This One's For Carol...Settling for the Wrong Man

                Her name was Carol, and she was my ex boyfriend’s wife.

                If you’ve read my semi-autobiographical novel, The Playground, that particular jackass appears as Terry.  Terry was an eyeglass wearing, pocket protector sporting nerd, but through the magic of the internet, he’d morphed into a player, using and discarding women like toilet paper.  He ghosted on me not once, not twice, but many times, because I am a fucking slow learner.  Terry would vanish without warning, only to emerge months later, begging for another chance and spouting a bunch of lines plagiarized from chick flicks.

                Every time Terry ghosted, I swore I wouldn’t give him another chance, but he always managed to break down my resistance when he reappeared.  Within an embarrassingly short amount of time, he would convince me that he did really love me, couldn’t forget me, and just maybe we were meant to be together.

                I wanted a love story so badly, I was like a miner pretending fool’s gold was the real thing.

                The last couple of times he returned, he was dating Carol and I was with “Donald.”  Just in case I’d failed to ascertain that he was a complete cheating douchebag, he suggested that we meet up for sex occasionally without letting our partners know.  I turned him down.  He was okay with that. 

                No hard feelings, let me know if you change your mind, ‘kay?

                Sure, pal.  Why don’t you sit your bony naked ass down on a tack and wait?

                The next time he checked in, I told him Donald and I had broken up.  Hot damn!  He’d just broken up with Carol.  What a cowinkydink, it must be fate!  Terry said they broke up because she was a dirty slob, and her apartment was something out of an episode of Hoarders.

                He described Carol’s bewilderment and heartbroken tears with unashamed glee.

                 It was two days before Christmas.  I was aghast at how callous and cold he seemed about it.

                I knew he was a liar, so I googled him and found his and Carol’s active wedding page complete with their engagement story.  They’d gotten engaged at Bear Mountain during Oktoberfest, a mere two months before.  His very overweight fiancé admitted she had to be persuaded to take a walk by the lake, because all she wanted to do was sit on a bench. It was there Terry dropped to one knee and proposed.  Her advice to all the single girls out there was to always take a walk when your boyfriend asks.

                Um, most of us already do because we’re NOT LAZY.  Also, Carol, your boyfriend is a shithead actively trying to cheat on you.  While you’re obsessively checking your Target wedding registry, he’s hitting up all his exes claiming the two of you broke up.

                 Oh, and Carol?  Eleven days before your proposal, he emailed me from a brand new yahoo address begging for sex.  No joke. 

                I’ll stop, because I’m a feminist, and I don’t hate Carol, although I do harbor some resentment because hey, I’m only human.   However, she seemed like an extremely nice person.   Although not conventionally attractive, she had lovely eyes that revealed the kindness of her soul.   She shone with inner beauty, and tragically thought she’d landed the man of her dreams.  Instead, she landed what looked like a delicious piece of cake frosted in dog shit.

                She deserved better, as do we all.

                I told Terry what I discovered (he responded with a typical deflection about me stalking him) and told him to fuck off. 

                He did, for a few months.  When he (predictably by this point) returned, I informed him that I’d checked out the website recently and saw his and Carol’s wedding photos, so don’t even try telling me you’re single, buddy.

                Silence.  A few days later, Terry replied stating he wasn’t going to talk to me anymore.

                 Don’t you love it when the person who keeps contacting you out of the blue tells you he’s going to stop talking to you?  I said GOOD, FUCK OFF!

                 He shot back some phony shocked response complaining about my language.

                Six months later he was back, whining about Carol having a miscarriage and needing a shoulder to cry on.  I tolerated a few days of communication, because I’m a nice person who has a hard time being mean to someone, even when they richly deserve it.

                 Typically, he began pushing for a date.

                First, he claimed he wanted me to meet Carol and see their apartment.  That turned into, he just wanted to show me their apartment, which turned into, “Hey, come down Memorial Day weekend while Carol is at her sister’s wedding shower in Florida,” to, “is it okay if I kiss you when I see you?  How about hug you?  Can I touch your breast?”

                Yup.  His wife just had a miscarriage and he was trying to screw his ex girlfriend.  I had no illusions regarding his undying love and devotion.  I was nothing special to this man.   During his periods of silence, he was no doubt hitting up every girl who’d ever crossed his path.  I was probably number two hundred on the list.

                  Poor Carol.

                I decided to tell her.  I pondered exactly how to go about this, and figured I would just drop her a line, hinting around, without coming out and saying, hey your husband is trying to cheat on you with me.  I simply sent her a message on Facebook explaining I was her husband’s ex, and he had been contacting me, and I just wanted to make sure this was okay with her.

                Her response? 

                She blocked me.  Guess it wasn’t okay with her and she didn’t want to know about it, either.

                Oh, Carol.  You have years of misery ahead of you, during which you will act as if you don’t know your husband chases other women.  You will pretend that shit frosting is chocolate; you’ll pretend so hard, you’ll even believe it’s delicious cake on some days.  You will smile for the camera with shit on your teeth, because convincing others you have a happy marriage is the next best thing to having one.  And one day you’ll have enough, or he’ll leave you for one of those other women. 

                The writing is on the wall.  You will wind up alone, wondering if it was worth it.

                This won’t end well, Carol.  It will end with you miserable and exhausted and always wondering what might have been…is it possible you could have found someone else, a more loyal partner, someone who made your smile a real one? 

                But I understand.   Because around the same time “Terry” was dating Carol while hitting me up every three months, I was dating “Donald.”  I convinced myself that Donald was the one, because we’d dated in college and reconnected fourteen years later through the magic of Facebook, as if the hand of fate brought us back together.  I ignored plenty of Donald’s flaws in the almost four years we spent together.  The worst thing I ignored?  That he tried to put an end to my dream of being a writer. 

                In May of 2012, I sent him a book I’d written about a group of teenage girls who turn on one of their friends and murder her; an old story that appears occasionally in the media.  Like most of my writing, it was no holds barred, twisted, and graphic.  I was trembling when I emailed it to Donald; it had been years since I’d shared my writing, or my dream of being a writer, with someone else.  Everything was riding on what he thought of my writing.  Did he think it was good, that I was talented, that I had a chance?

                His response shocked me. His texts were terse and to the point.  “This book is really disturbing.  Kind of freaks me out that I’m dating a person who thinks up things like this.   I’m actually thinking of breaking up with you.”

                I was aghast.   In a million years, I never imagined this was how he’d respond.  “I’ll never write anything like that again,” I promised.  “I won’t write anymore.”

                I felt a pang as I made that pledge.  Did I really want to give up my lifelong dream?  But I felt I was trading the uncertainty of a future of a writer with the certainty of having my own family, a husband, and joining the ranks of the chosen.  Sacrifices had to made if I wanted to be a wife and a mother.  I was sure it would turn out to be worth it.  After all, I didn’t write consistently, and I’d never had anything published, not really.  I didn’t even know if I was any good.  What was I giving up, really?

                Everything, it turns out.  For nothing.

                I understand Carol.  I know what it’s like to hear your biological clock ticking away like a time bomb and realize sacrifices must be made if you want a husband and a family.  Perhaps the dream you had since childhood never would have panned out anyway; and maybe Carol never would have found a loyal partner who loved her completely.  Giving up your dreams is better than being alone.  Misery with company trumps solitary happiness, every time.

                This is what we’ve been taught since childhood.  We were raised to believe someday our prince will come, and that even the ugliest, meanest men were worth it.  We were taught that a woman’s happiness is dependent on her ability to catch and keep a man, and that giving up your dreams and your dignity are but a small price to pay.  We are fed the fiction that we cannot be whole without a man, so we are willing to give up pieces of ourselves, the very things that make us who we are.

                It was only when I began pursuing my dreams and accepted all the parts of myself, that I became whole.  It wasn’t a man that gave me that; it was me. 

                We’ve come far in the fight for equality, but we still have so far to go.  And we’re not fighting men.  We’re fighting ourselves.  Every day I see things online that anger and sadden me.  Such as women who jump the gun and change their surname to those of their partner before they’re married or even engaged, women willing to throw their identity away without a second thought for very little in return. Or women who ditch their female friends in favor of their boyfriends, or spew hatred and venom at other women over a guy like Terry who isn’t worth it. 

                We need to do better for our daughters.  We need them to learn that their own happiness is more important than having a partner.  We all know that finding the right partner can deeply enrich your quality of life, the same way we know settling for the wrong one is the ingredient for years filled with misery.  What girls need to be taught is that happiness alone is better than misery with a partner.  We need to teach them their wants, desires, and feelings matter, and they should never compromise or give up a piece of themselves to please someone else.  The right person would love them whole, as they are.

                We need to eliminate the Carols of the world, good women who are settling for a shithead because the prospect of being alone is so terrifying.  We need to teach our daughters that their dreams are what makes life worth willing; maybe the only thing.  We are a flawed generation, but we need to blaze a trail for those that come after us.