The widowmaker
The 11th episode in my formative sex & relationship series.
Fresh in official girlfriend capacity, I throw myself into my new relationship and a role that entails reluctantly giving up my own identity.
While adventure is my boyfriend’s language, compromise is not. After unexpectedly risking my life on the Kananaskis River & being humiliated at a family Christmas, I come up against revealing insight: I may be young, but who exactly is the child in this relationship?
*Heads up* I use explicit language
In this series:
Ep 14 :: Seeding disenchantment
Ep 16 :: Petroleum engineering smart
Ep 17 :: Sex and the city
Ep 18 :: Part of the job
Ep 19 :: Hawaiian breeze era
Ep 20 :: Time out (update episode)
Ep 21 :: Risky business
Ep 22 :: That kind of girl
Ep 23 :: Under the influence
Ep 24 :: Sex therapy (update episode)
Ep 27 :: Daddy issues
Ep 28 :: Man food
Four hour canoe journey & camping on Maligne Lake, 2006 ⛺👙🛶
The signature taste of this era 🥴
One of many road trips through Alberta & British Columbia 🚗
The guest bathroom where I released all my tears & fears after the terrifying rafting experience 🚣♀️☠️
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This is Divine Interruption, I'm Sarah Hildreth Rankin. Hi, welcome back. So I'm going to continue on with more episodes in my formative Sex and Relationships series.
I have covered a lot of ground now, I must say. Starting with age 12, working my way all the way up to age 21. I've revisited so many things that I didn't forget.
But you know when you put attention on them, and then when you go back through your journals, and then you put the pieces together, I'm like, whoa, there is so much that happened here.
So if you haven't listened, I would recommend starting at the beginning. I've got all of the episodes in this series, in the show notes of this episode, or even this set of stories.
If you start with daddy issues, things will just make a little bit more sense because I'm chronicling the same narrative that I'm gonna be talking about today, which is the beginning of my first formative relationship with an older man we're calling
Steve. So where I left off last time, I had been living in this mountain town for a few years. I'd been on and off sleeping with Steve in the background for about a year, wanting more, nothing coming out of that. We'd taken a trip together.
I wasn't sure how I felt about some of the things that had happened, but I wanted more, and I wanted more for myself as well. And I had left town for about a week, reconnected with some old feelings and people, and I was like, you know what?
I think I want to go to art school. I think I'm ready to leave. It felt like nothing had been moving forward, and I was ready for something different.
So I came back and I was ready to go on this new track. I was like, I'm starting a new life. And then my boss offered me a new opportunity and a place to live that was so shiny, it was like I couldn't pass it up is what I thought.
And then Steve also said, hey, I love you and I want to be in a real relationship. So the universe was 100% testing me. It was like, hey, so what do you really want?
What are you really worth? Are you going to take these shiny carrots or are you going to choose yourself? And shiny carrots all the way.
I was like, yep, sign me up. I want this relationship. I want this free rent that wasn't free.
And I want to live in this huge house by myself, which didn't end up happening. And I want a stake in the business, which didn't end up happening. Like all of these things, I said yes to.
So I was now officially in this relationship. And I was excited. I was like, everything's gonna change.
Oh man, we're gonna do all this stuff together. It's gonna be amazing, which we can already kind of see where this is going.
And so we did. We did a lot of new things together. We went cross-country skiing.
We went skating. We went mountain biking, and we would take a lot of road trips. One of the first trips I remember that felt quite pivotal, we were gonna do a big camping trip.
We went out to Maligne Lake, which is like a very well-known place, like worldwide, it's beautiful. Tourists come from all around the world to experience the nature that's there. It's epic.
And I had never been before that point, so this was gonna be a real camping trip, and we were gonna have to take a boat and like actually paddle our way to our camping spot.
I remember going and like buying my first bikini ever, not something I'd ever done before or ever did after, but I was like, oh yes, I need to like present myself in this new way, and it'll be so exciting.
So we get there, we get in this canoe, and I knew it was gonna be a little ways to paddle, but you know, it took four hours. We reach our camp spot and set up our tent and all the things.
This trip reminds me so much of the taste of Smirnoff ice because we drank so much of it. That was like the drink of choice for some reason.
First thing in the morning in the tent, I would just hear this crack of a can, and I was like, oh, okay, we're starting our day off with a can of Smirnoff ice.
So that would start the day, and then it would be making coffee over the campfire and then pouring tons of Kaluha in there. And then he would make these huge, like, cheese stuffed sausages for breakfast.
The first meal, I was like, okay, I can do this. But honestly, as the day went on, I was like, oh my god, my body cannot do this. Like, no, I just need a vegetable, I need a fruit, I need to drink water, I need to not be in the sun.
Like, as sensitive as I am now, which is, you know, well, we've turned up the dial many, many notches now, but just the fact that I moved through some of these experiences where I was so sensitive already, just even just being out in the sun, you
know, not being under a tree. Like, those things were hard for me. And then eating the diet that he was on and drinking all the alcohol, like, it was a lot for me. But I went along with it.
I was like, okay, this is what it is to camp and he's having so much fun. I'm just going to go along with this as best I can.
And really, the rest of the camping experience besides, you know, having the campfire and making meals and exploring a little bit, became about finding other people. And I was like, what do you mean? I'm on this trip with you.
You're my new boyfriend. Like, aren't we just going to enjoy nature together and read and swim and talk? Oh, no.
Like, if I think about who I am again today and who I was then, I was still very not into that. But that's what we did. So we went to go find new friends and random strangers.
And it just wasn't as romantic as I'd hoped, because it turned out he really needed to be around other people. And like not just me, he needed other people, more people, different people, new people, lots of people.
And so the trip became a lot of making a lot of small talk, interrupting people in the middle of their camping experiences, and getting to know them, and talking about sports, and drinking a lot, and then telling a lot of drunk stories, and staying
up really late. And it just all blended together. And I just kind of wanted to have an experience with him. And sure, it's kind of cool meeting new people.
It's always special. Like, I'm open to that, but we were seeking that, and I noticed that was the main source of his enjoyment, was getting really drunk, and meeting new people, and being around people all the time.
So I got pretty exhausted on that trip. It just was a lot of things that I realize now were very out of alignment for me. And on the way back, I had kind of implicitly trusted him with this trip, and you know what?
Anything can happen, right? We can't plan for everything. But on the way back, it was brutal.
We paddled for, I think it took us four hours to get there, four plus hours to get back, and you're like in a canoe after these days of not sleeping and of drinking, and we got caught in a storm. It was so stressful.
And I remember something about bugging him about the time we were going to leave, because it was very important to leave at a certain time to catch the weather in its best course or something so you could get back.
And I remember thinking, huh, he didn't really care about that. And we ended up having a really, really difficult time getting back.
So we went on other trips. We took a really long road trip all through Alberta and BC, different mountain towns. And again, it was about seeking out other people.
It was a lot of going out to a nightclub and getting drunk and meeting new people. And it felt like his priority was just, let's keep this party going at all times.
And multiple times on that trip, depending on where we were staying, where we were going, he would just make new friends. And he would end up skipping out on our previous plans, like something that we had planned to do together.
And I would be left staying in the hotel room by myself. And part of me was angry about that. I was like, what are you talking about?
Why did you just meet George and Fiona from Germany, and now you're gonna go hang out with them when we were planning on doing this thing? Part of me was angry, part of me was sad. I was disappointed.
I felt like I wasn't enough. There's something very boring about me that he would need to seek out random strangers to hang out with.
But then there's another part of me that was really relieved because at least I didn't need to pretend small talk with strangers. If he would leave me alone in the hotel, I'm like, well, at least I can be by myself. That was the best case scenario.
I remember staying out really late one night at the club, and it was getting really messy. And I remember being like, you know what? It's time to go home.
Let's just go back to the hotel. Let's get some rest. We've got a huge day ahead of driving.
And he refused to go. So I just left him and I went back by myself. That would keep happening.
And on that trip, we ran into different friends of his at different times. We went to go visit. And I felt a little embarrassed.
There's something kind of embarrassing about being there. I felt like I was a bit of the elephant in the room. You know, he was introducing me.
We wouldn't talk a lot about how we'd gotten together or the age difference, but it was kind of obvious. I remember a few looks like, oh, that's interesting that you guys are together, you know, but let's not talk about it.
I did feel like a child a lot of the time. And then, of course, eating out was always a thing because he didn't really want to eat at new places. He didn't want to try new things.
He was very much about, this is what I like, this is what we're doing. And again, he would not want me to stop for coffee. It was always about getting coffee at the gas station.
He liked things a certain way, and he wanted to do them his way. And that was the way it is.
Like there was no point in trying to argue with him about it because he would just shut me down, and I didn't have a lot of resolve or energy to stand up to him over things that, to me, he made me feel like were not a big deal.
And something weird is I do remember, and this is so vague, but I know what happened about picking up hitchhikers. But what's crazy is I can't remember what happened. I can't remember the specific people.
I don't know why I can't, but that has come back to me. Oh yeah, he was open to picking up people off the side of the road, which again was something that I wasn't comfortable with. I was just like, again, not worth it.
I'm like, let's just not do this. If you're by yourself, fine. But I'm here and I just would not do this.
I do not want to end up in some weird scenario. Now, by this time, we were boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever that means. Even the way I said that, I'm like, can we– maybe I'll just take that out the way I said that.
Sounds so lame. But at this point, I could barely admit to my parents that I even had a boyfriend. That's like how awkward I was with my family still at that time.
We wouldn't talk that often. I would talk to them maybe once a month on the phone, and usually I was the one that had to call them. So we didn't share a lot of personal information.
But I remember I was planning a trip to come see my parents when they were living on Vancouver Island, and I wanted to bring Steve with me. So over the phone, I had to tell them.
I was like, I have to tell them that he's my boyfriend, that I'm bringing him with me. It just felt like pulling teeth. Essentially, I just said, hey, I'm going to bring someone with me and his name is Steve, and he's older.
That's all I said. We didn't talk about it. My parents didn't say another word to me about it until we were making hands in person when we went to see them.
And honestly, it went fine. I was definitely nervous, especially how my dad had been with my high school boyfriend and how awkward and horrible that was.
My brother or my mom told me after that, I guess my dad had thought when I said older that he would be in his 70s. So when they found out that he was in his 30s, they were just like, oh, no big deal, who cares? So it was fine, right?
But it was a big deal. I introduced him to my parents. He met my best friend in the parking lot of Swiss Chalet after he'd just been thrift shopping.
And he'd bought this really long fake leather, like pleathered shiny brown jacket, kind of like a Samuel L. Jackson and Shaft era coat. And underneath, he was wearing this bright yellow shirt with a big picture of a cartoon Jesus giving a thumbs up.
And I remember he had these fluorescent orange sunglasses with that neoprene strap that holds them around your neck. I don't know. These are the details I remember.
I don't remember about the Hitchhikers, but I remember his exact outfit in a Swiss Chalet parking lot and the feelings that that gave me. So it was a lot to take in. Introducing him and just being like, this is unconventional.
I don't know what this is, but this is my person. And you know what? He was really likable.
He tried with people. He was very sociable. He was friendly.
He was fun. So it wasn't a problem. I just remember feeling a bit awkward about it at times.
So he met my family, he met some of my friends, and then it was time for me to meet some of his family. His sister lived fairly close by. She lived in Calgary.
It's about a five-hour drive or so. And she had two kids and a husband. And you know what?
I don't actually remember if it was his sister or if it was his brother. But it doesn't matter. They were his family.
And he was like, you know what? Let's go visit her. And I've got this new raft I really want to try out.
So we're going to go in the Kananaskis River. We're going to go on a raft trip, and then we'll stay at her house for the evening. So this was the trip that was planned.
The day of, kind of have a bit of a timeline in terms of being able to do all of these things, get there in a reasonable time. We stopped for lunch, which was supposed to be just a quick in and out thing.
But attached to this restaurant, there is a bar, and he goes in and he has a couple of drinks and then he starts making friends with everyone. And he's making friends with the bartender.
And I just remember thinking, okay, can we just get back on the road? We've got a plan here. There's a reason why we have to be places at certain times.
So eventually we leave. But that's what I always remember. We're always stopping somewhere and it was always about meeting more strangers, having more drinks.
So we get back on the road. It was like late fall. It was getting quite a bit colder.
And he was very much like, I want to go on this raft trip because it's like, let's just squeeze in this one thing before the end of the season, before it officially ends and you can't go rafting anymore.
He wanted to try out this inflatable two-person raft he just bought. He was very excited about it. It just didn't seem like a big deal.
We were going to get in this little boat, float down a river, and that would be that. But we arrived fairly late and we pull in next to this river. And there's these two huge school buses filled with tourists.
They're decked out in wetsuits and life jackets, and they've got a bunch of raft guides, you can tell, who are like portaging these huge rafts. The rafts they have are fitting upwards of like six to twelve people, depending.
Steve gets out and he starts inflating this very small two-person dinghy, essentially, with a foot pump. And I'm looking and I'm like, oh, I thought like this is kind of small. Is this okay?
Okay. And I look down and I'm like, I'm wearing like a halter top bathing suit. I've got a life jacket, but then I've got like flip-flops.
And the two very disparate experiences that I'm witnessing things going on at the same time, I'm like, oh, professional rafting guide and crew versus me and my boyfriend. Hmm.
I just remember being very self-conscious about the experience we were about to have. It felt like maybe we shouldn't be here. This isn't what I expected.
I thought we were going on like a small, I don't know, like a creek or something river by ourselves. But it turned out this was a very popular spot where a lot of professionals were going.
So as he's like inflating this dinghy, we'll call it because it kind of was, it was very skinny and small, only fits two people. I can tell that the professional raf guides are mildly curious as to like what we're doing.
And I can see them looking over and they're like, oh, what's this guy doing? Like what's going on over here? And at some point they actually come over and they're concerned enough to talk to me and Steve about like, is this a good idea?
Like, do you guys know what you're doing? They were very unsure about the size of the raft and the fact that it was just the two of us. And they're asking him like, are you prepared?
And Steve just goes off, right? This is his wheelhouse. He's like, oh my God, guys, like I'm a raft guide.
I've done this so many times before. It's going to be totally great. And he just has all the bravado in the world.
But I am 100% questioning all of this. And I just know I'm like, I don't want to do this. And as we're kind of like pulling up to the mouth of the river, like everyone's portaged their rafts, and we're kind of standing there, assessing the situation.
I'm, you know, listening to these guides explain the experience to their rafters, like the tourists that they've brought, and they're talking about all the safety protocols. And as I'm listening to their spiel, I'm getting a bit more concerned.
And I'm like, hmm, I did not sign up for this experience. And now I don't think I actually trust Steve to know what he's doing. Like after I see where we actually are, and like the mouth of this river, I'm looking down and I'm like, oh my God, okay.
And that's when the raft guides introduced, they're like, this is the Widowmaker. And it's the Whitewater Rapid that we'll be going down, that starts as like this huge whirlpool right at the bottom of the rocks that we're gonna launch off into.
And they describe how timing is really important because there's this large dam that gets opened that floods the river to like 10 times its capacity. And so you really need to be prepared to do all of this.
And then they warn that the water is extremely cold. It can be turbulent and unpredictable. They say, you know, this is a challenging course and it's not for novices.
And that's why, you know, we all have to work together as a team and you guys need to follow our lead because we know exactly what we're doing. We've done this so many times before. You have to pay attention to exactly what we tell you to do.
And so like I look down at our like tiny little dinghy and I am just feeling so much dread.
And Steve's making jokes and he's like boasting in front of all these other guides and all the tourists like we're talking two busloads of tourists with all of their guides and all of their equipment.
And then there's the two of us, Steve and his like Hawaiian shorts and me in my tiny bathing suit. So Steve says in front of everyone, these two huge groups of tourists and all the guides, you know, we're going to launch first. We'll go first.
We'll get out of your way. We'll be done faster. We need to get going anyway.
So we do. We launch this tiny dinghy into the water, off the rocks, and instantly we shoot out and we get sucked into the middle of this huge rapid. Our dinghy flips over.
We are capsized. The water is freezing. And I'm trying to catch my breath.
You know, when you feel winded, it was that sensation because it was so cold and so sudden and the water just keeps pummeling me. My sandals are gone. My sunglasses are gone.
And I don't know how to get out. Like, I don't know how to get out of the water. I'm in this swirling rapid, this whirlpool.
The other raft guides, they quickly get down, they swarm around us and offer us paddles. We grab on to them, they pull us to shore. Steve kind of drags this raft out with him and two guides helping him get it out of the water.
It was shocking and terrifying and humiliating. And I figured I'm like, okay, that was that. That's done.
That was so embarrassing. That was so scary. I don't have shoes.
I don't have sunglasses. Oh, well, we tried. That sucked.
I definitely was not even thinking that we'd be getting back in the boat. And I definitely don't want to try to conquer whatever comes after that first whirlpool. Because the Widowmaker claimed us like within the first 10 seconds.
So why would I want to navigate her waters for the next hour of the river, right? Oh no. Steve's like, that was just our first try.
We're in front of two busloads of people waiting for us to get out of the way, and experts who have just had to rescue us. And I have no idea how to do this. But, oh no, my boyfriend apparently is an expert.
So like soaking wet, freezing cold, we do it all over again. Even like talking about this, I am like reliving this.
I use all of my might, my strength, my grit, and we make it off the rocks through the first whirlpool, and like just through that first rapid, just barely. We do not flip over.
And as I recount this, like the next hour is basically blacked out in my mind, because all I know in that instance of like making it through the first rapid is that we have to now get to the end of the river, like the dropout point, the point where
we get to exit the raft. And we're going to be encountering rocks, boulders, and eddies, and the water is moving fast and violently. And our boat is small and narrow, so it like doesn't ride the waves easily, right?
This isn't like a six person wide raft, and someone's at the front directing you what to do. This is just two people facing forward. I have no clue what I'm doing.
And every moment, I am clutching, clenching my entire body, just holding on.
Like, and I don't know if you've ever had an experience like this when you physically, it's like you have to override everything because you need to make it through an experience. I had to do that once in my friend's apartment.
Her shower broke, like the entire handle of the bathtub just flew off and water was like shooting into her bathtub and at me, like so strongly that it pushed me back. And I remember having to hold this thing and try and fix it.
And if I'd given up, like I would have flooded her entire apartment. But when you're so turned on, like all your adrenaline is going, you're like, I need to do this. I need to be so laser focused to make it through this experience.
So that's what I was doing in this raft. I'm telling myself like, okay, we just need to make it out alive. I am not going to be consumed by the river or this stupid trip, this terrible like ego trip that somehow I have been absorbed into.
And we did, like we made it to the end of the river. And I remember when we finally made it, like looking up and being like, thank God. You know, nature like is not a joke.
You know, rapids, rivers, boulders, rock cliffs, like people died in Jasper all the time from climbing mountains, from walking along ice caves, from paddling in rivers.
Like that was something that I never had a desire to do, which is probably why it wasn't the best fit for me.
I was like, oh, like I don't need to do those activities and other people do or they're more comfortable or it gives them something that they live for, that feeling that was not for me.
So, you know, this was something that I just, I did not want to risk my safety for. And I hadn't even known that I was doing that until we were already there. Like I thought we were going down a nice little easy raft trip.
Oh no, this was like a whole thing. So we get out of the river. I am just shaking all over, right?
Cause already I had to enter soaked. Like I was already soaked by the time we sat in that boat. And then we were in it for an hour.
So my teeth are chattering, all my muscles are seized up and I just want to collapse. Probably more so from the adrenaline, you know, how it wants to dump in your system cause you're so stressed out.
I realized then, I'm like, oh, now we need to walk our raft all the way back to the starting place where we parked the car.
Because when you go on a raft trip, you know, they move the buses down and they're parked and waiting for you when you're done because you're tired and you just want to get on the bus. But no, we have to walk all the way back to the car.
I did not have shoes because I lost my flip flops. So, you know, it just, it was not good. We make it to the car, I change in the back seat, and then I pulled this box of red wine that we brought with us.
I take it out of the trunk, I put it in the front seat, and I take my coffee mug and I just fill the whole thing. And then we drove off. Now, we have the second leg of the journey, which is, oh, we get to go and meet your family.
So I drank half that entire box of wine on the car ride, something that I've never done before, I will never do that again.
We arrived at his sister's place in the dark because it was late, because we left late, we got on the river late, because it's approaching winter, it's like late fall, and I was drunk.
We pull into the driveway, and I am just trying so hard to hold on a little longer. I'm like, okay, I need to keep all that stress and all that adrenaline pushed down until I have space to do something with it.
Because I had just been in this car kind of shaking and being like, I don't know how to process that experience I just had. His family were friendly. They were definitely conservative.
They were a little surprised, I could tell by my age, but they weren't unkind. It was after dinner, like the kids had already gone to bed.
They fed us leftover tacos, they gave me a beer, and I used every inch of energy I had to just hold myself together, to be coherent, to give off as good an impression as I could under the circumstances.
When we're finally dismissed for bed, they're like, okay, yeah, go get some rest. You know, we'll see in the morning. I went straight downstairs to the basement, into the bathroom.
I turned on the shower, I turned on the fan, and then I just bawled into a towel. I remember just crying and crying because I had just had, I don't know, one of the scariest like few hours of my life, and I was just supposed to be fine.
I felt like it had been a big joke to him. And I had known, like it was a bad idea from the moment we arrived when I had kind of seen what it actually was. But I'd felt held and confined and kind of coerced into carrying on with it.
That's how it felt to me. I felt like I wasn't able to again use my agency. And that was the scariest part, that I had allowed someone to put me in a situation that I felt unsafe in, that I knew was not the best idea.
And also that this person I trusted turned out to like make really poor decisions a lot of the time. But somehow he was the one who was in control of our relationship. Like his age seemed to make him the expert, the parent, the leader.
And yet, I don't know, he just like kept proving to me that he was actually the child in the relationship. Also knowing that he was not factoring me in to any of his decisions at all. That was definitely a wake up call.
So believe it or not, we went to visit his family again, this time at Christmas. And this time I was determined to kind of make up for whatever weirdness or drunkenness like I may have exhibited on our first visit.
We brought gifts and we planned to actually stay over and be there on Christmas morning. So they had two kids, a son and a daughter. I think the son was about eight or 10.
The daughter was about six-ish. I don't fully remember. Right away, Steve disappears with the son into the basement to play video games.
And I just didn't know what to do. I was like, oh, okay, I'm in this house. Like I don't really know these people.
He's just kind of gone and done something. There's no plans. I just wanted to make a really good impression, but I'm like, cool, okay.
My boyfriend is not making this easy for me. He's kind of abandoned me here. So the six-year-old comes up and she asks me to come see her dollhouse.
So I did. And I spent the next couple hours playing dress up, playing beanie babies, playing Barbies. And at one point, I believe the mom even came in and brought us snacks.
But at no point it was acknowledged as weird that me, 21-year-old me, is just left alone to babysit essentially without any prior discussion of doing that.
But then it was also like, I don't know, it felt more natural to even play with the child than it did to make small talk with the parents. And perhaps that was because I already felt like a child in my relationship.
And likely even in Steve's circle, like maybe they felt the same way. So the next day, Steve went with his brother-in-law and nephew to a hockey game. Did not invite me.
I had no car, we were out in the suburbs. And again, I was left to kind of hang around the house with the daughter. As her mom, who is more of my peer, even though she's older than me, she's just kind of like disappeared and reappeared.
She's like doing chores, doing her thing. But we're not socializing, we're not hanging out. She's not making any plans with me.
So I end up hanging out with the six-year-old. And I thought to myself, I was like, I used to get paid really good money to do this a few years ago. And now I'm kind of being conned into doing it for free.
Like I was, I was a babysitter extraordinaire, but I'm like, this is weird. Like I don't know how to be or who to be in this scenario. Then it's Christmas morning.
We're all sitting around the Christmas tree. And it's kind of the first Christmas, as far as I remember where I wasn't with my own family. So this was kind of a big deal.
Like I chose to opt out of our family Christmas to be with Steve and his family. I was like, you know what? I'm in a relationship now.
That's what we do. So we're around the Christmas tree and the family gifted me a set of fuzzy Tweety Bird pajamas. So I was like, oh, you know, like, what did they get for me?
They don't know me, you know, I'm at a weird age. They begged me to put them on. And, you know, that was kind of weird, just a little infantilizing, but what do you do?
I put them on. So I'm wearing these fuzzy Tweety Bird pajamas.
And when it came to unwrap Steve's gift for me that he'd put under the tree, I stand up and I open this rectangular box and I find a personal massager, otherwise obviously known as a vibrator. And I was stunned. I stood there in my cartoon pajamas.
I'm holding up this vibrator in front of his entire family and their kids. And I just wanted to die. Like I felt like I'd been abandoned on an island floating away from reality.
And he was just like waving at me and smiling and being like, bye bye, bye bye, good luck. How do you feel? I don't care.
It was too much. So as time passed in our relationship, I found that the currency of my youth wasn't actually as secure as I wanted it to be. Because he would frequently bring up other women in conversation.
He talked a lot about his first girlfriend. He talked a lot about the women that he'd slept with before and the ones who quote unquote got away. And you know what?
In a regular relationship scenario, this can go so many different ways. Like if you feel secure and your partner's intention is to make you feel secure, then I think, yeah, these conversations can be really helpful. If not, like just honest, right?
Life is life. People have relationships before they're with you. And I've done things and been with people just like you have, et cetera, et cetera, like that's life.
How freeing, how healthy to be able to talk about those experiences while also being in a secure relationship. But I will say, in a very small town where I now knew who all the characters in his story were, it felt less straightforward to me.
And also, my feelings were never a priority when it came to talking about any of this.
He would repeatedly tell me about what he thought about certain women in town, and he wondered why relationships with them had never worked out, or he'd tell me how amazing all these past experiences had been.
And that was a lot for me, especially for my very young and inexperienced 21-year-old brain to kind of take in.
Even during my last months living in that town, I was in a house with a woman who was one of his friends, and he was very open about his feelings for her, even while we were in a relationship together.
So needless to say, like it was confusing for me and it did not offer much reassurance for his feelings for me. I always felt like I'm like, oh, wouldn't you kind of maybe think before you said that or have another way of seeing that?
It felt like he was just talking, no filter, no thinking, no reason as to why he's telling me this. Is it necessary for me to know all of these details? He just shared everything.
And he would bring me to parties where he would often abandon me where I honestly knew no one. And I already knew from the beginning, honestly, in some of the trips that we'd been on, right? Like this was a pattern.
He was perfectly fine with up and leaving the room, going somewhere else, taking off to the hockey game, not inviting me, right? I was just left.
And it was tough because almost always, the places that he would take me or the parties that we would be at, everyone was at least 10 to 20 years older than me.
So I always felt like an outsider, like that child sitting, I said already, like at the kids' table at the adult dinner party. And for the most part, I just pushed down my feelings and I tried to be as agreeable, I tried to be as chill as I could.
But other times, I just couldn't do it. And I would bring it up the next day, and I would try to share my feelings with him. I'm like, this is kind of how it felt to be left or ignored.
This is what it's like when I don't know anyone, and you bring me to this in front of all of your friends. But he had no, he just had no patience, he had no time for talking about any of it. And he would just shut me down.
He's like, no, that's not what it's like. You're overreacting, you know. And I'm not sure if I've ever met someone who had less room to compromise.
Like, he truly could not go outside of himself to consider how so many of the aspects of our relationship felt to me.
And this showed up in so many ways, like when we'd order food, he would always get the pizza that he liked, and he refused, honestly, refused to get anything else. And so, Chicken Feta Mushroom became the pizza that I would eat, you know?
If we'd rent a movie, he would be the one who would get final decision. Anything outside of the norm of like a blockbuster action movie, and he would just say, no, no, I'm not getting that, I'm not watching that.
If I wanted to watch something off beat, you know, when Catherine O'Hara and Eugene Levy were making a bunch of really great movies, like Best in Show, he would actually say like, you can do that on your own time. And he would just refuse.
He also refused to sleep at my place. And I've got so many desperate journal entries written late at night, like agonizing over like why he couldn't come over to my side of the town.
He had a bike, he had a car, I had a nice place, and at that point, he didn't even have a job. So he had this unlimited free time, unlike me, who would need to wake up for early shifts often at the bakery.
But he just wasn't willing to drive for like six minutes. He would come over occasionally, but 95% of the time it was my job to pack up my things and come to his place. It was just like with the coffee, right?
Stopping and getting the coffee that means so much to me, that would be so simple, so easy. But it was like him almost going out of his way to shut down anything that required compromise or thought to my preferences. And I was young.
I was insecure. I wanted him to like me and I would feel angry. I would feel hurt.
I would feel confused that he wasn't willing to consider me. Like that was confusing. I was like, but we're in a relationship.
Like, why wouldn't you consider me at all? But it was just easier to shove aside my thoughts and my preferences and my interests and feelings at that time because I had become such a pro at doing that. It was about becoming who he needed me to be.
And for a decade, I'd say plus after this even, I always thought that a part of me just didn't really know what I liked or wanted, which is why often I would struggle to like express myself openly and honestly.
When in fact, it was just that I thought I couldn't have those things and I thought that other people in life mattered more.
I'd become so trained to always give precedence to the man or the authority figure in my life that I just like could not see a way out of that dynamic.
And yeah, this first relationship, this major relationship with Steve was a really big part in solidifying that for me. I'd say along with growing up, a lot of the times I had to do the same thing.
When people show you outright that your feelings don't matter, it starts to create this sensation of being invisible. And so my method of staying alive or staying visible or valuable was to become what they wanted me to be. And that wasn't difficult.
It honestly wasn't, especially as like a sensitive person who easily picks up on people's stuff, you know, doing that without even knowing. I always knew what someone needed, and I could easily fit that role.
And it actually became, this is kind of crazy to say, but it became much scarier and challenging to be myself. It was much easier to fill a role for somebody else.
And I want to be clear that the way that I felt Steve took power away from me in that relationship, it wasn't in a way that he was intentionally trying to make me feel bad about myself.
Like I've spoken about other relationships where I was really left, almost like I was in a mind game, and it felt like someone was purposely trying to break me down or make me question my self worth.
With Steve, he was like in his own bubble, and he just couldn't consider another person. I don't think he was ever intentionally trying to make me feel bad about myself at all. But that's why it was kind of so confusing.
It was like, oh, although like he was just a good guy, he probably should not have been in a relationship because at some level, like what's the point in being in a relationship when you're not interested in changing or opening up or bringing that
person into your life? So let's stop there.
If you'd like to see any, you know, embarrassing photos of me and my life at this time, you can check out the link to my website in the show notes, and there's more to come with this, so I'll pick up for the final chapter of this experience next
time. Thank you for listening and joining me in all of this catharsis. Okay, talk to you soon. Bye.
