Starting Again, Again

There is irony in the date of my last post--May 19, 2011.

On May 18, 2011, just one day prior--though unbenowst to me at the time--my boyfriend had written an email to a woman he'd been having a years-long correspondence with. His May 18th email went like this:

That girl I'm seeing is so jealous of you! Somehow she knows I have a wicked crush on you--I wonder how. I miss you terribly.

I only just read this email last week. I read it as my boyfriend stood with movers some 20 miles away, amidst the boxes and bags of his soon-to-be-former apartment, and I sat awaiting the delivery of him in the still silence of my apartment. That's when I read this email.

But I've gotten ahead of myself. Let me tell you how we came together before I tell you how we started to split apart.

I met this man on December 22nd of last year, just three days before Christmas. By New Years Eve, we were speaking to each other every day. By Valentine's Day, we were seeing each other exclusively. He began talking about moving in together when his lease expired in January.

Meaning now. Thus the movers, the boxes and bags. But again, I'm getting ahead.

The spring came, and with it came changes. His work, normally busy, had become overwhelming. The loving, funny, gentle man I was falling in love with became almost a different person--like someone related to my boyfriend and bearing a striking resemblance, but of a completely different spirit and humor. Irritable most of the time. Short-tempered. Pessimistic, critical, sometimes mean and cutting behind a veil of humor. As his work intensified, so did the appearance of this look-alike interloper.

One morning in early May, perplexed but still smitten, I was eating breakfast before work and browsing through Facebook, a rare guilty pleasure--rare because I seem to have lost the time I once spent socializing online; guilty because as soon as I enter that realm, I seem to have lost a guaranteed minimum of ten minutes of my life.

I saw an update in my boyfriend's status--some witty remark, very Facebook-y. Following it was a short string of dialog between him and a woman I'll call Monique. Monique happens to be her name, but I don't think we'll meet her here. So let's call Monique Monique.

This dialog, this burst of banter, between my boyfriend and Monique made me uncomfortable. It was flirtatious, but more: It was intimate and comfortable in its flirtatiousness.

I knew of many names from my boyfriend's past--too many, in truth. Names of two former wives; names of girlfriends, lovers, dates. Monique was not one of them.

I called him when I realized that yes, there genuinely was a knot in my stomach.

Who is Monique, I asked when he picked up his phone, And why are you flirting with her on Facebook?

He laughed. He wasn't flirting, turned out. For god's sake, Monique was married!

AHA, I said. Which of your friends is Monique's husband?

I believe that you already know the answer.

He had never met Monique's husband.

I can say now that the months followed--I am not exaggerating here, this is embarassing enough without additional embellishment--months of rageful arguments, all centering around my boyfriend's conduct on Facebook--were the most hostile I have ever spent in a relationship. The fights were not only about Monique, but about most of the women of his Facebook friends to whom he wasn't related. My boyfriend had dated most of them--some many years prior, others within the past few years. And they all met up regularly on Facebook, exchanging double entendre, lascivious comments, emoticons extraordinaire.

That is the part I did know.

What I didn't know was that following that very first conversation I had with my boyfriend in May, the conversation about Monique and how my boyfriend was not flirting with her, he had sent Monique the email you saw above--the one that starts, "That girl I'm seeing is SO jealous of you!"

Back to what I did know. The topic of Facebook, and my boyfriend's conduct on it, was a ball of twine that, once I started tugging, seemingly had no end. A ball of adolescent twine. Adolescent, defensive, defiant twine.

I may not have KNOWN, but I knew. The man doth protested too much. Week after week, argument after argument, we seemed to be locked in a groundhog day of words -- my interpretation of his conduct in these online relationships; his self-righteous denial and disbelief that I could be so paranoid and so lacking in trust to think that he would flirt with other women.

As a couple, we pushed on.

The summer was hot and long and mostly unpleasant. My boyfriend worked 60- or 70- hour weeks, including weekends, and complained bitterly throughout. It seemed as if I spent those months waiting for him to finish--he was always about to hang up a conference call, about to get off the computer, about to really start the weekend. I can picture him giving me the "just two more minutes" sign as he peered over his laptop at me, working from home on yet another intended long-weekend Friday. On one of these occasions I left, drove to the next town, took a yoga class, and drove home. When I walked back in he looked up from his conference call, rolled his eyes, and gave me the "just one more minute" gesture. Almost two hours later, his two minutes still hadn't passed.

At some time around October, the conversation about our moving in together became more serious. It had to; his lease was expiring on January 1, and he was ready to move on.

The Facebook arguments mostly died down, too. In the end he'd deleted most of the women whose interactions I found offensive. It felt like some subtle shift had taken place while I was sleeping. He seemed closer to understanding that there are things we just don't do when we're involved in a committed relationship. Out of respect, or something like it.

We picked a date for him to move into my 1-bedroom apartment: December 26. The plan was that we would shoehorn ourselves into my apartment for the few months before my lease expired in April--or for as long as we could stand the cramped quarters. We agreed that if time proved the space just too small, we'd forget our schedule and start looking for a bigger apartment sooner.

The holidays came without my really noticing. Work was busy, life was busy, and I had closets to empty.

It's not that I wasn't excited about my boyfriend moving into my apartment. I was. I was nervous, too: This apartment had been the first place I had chosen to live after leaving my marriage, and I had chosen it because the first time I had seen it I'd known, I will find peace here. The brick walls and high ceilings and tree-lined street had felt like home as soon as I moved in.

And I had found peace here. I had recovered from my lost marriage; had a couple of meaningful relationships, and the requisite number of crazy, newly single relationships. I had lived through and recovered from a major surgery; lost my grandfather--for so many years my ballast in this unsteady world. After all that, I had found my soul still mostly joyful and excited to start the day. The place had worked some magic on me, though no doubt plain time had something to do with it.

Which brings me to the morning of December 26. There I sat, surrounded by boxes and bags, when I heard my boyfriend's iPad bing with a new message.

Do you know how you know you're going to regret knowing something, but you ask the question anyway? I have always been the asker of those questions.

I lifted the cover of his iPad and saw the beginning of a message from Monique--my old friend Monique from Facebook. I knew my boyfriend's password because he'd given it to me to watch a movie over the summer. [And let me offer some advice to you here, readers: Always play the luddite. Pretend to not have a mind that can remember passwords or understand how to delete a browsing history. Adapting a persona of technical ignorance can be an enormous advantage when you least expect it.]

I entered his password. And witnessed months of flirtatious, endearing emails between Monique and my boyfriend. The last one he had sent was in mid-October: "Miss our conversations. Miss you terribly, as always. Love,..."

This new email from Monique, the one I'd heard come in on the iPad, started, "It's been awhile and I haven't heard from you..."

I thought it would be a good idea for me to reply to Monique. Who, I should mention, is married with two children; pregnant with a third. I did. I like to think of what feelings might have flooded her as she read my message. Whatever my imaginings, I hope the reality was much, much worse.

I also thought it would be a good idea to copy the words from my boyfriend's email to Monique--the email from May, the one that started those months of argument; the one that started, "That girl I'm dating is SO jealous of you..." I copied those words into a text message, and sent them to my boyfriend as he directed the movers handling his furniture and other belongings. I wondered if he'd remember them.

He did.

Anyone who has ever lived through a scene like this knows the stages that follow. First, his outrage at my reading his email. Then the confession. Then the apologies.

These apologies are their own sort of rollercoaster of emotions. They're not the pure mea culpas one might expect. There's quite a bit of anger at having been outed woven in with the apology. This has surprised me. But lately everything is surprising me, so take this with a grain of salt.

There are more details, but the details seem to matter less every day.

Here is what I know.

I let him move into my apartment after all. The timing had all the makings of a tragicomedy.

Most of the time I believe what he says: That this romantic flirtation was a last vestige of his single-man status, and a vestige that he allowed to linger for too long. "If you could see inside my head," he keeps saying, "You would see how ridiculous and meaningless it was." They had never dated--never actually even held hands. They had met at the home of a mutual friend, years before. Monique lives on the other side of the country. They are perfect for each other, actually--perfect illusions, untarnished and untarnish-able.

I know that if he could see inside my head, he would see how much has been lost.

I've synched up all of the dates of his email exchange with Monique--the ones that he saved, just since this past May--with dates in our relationship. The last email he sent, in mid-October, he sent a day after I'd taken a picture of him at lunch at one of my favorite downtown cafes. I loved that picture--he looked so boyish in it, so carefree. After the summer we'd had, it had felt triumphant to see him looking back at me through a lens like this.

I don't like looking at this picture anymore.

I looked forward to my boyfriend moving in to my apartment with real excitement. This, I had told myself--and really believed--this was a good man. My marriage had split apart under the strain of truths half-told. But this man, I'd believed--this man was a different creature altogether.

This part is actually true.

Just not in the way I thought.

I don't know what happens now.

There are moments when I think, Just believe him; accept that he was an idiot, and move on.

There are moments when I think, Why?

Why?