Personal Struggle — Part Two

This is a continuation of my personal story. As I previously stated, this is a deeply personal and painful account that I’m sharing with the world to bring awareness of several atrocious events that happened to me almost 19 years ago and were left unpunished.

I was overwhelmed by how many people reached out to me after reading Part I to offer support and share about their own experiences of physical and psychological abuse. Thank you. You have no idea how much it meant to me.

I’m doing this for myself. I’m doing this for you.

This story is meant to be read from the beginning in chronological order. Here’s the link for Part I.

This photo was taken not long before my ex proposed to me.

Part II:

My ex definitely caught me unexpectedly and at a very opportune moment for himself. I was only 18. I was still just a kid. I was an open book. It probably took him 2 seconds to scan all my vulnerabilities and he exploited them to the fullest.

Our second date was very different from our first encounter. He worked real hard for it. He took me to a fancy restaurant in Embarcadero and presented himself as a shiny knight on a white horse, as a savior, as someone who would make all my troubles go away. He made it seem like he wore his heart on his sleeve and that his was a heart of gold. Boy, was I naive.

He realized very quickly that I was yearning for a father figure. For reasons I’m not going to discuss here right now, I grew up without much parental involvement and especially missed having a present and caring father in my life. The message he was giving me was pretty much straight out of the George Michael song: “I will be your father figure, put your tiny hand in mine... I will be the one who loves you ’til the end of time.”

I was love bombed. I was smitten. I felt excited and exhilarated. By the end of this date I was already programmed to think that this was the guy I wanted to marry and have kids with.

From that point on, everything happened really fast and I didn’t even have time to comprehend what was going on while my ex didn’t waste any time. To my big surprise 2 weeks later, my mom gave me her blessing to go on a vacation to Hawaii with him. I was only 18 at the time. Now, I would think twice before committing to a vacation with someone I’ve only known for 2 weeks. But hey, I wasn’t thinking back then. I was 18.

It was a pretty shitty vacation, pretty disastrous actually. He couldn’t afford to (or maybe just didn’t care to) book a proper hotel, so we stayed at a very underwhelming timeshare in the middle of nowhere where we got attacked by swarms of mosquitoes every night. Every day some disaster would happen. One time we got stuck on the road to Hana and never even made it to the waterfalls. The apotheosis happened on the last day when I stepped on some crazy poisonous insect that bit the sole of my foot and left my whole right leg completely swollen and paralyzed for a week. The pain was absolutely excruciating and I still have a permanent tattoo looking bite mark where the venom was injected.

It was definitely a sign, lots of signs from above telling me to get the f*ck away from this individual. I should have run as fast as I could, however, at that point it was already too late. I had my pink glasses firmly on and through them I completely refused to see the reality of this person and this relationship. There were lots of red flags that I should have acknowledged. He was (and still is) a pathological liar. I would regularly catch his inconsistencies, but he was so good at coming up with excuses and more lies that I was dumfounded every time. And I chose to believe him and I chose to convince myself that all his shortcomings were not so bad or would become totally insignificant with time.

I remember when I first came to his place, he was very quick at hiding numerous frames filled with sentimental photos of his girlfriend that was still waiting for him in Boston. For a while, he would put them back out as soon as I left and hide those pictures again before I returned. Sometimes, she would leave voicemails on his answering machine (It was 1999. Everyone still had landlines and answering machines back then). They sounded very odd and something just didn’t make sense there. He would get very disturbed every time they would blink on that machine. I would also get very disturbed and jealous when it happened, but he was so good at convincing me that she was a crazy person, a clingy ex girlfriend that just didn’t want to let go, that horrible person who hurt him real bad and now wanted him back. And I believed him. And I never questioned him. I was so young and inexperienced that I didn’t even think that there could be another side to his story.

Only now I realize that he was stringing her along the whole time we were together. He never broke up with her. He led a double life. I don’t know if he struggled with it and if he had to justify it to himself somehow. I know that he still liked her. In any case, his love for money was greater than all of his other emotions, which were always quite meager. He was sure that he could get rid of me pretty fast after the wedding, be left with lots of money, and probably move back in with her.

After about a year since we started dating, my ex’s friends were getting married in NY and my ex was planing to fly to their wedding alone without me. I don’t even remember what excuse he initially came up with for that. However, his plans fell through when I accidentally discovered an email correspondence between him and the other girl where they were planning to meet up at that wedding. She was supposed to take the train from Boston to NY.

I threw quite a fit when I found out. He got pretty scared at that point. This could have been the end of it and I wish it was, but it wasn’t. He quickly came up with a bunch of lies that she wanted to give him back some of the things he left behind and to meet for coffee to have “closure,” blah blah blah. He assured me that he really didn’t care and wasn’t going to meet up with her, but didn’t want to upset her because she was crazy. That same day he bought me a ticket to fly with him and he canceled on her. I wonder what he had to tell her.

When we got to NY, he proposed. A big part of me was very hesitant to accept it and to say “yes,” but he did it so publicly and under so much pressure from all these people and friends who were there that I felt that I had no choice but to say “yes” to avoid some major conflict and humiliation at that wedding. He obviously did it in a way that left me no choice. All eyes were on me. What was I supposed to do? I was only 19. Back then I still really cared about what people thought and I got scared to come off as a heartless bitch who broke his heart. Oh, the irony!

The hardest thing for him was to pretend that he loved me. I think he really struggled with this one. If only I knew then what I know now. I would have called him out on his BS on day one. But hey, I was so young. I was really stupid and really insecure. I now understand that his initial plan to use me for money and him growing to know and to love me would be mutually exclusive no matter how amazing of a person I was. The absolute truth in life is that if you are used for something you can never be valued and appreciated for who you actually are.

Obviously, my ex had to justify his despicable actions to himself and his resentment and hatred towards me grew every day. Something that after about 5 years into this relationship he was no longer able to hide and control, but more on that later. We are still in the early chapters of this narrative and at this point in time he was still putting on a great show.

His family or I prefer to say his “clan” put on an even greater show to impress me. When he first introduced me to them, there was so much ass kissing that I should have realized that it was probably too good to be true.

I recently rewatched the first 2 Godfather movies and I couldn’t help but think about how similar my ex’s clan has always been to the Corleone family. Not in the way that they are involved in criminal activity, but rather in the sense of how the hierarchy is structured and how all the members of this extended family obey central command and pay tribute to the highest ranking member of the clan.

The central figure makes all the decisions for all the members of the family. As a regular member of the clan you have no saying rights and no freedom of choice. You do what you are told to do and there is no questioning of authority. You live in a constant state of fear that goes together with an imposed guilt trip. Any slight deviation from what’s expected from you is viewed as an act of rebellion and destroyed at the root.

It’s actually crazy and I’d say no coincidence that a large number of people who belonged to this family clan suffered freak accidents that left them either dead or permanently incapacitated. Others got sick with cancer or degenerative diseases only to be quickly locked up in assisted living facilities and cut off from the rest of the clan. Anybody who married into this family and tried to maintain their autonomy or dare to take their spouses away from the clan died or nearly died and never attempted to do so again.

The central figure of this clan was his mother, my future mother-in-law. He was her favorite and thus he enjoyed a special position of sanctity and immunity within the family. His wish was her command and she spared no means to help him achieve his goals (granted he wished the same she wished for him). She is a holocaust surviver. Her earliest memories are of the ghetto and the atrocities of the war. There’s no doubt that she suffered a lot as a kid and this experience has left her emotionally numb and completely inhumane. She grew up to be a monster, a fearless monster. She raised my ex to be a monster just like her.

He was always very social. He had lots of friends in SF. He had lots of friends in LA, and in New York, and in other places. We went out all the time, and we partied, and we hosted his friends, and we visited them. At the same time, he was very manipulative and controlling. He controlled all my social interactions. He quickly cut me off from most of my friends because they didn’t “fit in” with his crowd. He never really got along with any of them and not that he tried to.

With a handful of my friends that I no longer hung out with, but was still close with, he created outright fights and conflicts. One such instance was when he got a dear friend who was my bridesmaid and I was her maid of honor to completely cut me off. He totally blindsided me when he told her (on her wedding day!!!) that her husband cheated on her. It didn’t matter if he did or he didn’t. I knew that it didn’t matter to her. They are still together btw. I wasn’t there when it supposedly happened and I certainly wasn’t going to bring this up with her no matter how tempting it was, especially at her wedding party. Obviously, after he told her, both of us (as a married couple) became mortal enemies and I never saw her again.

He methodically and systematically cut off my support system so that I would later find myself completely isolated and lonely, without anyone to talk to. And it didn’t just stop there. From the very beginning he had long term plans of getting rid of me after the wedding in a “unsuspected” way by framing it as a “suicide.” He was a brilliant chess player and he became a master at gaslighting (more on that later) and he skillfully spread rumors about me.

Those rumors were mostly centered around me being mentally and emotionally unstable. I also amassed quite the reputation of being weird, unapproachable, and hard to communicate with. This was something that I didn’t comprehend at the time and only came to realize much later, years later. I still meet people today that get to know me and then they tell me: “Are you sure you are the same person that I’ve heard so much about? Because you are so different. I was expecting you to be so this and that and you’re not.”

I remember I was really good friends with this girl who was new to San Francisco. My parents knew her parents and gave her my number. We hit it off right away and we hung out a lot. We liked a lot of the same things and we always had a lot of fun. Then I remember her telling me something really disturbing, how she was at this party and there were people who knew me and were very surprised when she told them that she was friends with me. Apparently, I was known as the weirdo. She never quite told me what exactly was said about me, but I could sense that she was very disturbed by it. It was never the same with her after that.

And that’s how I lost my last friend that I thought I could talk to and trust during a time, which started in the fall of 2001 right after I got married to my ex, the time that became one of the darkest periods of my life.

To be continued …