This is a question about something that happened to me many, many, many years ago that's always sat on my mind and I stumbled across some letters today that brought it flooding back. It was all so strange so I'd like to know what people think really happened.
We met and fell in love. I'll admit I pored over every minute and can't think of anything that was off or wrong. With the benefit or hindsight and wisdom, we were just in love.
He was reliable, sensible, calm, soft, gentle and absolutely besotted with me and we moved in together after about eight months of dating. We both had children and our children bonded like best pals and it was the happiest time of my life.
I remember being a family. Family car. Family holidays. We used to laugh all the time and our sex life was electric. I felt calm, safe and happy. He proposed, after asking my Dad, and I was ecstatic to say yes.
Seemingly very suddenly, things started to get very stressful. He car accident and was quite injured and I thought he might die. He had a brain bleed they managed to get under control. His injuries were not terrible but he seemed not there for weeks after the accident. I was there, so ended up traumatised and started having really bad anxiety.
Around the same time a lot of things hit. Work issues. A few dramas. And it turned out (I didn't know until later), that he was in debt and had financial worries.
So around six months after, he just didn't come home one day. He kissed me goodbye one morning, I remember it so clearly because he was crying and I was asleep and didn't understand. Then he left and quite literally never came home again.
Me and the kids were given weeks to leave our house, and it was all just the biggest shock and so awful and he wouldn't speak to me. I had no idea what was happening or why it was happening.
He was incredibly cruel about it. Just left me and the kids without saying goodbye or letting me say goodbye to my step skids. It was so out of character and I had no idea why.
Eventually a while later we did see each other (to divvy up belongings and so on), and he was very unwell. I remember it was like he'd become someone else. Emotionally: alternating between hysterical crying and being eerily cold and staring into space. Physically: skinny, vomiting all the time, couldn't remember things.
It was the most bizarre experience ever. He said he'd had a breakdown and said he loved me but couldn't live with me and cited me having anxiety as the reason. I remember that not making sense. We were engaged. I'd only had anxiety a few months and it wasn't that bad. It didn't make any sense.
Then a few months passed of living separately with daily video chats. WhatsApp didn't exist back then, so we would text. I just found the phone this morning with all the texts and it was so weird to read them.
He wanted to message every day and speak, but he was cold like a robot and also hypersexual. Like abnormally, insanely hypersexual of all the things he wanted to do to me. You can see in the texts that I'm going along with it (I think I just wanted ANY intimacy at that point) but I was so desperately sad.
This man who'd seemed to love me beyond anything I'd ever experienced was just completely cold and detached and telling me all these pyrography fantasies.
He said to me that he'd had a breakdown. And I got him to the GP and he got antidepressants. He started taking them, and things got worse. He was even more cold and detached. It was eerie and so painful. I persuaded him to see a counsellor and he had his first session and said it made him feel better.
Reading over the texts was so uncomfortable. Like all his love for me was gone overnight. He was polite, cold and incredibly sexual and even all these years later I felt visceral pain reading them.
I went to stay him a while later (3 months after he'd left), and he was in a bad state. I remember just being so confused. It was like he had no emotions at all. Then he went to his second counselling session and came home and said "I don't love you anymore, sorry".
I remember just the complete bewilderment. Confusion. It was like an out of body experience. The next day he went to work and I checked his Internet history. He'd been googling how to pick up women, as well as prostitutes and sex websites. Not always, just the months we'd been apart.
I remember packing my bags and leaving that morning. I texted him to say what I'd found and to express the agony I was in. He said he'd been googling those things because he had lost a sense of himself and just wanted to feel normal. He said he thought he could feel love for me, but he couldn't, and it wasn't him, it was the breakdown.
I told him that nobody was happily in love and engaged and just woke up one day not feeling it anymore and that he'd never loved me at all if that was what happened. He replied saying "I did love you, you were my whole world". But he had no explanation over why he woke up one day and felt differently.
I left, and we only spoke again one more time.
He phoned me one evening about a year later. Very gently crying. He said his kids found a family photo and said they missed us, then he said to me "we were so happy, weren't we?" and I could hear the confusion in his voice. I said "yes" and that was all.
There was never another woman. Never any real explanation. I heard he battled mental health problems (maybe still is) and as far as I know never married.
I just stumbled on the old phone and texts today and reading them after all these years didn't make any more sense than it did back then.
What do you think really happened?
I barely think about it anymore, but it is hard in ways for me to make full sense of my life with thus puzzle always there in my subconscious.
Sometimes even now if I have a bad day or feel lost or scared or alone, I picture him in our happy house that felt so warm and safe. I can still picture his Pyjamas on the knob of the bed, or his grinning face when he was down on one knee or rolling along in the car with his hand reaching over to squeeze my leg while he smiled at me and the kids made up funny songs in the back.
That's my happy place and still is I suppose.
The way those eyes used to look at me like you could visceral feel the love coming out of them, and the overnight they were like dead fish. Soulless. Not even a tear on the day I left.
I'm not in pain. I accepted it.
I just want to know.... was it ever real?