My Marriage Meltdown: Discovering My Soulmate 10 Years After I Married Him

Today is Valentines Day and although I think it is mostly nothing more than a commerical holiday I'm going to use it as an excuse to tell you a strange an unexpected love story.

Once upon a time I met the love of my life and his name was Gabriel. Gabriel was beautiful and I loved him desperately and wholly but one day he stopped loving me and I was left broken hearted and alone. While in this broken state I dated crazy dark freak after crazy dark freak but during that time I also found my best-friend and that was JimmyEatWorld (JimmyEW).

After dating too many scary freaks I gave up on dating and told JimmyEW, who I loved very much in that philia way, that I was just going to marry him. I was kidding when I said that to him however one night something compelled me to kiss him. Something that made no sense and I always attributed to God giving me a little nudge…It was that midnight kiss that opened a door and I decided not to shut it. A few months later he asked me to marry him for real and I said “sure, maybe in a few years”. I knew he was what I wanted in a husband and partner. He was good, kind, honest and true.

Now we were married, I was a “wife” and I was a wife who was living a lie because my husband thought I loved him. And although I did love him very much, not in the way I should have. Never in the way he deserved.

At night I would dream of my love for Gabriel and wake feeling guilty as if I were betraying my husband nightly. These dreams plagued me but I shoved my feelings down trying to hide them from myself and from JimmyEW. At night I would pray to God that he free me from Gabriel but it never worked, he was always there in my heart tormenting me. And because he was there JimmyEW was never able to enter.

And so we lived our lives. We had some major ups and downs in our life but our relationship always remained pretty constant. I continued to tell myself that the deep love I'd had would eventually come with JimmyEW but it never did. Then it started to crop up, the longing for something more and the dreams, they never stopped. Never. 12 years after he left me Gabriel was still there inside me, afflicting me. And all of these things started spilling out of me, my life lost all joy, I no longer found pleasure in my children and I was vacant. It was like I was living my life through sheer force of will while my spirit was elsewhere.

JimmyEW began to grow troubled by what he was seeing so he read the equivalent of my diary…he hacked my email. And there he discovered that great dark secret that he had never known. He came to me and took me to the beach then confronted me about my feelings. I spent a few seconds trying to figure out if I could deny this or if I should let it all out. I decided to let it all out. I told him everything, the dreams, not loving him and the thing he never knew which was that I had never loved him. This shattered his world. Discovering his life was not what it seemed is not an easy thing to deal with.

JimmyEW had a whole host of things go through him, anger and sadness the main ones. He was so mad I had lied to him for all those years and so hurt that he wasn’t loved. Angry I had had children with him, angry that I had hidden so much from him. He told me he could let me go and he thought he could still be friends with me.

And you know what? I wanted to go, I wanted to be free. I watched him calmly with a stone face taking every insult and every crying question he threw at me, but my arms ached horribly. I had so much adrenaline running through me that my arms wanted to lift a car off a trapped child, but there was no car to lift and no child to save so instead I stared at the green water and wondered if I could jump in and let myself just die. We pulled ourselves together enough to get the kids from daycare and once we put them in bed our emotional conversation continued.

That night he slept on the couch and something about being separated from him in that way freaked me out. I snuck out of bed and laid on the floor at his feet rocking back and forth crying and singing Father Abraham. He let me stay beside him because I was getting a bit loony, he was kind even in his anger and sadness.

The next day we sat together and continued to try to come to some conclusion and that was when Sister HB called me and told me to go see a Therapist she knew (I had texted her the day before to tell her what was going on). JimmyEW didn’t want to go, what was the point but because he had felt a need to seek advice from HB about what was happening and since it was HB suggesting it he decided to listen to her and go see the Sage. We got in that afternoon and there I told the Sage everything. I cried a lot and JimmyEW was calm and collected. The Sage asked what JimmyEW wanted and he said he just wanted to give it a month and then decide, he didn’t want to make any rash decisions.

Then the Sage asked me what I wanted and this is where it all changed for me. Because as much as I wanted to be free to fall in love with a person who I would love desperately I knew that wasn’t the right answer. So I said “in a perfect world I would love my husband” and from my lips to Gods ears because I swear to you in that moment it was like a veil was lifted off my face and I saw my husband for the first time. I am fighting back tears while writing this part, so powerful is this moment to me. But something cleared my vision freeing me and I suddenly truly loved him in the way I always wanted to. JimmyEW did decide to give me a month and we drove back to our home to debrief.

We arrived home on that sunny September day, me very uncertain of my future but very certain that I loved this man like I never had before. He took my hand and I bit my lip hopefully. Then we climbed high up the hill that overlooks the valley our home is in. There in the sunlight, the warmth shining down on us he took me in his arms and told me he was going to choose me. He thought we could work it out.

(the picture to the left is that actual moment of us sitting on the hilltop for your viewing pleasure)

I don’t know how he came to this conclusion because if I hadn’t loved him for 10 years what could work that out? But he says he knew that God was telling him that was the right choice. And although I was afraid to say it, afraid he wouldn’t believe me for all the years I had said it but had never meant it the way I should have, I told him for the first time that I loved him.

And God smiled down on me that day because JimmyEW could see in my eyes it was true, he could feel it was true and we could feel God around us and he knew that there was a path that we were meant to be on together.

We basked there together, tears flowing down our face, crying and laughing at the same time for this sudden discovery of each other. He realized that although he’d always loved me he had never loved me in the way he now did. I texted a quick “everything is ok” to Sister HB (who had to pull over to the side of the road the day before because we were giving her a heart attack) and we got our babies from Daycare.

We are both changed for this experience. He has become a very strong, wonderful man and I find myself continually amazed by him. And he suddenly can eat spicy food too…that is just weird.

Me…well I can tell you I have had one more dream about Gabriel since that Hilltop Moment. But in that dream he was a fat gay man! And I now that I am free of him I can see how that sadness and misplaced love weighed me down my whole marriage. I have such joy in my life now. I get such delight in simple things like watching my oldest child carefully dunking a cookie in a cup of milk.

And together we suddenly are ultra tuned to each other. He seems to sense me and my emotions and I his, even if we are separated by hundreds of miles. The weird unexplainable moments we’ve had can attest to this.

Before we moved along two parallel lines but finally we’ve come together and move along one. We are synchronous, we are connected and we are in love! JimmyEW and I plan to be recommitted this fall, this time with both of us desperately in love with each other. And after our ceremony it is our plan to also be baptized as well since we see Honey Bunch God as having been such an intregral part of us finding each other.

Somehow my destiny is wrapped up in him. Not in that obvious way but something deeper and more profound. All I know is that now I know for sure he is what you’d call “my divine mate” because I truly feel like God intended him to be my husband-he is my God Intended Mate. God, in his every Ezer-ness rescued me in the nick of time and lifted that veil that covered my eyes for so long. It seemed to happen the instant I asked for it. I had the right answer when my Sage asked me what I wanted. I asked and I received and I am so incredibly grateful and blessed for it.

There is still healing to be done. My darling JimmyEW still is over come with sadness at the lie he unknowingly lived for nearly 12 years. But there is also great joy that comes in moments when we see how much happier and full of love we are now.

So I travel this path but not on my own because I have my human Ezer K Negdo and together we will discover life as we were meant to have it. Happy Valentines Day to all. Go find joy in your life and if you don’t have a love at the moment try to take joy in the love around you because it is a beautiful and wonderful thing.

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