I remember when I first saw you. You were in a photograph with a friend of mine, and while I had my suspicions, I wouldn’t find out that you were officially dating each other until quite some time later. I’d never met you in the real world, but even in photographs your physical beauty was stunningly obvious. With your black hair tinged with grey, your piercing blue eyes, and your wiry body, you were everything I could have hoped for in a man.
I have to admit that I was fiercely, even pathologically jealous of my friend. Why, I wondered, hadn’t I been the one to stumble upon you? Why was it that my friend had clearly gotten lucky? For some reason that defied all reason and logic, I felt a profound connection to you, and it just seemed profoundly unfair that somehow our paths had never crossed.
A great deal of this jealousy stemmed from the fact that I was profoundly unhappy and dissatisfied in my own relationship. By that point in my relationship, the writing was on the wall, even if I didn’t want to admit it to myself. We were hardly having sex anymore — we once went almost an entire year without sexual contact of any kind — and it seemed like we fought more than anything else. I was miserable, but I was too much of a chicken to really get myself out of the situation.
There’s something about complacency in a dysfunctional relationship that exerts…
