My parents’ 30th wedding anniversary was October 4th. When my mom gave me the date last weekend, I thought it sounded familiar. But it’s not a holiday; it’s not the birthday of anyone I know. Just now, it hit me in the shower. (Click on the link below for “more” if you’re curious.)

October 4, 2003 – The ex and I had been dating very regularly for 6-7 months. He kept stringing me along and telling me that he would stop seeing other people, and then that he’d stopped dating other people already except for one – a student of his that he’d been seeing for about a year (whom he’d cheated on his ex-girlfriend with). It was excuse after excuse ab0ut why he couldn’t end things with her: her aunt had just passed away and she was upset; she had finals coming up and he didn’t want to jeopardize her grades; they went out and he had all intentions of giving her the talk, but she’d looked so attached he didn’t have the heart; he started to tell her and she started crying so he stopped, etc. Basically it was just a string of dates. The evening of October 3, 2003, after he’d taken her out again I was so fed up that I told him gently that if he doesn’t want to stop seeing other people, that’s okay, that’s his prerogative, but I didn’t want to be involved in this. I said he’s steering this relationship and he’s in the driver’s seat and I’m in the passenger seat, and if I thought his speed or driving style was going to hurt me, all I can do is open the door and jump out before the accident. Sure I’ll be injured when I hit the ground, but I can’t just reach over and take over the wheel when simply urging him to drive straighter and better isn’t working. The next day, October 4, 2003, I didn’t pick up any of his phone calls. I found out from various sources (including his own admission) that he proceeded to get WASTED bar to bar with his friends. At his regular bar, after polishing off an entire BOTTLE of tequila, he tried to recruit his friends to take an impromptu drive with him to Vegas. They all refused. He got up to get out, and passed out cold right by the front door. Freaked the hostess out, but then he got right back up and then left. Drove halfway to Vegas (I got up to 10 voice mails at this period of him singing along with songs on his radio and talking crazy to me), almost got into a fight at a fast food restaurant halfway there, then turned around and came back. When I got home that night, I saw that my house had been broken into; the patio door blinds were moved, there were footprints just inside that door, a dining chair was moved, and there was a poem from him on my pillow. Something about his having waited for me in “our bed” and how I’d abandoned him because I didn’t come home. (I was afraid to go home that nite.) He eventually got me to go pick him up from his friend’s house by playing on my sense of responsibility and conscience, threatening that he was going to walk to his car and drive home (completely inebriated) if I didn’t pick him up from the street he’s walking on. So finally at like 2 or 3am, I did. I’d planned to just sit with him in my car next to his car until he was sober enough to drive, but he cried and begged and convinced me to let him back into my house to sleep it off. That date was always thought of by my ex as one of the worst days in his life because I’d cruelly abandoned him, causing him to go insane, but he to this day doesn’t seem to acknowledge that the day and my actions were consequences of his series of very hurtful actions and inactions toward me. To this day he believes he’s the victim, altho I’d told him after being reminded of his horrors of October 4th over and over that hey, for there to be an October 4th, there had to be an October 3rd.

October 4, 2004 – We had been broken up for a month due to various reasons; his treating me like I’m inconsequential, his constant boys’-only trips to Vegas in which less than kosher things would go on behind the girlfriends’ backs (I’m not just talking getting wasted and going clubbing and hanging out w/other girls, I’m talking strip clubs, picking up on other girls and getting their numbers and storing girls’ numbers in each others’ cells so that the girlfriends wouldn’t know and they could honestly blame it on their friends, i.e. “Oh, Hope is a hooker that M. was talking to and he was too drunk to take her number so I stored it for him. Don’t tell his girlfriend, don’t get involved.”), his disrepecting me in front of our friends, his drinking, his other women, the list goes on. We were, however, still very close and saw each other every so often, but he decided that weekend that he was gonna send me one last bouquet of flowers to work and then disappear off the radar forever. Of course he never told me this. October 1, 2003, I just got a huge floral arrangement that looked like a funeral arrangement (people actually jokingly asking me who died when they saw me with it) and he ignored my call to him to thank him, and all subsequent calls of me asking if he’s all right since I can’t get a hold of him. Turns out, he went with his friends to Vegas to forget about me because this was the “anniversary” weekend of last year’s horrible weekend for him. He expected this year to be just as bad when the date hit. It was bad all right, but for me. I had just gotten to my friend Karen’s apartment for a purse party, barely gotten in the front gate, when I received a call from a caller-ID blocked number. Some girl, sounding drunk, refusing to answer my questions regarding her identity altho she knew my name. I guessed already. “Is this T.?” The student he refused to break things off with, whom he’d claimed that he’d broken things off with and they were just best friends now, altho I already knew their relationship was still inappropriate. She admitted that’s who she is, but won’t tell me how she got my number. We talked for a long time. She told me she had just been with him and his boys in Vegas a couple weekends ago. I knew he’d just gone there on a boys’ trip and none of us girlfriends were allowed to go, but I did not know that he met up with this girl there. She gave me details about him, his friends, told me that M. did meet up with his prostitute friend Hope up there (whom he’d sworn to his girlfriend he was no longer in any contact with), on and on. And that she thought she and my ex were still together for the longest time because he never ended things with her, never stopped calling her when he was with me, and she only the day before learned of my existence, and even then he’d lied to her and changed my name to “Maria.” I knew about their contact long before she told me, knew that he’d lie to me when he was with her, knew when we vacationed, that he’d find a private moment such as when he was in the bathroom to call her. But he had me thinking they were just friends and that my instincts that something was wrong was really just paranoia and jealousy.

Can you guys believe, that after all this, I still did not end things definitively (altho we’d broken up) until May of this year, when I got actual confirmation from both him and her that he absolutely cheated on me with her from the first weekend he and I officially got together, and that they carried on an entire dating relationship months and months into his and my supposedly exclusive, committed relationship?

Never again. Never, ever again. I will always, always trust my instincts from now on out. And I’m not just paranoid, because when I was with my 5-yr-long relationship before the Cheating Ex, I never had the urge to check his cell phone or wonder what girl he might be hanging with and lying to me about. We had other problems, but not anything like this. And with Mr. W, if I call him and he doesn’t pick up, I may or may not hear from him until the next day, and it’s okay, because I trust him completely. Whereas with the Cheating Ex, if I called one night and he doesn’t pick up and doesn’t return my calls, chances are that he was doing something inappropriate. Yes, I’d caught him before. He’d always said I have trust issues, period, thereby pinning all the blame of the relationship on my supposed insecurities.

It does surprise me that all this didn’t click in until tonite in the shower. The ex recently started calling, emailing and texting me again. I spoke to him a couple of times when he called me at work and once this morning when he called me at home. He said he’d been depressed lately, and I asked why. He snorted incredulously, and said because of all the things that happened between us last year at this time, the breakup. And I STILL didn’t remember the significance of October 4th. Isn’t that a good sign? It means I’m healing, right?