He Said – The Truth Hurts

I’m trying really hard to not feel guilty about how much I’ve disrupted her life. We both took pride in the way we (supposedly) communicated openly and honestly with each other. Now that we both know that wasn’t always the case, it’s causing the world she knew to crash down around her. That hurts me more that I can say, and probably more than I’ve been able to realize yet.

She said:

“The thing that I valued most about our relationship was that it was built on honesty. We talked about everything. We tried everything. We agreed, together, to the boundaries and journeys of our relationship.

Except that we didn’t. He just told me that we did. I made a lifetime of decisions based on things we talked about, things I thought we agreed to, adventures that we were in together. But, it turns out, I was all alone, all along.”

In my defense, I was not always completely dishonest with her. Maybe she didn’t really mean “all alone, all along”, but I can certainly see how she would feel that way.

Perhaps what did happen all along is that I adopted her truth, her feelings, her beliefs as my own, in the hopes that they would legitimately become mine as well. She had a lifetime of experience even before meeting me when she was only 23. I lacked that type of experience, I lacked the courage to have my own truth, and I lacked the sense of security that I needed to believe that my feelings and beliefs had any validity, so I used hers. I used HER.

The current truth:

I’ve hurt myself. I’ve hurt her. I can’t change the past, as much as I would love to go back, I can’t do that. The future I thought we would have together will not happen. Our marriage, as we knew it, is over. She used to tell me “You make me possible”, and I loved it when she said that (I most likely never told her that). She doesn’t say that anymore.

What will always be true:

I love her. I want her to be part of my life. I trust her. When she says “Our lives will be better than we ever thought possible” I believe her. I can’t depend on her. I’m responsible for my own happiness. I’m NOT responsible for her or anyone else’s happiness. I need to find my own truth, and sometimes it will hurt, but it can never hurt as much as a lie.