2020.

Wichita, Kansas.

I wake at 4 am to a slap in the face.

Jill shoves my phone in front of my eyes.

“What the hell?” I croak, groggy from beer and exhaustion.

“Why do you have this on your phone?” she screams.

“What are you talking about?” I groan, trying to focus on the screen.

“This note app is locked!” she screams. “What the hell are you hiding from me?”

I don’t even have the strength left to ask her why the hell she’s looking through my phone at four in the morning.

“Must have come with the phone,” I lie, just before the second slap lands.

I won’t say every morning starts like this…

But it’s not far off.

*****

I was killing it in the funeral sales industry a couple of years before.

I was a bit overweight, sure, but healthy.

I was making a great living and was pushing on an 800 credit score.

Jill comes into my life, and everything starts to crumble.

She consumes all my time, energy, and money.

She heavily contributes to over $20,000 in credit card debt.

My work performance drops off a cliff.  

My boss at the funeral home, a good guy, he tells me to quit instead of being fired so at least I have a chance of being rehired in the future.

So I go to work at a restaurant, and the drinking gets worse.

To cope with the mess at home, I’m probably knocking back a dozen beers a day.

The arguments, the stress, and my weight balloon…

And my self-esteem drops like a turd in a toilet bowl. 

The list of crazy that Jill drops on me is long and wild.

The 50 calls a day to check up on me.

The “forced” proposal…

Jill gets me drunk off my face in a pool hall, drives me to Walmart to buy her an engagement and wedding ring combo-deal with the last dollars I have, and makes me propose to her in the Walmart parking lot.

Then on Valentine’s Day, 20 minutes before we’re supposed to marry, she calls it off.

The gaslighting… Jill was a demon in private, an angel in public.

Like, when I eventually confided in friends and family about how much trouble I was in, they’d say “Are you sure? She seems so nice, and you two look perfect together.”

You hear that enough times and you begin to question your own sanity.

That’s the horror of being bombarded with lies, tears, and drama 24/7…

You don’t know what the truth is anymore.

So when Jill told me first she was pregnant, then had a miscarriage, I just flat out didn’t believe her.

*****
You might read all this and ask me…
“How dumb were you to put up with all this crap?”

It’s a fair question, and one I’m still coming to terms with a couple of years later.

See, I’m a people-pleaser.

I have a hard time saying “no.”

I'm incredibly generous when it comes to not just money but also time.

I’ve never been a hookup kind of guy…

I’ve always believed in long-term love.

And I could see Jill wasn't someone I wanted to live and grow with, so I broke up with her five weeks in.

Or at least, I tried to.

But she said, “No, we’re not breaking up.”

Then came the tears, threats, and screaming…

And I backed down and stayed.

This pattern repeated itself dozens of times over the next couple of years.

So how did I end up in this situation?

My parents have had the perfect marriage for over 42 years.

From them, I learned that for a relationship to work, each person must give 100%.

But I made the mistake of taking one part of the lesson, and not the other.

Case in point…

One time when Jill was really depressed, I bought her a $4,500 English bulldog to make her happy.

Idea being, if I just keep doing more for her, surely then she’ll love me.

Problem was, she was giving nothing in return.

But this only drove me to give even harder.

*****

I finally managed to get her out of the house after months of psychological torture.

I even called my folks over to help get her out.

Then Jill’s Dad – a military high-up - threatened to slash my tires, and when my Dad told him to stay out of it, he said he'd slash my Dad’s tires too.

My Mom had met Jill’s folks early on and thought they were a bit off.

She’s a social worker and told me to be careful with Jill as an apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.

Listen to your parents, folks.

When Jill did finally leave, I did okay for a while…

Then the loneliness crept back in.

I was such a mess after being with her for so long, I wondered who the hell would want to be with me now anyway?

My weight had ballooned to 280, I drank too much, was heavily in debt, and had a total lack of self-respect.
So I asked Jill back.

In my messed-up mind, I thought we could live together as friends.

Who was I kidding?

It was worse than ever before.  

It got so bad that I moved out of my own apartment and stayed in a friend’s basement.

That’s when I got the call about the supposed miscarriage.

“You 're at some bitch’s house while your dead baby is in the toilet behind me,” she screams.

Now, I 100% value human life, but without getting into too many details, the likelihood of her being pregnant in the first place was super low.

Okay, here’s one detail - I used to fake orgasms.

Yeah, I know.

So I refused to come home that night because I refused to believe she was pregnant in the first place.

She threatened to kill herself, so I called the cops and told them what was up.

A while later one of the cops calls me back.

“Mr. Schmidt, your friend is fine. She seemed real sweet. Matter of fact, she asked us to check on you because she was worried when you didn’t come home. You doing okay sir?”

Dammit all to hell.

Maybe I was just in a long, never-ending nightmare and I really was the mad one.

But the end did come, and it was surprisingly painless.

A friend texts to say Jill has left the dogs behind and moved out.

I get home, and there’s dog shit everywhere, and she’s trashed the place.

Of course she has.

*****

I don’t know.
Looking back now, even two years later, I can’t quite wrap my head around it all.

You might have read this and thought it’s a long list of “she did this crazy thing, she said that horrible thing,” and you’d be right.

I can only tell this from my perspective…

How I was feeling and what I was going through.

And honestly, I was a pretty shitty person at the time too.

I swung from doubting and blaming my own sanity to doubting and blaming hers. That’s what’s so twisted about this kind of behavior.

All that fighting, all that ugliness, all that pain…

No-one wins.

But recently, I came to realize that I just had to forgive her and move on.

Because if I didn't, even though she was no longer physically there, she was still controlling me in spirit.

My work is to learn to understand what a healthy relationship is again.

I hate that this turned me bitter and ugly for years of my young life.

See, I have an incredibly big heart for people.

I want everyone to be okay, and I’ll do what I can to help them get there.

And I know this...

I fucked up and it’s my responsibility to fix all this up.

And I will not allow this to happen to me again.

I’m adamant about always telling and demanding the truth.

Anything false, anything fake, I can see it a mile off.

And I’ll protect my health and well-being with my life.

So come at me true, and I’ll treat you like family.

Come at me wrong, well, I’d say you’d best not come at me at all.