In the beginning

Today is a sad day. Some days I just wake up and know its going to be a sad one. Sometimes it fluctuates from minute to minute or hour to hour between sadness and anger. But today is just overwhelmingly sad.

Today I sent the agreement to the divorce attorney, along with her retainer fee that cleared out the little bit of savings I had. Today I formally started the process to end my marriage..the marriage I thought would last for the rest of my life. The marriage I thought was so perfect and I felt so lucky to have found.

That's the hardest part. It wasn't always bad. In fact, it was consistently fantastic for awhile. It felt like a fairytale, which I guess should have been a red flag, but instead, I just enjoyed it and thought that "This must be what a GOOD relationship feels like!" There were always little things that turned into bigger things that turned into red flags, but I thought that every couple had problems, and those were just ours. I knew that no one was perfect, myself included, and I was dedicated to working through everything together. I loved him so much. Unfathomable amounts of love. I still love him. The truth is, I will always love him, despite everything. And even in the end, we still had some great times, and great days. 

In the beginning, we would talk for hours every single day. We had everything in common. He told me how beautiful I was, he listed off my positive characteristics like it was a grocery list. I thought that had finally found the person who really saw me for me, and who liked what he saw. I thought he saw my value, where all others had taken me for granted.  I felt so lucky and so blessed to have finally found a man who reciprocated my love and who thought I was as special as I thought he was.

Even in the bad times that followed, I kept coming back to that. I came back to the beautiful, romantic way we met--I was on vacation that I almost didn't take, at an event I wasn't even invited to and almost didn't go to, in a country where I didn't speak the language. I thought about the dreams I had before I met him--literal, actual dreams--which showed me not only his city, but our future. I even got his first name in a dream. I thought of how neither of us were supposed to be in the place where we were when we met. It was all fate, I thought. I truly believed that. I believed that he was my soulmate, and that I met him because I'd finally done enough work on myself to attract someone like him.

I was so wrong.

But I do believe that he also believed this. The problem is, that he believed it for self-serving purposes. And he's believed it for everyone he met before me, and for everyone who will come after me. Everyone is the next perfect love. Everyone is the one who will solve all of his problems. I wasn't special to him, I was just the one who served him best in the moment when he met me. He was still in love, whatever that meant for him, with his ex. Yet he had just broken up with a different girlfriend--a different woman than the one he was still in love with. I also found out just before he left that he had ANOTHER relationship going while he was with the girlfriend while he was still in love with his ex. That third woman was still in the picture months into our relationship (it's amazing what one can figure out by women who suddenly blocked me on facebook at the time, and by the ones who have done the same thing recently). They were dropping like flies for months after we first met, and he admitted that some of them were in love with him, but he didn't  feel the same way about them, because "he can't be everything to everyone." But I let it slide, because I had also had past loves, some of whom I was still in contact with. I also had to let a few guys down easy--ones that I was casually dating, because I knew as soon as I met him that I wanted to be with him and no one else. I thought we were in the same boat.

We weren't. 

I guess the silver lining in all of this is that he showed me how much I am capable of loving someone, and the extents to which I will go to for love. I had never felt more connected to another person, or to myself and my spirituality. I've never been a pray-er, but I was praying for him and for us every night. I counted the days until I could see him again. I wrote gushing love emails and sent cards and little gifts I would see that reminded me of him. I was a pretty amazing girlfriend in those early days.

Then I started to realize that he'd never bought me anything. He'd never once given me a gift, not even on Christmas or for our anniversary or my birthday. In fact, in the three years we were together, he was never with me on my birthday. There was always work or something more important, or, this year, he was with the other woman out at  a club...when I'd scheduled a vacation just for us. 

I went on vacation alone. 

I had a king bed and a hot tub in the honeymoon suite, alone. 

I went to dinner on my birthday, alone.

And what started as a sad day just turned back into an angry one...all I have to do is remember the way things went down in the last year, and how virtually nothing I ever gave, emotional or physical, was reciprocated. I have to remember the person he was in the last year or two instead of how good it was in the beginning.