Ancient history

Ex is my high-school boyfriend, the one I'd never allowed myself to break up with. 

We were best friends; I'd read many magazine articles about how you should marry your best friend. I wasn't old enough to understand what that meant, and I took it at face value. 

What can I say? I was a teenager.

Getting married was also the obvious solution to the problem we'd created by sleeping together. 

I wasn't pregnant. Just religious.

Time passed. We were still best friends. I had a baby. 

Funny thing about that. I got pregnant on the Pill. I went to the doctor for a routine checkup, and she asked what I did for birth control. I said that I wasn't having sex. She scoffed and prescribed the Pill over my concerns that the drugs that treat my chronic illness would interfere with it. (I'd gone off it a few years earlier because of that concern.) 

A month later, I was pregnant, but I didn't catch on until I was three months along because you can't get pregnant on the Pill, right? 

Our son is awesome. 

I was serious about not having sex. I never liked it; it felt violating, somehow. I was pretty sure this was because all of the anti-premarital-sex stuff I'd read as a teenager. That stuff doesn't go away; it stays for years, wrecking adult relationships and contributing to bad life choices like the ones I made in good faith.

Time passed. We were still best friends. But I started to think about leaving him. I was unhappy and it was becoming clear that we had issues that couldn't be resolved.

Eventually I got up the nerve to leave him. He begged me to stay; I refused. He begged me to go to counselling; I agreed but told the counsellor that I wanted help with the logistics of the separation, not repairing the marriage. Ex told her he wanted to repair the marriage. The two of them decided to work on the issue that was bothering me the most at the time, and eventually announced that it was all fixed. I was not sure it was fixable, but what sort of person leaves a marriage when her partner is willing to fix the problems? Certainly not a person who has spent years reading about how divorce is a great evil.

Time passed. We were still best friends. I settled into acceptance. We were essentially roommates, and it was working well. We did not fight. I would get mad at him, but we did not fight. We lived together well: he had his life and I had mine. I did the cooking and he did the banking. I stopped caring about the issue that had bothered me so much. And I never told anyone, because there was no point and it would just create drama. 

This all worked perfectly until the day it didn't.