You know its funny...
The way "love" can go from utter and complete joy and happiness to the most destructive and destroying idea in the world. I have been talking to someone in my life who has helped me see that once again I have fallen into old habits.. the habit of keeping everything inside hoping it will all just magically disappear... Well, friends, the truth is it is not going away.
For the past year of my life, I have been filled with anger, bitterness, sadness, brokenness, and depression. I have felt betrayed by not only the man who I loved but also my Heavenly Father.
It has not been a great year for my relationship with him. Now, that being said I may be bitter but I haven't stopped having faith in him, or loving him immensely.. but I have been really upset with him.
So bear with me... because I have some things to share that I don't share lightly.
Where to begin...
One year and six months ago I fell in love with a beautiful man. He was everything I wished he would be when I found love again. He was kind, loving, tender, funny, and the most wonderful man I knew. He swept me completely off my feet. He filled my heart with the words I longed for the man I would one day love to say. He was my rock. I leaned on him completely. He dried my tears when I was sad.. he supported me in my dreams... he prayed with me. It all seemed so effortlessly easy to love him. It seemed like it was destined for us to love each other. One night we prayed, and we asked Heavenly Father if we had his blessing to get married because we wanted nothing else in this world than to be together forever... after weeks of praying together and discussing our future, we both received the answer to do so. We were so unimaginably happy. I was happy to find a man who loved me and who I loved just as much. One day we went and found the ring that would symbolize our love for each other, and we both had the reaffirming answer that we were the one for each other.
But just as quickly as love entered my heart love was taken away. The rug that was once underneath my feet, a solid soft comfort, was ripped out from me without any warning. The love of my life was no longer a man worthy of my trust. The 6 months we were together turned into a shambled mess of questioning whether he had been upfront and honest with me, or if it was as crumbled as the lie he so carelessly kept from me during our entire relationship. I began to question everything. The wall he had carefully help me destroy brick by brick that I had been building for years began to reconstruct itself in a matter of seconds. I shut down. There are no words in the English language that can describe the heart-shattering pain I felt for the 24 hours after he walked out my door.
The night he told me that he was lying about his age for 6 months and that he was actually ten years older than me, at the time shattered me. I let him walk out my door without knowing if I would ever see him again. I was devasted. I laid on my floor in a ball, sobbing, crying out to The Lord to make it stop... to take away every ounce of pain that was happening to me. I could feel every shattered piece of my heart begin to shatter piece by piece all over again. This time I knew I wouldn't recover so I laid there. Helpless and hopeless. I began to question everything in my life with J. He was supposed to be the one person in the world that I could always trust and always rely on. Even worse I felt like I had failed because I knew that he didn't trust me, or believe in us enough to tell me when we first started dating. The day that followed one of the darkest nights of my life was three days before we were supposed to fly to the midwest where I was going to meet his family for the first time. Instead, I went home to my family where I found myself constantly haunted by our ghosts. The ghost of the happy version of us. The version of us that I thought was unbreakable. I began searching for answers with my Father in Heaven. I prayed constantly for a week wanting him to tell me what to do because I knew I couldn't leave J... I knew leaving him would be the end of me... but I also knew that I no longer could love a man who didn't keep his promises to me. So I sat torn. Not wanting to move one way or another for fear that I was about to make the biggest mistake of my life. However, life doesn't stop because you want it to. Eventually, I had to face him. I told him I would try to trust him. I was a fool to think I could but I was so blinded by the love I had for him that I didn't want to lose him.
So I stayed. I completely detached but I stayed. I asked him question after question wanting to get answers for things that were no longer crystal clear in my mind. I told him how lost I was, and how badly I just needed time. Then things turned. I saw this change in him. It wasn't so much desperation for holding on to us as it was determination. In some ways, it scared me. I wanted to let go but he just kept holding on tighter. One night when I knew I no longer could keep holding onto a man I no longer knew there. He sat on my couch, a remorseful shell of the man I wanted to love but not the man I knew. He sat there as I asked him the one question that mattered most to me, a question that answered a million others that he happened to have tied to my brother. I knew then in the rage I was in trying to understand if he was lying knowing full well that this lie would be the one to break us. Not his age, but this moment. He answered my questions and it was exactly what he wanted me to hear but deep down I knew that he was holding more back. So I told him that in that moment and the hundreds we had had yelling and fighting since everything was shattered that I had gotten my answer. I no longer thought we were supposed to be together. We cried and he held on to us so tight I wanted to change my mind I didn't want to walk away from him. The thought alone scared me, but I persisted. This was the moment the man I loved turned in the monster that would tear me apart for the next year. He looked at me with this blank expression as he told me that I wasn't praying the way I was supposed to because I wasn't getting the same answer as him and that if I would pray the way he did, the "right way", that I wouldn't have gotten that answer. I think I lost myself in that moment. I didn't understand what was happening but I just kept saying that it was over and then the one phrase that he said that would finish destroying me was said, "You are never going to find a man who will ever love you like I do." With those words, the last piece of me was shattered. I now had to face not only the reality of losing J but I was also reminded of my one true fear that I may be alone for good this time. He walked out my apartment that night and that was the night I knew I had lost him...
However, it didn't end there. The more I pleaded for space the less space he wanted to give me. no matter how many times I would tell him it was over and plead for him to hear me he wouldn't. I would sit on the phone with for hours as he talked at me not wanting to hear what I had to say as he constantly told me how I should feel. He filled me with worthlessness. He would tell me that I never loved him because I wouldn't just forgive him and that I needed to live the church's teachings to forgive man. He began to make me feel as if I was an awful person. The thing is I did forgive him. Heaven knows how much I loved him. I gave him my everything. I sacrificed my time to help him succeed. I was willing to sacrifice my dreams to help him reach is full potential... but in our situation forgiveness was never going to be enough. When I looked into his eyes I no longer saw the love of an honest man who treasured me... instead I saw emptiness. I no longer saw our lives together in his eyes. I just didn't know how to say that to him. So my broken heart piled up whatever courage it had left and I told him that I was done. It wasn't said with sweetness or compassion for a man I once loved. It was filled with anger and bitterness but I knew that he was so determined to change my mind that if I wasn't angry with him he was never going to hear me. He resented me for that. He made me feel as if I was the most awful person on earth for not sugar coating what I was feeling anymore in order to spare him. Truth be told I never wanted to hurt him. I didn't want him to feel the same pain he had caused me, but to him, I was now a monster, and he spared no time telling the world how awful I was.
Summer came, and I left just as he did to work at a camp over the summer. I never reached out, but I cried every night of that summer. I ached for him. I wanted nothing more than to be with him. No matter how badly he broke me and my trust I wanted him and only him. However, I still knew my answer... No... I prayed like crazy begging Heavenly Father to take it away to make it all a bad dream. I wanted it to not be true. I wanted the love we had, but he persisted. I became so bitter with him over the summer. I felt so betrayed that he would send me a man who would promise me the world only to take it away. I felt as if he had finally given me my happiness that so desperately had searched for since Taylor, only to have him rip it away from me. So I slipped away into myself. I began to only say the basic prayer. I no longer wanted to ask him questions. I still loved him.. it felt a lot like when your parents tell you that you can't spend time with your friends and you fight but you still love them but you don't really want to talk to them either. That's how it was. I would give him the bare minimum in my prayers because I felt like he had taken away all of my happiness. This darkness devoured me. I began to sink lower and lower, as I cried each night. Food lost it's flavor, things I once loved no longer mattered. I honestly had to force myself to get out of bed each morning to make it to work each day. Time passed and I didn't heal. My heart would break every time I heard our song play at work, or when I would see his jeep drive past my work. I felt so immensely lost.
As summer began to wind down I found myself sitting up one night like I did most nights terrified of moving back up to Logan. I knew he would be there, this time right across the street. I knew it would only be a matter of time before I would run into him. The pure thought was incapacitating. I didn't know if I would run into his arms longing to be in them, or if I would want to hit him so hard for giving me the summer from hell. I faced my fears and I moved back knowing that I couldn't let him take over my life completely even when he was no longer in it. I went back to work as soon as I got there. One day at work I had my first answer from Heavenly Father since I was told to walk away. He told me I needed to text him. I didn't want to. Oh boy, I fought that prompting like crazy. Let me tell you. I had this prompting for three days. So I texted him. As I opened the doors of communication between us I began to question everything. Did I just make the biggest mistake of my life? What do we even have to say to each other anymore? He responded and asked if we could talk. I agreed and we walked around campus talking about our summers. I held nothing back and neither did he. I could feel myself slipping into him. I knew how badly I wanted to be his again, just as much as I knew it was never going to be again. He continued to say all the right things to me, as he filled my heart and mind with the words I had longed to hear all summer. I gave in. I thought that maybe if I gave him one more chance that I would know what to do now, now that my mind had cleared from the initial shock of our breakup. So he took me to dinner, he took me to a field and danced with me to our song. It felt right, but at the same time, the reaffirming answer of letting him go also began to be stronger and stronger. It was crazy how with each moment that I felt myself get closer to him something would come out that would make me not trust him. Whether it was him telling me how to feel, or telling me how the girl he always told me was not even an option in his life had become a bigger part of his life over the summer, or how he was going to stay with her for a week, and that if I didn't tell him not to go that he would probably sleep in her bed... and the man I knew once slipped further and further away. He would push and pull me around and when I didn't say or do what he wanted he would flip out. He wouldn't yell or get physically upset he would make me feel as if I had screwed up in some way to make him do what he was doing. He would tell people that I wasn't trying, or that I was going on dates with other guys just to hurt him, when in reality he knew that I was dating other guys because I didn't want to commit to him and he agreed, but he would use it against me time and time again making me feel like an awful person for trying to be happy again.
Just like that within a month, our webs began to tangle more and more, and the lies he told not only his friends about me but also teachers I knew began to come up everywhere. I was thought of as nothing more than a girl who was using and abusing a man who did nothing but love me. I received so many awful looks from institute teachers that he had heard his version of our story. His roommates looked at me as though I carried the plague and with it a scarlet A. The thing about this is I still don't think anyone in his life knew he was 33 years old. They all just think that I am the awful girl who broke him for not having enough money which couldn't be farther from the truth.
It has taken me a year and six months to realize that this man who I loved had emotionally abused me. He had convinced me little by little while we were together that I didn't need anyone but him. When I would get upset with my friends he would assure me that I didn't need anyone else but him because he was all I needed to be happy. He would say I love you when I was upset with him to make me forget why I was mad. He took bits of me little by little, piece by piece until he held every bit of me, and he waited to tell me the truth until he had me at a point of loving him so much that he didn't think I could leave him, and when I did the emotional turmoil just got worse. I couldn't talk to anyone because he told me that he didn't want anyone to make decisions for me, when in reality he wanted to make the decision for me, and the more I fought back the more he would use the things I had given him against me to make me feel like I had no choice than to be with him. He made me feel like it was my fault we didn't work. He wanted to manipulate me to feel and do what he wanted and when I wouldn't do it he would say or do things to make me feel like I was worthless or humiliate me to others.
It has taken a year and six months to understand that it is not my fault. After weeks of talking with my bishop (he made a pretty great therapist) about the depression, I was feeling that I did nothing wrong in our relationship to deserve being treated the way I was. Emotional abuse is something that is still misunderstood and is only thought of in the extreme sense, but it happens to more people than you and I can imagine. I learned that by giving a man my heart, and wanting to help him succeed by helping him in every way did not make me weak, and that when I did not run back to a harmful relationship it did not make me unforgiving. I loved J entirely. It wasn't always awful and hurtful. I have had to learn how to separate my feelings for J into two categories us, and him. The laughs, the love, the kisses, the I love you's are us. The manipulation, the lies, the shaming are him. I want to get one thing clear here. I am not innocent in our relationship failure one bit. I held back a lot of things during our relationship that would upset me because I was afraid to lose him. I figured in the grand scheme of things that bothered me didn't matter, and at times I was untrusting of his relationship with Lissa. I at times took out my pain of being cheated on in the past on him, and I know that at times it made him resentful of me. I know that I have also said things to him that haven't been said in the nicest way, and I know I have hurt him. I am not writing this to by any means taint the way anyone who knows J feels about him. Each of us have our own relationships and they are built differently. I know that I was/am emotionally abused by J, but that doesn't make him a horrible person that everyone should hate, but it is my reality. The reality I have not wanted to come to terms with, and still, struggle to wrap my head around each and every day. J will always be a man who I loved, and he will forever be one of my greatest losses. I have had to grieve losing a man I thought would be my forever, and that has and will be a battle. I now have gained a greater understanding that I am not broken, I am not unloveable, and I am not Hester Prynne for dating again and wanting to find a love with someone who is honest with me about everything.
For those of you reading still who know J. Know that I loved him. I wanted to give him the world, and I would have. I have never wanted to hurt or break him in any way, and every story has another side to tell and I hope you have heard mine. Your friend, brother, roommate, etc. is still one of the kindest people I know. I wish that this was not the end of our story, and I have always only wanted what was best for him, but what I know is best for us he never wanted to hear so I had to be the bad guy, and I am learning that it was worth me being known as the horrible girl that broke his heart in order for him to move on and find love with someone who I pray he will be honest with always. I genuinely enjoyed and loved getting to know each of you.
So, for now, I am here. Broken and healing. Learning to love myself, and to understand that Heavenly Father never wanted to break me or take away my joy and happiness. He wanted me to grow and learn more about love and relationships to help me to be ready for the man who is worthy of my forever... and I will wait for him whenever he comes. Until then I am learning to love me for me again, and that is enough.
