The Truth about the Perfect Couple...

Dear Future Joseph and Julie, We will be receiving this email on what would have been our eighth wedding anniversary. Today is December 28, 2005. I am writing this because I have had an epiphany about my own understanding of what has happened between us and what I need to remember and hang on to to never return to this marriage or long to. Tonight as I was watching Oz with you, it suddenly occurred to me that I should no longer be asking how could you, Joseph, hate me or be so selfish that you could do these things to me, to us, to our family. Rather I must continually ask myself how could I hate MYSELF enough to want this relationship knowing your capacity for deceit, selfishness, callousness and betrayal. This is an important switch in my thinking, and as I continued with this line of thinking, again bits and pieces of the absolute horror and selfishness of your acts opened to me. In my mind seeing you lie in our bed holding another woman and smiling and laughing with her when our wedding pictures were on the wall only five feet away. How you kissed her and entered her body in the bed our son was conceived in and in the same bed that you lay beside me and told me you loved me with all your your heart. No amount of confusion, desperateness or longing justifies the level of betrayal you have meted out on me. My marriage, my home, my heart , the only places I ever felt safe and loved, were violated and disrespected out of nothing more than sheer selfishness and immaturity. I have to think of your hands on my stomach that carried our son and remember how your face smiled and your voice said you loved me while your heart betrayed me and wrote love letters to a simple whore. I have to remember these things and carry them with me, brandishing these scars on my heart as symbols of the possibility and the hope, the need for rebirth, for growth, for STRENGTH. I don't hate myself for loving you, I will love you until I die-- nothing will ever change that. We shared our life, dreams, families, years and we will always share a beautiful son. I will hate myself for accepting a marriage in which I was betrayed, and used. Another thing I realized is that, for you, a large part of your attraction to me originally was the glow in my eyes that reflected back to you that someone valued you and saw you as perfect-- when you yourself had no love for yourself. You have confidence in your abilities and drive, but I don't believe you have ever loved yourself, and as a result you have never loved anyone else as a partner, a lover, a friend and a wife. Your heart is full of fear and insecurity, and no amount of reassurance on my part will ever change that. You have denied this before, but if it weren't true you would not speak the cruel words to people you care about in order to deflect the focus away from you and your errors and instead try to tear the other person down. I am a good person, I am loyal, strong, loving, brave, and generous -- all things you long to be but cannot. I believe that is partially why you have chosen someone else (T) who is equally selfish, needy, and so desperate to be accepted and loved that you will betray your very families, your morals, your dignity, everything, to have the emptiness filled in your hearts. I would say you both are disgusting people, because genuinely, I am revolted by both of you-- but the revulsion is balanced by pity, especially for you Joseph because you had an opportunity to be with someone who loved you and accepted you and whose heart burst with love for you every day, twenty times a day, -- but who asked for something from you which you could never truly give-- honesty and genuiness. You thought my love for you was based on the image you projected-- but I saw you Joseph-- and I loved you completely, purely and eternally. I didn't love you in spite of everything that you found weak and bad about yourself, I loved you in part because of it-- it is what makes you human and vulnerable and allows for true intimacy between two people. Sadly, because you judge yourself so harshly you judged me as well and that is ultimately what killed the love between us. This marriage ending is truly your loss and my gain because it allows me the opportunity to find a man who will look at me and smile, who will kiss me back when I kiss him, who will pull me to him rather than hold me at a distance. (Did you think I never noticed how you always put your hands on the front of my hips with just enough pressure to keep a bit of distance between us when we kissed? Or how you often looked down and away when I told you I loved you and kissed you rather than at me and into me?) I do deserve more than that, I asked for it from you and I gave it to you, but in the end you got the best of yourself and I was betrayed. What survives between us is our son, our memories, and our friendship. In many ways I would like to be able to walk away from you and heal myself in solitude away from you, and in some ways I am glad that I can't. I do wish you the best, and that is why I don't wish you happiness with a selfish and self destructive whore. Just as my heart was stolen by you, yours was stolen by her and as a result we will always have a blind spot-- I for you and you for her. The difference between us now is that I am reclaiming my heart as my own and beginning to take care of it and to care for it myself. I hope that one day you can calm your fears and do the same . I am beginning to realize the necessity of actively loving myself, of claiming my own self respect, and as a result the respect of others. Julie-- as the future is unknown, if I am regretting the loss of this marraige or in a position where we are considering reconcilation-- RUN! RUN AS FAST AS I CAN! Joseph has shown you who he really is-- BELIEVE HIM. He only wants you back because of the baby and he is lonely, likely because things aren't working out for him. He will never see you as beautiful, strong, intelligent and as the most valuable person in his life, thusly the PERSON YOU ARE. HE will always look back at her and long for her, believing she is his true love, despite her betrayals and abandonments and capacity for destroying all that is good in him. HE WILL NEVER LOOK AT YOU AS THE PERSON HE WILL CHOOSE ABOVE ALL OTHERS-- YOU WILL ALWAYS BE HIS SECOND CHOICE, THE ONE WHO IS THERE AND AVAILABLE. You lied to yourself and convinced yourself that this was untrue before, and the truth came out and you were almost destroyed. Be true to yourself and remember that your love is not second best, you deserve to be first choice, to be loved, to be made love to, to see a glow in someone's eyes that says you are special, loved and perfect to that person. Joseph is NOT THAT PERSON-- You spent 13 years waiting and hoping to see that in him and never really did. Don't let it break your heart, let it make you determined to find that and never settle for less than that in a partner. You will find love, because you are lovable. Don't let him hurt you again, because he will. He doesn't love you the way you need to be loved, and never will. It is time to let your demons be vanquished, to look towards the future and smile, to look back at the past and glow because you are wiser and stronger than you would have ever been otherwise. Some loves have to end, and this was one of them . I don't fully believe this now-- but hopefully the future me will. Joseph-- I loved you fully, honestly and completely. I am sorry that you didn't receive that from the person you wanted it from. I hope you do find happiness and love. Know that I have closed the door on you, that I will not let my love for you shine in my eyes again, but I hold it within me and cherish the memory of it, just behind closed doors now. Even if you see shadows of love in my eyes, don't think that I will ever again let you into my heart in that way again-- whether we are together or apart. My heart is yours no longer, it is mine again, waiting and hoping to be given to and received by another who is worthy-- you are not. Love Always, Julie