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Dustin S. Stover

When One Says "I Do"

Updated: Dec 16, 2021

I have been debating writing this for awhile, as it is, perhaps, the most personal thing I'm ever going to write. I don't know why I even want to write it in a public setting, but I am now committed to the point of at least starting it here. Perhaps it won't get published. Perhaps it does. Either way, here goes nothing.


It started years ago. I met my ex wife through a dating app after degrees of successes and failures - I met some people I genuinely feel as though they are great people but just didn't connect with on an intimate level while others I met told me stories that made them look absolutely batshit insane. I preferred the latter of the two, obviously, for my own entertainment but I pursued none of them in a romantic setting.


Then there was my ex wife. She came along and I felt like she was genuinely interested in getting to know me. She was from another country and was just learning the language so there was a significant amount of trying to explain what I meant, but overall I felt like she was genuinely interested in me.


And I was genuinely interested in her. That's never really been a problem of mine. Individuals, I find extremely interesting. Getting to know their history, what makes them motivated and destroys their desires. People in general are just extremely interesting to me, and my ex was no exception to this. Her personality was quite different than anyone else I had known and it was really interesting to get to know her. Add into that, the differences in cultures - it was the perfect combination for me to become overly indulgent.


It was a whirlwind at first. We spent nearly every day together. I would listen to her stories, she would listen to mine. It all seemed to be going well with one major hang up - there came a point in time where I asked her if she was just looking for someone to marry for a green card. She became irate. I didn't mean it the way she took it, I was simply trying to figure out whether that's what she was actually looking for when she got onto a dating site or if she was just looking to have fun while she was here and before going back to her home country.


We ended up talking through that major fight with me feeling like there wasn't any way she was actually looking for just a green card and then it was onto the next thing. Her tourist visa was getting ready to expire. I was at a place where I truly wanted to continue getting to know her. I was at a place where I was fascinated by her as a person and I felt like seeing where things went with her was worth exploring. And, to that point, she was still very into me.


Of course, that's how it seemed. In a rush in which we flew back to Indiana, we did a courthouse wedding. Minimal family and friends were told. We didn't want to make it a big deal in the slightest. My parents, brother, and sister in law were all in attendance. We even had an officiator from her home country by total coincidence.


Shortly thereafter, though, we moved into together. The entire dynamic shifted drastically. The day we moved into together was my birthday. She left me to hang out with another guy, leaving me and a friend to carry all of her and I's stuff up three flights of stairs. Then proceeded to be angry when I hadn't started unpacking things. Also, told me to sell off my most sentimentally valuable objects - my cds and books, which anyone who knows me knows that those are the things that throughout all of my travels I have refused to get rid of and have never had any intention on separating from. Of course, I didn't sell them, but there were some very serious arguments about that.


She did, however, trash several of the concert shirts I had kept for over a decade just because she didn't want to look at them. To be fair, they were raggedy to say the least, but the sentimental value existed all the same.


Things continued down that road. She couldn't hold down a job for very long so a lot of our early time married was me supporting us. I spent the money to get her a business license. I spent money to create business cards and what have you to pass out. I paid for advertisements in the newspaper. She was also always trying to live better off than what we could afford in those early days. We rented an apartment that was well over twice as much as what my house payment was when I owned a house (and, even now, more than what the house payment is for the house I'm currently living in). I had at least started making enough to cover everything, but it wasn't living near as comfortably as I would have liked.


Things eventually broke for her, though, and her business took off like a rocket. Before I knew it, I would come home from my job and find thousands of dollars in random drawers or laying around in random places from where she'd have just misplaced the money. I spent quite a lot of time trying to help her get organized with those things. All the while, though, I was becoming less and less of something she cared about - if I ever even was. Our conversations had all but died. She would ask me what I wanted from her, which I'd state that I wanted communication. I wanted to talk about big ideas and little ideas. I wanted to talk about philosophical thoughts or politics or music and art. This was too much of an inconvenience for her now.


Which led to our first conversation about why we were with one another. I was the one who asked. Her response floored me - she said, "because of what I gain from you." Now, mind you, she was speaking English well enough by this point that she'd have grasped the weight of what that meant. When I asked if that's what she truly meant, she doubled down on it. Yeah, that's what she meant. I didn't want to believe it, of course, so I excused it as her not knowing the proper English words to express what she really meant at the time, but nonetheless, it held a very heavy weight on me emotionally in the relationship.


This isn't to say that I was easy to be with. I'm not easy to be with. You could ask any number of my ex girlfriends and they will all tell you. I suffer depression far worse than I'd ever let on which leads to me lacking the motivation to do work around the house, or motivation to better my life once I reach a certain point of stability. That's not me trying to make up an excuse as it is something I actively work on, but it makes for one horrible partner in a relationship in a lot of ways.


It isn't just that, either. I am too logical, as well. Even if I feel a certain way, I try not to let that stand in the way of what I logically feel is the right thing to say. Case in point, my current girlfriend seeking confirmation that I love and want to be with her by bringing up something out of my past - I automatically default into talking about whatever it is from my past the same way I would the weather. It never gives her the comfort she is looking for, but I never see it as her looking for comfort and being insecure. It is all just logic. This happened. That's the end result. This is why I did it. This is what I learned from it. It isn't the I love you and are who I want to be with regardless of what has happened in the past, or that the past is in the past for a reason and nothing could make me go back to it, but right now I wake up every morning and choose her over any of the other possible futures I could have because of how much she means to me.


All of that is to say, I am hard to be in a relationship with. I am fully aware. And it isn't like those two major things are my only faults either, but it is time to move on.


Even though I wrote off what my ex wife said as not meaning how she said it, it also made a huge impact on my outlook of the relationship. I had already started feeling as though that was the case, anyway, hence me asking in the first place. She'd throw parties without even telling me. She'd go out with other guys just because she felt like she'd have a better time with them than me. It was all taking a huge toll on me, but I continued ignoring all the signs because I wanted to believe she cared about me.


But of course, the longer we were together the more that "our" life became "her" life with me just attached to the side of it as a means to support any and everything she wanted. I quit my job that had supported us in the early couple years of our relationship to help her organize her business better and follow a career as a writer, but spending the time writing just ended with her (and her daughter) calling me a lazy piece of shit. I would stay up all night writing, sleep for a couple hours when my ex would call me to help with her business in whatever way, then take care of her daughter while she was away. My depression was hitting an all time low, naturally. I felt like I was nothing. I ended up getting another job to provide insurance to the three of us. Even though it was a job that paid next to nothing, I started getting more respect than when I was pursuing my own desires in life.


She was horrible with money. I would routinely have to take money from our joint account to move it into my own account to pay all the bills or else she'd have spent all that money before any bill got paid. When I took the crappy paying job, I put every dime of that money towards bills, as well. She'd buy a $3,000 couch, but she'd complain to no end if I bought myself something that didn't fit into what she wanted, and everything I did buy went into a room, out of sight and out of her mind. It had me secluded into a room.


Now I just sound like I'm whining, but she was making six times what I was making when I was supporting us. And all the money we had started making with the business started with the money I put into it to start it. I had to put the license on my credit card because she had stretched our finances so thin that I couldn't pay cash for the business license.


A couple years had passed since I had asked her that fateful question about why she was with me, and I was genuinely feeling as though I was strictly being used near constantly since then. I asked her again and her response was the exact same. Now I had all the confirmation I needed. I became so distanced at that point that I may as well have not even been in the relationship at all.


I had decided that I just stopped caring altogether. I felt trapped because I had given up every financial security I had while she was living her dream life. We ended up opening up our marriage. Well, half way. Her half, of course. I had given up. I could have vanished into the abyss and felt more content in that than I was in my daily life.


Now, don't get me wrong. I loved her daughter. I genuinely cared about her having as great of a life as she could possibly have. I genuinely wanted to see her have a life she could be proud of, but I just felt every ounce of myself dwindling into nothing, and anyone who knows me knows that I have a pretty strong foundation of who I am as a person. To feel like I was in a relationship with someone who couldn't have cared about me any less was soul crushing.


She met someone in the openness of the relationship. She started falling for him. In a weird way, I was happy for her. I was hoping that the two of them could be happy together in ways that her and I very clearly weren't. I walked away with very little. My cds. My books. A couple of the instruments I had acquired in our years together, but also leaving just as many for her daughter. I left my camera that started my love for photography with her daughter as well. I took $20,000, a $6,000 car, packed up my things, and traveled the country.


I was searching for new insight. I was searching for my world to grow. I had traveled quite a bit 9 years prior to this and it was the first time that I felt like my world expanded in a huge way, and I was just looking for that feeling again. This time, though, it never came.


Now, when I left it was very firmly agreed that I was getting royally fucked in the deal. I honestly didn't have any expectations in what my life would be six months from then, so what did any of the things I "deserved" mean to me? I had found myself in a situation where I was ready to settle down and build a life. My ex and I's divorce still wasn't finalized, and so I tried to renegotiate our terms. She was the one who originally told me how unfair it was, and that I should have been taking so much more.


She had three cars, including one we bought brand new, and two vehicles for her business. One of those was strictly in my name because she didn't want to sit and wait for the paperwork to get done on it. She had a business making a quarter of a million dollars a year.


She sent me paperwork stating she'd pay me another $10,000 over the course of the next several months, but there were so many mistakes in the paperwork that I legally would have been signing fraudulent paperwork by signing it. I told her to rework the paperwork to feature the actual facts of the situation - as an example, the paperwork listed three cars, not the four we all owned, and not a single car was right. Her income was also falsified. My address was wrong. Her address was wrong. Everything that mattered about the paperwork was wrong. It had so many punctuation and spelling errors that it seemed like someone illiterate wrote it, and featured a typed document that had someone mark out things in pen, write the fix in pen, and then copied that document instead of making any of the correction on the original document itself. It was also obvious that the guy she jumped into a relationship with directly after me is the one who notarized it. Surely there is something about that can't be legal, but whatever.


I told her to fix the document and I'd sign it. I'd have still been getting fucked royally, but at least it would have been something.


Of course, she didn't fix any of it. Instead, she turned it in as a default on my part and changed the terms of the divorce to where she didn't owe me anything. I don't want to believe she was this shitty intentionally, but I could not imagine a world in which it was any other way. It was the final way she showed me that the only reason she was with me was because of what she gained from me. I was never anything of value to her. I was just someone she could utilize to get what she wanted out of her life, and the moment she had gotten all she could from me then there was someone else there to fill that role.


So, at the end of all this, she really did get everything she could out of me. She got a job that pays her so well that she'll never have to worry about money again. She got a green card so that she can legally reside here. Her daughter is legally here. She got away with me taking such a small amount from the relationship that she won't ever feel it, while I will be struggling for the foreseeable future to recover from everything I lost.


There were even times when we'd be in arguments on the phone discussing the terms of our divorce where it became pretty clear that she was recording the conversations we were having to ensure she was in the "right."


Now, I am not sure exactly why I felt the need to write all this out. I guess I just wanted it put somewhere that I could come back to if I ever felt like I needed remembrance of that time in my life, or the one I'm currently in and how much different it is. In the past, I'd have taken all the emotions from all this, shoved them into a bucket, put a lid on it, shaken them all up until it was a soupy mess, taken the lid off of it and poured it out to make a fuck load of short stories and attempted at a novel. To be totally honest, though, it all just feels as though I could have seen it all coming from the start.


You see, it wasn't very long after we had moved in together that I realized that all that interest she had in me early on wasn't because she was interested in me, it was because she was struggling so much to understand what I was saying. Once she got what she wanted from me - marriage, a green card - she stopped trying to pay attention to what I was saying.


Now, one might be saying, "so why did you stay if this happened so early on?" Well, anyone who has ever been in a long term relationship knows that while you're in the relationship, you simply can't see it clearly. It took a three year marriage and me traveling the country to see it for what it truly was. And I had hoped it wasn't what it was even months after it had ended, trying to convince myself of things that she wasn't as selfish as she had been demonstrating herself to be since I had met her.


And for all those who could be curious as to how I couldn't be, or wasn't, more upset about it all and how it all transpired, well, it goes back to all that logic thing that makes it so hard for me to be in a relationship with me. When you can understand someone's motivations, and understand how those motivations can lead someone to making actions, then you only have yourself to blame for whatever caused you to put yourself through those things. My ex is who she is, and she will always be that person. If I would have been honest with myself from the beginning then we likely wouldn't have ever gotten married. All the warning signs were there. It was my own naivety and hopefulness that led me down the path that had me making those choices. I can't be mad at her for going after what she wanted and being able to achieve it. I can be disappointed in myself for letting it happen.


Or, even more, only care about the emotions that remain from it all. I understand my motivations, as well, and so I'm not even upset at myself for having it happen.


Thinking back on it, though, I am really glad I didn't sell my cds or books.

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