When I came home from my Krav Maga class the evening of February 13th, 2012 I found my wife, Tomi, sitting at the dining room table. I gave her a kiss and said, “Love” in our traditional greeting and headed to the bedroom to change out of my gym clothes. When she didn’t respond with “Love”, I stopped and asked if everything was OK. She shook her head and said, “No.” So I came to the table and asked what was wrong, she said this wasn’t working anymore. By “this” she meant the marriage. She proceeded to list out all the reasons that she couldn’t be with me anymore. Some were legitimate issues, some seemed like stretches, but none of them, none of them were reasons to end a marriage. Things to work on, yes, but bailing on a life commitment, no.
Abbreviating this tale significantly, she had already rented an apartment the prior Thursday on the day I left for a trip and was moved out of the house we had shared for five and a half years on the 16th of February. It was quick and brutal. The night she told me she was done, she showed some level of compassion. There were tears, some semblance of regret. But starting the next morning it was pure venom. Saying such things as the last eight years were a waste of her time, that every minute that she was with me was killing her; that she hated me and everything we had ever shared. When she left, she took nothing sentimental about the eight years we spent together. Just her stuff, that’s it. She cut and ran. We agreed to one counseling session on the 27th, which she attended but wasn’t really there. She did it just to placate me. While there, she continued with the venom. Just spewing the most hateful things I’d ever heard come out of her mouth. She did reveal one thing of interest, though; that she felt I needed too much validation from her. We’ll get to that more later.
After the counseling session I was devastated, but I managed to convince her of a 90 day separation rather than divorce. But she didn’t want to talk to me regularly. I agreed and I spent the next month dwelling on what I had done wrong. What I could do to fix things. What I could do to get her back. I didn’t call, e-mail, text, I did write her two letters saying that I loved her, and was working to try and fix things to make her happy again. I imagined her trying to figure out what to do now that she was alone. She never had any really good friends, so I just figured she was going to work and coming home to watch TV. I missed her and wanted to go to her and say that things would be OK. To comfort my wife in what I perceived was a terribly difficult time for her.
So I pinned. I started seeing a counselor twice a week. I took Krav Maga as much as I could. I went to yoga. I started having anxiety attacks and physical twitches due to stress. I stopped sleeping and eating. I lost 17 pounds in less than a week. After a month I had lost almost 30. I talked to everyone I knew. I tried to gather information from other peoples experiences in a hope of applying it to mine. I was, in clinical terms, fucked up.
Then came March 23rd. I went to meet a friend at the Poplar Street downtown next to Redrock Brewery. Redrock was always Tomi and mine’s favorite restaurant and as I walked to Poplar Street, I had a massive anxiety attack. The kind that stops you in your tracks. I stood there for a moment saying, “No, not now. I need to get it together.” After a minute and some deep breaths I kept going. And as I passed the entrance to Redrock where 30 or so people were waiting I saw her there… with another guy. Holding hands. And I knew the other guy, his name was Chris Kareis and he was a grad student in the chemistry department on campus where Tomi worked. This wasn’t the first time I had seen them together, exactly a month before I had run into Tomi at a coffee shop and she was there with another girl and two guys, including Chris, from work. She refused to talk to me that day and I just wrote it off as a work outing. But this, well, it was different.
I caught my breath and approached them. And first she didn’t notice, but when she did, she quickly pulled her hand away from his and put it to her mouth in a shocked, “Ohhh!!!” then collected her cool again. I asked what was going on, she said “Same old.” To which I responded, “I don’t know what old is, anymore.” She clearly didn’t want to talk. So I looked at Chris, who was looking the other way, stuck my hand out and said, “Chris right?” To which he said, “Uh, yeah.” and took my hand (which, by the way was the limpest most pathetic handshake I’ve hand in a long time). I then replied with, “I’m Stephen, Tomi’s husband.” He looked at the ground, “Uhm, yeah, I know.”
I then gave Tomi a look of, ‘What the fuck is going on?!?’ She looked at me with a, ‘What?’. I asked if she would come and talk with me for a second, she refused. So I hugged her and said I loved her and walked into Poplar. At that exact moment, my friend sent me a text saying he was running late. So I sat in Poplar for a few minutes and then decided, no, I was not going to stand for this and stormed out. Fortunately they were still out waiting to be seated. I walked right up to Tomi and demanded that we talk. She said no, to which I said, “Either we do it here or in the parking lot.” She rolled her eyes and walked with me to the parking lot. Things get a bit hazy here as I was so heated. But basically I asked how long it had been going on, she said, “It just happened!” I called bull shit and asked how long, she replied, “I don’t know, a few weeks.” I said, “Well that’s interesting, you moved out a few weeks ago! So this was the reason, huh? How long have you been having sex with him?” She didn’t reply to that. I continued to push, she wouldn’t talk about it. I changed direction and said, “OK, how about us?” She blew up and said, “There is no ‘us’. There is just you and me! And I can do whatever I want!” I stopped, looked at her, and said, “I think you’re throwing away a good thing for a fling.” She rolled her eyes. I then hugged her, tried to kiss her, which she said, “I don’t want to kiss you, Stephen!” I let her go, then walked towards Chris.
At this point Tomi starts screaming, “No, Stephen!!! No! Don’t!!” Obviously she was afraid that I was going to hit him. And I almost did. I don’t think that piece of shit will ever really know how close he was to getting his ass completely kicked. My adrenaline was running so high, I have no idea what I would have done. No idea. But I managed to stop myself from hitting him and instead stuck my hand out again, which he took after a moment, and I said, “Chris, good luck, be safe, you’re an asshole and remember, she’s a married woman.” I then turned and left for Poplar.
Monday, the 26th I served Tomi with divorce papers on the grounds of an extra martial affair. The next day we signed them, with no dispute from her. When I walked her back to her car (which in retrospect, I really never should have let her take. Oh well) I stopped. Looked at her, she said with no emotion, “Thank you.” To which I replied, “I wish I could say the same.” I then choked back some tears and said, “You will always be my Tomi. You will always be my first true love.” I then hugged her for what seemed like forever. All she could muster was a limp arm to pat my back once or twice. When I let her go, she just looked at me and said, “Good bye.” and went to get into her car. And that was the last time I saw her. I don’t know how I got home.
And that was the end. Eight years, gone. Just like that. I’ve spent the past two months battling regret, remorse, anger, stress, anxiety, and all sorts of other problems. But I recently realized something that she said was very true. Even though most of her initial reasons for wanting to end the marriage were bull shit and simply projections of guilt to hide her affair and convince herself that what she was doing was right, there was one thing. In the past few years, I had made Tomi the center of my world. I did rely on her for most of my validation. And that’s something I’ve been struggling with recently. Who am I? What do I want? Well… that’s what I’m going to find out.
