Foolish Trust

It’s been a bit of a rough week.

Several days ago, Mr. Right decided that he wanted to switch cell phone carriers because the service with mine was better. So we bundled up and headed off to our local Best Buy, teasing each other about our shared cold and holding hands as we are wont to do.

Our general state together is happiness; the day prior, we’d been discussing marriage. It had been inspired by BFF, whose mr. right has indicated that he’d like to get married next year (though he has yet to propose, since he knows her reservations about weddings). I’ve had very life-altering changes to my thoughts about marriage over the past year, thanks to my Grandparents and Mr. Right himself, and I told him so. Mr. Right wants to marry me. You can imagine how light my head was in the clouds after that lovely conversation.

Fast forward to the following night: we’re sitting in the Best Buy while the clerk searches for Mr. Right’s old account.

‘You have a mobility account???’

‘Yep,’ was his only response. He tells the clerk that he doesn’t know the postal code or the account number, and I hand my iPhone over to him so that he can log into his online account to retrieve the details.

‘The postal code on this account is --- ---‘

I’m not stupid. As a child, I was tested with a genius level IQ. I have a photographic memory and an extremely analytical mind. So it took less than the blink of an eye for me to connect said postal code with the city that ex-nonwife lives in. Which she just moved to some three months ago. Where she still has a cell phone contract under Mr. Right’s name.

Normally this would not be an epic, tantrum-worthy issue. But here’s the thing: Mr. Right lied to me about it. Also, they split almost two years ago. And lastly, it’s not just the cell phone account… it’s also the joint bank account that they still share and the vehicles that they have in each other’s names. And maybe, most importantly, the fact that ex-nonwife still hasn’t gotten over Mr. Right.

Two years, and none of this shit has been resolved. Back when Mr. Right and I decided that we wanted to live together, I told him right up front that he would have to be completely uninvolved with ex-nonwife, except for connections required due to L~. Which, in my mind, is child support, co-parenting decisions, and legal custody agreements. Mr. Right agreed, and promised me that everything would be in order by May 2013, which is when his lease is up on his house. We have discussed this several times since, and each time the only thing that he told me about was the vehicles and the joint bank account. So you can imagine my surprise when I learned that ex-nonwife has been using his cell phone account for 2 years, and I had to learn about it while sitting on an ass-bruising wooden bench in a big-box electronics store.

Awesome.

My m.a.d. was ON. Just like that, I went from Cloud 9 to wanting to tell him to take ex-nonwife’s phone and shove it. WWI started as soon as we got into the truck; I lambasted him. Normally when I’m fighting with someone, I turn calm and cool and suddenly have epic control over myself. I listened to him tell me that he never lied to me… that he just hadn’t remembered that ex-nonwife was under his account. I countered by saying that a lie by omission is still a lie. He told me repeatedly that there was nothing he could do about it, that he didn’t understand why it was such a big deal, it’s just a cell phone for christ’s sake!, and I calmly informed him that I didn’t appreciate that BS and that if he really wanted to move forward with me, he would start taking action and resolving these outstanding issues with ex-nonwife.

‘You want me to just cut all ties with her. It’s not that easy. You want me to hate her!’ he told me. I think I actually sputtered at that; I helped her get a fucking job when she decided that she wanted to change careers and up and quit only to be unemployed for 3 months. Her son is in my house every fucking weekend. I think she’s a horrible mother and a lazy, irresponsible, co-dependent whiner, but I want what’s best for L~, which is his parents getting along. I don’t want Mr. Right to hate her, I just want him to be appropriately uninvolved and invested in moving forward with me. I want our future to be more important to him than his past. That’s not too much to ask, is it??

He said some awful things to me, and I ended up almost kicking him out of the house. That sounds horribly dramatic, doesn’t it? I replay it in my head now, and I’m amazed that I didn’t tell him to leave. Had he not instantly apologized for what he said, I would probably be blogging from singledom again right now. I’m not one to take much crap from people, whether I love them or not, but I do know that a good majority of the population says things in the heat of the moment that they don’t mean. I grew up with two sisters who, during any fights, would simply point their verbal cannons and fire at random, intent on racking up as much emotional destruction as possible. But we’d always come out the other side still loving each other, still sisters.

The wound is still there, and my trust in him has been damaged. When the smoke cleared, Mr. Right promised that he would have ex-nonwife removed from his cell phone account and that he would take care of the joint bank account by the end of the year as well. I’ll admit that I have a hard time believing him, even though he’s already opened up a new bank account and is working on having everything transferred over. As of yesterday, he still hasn’t told her that she needs to get her own cell phone account and the vehicle issue will remain for another few months while Mr. Right gets the funds in place to pay off his truck loan and she gets rid of the car. I’m giving him a lot of leeway… more than I’ve ever given to any man, and I find myself wondering if my gut is telling me something that I’m not listening to. I love this man, like I’ve never loved anyone before, and I worry that it’s making me blind. I know that he loves me equally, there is no question in that. But I think… if I’d known a year ago what I know now, I likely would not have gotten involved with Mr. Right. And then I would’ve missed out on a year of wonderful, of loving, of laughing and enjoying each other in every possible way.

But a relationship is built on trust, isn’t it? I worry now what else Mr. Right is keeping from me…and unfortunately had to confront him yesterday about one such thing. You see, this past weekend he came home with a Walmart envelope containing L~’s school pictures. I commented that I didn’t realize that Walmart took school photos, and Mr. Right told me that ex-nonwife had just put them in a Walmart envelope because she had other pictures to give him, as well. My radar flagged at that one, and sirens went off when he didn’t dig back into the envelope to show me the rest of the pictures. So later, while he was outside shoveling the walk, I opened up the envelope to have a peek at the other pictures. There were none. What there was, was a Christmas card made out to Mr. Right and signed “love L~/ex-nonwife”. Love. Fuck. At the time I stuffed it back in the lockbox in the deep recesses of my mind, telling myself it wasn’t a big deal. And then I went online and did some googling with just one thing: ex-nonwife’s name. I’m sure that you now must think that I’m a psycho, obsessive girlfriend; I might even agree with you and want to slap myself for it. But what I found online simply backed up my suspicions; ex-nonwife still isn’t over Mr. Right. It’s probable that her continuing dependence on him is a manipulation tactic. Mr. Right is a big, intimidating marshmallow who has a weakness for helpless females… which I’m not. I am, however, a female who knows how women get over men and I think all women can pretty well spot the tactics that other women use to hang on to guys after a break up. She implies intimacy with him on public forums like facebook by posting vague, teasing comments about Mr. Right’s life that are not yet common knowledge. She has an excuse, every night, to keep him on the phone talking about non-L~ related things. Her social media pages contain multiple quotes or updates that speak about how she’ll always love him and that sort of pathetic, clingy, can’t-get-over-you shit that I absolutely detest. Six months after he left her, ex-nonwife asked him to try again (he refused).

But I wasn’t upset so much about how she signed that Christmas card; instead it was Mr. Right’s need to hide it from me that was the problem. When I called him on it, he told me that he thought I would’ve been mad because she signed it ‘love’. I pointed out to him that, though I wasn’t particularly happy with that, what’s more important is that HE recognized that it was inappropriate and proceeded to hide it from me. Once again, he betrayed my trust in him and kept something from me. What else is he hiding? My sister pointed out that he probably feels stuck between a rock and ex-nonwife, and that he likely doesn’t want to rock the boat because of L~. And, unfortunately, one of the biggest differences between Mr. Right and I is that he’s extremely laid back, while I’m an aggressive go-getter. So how I react to things tends to be very different from how Mr. Right reacts. What I consider a big deal isn’t necessarily that for him.

Where we stand now, I’m not entirely sure. I know that I love him, but I don’t trust him anymore. I’m willing to let him win back my trust but my cynical side says that the chances of that happening are low. I don’t trust him to keep his promises anymore. I worry about what else he’s hiding from me and what he’ll keep from me in the future. I also worry that his lack of action with ex-nonwife and separating the things that they share is indicative of a larger issue, that it might very well be his way of hanging on to the past and that he hasn’t moved on from her yet. He still sleeps with me every night, still tells me how much he loves me multiple times a day and holds my hand and rubs my bum. I’ve decided to just let things happen for now (which is difficult for me since I’m not comfortable with inaction), and take action after the holidays. I’ve been thinking that we need some time apart, some space; we’ve moved quickly and sometimes I worry that everything has just happened a little bit too easily for him.

Maybe I’m a fool, it’s quite possible that I’m not seeing what’s right in front of my face. I guess love makes fools of us all in the end, doesn’t it?