The Story Before The Story

Very shortly after my husband and I separated in 2011, I ended up in a relationship I could not get out of for nearly a decade.

It was an extremely painful new relationship — filled with emotional highs and terrible lows — and when it finally ended, the separation was dramatic and exceptionally painful for him. It also left me facing my own choices and shame.

But before I talk about that relationship, I need to explain what came directly before it.

My husband and I were married for six years.

We separated on positive terms.

We both agreed that we were not a good match for each other, and we shared a clear understanding that we would work together to co-parent our children successfully.

And we did.

Our kids are now young adults — healthy, well-adjusted humans we are deeply proud of.

Our kids were still babies when we separated, and suddenly we were a two-household family.

No more mommy and daddy together in the living room playing with the kids.

No more one home holding all of us.

What I didn’t recognize at the time was the profound loss of the family unit.

I never cried about it.

I never grieved it.

I just moved on with my life, relieved, and believing I was completely ready for a healthy relationship.

Our marriage hadn’t been toxic, but it also wasn’t deep. We played the roles of husband and wife, mommy and daddy, happy family really well, but we weren’t truly a good match together.

I had experienced significant personal growth during my marriage, and I assumed I was ready to move on to a healthy, fulfilling relationship.

About four months after we separated, I met someone I really liked.

It seemed like he liked me too.

Which he did.

But he wasn’t ready for a relationship.

And when he told me that, it hurt my feelings in ways I was not equipped to deal with.

All of a sudden my behavior was being driven by pain I didn’t understand and coping mechanisms I thought I had long outgrown.

It was a startling realization.

Coping mechanisms don’t disappear just because they haven’t been activated.

They simply lie dormant until something triggers them.

And that is how I ended up in a relationship with a man I knew from the beginning wasn’t right for me.

In so many ways.

I wasn’t planning to build a life with him, but it happened anyway.

He was persistent.

He didn’t go away.

He didn’t reject me or hurt my feelings.

He was there.

And in a strange way, that felt safe to my fragile nervous system at the time.

Not safe in the way we normally think about safety.

He was an alcoholic and a drug addict.

At the time, I knew he drank.

What I didn’t understand was the nature of addiction.

There is a difference between someone who drinks too much and someone whose body has become physically dependent on alcohol.

When alcohol becomes a constant presence in the body, the body adjusts to it. It becomes integrated into cells and organ function. When the alcohol suddenly disappears, the body goes into withdrawal — shaking, irritability, severe distress. In extreme cases, withdrawal can even kill people.

I didn’t know any of this then.

I just knew there were mornings when he asked me to drive him to the liquor store at 7:45 so he could buy beer when it opened at 8.

I lost count of how many times he was hospitalized.

And I lost count of how many times, when I picked him up from the hospital, he asked me to stop and buy him beer on the way home.

Addiction is a real thing.

And still, I kept letting him back into my life.

I broke up with him over and over and over again.

But when loneliness crept in — and it always did — I invited him back.

Back into my bed.

Back into my life.

Because he was easy.

Available.

And we shared genuinely good times, even when he was drinking.

I summited mountains for the first time with him. Our life was full of outdoor adventure,

companionship, and meaningful physical intimacy.

There were times when he was sober.

Usually after I had completely cut him out of my life.

He would show up at my doorstep with weeks of sobriety behind him, hopeful and determined.

And I would welcome him back in.

Then we would walk through the difficult work of someone learning how to live in abstinence — the anger, the mood swings, the blame, the small victories, the light and the good.

It was hard.

But it was also filled with hope and the promise that real change might be happening.

Sometimes sobriety lasted months.

Once, it lasted more than a year.

But relapse always came.

I remember one moment vividly.

We were flying to Las Vegas together for a business conference. At the Seattle airport he decided to have one beer.

When he took the first sip, I cried.

Because I knew exactly what it meant.

It wasn’t long after that that he was hospitalized again.

Eventually, he stopped drinking; but the drug use that followed is a story I may never share. It was simply the next, more difficult phase of a cycle of addiction, recovery, and relapse — one that finally forced me to face myself.

Eventually, that relationship ended in a way neither of us expected.

After years of being off and on, a significant rupture between us finally broke whatever spell had kept us circling each other for so long.

A couple of months later he tried to come back.

But for the first time in nearly a decade, I didn’t let him back in.

For most of this year, I thought the greatest catalyst for my growth and transformation was what happened to me in my most recent relationship.

But that isn’t entirely true.

The ten years I spent inside that cycle forced me to face myself in ways I never had before.

Not him.

Myself.

The wiring inside me that allowed me to stay.

The loneliness I had never acknowledged.

The grief I had never processed.

My own patterns of codependency.

My lack of standards and boundaries.

My own toxicity.

That decade pushed me into some of the deepest self-examination of my life.

And in many ways, it was the beginning of learning how to live differently.

I spent time alone after the end of that relationship — working on myself, getting comfortable with aloneness and the loneliness that comes with it, learning about healthy relationships, and doing the work I needed to do to become healthier.

When I thought I was finally ready for a healthy relationship — when I believed I had found one — only to discover it was a beast I had never faced before, that became another personal reckoning.

The kind that makes you realize the work you did before wasn’t wasted.

It was preparation.