The extraordinary humiliation of discovering just how naive I could be.
I’ve been thinking about something else.
Something that makes me almost physically uncomfortable to admit.
I protected her.
I protected the reputation of someone who was controlling, bullying, manipulating, gaslighting, isolating, stealing from, and abusing me.
And I did such a magnificent job of it that when the relationship finally ended, she came out looking better than I did.
Think about that for a moment.
I was being hurt, and I was managing the public relations campaign for the person doing the hurting.
I wasn’t even getting paid.
In fact, I was paying dearly for the privilege.
If that isn’t one of the most humiliating realizations of my life, I don’t know what is.
I’m 76 years old. I’ve traveled the world. I’ve managed money, built businesses, navigated difficult circumstances, and made my way through life with a fair amount of independence and a reasonably functioning brain.
I’ve never considered myself particularly gullible.
Until now.
Now I look back at this relationship and wonder how in God’s name I could have been so spectacularly naive.
How could I have believed so much? Excused so much? Overlooked so much? How could I have been so easily convinced to question my own perceptions, my own instincts, my own understanding of what was happening right in front of me?
And how could I have gone on doing it for so long?
I am mortified.
Not the passing embarrassment of having said something foolish at a dinner party or having walked around all afternoon with spinach in my teeth.
I’m talking about the kind of embarrassment that makes you want to crawl out of your own skin.
The kind that comes when you realize you’ve been participating in the deception of yourself.
I kept the secrets. I made the excuses. I softened the stories and omitted the ugly details. I presented a version of our life together that bore an increasingly questionable resemblance to the one I was actually living.
I was the public relations department for a relationship that should have been under investigation.
And I was damn good at my job.
I could explain away almost anything.
The cruel remarks. The intimidation. The accusations. The manipulation. The gradual isolation. The money. The relentless questioning of my judgment.
Every incident had an explanation. Every offense had a mitigating circumstance. Every betrayal could be reconsidered in light of some new understanding I had persuaded myself to adopt.
I had become a remarkably accomplished defense attorney.
Unfortunately, I was representing the wrong person.
And here’s what I find so excruciating.
I wasn’t merely fooled by someone else.
I helped fool myself.
I don’t mean that I caused the abuse or deserved any of it. I mean that I became invested in believing explanations that contradicted what I was experiencing.
Because I was in love.
Because I trusted her.
Because I wanted so desperately for the relationship to be what I believed it was that I kept finding ways to dismiss the evidence that it wasn’t.
I look back now at some of those moments and I want to shake myself.
For God’s sake, woman. What more did you need to see?
How many times did your instincts have to warn you? How many things had to happen before you stopped believing another explanation, another justification, another promise?
How many pieces of yourself were you prepared to surrender?
Apparently, quite a few.
And that’s an extraordinarily difficult thing to acknowledge about yourself.
I have always valued my independence. My judgment. My intelligence. My willingness to speak plainly, even when doing so makes other people uncomfortable.
Yet in the most intimate relationship of my life, I somehow became a woman who questioned her own judgment, kept her mouth shut, and worked tirelessly to protect someone else’s image.
I can barely reconcile those two women.
The one I believed myself to be.
And the one I became.
And the second one embarrasses the living hell out of me.
But there’s another layer to this humiliation.
When the relationship finally ended, the people around us hadn’t witnessed what I’d been living through.
How could they have?
I’d made absolutely certain they wouldn’t.
I’d polished the image. Concealed the evidence. Managed the explanations. Kept the uncomfortable details out of sight.
And then, when everything fell apart, I discovered that my years of silence had left me in an almost impossible position.
She had the reputation I’d helped preserve.
I had the anger, the humiliation, and a story that sounded almost unbelievable coming from the woman who had spent years insisting everything was fine.
Well, wasn’t that a brilliant piece of work?
I had practically provided the foundation for my own discrediting.
I had protected her so successfully that I emerged from the wreckage looking like the difficult one.
The angry one.
The one who suddenly had all these terrible things to say.
And the truly maddening part is that I understand why people might have been confused.
I’d helped create that confusion.
I had handed them a carefully edited account of my life and then expected them to understand the unedited version.
How could they?
It’s almost breathtaking, the degree to which love made me naive.
And I don’t particularly want someone telling me that I wasn’t naive, that I was simply loving and trusting and loyal.
I know I was loving.
I know I was trusting.
I know I was loyal.
But I was also naive.
Painfully, embarrassingly, almost unbelievably naive.
I believed things I should have questioned. I accepted explanations that deserved skepticism. I kept granting the benefit of the doubt long after doubt had become the most reasonable response available.
I gave someone else an extraordinary amount of power over my understanding of my own life.
And I am ashamed of that.
There. I’ve said it.
I’m ashamed.
Not of loving someone. Not of believing that people can be decent, kind, and capable of change.
I’m ashamed of how completely I abandoned my own judgment in the process.
I’m ashamed of how many times I knew something was wrong and persuaded myself otherwise.
I’m ashamed of how little I demanded for myself while giving so much.
And I’m particularly ashamed of how effectively I concealed the very things that were destroying my peace.
Somewhere along the way, protecting her became more important than protecting myself.
I find that almost impossible to believe now.
And yet it’s true.
I wasn’t simply keeping our private life private. I was helping maintain an illusion.
An illusion I desperately needed to believe in myself.
Because the alternative was admitting that the person I loved was hurting me, that the relationship was not what I had believed it to be, and that I had spent an enormous amount of my life trying to save something that was costing me dearly.
That’s a terrible admission.
Especially when you’ve always prided yourself on being nobody’s fool.
Well.
Apparently, everybody has a talent they didn’t know about.
Mine was being an extraordinarily effective fool for love.
And the love is dead and buried now.
Completely.
I have no interest in resurrecting it, reconsidering it, romanticizing it, or searching through the ashes for some redeeming little ember.
I don’t miss the relationship.
What haunts me is my own participation in keeping it alive.
That’s the unfinished business.
Not whether she loved me. Not why she behaved as she did. Not what other people think happened.
I’m exhausted by those questions.
What I want to understand is how I became so willing to betray my own instincts in order to preserve someone else’s place in my life.
How I became so practiced at excusing the inexcusable.
How I confused loyalty with silence, compassion with surrender, and love with an apparently limitless obligation to endure.
I wish I could say I’ve forgiven myself.
I haven’t.
Not yet.
I’m still too angry. Too embarrassed. Too astonished by the magnitude of my own naivety.
And I’m not going to manufacture some lovely little declaration of self-forgiveness simply because it would make a more uplifting ending.
Some things take time.
Some realizations need to hurt before we can understand them.
And this one hurts like hell.
Here on the ridge, where I’ve built a life that increasingly feels like my own, I have plenty of time to think.
Perhaps too much time, occasionally.
The wind moves through the grasses. The birds conduct their noisy little affairs. The hills change color with the seasons, entirely indifferent to the ridiculous complications of human love.
And I sit here sometimes, looking out over all that beauty, still shaking my head.
How could I have been so naive?
I don’t have a satisfying answer.
Maybe I never will.
But I do know that I will never again confuse protecting someone’s reputation with protecting a relationship. I will never again assume that loyalty requires silence about cruelty. And I will never again willingly surrender my own judgment merely because someone I love insists that I should.
I am still embarrassed.
Terribly embarrassed.
And furious.
But at least I’ve stopped making excuses.
For her.
And, perhaps more importantly, for what happened to me.
For the first time in a very long time, I am willing to look at the whole ugly truth without editing it to make someone else look better.
Even when that truth makes me cringe at the woman I was.
Especially then.
Because I spent years protecting her image.
And I’m damned if I’m going to spend another year protecting the illusion that it didn’t cost me anything.
