#88 MOVING TO ENGLAND ON MY THIRD ANNIVERSARY
The cruelty of the gesture, the hope for a brighter future, the warmth of loving family
In the end, the Air Force Guy took me to the airport, after we’d had rough sex at his apartment and a rushed breakfast at Chick-fil-A. I gave him some fuel money for driving from Madison, Florida to Orlando, Florida – and back again. He lived in Orlando at the time and was attending some kind of acting/art university-type thing, which is quite famous for launching entertainment/game design careers.
My delicate heart was not ready for that kind of interaction (i.e. being treated a bit like a porn object but it had been many years since I’d seen him and maybe he’d changed – I certainly had). On the other hand, my ego was boosted by someone handsome taking an interest in me again, someone from my past awakening those parts of myself I’d long buried.
I was also thankful that he’d made a six-hour round trip for me. Plus, it seemed like poetic justice to re-sleep with the last man I’d had sex with before marrying Benoit and the first person to have sex with after Benoit tossed me aside.
It may have been at the Orlando airport or when I was on a flight to Colorado (why is Substack no longer highlighting links? Can you see the links?) that my mother-in-law rang me in tears, asking if I could find a way to make our marriage work.
I assured her it wasn’t me who was choosing to end things. I felt crushed at her sadness, which may have been because Catholics didn’t believe in divorce and Benoit would then be the only child of hers who had one under his belt. She, perhaps, wasn’t quite so torn up later when he remarried (story to come in the next and final chapter about Benoit).
It felt cruel but maybe it was perfectly fitting that Benoit chose to fly me to England on our third anniversary (21 June 2016), after four mostly failed years together where, at the end, I was left questioning myself, my loveability, attractiveness, self-worth, drive, ambition, everything.
Was I simply as awful as my ex claimed I was?
The sad thing is I’d thought I’d been happy, that our relationship had been mostly good, blind was I to the mental abuse that was really happening. The marriage had robbed me of 40% of my adulthood years thus far lived (from age 25-29) and shattered everything about me as a person.
If you’ve read any of my dating history, I suppose that wasn’t very difficult to do. I’d always used external validation from men as a tool to measure self-worth, which is a stupid way to do it.
In fact, my therapist said I actively chased toxic patterns, chased the men who wouldn’t love me the way I deserved, which is why I’m convinced if I’d met Michael any earlier we would not have worked as well as we do.
I had met plenty of lovely men along the way in my journey: Noah, Charles, and Theo, to name but three (but there were more) – and of course, Chester, my loving, amazing, handsome, intelligent bestie who had women chasing him around the block.
But I didn’t see long-term with anyone lovely, anyone who would have actually made me happy because they were genuine, kind men, and I was unknowingly looking for something distinctively not that.
(Thankfully, they are all happily married to much better, successful, lovely women who were kind to their hearts.)
I have a beautiful colleague, Nicole, who lives in Glasgow, about a decade younger than me and I marvel at her. She is confident and intelligent, witty and funny, smart and kind. She says how she looks good in all her photos (and she does) and she approaches life with such ballsiness that I love that for her so much. And she has such a loving, kind partner by her side as well so she’s not out there chasing toxic love (also a fluffball cat named Jasper).
I think what if I had claimed my power in that way when I was her age? People in their twenties – no matter if we look like supermodels or not – are inherently so beautiful and it’s a downright tragedy for anyone to take that from us. For anyone to crush that optimism, happiness, or wild abandon is a crime – or for anyone to tell us our bodies aren’t beautiful as they are. (And that goes for young men too.)
Benoit at least had the ‘kindness’ (guilt?) to fly me premium economy, but on Thomas Cook (which folded the next year maybe?) that wasn’t quite the flex it seems.
I did have a glass of champagne on the flight and my row was mostly empty (or maybe I just imagined it being empty). During one moment, I cried and the flight attendant asked if I was okay. I said I was going through a divorce and she was very empathetic, having been through one herself – and told me I’d be okay. She may have given me extra snacks and I’ve always loved to be rewarded with food treats.
Benoit rented me a car for my first two weeks in England and I drove myself, bleary-eyed, emotionally wrung out from the flight from Orlando and drove to my Dad’s house in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, where I was going to live (and still live).
My Dad was just so happy to have me home, finally having the chance to have both his daughters in one country. My Dad felt joy and my Mum (back in Florida) felt sad yet again having a daughter so far away as I’d spent the last few years in Germany before moving to Minnesota only to be dumped by my husband.
I don’t remember anything specific about being back that day or if we had a special meal or anything but I knew all my family was happy I was there and couldn’t wait to schedule me in for time together (which is a rather flattering feeling).
My cousin Pam had me over for her corned beef hash (who doesn’t love good, Northern comfort food?); my sister invited me over for vegan spaghetti bolognese and her famous salads that she makes taste delicious because she adds capers, radish, and spring onion (plus magic); Grammy took me out to the carvery; my four-year-old niece, Caroline, wouldn’t leave my side (figuratively and a little literally as in she watched me shower. LOLs); I invariably saw my childhood best friends, Kate, Joanne, and Ruby; plus, my sister’s girlfriends adopted me into their supportive girls’ group (Lacey, Marie, and Christalla). I felt wrapped up in love and a glimmer of what looked like hope. It also happened to be a sunny English June and England is so beautiful in the sun!
My ex had left me with these parting words in the one email he bothered to reply to that mostly gaslit me and said how my engaging in dialogue about my version of events pushed him further away:
“You did add something to my life. Something that changed it from boring to interesting and purposeful. I had a purpose and it was making you happy and I was willing to spend the rest of my life doing it if you were willing to put some effort in doing the same the way I interpreted love not the way you saw fit.”
My therapist years later (years later being last year or the year before) would say my first marriage sounded abusive. Like any person slightly on the disbelieving edge, I Googled it. Was he actually really abusive? That seemed such a loaded term.
Apparently, abusive people gather intel on you, listen to all the things you love, what makes the essence of your personhood. They’ll then use this in two ways: first, to lure you in like a fish on a hook. They’ll become the absolute dreamboat of a person to you, “love bombing” you as the term is called. They’ll seem perfect, too good to be true. Then, they won’t be able to keep up the charade. That does sound familiar…
Second, they’ll use all the ways they know you to destroy you, chip away at you, make you lose your sanity and question yourself, all whilst making you feel like a shell of a person. It’s always your fault. Never theirs.
I’d like to think I always had a strong character, knew myself as a person, was self-reflective, but who knows? It still happened to me and some things seem pretty textbook. Did he know he was doing it? Maybe not. I’ll never know.
Read about the beginning of our relationship here, the ‘too good to be true’ bit.
Sometimes these people will repeat these patterns but it didn’t seem like he’d done this with his ex before me and I can only hope that he hasn’t done this to his wife now; she deserves better than that.
Perhaps, in me, he saw character traits he loathed in himself and thus, I represented everything he hated. He wanted to tear me down for not being good enough for his standards.
But I was good enough. I would be good enough for the right person.
Before my baby sister, Hannah, who lives in Florida, found the lovely relationship she has now, she had a mentally abusive boyfriend and I saw the patterns. I was not quiet. Neither was Michael. I observed the ways he was tearing her down, re-writing her narrative and framework for who she thought she was and wanted to be.
She, at the mere age of twenty, was strong enough to recognise that she wanted that relationship to end (I’m so proud of her).
She kept telling me how good it was in the beginning and I knew with the knowing way you know if you’ve lived it, it always is. It’s always great at the beginning or you’d never put up with the rest. You keep going back to the shiny, wonderful beginning, but that was never real. You keep wondering what you did to destroy that bit, how you could get it all so wrong.
As I say, thankfully, she ended that relationship and the heartbreak was tough for her but the appreciation for what she has now is all the sweeter. I messaged her current boyfriend, Hunter, on Instagram and told him to be kind to my baby sister’s heart and he assured me he would, that he loved her. And I believe him.
Maybe Hannah’s ex thought he loved my sister, maybe my ex thought he loved me, but some people don’t truly understand love. Love is something way deeper than someone always pleasing your needs at the expense of their own.
Present-day snippet
I don’t want to make a whole post but I have four things to announce.
First, my lovely, amazing colleague has just launched The Corfu Chronicles.
was actually the one who inspired me to write again. We met as he was onboarding as a fertilizers reporter and I had to train him on what my department (copy editing) did – and how the two editorial departments work together. I know, my job sounds fascinating. Chemicals and fertilizers…riveting.Somehow we ended up chatting about creative projects and I was so inspired he was doing the thing. He’d written so many plays and had gotten thousands of words into his novels and that was motivating.
I thought I can write too. Why not me, too?
Check out his Substack. It’s newly launched and he plans to post a couple of times per month.
Second, I finished the first zero draft of what I hope will be my debut novel, The Broken Engagement Club (circla 93k words). I’ll tell you guys more about it later. It’s (maybe obviously) about people who form a club after their engagements end because broken engagements are a relationship grey area – it’s not just boyfriend-girlfriend and it’s not divorce.
I’m putting it to bed for now so that I have distance to edit it next month with fresh eyes. Back to Nicole, my amazing colleague, I am thankful because she has been reading my manuscript as I’ve been writing and providing such insightful feedback and I am so grateful.
Last summer, I wrote 50k words of a not-so-great romance novel (think billionaire recluse and Duke trope but the main guy pretends to be an organic farmer to meet the protag on his own terms) but I think and hope I’ve become a better writer since then. It’s still very work in progress but I feel excited.
I’m moving on to my next manuscript draft, In Search of Golden Retriever Boyfriend (currently circa 12k words where MC had her life collapse – themes, anyone? – and has to move in with her half-sister to rebuild and then she meets the dog walker – except he’s not really a dog walker…he’s a secret eligible bachelor with a tragic past…no, it’s not thriller vibes), and then I have a couple more concepts to explore (one about a marriage on the brink of collapse and an inherited cat comes in to save it, and another about partying uni students circa 2010s maybe a la The Rules of Attraction but rom-com vibes not creepy AF vibes – but also great novel). Although Nicole has given me an idea for another novel based on her friends’ dating lives that could be good to explore.
Third, this month a real-life literary agent, Catherine Cho, is critiquing my novel pitch (the finished one) and the winning entry will appear in Mslexia magazine’s 1 March issue. It’s the first thing I’ve ever won in my writing journey thus far. (Yay!) My therapist let me borrow copies of the magazine, so I have her to thank for finding this opportunity.
I mean dream scenario is that Cho will request pages and offer representation (is that a possibility? I hope so), but obviously, a still good scenario is my pitch gets some useful feedback, which will help when I query agents and hope they ask for pages and offer representation. If I got an agent from this, it would be like skipping a very long, long queue. I’ll keep y’all posted. Please send good vibes to the universe or religious figure. Ha!
Fourth, I’ve been spending all my spare time outside of work writing and reading. I loved
’ amazing new novel, We All Live Here, and I’ve read 17 other books since 1 January and so many of your amazing Substacks – not even sure myself how I’m finding so much time? Less social media scrolling? Definitely waking earlier and going to bed later and thus am knackered. Since Michael is barely seeing me now, he has had more time to himself and has taken to watching murder documentaries. This is a new genre for him. You know the kind where the husband murders the wife and children.I joked and said I hoped he wasn’t getting tips, planning to murder me for our death and critical illness cover on the mortgage and my work payout life insurance (four times my salary which is pretty good).
After one particular documentary (I think he’s on number four at least), he sat me down, looking serious and upset. He said some of the way these men behaved reminded him of Benny and how in an alternate universe that could have been me.
Benny, despite being emotionally abusive (maybe unwittingly, I’ll never know), was certainly not physically violent.
But it was sweet of Michael to care so deeply and I said, “Oh, darling, but I’m with you and I am so thankful. I’ve been with you twice as long as I was ever with Benny.” This year, Michael and I will have been together NINE whole years. I can barely believe it myself.
I crawled into his lap and kissed his neck in the way I do until he tells me I’m on his bladder and to move (as he usually does).
The truth is I could never have done any of the things I’m doing without the healing that Michael brought to my life (plus writing, plus therapy). After all, most of us write towards knowing, towards understanding, towards a deeper knowledge of ourselves, people, the universe, whatever.
I am finally in a safe space emotionally, financially, and in myself to write these novels I’ve always dreamed of writing.
To all of my readers, no matter if you read every word, skim, or dip in every now and then I am so THANKFUL. To my paid subscribers and founding members, just someone supporting me has given me courage too, and I am so GRATEFUL. Lots of love and best wishes. Truly! I’m feeling pretty elated right now.
Coming up next, the absolute final chapter about Benoit (yay!) and what happened next for him (as far as I know).
New here or haven’t followed from the beginning, why don’t you catch up on the other eighty-seven chapters I’ve written, including the one on why I’m writing these chapters in the first place – with the odd “present day snippet” of what is happening in my world lately.
Have you ever had a relationship end only to realise much later – as my friend, Marie says here (I also designed her simple website on Wix for her as well) – that it happened FOR you not TO you? I’d love to hear your thoughts on these chapters.
Need to catch up on the Benoit saga? Check out the past chapters:
The story of the fourth person I met at Starbucks begins at chapter 72 and goes to chapter 87. The new chapters about my current husband will begin at chapter 90.
How exciting! Am crossing everything for you on your first MS!
I’m a true-crime fan myself and enjoy documentaries on murder, like Michael. On its face, that sounds like I’m a morbid person, but the psychology of the criminal mind is fascinating. I also enjoy learning about forensic science and the legal aspect of these types of crimes. As long as he mixes it up with “normal” stuff (comedy, biographies, etc.) he should be okay!