Don't Go Breakin' My Heart

I'm a foolish woman. I gave my long-unused heart to a man and he just broke it. I didn't think my heart was still breakable, because it felt brand new, somehow, and better than ever. I felt better than ever. Walking on air good. Head in the clouds good. Everything was lovely, lovely, lovely because some parts of me, like my heart, were in LOVE.

You have to understand that I've been married for 20 years to the same man. We are in the process of getting a very civil, non-acrimonious divorce. The divorce is taking too long, so the man who had my heart (but who played no part in the dissolution of this marriage at all) just bailed. Two days ago. Via e-mail. My heart was cyber-broken.

This man, whom I will call B, and I reconnected a little over a year ago. We'd dated briefly in college and I had broken his young heart for reasons I no longer recall. He bore no ill will and was more than happy to hear from me last year. We struck up an e-mail correspondence. He had a girlfriend, so it was all very platonic and friendly. But we e-mailed every day, sometimes twice a day; even three or four times.

Reconnecting meant we discovered that we shared all the same likes in books, food, movies, life experiences. A full quarter-century had passed and there we were, formed and informed by all of those years of experiences. It was delightful. And I mean that. Full of delight. We both felt buoyed by each other and we connected very strongly.

He asked me to go to Egypt with him. I didn't go, because I was still married, but how romantic! He e-mailed me every day from Egypt and shared that trip with me. We both felt really young again. How great it felt to feel 19 again! All of those emotions! All of those hormones!

Our e-mails veered into a new direction about six months into our reconnection. They became much saltier in tone, explicit, even, very sexual and very erotic. It was wonderful. Here I was, getting the kind of attention I hadn't had from my spouse in YEARS. Getting a lot of attention from a handsome, accomplished, funny, smart, sexy and sexual man. Both of our sets of hormones went into overdrive.

And the phone calls. Three hours. An hour-and-a-half here, an hour there. Always wonderful and happy and sometimes sexy. Not phone sex, though, because neither of us were or are fans of that. But straight, open, honest talk about sex. Likes and dislikes. Limits. What we each loved and liked and couldn't wait to do.

You may be wondering how the girlfriend fit in. I did, too. I assumed it was a casual thing, not intense at all, because he had said that when he and she got together, they did because there "was nothing better to do." So he couldn't feel all of that for me, and express it the way he did, while involved with another woman, could he? I could barely wait to open my e-mail each day and I did so with butterflies in my stomach, because each e-mail confirmed that his feelings for me were deep and intense, and mine for him were deep and intense.

My spouse does not come into this at all. We began the process of a collaborative divorce long before B came into the picture. So my marriage had no bearing on my relationship with B, which was always just e-mails and phone calls. We hadn't seen each other, except for updated photos, for 25 years. It was delicious. And enticing. And so much FUN. We both needed some passion in our lives and here was a significant amount because we'd found each other again!

The original plan was to meet at a nice hotel for a Weekend. That's how we referred to it: The Weekend. We were going to talk, watch old movies, have as much sex as possible, have fun, hang out... a whole weekend of being together. But B's schedule was very busy, and The Weekend, which was planned for sometime in the Fall of '08, never came to pass. It almost did. Several times. I was dying from sexual frustration and could NOT wait for this Weekend. But it never happened.

What happened instead was B decided that we should spend a long weekend together at his house (we live about three hours apart) and hang out, watch old movies, have as much sex as possible, and do all of the stuff but in real life, not at a hotel. Fine with me! My marriage was over in my mind, and it didn't feel like cheating, although I really wanted to wait to be with B until I was divorced. I was raised Catholic, and the guilt was getting to me. He agreed to wait, broke up with the girlfriend (whom I later found out he was in love with! and part of me had been half in love with him the whole time; I felt like a chump. But he broke it off with her...)

So we began IMing through Facebook. Sometimes the IMs were very hot and intense and sometimes they were just regular conversations, but they were always wonderful. The phone calls continued. All was well in my world. And then he started to withdraw. Just gradually. Less phone calls. Hardly any e-mail, but there were those hot IMs... I thought I was giving him his space. I was hardly in a position to be needy, and I knew it, so I let lots of things slide. I was married and so didn't feel I could complain that he never called or e-mailed anymore. He was sliding away from me, slowly, and I knew I couldn't keep him... so I steeled myself for a kind of breakup. But it never came.

And then the "relationship" morphed into something unhealthy. I had been living in Fantasyland for months regarding B, and it was starting to become toxic for me. I didn't know how to change things so I just let them continue on and they did, until there was little air left in the relationship at all. It didn't go anywhere. My life wasn't moving. I've been having trouble finding a job in this economy and so started to slide into complacency (same house, same soon-to-be ex-spouse, no momentum in my own life... every day the same as the one before: Law & Order episodes, laundry, pet the cat... all of it the same, every single day).

And then, two days ago, an e-mail. Part of me was expecting it, and ending this was the right thing to do, but still it hurt a lot and I felt shame and embarrassment that I had given my heart to this for SO LONG, had let it CONSUME me for MONTHS... so I cried, and felt like a teenager, and cried some more. This quasi-relationship had taken over my entire life. I lived and breathed B. I knew what he was doing, and he knew my life, too. We shared a lot and it was very intimate.

And now it's over.

I can't go on Facebook except when I know he will be busy, because I don't want to "run into" him there. I don't want him to IM me like nothing happened, but I don't want to be cyber-disssed, either. I sign on, and if I see he's on, I sign out right away. It's only been two days, but this is already problematic. I deleted my status because I don't want him to know anything about how I am or how I feel right now. I don't want Facebook to become a bulletin board we both look at to see how the other one is doing. His life appears to be doing just fine. His status posts are upbeat and positive, and he seems to be spending longer and longer amounts of time there, posting photos, commenting on other people's posts and photos--something he rarely did before.

I should grow up. But he hurt me. It was a necessary hurt, but still it hurts a lot. He was a big part of my life for well over a year. We had contact every single day and now it's over? No more contact? Ever? Because he can't wait a few more months for my stupid marriage to end? Because, as he so rightly pointed out, I have to build a life for myself and have nothing going for me NOW, and he can't be anything more except "an occasional platonic e-mail." He's oh so sorry about it. But he's already moved on and there's an absence of B in my life now. A missing B, a missing part, a sliver of my heart gone forever.

I forgot how much this stuff hurts.

I forgot how fragile a heart is.

I forgot myself and got lost.

I miss my B. Now we will probably never meet. And again he is out of my life.

Maybe in 25 years he will be back and we will both be old enough and mature enough and single enough to handle it.

Maybe.

My heart will never be the same.