13/11/2022
What happened… (Part 3:Toxic Relationship)
I started dating someone shortly before my grandma died. There was this connection when your soul recognizes someone but initially I thought perhaps we will have a brother sister relationship. So it was the kind of experience of three in one package, where I dated a married man, a colleague (my supervisor) and someone who had actually been a cheater since the very beginning but found out 2 and a half years later. Am I proud about it? No, however I own every single one of my actions. Does it go against my values? Based on what I believed was truth no. It was probably a relationship of 95% pain and heartache and less than 5% of happy magical memories with multiple valuable lessons. He was still married solely for the kids, he was not sleeping and not sharing the same bed with his wife, he liked to be committed to just one person, or so he said. So as long as we had established the rules for an exclusive relationship with no cheating and in honesty without betraying other people, it was ok to try this out and follow the course of our feelings.
I blindly believed that we shared something special. It was in the first few months that I realized the challenge of dating a married man but I had gotten stuck already without realizing it… This happening during the time I lost my mom and grandma which made me long for a place to call home, during COVID time at a place where it was a huge struggle to make friends or socialize at all and while we were working together just made it really hard for me to manage to break free from this.
He was good with words… I lost myself, felt little, felt I was wrong, felt I should try more… I tried multiple times to break up but failed… I started having a death wish in August 2020, I just wished I could go where my mom and grandma are, to my safe space called home… When you are with someone and you feel lonely is worse than feeling lonely alone… What was the purpose of keeping to date someone with whom you fought so much that most nights you had to cry alone unable to resolve the fights? But I was so stubborn, I thought that if there is love and if both people want to achieve something then anything is possible!
When I was convinced that it was impossible from his side to not hurt me, I made my first big effort to actually break up in July 2021… But failed because I was concerned about his health.
Then my second big effort was in December 2021, because I was reflecting and felt that his actions contradicted the things he said, there is no way he could love me and behave that way, he probably thought he loved me. I felt that I don’t want to keep living that way, so I couldn’t let my emotions be the death of me. I wanted to be the Rea I knew before all these happened, before my mom passed away, that happy Rea that I used to know. I couldn’t handle the fights at work with him and the abuse of his authority there. Perhaps I was meant to be completely alone at that time without friends around me because that was the best for me even when I couldn’t see it. Therefore I submitted my resignation papers and everything but ended up failing again because of the war in Ukraine. I felt so much regret when the war started for wasting each other’s time and energy fighting rather than walking away from each other’s life. And although I was already convinced he never loved me, I loved him, so I tried to be there for him because when he had to go to Ukraine to evacuate his kids I didn’t know if today would be the last time we would get to talk or not. This made us get close to each other. However regardless of all the things he said he was still hiding us. Who would keep hiding their love of their life when they don’t know if they would see tomorrow’s light? If being there didn’t harm me then I would stay there to support but when it started harming me I decided to walk away.
And that’s when my third attempt to move on with my life took place, in April 2022, with my new life in Phuket, disengaged from the previous job and him, trying to focus on myself, healing and improving.
Then when he got back to Thailand, again, chasing after me… Until August 2022, when I thought that maybe he is sincere, let’s try this again and decided to move in with him. Before moving in together I was telling him how we should be so grateful because nowadays it is a rare thing for people to be in love with each other from both sides and be together and that I am very thankful that we had gone through all those hardships but stayed loyal to each other. Until he came and told me that he can’t keep doing this, I am too good and he has been cheating on me since the beginning.
