December 20, 2012
(with this post I am breaking format and including the letter I wrote to the other woman instead of a letter I wrote to M)
A,
I have been M's lover for the past nine months (with an exception of July-Sept). I met him at [his band’s] show and I thought things were going great until he left me because things were going too fast for him. He came back a few months later after dating you for a short time. During these nine months I have believed him to be my soul mate and a very important person in my life. I have listened to him talk about how he doesn't trust women and I felt special that I was the woman he could trust. So it turns out there is more than one woman he can trust.
I had asked him about you and he spoke as if that was in the past. Apparently it's not. I lowered so many of my expectations to stay with him as long as I have, only asking that he tell me if he took on additional lovers so I could make the choice to leave if that grew to be too much for my heart to bear. He obviously does not respect me enough to grant me that.
I hope none of this comes to you as much as a surprise as it did to me, or that you at least had not deluded yourself as thoroughly as I have. I know he loves to praise the ways of polyamory, but as I understand it, all the participants are supposed to know that is what they are a part of. I hope I have it wrong for your sake, but in case this is important for you to know I wanted to return the favor you did for me. I was able to figure it out by your Facebook posts on his wall, but I only saw them one week ago.
I know that if he finds out I contacted you he will probably never speak to me again and that thought hurts my soul. I understand if you feel the need to confront him though. That's what I did. I'm willing to talk on the phone or in person if you feel the need to discuss this more thoroughly. I will be completely honest with you as that is the virtue I praise above all others.
Sincerely,
D
***
I had spent the previous week going back and forth on whether or not I should reach out to A. I wasn’t sure if my inclination was motivated by sincere concern for her, my own pressing desire to know the truth, or my wounded heart’s need to lash out at M in some way. I analyzed all the possible ways I could approach her. My ego wanted to ask her pointed questions without revealing my own entanglement in the situation, but my brain knew this would only make her suspicious and not lend itself to any meaningful discourse. In the end, I decided to put myself entirely out there with my first contact and place the power in her hands. I wanted her to know the truth and hoped she would communicate with me, but I was terrified of her reaction.
I sent off this message via Facebook right before heading out to my company Christmas dinner party. She responded within the time it took me to walk the five blocks to the restaurant. She gave me her number and asked me to call. It was only during that first telephone conversation that I found out she was his girlfriend, but I still thought maybe she had just slapped the title on their relationship without consulting M on the subject. We had a tear-filled chat for about half an hour and we made plans to meet up later that evening. I spent the company dinner in a daze.
A few hours later, she and I met up at a local pub and compared notes. We bought round after round of Irish Car Bombs, commiserating over what an asshole M turned out to be after we were both duped into thinking he was the most perfect man on the planet. I got drunker and drunker, crying my eyes out and revealing to A the entire timeline of my relationship with M, giving her the sordid details of how he and I had been sending each other sexually explicit texts up until I found out about her. A’s best friend was also at the pub and when she got wind of my involvement with M, she became incredibly hostile, making it clear that she believed that I only revealed myself to A after being dumped and that she thought I knew M had a girlfriend the whole time.
The culmination of that evening was when A suggested that the most reasonable course of action would be to take a photo of the two of us kissing and post it up on Facebook and tag M in it. It worked. Within minutes he had unfriended her and we had a tremendous laugh over imagining what must be going on in his mind in that moment.
She thanked me again and again for coming forward to her. M had begun the process of a long, cruel discard of her and she was already beginning to feel the ill effects. She admitted that she wasn’t sure if she would have been able to escape had I not revealed myself. After spending the previous summer near suicidal, I thought maybe I knew what she meant and was glad I was able to help. I, for one, felt more able to walk away from him than ever before, but there were still some huge obstacles to overcome. The largest of these was the tremendous cognitive dissonance that had been created with my discovery of A. M had an entirely different life than what he had revealed to me. He had a girlfriend that he wasn’t afraid to say “I love you” to and had introduced her to his family. He spent holidays with her and they went on trips together…all the things he had denied me because he “wasn’t ready for a relationship.” Everything I knew about him was wrong. He was not the sweet, honest, empathetic person I thought he was. He was not the wounded ex boyfriend of a girl that treated him roughly. He was not my friend. In fact, he told A nasty things about me and tried to make it look like I was the one in the wrong. He would turn around and say the same things about her to me. The way he spoke about A made me FURIOUS. In fact, that was one of the biggest mistakes he made with me. By letting me see him wrong her so repeatedly, he stirred up something in me that he couldn’t wrap his mind around…empathy for HER. Watching his behavior towards her was the one thing that allowed me to see how he truly is: a heartless, manipulative monster. Without empathy, you aren’t fully human, and that is precisely what narcissism is, a psychological condition caused by a lack of empathy for others. You could say it’s a sort of brain damage.
It’s still so difficult to wrap my mind around the idea that perhaps M is not physically capable of love for another human…that never in his heart was there any love for me, but looking back on his behavior, everything adds up. It is only my belief in this that has spared me from the devil’s hand for so long. If for one second I let myself believe he had the capacity for love, I’d be right back in it, trying to win his affection. This is how deeply the addiction lies, that is caused by the early stages of a narcissistic relationship.
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