My Shining Ones, I hope you are ready for this. Stories of infidelity are a dime a dozen. I am grateful that you are putting your trust in me to break my life wide open. With all of my viscera hung out to dry, I will reveal all. I am adding real e-mails to my blog. They are sometimes explosive, other times tasteless, but always emotional. Why am I including such sacred correspondences? During my greatest times of grief, I scoured the internet for stories like my own, only to find threadbare details. The pain of heartbreak cannot be summed up in 1200 word essays. They leave out the bloody, gory details. I needed to know what happened in the middle. How did they get through it? Or not get through it? How long did the roller coaster ride last? I wanted to know the anguish, the discoveries, the frenzy of emotions. I was bereft trying to find a scenario similar to mine. Most couples are married, have kids or want kids, and the straying partner did so willingly. How was I to find a story with an unmarried couple of almost ten years who did not want children, but there was the possibility of a child born from an unconscionable act? As I cannot find myself in the stories of others, I’m inviting you along on my journey. This is the tender, vulnerable, and exposed middle.

As a way to diffuse the bomb, I would deploy counseling. We would either work through it or end our relationship in a healthy manner. In order to explore whether or not we could be salvaged, we researched therapists. It was hard to agree on a counselor, but there was an understanding that if we didn’t like one, we would locate another. We would attend individual sessions at a minimum. He needed to work on himself, and I needed to process a-year-and-a-half of lies. I was obligated to untangle the complex and pulsating strands of my feelings before I walked away.  

I demanded that radical honesty be the policy going forward. As his lies were born to cover up a traumatizing experience,  I was willing to work on forgiveness. A paternity test would also need to be conducted. The implications of the life-form that this woman had carried inside of her, and that she was now claiming belonged to my boyfriend, could be my undoing. Having a child together is a bond we would never share. I could not imagine another woman carrying his baby, even if he felt a complete disconnect from the situation. I was ashamed of myself for not being equipped to get past him fathering a child, even if it was against his will. What kind of a person was I to hold this against him? I knew it was unfair to lay this at his feet. On the other hand, how could I live with something that I had never wanted? 

His e-mail response to the paternity demand was explosive. (The only communication between the former Blue Eyed Prince and myself was via e-mail. I didn’t own a cell phone, and we hadn’t been living together for the past three years. We were living with separate family members while we saved up for a house.) I suppose it is lazy of me to simply post the actual e-mails, but it sums up his feelings better than I could.

She has pushed herself on me twice that I knew of and raped me while I was fucking sleeping. I hate her and I never want anything to do with her or her baby. I am never getting a fucking DNA test because I don’t fucking care, if it turns out definitively that it is mine than she will be inclined to use that to push her way into my life. If it is not then I’m still right where I am at right now with her, which is telling her I want nothing to do with her. I’ve made that perfectly clear to her. There is nothing hanging over my head. Her life is hers to keep fucking up and mine is mine. There is no overlap. If this means we are never getting back to gather than that fucking sucks but I guess I’ll have to find a way to convince you otherwise. I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone and I’m not going to just give up. We have gotten past a lot of shit over the years and come away from it loving each other more, or at least I felt that way. I believe we can still make this work. I have too, I want too. I always have.

A couple of hours later, a second e-mail appeared.

Sorry that I was so rude/defensive in my email this morning. I am just flustered. You are absolutely right though it would be best to know for certain. I have to keep in mind that this is new and fresh for you where as I have had almost a year to dwell on it. My lack of integrity also robbed us of going through this together. I was such an idiot. I hope someday you can forgive me. I fucking love you.

My heart hurt at the vitriol of his reaction. I had spent a year volunteering with a Rape Crisis Hotline, and my experience taught me it was likely re-traumatizing him. It was unfair that he had to apologize for what had happened to him. I didn’t want to cut deeper, but on some level, didn’t he need to know? What role would this woman would play in our lives? I could not imagine trying to ameliorate this situation with a dark cloud looming over our heads. I did not want this predator controlling the situation. How could I begin to process this if I didn’t know what to process?

When I wrecked my car in high school, I re-lived the sensation of the car rolling for months. I had never known emotional trauma to be on par with physical trauma. I would relive this bomb as though it were going off for the first time over and over again. It had only been two exhausting weeks since I found out the devastating news. It was time to tell him something which I hadn’t previously divulged. Maybe I had never told him because I never trusted him enough. Therapy might be my time to come clean.