Leaving Salt Lake City

by Matthew Timion

  Mormons spend their entire lives on a strict diet. They cannot consume alcohol, coffee, tea, tobacco, or illegal drugs. This dietary law is based on a revelation the founding prophet received. Because of this, when Mormons leave the church, they often jump off the deep end with consumption. Many ex-Mormons start drinking, smoking pot, smoking cigarettes, and usually engage in risky sexual behavior.

  We were making up for lost time. While I never experienced it first hand, I hear most people get all their “partying” out of their system during their teenage and college years. Because most of us former Mormons were away on two year missions during prime partying years, we felt the need to cram as much and as many of the lost experiences into as short a time as possible.

  As adults, fully recovered-from-Mormonism adults, we could afford to buy good microbrews and expensive pot. We were adult teenagers experiencing a second adolescence. Since I had had no real experience with which to contrast the behavior of my new community, everything we did was normal.

  This was how adults lived. Real adults.

  I had moved into my new home. Salt Lake City was going to be my home base for the rest of my life. I was going to live and die there. I was going to raise a family there. I was happy.

  | THREE |

  Letting Go of the Past

  March 2005

  I spent the next few months adjusting to living in Salt Lake City with a live-in girlfriend, which took some getting used to because I'd never had a live-in girlfriend before. I telecommuted to my office in Southern California while Jessica worked for the Air Force a few miles from our house. It was a great situation. She would leave, I would work, and then she would come home. Life was exactly like it was supposed to be: routine and a little boring, but stable since we were both making decent money. I took advantage of our financial situation to pay off my debts and save a rainy day fund.

  I finally felt like an adult: I owned a house where I lived with my girlfriend, two dogs, and a cat. I was free from Mormonism although my idea of what an adult should be still reflected being part of and surrounded by Mormon culture since I was eighteen. I was doing something real and meaningful by being part of our small family in our house. I was fortunate to have Jessica living this experience with me. She had spent a considerable amount of time “in the world,” outside of Mormonism’s grasp, so not only was she my partner, but she could be my guide. I was living the way I was supposed to live. I had come a long way and I was terribly proud of myself.

  As perfect as my life seemed, my American Dream hadn't prepared me for how much of an adjustment it was to move in with someone. We had to figure out rules, expectations, and roles. Did we both do the dishes, or did just one person? Who was supposed to pick up after her dogs? They were her dogs after all and not mine. Who was supposed to clean the furniture? It was my furniture and not hers. We were young and in love. How often should we have sex? How messy around the house was I allowed to be with her? Figuring out new roles and rules is completely normal when two people move in, but sometimes it felt like we were trying to build a life during an earthquake.

  These adjustments took a toll on both of us. I started wondering what I got myself into. She began to passive-aggressively criticize my lack of dusting or sweeping up the dog hair. Many of her criticisms would start with the phrase, “You’re here all day, you can clean." She seemed to forget that I was working too. We were both questioning whether we were in over our heads.

  Jessica came home one day and had a panic attack. “My friends ask me if we’re dating, and I honestly don’t have an answer for them." She was right. We had never defined the relationship with a title. I had assumed living together would be evidence enough of our relationship status. I didn’t know if it even needed a title, but I didn’t want her to feel like a roommate with benefits so some sort of definition needed to happen. I told her, “Of course you’re my girlfriend, Jessica,” secretly unsure if it was what I really wanted.

  Her constant drinking and partying wore on me. I wasn’t used to people drinking every night, and honestly it frightened me. My father had died when I was sixteen from alcoholism. I have always been afraid the same could happen to me, so I avoided alcohol as well as I could. I had a drink here or there, but I was twenty-six and proud that I had never been drunk before. I wore it like a badge of honor. While everyone else around me was getting drunk, I smugly looked at them knowing that I was the only sober one around. This left me picking up after them, coordinating rides, or stopping them from breaking something important to me.

  I tried looking for a new point of view. I was barely twenty-six, and she was twenty-four. We had both left a controlling religion, and we had each recently divorced a Mormon spouse. We had enough combined baggage to make us question why we hopped into a relationship.

  I started sharing my concerns about Jessica with my friend Bryce. I had met him online as well, and he more or less ran the online community where I had met her. He and I had a lot in common, and we would often times spend hours just chatting. I told him I didn’t think Jessica and I were going to last, and I felt the relationship was going to end within a few weeks. I knew our annual ex-Mormon trip to Las Vegas was coming up, and I asked him to watch my cat while I went to Las Vegas with the other ex-Mormons. He agreed, and then told me he had something to tell me, something he wished he had told me before I moved to Utah.

  “I’m only telling you this because you’re thinking of leaving Jessica, but did you know that she and I used to date?”

  “No." My heart was racing. What did he mean?

  “Yeah, while you were still in California, we dated.”

  “What do you mean by dated?" I was hoping for a liberal definition of the word date.

  “Dinner, movies, sex, you know, the normal.”

  To say that I was shocked would be an understatement. I had had no clue. I put the pieces together and realized that Jessica had explained away some rumors a few months before.

  One night Jessica, Bryce, and a girl named Amy all went out for dinner. They drank a lot and ended up at Amy’s apartment where Amy went to bed. Amy was a little upset because she and Bryce had dated, and they had broken up a week before. Amy had kept checking in on the other two, who were sleeping in the living room. According to Jessica they spent the next few drunken hours just giggling and being silly. After telling me this, Jessica warned me that any other version of the story I might hear was simply Amy being upset and jealous. Everyone was jealous of Jessica. I had no reason to disbelieve her so I started seeing Amy as a bit of a nut. This was exactly how Jessica wanted me, and everyone else, to see Amy.

  The real story was that Jessica and Bryce had sex that night in Amy’s living room, according to Bryce. The “rumors” Amy was telling everyone were in fact true, but after a while no one believed her and as a consequence a number of Amy’s friendships were ruined.

  “How often did you have sex?" I had to have more information.

  “Very often, usually without protection. In fact, when Jessica got pregnant a few months ago, I was so relieved when she had the abortion because I was afraid the baby would come out looking like me.”

  This was the final straw for me. I could understand the difficulty of a long distance relationship and her inability to be completely faithful during that time period. I even understood why she was sleeping with two of us in the same time period (at least once she slept with both of us during the same day). I was far away, and he was close by. What I could not understand, however, was how she had handled her accidental pregnancy.

  In July of 2004, Jessica and I had only been dating for a few months when she became pregnant. She had promised me that if she ever got pregnant she would have an abortion. We both had felt we were both too young and that the relationship was too new. When she became pregnant I was assured that I was, without a doubt, the father. I trusted her.

  Upon finding out about her indiscretion with Bryce I realized I might not have been the biological father of her unborn ba
by. All along she had been sleeping with someone else on a regular basis without protection.

  Bryce forwarded me a number of email exchanges he and Jessica had where they were planning dates, planning sex, or discussing the secretive nature of their relationship. They had both agreed that it was something I was to never know about.

  It was late at night when I learned about Jessica’s secret cheating past. I went to bed with my head swimming with everything I had learned. Waking her up and screaming at her seemed like a better idea than trying to sleep. I easily spent the next three or four hours in bed stewing. The next morning while Jessica was at work I sent off a number of cryptic emails to her letting her know I knew what was going on. She put the pieces together really quickly and rushed home.

  “I am so sorry." She apologized before I said anything to her.

  “How many times did you sleep with him?”

  “Just once.”

  “You are telling me that you are being honest, and then you just lie to my face.”

  I couldn’t think straight. I needed a cigarette, so I went outside, into the bitter Utah cold and smoked. She went outside with me. I confronted her with what I knew, and she minimized it. She said it didn’t happen as often as Bryce claimed and that they had always used protection. The accidental pregnancy had to have been mine due to math and when we slept together. When I asked her why she had sent a certain email or had said something else in a chat message, she denied ever having said or sent those things.

  “Bryce probably changed my chat log or my email. I would have never said those things.”

  I knew she was lying.

  Jessica told me if I wanted to end the relationship and have her move out, she would understand. She just wanted to know what I wanted and what to expect. It was as though she had prepared for that moment, either out of anticipation of the truth coming out or from having been in a similar situation before. Her matter of factness bothered me. I couldn’t think straight with this new knowledge. How could she be so calm about it? I told her I needed time to think about what I wanted next, which meant for the time being we were together, but on the verge of the relationship being over.

  I spent an unhealthy amount of time scouring through emails. I keep all of my emails. It’s the pack-rat inside of me that thinks I might need that email one day. I reconstructed time lines and tried to “prove” to her she was lying. I knew she was lying, and she knew she was lying. For whatever reason it was important for me to show her that her lying was unmistakably obvious.

  Over a period of a few weeks I reconstructed her entire relationship with Bryce in extreme detail. Her memory of their relationship always became hazy whenever I confronted her with information that caught her in a lie. I persisted. Looking back, all I wanted from her was an admission of guilt, an admission that she had lied and caused me pain. Instead, she had selective amnesia. After I showed her how her story didn’t add up, she agreed with me that her story did not match up with the facts. She then gave me the most baffling justification I have ever received, one I would become all too familiar with over the next few years.

  “You’re right Matt, that doesn’t add up. I don’t know. I just don’t remember it like that.”

  I don’t know. As if claiming ignorance about painful events somehow magically removed the transgressions from existence. At the time I didn’t know if she was trying to trick me, play the victim card, or if perhaps her memory was so horrible she really didn’t know. Maybe the person in front of me wasn’t the person who did all of those horrible things. Perhaps she forgot them because they were caused by some factor beyond my understanding. A part of me bought it. She didn’t know.

  Trying to figure out her motivations made me look at mine. My Encyclopedia Brown adventure of proving her lies and trying to figure out “why” made me look at myself and ask the same questions. What I discovered about myself was that I had entered the relationship expecting it to end. I had been planning for a way out, an escape, since the relationship was new. This was an obvious issue with me and my ability to be in an adult relationship. After my first divorce I had gone into defensive mode. Knowing it would end one day made everything safer somehow. Her mistakes notwithstanding, I knew building an emotional escape pod from the relationship was part of the problem too.

  We spent those weeks of not knowing our future, not talking about anything serious and definitely not touching each other in bed. We walked on eggshells as I kept thinking about a topic that pained me. It had been a few weeks since I had discovered her indiscretion, and I just needed the uncertainty and confusion to end. I needed to move on knowing she was committed to me now, not with Bryce, not with anyone else.

  One Saturday morning I surprised her in the shower by joining her. It was the first time we had had sex since finding out about her lies and unfaithfulness. We both understood I had accepted her apology and that we were moving on, together. We talked about it more afterwards. I told her that while I was disgusted with what happened, I was willing to let it go for the sake of our relationship. This time, I was really going to try to make a relationship work instead of always planning my escape. I was jumping in headfirst. It felt liberating to put everything on the line and have blind faith in someone for the first time in years. This relationship was going to be perfect and nothing like the marriage I had ended with my first wife. I was making this choice myself, not simply following the teachings of the church, so I knew it would be perfect.

  It was March of 2005, and I weighed 200 pounds. At 5’10” I knew I was too heavy. We decided to repair the relationship and make our health a priority. I needed to lose weight. So did she.

  | FOUR |

  Trying Again for the First Time

  April 2005

  Our relationship felt new. It felt exciting. It was as though we were at Disneyland for the first time; as if we had never been there one hundred times and never had gone on a ride. For the first time ever, I was making every effort for my relationship to succeed. After all, I had moved to Utah to be with Jessica. I had uprooted my life to be around her, to be with her, to start a life with her. I wondered if I had known all along that we would end up together. Luckily for me we were willing to really put the effort into our relationship and do whatever we could to make our future a reality.

  Our renewed dedication to each other brought not only complete honesty, but also a focus on making ourselves more healthy. We wanted a long happy life together so both of us had to be alive for a long time. Luckily for me, Jessica had once trained as a professional Mixed Martial Arts fighter a few years before I had met her. She told me stories about fighting professionally and would often brag of her third degree black belt in Brazilian Ju-Jitsu.

  Her stint as a professional fighter had been short lived, mainly due to the backlash from her family and the objectification she experienced for being a female fighter. She told me that one night Joe Rogan (the host of a popular reality television show and the commentator on Mixed Martial Arts tournaments) had asked to sleep with her after a fight. She slyly gave Joe Rogan the hotel room key that another man (who was trying to sleep with her) had just given her. The world of professional fighting was not for her.

  Because of her extensive training, she knew how to work out properly, and we did. We ate right, we exercised, and we supported each other. We worked not only towards a healthier us emotionally, but physically as well. I was working at home still, telecommuting for my job in Southern California. She ditched the idea of driving to work and bought a bicycle. We had become urban; commuting on our bikes and working at home. We focused on our health because we both wanted a future together.

  Our renewed relationship did not go unnoticed in the ex-Mormon community. We were still popular. Some people wanted to be like us. Other people wanted to be around us. Jessica and I were strong together. Jessica’s previous indiscretions were unknown to the rest of the community and so was all of the turmoil we had experienced. It was better that they didn’t know. If I no l
onger cared about the past then why should her mistakes be public knowledge?

  “OH MY GOD! You have to come see this!” Jessica yelled from the basement. I was upstairs making dinner. “Get your ass down here now!” I ran downstairs into the study where both of our computers sat. I spent over eight hours a day working in that room.

  “What is it?" Jessica was laughing hysterically. She could not contain herself.

  “Look what I just posted!” Her laughter continued. I saw what she had posted on the Internet and laughed with her. We had a long tradition of posting online as alter-egos. We were professionals at baiting people and then insulting them. This hobby was never something I had done before Jessica. Her apparent zeal and talent for it made joining her so much easier.

  A few months before she and I had joined our friend Bryce (while they were sleeping together) in baiting and insulting people in our small online community. We were the worst. If someone posted a genuine thought on the Internet, all three of us would insult the person who shared had shared his or her most intimate moments with the Internet. We never posted such negative remarks using our real names or even our known pseudonyms. We shared one name, and it made people furious.

  Eventually the truth of who we were came out, and we all stopped immediately. Well, Jessica never stopped. Her hobby was toying with people and seeing what kind of reaction she could get from them. She wanted to know just how far she could push them before they would break. I still welcomed the entertainment while I felt uncertain about the damage of what she was doing. Truthfully, without Jessica’s influence I might never have even entertained the idea of participating in online harassment. She was teaching me how to be normal. I wanted to be funny and popular like she was. Stirring up drama usually made her happy, and a happy Jessica meant a happy Matt. I loved laughing together.