فصل 05

CHAPTER 5

The Lie

LOVING HIM IS ENOUGH FOR ME

I fell in love the first time I saw him.

Does that sound dramatic? Probably. I’m not even sure I was aware of it at the time, but the scene plays out so clearly in my memory.

I went out to the lobby to get my boss’s eleven o’clock appointment. There was only one man standing there. His back was to me, hands down deep in his pockets. He had a beat-up leather messenger bag slung over his shoulder.

I noticed the bag first.

I remember thinking it was so cool that this guy wore business clothes but carried a worn-in leather bag instead of a briefcase.

“Excuse me,” I said as I crossed the lobby. “Are you here to meet with Kevin?”

In my mind, he turns around in slow motion. The memory illuminates when I first see his face. He smiles at me and reaches out a hand to shake mine. The moment stretches into infinity, then snaps back together like elastic. It speeds back up into real time.

Something just happened, I distinctly remember thinking. I was equal parts excited and terrified. He was older and totally out of my league. Still, I caught myself thinking, But maybe . . .

That maybe is what did it. My curiosity wouldn’t go away. It was enough to startle me, to make me wish I was wearing something cuter than a black maxi skirt and an ill-fitting matching T-shirt.

That day wasn’t the first time I’d spoken to him; he called to talk to my boss often. It was the first time I’d spoken to him in person. I’d had no idea what he looked like, or more specifically, that he was so handsome—and what had been a business relationship quickly turned into something more flirtatious.

It’s important to note here that I had zero experience with men. I’d been hired as an intern during my first year of college. That summer they offered me a job, and I promptly dropped out of school to accept it. I had just turned nineteen years old. At this ripe old age, I had smooched a couple of boys in high school, but I’d never had a real relationship and had never been on a date. I might have been professionally mature beyond my years, but when it came to romance, I had the life experience of an amoeba.

Our relationship progressed over email and staring at each other during business functions. It’s probably also fair to tell you that I had my big sister’s ID, so at those business functions I ordered a glass of wine like everyone else. Given the job I had, this man never thought to question my age. I also never willingly volunteered the information.

It’s also worth telling you that he was eight years and a lifetime of experience ahead of me.

He asked me out on my first real date, and I spent days trying to figure out what to wear. I was a little surprised to find him dressed so casually when I arrived. It was telling, in retrospect—his preparation for this date versus mine—but I can only see that in hindsight.

We walked down the street to a little Italian restaurant. I tried to keep it cool, though internally I was freaking out that we were on a date! I was so nervous. I worried that he would try to hold my hand or kiss me, or both! I had no idea how to handle either situation with grace, and I prayed fervently that I wouldn’t be put into a position to figure it out.

We were seated at a table. We ordered a bottle of wine.

“I hope you’re not one of those girls who’s afraid to eat on a date.” He laughed.

It annoyed me. Whoever or whatever kind of girl I was hadn’t been determined yet. I didn’t like the comparison to anyone else, didn’t like the reminder that this wasn’t his very first date too.

I responded by eating more than half the pizza we were sharing. He talked about himself for two hours straight. I didn’t mind. I was fascinated.

That night when he walked me to my car, I thought I might be sick. I was 99 percent sure he would try to kiss me, and I felt confident that I wasn’t a girl who kissed on the first date. I mean, I had no practice with this theory, but it felt like the truth. So when I went to throw my bag into the front seat and turned around to see him leaning in, I immediately threw both hands up in between us—real graceful like—and yelled, “Don’t kiss me!”

He paused, a deer in headlights, before chuckling like some sexy leading man.

“I was going to give you a hug,” he told me. He reached for my hand and gave it a firm shake. “But just to be safe.”

It was so charming I wanted to die. My mortification knew no bounds. I drove away from that date bemused and a little bit in love. I was positive, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I would marry that man.

After one meal of pizza and cheap red wine, we were officially dating . . . or at least, I thought we were.

I didn’t know there were rules.

I didn’t know there was even a game.

Soon after that first date, he asked me out on another. This time for soup at an ultra-hip restaurant that was popular at the time. Only in LA can you unironically invite someone on a date to the trendy local soup joint and nobody finds it odd.

A week later he asked me when I’d graduated college—because, dude, I still hadn’t told him my age. On some level I knew he wasn’t going to be happy about our age difference. The email I wrote him back (because this was before text messaging, kids) started with, Well, this should be interesting . . .

He responded like a champ. He told me I was Doogie Howser, and I did feel like some sort of child prodigy, because not only did I have this job but also I was in a real relationship with a grown-up. I didn’t know it at the time, but on the other side of that email, that grown-up was very unhappy.

It came up on our next date I was too young, I was too inexperienced in every way, and he didn’t want to be the guy that hurt me.

Can you believe me when I tell you that I didn’t hear him at all? I mean, my ears were working just fine, but my brain couldn’t even process the idea. I kept thinking, How in the world could you possibly hurt me? We’re going to get married and have babies, and it’s going to be awesome!

I mean . . . bless my tiny, ignorant heart.

He resisted, but I was dogged in my pursuit. I thought I was mature enough to handle it. I went quickly from never having gone on a date to spending every night at his apartment. For clarity’s sake, let me spell it out at that point we weren’t having sex . . . but honestly, that was a technicality.

Are you supposed to admit all of this when you write a book for a Christian publisher? I have no idea. But I know for a fact that I am not the only “good Christian girl” who fell in love with a man and threw every ideal she’d ever believed right out the window because nothing mattered to her more than being loved by him.

A month into our relationship we went to a party at my friend’s house, and because I was a tiny baby bunny, I introduced everyone to my boyfriend that night.

“This is my boyfriend. Have you met my boyfriend? Who’s he? Oh, that’s just my boyfriend!”

Oh, I cringe at the memory. I also cringe remembering the next day, when he was clearly upset with me but wouldn’t tell me why. I kept asking until he finally gave a frustrated huff. “You’ve never acted your age before, but last night it was like it was written on your shirt.”

Ouch.

On the one hand, in a lot of ways, he was right. I had always been incredibly professional at work and mature when we hung out, but in this instance I didn’t know the rules. I didn’t understand that you couldn’t just call a guy your boyfriend without a discussion. I naïvely believed that if someone had seen your boobs and you regularly went to dinner together, it meant you were a couple. Just to put a little more truth on this, I had zero guilt about the whole here are my boobs thing because I believed we were getting married. I justified my choices because I thought they were part of the bigger story of us. Meanwhile, this man didn’t even believe we were dating.

Thirty-four-year-old Rachel can see all of this so clearly in hindsight. Nineteen-year-old me was in love and insecure, so I justified everything he said or did that was hurtful.

It’s hard for me to write all of this down. It will be hard for my husband to read it. Dave is so different from that man, and it will be tough for him to learn—in detail I’ve never fully shared—how much this treatment hurt me.

But here’s the deal I am not the only woman who ever let a man treat her badly. It’s important to tell my story because I believe some of you may find yourself in a similar situation now. And just like me, you’re maybe so deeply inside the forest you can’t see the trees. In telling my story and my truth, I hope it can help some of you make better choices than I did, or see your reality for what it actually is.

Because here’s the ugly truth I was a booty call.

The preacher’s daughter, the one who hadn’t ever been on a date, the conservative good girl . . . I drove to this man’s house every single night he asked me to and pretended that it didn’t gut me when he wouldn’t acknowledge me during the day.

When we were together, he was so sweet and so loving that it held me over during the times when he wouldn’t call. On the rare occasions when I’d meet up with him at a bar and his friends would ignore me—or worse—refer to me only as “the nineteen-year-old” and he wouldn’t say anything to stop them, I made excuses. I was like the overweight girl at school who makes fun of herself before anyone else can . . . I acted as though I was in on the joke, that I was a joke—that I wasn’t worth defending. When he would flirt with other girls in front of me or invite me somewhere just to ignore me all night, I told myself to play it cool. He’d reacted so badly when I called him my boyfriend, and I’d learned enough to know that if I brought up any of this I’d be seen as clingy. I took whatever scraps he gave me, and worse still, I was thrilled to receive them.

As I write these words, I’m crying.

I didn’t cry when I wrote the chapter about my brother’s death or the pain of my childhood—but this? This flays me. I am so sad for that little girl who didn’t know better. I am devastated that nobody prepared her for life or taught her to love herself so she wasn’t so desperate to get any form of it from someone else. I’m sad that she had to figure it out on her own. I’m disappointed that it took her so long.

It took me a year—a whole year of whatever you want, whatever you need, whatever you think is best—a year during which I tried everything I could think of, tried to be everything he wanted. Attentive but not clingy. Pretty without trying too hard. Funny and smart and cool. Nice to his friends even when they treated me like garbage. Caring and thoughtful when he wanted me around, and never bothering him if he didn’t call me first. Toward the end of that year, when his company moved him to another state and our already tenuous relationship was threatened, my virginity went from technical to nonexistent. It was the last, best way I could think of to hold on to him.

It didn’t work.

Two months after he moved away, he flew home long enough to break up with me.

He wanted a clean break, he said. He needed a chance to really put down roots in his new city, he said. He cared about me, he said. It just wasn’t going to work out, he said. We’d always be friends, he said.

I can see it perfectly in my mind, though I don’t often remember that day in real detail because it was so heartbreaking for me. My bed had a bright pink and orange Ikea comforter, and as I sat in the middle of it, I wept. The memory makes me lower my head, and it brings my heart to its knees. You may read this chapter and feel anger at the way that man treated me, or anger at the position I’d put myself in—but I didn’t see any of it.

I had no pride.

I sat in the middle of that neon duvet, and instead of standing up for myself, I begged him not to leave me.

He left anyway.

I cried myself to sleep that night.

The next morning I got in my car and drove to my hometown two hours away to spend Thanksgiving with my family. That day was miserable. Use your imagination to dream up the kind of conversations I was forced into by well-meaning Southern aunts when I’d been dumped.

Jesus wept.

When I got back in my car to drive home that night, I saw that I had a voicemail. Somehow I knew he’d call me that day—it was routine, after all. He would do something hurtful, then I would accept it and wait by the phone to see if he wanted another go.

I held off listening to that call for the two hours it took me to get back to my apartment. I dialed the number for my voicemail and stood immobile as I listened to his message. He was just checking on me, he said, wanted to make sure I was okay.

It was a divine moment in my life. Never before or since have I experienced such total clarity. I stood in my crappy Hollywood apartment and saw our relationship like a map before me. There was the spot where we first kissed. The detour when we didn’t talk for two weeks after I called him my boyfriend. The night he flirted with the popular girls from work in front of me. Then there was the day I first heard the line “We’re not together, but we’re not not together.” I saw that phrase and platitudes like it scattered like mortar shells over the terrain. There was the first time he called and asked me to come over after getting drunk at a bar I wasn’t invited to.

For a year I’d only looked at the pretty parts of our relationship, and for the first time I made myself see what was really there.

“Who are you?” I asked my empty bedroom.

But that was the wrong question to ask. The issue wasn’t that I didn’t know who I was; the problem was that I didn’t know who I had allowed myself to become.

It might surprise you to know that I don’t blame him for anything that happened that year. Though he was a grown man, he had his own baggage. He was young and immature in his own way. People will treat you with as much or as little respect as you allow them to, and our dysfunctional relationship started the first time he treated me badly and I accepted it.

I called him back, just as I had a hundred times before. But this time I was totally calm. I had no anxiety about what he might think, and I wasn’t excited to talk to him. When he answered the phone, he immediately launched into questions about how I was feeling and if I’d had fun with my family—as if we were old friends catching up, as if he hadn’t eviscerated me the day before.

“Hey,” I interrupted him.

He went silent. I like to believe there was something in my tone that made him pause, but perhaps it was simply startling because I’d never interrupted before.

Calmly and without any dramatics, I told him, “I am done with this. I am done with you. Don’t ever call me again.”

It wasn’t a bid for attention or an attempt at playing hard to get; I meant every single word.

“Why?” he choked out.

“Because I don’t deserve to be treated like this. Because I can’t go back and forth. Because I don’t like what I’ve become . . . but mostly because you said we were friends. This whole time, whatever else has happened, you told me I was your friend. I don’t want to be friends if this is how you treat someone you care about.”

I meant those words with every fiber of my being. I hung up on him and shut off my phone. I brushed my teeth and put on pajamas. Then I went to bed and crawled under that pink blanket and went to sleep dry-eyed and peaceful for the first time in months. I remember that night as the first time I really felt like a grown woman.

I woke up to someone banging on my front door.

This is the great part of the story. This is the moment that feels like a movie or a romance novel.

This is where I tell you that I woke up and found my husband on the other side of my front step.

The man who treated me badly, who had strung me along, and who couldn’t make up his mind was lost somewhere between his parents’ house and my apartment that Thanksgiving night. I know it seems dramatic, but that’s really what happened. I remember everything in our relationship as either before or after this moment our love story being reborn.

And it is a love story. Our relationship is the greatest gift in my life. Dave is my best friend, the first real caretaker I ever had, and I have had the honor of watching him grow from that guy into a wonderful husband, father, and friend.

But every story is not perfect.

Very few roads to love are easy to navigate, and ours was no exception. But it’s important to me that you know that while our journey hasn’t been easy, the fourteen years since that first really crappy one have totally outweighed the mistakes we both made. It’s important for me to tell this story because it is the story of us. My husband is brave and humble to support me in sending it out in the world in hopes that it might serve someone else. It’s also important to understand that I don’t believe this is typically how it works out.

Opening the door that night and finding Dave on the front porch begging me for one more chance feels special because it was special. What is far more likely to happen in most cases is that as long as you allow someone to treat you badly, they will continue to do so. If you’re not able to value yourself, no one else will either. I hesitate to even tell you the ending because I don’t want anyone to use it as an excuse to stay in an unhealthy relationship in hopes that it will become healthy. Our story ended well, but that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been willing to walk away. That night in my bedroom, I hit the point where I couldn’t live one more day without self-respect; I couldn’t stay with a partner who didn’t truly value who I was as a person. Sometimes choosing to walk away, even if it means breaking your own heart, can be the greatest act of self-love you have access to.

What else can I tell you? What can I offer you as insight or wisdom or what I hope you receive from this chapter? I hope that if you read yourself in my story, it will hold up a mirror for you. I hope you’ll get out of the trees long enough to see the forest for what it is. I hope that those of you who’ve lived through something similar and carry guilt about it long after it’s over will learn that you are not the only one.

So many women have made mistakes or done things they regret or become versions of themselves they aren’t happy with. So many other women have survived and come out the other side stronger because of it. Every day you’re choosing who you are and what you believe about yourself, and you’re setting the standards for the relationships in your life. Every day is a chance to start over.

THINGS THAT (WOULD HAVE) HELPED ME . . .

1. A sounding board. When I walked through this season, I didn’t really have any close friends or mentors who could advise me. I think if I’d been able to speak with someone wiser, I might have become aware sooner of how unhealthy my relationship was. Be careful any time the only voice of advisement is your own. Your judgment is easily clouded when you’re in love.

2. Being prepared. When my children are old enough, I will tell them this story. I know it doesn’t paint either of their parents in the best light, but I want them to learn from it. If I had been less naïve and known more about self-respect, I think I would have seen our relationship for what it was.

3. Someone else’s shoes. If you told the story of your relationship—both the good and the bad—would there be more good or more bad? If a friend or a stranger heard about my relationship, and if I walked them through all of the stuff that was hurting me, I can’t imagine them not wanting to shake me until my teeth rattled. Imagine someone else describing your relationship to you. Would they say your relationship is healthy? If the answer is no, or if you even have to question it, I beg you to take a deeper look at the relationship in your life.