NaNoWriMo - Day 11

It gives me some comfort to know that I wasn't the only one Darren had fooled.  My friends thought he was great, too.  But then again, my friends had also thought Steve the chauvinist was a perfect match for me.  To me, the difference between Steve and Darren was the difference between a frog and a prince.  What I discovered, though, was that a frog is straightforward and simple.  A frog is a frog.  A prince can seem like prince charming, but could actually be a manipulative power-monger who slowly eats away at your soul.

For a while, every day with Darren seemed better than the day before, and then slowly, every day got a little worse.  It was a gradual change, and like a frog sitting in a pot of slowly warming water, that gradual change kept me from noticing that I needed to get out.  We weren't actually dating for that long before the water started heating up, just a few months, but it was such a slow fade that our relationship drug out for almost a year before I finally realized what was happening and knew that I had to get out.

It started innocently enough.  He stopped listening to me as closely as he did at the start.  At the beginning he seemed to value every thing I said, and to be honest and respectful about whether he agreed or disagreed.  As time went on, I more and more often would get responses of "Hum?  What did you say?" or "Sorry, babe, I wasn't really listening."  That I could live with though, so I told myself, and things kept going on with me thinking he was still just as great as when we had begun.

Then, I started noticing him looking at other women when we were out in public.  He was pretty subtle about it at first.  So subtle at first, that I figured I was just imagining it and was too embarrassed to call him on it.  But then, he started looking longer and more often, as if he wanted me to notice and reprimand him for it, so I finally did.  His response was to seem genuinely hurt as he said, "You know you're the only girl for me.  Have a little faith."

That actually made me feel guilty, and it seemed like he felt bad about it too because I started noticing the glances at other women less and less.  Now, I suspect it was just that I chose to stop noticing and not that they had diminished, but at the time, I thought Darren had taken what I said to heart and tried to change for me, even though he didn't think he was doing anything wrong.  It actually made me like him more, and drove me further into the denial that a relationship with him was not all it was cracked up to be.

Breaking off planned date nights with me to go out with his guy friends was the next stage of darkening in our relationship.  He justified it by saying he had been spending so much time with me and needed some male bonding time.  His friends backed him up by mentioning whenever they happened to see me how nice it was of me to let Darren hang out with them.  They made it sound like I had Darren fully under my control, which again made me feel guilty, and made me less and less resistant of him wanting to spend time with them instead of with me.  After all, who was I to keep him away from his friends?  I still had my friends, so why shouldn't he?  What I didn't think about at the time was:  if I still managed to find time to spend with my friends in addition to our date nights, which I had, why wasn't he doing the same?  On the nights he broke our dates, I ended up mostly staying in my apartment studying because I had already had my girls night for the week.  So why hadn't he had his guys' night already?  That was a question I never bothered to ask.

The answer finally came out months later when the truth about Darren's "guys' nights" was revealed.  You probably guessed the truth from my generous use of quotes.  Turns out Darren had been cheating on my with multiple women.  I don't care to go into the details of how I found out.  It's enough that I did find out, and that was when I finally woke up and realized I had been getting boiled alive for months.  Darren begged me for a second chance, but I had already unknowingly, unwittingly given him multiple second chances.  I wanted to be strong.  I needed to be strong.  That was the one good thing that came from it all.  I was able to tell him, "No" without hesitation.

My friends applauded me, of course, and told me I was so right to get out.  I didn't need their validation.  They, I realized, were in some ways a lot like Darren, telling me what they thought I wanted to hear, just stringing me along.  They weren't malicious about it like he was, but they did it just the same.  They meant well, I knew, but I needed new friends, better friends, friends who would really watch out for me the way the men I had dated never would.  And not just external friends, I needed to be a better friend for myself.  I vowed that never again would I date an asshole or a loser.  I would only date men that really respected me and cared for me, the kind of men I could bring home to the family to be accepted as a potential son-in-law.  And if I did mess up again, I would break it off at the first signs of real trouble.

I realize now that this was a bit extreme and potentially unrealistic, but it was less unrealistic than you might think.  After all, the next man I would date was the man who was going to become my husband.