Finding the truth out about Daniel

All day Monday I struggled with the knowledge I had uncovered about his relationship past. It was our routine for him to text me from early in the morning and for us to converse, essentially, all day long. Happy, loving messages through out the day. I felt like I was lying to him. I felt terrible. But he had literally lied to me. I had to wait until his day ended to have this conversation with him.

All day long I tried to keep things as normal as possible so as not to tip him off, and I tied up loose ends with the rest of the research I needed to do on the matter. It felt awful. I loved this man. I was pretty sure I understood why he had done what he had done, but I had questions and I wasn't sure what was going to happen that night. I was scared.

Daniel didn't get home from class until after 7:30pm that night, and basically, as soon as he did I checked in, and asked if I could come over. I felt so guilty when he responded with excitement for me to swing by. It was not uncommon for one of us to run over to the other's house on long days to sneak in a hug because we missed each other. I know this is what he was thinking- and I felt terrible because I was basically going to ambush him. I can't say this enough- I loved this man.

I drove over to his house and he was in the middle of making tea when I got there. It's funny because, our conversation (I think) is actually preserved on his Instagram. He had taken a picture of his tea cup I guess right before I got there, and posted it... but we started talking and he never drank it. The photo is still there. It's like this memorial. A bad memorial. I wish I could erase it sometimes, and then I think... It was evidence that it happened. And that's okay too.

I came in and we had hugs and kisses and I asked him to put down his tea and sit on the couch so we could talk and he was immediately alarmed. He even said, (half-jokingly) "That's never good when a girl says that." But I just told him to please sit.

I had thought a lot about the least threatening way to do this and I wanted to present him with an opportunity to come clean. I wanted him to tell me the truth on his own. I was praying that he would. I valued and cared about this relationship more than any other relationship I had ever been in. I connected with this man more than any other person I had ever met. He felt like me more than I was. He felt like an extension of myself. I had been more of myself with him than I ever had been with anyone, ever. I wanted to give this relationship every opportunity to succeed. I had thought long and hard about how on earth to have this really hard conversation without shaming him or trapping him.

I think I started by telling him, "You remember that lawyer quote, 'Never ask a question you don't already know the answer to?'" He nodded. I specifically brought this up for a couple of reasons. 1.) I wanted to make a joke. This is the essence of me. 2.) I wanted to give him a heads up that I already knew everything. I wasn't going to say this next part, or ask this next question without already knowing the answer... So in other words... please don't blow this Daniel. Come clean.

"Is there anything we haven't talked about that we should? Like your relationship history or anything?"

And he looked confused. But his facial expression, for once, wasn't one I could easily read and I wasn't sure if he understood what I was saying or not. I repeated the question and he, at some point, said, "No." And I became very shaky, and began to cry and repeated the question again. "There's nothing you have held back or haven't told me? Nothing?" And he said "No?" With a look of absolute puzzlement on his face.

In my head all I could think was, this relationship is over. He lied to me before, he is lying to me right now, and I am going to have to get up and walk out that door because that is the boundary I set for myself and I cannot violate that rule for myself. I held back choky sobs as I try, one more time, "There isn't anything you haven't told me about --- [Ex]--- that you should have already?" And then his face clicks into the conversation immediately. "Yes. We dated this year, not last year."

Finally I can exhale. "And?"

"And we were engaged."

I can let it all out now, and I cry, but more from relief than anything else.

There's so much of this conversation I don't even remember because I was so emotional. Afterwards he told me at first he had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. It wasn't until I explicitly dropped her name that he realized what I was talking about.  In a nutshell though, he was somewhat horrified I had found out, impressed that I had figured out to the level of detail that I had, and ashamed that he hadn't told me himself. He had been trying to tell me for awhile and had tried to several times- in several specific conversations I could specifically remember even. One memorable one in which we had discussed wedding venues and he slipped on a detail about another ex, and he almost stopped and told me right then, and then.. couldn't bring himself to. When I talked about it with Kristin later she said, maybe he made the comments he did about snooping on Facebook the night before because it was just easier for him if I figured it out myself. He basically outted himself. He got in so deep he didn't know how to get out of it. And honestly, I can say I relate to that too. I still have a client who thinks Matt died. Not because I explicitly told her that, but because she assumed based on my behavior back then and I had no idea how to correct her. 5.5 years later and I still see this client at least once a year and I have no idea how to get out of this. One lie begets another.

For Daniel, telling me he had been single for a year, that single sentence had enormous consequences. First, it changed the timeline of his relationship history. He had to flip flop the timeline of other dating relationship, moving it forward a year, even though that one had actually happened a year previously. When I asked if he had always lived in his excessively large 2 bedroom apartment alone, he hesitated and said he had had a roommate over the summer. The roommate turned out to be the ex. The lack of furniture turned out to be not from "just moving in," but from her "just moving out." (And forcing him to get rid of all of his stuff for the whole 4 weeks they lived together). His lack of a couch- probably due to the fact they used her couch. His bed in the living room was because his bed had been in the guest bedroom. His couch had been banished to the patio, where it was now full of spiders. The cute patio tent out there with the lovely twinkle lights that I noticed out there the first time I toured his unit turned out to be hers, too. He told me he helped afford his extremely expensive apartment (more than twice the cost of my HOUSE) by Air B'nB'ing the unit, but it turned out there was actually a settlement between them. He had only used Air BnB once, and it was not a good experience.

The jars of jam in the cupboard that he said he had made over the summer I still wonder about.

We sat on that couch and we went through each of these points and he went through every single story he had ever told me about his life- ever- over the last couple of months of dating to verify he had told me the absolute and total truth about EVERYTHING. And he had. I asked him, a hundred times, why he lied. And he said exactly what I thought (and what Connor thought) he would say. He liked me. He was ashamed of the truth. It just flew out of his mouth. He thought he was ready. His best (female) friend and he had talked at length about his situation and she had acknowledged that he was miserable alone, she knew he would be miserable alone and she thought it would be okay to go out and start looking for someone. But, he thought it would take awhile to meet someone. He literally signed a 2 year contract with eHarmony.

And then he and I found each other the first week of each our memberships. That 6.5 hour first date. He went home from that and thought something like, "Oh, shit."

He said meeting me was like being hit by a lightning bolt. And then he didn't know what to do. He didn't expect to meet anybody that fast. And he was falling for me from the first date. When he went to Yosemite he told his best (female) friend Kait that he thought he loved me, and wanted to tell me. (Exactly when I first felt that way about him.) And Kait basically flipped out on him. He had just gotten out of a super serious relationship- he had just ended an engagement. If that's really how he felt about me- fine, but I was a real person and he couldn't jerk me around or dive into something. That conversation with her affected him deeply, and he spent that weekend in Yosemite raging drunk and I am guessing, confused about our relationship, and his last relationship as well. I'm still not sure on the exact timeline, but I think his break up happened about a month- six weeks before our first date, but he saw his ex for the last time the weekend before he and I met. This thing was extremely fresh for him, and it had to have been extremely confusing. This is why he had pulled back and had been all over the place.

Like I told him that night, all of your behavior makes complete sense now that I know your actual timeline on things. All of it makes sense. The push-pull, the hesitancy, him wanting to push me out in the middle of the night, the being weird about the label, the Facebook thing... Not only being embarrassed about the engagement ending, but he had to be self conscious about having a new girlfriend so soon too and how that looked to everyone. My heart felt so very sore as we talked, and yet, we still had that conversation. We made jokes and eased the tension, but asked the hard questions and plowed through. When we got to the end of it, I put my arm around him and said, "Was it as bad as you thought it would be?" And Daniel said, "Yes, it was, but you made it better." So while I was sorry I couldn't make it perfectly smooth, I was still glad we could engage and make it out the other side. I tried to reassure him right out of the gate that this wasn't a deal breaker for me, I just needed him to be totally honest and that's what he was that night.

We sat on the couch looking at each other for a few minutes, but then his demeanor seemed to change. He had held it together fine through the conversation but once we sorted out my stuff, he started talking about some other things. He had been feeling depressed and low and he talked about that for awhile. He became very emotional and he seemed to shut down. His body language and demeanor changed. He crossed his arms over his chest and didn't want me to touch him. He shook and trembled and I became alarmed watching his body shift. We ended up talking until well after 2am and I tried my best to comfort him but I wasn't exactly sure how. He told me he was hitting bottom.

 I asked him, tell me how to be here for you, but he was so upset he couldn't really answer. I wouldn't have ordinarily slept over, but I wasn't comfortable leaving him in the upset state he was in, so I told him I was staying with him, even if it was on the couch, and I told him he had to go to bed because it was so late.

I offered to stay on the couch so he would actually sleep (we hadn't shared a bed enough times for it to be a smooth experience) but he felt so guilty he kept saying he felt like he should stay on the couch, to punish himself, and I said that was absolutely ridiculous and he was not going to do that. I was of course happy to share the bed with him, despite the emotionally draining evening, I just wanted to make sure he would sleep, and after seeing him so upset I didn't want to disrupt him and I am an absolute terrible sleeper. He said it would be fine for me to share the bed so he tried to find me something to sleep in. Now that everything was out on the table, he offered me an old sweatshirt... that his ex used to sleep in. I understood why he offered it, but the fact that the trauma from the break up was so fresh that it had to be mentioned made me want to burn it. I don't remember what I ended up wearing but it wasn't that.

His sleep was restless and he stayed curled up in tiny little ball the whole night, which for a 6'2" man was pretty impressive. I tried to hold him or comfort him but he didn't want to be touched. He was so emotional and so overloaded and I had absolutely no idea how to help him or support him or be there for him. It was upsetting to see him so upset and to feel so powerless. For me, all I needed was to talk about everything and my needs had been met. From here, I just needed to go forward with honesty. Time would only tell on that front. But right now the only thing I could think about was how much my partner was struggling.

Daniel was supposed to be up at 5am for Crossfit but neither of us woke up until long after that class was over and the next morning he sent off a text apology to his friend for standing him up and I hustled off to move my car before I got ticketed.

It was a long, draining, difficult night. I left Daniel's mostly settled about the untruths I had discovered on Sunday, but absolutely shaken by Daniel's upset after that. I felt down, and worried and definitely still in need of reassurance that all would be okay. It was a hard day for us, and I know I said this before, but we did do it. We rose to the occasion and it was okay.