How Much Ignorance Is Bliss?
What do I still want to find out about my ex’s double lives?
I am an intelligent, alert, curious woman. The very nature of my job is to be inquisitive, this way I learn new things every day. If there is something I don’t understand, I have to research until I do. I don’t need to know everything, but the more I do know the more I understand. When it comes to people, I’ve always been sceptical of what people say or promise and taken actions over words. Yet for the past 1 1/2 years, I have lived in a fake reality and put all my trust in a person who was never genuine. If I didn’t understand things, I asked him and took his words as gospel, if my gut told me something was off, I only questioned myself. I was sceptical of what other people said, but never him. He was the only person I trusted, the only one who learned all my secrets and insecurities, the only person I could be truly honest and vulnerable with, the person I felt I could speak to about anything. I thought that feeling was mutual, mainly because he told me so, over and over again. Now I know it wasn’t and little of what he said was true. Sometimes I imagine meeting him again, confronting him with all the things I have found out since, asking HOW and WHY he did what he did. But I doubt it would ever come to it, and even if it would, he would lie about anything that I cannot prove. If I want to find out the truth, I have to research myself. I have solved so many mysteries around the relationship and him as a person already, but it’s a never-ending puzzle.
Why am I still digging?
A few days ago I had another breakdown. I was reading the messages he sent to one of his affairs again. (Can you even call it an affair if she had no idea he was seeing me?) It’s wasn’t just the content that hurt, it was the intensity, the language he used and the timing. This message was sent the day before he took me to Tiffany’s to select an engagement ring. My stomach still reacted strongly, and at this moment I called my friend, sobbing into the phone: “I understand his wife now. I’ve only been with him for 1 1/2 years and there is so much I have found already that hurts more than anything, I cannot imagine having to go through this if I was in her shoes, going through 10 years worth of double-lives, I can understand why she doesn’t want to face it.” “I know”, she responds “but you are not his wife. You are strong, intelligent and curious, you are not married to him or have any kids with him, you don’t have to bury your head in the sand. You will get through this and learn so much from it. One day you will just be able to move on”. One day. There were points when I thought I had reached this day, accepted that I will never understand or know the truth. There were moments where I thought I had reached acceptance: Everything was a lie, I am not living that lie anymore, I can move on. But then suddenly I remember something else that was odd, some conversation, some event, or I think of another way to search the internet for answers, and then I go into detective mode again: I want to know more of the truth!
My obsessions with Laura
Laura (name changed) is someone he met on Tinder not even 2 months into our relationship. I am fairly certain he had an affair with her and she had no idea about me. I have her name, her location, age, I know how old her kids are and I have a rough idea of what she was doing for a living at the time. Maybe Laura wasn’t even the person he had the affair with, it could have been someone else of Tinder, but she is the only one I have information on. There was at least another woman, much later on, but I don’t know anything about her, just the fact that he was sending her videos on Snapchat. So Laura is the only lead that I have, the only person I could find, but she is not easily found, at least not on social media. I don’t have expectations on what would happen if I did find her, they might have just spoken and never met. But then again, she could be a big piece of the puzzle, her story could just fill a lot of the memory gaps I still seem to have. And perhaps I could even help her, in the same way, that I helped his other mistress, making sense of all that has happened and the man she thought she met. But maybe, she doesn’t want to find out, she might have moved on a while ago, and ignorance can be bliss.
There will always be more
I now accept that people who are serial cheaters, pathological liars and master manipulators spent a long time practising those skills. When I first met him, he was the committed husband, who had never been with anyone else in his life other than his wife. He led me to believe that he had spent years trying to fix their marriage but struggled, only when he met me, he had fallen in love like he never felt before, which had finally given him the strength to leave. Yesterday I found his profile on a couple of dating sites for married people. It looks like it hasn’t been active for at least a year, so I presume it was created before I met him. He describes himself as honest and generous, a “bored husband looking for some fun on the side”. I am not surprised at the find, but it does give me another angle to his character to wonder about: How long has he been doing this? How many were there before me? And if a little bit of fun on the side was all that he was after, why bother with the show? At the start I would have been fine with it, it was him who started all the marriage/baby ideas, him who “left his wife to be with his soulmate”, him who involved our children and created all those plans for the future. Did he do the same with the women he met on one of these sites? Or was it exactly the fact that I didn’t want all those things with him that he saw it as the greatest challenge to convince me otherwise?
It’s for my writing
I started writing a book. I know I don’t have all of the information, but I have more than enough to fill a novel. Many people tell me to move on, ban him from my thoughts, forget all about it. I get where they are coming from, and I do try to focus on me, my family and my friends. But I am an intelligent, alert, curious woman. The very nature of my job is to be inquisitive, this way I learn new things every day. If there is something I don’t understand, I have to research until I do. The way I see it, people are different, I guess for many who have experienced something similar, accepting what they know and not questioning what they don’t know is the best way to deal with it. Not for me. As long as it doesn’t take over my life, I will keep digging. I am at the point where nothing can surprise me anymore, I have rediscovered my passion for writing, and at the very least he has given me some great material to write about. Learning something new every day, even if it’s about the most unpleasant time of my life, and writing about what I have learned makes me happy. And if my curiosity and drive to understand everything can help just one person to understand what they might be going through, then I will keep researching.
