lie no. 20 | 05.28.19
Last summer, after almost 7 years of marriage and 11 years with my now-husband, I was smitten.
Inconveniently, I was smitten with someone decidedly not my husband.
I didn’t understand what it was at the time, but I’d go on to give it a whole host of names and labels over the next year.
The first label I tried on for size was flirting. During a text confessional with an old friend after it—whatever it was—had ended, I realized that wasn’t quite right.
Me: Honestly don’t know how it started, but I’ve been having this daily, bizarre—but fun—banter back and forth with a near stranger, oddly via Instagram dm... perfectly innocent.
Her: Go on...
Me: Until last night when I threw out a “can’t stop thinking about you.”
Her: I wish I had someone to flirt with
Me: This morning I apologized and thanked him for being a decent human to counter my obnoxiousness. But I'm mortified.
Her: Eh
Her: Don’t be
Her: We’ve all crossed a line in some form or fashion. Good to recognize the wrong before it’s too far over the line.
Her: And move on
Her: And recognize we are all humans and need someone to play with our hair and tell us we are pretty
Me: It’s honestly been the most fun thing to have someone to flirt with. And it wasn’t really even flirting. It was just nice to have someone ask about my damn day. It became my favorite part of each day.
Her: I get it.
She continued to check in on me regularly, reminding me why we have girlfriends and why it helps to tell them the truth, especially when it seems unspeakable—not that I realized the latter lesson at the time.
The way I saw it then, I’d opened up to someone—albeit a stranger—and told them how I felt—wildly inappropriate as it was, and in the process burned myself big time.
The way I see it now, I was learning to feel again, to open my heart up, trust people with it again and be open about it without fearing the consequences. Even if it hurt like hell at the time, it was like basic training, preparing me for a storm not yet on my radar.
Me, a few days later: Ok. Am I allowed to now make a joke about how a shame spiral is an excellent way to take your mind off other things?! I’m terrified of the next time I see him and want to cut the tension before then. And I only know how to do that by making jokes. Or do I just totally fade into the abliss?!
Her: Fade. No more communication.
Me: *abisd
Me: oh god. *abiss
Me: holy hell. My phone hates me and loves to humiliate me. ABYSS.
Me: shit. must explain why it just sent him exactly what you told me not to send.
When she could tell I was beating myself up, really punishing myself, she’d grab my hand and take me for a walk down memory lane, pointing out past bad decisions I’d long forgotten, reminding me none of them ever actually killed me (or anyone else!) and we’d laugh at our younger selves till we hurt.
When she could tell I was giving it too much weight, she nicknamed him: Dexter the Sexter. That made me laugh, too, mostly because it couldn’t be further from the truth.
It also gave me a new label to cross off the list: sexting. A modern phenomenon I thankfully do not know how to do.
And I can’t forget the one Brené Brown gifted me with at a time I was convinced my label-maker was broken: confabulation.
Last fall I added a new therapist to my sanity squad, which I’ll get to later. And by our second or third appointment, she gave it a label that actually repulsed me, despite her making it sound like the most normal thing in the world: a fantasy.
Nope. Thanks, doc. But that’s some Fifty Shades shit. That… is not what this was. (It’s what it was.)
What hurt the most was the invisible grief I felt toward something or someone I shouldn’t have even considered a loss in the first place.
At least if this had played out in real life, really crossed a line, there’d be no virtual paper trail I could access to replay it all.
There’d be no evidence it ever existed. No digital breadcrumbs and receipts to prove it ever happened and none to prove it hadn’t. There’d only be coffeeshops, restaurants and presumably a bed or two I’d have to avoid, not my entire god damn mind that had crafted this perfect, non-existent love story that never was. Fantasies have a funny way of making it look so easy—this flawless, alternate life that’s not yours.
When it ended, it was like being stuck with an inside joke and no one to share it with. I couldn’t exactly run to Matt and ask if he’d heard the one where his wife gets rejected by someone else. Husbands don’t make for the best sources of comfort in times like these.
I started telling myself and Matt that we’d fallen out of love with one another around that time. I saw no other possibility: No one who is married and capable of developing feelings or whatever this disease was AND expressing them could possibly still be in love with their spouse. That was a duality I drew the line on.
Depending on the time of day—and how much alcohol was involved—the way I’d tell this story of us, to us, varied greatly.
In the light of day, it came from a place of compassion. “It’s not our fault,” I’d say, reciting lines from a memorized script, probably pulled from something I’d heard Gwyneth Paltrow say. “We love each other unconditionally and that’ll never change. We simply fell out of love and both deserve to find and feel that again, even if it means with other people.”
The nighttime translation of this tall tale tended to take a darker form; more of a dramatic reading, an impassioned monologue delivered by a method actor so immersed in character she couldn’t separate the reality from the act.
I don’t know why, but in the months that followed, it never once occurred to me that repeatedly telling someone you’re not in love with them isn’t likely to result in them falling more in love with you or even wanting to spend any time with you at all.
Sometimes I even went so far as to force him into admitting that he, too, had fallen out of love with me. When you only ever give someone one choice to a question when there should be multiple, or at least the standard “other” option to write in a different answer, you’re setting that person, and yourself, up for failure.
A friend once told me being a good storyteller is a liability. I agree, but only to a point. It becomes a liability when you start skipping ahead to the end, or to how you think it ends.
That’s what I did with our marriage. I got impatient when the story started to get bad, so I skipped to the end, desperate for it to be over.
I was so ready to pick up a new page turner after getting that sweet, sweet taste of newness from another’s excerpt. I never stopped to consider how even the most boring books can generate an effective tease with minimal effort.
Worse, I never stopped to consider that perhaps none of this had anything to do with my husband or even our marriage.
That’s when things got even worse and I moved on to the most gut-wrenching of labels—emotional affair. I knew if I dropped the adjective, I was left with a word I had more experience with than I’d ever wanted.
I had to come clean.
When I told Matt what I’d done—had a one-sided emotional affair with someone I don’t really know on Instagram—he refused to skip ahead with me, to heed my spoiler alerts, not ready to accept the inevitable ending I warned him about.
I’d just watched the Joaquin Phoenix-Scarlett Johansson movie Her so this made perfect sense to me. And when you start describing your colossal fuck ups as plot lines from Oscar-nominated films, it helps. The truth gets a little easier, less foreign. It also makes you sound a little crazy.
When your wife tells you, “I’ve been having what I think is a one-sided emotional affair with someone I don’t really know on social media,” the natural inclination is to ask if she’s sleeping with someone else. At least I imagine that’s what I’d do, right before the highlight reel of a story I don’t know would inevitably start playing in my head. But I’ve got a hell of an imagination. And he didn’t ask. So I answered anyway.
“I’ve literally never been alone with him, except behind a screen,” I told Matt, truthfully, that night. “Strangely, you’ve been by my side during mine and his brief in-person interactions.”
His response: “I feel like you’ve given up on us. I’m not going to give up. Let’s go to bed.”
Had he never watched Her on an airplane?! Did he not understand how serious this was? Me and an operating system, sitting in a tree! Why isn’t he punishing me? Why is his not punishing me the worst punishment of all?
I saw his choice to stick with it, with us, as rejection, as twisted as that may seem—oddly enough, a word I learned from this other guy. Book clubs—and marriages—only work when everyone’s on the same page, or at least working through the same story at a similar pace. I suddenly felt no one seemed to care what page or what story I was on.
It’s painful to watch someone you love refuse to spare themselves despite your spoilers, to persist even as you warn of the heartache awaiting them at the end. It’s just as painful, I’m learning, as watching someone you love toss in the towel too early.
There we were, both ultimately trying to save the other from suffering. Neither a villain, neither a hero.
As time went by, I was no longer interested in getting my hands on that new book I’d so desperately thought I wanted, or any other for that matter.
Contrary to all the time I started spending in libraries and bookstores around the world, I started to realize what I’d been searching for all along wasn’t a story that existed yet. I craved my own story. I craved a story that didn’t involve approval or validation from anyone else.
Tonight, after I read the strange, uncomfortable place my words had guided me to, I asked Matt if he wanted to read it before I published it—a first.
“Is it about me?” he said.
“No, it’s about me,” I said. “But it’s not an easy read and doesn’t make either of us look great.”
I hesitated.
“Do you remember last summer when I told you I’d had an emotional affair?” I asked.
“Ehh, vaguely,” he said, as if I’d asked if he remembered that time in June it rained on a Tuesday. “I trust you. I don’t need to read it first. If you feel good about it, just do it.”
He never said it, but what I heard in the moment was, “It’s OK. You just had a crush. You’re human.”
“You’re right, it was totally just a crush,” I said, or at least thought to myself, so relieved to finally have a label I could digest and stomach.
And then we laughed at our new inside jokes from the day, ones we shared together. It felt so good to have someone to share inside jokes with again. It felt even better to remember I’d always had that, I’d just forgotten not to take everything so seriously.
People love to say misery loves company. Fuck that. Misery only wants to know it’s not alone in the dark. More often than not, it doesn’t want company. It’s lonely that loves company. Lonely craves someone asking, “How was your day?”
I didn’t see it this way at the time, of course, which is probably for the best. Otherwise, I might have seen the next storm coming, the one swirling out in the Atlantic, the one unable to take its eye off a place I call home, the one about to violently wash up what the tide had dutifully taken out to sea over the years: my past.