Tell Us About a Moment of Regrettable Rage
I’ve been thinking about this for several months, but I’d never come up with a good answer until this summer. For months we’d had a good relationship, and a couple months ago, I’d had a wonderful experience with a very close friend. It was my first time in a long time to think about this kind of moment, and I came to realize what a huge deal it was—not only for the two of us, but for our entire community. The woman with whom we were communicating—a woman I’d known for many years—had fallen in love with a man who had cheated on her. He was incredibly charming, sweet, and beautiful, and so beautiful that she was immediately infatuated with him. She had wanted to marry him, and he had been eager to propose. But that’s not how it went.
We were together for three months and things went as I had hoped. We had sex, we kissed, we cuddled, we laughed, and I had been able to tell her how I felt and she had been very receptive. There were no tears, no recriminations, none of the usual emotions you associate with a breakup. When she told me they were engaged, I felt a sense of loss; it was a very sad feeling. The other night, as I was thinking about that moment, I felt a deep sense of relief, knowing that we weren’t divorced. I realize now how much that meant—that being divorced didn’t mean that I was giving up the relationship that I had. I still loved her and she loved me, but it seems to me that there is a certain stigma to being divorced, and for us, the time and effort we had invested in the relationship wasn’t worth much. It was only after I got divorced that I felt it was worthwhile to go back to my ex and we were able to reconnect.
I now realize that a great deal of this problem with
