Hindsight

I had lunch with two of my favorite people yesterday.  Two girlfriends that I went to highschool with.  You really do meet your best friends in highschool I think. I guess because these are the people that you transitioned with from being a little kid, to getting pushed into the grown up world.  Ok, semi-grown up world, considering that I went to a college prep conservative highschool.  We weren't so much pushed into the real world. We were pushed (forced) to go to college.  Anyway, it was a really nice break.  Two hours at a local diner to just catch up and gossip without our kids.

At some point we were exchanging stories about how we got engaged.  For the record, one of the girls is very happily married with 3 kids, and the other friend is very happily dating a man for over a year and just starting to think about marriage and maybe kids. 

At another point  my married friend asked me if, in retrospect, did I see any clues from my Ex that could have warned me about what type of person he really was and what types of things he was capable of.  Hell yes!  Thousands!   But, because love is blind, I thought I could help him.  I didn't actually know how bad things were and how much he was actually capable of, but I knew he had a very tough childhood, and I decided that I was going to show him what real love and real family is.  Stupid.  Naive. But I really thought so. I guess I was too young to have been watching Dr Phil and Oprah regularly enough yet to know that you HAVE to listen to these clues and run!  You cannot change a man.. or woman for that matter.  A tiger doesn't change it's stripes.

I was thinking about these conversations when I got home.  It brought me right back to our first apartment together in Midtown. 6F.  Clues.  There was an occasion when I got a bounced check notice sent to me in the mail from my old bank.  I hadn't had an account with this bank for at least 2 or 3 years at this point.  I still had an old checkbood with my things that I had just never gotten rid of after I moved to Manhattan and changed banks.   He was very nonchalant about it when I confronted him.  "Oh, I thought that was your checkbook from Chase... I knew you had enough to cover the rent, and I was a little bit short, and I just forgot to mention it.... blah blah..."  There were definitely alarms sounding, but I quieted them for the sake of love.

I knew he gambled, and this was a source of contention with us.  I felt he gambled too much. He trivialized it as a hobby and lumped it as part of the package with a sports lover.   Shortly before we became engaged, I pleaded with him to stop gambling.  He promised he would.  It was no big deal to him, he'd just stop.   I didn't trust him, not really.   I'd walk into the apartment after work and he'd X out of the website he was on and do things like that..  other women might assume their man was looking at porn or chatting with another woman.  Me, I assumed he was looking at sports statistics and/or visiting an online gambling site.  I would call him out every single time I suspected him.  He would, of course deny it every time.

Then we got engaged.  We had only been dating for a year and I was completely blind sided by the proposal.  Seriously did not see it coming.  I had been in several long term relationships before him that lasted 3 or more years, so I really didn't see it coming after just a year together.

He TOTALLY used my shock and surprise against me.  At some point he said to me, "see? all those times that you thought you caught me doing something wrong with the computer??? I was just booking our flight to Florida and talking with the diamond guy!"   Silly me.  I thought he was gambling.