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.