The paramedics called during the summer of 2016, two weeks after our wedding.
They had found him on a sidewalk, bloodied and unable to remember how he had gotten there. “Your husband is intoxicated,” they’d told me. “We’re taking him to the hospital.”
I didn’t know I had married an alcoholic.
What a foolish thing that sounds like when you write it. When I was 21, everything about our romance had felt like a fairytale. Two weeks into meeting him, he said I was the girl he was going to marry. 5 months later, he proposed. We didn’t spend a single day apart until our wedding, a year after we met.
Despite all of that, this is not even a story about my ex husband. It’s about the man I’ve been in love with for almost a decade. It’s taken me a very long time to be ready to share this story.
I had met Jordan 4 years earlier, when I was 17. Later, he’d tell me he saw me from across the room and thought,
“That girl is special. I need to go and talk with her.”
The briefest of conversations was the most pivotal moment in my life up to that point. That night set so many events into place, the effects rippling for years onward. We learned we were both from the same place in Orlando, and we shared many of the same circles there, in fact. When we spoke later after that night, I learned that we shared the connection of chronic illness. Mine with Diabetes, his with a kidney transplant. I learned he was a DJ and passionate about music. We shared a love of literature and intellectual conversation.
I felt a real connection with him, but I had a long term boyfriend I’d been dating for a few years when we met. Ironically, he was the reason I’d ended up in Macon…of all places. Then, he’d ironically also moved across the state after I moved there to start college. I had hoped to close our long distance gap.
It wasn’t until a year later, on the brink of a breakup, that we reconnected.
Jordan had moved back home from college, but was visiting friends back in Macon for the weekend. He invited me to coffee. We’d had a phone call just a few weeks prior, but aside from that, I’d met him only twice. When I accepted the invitation for that evening, I wasn’t sure what to expect.
I didn’t return home to my dorm until he dropped me off at 4 in the morning. Neither of us wanted to end the night. The evening had passed and the coffee shop closed. We spent the entire night wandering the Mercer University campus, exchanging the entireties of details about our lives, who we were, who we wanted the other to know. Many of us can’t notice the inexplicable shifts that occur in our lives until we see them in hindsight, marking the point where we become changed people. But that night, I felt the shift. I discovered a kind of intimacy I’d never before felt in my life. It touched me inexplicably within my soul, in a way that has never changed, not once, since I felt this shift 10 years ago. If we’d never had any interaction after that night, I still would say I’d never felt closer to another human being.
I felt giddy the next day, full of butterflies and nervous jitters, disappointed to have to spend the day working, unable to think about anything but how immensely, unbelievably enjoyable spending the night talking had been. We texted each other the whole day, and we met up that night for a show he was playing. A pull that felt magnetic coursed through me that entire day. The kind that makes you feel like you’ve only ever read about love but never felt it before. Even now, ten years later, that feeling still remains. I remember seeing him as I walked in the room and lighting up. I was so aware of everything that night: the way our gazes lingered on each other, the way our legs brushed under the table after he’d finished playing his set. His friends had driven me there, but he volunteered to drive me back, just the two of us. Every moment just sitting next to him felt like it set my heart on fire. We stayed up the entire night talking again, and no matter how many hours passed, the conversation and the company never grew old: something I still feel even today. He felt like my closest friend even after just that weekend.
The next few months were filled with mountains of consequential moments for me. Jordan told me he liked me. I invited him to my college homecoming dance, and then I got so nervous, I almost didn’t go through with it. Over Thanksgiving we met up in Orlando, spending a sunlit day in my hometown of Winter Park, somewhere I’ve always found to be an idyllic place paved with brick streets, and shadowed by canopies of trees overhead. We played chess, I saw his family’s home for the first time, we held hands in his car, I cried on a swing over something my mom had said. We shared a moment on his dock at the lake and I felt like I could have kissed him then, but my fears of moving on from my first love held me back.
When I started second guessing myself, and got back together with ex boyfriend, Jordan insisted I was making a mistake.
“If you’re so angry at me, why are you still talking to me?” I asked.
“You know why,” he replied.
“Tell me,” I pushed him.
“Because I love you.”
We reconnected my senior year, after cycles of speaking, and my ghosting, him. Each time we talked, I couldn’t remember why I had chosen not to be with him. It was always the same story: I’d reach back out. We’d start talking until well into the morning, night after night. All of my feelings would flood back. We spent so many evenings walking around downtown Macon, braving cold nights, getting coffee at Jittery Joe’s, me thinking I was finally ready to act on my feelings: always second guessing myself. I couldn’t understand what was wrong with me. I hurt Jordan with my actions, but he never held it over my head. He was always the level headed one, imploring me to see things for what they were.
Every year on my birthday, since the first evening we’d had coffee together, he’d send me a beautiful mix of songs he created, telling a story through lyrics, song titles, and concepts, about us. The very first one was titled “ideal day”, inspired by a question he asked me as we were our getting to know each other: what my ideal day looked like. They grew more intimate as the years passed, exploring the nuances of our complicated relationship.
“The only walls we’ve got are the ones we build ourselves,” one of the songs in his mixes mused that year.
By the time my relationship finally ended, my senior year of college, Jordan and I again weren’t speaking. I still had yet to realize the cause to my poor dating choices. That was in order to feel needed, I looked for men I could try to fix. These relationships were unhealthy, but they felt normal. Safe. I struggled with codependency, having grown up with a complicated relationship with a father rarely in my life, and a cold family. I would later read books that write about how codependents will push away healthy relationships for this reason: they were uncomfortable, and this is exactly how Jordan made me feel. Uncomfortable. Unsure of the feelings I was having. He knew me better than anyone, but I couldn’t explain why that also made me feel like I wanted to run away and shut him out. I don’t think I wanted to face many of the things he implored me to confront within myself. Still, my feelings were so strong, so unlike anything I’d ever felt. They ran deeper than anything I’d experienced, which was what I knew always led me back to reaching out to him. I’d always wake up one day and out of the blue miss him so much I couldn’t stand it anymore.
The summer before I moved to Atlanta, Jordan came to visit. I was so nervous. It was a tumultuous time: my ex was stalking me, his post-breakup interactions having turned very abusive, and it made me paranoid and fixated on him, worried he would show up at any moment. The weekend wasn’t at all what I’d hoped it would be: an opportunity to solidify our relationship. Instead, it became a weekend of my paranoia intensifying with Jordan's presence, leading me to shut down almost the entire time, barely sharing my feelings, and certainly not moving our relationship forward in any meaningful way. I wanted to get out of Macon, to have a fresh start in the city and wash away old memories and hurt. I came to the conclusion that I just wasn’t ready for a relationship, and might not ever be, with him. For what I thought was the last time, I said goodbye to him after that weekend and again pushed him away. I’ll always remember that weekend: how hurt I knew I made him feel. “I worry,” he told me. “That there will be a day where you’ll wake up and regret that you made this choice. Where you’ll remember this moment, and wish you could have changed it. By then, it might be too late.”
I chose not to let myself think of this.
---
I managed to forget him for two years. I well and truly moved on in my life. Then, I found that I really did wake up one morning and was struck by the overwhelming need to talk to him. Jordan had been right about this.
He’d also been right about the other part: It was too late.
Because I realized it once I was already married.
That first summer after my marriage, I had struggled, in complete isolation, with the gut punch of realizing I’d married someone who had lied to me about who they were. Two incidences with paramedics, and nights of disappearing and not remembering where he went the next day. Hidden bottles found behind the trash can. I found I grew paranoid as I second guessed every action, every smell of what I thought might be alcohol on his breath. It felt like it had come from nowhere: surely it hadn’t, but I hadn't noticed any of these signs before. And then, one day, I got that call, and it was like a switch had flipped. I went to sleep in a fairytale one day, and the next I woke up in a story I didn't recognize.
But I felt I could tell no one. How could I? The shame I’d feel admitting I married someone too soon, and only a few months after our wedding … I was too proud to tell anyone. So I buried these thoughts, as deeply as I could, as long as I could.
Deeply troubled, I spent two weeks barely sleeping after I woke up that morning. But my thoughts felt deafening, and no matter how I tried to bury them, they kept resurfacing. Finally, I did the only thing that gave me peace: I sent Jordan a message.
I felt panicked. Lonely. I felt shame and guilt. Here was the truth: if I had known that the man I’d chosen to be with was an alcoholic, if he had been fully honest with me… I wouldn’t have gone through with the marriage. I felt pain and hatred towards myself for this realization. I grew up as a child of divorce, wanting desperately for my first marriage to be my only one. I felt a strong sense of Christianly duty to honor the vow I made through thick and thin. Imagine how I felt when almost literally all of a sudden, I couldn’t rid my head of these deafening and troubling feelings for someone else.
I realized I would therefore very likely live my life in love with a man I could never be with at the same time I came to the realization that I wasn’t strong enough to leave my marriage.
I didn’t want these feelings, or the questions they left me with. I didn’t want the solution: a complete upheaval of not just my life, but my husband’s. Unthinkable pain. I wanted to be a good person.
But the pain of his addiction, and hiding it from me, cut deeply. So did the realization that we were simply a bad match. Caught up in mutual codependency and naive romanticism, we had failed to stop and ask ourselves whether we operated in compliment, or opposition, to each other, prior to marriage.
I felt truly lost: like God had forgotten me. I went to church. I prayed to God and I asked him over and over why I felt the way I did. I wanted to cry out in church, "Here I am. Why can't I stop these feelings? Why is trying my hardest not enough to silence my doubts? Why can't you silence my thoughts?" I questioned my life. I mourned from the pain of mistakes I felt were permanent.
“You’re going to have to make a choice,” Jordan told me. “I’m not saying that for me. I’m saying it because you making a decision that prolongs and perpetuates your sadness will only prolong this negative cycle.” I knew he was right: I had to choose whether I wanted to move forward or remain in this cycle. I again chose the cycle.
Two weeks later, my husband found emails we'd exchanged while we were on our delayed honeymoon in Europe. I had felt both elated and sad on that trip. Elated to be overseas for the first time in my life. This, overshadowed in that I felt sad at how angry I was about what had been hidden from me. I felt bitterly heartbroken at how many doubts I had about my marriage. When he found those emails, though, I felt numb, and ashamed. As he cried at me, I knew I was in the wrong. I knew what a shock and betrayal this was to him, to see that I struggled with these emotions towards another person, that I hid them from him, and for him to read about how much I struggled to justify staying in our marriage. Emotionally cheating is a heavy thing to carry. But I was angry, too, and I snapped. “If you didn’t drink too much, this wouldn’t have happened,” I told him. Was that really true? I honestly didn’t know.
When he convinced us to go to counseling, things got better. I was relieved: I wanted to do anything to avoid facing the hard questions my dilemma posed. I so badly wanted us to mend things so that my life could be stable. The questions still loomed. What did it mean that still, no matter how hard I prayed in church, I could stop neither my questioning over whether I should be with someone else, nor ease the pain in my heart?
I wanted to dedicate myself to fixing my marriage. After losing his job from a drinking incident, I encouraged my husband to go to college. I threw myself into supporting his dream of going to medical school. I knew it would keep me busy, being in graduate school and working nearly 30 hours a week myself. I preferred this to allowing myself to stop and think about things.
If I thought this would change me, I was disappointed in how depressed and unsatisfied I still felt. I caught myself hoping that my husband would slip up, to give me a reason to leave. But what would it say about me, to leave a man struggling to become sober? I think it was wrong to both of us to wait for him to make a mistake first to leave. I was giving control of my life to someone else.
But I was too fearful to end things, worried about the pain I would cause, worried about the shame I would feel. Worried about what people would think, and filled with guilt: I felt I could never hurt someone I care about that badly. I promised myself I’d stop giving into my feelings, stop all communication with Jordan, and I did. It hurt me immensely to do so, and I wrote about my unhappiness and pain in my journal, which my husband picked up and read one day without telling me, then later confronted me on. I didn’t know how to make things better.
When the accident did happen, it shocked and shattered me. He showed up to swing dancing, drunk, a little over a year later. I remember laughing about that day in morbid humor: the day of the solar eclipse, the day people thought the world would end. It didn’t, but my world felt like it did.
He’d told me he would meet me there since he was late getting back from seeing the eclipse. I’d just started my first job, and had had to work. He drove my car there, and ran up and violently shoved off the partner I was dancing with, screaming in the middle of the crowded floor. My mind felt like it shut down. I sobbed, running out of the dance. Dancing had been my “place” for years. My happy place, my safe place. It’s where my husband and I had met. I felt violated and ashamed at the scene caused. I drove across town alone to a parking lot and sat there, after calling my husband’s mom, letting her know what had happened and crying over the incident.
It had been months since we'd talked, but I called Jordan. Instead of admonishing me, Jordan told me gently, “This can be the last time you hurt like this, if you want it to be.”
For almost year now, I’d tried denying my feelings. What if everything was all in my head? Was this merely something I clinged to for escape from my unhappiness? Would I feel this way if my husband didn’t drink so much?
I needed time alone back home. I saw him after 3 years that fall. When I did, I couldn’t breathe. My heart raced. Everything I’d denied myself came rushing back: just from literally seeing him. The most wild and long-burning love I’d ever known. In that moment, I knew it was never just in my head. I’d been waiting for years to allow myself to accept that this was who I should be with.
I planned to end things and move back to Florida. But when I returned home, the pain I anticipated leaving would cause outweighed the truth that I had lost the ability to be happy in my relationship. When he implored me to, I told him I would try again. I shoved away the future I hoped for. The words Jordan had once told me rang in my ears.
“When sacrifices cause us deep unhappiness, in the long run, we aren’t even doing the right thing anymore. The sadness will come back around to ruin the original sacrifice. The cycle will continue.”
He promised to stop drinking this time. A year passed. Jordan moved to Atlanta for work. I told him I still couldn’t be with him. I pushed myself to stay away.
“I made a promise,” I said. A hundred social ties still bound me to a marriage I felt trapped in.
“So did I,” he told me. “I told you I’m going always going to be here for you.”
We didn’t talk for another year. I told myself that I had to put my all into focusing on my life in the moment, if I was going to fix things. I didn’t expect a birthday mix that October, but it arrived. It came with a message.
“I tried to move on,” he wrote. “But I always wake up one day, and my feelings pull me right back. The biggest thing I regret is choosing not to remain friends with you. I’d do anything to take that back.”
I knew that if we began to talk again, I wouldn’t be able to ignore my feelings. As long as he was in my life, in any capacity: everything in me pulled me to him closer. I knew I would inevitably have to make a choice. Otherwise, this cycle would continue.
I fantasized about what my life would look like if I could stop letting my fear paralyze me and see the truth for what it was: I’d gotten married too young to someone who had lied about who they were. I’d married someone during a time in which I’d buried my feelings for someone else as an attempt to run away from processing old hurt and emotions in my life. But I felt I was doing right by putting every effort into my marriage to fix it. Was I truly willing to sacrifice everything to end things? I didn’t think so. That’s the nice thing about a holding pattern: all of the possibilities are present, with none of the consequences. There were a lot of consequences. I didn’t think I would be strong enough to bear them.
Nearly another year passed, and my husband promised me it would be okay if he could start drinking again. I never thought to push him to finish AA. My mom always asked me how his meetings were going. I lied and said they were going well. I didn’t know how to properly support someone recovering from addiction. I didn’t realize it was significant that he didn’t finish. I figured it was like counseling: you felt better, so you could stop going. (Later I learned this isn’t necessarily the case either). Sober, he was angry, so it was almost a relief. Then, one beer turned into two drinks. A bottle overnight. It always did. I cleaned drinks hidden behind the nightstand in the morning.
I knew this wasn’t happiness. I might have been Christian, but I had a hard time believing that this was what any God could want for me. I didn’t want to feel like I was losing myself anymore. I didn’t want to feel like a hollow shell struggling to find happiness. I didn’t want to feel like I had to drown myself in half a dozen activities just to stave off depression daily.
But I told myself this was merely my own selfishness talking. If I tried harder, I could find happiness. If I went to church more, I’d stop feeling things I shouldn’t. I ignored the next birthday mix.
In 2020, 15 months since we’d last talked, I suddenly couldn’t get it out of my mind. I decided to listen to the mix on the way home one day. I felt I was in a stable place at the time, and able to listen with impartiality. He’d sent a second mix with the first. “One I’m very fond of,” he’d noted. Titled, ISLY.
ISLY. I still love you.
I listened. The mix devastated me: it felt like every track implored me to see the truth for what it was. I wept in my car as I listened to a track with lyrics that sang,
“I have unfinished business in this life/Not ready to go to the other side/Your immortal lover.”
It made me so depressed. I wanted my heart to do something other than cause me pain. I started getting anxiety attacks. I cried during my commutes for days. I sat in my car once I got to the parking lot of work, listening to the tracks I’d heard in the mix on repeat.
Something was wrong in my life. I’d done everything the right way as much as I could. I had followed all the steps. Church. Counseling when I had doubts, or started to end things again (Even if I went begrudgingly at first). Small group. Friends who encouraged me. Not perfectly. I failed many times. But I truly gave it my all. I prayed. I journaled. I focused and worked hard to love my husband. Years passed. It felt like I tore out my heart to not talk to Jordan, over and over again. My heart felt like it beat at half capacity in the life I continued to live.
I think I had done everything the best right way I could.
And still I couldn’t escape the fact that I loved another man. What do you do when you realize that? Do you hate yourself for years, like I did? Fight it with all of your might? Push it away as desperately as you are able?
I suppose if I could tell you that I finally got my act together - that ceasing all forms of communication, doing counseling, and continuing to tell myself that I was happy fixed things for me - this would truly be a redemptive story. But the fact is, I tried all of that, and it failed. Lines became blurred in my life that I never thought could. I became a person young me would have villainized. I think it was hard for me to see the good in myself for a long time. And maybe the fact that nothing I tried to amend this situation worked made me weak: I’m not sure. But I did learn this, and it’s made me very sympathetic to stories of difficult love: ignoring the heart is something you can only do for so long. Something will give: you’ll have to find a place for the sadness to go. You don’t get to try to decide what the heart feels. I don’t know why that is. But I never could tell mine what to feel for a prolonged time. It never lasted. It always went back to telling its truth.
Eventually, if you cannot rid yourself of these feelings you have to accept that it is all real. Then, you can either choose to continue in darkness, smothering your heart, or step into the light. I’d lived in darkness for a very long time now.
So I wrote him a letter. I hurt so much that it was all I could do. When you hurt, you’ll do anything to make it stop.
I posted it in the Dropbox we’d shared for 8 years, making no grand statements or declarations, simply telling him that it was enough just to have found what we shared in this lifetime: that this gave me happiness when my days got hard.
Truthfully, though, I think I took for granted that Jordan would still be there. I think I knew that, deep down, he’d also never fully shake the very clear fact that whatever we had, we seemed to be made for each other. He knew I felt the same.
In his reply, Jordan told me he’d again woken up and couldn’t shake the feeling that he had to talk to me. He’d found my letter by accident, three weeks after I’d written it.
Just a few weeks after, when I came home and my husband was still drunk from the day before, I finally sunk with the realization that the cycle had merely continued. Pain, dissatisfaction on both ends. Deep down, I believe I had always known that no matter how hard I still tried, this wasn’t right, even if I didn’t want to. My body knew: the depression, anxiety I had developed. We’d lived separately under the same roof for a long time. I had struggled greatly for never letting myself believe that choosing Jordan was the right thing, never truly able to shut out my feelings for him. Instead, I had spent 4 rather lonely years unable to give my husband the wholehearted support he needed for a truly devoted wife. I had distanced us. I had given myself an anxiety disorder. I won’t abscond him: he continued to abuse my trust by spiraling back into addiction. He blamed me for not finishing AA. In the end, he told me that my toxicity drove him to develop a drinking problem, even though it had existed long before me. Two of us were at fault. And almost every night for 4 years, I had questioned if anything I ever did would make me feel satisfied.
Then, the pandemic felt like it had stripped everything from me that I thought was too important to leave behind.
Church. Friends. Travel. Work.
With nothing left to bury my unhappiness in, I took a long walk and then I finally told my husband what I should have said years ago.
“I can’t do it anymore. I hope that you know what your drinking has cost you.”
The week of what would have been our 4th anniversary, he left. I wanted to undo what I had done. I asked him to stay. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep. I begged him to reconsider. It all felt like a mistake: I didn’t feel the grand sense of freedom I thought I would. I felt pain, and disgust, with myself. Had I flippantly villianized one man to ease my conscious about being in love with another? Was this the greatest mistake of my life?
I told Jordan I needed space. I didn’t know when, or if, I could talk to him again.
Alone, I went to the darkest places imaginable. As I considered going to the hospital for my panic attacks, I sought treatment for my codependency. I went to the counselor I’d gone to for years, who had counseled me through my marriage and now counseled me through divorce. I got a psychiatrist. I still went to church online. I did a lot of talking to God. It took months of healing, months of being alone and learning how to not cry when coming home to an empty home. Months to think about what I wanted, and what the past ten years had meant. I began to see things clearly, very slowly, in the midst of that copacetic summer, I finally found, after all those years, healing.
I texted Jordan, months later. It had been 9 years. I felt as though we had fought a war. We’d tried moving on. I’d pushed him away, multiple times. Back in Macon, all those years ago, Jordan made me a promise that he would always be there for me and would care about me. Even after all the years that passed and all I put him through he never broke that promise.
Finally, it was time to bring the cycle to a close.
So I wrote to him.
“I’m finally healed enough to talk again. Do you want to come over?”
Listen to ISLY here: https://m.mixcloud.com/jordan-mcgee2/isly-mixed-by-mcgee-me/
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