I chat to my wedding band every morning, the way you chat to your partner. I have not spoken to my ring today. I cried once already. I do not know what to do with my hands.
I wrote that thing about the ten signs your ex hates you, and then I did something I would tell any other woman not to do. I rang a man for company, I needed the orgasms, the comfort, to empty my head. And it didn’t work. Because I did something stupid. He’s still single. I knew he could do me how I like it. I also knew his ending looked like mine. That was the whole plan. Get him into bed, soften him up, make him tell me I was not the villain. But this guy is a monster we created, he’s in the top 10%, everyone wants him, and he chooses the ones he wants. I’m a guilty pleasure of his. But I also know he’s a creation of women like me, I wanted to ask how he thinks, why he never gives commitment, because I can see my dead husband in him. They were treated the exact same way. He even looks like him.
It backfired.
He did not soften.
He said it to my face. No shame. No stutter. He regrets the split with his partner. He regrets getting with her. He regrets even meeting her. He knew what she was known for and he did it anyway, and he should’ve told her to fuck off day one, and that is why he stays single now. One of her friends told him recently, she was looking for a stepdad the whole time when she met him, nothing more. Then her kids hit 18. She went. Another man. He is not even angry in a loud way. He is just finished.
And I saw it. The contempt. Not at me, not exactly. At her, through me. For the first time in my life I was on his side of the glass. And all I could think was, that is how my husband looked at me. That is what he felt. He regrets meeting me. I will never get to ask him. He is dead, and I had a major part in the ending of his life, and I have to live in that sentence.
I woke up worse. Of course I did. You cannot shag a kinder verdict out of a man who has already done the sums.
I have been in the laugh
This is the bit that is making me sick.
I have spent years in the group chats. The memes. The divorce him under a row about the bins. The soft launch. The little jokes about men being tall children, or wallets, or a phase. My friends do it. I do it. The internet claps. Society claps. We got told we were empowered, and some of that was real, I am not taking the real bit back. The right to leave. The right to earn. The right to not be a punchbag.
But somewhere in the middle we started talking about them like disposable cattle. Use him for the rent. Use him for the school run. Use him until you are bored, or until the kids are grown, or until a better offer pings. Then narrate him as a mug so the leaving feels clean.
I have done a version of that. I have made a man smaller in a chat so I could feel like the clever one. I have left in my head weeks before I said it out loud, and then acted shocked that he was still on day one. I have called it boundaries. Sometimes it was. Sometimes it was just contempt with a better outfit.
He said she was famous for it. I am not going to repeat the word he used. I do not know if her friend was telling the truth. Maybe she’s trying to muddy the water, get a bit of him herself by breaking the loyalty wall; because yes, we do that too. What I know is I recognised the story, because I have heard it told as a win. And sitting on the edge of his bed, I did not feel like a winner. I felt like a woman who has been in a crowd, all of us egging each other on, and only just heard what it sounds like from the cheap seats.
It hurts because I can see his face
Not the human dildo. My husband.
Sadness still thinks you were a person. Contempt has already filed you under mistake. I know that face now. I think he wore it. I think he smiled anyway, because men like him do. They become the pal. They say they are fine. They file it. And we tell ourselves they have processed it, because the smile lets us off.
I do not get a cross-examination. Dead men do not correct the draft. My head will write the cruellest version and call it memory. I am trying not to promote that to fact before lunch. I am also not letting myself off. You can be unkind and not be the sole author of a death. You can still have been careless with a person. Both are sitting in my kitchen and neither will leave.
The truth is, I have nothing but fond memories of my husband. Happy times, and good laughs. They are torture. He was a great man. Somehow, while the other guy was texting me, I had rewritten and amplified all his shortcomings, everything was louder, my brain rewriting history to make what I was about to do justifiable. Little did I know that in six years, all those rewritten memories would be unravelled and turned into smoke. I threw away the best thing that had ever happened to me, because I was talking to a guy I should’ve told fuck off on day one. That’s on me.
When I told the guy the story as he laid next to me, I watched his face sour. I felt it. His eyebrows raised, not in shock, but in the opposite, like he already knew my story.
So I sat there, hit Google at 3AM.
There is research. I looked, because I do not trust myself. Separated men die by suicide at a much higher rate than married men. The gap is worse in the raw months, worse again if they are young. That is not a weapon and it is not a conviction. It is a reason the joke lands harder than we pretend. Some of them have nobody to ring. We made the ending content. They were not in the group chat.
The pill
I think we might be the problem. Not all of us, not for breathing, not for leaving a man who was harming us. I am not walking that back. I mean the culture. The internet. The friends. Me.
We got empowered, and then we used it, some of us, to treat men like they do not bruise. Like a stepdad is a service. Like regret is something only we are allowed to feel. Like if he goes quiet, he is fine. He is not fine. I saw not fine. It looked like contempt, and it looked earned, and it has ruined my morning.
The ring can stay in the dish today, he doesn’t need me. I am going to eat something fatty and unhealthy and spend the day in bed. If the guilt sits on me like a second person, that is a phone call to a real human, not another bribe. Maybe Lisa.
I still love my friends. They just told me what I wanted to hear. Lisa was the only one told me I was making a mistake, and we all laughed at her. Ironically, she’s the only one still in my life today.
I walked out on a marriage after a year. We only argued once or twice a month. That is the bit I cannot dress up. It was not a war. It was a life I got bored of, or scared of, or talked out of, and I left it anyway. I carry that. Not as a brand. As a weight. I think about the ordinary Tuesdays I threw out, and I feel sick.
The man on the side is almost as bad, in my head. I can barely look at him. Men like that are quick. They see what someone else has and they will say nearly anything to get you to do the deed. You are wasted on him. He does not see you. I would never. All of it. I let every chat in. I replied. I opened the door and then acted like the door opened itself. So the resentment I have for him sits right next to the resentment I have for me. I am just as horrible as he is. I do not get the cleaner role.
I think humans are cooked. Not men. Not women. Us. We will burn a decent thing for a spark, and then we will need a whole internet to tell us the fire was empowerment. My friends would still back me. The group chat would still find a way to make him the problem, or the marriage the problem, or the timing the problem. I do not want the backing today. I want the year I did not finish. I want to be able to look at either of them without my stomach turning. I cannot. That is the pill. I took a man who was not perfect and I was not drowning, and I helped break it, and now I am shocked that broken men look at women like we are a mistake. I helped write that look. I have to carry it.
I would give anything to say sorry to him. He died with a quiet, secret hatred of me, and you have no idea how that feels.
