I wasn’t looking to get married. I had been down that road before and I had gotten burned, badly. I started to date Lena in 2010 and I fell for her hard and quickly, but it wasn’t me that pushed to get married. Lena wanted to get married and so we did. I don’t remember when this conversation happened, but we were sitting on a bark bench looking out on the Hudson River in Rivertown. It was either shortly before we got married or shortly afterwards. I remember Lena asking how long it would take for my walls to come down and for me to fully trust that she loved me and would always be there for me. Lena said disparaging things about the women in my life prior to her… things along the lines of, “These women really fucked you up. I am not those women.” Lena went on to reiterate that she would not hurt me and that she was in this for the long haul. Furthermore, she said, “I am going to love you like no other woman ever has. I’m gonna love you better.” That should have been a huge red flag, and it probably was… but I ignored it because I did love her, and I did want to spend the rest of my life with her.
Life happened and seven and a half years later Lena no longer wanted to be by my side. Lena no longer wanted to be married to me. Lena wanted a divorce; just like Ava and several of “those women from my past,” who had destroyed my heart and my trust in love. When Ava wanted the divorce, she told me point blank and it was over. Lena didn’t end things that way. Lena told me to leave and then things stayed that way for a few months. I had hired a matrimony lawyer to represent my interests in the divorce. The lawyer had Lena served with papers and Lena totally freaked out. How could I do this to her? Couldn’t we deal with this just the two of us without lawyers? Lena convinced me to fire my lawyer against everyone’s advice. I did fire my lawyer. Lena immediately started pressuring me to sign a legal separation agreement without the counsel of a lawyer; just weeks after the death of my father.
Then Lena said that she needed a legal separation so that she could rediscover who she was and who we were to each other. This was the first calculated vicious manipulation towards getting me to commit suicide. I didn’t understand what Lena was asking for. Yes, of course I know what a legal separation is, but I did not understand what she meant when she said that she needed this so we could rediscover who we were to each other. I asked her, “What does that mean? Are we going to sign a legal separation agreement and then start dating each other?” She answered that she did not know… maybe. Seriously. And I, the love blind idiot I was, agreed. Luckily, I did ad some language to the separation agreement that made it non-binding.
All my friends and family said that I was being manipulated and that I was being an idiot. Part of me thought it was ridiculous and that I probably was being an idiot… but Lena had said that I was the love of her life. She said she still loved me. She still proclaimed that I was the love of her life as we were signing the separation agreement. I have hundreds of pages of texts between us filled with proclamations of love from her to me and me to her. In these texts she tells me she still loves me. She tells me that I am still the love of her life. She tells me that she needs this separation for herself so that she can rebuild herself and discover who she now is.
I went down to Rivertown a month or so before we signed the separation agreement and Lena and I met in a park down by the Hudson. We spoke for a couple of hours sitting on a bench. She put her arms around me. She put her arms around my neck. She held my hand… and when we parted, she kissed me passionately… I mean deep tongue kiss like we did when we first started to date… with tears in her eyes telling me that she loved me. This happened again on the day we signed the separation agreement… After signing the document in front of a notary, we were out in the bank parking lot and she hugged me… tightly… with tears running down her face and she kissed me deeply passionately again. As we parted, she told me that she loved me. I never saw her again until we both had to show up to divorce court.
The separation agreement clearly states that Lena had to maintain my health insurance. Within a few months she cancelled my insurance. I no longer had access to doctors or prescription medications unless I could pay cash out of pocket. Lena switched jobs and claimed that her new employer wouldn’t cover me; I don’t know if that is true. Regardless, she was legally required to maintain health insurance for me, and she did not. She did buy some totally bogus health plan that supposedly covers 4 or 5 doctor visits a year and some medications. Every doctor I showed the card to said it was fake and I had to pay cash out of pocket.
When Lena and I first started to date I was 100% honest with her about all my mental health issues and history. She knows all about my suicidality and suicide attempts and anxieties over abandonment issues. During our marriage Lena experienced both my depression and suicidal ideation. I was totally honest and open with her more than I had ever been with anyone in my life. When we separated, she used all of what I had told her against me. I don’t mean that she used it against me in court… she used it to manipulate me into signing a separation agreement under totally false pretenses (that we would date and that she still loved me). She used my unconditional love of her and her children to convince me to fire my attorney. Then after the death of my father, which she knew was devastating to me, she cancelled my health insurance cutting me off from doctors and antidepressant medications and my pain medications.
How could anyone look at the lies and manipulations Lena perpetrated combined with cutting off necessary medical care and not conclude that she wanted me to kill myself? Being a widow to a dead husband you no longer love, need, or care about, is certainly easier than being a two-time divorcee. Yes, I think that Lena would prefer for me to kill myself and that she has done her best to manipulate both my mood and my access to health care towards that goal. I won’t give her the satisfaction. Knowing that she wants me to suicide has pissed me off enough that although I have been suicidally depressed at times, I won’t give her the satisfaction! So, I am alive 😛