship to fight for. I ultimately chalked the failure up to the distance and the fact that he probably just “wasn’t that into me.”
His friend request caught me by surprise, but the message that came shortly thereafter really threw me for a loop. In it he explained how sorry he was for how our relationship ended and filled me in on the successful path his life had taken since we’d last spoken. He then added that he was “very thankful, because it was the motivation of messing up our relationship that forced me to move forward with my life.” He said he’d thought about be over the years, which surprised me since I felt like I’d been written off. Reading his side of the story, and hearing his reverential tone, put salve on that old wound and reassured me that putting ones heart on the line was not merely Pickwickian foolishness.
Also in that cluster of “blasts from the past” was a birthday message from my high school sweetheart, checking in to see how I’d fared over the years. This was in addition to various social events I attended with old flames who were now shelved in the “friend” category.
Perhaps the most shocking of all was the birthday e-mail from Ramón (whom I had called “Andres” in previous posts but am using his actual name now, with permission). Ramón is someone I knew at MIT. He lived on the same floor in my dorm freshman year, and had a relationship with a friend of mine towards the end of college. For the last two years he drove me from New York to Boston for my annual trip to attend Suzanne’s birthday party. I didn’t know what to expect going in to that first trip in 2007. I would see him occasionally in mixed company, but I’d never spent time with him one-on-one.
During the drive, our conversation flowed relatively easily and we all had a great time in Boston. Ramón and I repeated the trip the following year. He seemed to be much different than the guy who had hurt my friend in college, but that side of him was all I had previously heard about as she didn’t tell me about their relationship until after it was over. Post-collegiate Ramón seemed kind, responsible, sociable, generous and complimentary. The last trait took me by surprise when he directed his compliments towards me, about the outfit I was wearing or the joke I cracked. I wasn’t sure at the time if he was just trying show how much he’d changed or if he was just being himself. Either way I began to understand what my friend may have seen in him years before.
Ramón joined Facebook in early February of this year and sent me a friend request. I hadn’t seen him since he showed up to my joint birthday party with James the previous April. He worked a block from my office, so we agreed to meet up for a drink in the neighborhood. As we sat chatting in the café, he inquired about James, not knowing we’d been divorced for months. I cleared that up quickly, and our night continued on (and on, and on). While both of us had gone into the evening with intentions to simply hang out as friends, by the end of the night a spark had been ignited.
Ramón and I began dating, seeing each at least once a week and speaking on the phone regularly, and I was having a great time with him. Suzanne’s birthday was in early March, and Ramón invited me to stay with him at the hotel in Boston, which I gladly accepted in favor of Suzanne’s sofa. We had an amazing romantic weekend with one glaring exception. On Saturday night we hit the town, with drinks followed by dinner followed by more drinks. When I woke up in the hotel bed in the middle of the night, disoriented and drunken to find Ramón watching television across the room… one thing led to another and, well, as they say, “nothing good happens after 2am.” It was our first disagreement and I felt horrible that I’d instigated it. It wasn’t a blowout, but it put a damper on an otherwise perfect weekend and made for a quiet drive back to New York.
We continued seeing each other and things seemed to be back on track. I took him out for his birthday, which fell a few days after Suzanne’s, and gave him several gifts that I had put some real thought into. I tried to tell him and show how much I appreciated and respected him. I went out with him to meet his friends, and I told mine about him. Oftentimes it seemed like we shared a brain. The phrase “I was just about to say that” was constantly being uttered by one of us.
My grandmother, while driving me to high school one day, told me to seek out a companion “who has a shared background.” For her it was her childhood friendship with my Grandfather’s older sister. She became my Grandfather’s third wife when I was ten years old, and while they had not seen each other for many years it was that formative connection that provided the basis for the relationship that will last them through their twilight years.
I have taken what she said to heart, and understood it to mean the shared background could be anything that shapes who you are as a person, such as hometown, culture, religion, or in my case with Ramón, getting our asses kicked by the same university for four years. MIT is a very self-selecting school, and the kinds of people who get accepted and choose to attend are a certain breed in and of themselves. An MIT student’s innate thirst for knowledge is generally a much stronger character trait than any other, and in that regard I found a kindred spirit in Ramón.
With James, our common ground was much more superficial, and I tried to use all those little commonalities to fill the mold cast by my grandmother. I realize now that liking the same song, for example, should merely be the drywall standing atop a strong foundation, and not the foundation itself. By mid-March I was beginning to feel that Ramón and I had built a strong foundation.
Then one night we were out on a date. We’d had dinner and shot a game of pool before heading to another bar for some beers. In our conversation, he mentioned that he didn’t like how I frequently compared him to James (like I just did above, for example!). In my mind Ramón had many similarities to my ex-husband, but to show how much I appreciated him, I tried to tell Ramón the ways he was the better version. This was especially true in regards to their relationships with their respective children. Ramón feared that I was only with him to make up for my past mistake. I tried to explain that I was intending to be complimentary and let him know that given my history my craziness and insecurities were bound to surface. Yet the more I spoke, the deeper I seemed to dig myself into a hole.
When I arrived home from that frustrating date, I received an e-mail from Ramón. He had decided that our conflict resolution styles and views on relationships were too different, and that there was “somebody out there better for each of us.” He felt that we would have lasted either “two more dates or at least two more decades,” with the same negative outcome either way.
I was so shocked and hurt that I couldn’t imagine carrying on from there as friends. I decided to stop communication with him, which was extremely difficult. I would walk down my block and hear the cars blasting the songs he played on our drive to Boston. I worried that I would run into him on the street near our offices and not know what to say. I reflected on our relationship in my writing, and just couldn’t understand how a person could go from so enamored to dumping someone over e-mail in a matter of hours.
About three weeks later, on the eve of my birthday, a message from Ramón popped up in my inbox. In it he wished me a happy birthday and wrote, “After everything you did for me on my birthday I thought it would be rude for me to ignore yours,” and signed it using the moniker I’d given him in my writing. It was one of those jarring re-emergences, and it left me flummoxed.
I wrote back, saying:
I'm not really sure how to reply to this... Hearing from you is like ripping the scab off a nearly healed wound. I've been trying to move on and learn from all my past experiences (in part by writing a bunch, which I see you've read) so that I don't repeat the same mistakes in the future. It's been hard because over the past couple weeks I have had a few dreams with you in them, and I wake up happy until I realize they were just dreams. So while my conscience understands where you were coming from and that I have to accept it, my subconscious is still in denial or something. I guess it's a little ridiculous to have taken it so hard, but that was the first time I'd really opened my heart up to someone since my divorce, and now I feel pretty foolish for doing so.
He responded to my reply with some kind words, and I left it at that. I was turning thirty the next day, I was single, and I didn’t want to stir up more drama. Just weeks before I’d envisioned he would be the one with whom I would celebrate my birthday. Instead, a line from a Whitesnake song skipped on the turntable in my mind: Here I go again on my own... I knew it was time to move on.
Then last Monday evening, again out of the blue, another e-mail from Ramón graced my inbox. It’s subject? “Egregious error.” Curious and excited, I opened it. It was the kind of note any jilted woman would hope to receive from a man she cared about, a request for a second chance.
I immediately thought, “This is the sort of thing that would happen to the leading lady in a movie, not to me!” And so, in shock, I read and re-read his message.
He wrote that one of the main reasons he called our relationship off was fear. When faced with our conflicts, he was afraid, in part, to revert to the guy he was when he dated my friend. He indicated that his fear oftentimes resulted in bad decisions, and wrote, “The choice I made to end things between us feels like the worst of those bad decisions.”
I thought about his note the rest of the night and into the morning. Ramón’s timing was perfect in one respect. The night before I received his message, I decided to get on the wagon in terms of drinking because I didn’t want to have it influence any relationship I had in the future. He indicated in his e-mail that he had done the same, for the same reasons. He also said he understood if I weren’t willing to just take him back, but he simply wanted another shot. I decided that since the only thing he did to hurt me was cut me out of his life, I would meet up with him if only for coffee to see what he had to say. In case I needed another indicator, while I had been pondering what to do, I continually caught myself smiling. That was a good sign, right?
We met that afternoon at a coffee shop near our offices, ironically called “Peace & Love.” The conversation started off a bit awkwardly, but soon we fell in to our old familiar banter. Ramón invited me to dinner, and then followed that up with the suggestion we grab a drink somewhere. That drink consisted of sparkling water for him and fruit juice for me, of course, given our new teetotaler status. We held each other’s hands at the bar and discussed what was transpiring between us. I went home that evening feeling very optimistic.
The next day I told Ramón that I was “all for forgive and forget and second chances and fresh starts” but needed reassurance that he wouldn’t suddenly bail on me again. His reply was extraordinarily endearing and very much in character:
I once saw a Military Channel show about pilot training. It was talking about airplane ejections. Apparently in fighter jets an ejection is nothing more than a controlled explosion, and is therefore quite violent and excruciatingly painful. As training potential pilots are strapped into a device that mimics an ejection for two reasons: 1) to practice survival techniques for ejecting (the forces are so great about 1% of the candidates have a leg bone snap in the training), and 2) to understand exactly how bad an ejection is and therefore fundamentally understand it's an option to be avoided at all costs.
I wish I could have had similar training. But now that I understand what it means to pull the emergency lever on somebody I care so deeply about, I am supremely confident I will treat that action with the apprehension and respect it deserves.
After receiving that explanation, I felt confident I could safely pursue a relationship with Ramón. We discussed how to approach our rekindled romance. Everyone (from my best friend to my Gram) who heard about us warned me to take things slowly. Yet that didn’t seem to be our style. We followed up our “second first date” with lunch one day last week, spent practically the entire weekend together, and then had dinner yesterday. We have already made plans for this weekend and for various events in May. The past week has been filled with stories, like-mindedness, canoodling and laughter to the point of tears.
There are moments we look at each other in bewilderment, wondering how it took us this long to get to where we are now, and how quickly we got there once we started down this path. The other day over coffee, he joked that he is the kind of guy who waits three days to call a girl after getting her phone number. But since he’d had mine for three years, I joked that he’s gotten the units wrong in my case!
Things with Ramón seem much different this time around. Our conversations, in addition to consisting of the interesting topical fodder we’d always shared, have gone to a deeper level. I like to attribute some of that openness to the fact that Ramón has been an avid reader of my blog (Hello, darling!). I have been so honest with the public, and myself, that I think it has helped him understand me better. In turn he is much more open and compassionate with me (He showed up this weekend with a birthday gift for me, the sentimentality of which a thousand times over made up for the fact he wasn’t there on the actual day). Plus, to add even more support to our foundation, he now knows pretty much my whole history and I, his – both the good and the bad.
People always cite the importance of communication in a relationship. Speaking for myself, as a socially awkward nerd trying to reform, communication isn’t my strong suit. I think because we were forced to be open with each other to rebuild our mutual trust the second time around, communication now comes much more effortlessly. In fact I feel this newfound transparency has entirely compensated for the time we lost while we were apart, and as a result spending time with him feels both so comfortable and yet still so new.
Several months ago I saw two teenagers in the subway station making out and staring deep into each other’s eyes, as if they were the only people on the platform. Feeling cynical at the time, I thought to myself “Well, I will never feel that way again.”
There is something about young love, like that I witnessed, which can never be replicated. But when I am with Ramón those charming stirrings are brought forth (mostly in the form of butterflies in my stomach, which I can safely say I have not felt in many, many years). I have renewed faith that a relationship can be honest, exciting, safe, caring, and passionate. This feeling was only augmented when I walked out of my apartment building this morning and saw a pregnant alley cat weaving amongst the budding tulips in the garden, and I thought:
Life can begin anew, especially in the springtime.
So that is how, out of the blue, I went from a sullen, single thirty year old to feeling like a giddy teenager. The idiom “out of the blue” originated in1837 in Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution, in which he referred to something as being “sudden really as a bolt out of the Blue,” referring to a bolt of lighting that come out of the clear, blue sky. While our burgeoning relationship may have been reinstated as instantaneously as that lightning strike, I take comfort in knowing that when I look up to the sky, the sun is in fact shining down on me.
I have a boyfriend!
Yup, it’s true. I am dating a guy who comes complete with a bona fide title and Facebook relationship status. As silly as the term “boyfriend” (and frankly the significance I attach to the Facebook proclamation) seems at thirty years old, what else am I supposed to call him? My “suitor?” My “significant other?” My “friend?” My “lover?” The “guy I’m seeing?” Problem is, he is all of those things, and they are all embodied in the term “boyfriend,” so that’s what he is.
This whole thing may seem to have come out of the blue given the nature of what I have been writing. It certainly caught me by surprise, all starting with an e-mail message I received last Monday.
I am no stranger to an e-mail (or now text or Facebook message) popping up now and again from a “blast from the past.” I have remained cordial, if not friendly, with many of my exes, so it is not uncommon for them to check in with me once in awhile (or vice-versa). These messages are always unexpected, but are sometimes pleasing and other times jarring. One example of the latter springs immediately to mind. On the eve of our wedding, James was checking his e-mail, which he did only sporadically. In his inbox was a message from an old flame of mine, congratulating me on my upcoming nuptials. It had been sent weeks before through our wedding website, and the sender did not realize the e-mail address on the site carbon copied both of us. James was furious that someone from my past would still be e-mailing, asking why we were no longer friendly. It took quite a bit of soothing and reassurance on my part to diffuse the situation, and I questioned whether it was worth it to have these exes lurking in the background when I was about to commit my life to one man. But you can’t control who contacts you, I decided.
On the other hand, hearing from an old friend, whether it was a romantic relationship or not, can be incredibly gratifying. The advent of social networking sites has certainly helped further that cause. I have found over the years that these olive branches seem to come in bunches, without any discernable correlation. The last few weeks were one of those clusters. The week before my birthday, I received a message from Owen (of baby mama drama fame), asking if I wanted to meet up. Interested to hear what he’d been doing since New Year’s, I agreed and we went to an industry event together. It was nothing remarkable, but just interesting to see my old buddy after months of exile.
Then a few days after my birthday, I received a Facebook friend request from someone I had relationship with years ago. It was a long distance thing (he lived in Florida), and ended up not working out despite my best efforts to the contrary. During our time together I traveled to visit him, called often, e-mailed and instant messaged, but there was little in the way of reciprocity. I was at a time in my life when I was willing to come up with hypothetical situations to give a guy the benefit of the doubt (“Maybe he didn’t call because his phone battery died.”). After a particularly fervent bitch session about my absent beau, my friend Lauren once commented to me that, “your back must hurt from carrying this relationship.” Lauren’s words stuck with me, and when the phone calls from Florida started becoming fewer and farther between I realized there really was no relationship to fight for. I ultimately chalked the failure up to the distance and the fact that he probably just “wasn’t that into me.”
His friend request caught me by surprise, but the message that came shortly thereafter really threw me for a loop. In it he explained how sorry he was for how our relationship ended and filled me in on the successful path his life had taken since we’d last spoken. He then added that he was “very thankful, because it was the motivation of messing up our relationship that forced me to move forward with my life.” He said he’d thought about be over the years, which surprised me since I felt like I’d been written off. Reading his side of the story, and hearing his reverential tone, put salve on that old wound and reassured me that putting ones heart on the line was not merely Pickwickian foolishness.
Also in that cluster of “blasts from the past” was a birthday message from my high school sweetheart, checking in to see how I’d fared over the years. This was in addition to various social events I attended with old flames who were now shelved in the “friend” category.
Perhaps the most shocking of all was the birthday e-mail from Ramón (whom I had called “Andres” in previous posts but am using his actual name now, with permission). Ramón is someone I knew at MIT. He lived on the same floor in my dorm freshman year, and had a relationship with a friend of mine towards the end of college. For the last two years he drove me from New York to Boston for my annual trip to attend Suzanne’s birthday party. I didn’t know what to expect going in to that first trip in 2007. I would see him occasionally in mixed company, but I’d never spent time with him one-on-one.
During the drive, our conversation flowed relatively easily and we all had a great time in Boston. Ramón and I repeated the trip the following year. He seemed to be much different than the guy who had hurt my friend in college, but that side of him was all I had previously heard about as she didn’t tell me about their relationship until after it was over. Post-collegiate Ramón seemed kind, responsible, sociable, generous and complimentary. The last trait took me by surprise when he directed his compliments towards me, about the outfit I was wearing or the joke I cracked. I wasn’t sure at the time if he was just trying show how much he’d changed or if he was just being himself. Either way I began to understand what my friend may have seen in him years before.
Ramón joined Facebook in early February of this year and sent me a friend request. I hadn’t seen him since he showed up to my joint birthday party with James the previous April. He worked a block from my office, so we agreed to meet up for a drink in the neighborhood. As we sat chatting in the café, he inquired about James, not knowing we’d been divorced for months. I cleared that up quickly, and our night continued on (and on, and on). While both of us had gone into the evening with intentions to simply hang out as friends, by the end of the night a spark had been ignited.
Ramón and I began dating, seeing each at least once a week and speaking on the phone regularly, and I was having a great time with him. Suzanne’s birthday was in early March, and Ramón invited me to stay with him at the hotel in Boston, which I gladly accepted in favor of Suzanne’s sofa. We had an amazing romantic weekend with one glaring exception. On Saturday night we hit the town, with drinks followed by dinner followed by more drinks. When I woke up in the hotel bed in the middle of the night, disoriented and drunken to find Ramón watching television across the room… one thing led to another and, well, as they say, “nothing good happens after 2am.” It was our first disagreement and I felt horrible that I’d instigated it. It wasn’t a blowout, but it put a damper on an otherwise perfect weekend and made for a quiet drive back to New York.
We continued seeing each other and things seemed to be back on track. I took him out for his birthday, which fell a few days after Suzanne’s, and gave him several gifts that I had put some real thought into. I tried to tell him and show how much I appreciated and respected him. I went out with him to meet his friends, and I told mine about him. Oftentimes it seemed like we shared a brain. The phrase “I was just about to say that” was constantly being uttered by one of us.
My grandmother, while driving me to high school one day, told me to seek out a companion “who has a shared background.” For her it was her childhood friendship with my Grandfather’s older sister. She became my Grandfather’s third wife when I was ten years old, and while they had not seen each other for many years it was that formative connection that provided the basis for the relationship that will last them through their twilight years.
I have taken what she said to heart, and understood it to mean the shared background could be anything that shapes who you are as a person, such as hometown, culture, religion, or in my case with Ramón, getting our asses kicked by the same university for four years. MIT is a very self-selecting school, and the kinds of people who get accepted and choose to attend are a certain breed in and of themselves. An MIT student’s innate thirst for knowledge is generally a much stronger character trait than any other, and in that regard I found a kindred spirit in Ramón.
With James, our common ground was much more superficial, and I tried to use all those little commonalities to fill the mold cast by my grandmother. I realize now that liking the same song, for example, should merely be the drywall standing atop a strong foundation, and not the foundation itself. By mid-March I was beginning to feel that Ramón and I had built a strong foundation.
Then one night we were out on a date. We’d had dinner and shot a game of pool before heading to another bar for some beers. In our conversation, he mentioned that he didn’t like how I frequently compared him to James (like I just did above, for example!). In my mind Ramón had many similarities to my ex-husband, but to show how much I appreciated him, I tried to tell Ramón the ways he was the better version. This was especially true in regards to their relationships with their respective children. Ramón feared that I was only with him to make up for my past mistake. I tried to explain that I was intending to be complimentary and let him know that given my history my craziness and insecurities were bound to surface. Yet the more I spoke, the deeper I seemed to dig myself into a hole.
When I arrived home from that frustrating date, I received an e-mail from Ramón. He had decided that our conflict resolution styles and views on relationships were too different, and that there was “somebody out there better for each of us.” He felt that we would have lasted either “two more dates or at least two more decades,” with the same negative outcome either way.
I was so shocked and hurt that I couldn’t imagine carrying on from there as friends. I decided to stop communication with him, which was extremely difficult. I would walk down my block and hear the cars blasting the songs he played on our drive to Boston. I worried that I would run into him on the street near our offices and not know what to say. I reflected on our relationship in my writing, and just couldn’t understand how a person could go from so enamored to dumping someone over e-mail in a matter of hours.
About three weeks later, on the eve of my birthday, a message from Ramón popped up in my inbox. In it he wished me a happy birthday and wrote, “After everything you did for me on my birthday I thought it would be rude for me to ignore yours,” and signed it using the moniker I’d given him in my writing. It was one of those jarring re-emergences, and it left me flummoxed.
I wrote back, saying:
I'm not really sure how to reply to this... Hearing from you is like ripping the scab off a nearly healed wound. I've been trying to move on and learn from all my past experiences (in part by writing a bunch, which I see you've read) so that I don't repeat the same mistakes in the future. It's been hard because over the past couple weeks I have had a few dreams with you in them, and I wake up happy until I realize they were just dreams. So while my conscience understands where you were coming from and that I have to accept it, my subconscious is still in denial or something. I guess it's a little ridiculous to have taken it so hard, but that was the first time I'd really opened my heart up to someone since my divorce, and now I feel pretty foolish for doing so.
He responded to my reply with some kind words, and I left it at that. I was turning thirty the next day, I was single, and I didn’t want to stir up more drama. Just weeks before I’d envisioned he would be the one with whom I would celebrate my birthday. Instead, a line from a Whitesnake song skipped on the turntable in my mind: Here I go again on my own... I knew it was time to move on.
Then last Monday evening, again out of the blue, another e-mail from Ramón graced my inbox. It’s subject? “Egregious error.” Curious and excited, I opened it. It was the kind of note any jilted woman would hope to receive from a man she cared about, a request for a second chance.
I immediately thought, “This is the sort of thing that would happen to the leading lady in a movie, not to me!” And so, in shock, I read and re-read his message.
He wrote that one of the main reasons he called our relationship off was fear. When faced with our conflicts, he was afraid, in part, to revert to the guy he was when he dated my friend. He indicated that his fear oftentimes resulted in bad decisions, and wrote, “The choice I made to end things between us feels like the worst of those bad decisions.”
I thought about his note the rest of the night and into the morning. Ramón’s timing was perfect in one respect. The night before I received his message, I decided to get on the wagon in terms of drinking because I didn’t want to have it influence any relationship I had in the future. He indicated in his e-mail that he had done the same, for the same reasons. He also said he understood if I weren’t willing to just take him back, but he simply wanted another shot. I decided that since the only thing he did to hurt me was cut me out of his life, I would meet up with him if only for coffee to see what he had to say. In case I needed another indicator, while I had been pondering what to do, I continually caught myself smiling. That was a good sign, right?
We met that afternoon at a coffee shop near our offices, ironically called “Peace & Love.” The conversation started off a bit awkwardly, but soon we fell in to our old familiar banter. Ramón invited me to dinner, and then followed that up with the suggestion we grab a drink somewhere. That drink consisted of sparkling water for him and fruit juice for me, of course, given our new teetotaler status. We held each other’s hands at the bar and discussed what was transpiring between us. I went home that evening feeling very optimistic.
The next day I told Ramón that I was “all for forgive and forget and second chances and fresh starts” but needed reassurance that he wouldn’t suddenly bail on me again. His reply was extraordinarily endearing and very much in character:
I once saw a Military Channel show about pilot training. It was talking about airplane ejections. Apparently in fighter jets an ejection is nothing more than a controlled explosion, and is therefore quite violent and excruciatingly painful. As training potential pilots are strapped into a device that mimics an ejection for two reasons: 1) to practice survival techniques for ejecting (the forces are so great about 1% of the candidates have a leg bone snap in the training), and 2) to understand exactly how bad an ejection is and therefore fundamentally understand it's an option to be avoided at all costs.
I wish I could have had similar training. But now that I understand what it means to pull the emergency lever on somebody I care so deeply about, I am supremely confident I will treat that action with the apprehension and respect it deserves.
After receiving that explanation, I felt confident I could safely pursue a relationship with Ramón. We discussed how to approach our rekindled romance. Everyone (from my best friend to my Gram) who heard about us warned me to take things slowly. Yet that didn’t seem to be our style. We followed up our “second first date” with lunch one day last week, spent practically the entire weekend together, and then had dinner yesterday. We have already made plans for this weekend and for various events in May. The past week has been filled with stories, like-mindedness, canoodling and laughter to the point of tears.
There are moments we look at each other in bewilderment, wondering how it took us this long to get to where we are now, and how quickly we got there once we started down this path. The other day over coffee, he joked that he is the kind of guy who waits three days to call a girl after getting her phone number. But since he’d had mine for three years, I joked that he’s gotten the units wrong in my case!
Things with Ramón seem much different this time around. Our conversations, in addition to consisting of the interesting topical fodder we’d always shared, have gone to a deeper level. I like to attribute some of that openness to the fact that Ramón has been an avid reader of my blog (Hello, darling!). I have been so honest with the public, and myself, that I think it has helped him understand me better. In turn he is much more open and compassionate with me (He showed up this weekend with a birthday gift for me, the sentimentality of which a thousand times over made up for the fact he wasn’t there on the actual day). Plus, to add even more support to our foundation, he now knows pretty much my whole history and I, his – both the good and the bad.
People always cite the importance of communication in a relationship. Speaking for myself, as a socially awkward nerd trying to reform, communication isn’t my strong suit. I think because we were forced to be open with each other to rebuild our mutual trust the second time around, communication now comes much more effortlessly. In fact I feel this newfound transparency has entirely compensated for the time we lost while we were apart, and as a result spending time with him feels both so comfortable and yet still so new.
Several months ago I saw two teenagers in the subway station making out and staring deep into each other’s eyes, as if they were the only people on the platform. Feeling cynical at the time, I thought to myself “Well, I will never feel that way again.”
There is something about young love, like that I witnessed, which can never be replicated. But when I am with Ramón those charming stirrings are brought forth (mostly in the form of butterflies in my stomach, which I can safely say I have not felt in many, many years). I have renewed faith that a relationship can be honest, exciting, safe, caring, and passionate. This feeling was only augmented when I walked out of my apartment building this morning and saw a pregnant alley cat weaving amongst the budding tulips in the garden, and I thought:
Life can begin anew, especially in the springtime.
So that is how, out of the blue, I went from a sullen, single thirty year old to feeling like a giddy teenager. The idiom “out of the blue” originated in1837 in Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution, in which he referred to something as being “sudden really as a bolt out of the Blue,” referring to a bolt of lighting that come out of the clear, blue sky. While our burgeoning relationship may have been reinstated as instantaneously as that lightning strike, I take comfort in knowing that when I look up to the sky, the sun is in fact shining down on me.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
A Character List
A list of characters who appear in this story in alphabetical order, so I can keep their pseudonyms straight, and you can keep the characters straight! This will be updated as new people are introduced.
Bert - Crystal's ex-husband
Bruno – James’ friend from high school & a groomsman
Cammy – James’ sister-in-law, Matt’s wife
Carlos - James' high school friend
Cathy – one of my close girlfriends in New York City
Chuck - Crystal's new man
Clancy – James’ friend from the CD shop he worked at
Crystal - my recently divorced aunt
Dad - Dad
Dennis - James' best friend from high school & best man
Erik – Lisa’s husband/Jamie’s stepfather
Gram - my mom's Mom
Gramps - my mom's Dad
Grandfather - my Dad's Father
Grandmother - my Dad's Father's wife
Jacinta - the girl James started seeing as he was leaving me
Jamie – James’ son
James – my ex-husband
James - awkwardly the name of one of Crystal's suitors
Jeremy - a freak I met while out one night
Joey - my former roommate and love interest
José - James high school friend and groomsman
Katie – me!
Lacey - Owen's baby mama
Lisa – Jamie’s mother/James’ ex-girlfriend
Margaret - my college friend & sorority sister
Matt – James’ older brother
Mom - Mom
Owen - a guy I once dated who is now a friend
Ramón - my boyfriend
Sara – the hostess at a restaurant I worked at and James’ college friend, our matchmaker and one time roommate
Shelly - Dennis' girlfriend
Suzanne - my best friend from college
Bert - Crystal's ex-husband
Bruno – James’ friend from high school & a groomsman
Cammy – James’ sister-in-law, Matt’s wife
Carlos - James' high school friend
Cathy – one of my close girlfriends in New York City
Chuck - Crystal's new man
Clancy – James’ friend from the CD shop he worked at
Crystal - my recently divorced aunt
Dad - Dad
Dennis - James' best friend from high school & best man
Erik – Lisa’s husband/Jamie’s stepfather
Gram - my mom's Mom
Gramps - my mom's Dad
Grandfather - my Dad's Father
Grandmother - my Dad's Father's wife
Jacinta - the girl James started seeing as he was leaving me
Jamie – James’ son
James – my ex-husband
James - awkwardly the name of one of Crystal's suitors
Jeremy - a freak I met while out one night
Joey - my former roommate and love interest
José - James high school friend and groomsman
Katie – me!
Lacey - Owen's baby mama
Lisa – Jamie’s mother/James’ ex-girlfriend
Margaret - my college friend & sorority sister
Matt – James’ older brother
Mom - Mom
Owen - a guy I once dated who is now a friend
Ramón - my boyfriend
Sara – the hostess at a restaurant I worked at and James’ college friend, our matchmaker and one time roommate
Shelly - Dennis' girlfriend
Suzanne - my best friend from college
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