I don’t have an exact date, but 20 years ago this week, my fiance Meredith died. She didn’t really, but that’s what I told myself, because it was actually kind of accurate from a certain perspective. I’ve only ever seen such a dramatic change in personality a few times in my life, and to cope with the psychological damage I decided to mourn her imagined death as a way to process the pain she caused me.
This whole idea worked well for years. Despite living relatively near one another, I never saw her again, except that now you can find everyone on Zuck’s worldwide phonebook (now with propaganda!). Aside from the fact that in the modern age this trick is more difficult, it also didn’t really work well because there wasn’t a funeral or anything, and nobody else went along with it. In the aftermath, because of this, I was a shitty friend at times. If I had it to do over again, I would deal with the issues head on, but I’m middle aged now with a full psyche and a healthy relationship and also have this experience to reflect on. 19 year old me didn’t have any of that. I am sorry to those friends, I could have done better.
Prior to October of 2001 we had a quaint love story, but something happened and I have no idea what it was, or even if it was anything specific. She suddenly looked on me with such contempt that she treated me as a credulous moron and avoided all the usual calls and emails and letters we’d exchanged with such frequency in the years prior that one person remarked “if erik ever doubts you love him, I’ll show him this picture I took of you writing him a letter”.
I suspect very few people if any will ever read this, but even so, opening up old wounds and talking of embarrassment and sex is a difficult thing to do, esp in the context of my very happy marriage. On the other hand without this damaging experience I think I would not have known what to look for, and certain relationship traps and issues might have festered, unrecognized, so it’s an important part of my personal story. Many of the problems we had before and after October 2001 are common enough, but I didn’t know how to address them. I thought our relationship was bullet proof, so I preferred to go along to get along, until she graduated from college and we could move in together.
We met in the summer of 99 at our first job: retail. We were both tentative, nervous, clueless really. Lacking in confidence. She went to a different school a couple hours away, so letter writing and emails were an awkward path to romance. I remember that we were at ease together, constantly showering one another with affection.
Neither of us knew how to tell the other “yes, let’s have sex” so there was a ridiculous dance around this that went on through comical shyness for much longer than anyone would have guessed. She was easily convinced to receive oral sex, and we both enjoyed that, but months after she eagerly accepted the offer (many times) I shyly asked for her to reciprocate and she burst into tears, without any willingness to explain why. Looking back, this is a big problem that I should have addressed. Instead I let it slide since I didn’t know how to have difficult conversations, I assumed it was a result of some kind of trauma and decided I shouldn’t push, especially since this reaction was so out of nowhere. This is also relevant again later.
When she was at school, instant messaging took up a lot of our time conversing at our computers while studying. It worked well from the standpoint of our academic lives; I was dean’s listed twice while pursuing my engineering degree. Instead of going out, we were sitting around studying and writing to each other.
Back in those days cell phones were new and had poor battery life and very few monthly minutes. The old landline was still king, with expensive long-distance costs. When she returned home for breaks any time not together was on the phone, and one or both of us would often fall asleep on the phone together. Looking back, this was an exhausting expectation for us to have set up, but it was an innocent one for both of us.
We read books to one another, joked endlessly and were accepted into one-another’s families. Just last week I finally threw away an old tool that was a gift to me from her aunt. Meredith sketched our hands holding and gave it to me as a gift, and I wrote sappy letters with rose petals in them. We were on a beach vacation and it seemed natural to ask her to marry me. This was the first time I had been emotionally, romantically and sexually vulnerable with someone, and that in itself raised the stakes. Still, I approached the idea with an open heart; it was an honest idea, and one she was equally enthusiastic about.
My dad died of cancer, and she helped me to cope with that loss. Looking back, this was a lot to put on her, but she was still the old-version, the one still alive, an uncomplicated love story. I wondered for years if she had turned into a hateful villain because she saw me cry so much about it. It’s possible.
In October of 2001 I got the last real email from her that I would ever receive, the last of many hundreds of letters and emails, the last one in which the tone was one of loving and longing. It was a perfectly normal, cheery and relaxed tale of her life at college, and I remember looking at that email for months and months afterwards, looking for clues to understand what had gone wrong. Whatever happened must have come after.
What happened was that she was cheating on me, and it was both obvious and horrible. She treated me like an idiot and a jerk for any pangs of jealousy, and like a chore when expressing any vulnerability and need to spend time with her.
Suddenly there was another person in the picture, a “friend”, and our relationship was so solid I didn’t think anything of it at first. In fact this is something I did right, I gave her plenty of space for friendships without any jealousy at all. It wasn’t until she started to act much more openly and to mock me for missing and needing her that I started to let her know I had jealous feelings. This only plunged the knife deeper when, instead of validating and reassuring, she contemptuously claimed I was wrong about anything and everything.
She started to gaslight me, and at the time that phrase wasn’t a thing, so I was deeply confused and hurt by it. I visited her at her college, and she spent all the time I was there with him. When I asked about this, instead of apologizing and filling me in on some kind of extenuating circumstances, she claimed I was simply mistaken, distorting reality in a way that was surprisingly brazen.
The people around us became increasingly awkward and embarrassed about this situation. This became humiliating on several occasions. The first was a game of “never have I ever” in the dorms. She admitted to giving a blowjob to the guy that was her boyfriend before me with a lighthearted “of course”, flippantly dismissing my look of shock. Because she had cried about it I had assumed she had been threatened with some kind of rape or other trauma, but suddenly her attitude about it was easygoing. Still she was firm she wasn’t interested in “returning the favor”, but her story about having done it was plain and boring. She claimed that she had told me, the first of her attempts to openly gaslight me since I remembered the previous circumstances so vividly.
The only explanation that makes any sense is that she had some internal shift in values that led her down the path that she could compartmentalize. I’m guessing BJ’s were on the menu for the other guy, hence why she suddenly had a flippant attitude about it. The idea that she’d done this for a previous boyfriend was a lie, and she was caught in it in her response to the never-have-i-ever challenge. At the time, I wasn’t willing to consider all this, but it bothered me subconsciously, a lot.
I remained “cool” determined not to be the jealous boyfriend. Hesitatingly, I expressed some of these feelings, but they were met with agitation, or outright anger. Her ability to distort reality with me and my hesitancy to speak up just seemed to spur her on to try more open defiance of social norms and any respect for our relationship or my feelings. Now even if we were together she spent the entire time on the phone with others, sighing loudly if I finally signaled I had to leave and wished to say goodbye. A curt hug and a dismissal was common since I was now just an inconvenience to her.
Around this time she claimed to have mysteriously contracted oral herpes, somehow spontaneously, certainly not from anyone in particular. I have come to doubt this, since she didn’t actually have any visible sores, but to keep from spreading it to me we were not to kiss as usual. I believe this was a ruse because the other guy was now becoming jealous.
On one such call to a friend, while I was in the room she spoke of “kissing ronnie”, and this wasn’t even the guy she was cheating on me with. She looked at me while saying this, then when she saw the look of pain and shock on my face she rolled her eyes and told her friend she’d call back after dealing with me. Suddenly she had never agreed to exclusivity, despite wearing a diamond that I’d spent 1000$ of my 7.25 an hour paying for with my after-school job. Looking back, this was a bizarre moment, but I was still confused and convinced that I needed to show that I wasn’t an angry jealous boyfriend, a monster that she conjured up to keep the conversation and overall confrontation suppressed.
She continued to be adamant that there was nothing going on with the other guy, but I believe their relationship was getting more serious. I asked her point blank to respect me by promising that in the future she wouldn’t kiss other guys, and she outright rejected agreeing to that. I believe in doing so she expected I would break up with her on the spot, because that’s just too ridiculous on its face. But again, I was in too deep, I had to let it go. This was a very damaging moment to my psyche, but I also feel like it was the first bit of recovery I could process in the ensuing breakup to come.
Undoubtedly she had envisioned returning to school single after this incident, because she became more withdrawn. I had ruined the plan in which she could return the “victim” crestfallen that I’d broken up with her, and by christmas her relationship could be public and she could save face with everyone. These people she went to school with were at least somewhat my friends too, so she wouldn’t want to appear to have been the bad-guy. Pretty psychopathic looking back. The girl I’d fallen in love with wouldn’t have acted this way. That girl was dead.
When she came home for Christmas I had the most shocking heartbreaking moment of my life. She was heading back to school and I planned to put gas money and a nice note in her purse while she showered- for her to discover later. Instead I found a note written to me, or so it seemed. I was overjoyed, because she had stopped writing to me months prior, claiming to be busy with school. I happily devoured the letter, until I was left shaking at staring at the final paragraph, “I had a dream that we were going to have sex, but Erik was in the next room”.
She came into the room and found me in tears. Looking back, I think she was purposely torturing me, and secretly hoped that I’d find the letter. At these times when she would hurt me, whether a little with a dodged phone call, or a lot with this letter, she had a veiled satisfaction about it. As much as she had enjoyed showing me affection, it seemed she equally enjoyed causing me pain. In this case she wove a ridiculous tale gaslighting me further and convinced me the letter was meaningless, and written to “no one”. I felt stuck, because I had made a lifelong commitment, and she wasn’t letting me off the hook by breaking it off with me, nor did her story make any sense. I had pledged to believe her. It was a paradox.
Throughout this, she was reassuring me by continuing to have sex with me. Looking back, this kind of manipulation is perhaps some of the worst of all, since she treated me with increasing disdain. I’ve often wondered if their physical relationship began as early as October, and when he thinks ours ended.
Because she was at school and stopped answering my calls, and now dodged my instant messaging, I was tortured for a further 6 months after that incident. I would try to plan to come see her, hoping to get our relationship back to solid footing, but she would come up with excuses, and at face value claimed to be 100% invested and committed to our engagement.
Somehow the greatest humiliation was to come. There was a formal dance at her school, and I was her “default” date. I drove the whole group, getting glitter in my car that was a painful reminder of the scene for years. She was slow dancing with Clefton, the “other guy” and her friends all shoved me over to them ordering me to ask to cut in. Looking back, this was an incredibly merciful action on their part. There was an instant of dead silence when I asked politely, sheepishly “may I cut in?” and everyone around us turned their heads on the dance floor in a lull in the romantic music, and she said “no” with an angry dismissiveness.
I went outside and sat in the cold alone with complete confusion. She came out and insisted everything was fine, and that it was all in my head, and that I was actually a monster for even being hurt. She was 100% committed still, totally innocent of any cheating, and we were still to be married. She made a show of how frustrated she was by this, because of how obvious it was that there was nothing wrong.
She was cheating on me with this guy, but part of what made it sort of strange was that I felt that I was “better” in almost every way. He was both much more boring than me and not as good looking. He didn’t have much of a sense of humor beyond a few movie quotes. I can recall her saying things like this to me behind his back, almost coyly. It was another trick in her guile and self-deception. You see, I “didn’t have anything to worry about.”
Finally, I knew it was over when she insisted on spending the week of spring break at his family home in Tennessee.
Part of her oblique psychological manipulation was when she became jealous that another girl might do the same, with a look suggesting this other bitch was moving in on her territory, and claimed “if anyone is going to stay with him for spring break, it’s me!” She got the reaction of pain she was looking for. I watched them drive off, waiting for the moment she would turn around and realize how wrong she was, how ridiculously she’d treated me.
For a guy who had established all this (at least partially) with letter-writing, and was 60K words into my first amateur novel, I was embarrassingly bad at expressing myself in this time. I sent her the lyrics to “Stay” by Lisa Loeb, and her response was to angrily ask what I expected in response. I was hoping she would validate it, and that she would in-fact stay. If I had it to do over again, instead I would tell her off, but again, I was a vulnerable 20 year old. I was as gullible as she thought.
Instead it was a full month before I got her to finally come to my home and I was the one that had to break up with her. It was a painfully one-sided conversation, she didn’t seem to have any interest in fighting for me, or any feeling of sadness. It was one last parting wound, feeling nothing, showing me that I meant so little to her. She left her engagement ring behind and I never set eyes on her again. She was dead.
She eventually married this other guy, and they’ve since had two kids together. Their life together from the outside looks happy enough, normal enough, but also tinged with a kind of joyless boredom – though that is limited by the lens of public social media. Given that her default operation seems to be protecting the status quo at all costs, regardless of what that actually is, it’s actually kind of sad to think they’re stuck with each other. I sometimes have wondered if she would ever apologize, and it’s still a fantasy for me that first he’d cheat on her, then she’d say “I was a fool!” and I could tell her to get fucked.
What happened is: I think she had a profound change in personality in early adulthood, and couldn’t see herself as “the bad guy” enough even to deal with me honestly. I also don’t know if she also saw him as less good-looking, boring and overall dumber than me, but I’ve always felt that contributed to her extreme deception – If he’d been an adonis and a stand up comedian would she have left me twisting in the wind from October to June? It’s a bit of a doubt for me, honestly, I think she would have dumped me, but was holding onto the idea in which I was a concept and a plan – a hedge in her bets.
In October of 2002, I observed the first anniversary of her “death” by visiting her college. I sat on the picturesque campus on a bench and reflected on everything. I missed the friends I had made there and the experiences and the stories created; it was a time of mourning. One of the girls who had gotten glitter in my car saw me and invited me to a party, but I was still shattered, now with a loss of confidence and a feeling of grief. Looking back, I wish I could thank her for both forms of kindness – both in pushing us that night on the dance floor to tear me free of the thrall of the ghost of my fiance, and also inviting me to be her friend on a cool October day. I wish I’d said yes. I saw one other friend, who was willing to perform the ritual of dissing the crazy-x with me. He was cool too, but it was harder to stay in touch with people back then, before social media. These feel like memories from another life, and that day I said goodbye to all of it.
The loneliness of such a time is profound. Suddenly being in a place with nowhere to go, no promise of a check-in, no well wishes, no person who would be there to share it with or to say goodbye to. I don’t know how many people who lose a lover to the veil of death get to say goodbye, but I’d guess that sound can’t make the silence ring out with the memory enough to shut out the sadness. I remember imagining that somehow the old-her would be transported through time, what would that one say? She’d have been horrified by what happened, apologize for it, and then let me off the hook, so that’s what I had to do for myself.
I lucked out. I found someone so much more well rounded, more suited to me, so much funnier and smart than Meredith was, and she’s objectively much prettier.
In another way I lucked out, even though I told her I was going to keep writing the book I was working on, I dropped it. It was terrible and derivative. I would have been destitute trying to make it that way. Instead I’ve had lucrative opportunities in engineering, and more recently enough slack to write without as much worrying about the money side of it.
I am even more deeply relieved to have dodged a bullet when I discovered through FB that one of her kids has an anxiety disorder, selective mutism. When you google the causes of it, you get this list:
- An anxiety disorder.
- Poor family relationships.
- Untreated psychological issues.
- Self-esteem problems.
- Problems with sound processing.
- A speech or language problem, such as stuttering.
- Family history of anxiety disorders.
- A traumatic experience.
This list in the context of our relationship gives me the heebie jeebies. It seems like a foregone conclusion that she would have treated our children with the same kind of contempt and psychological torture that she dolled out to me. Since I can attest there’s no family history of inheritable biological or “sound processing” on her side, (and none that I recall from her constantly yakking about him), let’s just say I’m very relieved that I escaped the situation without any children.
In this again, I couldn’t ask for a better partner in raising our children, and I am lucky so many times over.
I decided to write this today as an exercise, I just came across this video, and it reminded me of the story. This story isn’t “the truth of my writing” or my life or whatever, but it’s difficult to share, even if nobody actually reads it.
Writing in Any Genre 