I was my own Frog Prince

If I'd known that my black-and-white world would turn to technicolor when I kissed him, I might not have done it quite the way I did. I might have done it much sooner, or I might have waited, afraid of the change that would come over me and drive me to drop a bomb on my quiet existence. 

I had approached it cautiously, feeling it was both a giant leap and something I just needed to get over. Like jumping into a lake, I knew I wouldn't be able to undo it quickly. 

There's a moment in "Back to the Future" when Lorraine kisses Marty. She stiffens and pulls back in something approaching revulsion. "I don't know what it is. When I'm kissing you, it's like I'm kissing my brother."

When I kissed him (I need to find a handy nickname for the gentleman I've been calling "my friend") I suddenly realised that kissing Husband was like kissing my brother. It was an entirely different experience. It always had been. 

And it hit me that I hadn't fallen out of love with Husband at all. I'd never been in love with him to begin with. I felt great affection for him. He was an important part of my life and a member of my family. But he was like my brother. That's why I thought I didn't like sex, why it felt so violating and wrong. I should never, ever have married him. I should have broken up with him when I was in high school. 

That piece was hard for people to understand. They had a sense that we were, as my mother said repeatedly in her non-apologies, "a happy couple". We hadn't been unhappy, and I suppose we were a couple in the sense that there were two of us. 

I have tried to explain this way, sometimes unsuccessfully:

Dear blog reader, you and I could live together. We could be happy. I could do the cooking and you could take out the trash. We could raise our kids together. And that might be okay for a long time. But then, one day, you would tell me that you wanted to live with someone else. Someone you loved. And it wouldn't mean that you were rejecting me; you would still feel the same way about me that you did the day before or the year before. It would only mean that you didn't love me the way you loved the other person. And no amount of "working things out" (what an unhelpful suggestion!) would make you love me that way. 

And so when I realised this, I knew it meant I finally needed to leave Husband. 

My family said I left him for my friend. That might be a handy shorthand, but it's not really true. Things progressed in a way that made me realise I'd never really been with him. It wasn't about "hoping this new guy is worth it". It was about finally realising that I was worth it. 

I have never had a worse summer than the one that just passed

My family does not believe in divorce.

This is not entirely a religious matter, although several of us are Christians to varying degrees. (I am what I consider a cultural Anglican, and sometimes jokingly refer to myself as a "Prayer Book atheist".) 

No, we have limited experience with divorce, and that experience is not positive. By the time our annual family reunion came around, there was no doubt in my mind that I would not be staying with Ex. I did not want his relationship with my family to deteriorate like I felt mine had with his mother. (He had been sure to inform her that I was leaving him and what the circumstances were.) I told my family that Ex needed just as much of their love and support as they gave me, and that nobody supports me by being cruel to him. 

They responded with a vengeance. 

I have mentioned on this blog that I am the bad one, the one who decided to leave. And once I realised I had to leave him, there was nothing that could have changed my mind. 

Ex had started hacking into my accounts and knew that I was emotionally distraught about leaving him. I didn't question whether I needed to leave, but I did feel that it was -- well, not wrong, but perhaps the better of two potentially immoral choices. 

I did not expect Ex to throw me under the bus, and I did not expect my family to side with him. And I did not expect them to stand by as he became even more verbally and emotionally abusive than usual. They poured drinks for him and watched.

They'd found out almost by accident; that's a story I will tell some other time. By then I'd realised that I did not love Ex and had never loved him in any sort of romantic sense.  I tried to explain. This was unsuccessful. 

My father did not look at me for several days. He told me that it didn't matter whether I love Ex, because I'd made a promise to stay with him. That I was to blame; this was never in doubt but became clearer to him the more I tried to explain. I did not love Ex and cringed at his touch; it had always felt violating but seemed more so as I realised why. I thought my father would understand this; although that eventually came with time, it did not come last summer and I started to feel it was a weapon. "You weren't 'one'," he chided me. And, most infuriatingly, "You wanted to have a blog instead of working on your marriage."

There were moments when I thought my mother understood. Then she would be back to "Well, there are marriage vows involved..." and suggesting that she couldn't help because I'm not Christian enough to know what love is. (It was never specified how she knows how Christian I might be or what level of Christianity was enough to unlock this particular achievement. I suppose that deciding to get divorced is all of the proof that is needed.)

I felt there was nothing I could do to make them understand. The glimpse they got from Ex was partially accurate and I doubted there was any point in elaborating. After all, I was indeed leaving him. I was indeed involved with someone else. And nothing I said made things better.

And so when I started searching my house and realised the full extent of the insanity I was living in, I was certain I could not turn to them.