In Jan 2006, i was fresh out of an 18th month failed relationship. I had been unhappy in the relationship for a long time so, altho i was a little bit scared of living in a new state with no friends and no job, i wasn’t too broken up about it. i got a work book that had you write daily about the relationship. like one day you wrote all the great things about your ex, and the next day you wrote all the things you hated, etc. i didnt sweat the future or lament the wasted time, partly because it had been less than 2 years, but mostly because i was 31 and death anxiety hadn’t truly hit me yet.
by february of 2006, i had a decent job, tho low paying, and i was pretty much over the break up and happy to be on my own. i wanted to focus on raising my kids and getting healthy. i started weight watchers again. i was doing good. eating right, exercising, taking care of business. i was self sufficient and pretty satisfied overall.
in July i had a weird idea strike me on my way home from work. i said to myself, hey universe, i think i might be ready to meet someone new. it had only been 6 months, but that last relationship was definitely over and any pain was healed.
in October of 2006, i was at work and got on myspace at lunch. i got into a casual conversation about russian authors with someone in a literature forum. over the next few weeks, we messaged thru myspace, continuing to have purely intellectual discourse — nothing personal. altho, it did become personal, but i dont remember how. eventually we were instant messaging on yahoo (i think?). by november, it has become important to me and we “chatted” every night. in december we started talking on the phone. altho he told me later he thought it went well, i remember the first phone call as a real let down. his writing was very captivating and his lavish and intelligent praise and attention was very seductive (love-bombing). but the phone call revealed a weak voice and a less certain person. i decided to let that first impression slide. because it wasn’t the first impression if you count our written correspondences, nor was it a true in-person first impression, right?
we talked on the phone again soon and it became sexual fairly quickly. he made me feel safe and i was more open with him than i normally would have been. i told him secrets. then he told some of his. i was committed to respect his secrets, since he’d respected mine, and i have an open mind. but his secrets stretched my compassion and understanding.
first, he told me he was leaving for Korea on Christmas day, just weeks away. he was scheduled to be there for one year. while i was disappointed in a way, i was also happy that i wouldn’t have to meet him soon. i wanted to lose 25 pounds before we met so that his first impression of me would be “perfect” like he deserved. but a year did seem like a very long time.
but his other secrets were tougher. he had confessed that he was a sexual masochist. at this point in my life, i had only had relatively vanilla experiences, and altho i’d read a variety of classic erotica, i hadn’t put a lot of thought into it. i was intrigued as i always am when confronted with something i dont know much about, but i was disturbed by some of his stories. incestuous stories of sneaking in and sniffing his mom’s underwear. masturbating in his sister’s rooms when they were off at college. various interactions with strangers he’d met online where he paid them money to either do nothing more than act bitchy, to requesting him to meet other men in hotels and insert objects into each other’s asses.
a normal person would have hung up the phone and been done. and i have so much regret at not having done just that. there wasn’t ever anything good that i got out of the relationship after this point, so it’s impossible to justify. as one might expect, it just got worse. i can only assume that it was the intense and overwhelming nature of the love-bombing in the first few months that set me on a path i wasn’t able to escape until now, 10 years later. that initial love-bombing was followed with teasing crumbs and a few minor love-bombings over the years, altho they were never as good. maybe because he didnt put as much into it, or maybe because they were always tainted with the pain i’d begun accumulating.
but at that time, i thought this was it. this was his openly confessed flaw and im sure i thought with enough love and care, i could help him. that was the dynamic that was set, the trap as it were, and i was only too eager to rush in. again, because of the love-bombing, but also because he convinced me of his shame and hate of this predilection–which turns out was true. he does feel shame and hate. however, he loves it too, and has the cake as well as eats it by compartmentalizing. he also convinced me that there was never any incest, he was not molested, nor had he molested anyone. and he was not sexually attracted to any family member, but that he was drawn to explore sexual taboos. he made this seem like a virture, nay a sacrifice he was making to becomeing his best self. but, more than anything he was drawn to powerful, older women, which is unusual so i was intrigued. and all this that he said is also true. in a way. and also untrue.
thus began my foray into the duplicitous nightmare of false realities, crazy making, and unattainable acceptance that has completely destroyed me. for now.
this is the photo i keep on my phone to help me stay focused, because it so perfectly represents the following 10 years of my life, to be detailed in future posts.
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Station H 