The (very long) story of my time with "Liz" and our crazy relationship

[EStreetJC]

Hi, folks. I thought I would post this here to provide backstory and context to my previous post about the time "Liz" (obviously not her real name) asked me to move to her state to be her closer to her, and all the drama that ensued. I'm also posting it to gain additional insight and opinions as to what exactly the hell this was. It has been thirty-two days since I walked away from Liz, and I'm still sifting through all the wreckage by myself. I need all the help I can get. Apologies for the extreme length...it is indeed an extremely long tale, and maybe the more detail I provide, the more sense it'll make.

 

Background on me: I’m a 32 year old male and live in a major city in the U.S. I’ve recently come to accept that I have suffered from intense depression and anxiety for well over a decade but have seldom acknowledged it or attempted to treat it, despite its demonstrably deleterious effects on my life. This will be important later.

 

I’ve only ever had one long term girlfriend of two and a half years, and we split up almost nine years ago, when I was 23. Since then, I’ve drifted from casual relationship to casual relationship, and a ton of first dates that went exactly nowhere, and long stretches where I didn’t bother with dating at all. A couple of women captured my attention but never enough to inspire me to fully commit and pursue them. That is, until I met Liz.

 

We met on Reddit, in one of the pen-pal subs. It was a lonely Saturday night in August of 2017. I learned she was 24 (so seven years younger than me) and in another area of the country. We moved our conversation to another platform and quickly realized shared the same sense of humor and appreciation for classic rock. We exchanged photos (nothing sexual) and I was taken by how gorgeous she was. We chatted late into the night. By the time I fell asleep, I knew I needed to speak to her again as soon as humanly possible.

 

Checking her Reddit the next day, I discovered, much to my horror, that she was married. Devastated, I asked her about this and she confirmed yes, she was married, but rather unhappily, as it turned out. We initiated a long-distance friendship anyway. Phone calls and FaceTime chats confirmed her to be exactly who she presented herself as, which was a tremendous relief. We became intensely close and long conversations became the norm for us. We both shared our individual struggles with mental illness (she has bipolar disorder). I listened to her talk about the problems with her failing marriage and offered as much advice as I could to help talk her out of what sounded like a rotten situation (her husband sounded like an emotionally neglectful ass). There was a lot of fun and laughing too; talking about our respective days, our crazy families, pop culture stuff we loved and hated. I had never met someone who “got me” as much as Liz, and she told me the exact same. After a little while, she was talking to me more than she was talking to her husband. Frankly, I didn’t care. We were already falling for each other. She even sent me a birthday package a month after we started talking.

 

In November of 2017, Liz and her husband moved into their first house. He did not yet know of my existence. Overcome with guilt for what she was doing, Liz decided we couldn’t speak anymore. I was shattered. This end was brief, as we began communicating again a week or so later. Liz cared too much about me to just forget and ignore, and I was relieved she was back. We decided it was finally time to meet in person. She would fly to me on a weekend and then back home in time for work on Monday. I was apprehensive and freaked out about impressing her (I’m pretty broke and was concerned I couldn’t show her a good time) but she didn’t care about any of that. She just wanted to spend time with me.

 

Liz flew to my city in December of ’17. We’d been speaking for only four months. It was her first time ever being here and we spent the entire weekend together, me showing her the sights. She even met my family. It was during that visit that we first kissed, and had sex, and realized we were completely in love. But she wasn’t ready to leave her husband; she couldn't yet bring herself to do it. I felt no guilt in being "the other man" because he sounded like such a bad dude and obviously didn't deserve her; I realize now I was blinded by desire and loneliness, and regret my actions. My memory here is slightly hazy, but I remember he found out about us around this time. He was pretty pissed, but nothing major happened.

 

Enter 2018. Liz and I continue voice and video chatting using alternate means that her husband was unable to track (Kik and Skype). She frequently expressed intense guilt about deceiving him but loved me with such an intensity she had never experienced before. She was deeply unhappy in the marriage but so hesitant about leaving and throwing her life into chaos. There was another brief period where she stepped away out of guilt, but she came back again because we simply could not pull out of each other’s orbits. We were completely keyed into each other. But remember the mental illness I wrote about earlier? Liz had been imploring me to let her help me to find more professional help for what I was dealing with. I was so deep in the hole that it had become my home, and it blinded me. Kept me distant from all the things I really wanted in life. This had always been the case, and as much as I loved Liz, I was terrified by all the work her love would inspire me to do; I’d have to do to claw myself back into the world and I did not see myself fit for the challenge. I kept promising to get help, never following through, always trying to deal with it myself because I was petrified of revealing the extent of my illness to my family (we don’t really “do emotions” in my family). I thought I could talk myself out of it. Sometimes I even succeeded. It grated on Liz when I would lose myself, but we were still there for each other when our respective mental illnesses got the better of us (she went through a very rough patch early last year due to problems with meds).

 

Liz and I visited in person again last May, this time in her city, while her husband was on a business trip. She paid for my airfare and put me up at her mom’s apartment (she was also out of town at this time). We spent the entire time together. I pushed through a hellacious fear of flying to make it happen, but I had to see her. Nothing was going to keep me from her. We spent four days together down there, and Liz was distraught by the end, wondering when we were ever going to see each other again. Quite wrongly, I tried to “be a man” and serve as a stoic pillar of strength for her. I hate that I did that. I was as torn up and uncertain of the future as she was. Of course, her husband figured it was me who had come down to see Liz (not just “a friend” as she had told him), but the marriage shambled along like a zombie, deteriorating and rotting but never actually dying. Nothing changed.

 

We attempted another break that summer, but by now you know how well that worked out. My depression/anxiety continued to eat away at me and Liz threatened to leave if I couldn’t enter treatment. I promised her I’d get better but I could never find the bravery to open up to my family. Surely I could finally find the magic words, some archaic incantation, to talk myself out of it and avoid shame and embarrassment! Liz hung around, and we had our good days and our bad days. She went back to school in the fall to finish herdegree, and with this and her persistently ****ty marriage neither her nor her husband seemed to be able to leave, her own life became highly stressful, but we continued to remain as close as we could in kind of a “holding pattern.”

 

Now to the part you may already know: in September, Liz asked me what I thought about moving down to live with her, if she got herself out of her marriage. Me being me, I freaked out and instinctively said no. The hole was home, remember? I’m too stupid and helpless to do something like move to a completely unfamiliar part of the country! I didn’t want to say no. My brain was screaming “YES! YES! YES!” through the frantic cacophony of my anxiety. The damage was done; Liz rightly interpreted this as a rejection of her. I knew how wrong I was but I was so terrified by the idea that I reflexively ran from it. I spent days and weeks breaking myself down to remove the fear, and told her how wrong I was, how I wanted to do it. Things settled down, but Liz hangs on to that initial rejection to this day. I can’t blame her for being wounded.

 

In October, her husband caught her talking to me via Skype. He flipped his lid and Liz once again terminated contact, saying she was a "very messed up person and needed to stop hurting people." I was already beginning to feel numb to it by now, almost expecting it to happen, but it never failed to obliterate my heart when it did. She came back to me literally the next day, and this was when she had stopped taking her bipolar meds, attempted suicide, and wound up inpatient for several days; she called me a few times from the hospital to maintain contact. She was soon released and placed on new, better meds. You already know what happened next. The holding pattern continued, then she started spending more time trying to buckle down and be “the good wife.” Our communication became dramatically limited but we would occasionally chat about how much we missed each other. She had planned a trip here with her mother and cousin which was due to happen in January, and we both dreaded it because we didn’t quite know what to do with each other at this point.

 

Liz did come here in January. We met and spent a lot of time together, and our love was reaffirmed. She told me her marriage had finally collapsed during Christmas and she was unofficially separated from her husband. She ended the trip with a promise not to leave my life again, and there was optimism that we could finally move forward with her marriage out of the way.

 

When she got home, she texted me that she suddenly realized she “couldn’t do it” (be with me), how deeply unhappy she was, how she wanted to be alone with no commitments, etc. All these doom and gloom ideas. She claimed to have stopped taking her meds again. Communication fell off for a little while. I entered into a dark and painful period of depression wherein I kept trying to force myself to seek therapy, having finally accepted this was bigger than me and I couldn’t do it myself.

 

Liz and her husband officially separated early in February. And this is when it all comes back to Reddit.

 

I stalked Liz’s Reddit account one night, a week ago. I hadn’t heard from her in a few days and was worried. I wanted to see if maybe she’d been active on here. My world ended. I discovered that in December, she had met another man on the same pen pal sub we had met on, and they had already made plans to meet up, entirely behind my back. I confronted her about it, and she came clean. She said she was afraid to tell me because of how devastated I’d be but had planned to do so when she “could explain it better.” She told me she could not wait anymore for me to get better. It was as if all her talk of us being destined to be together, how right and perfect we were, had meant absolutely nothing. In a flash of suicidal ideation, my defenses broke and I finally admitted what I’ve been going through for years to my dad and my brother. They’ve actually been extremely helpful and supportive, and I am four weeks into therapy.

 

Liz didn't want to hear anything about it, though. She told me she’s heard it all from me before, after all the help I refused from her. She didn't believe this time is any different, but it is, because her betrayal and selfishness decimated my world and my hopes for the future. The thing about Liz is she was the first person in nine years to make me believe I could be a good person, that I could have a future, that maybe I did deserve to be happy. And I wanted it to be with her. She’s the first woman I’ve ever actually loved and wanted to climb out of the hole for. Anyway, after a week where it was like pulling teeth to get her to answer my e-mails and acknowledge me, I told her I needed space of my own. She barely acknowledged it, and didn't even respond to the goodbye e-mail I wrote. I was totally frozen out, like she'd stopping loving me completely.

 

In January, she looked me in the eye and told me she loved me. It wasn’t until after she left here that she “realized I was never going to change.” Does that all disappear in a month? Is this completely my fault, as I suspect? Was I only being used by Liz to help her leave her marriage, as my friends and family suggest? Was it all a lie, or was it something beautiful and pure that I destroyed because depression closed its grip too tightly around my neck and I was too stubborn and prideful to ask for/accept help?

 

Somebody please help me gain some insight and perspective here. I’m in desperate need of it. This was my first time dealing with a married woman, and will most assuredly be my last, I was wrong, and it is a shameful time in my life. I was...much too lonely and blind, I guess. Thank you for reading.

[PhillyLibertyBelle]

This is a tale of tragedy and triumph. Not going to sugar coat this but you were complicit as an adulterous man which contributed to the breakdown of a marriage.

 

Now the triumph: this isn’t about Liz. It’s about you and the brave step you finally took to come clean to your family about your issues and get into therapy. Congratulations!

 

As you go through therapy and unpick your life, your experiences and how they shaped you and why they have caused you to live a life that is not as happy and fulfilling as you would like, you will also be learning all about yourself, learning new ways of dealing with issues, new ways of living and an acceptance of yourself and your history.

 

The best part of all this is that you have the blessing of being able to focus solely on yourself during this journey without the drama of a long distance affair with a bipolar woman distracting you from your therapy work.

 

Your future is yet to be written.. by you! You are a young man. Get healthy in yourself, find out what makes you happy, learn new ways of coping with issues, leave all unhealthy fear behind, and live the magnificent life you deserve. It won’t be easy, but it sure will be worth it, it won’t happen in 3 months so stick with it, it will be the best gift you ever give yourself.

 

There will be many more (healthy) loves in your life. The person you need to be in love with, to give everything to right now is YOU.

 

Be the Phoenix that rises from the ashes!

 

Good luck!

[BaileyB]

I would offer the same advice as your other thread...

 

You made a poor decision because you were lonely and you mistakenly trusted a woman you should not. She is married, has a diagnosed mental illness, her behavior is unstable, narcissistic, and manipulative. Not the kind of person you want to have in your life...

 

Don’t spend too much time analyzing this - there are some things that you just can’t understand or explain. And, the behavior of an unstable, mentally ill woman is definitely unexplainable. If you want to analyze anything, spend some time thinking about why you were vulnerable to this situation... why you didn’t pay more attention to the warning signs and why you let her manipulate you into thinking that the failure of this relationship was somehow your fault.

[preraph]

Liz is a serial cheater, and you both have mental health problems that both of you need to work more on before even trying to be in a relationship. I just think Liz is someone who likes a lot of attention. I mean, she acted like she felt bad for "hurting people" and then she went right back on the penpal website to start right back up again with new men. She knows he hurts people. She hurt her husband and you and she'll hurt the next guy. But you're all hurting yourself by not having any boundaries and common sense, so.....keep working on your mental health and do therapy and don't give up on meds, but I think therapy is important here.