5 August 2008 - 22:11Ten years ago part 3

I can’t let it go without mentioning that it was ten years ago today that I broke up with Marty (see Ten years ago part 1 and Ten years ago part 2). It felt like the worst day of my life at the time it happened. It’s easy to say now that it was really the best thing.

1998 was a very hard year for me. A couple of years earlier, I’d bought a four-bedroom house in my own name and moved my boyfriend and his two teenaged sons in with me. Then they all moved out toward the end of 1997 and I had to pay the mortgage by myself at the same time that I had taken a cut in pay to take a new and more promising job at the library where I now work. For most of 1998, I struggled financially, and I also struggled to keep my relationship with Marty together, despite his moving out.

On August 5, 1998, we had just returned from our third session of couples counseling. It had not gone well for Marty. Basically, the therapist, after hearing both our stories, turned to Marty and told him that he was wrong. As gratifying as I found this, I was by then savvy enough to know that this did not bode well for our future. After the session, Marty and I sat out on the patio in the backyard and discussed it. I don’t remember a lot about our conversation, except the moment when he turned to me and said, “I’m still mad at you for buying this house.”

That was the statement that made me stop my futile efforts to save the relationship, which had been an enormous drain on my emotional and physical resources. With everything I had sacrificed and compromised in the service of preserving it, it was finally clear that it was no damn use. He was stuck on the petty view that, as he put it, “a marriage won’t work unless someone is in charge, and if I get married, it’s going to have to be me.” I told him it was over, and he could take all of his stuff, including the radial arm saw in the basement, out of the house he resented me owning, and keep it all somewhere else. I didn’t care where.

If he saw me now, married to Bob, who is so much his opposite, I’m sure he wouldn’t know what to make of it. It was beyond his comprehension to think of a relationship where people are equals, and position isn’t determined by gender or (mis)interpretations of the Bible. (How DID I end up with this guy, anyway?) He’ll ever know what my life is like now; he died suddenly of a massive heart attack in early 2004, the same year in which I later met Bob.

Dang! That’s a hell of a way to end a post. Even though I am now happy in my marriage to Bob, there seems to be some processing I still need to do with the emotional remnants of my experience with Marty. Sometime soon, I want to post stories from the trip I took to Colorado with Marty to visit his extended family to tell them about how his stepfather abused him from the age of about three. How’s that for a cliffhanger?