Thursday, January 7, 2021

Why I'm Single

This'll probably be the hardest post to write, but I guess before I can go on and talk about life as it is now, I have to go back and explain how I got to where I am. I'm telling you now that I'm not proud of some of the things I've done, but here goes ...

In the mid-1980s I married my high school sweetheart and we stayed married for over 30 years and had some kids. As the years rolled on and we grew up, it came to be that we just didn't have that much in common. I tried a few times to talk to her about it, but she didn't take it seriously. There were some disagreements, especially when it came to the lifestyle of our oldest daughter, and things were pretty bleak. At least, they were to me. I got to feeling like I was just a source of income to the house. It got bad enough I was considering taking my own life so the family could have the life insurance. But then I met someone and one thing led to another and next thing I knew, I was having an affair. My wife found out about it and the marriage was over.

Not long after that, the woman I'd cheated with decided she couldn't be with me because she felt pretty sure her friends and family wouldn't approve of me, and so she left me, too. Looking back on it, she was pretty much self-absorbed and shallow and I was a fool to get mixed up with her, but there it is. At the time, I fell hard for her and I think she loved me for a while. The look in her eyes told me she did, but then that all dried up and her friends took up all her time.

So, yes, I am alone and single because I was weak and cheated. I've worked this over in my mind for years now. I was pretty serious about considering suicide. Did God or the universe or fate or some otherworldly force put that other woman in my life at that moment to keep me from killing myself? Is what I did better than what I was planning? I just don't know. Had there been other opportunities in my life that I just didn't see until I was at a point I was so low I jumped at the chance to be with someone else? I can tell you that I began the affair thinking it didn't matter because I would be dead before anybody found out about it.

But that isn't how it worked out. The marriage is over. The affair is over. I do not plan to kill myself, despite nights of crushing loneliness and days of deep depression. I have my kids and my grandkids -- they're all talking to me again and in some ways our relationships are even stronger -- and I have a couple of good dogs that probably get tired of me talking to them.

Okay. That's out of the way. There will be more posts about loneliness and depression and dating sites and doing things by myself, but it was necessary to get the origins story out of the way first. I was weak. I was wrong. But I'm trying to do better.

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Why I'm Single

This'll probably be the hardest post to write, but I guess before I can go on and talk about life as it is now, I have to go back and ex...