One Night: A Follow-up to the Fairy Tale That Didn’t Happen
Why did I go so far as to unfriend him and cut all ties?
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So I wrote this story a few weeks ago, detailing how I’d spent the night with someone I’d known for 20+ years and hooked up with on and off and it changed everything. I mentioned how I unfriended him on social media, and interestingly, that was the biggest shocker for many people.
I’ve gotten some public comments and a few private messages asking me why I took such a drastic step. And I thought it was time to address them.
The story was about one night. A single night in the more than 20 years of history this person and I shared. I wrote it because that night weighed so heavily on my mind for a long time. Three years, actually, since it happened.
But that night… it was the culmination of so much of that relationship. There was much more to the story.
A tangled mess of feelings
As I said in the other story, we met when we were very young and dated for maybe six months before breaking up and becoming friends with occasional benefits. What I didn’t say was that it wasn’t the only time we dated.
We actually tried to date another time or two after I split from my former husband. And because of our longstanding friendship, dating him was always very comfortable, even if it never ultimately lasted.
But here’s the thing about having a friend that you occasionally date and occasionally have sex with: it really confuses the absolute hell out of your feelings.
You start thinking: I love this person. But do I love them romantically? Or do I just love them like I love my best friend or my cousin? And if I romantically love them, why isn’t this working? Is it because they don’t love me the same way? Or because we want different things? Both? Neither?
And you think about the reasons you know it won’t work. In our case, marriage and family mattered to me and they weren’t things he really wanted. He’d had a child with another woman that he later gave up his rights to. His reasons for doing so were not wrong but for me, a woman whose ex-husband walked away from their children, it wasn’t something I could…
