I Knew He Was Broken and I Married Him Because of It
During our engagement, his adoptive mother asked me why I was committing to a broken man. But that came later. At seventeen, I had only just fallen in love with Donald and was miserable about leaving him behind for a three-week trip to Europe with my mother and sister. I consoled myself by buying postcards in each new town, and writing “I love you” in the local language: “Jeg elsker deg” from Oslo. “Jeg elsker dig” from Copenhagan. “Jeg älskar dig” from Stockholm.
I was madly, head over heels, in love.
It was the summer between the end of high school in Gainesville, Georgia and the start of college. Donald was my co-worker at Wendy’s. He had blue eyes, a nice butt, and volunteered to clean the bathrooms for me. I saw this as evidence of his deep love for me. Love that I had never known from a boyfriend. Love that I was missing at home.
Donald was also seventeen. He’d been kicked out of high school, and recently thrown out of his adoptive parents’ house. He was living with a roommate in a cheap rental on the other side of town. He had his own bedroom and lived near a bar that served us alcohol. It was all very exotic.
My friends assumed Donald was a passing phase. My mother prayed he was. She thought Donald should join the army and leave me alone—a sentiment she shared with him during family Sunday dinner. Still, on our third date we discussed marriage. On our two-month anniversary I gave him my virginity—or rather pleaded for him to relieve me of it, as I did not want to enter college so burdened. He was tender, while I lay there stiff in his twin-sized bed.
I guess our relationship started as the typical attraction to a bad boy. I was the smart girl, headed to Virginia Tech to become a Metallurgical Engineer. Donald’s troubles ran deep. He’d had a tragic childhood. His mom died when he was five. His dad was accused of her murder and died in jail a year later. Donald and his older brother were sent to foster care where Donald was badly abused. Eventually, their aunt and uncle adopted them.
My heart was captured by my vision of him as a young child. I looked at the man in front of me and saw intelligence in his humor, was fascinated by his quirky observations of life, and marveled at what he had survived. My friends and family didn’t approve of Donald, but I saw his potential. With all my advantages in life, I could help him realize that potential. At seventeen years old, I decided to give my heart to Donald, forever.
Later, I found out he volunteered to clean the bathrooms at Wendy’s so he could find a place to smoke pot.
The last months of my freshman year at Virginia Tech, we’d each drive four hours, me in my red Mazda GLC, Donald, on his motorcycle, to meet at a cheap motel off the freeway in Charlotte, North Carolina. We’d smoke pot and have sex all weekend, only taking a break to go to IHOP. That year, I gained fifty pounds and had a 2.78 grade point average, the lowest I’d ever had. He stuck with me—perhaps seeing my potential.
I transferred to Emory University in Atlanta the next year where my mother insisted I join a sorority. She hoped I’d meet an appropriate fraternity boy, but I secretly shared my off-campus apartment with Donald. He got an entry-level job at the computer lab while I was on my way to graduating with honors in Math and Computer Science. In Atlanta, Donald’s bad boy behavior—excessive pot smoking, sleeping with his ex—escalated.
One day, I had to take a break from my studies to bail him out of jail. “Don’t worry,” he reassured me, “I didn’t have any money.” He’d been picked up for propositioning a prostitute. I didn’t know whether to kick him out of the car or pity the man so wounded by his past. I drove us home. I returned to my studies.
Shortly after Emory, we got engaged and were married in front of over three hundred people at the Chattahoochee Country Club. I wore a classic 1980’s wedding dress with puffy sleeves. We had groomsmen and bridesmaids. All the people who cared about me most thought I was making a mistake. Many told me. After our vows, Donald and I high-fived each other.
A few years later we were living in Seattle. Donald had started taking classes at a mail-order college when in Atlanta. He continued in Seattle and started work as a real estate appraiser while I was working my way up the technical ladder at Microsoft Corporation. For almost a year, I thought Donald was truly on the track I imagined for him. But it didn’t last. Donald started doing stronger drugs. I worked nonstop, only spending Sunday afternoons at home.
Back then, Microsoft held glorious holiday parties. They’d rent out the Seattle Convention Center and feature different food and entertainment in each room: a pasta bar in one room, a satay bar in another, a seafood tower surrounded by ice sculptures in the next. The booze flowed liberally. Everyone from Corporate was invited including my boss, my boss’s boss, up to Bill Gates. One year, Donald and I were sitting at a table with several friends, and my dear friend Liz started to giggle. Eventually, her giggle turned into a full belly laugh. Donald—the life of the party—was under the table licking her leg. My friends almost peed themselves laughing. I drained my nearly full wine glass.
On our fifth wedding anniversary, Donald and I went to Arcadia National Park in Maine. We bought ice cream cones and walked the beach looking like we were posing for a postcard. By this time, Donald had lost his appraisal job and had convinced me to buy a chicken farm back in Georgia, where he’d go and hole up in a Red Roof Inn and binge on drugs. As we climbed the rocky Maine shoreline, he explained that while in Georgia, the CIA rented the room next door, drilled a tiny hole in the wall, and spied on him. After returning from one of the next short trips to the farm, he accused me of having Bill Gates’ child. I focused harder on work and cried myself to sleep at night.
At the time, I could only see the commitment I had made when I was seventeen. My facts were as concrete as any teenager’s: I was committed, Donald had potential, our love would heal him. Never did I contemplate breaking up with him. Sure, on my commute home from work, I’d listen to country music and daydream about Donald being the protagonist in the song. What if he went off to war and died? He’d be a hero and I’d be free! It didn’t occur to me that this was a sign something was terribly wrong.
Things got worse. Donald started going to Arizona to shoot guns with militia wannabes. On a trip to Costa Rica we stopped in a rough port town to grab dinner. When I returned from the bathroom, Donald said, “I know you just slept with the cook in exchange for drugs.” For the past year, he had accused me of doing cocaine whenever I had a sniffle. This had happened so frequently, I’d begun to doubt myself when I told him “no.” Once again, I was defending myself against the absurd. But this time he threatened to abandon me in a foreign town. “Don’t leave me,” I said. I begged him to take me with him. Knowing none of this story, his brother called a month later and asked me if I felt safe.
Eight years into our marriage, we met with the only therapist Donald would see: his own. He said our marriage’s only hope required a tremendous amount of work. We’d each driven a car to this final appointment and we sat together in mine, discussing the verdict. Donald told me he was done with both me and the therapist.
In a single heartbeat, my entire frame of reference shifted. I felt my release.
It was like the game where someone pretends to crack an egg on your head. I felt shivers all the way to my toes. I suddenly realized how miserable I’d been. At thirty years old, after thirteen years of being trapped by my vision of Donald’s potential, I felt freedom. I could see a new life in front of me. By breaking up with me, Donald not only released me from our relationship, he gave me permission to grow up.
Eight years after that moment in the car, I was sitting on my bed with my new love. We had just returned from a long trip to Italy, and I was sorting through bills and letters, when I saw one from Donald’s brother. I immediately opened it. He explained that Donald had been driving from Seattle to Georgia, to enter treatment he’d finally agreed to. Halfway, in a tiny town in Texas, he shot himself. The car was full of guns and fringe pornography. The only note he left behind was to me.
Donald’s note was gracious. He said that I was the best thing that had ever happened to him. I stared out at the quintessential Seattle view from my bedroom: Lake Union with sailboats and floatplanes. I laid back and cried: for Donald, his tragic childhood, and his lost potential.
The last time I’d seen him was years before when our optometrist appointments accidentally overlapped. We nodded toward each other as I filled out my forms and he was called back for his examination. I felt nothing and it appeared he didn’t either.
Lying on my bed with his suicide note, I thought about Donald as a child, before I had ever met him. “Jeg elsker deg” I’d written from Oslo so many years before. From Copenhagen “Jeg elsker dig.” I felt safe to love him again.
-Alexandra Loeb
Alexandra Loeb was born in Gainesville, Georgia and spent most of her adult life in Seattle working at Microsoft. She currently lives in the small town of Rossland, BC where she now focuses her nerdy brain writing fiction and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Kootenay Living Magazine, 101 Words, Cleaning up Glitter, and The Write Launch.