I've Never Been to Vegas, but My Luggage Has: Mishaps and Miracles on the Road to Happily Ever After

by Hale, Mandy

  “Mandy, he really cares about you,” John reasoned. “He would never do anything to purposely hurt you if he was in his right mind. Something else had to be going on that night. Please think about giving him another chance.”

  In the end, I gave Steven another chance. Unfortunately at the time, I either didn’t realize or didn’t want to see that the crazy fit he threw wasn’t just a giant red flag; it was like a blazing red fire, warning me to run for cover. Had I left then, I would have spared myself the next year of torment, lies, betrayal, and abuse. But then again, since the demise of that horrible relationship would ultimately lead to the creation of The Single Woman, how can I really regret a single second of it?

  Chapter 12

  Turbulence

  After Steven’s birthday rampage, things quieted down for a while. He was on his best behavior. I started to feel like maybe things were going to work out between us after all. It’s amazing the lies we’ll tell ourselves to maintain a relationship. My gut knew I needed to run, but my heart felt differently.

  I was always one of those women who scoffed at the Lifetime movies that portrayed domestic violence situations, saying time and again, “I will never be one of those women. The minute a man lays a hand on me, I’m gone.” I viewed those women as weak. I couldn’t imagine anyone choosing to stay with someone who purposely hurt them, over and over again. The thing that I didn’t understand at the time about domestic abuse is that it creeps up on you a little at a time. A push here. A grab there. It doesn’t start with a bloody nose or a black eye. It starts so subtly, you don’t even realize it’s happening. And then the abuser, being the master manipulator, manages to convince you that it’s somehow your fault. You nagged him too much. You picked a fight with him. You pushed him to hit you.

  And then, ashamed, apologetic, and remorseful, the abuser works overtime to make you forget what he did. He brings you flowers. He sends you sweet e-mails and texts. He cooks you dinner. He has no shortage of tricks up his sleeve to make you accept his profuse apologies. Before you know it, you’re lulled into a peaceful oblivion, and all his powerful blows, hate-filled words, and broken promises are just a distant memory that seems more like a bad dream.

  That was the process I went through with Steven following his birthday. I wanted so badly to believe in him, and I wanted so badly to make the relationship work, that I allowed myself to grow complacent. I allowed myself to turn off my inner voice and listen to Steven’s seductive lies. I allowed myself to become one of those women I so pitied. I basically became the Queen of Bad Decisions. Which is not to say I deserved what Steven was dishing out, but I did actively choose to keep taking it. I do bear the burden of responsibility, not for his actions, but for my own. I’m not sure why I was clinging so tightly to the relationship. I think I knew in my gut that it was toxic, and that I didn’t love him like I claimed to. But my relationship that I had believed so strongly in with Mr. E had gone up in smoke, and I hadn’t managed to make any other relationship in the past five years work, so I think somewhere inside I believed that I was flawed, broken, and didn’t deserve any better than Steven. Despite my inner hesitation, I forged blindly ahead with the relationship, determined to prove to myself and to the world that I could sustain love.

  After a few months of dating, Steven came to me one day with a suggestion: “Why don’t we move in together?”

  My moral compass instantly recoiled at the suggestion. Despite the fact that Steven and I were already living in sin and having a sexual relationship, I couldn’t imagine actually physically living with someone outside of marriage. Isn’t it funny how we rate sin? How we think if we do this one but not that one, we’re still doing okay?

  I had made a vow to myself, many years before, that I would never live with a man before marriage. It just wasn’t something that I wanted to do. I had very strong convictions about it and couldn’t fathom breaking that vow to myself and to God. I know a lot of couples live together before marriage. I actually know several Christian couples active in the church—and who had been Christians and active in the church when they got together—who lived together before marriage. I’m not here to judge those people, as that’s not my place. That’s between them and God and their own personal convictions. But for me, living with someone I was in a romantic relationship with, but not married to, simply felt wrong.

  “But you lived with Crawford,” some people might object. I understand the comparison, but there’s a major difference. Crawford was my strictly platonic best friend who just happened to be a male. Crawford and I had never so much as pecked each other on the cheek. We didn’t share a bed. We didn’t have any level of intimacy outside of friendship. He was basically my brother without the blood relation. To me, living with a male friend is no different from living with a female friend. My relationship with Crawford was innocent, pure, and completely God-centered.

  My relationship with Steven, however, was the exact opposite. We were romantically and physically involved. I didn’t feel right about living with him, plain and simple.

  Still, I told him I’d think about it.

  And just like that, sin creeps in.

  Over the next few weeks, I started to convince myself that it wasn’t that big of a deal. We were going to get married eventually anyway, I told myself. It’s not like we’d just be arbitrarily living together. This relationship was going somewhere! This was just a prelude to marriage. And that was okay, right?

  The more I considered it, the more I began to think about how fun it would be to live with Steven. I would have my partner, right there with me, all the time! And I would keep going to church and praying, which meant God would forgive me, right?

  A few days later I said yes to Steven. The more I smiled and laughed on the outside, the more conflicted I felt on the inside. There’s a scripture in Romans that encapsulates perfectly the internal struggle I was experiencing: “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Rom. 7:15 esv). I didn’t really understand why I was doing what I was doing, and I silently hated my willingness to go against what I believed in so strongly for the sake of a relationship, yet I forged ahead anyway.

  That spring I moved out of Crawford’s house and into an apartment with Steven. Saying good-bye to Crawford was physically painful, since I knew he wanted to be happy for me but saw the compromises I was making in an effort to force this relationship to work. He knew I was going against everything I believed in. And he was the only one in my life who knew about Steven’s birthday outburst because I was too embarrassed to tell any of my other friends. Obviously I couldn’t hide it from Crawford, since his birdfeeder had taken the brunt of Steven’s rage that night.

  “I’ll miss you,” Crawford said sadly as he squeezed me into a tight hug on the front porch the day I left. “You know the door is always open for you here.”

  “I know,” I whispered into his shoulder. “I love you.”

  “Love you too.”

  The apartment Steven and I would be sharing was in Murfreesboro, just a few miles away from my parents, but I didn’t tell my parents Steven and I were moving in together. They had been to my new apartment, but assumed I would be living there by myself. I was afraid they wouldn’t approve (which of course they wouldn’t have), but mainly I was just ashamed. Ashamed to be going against my word to God and to myself, ashamed to be openly living in a way that would embarrass them, and ashamed to be doing something that would disappoint them (and God). Of course they figured out within a few weeks that Steven was there all the time, but once again stood out of the way and allowed me to make my own mistakes. I’ve never given my parents enough credit when it comes to knowing me better than I know myself. Here’s the thing, though: if you have to lie about something to the people you love most in the world, and if you have to keep something a secret, it’s not something you should be doing.

  The first few weeks of living with Steven, picking out furniture, and designing our new p
lace was fun, and the dark cloud over me started to lift. I felt like I had finally found a place where I fit. I was finally making a relationship work! Maybe I was just being silly worrying so much about the whole living together thing, I told myself. Everybody lives together before marriage these days, right? This didn’t change who I was in the least. Maybe I needed to stop overthinking everything and learn to just go with it!

  Then the walls of the carefully crafted lies I was telling myself started to crumble—just a bit at first.

  It all started one night when Steven told me he wouldn’t be home for dinner because he had a business meeting in Nashville. He was a real estate agent, and this sounded like a feasible story to me. I didn’t think twice about it as I shot him a text back: “K. Have fun! See you when you get home.”

  I knew his meeting was at six in the evening, so I expected him home by nine, ten at the latest. But eleven rolled around, and he still wasn’t home. Being my mother’s daughter, I started to get a little worried, so I tried to call him. No answer. I sent him a text. No response. My pulse quickened. What if he had decided to have a few drinks at dinner and then drive home? I wasn’t a drinker, but he was, so when we were together, I was always the designated driver. If he was with a bunch of guys, however, and everyone had drinks with dinner, he might have struck out for home without a designated driver. I knew his dinner meeting was at Merchants Restaurant downtown, so when I still hadn’t heard a peep from him by midnight, I called the restaurant.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m looking for my boyfriend, and I can’t reach him on his cell. Can you tell me if he’s anywhere in your restaurant, or maybe at the bar?”

  “Ma’am, there’s no one left in the restaurant or in the bar. We closed an hour ago.”

  Hmm.

  I hung up the phone, wondering what to do next. Just then my phone lit up with a text.

  “Still hung up at Merchants. Leaving in a half hour.”

  Obviously I knew he was lying, but for what reason? Where was he?

  Suddenly something hit me, and I knew where he was. To this day I can’t tell you how I knew, as I had absolutely no reason for suspecting this and no evidence to prove it. Call it female intuition or divine inspiration, but I knew in my gut where he was.

  I tapped out a text: “Hope you’re having fun at the strip club.”

  Five minutes later my phone rang. It was him, raging at me through the phone.

  “How do you know where I am? Are you having me followed now?” he screamed.

  “No, Steven. I am not having you followed. I actually didn’t know where you were until this moment. I just took a shot. Thanks for confirming it, though.”

  I hung up the phone.

  He blew up my cell for what I can only assume was his entire drive home. By the time he finally got there, there was a pillow and blanket waiting for him on the couch, and I was in the bedroom with the door locked. He pounded and pounded, but I ignored him. Finally he wore himself out and stopped, but I got very little sleep that night. It was already 2:00 a.m, and I had to be up at 6:00 a.m. to get ready for work. I felt like such a fool. How could I have ever trusted Steven again after his inexcusable behavior on his birthday? And not only that—I had moved in with him! Now I felt trapped.

  Of course the next morning I woke up to a decadent breakfast and a million apologies.

  “Mandy, I’m so sorry. I feel so horrible about everything that happened last night,” Steven said in a pleading tone as I tried to force down some eggs. “The prospective clients wanted to go to this gentlemen’s club, and I didn’t know how to say no without losing their business! Can’t you understand that?”

  Honestly, I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand at all. But I had made a commitment to live with this person and to make this relationship work, and I was stubbornly determined to see it through.

  So I stayed.

  That’s just one of the many problems with making the choice to live with someone you’re not married to. There’s a false sense of obligation that doesn’t exist when you’re simply dating someone and not living with them. Even though the apartment was in my name, and I could tell Steven to pack his bags and get out at any time, the decision to move in together felt binding, almost like the responsibility of marriage without any of the perks. Had I really been honest with myself, I would have realized that Steven wasn’t truly committed to me and our relationship, or he never would have even considered stepping one foot into a place that defiled women and completely obliterated the bonds of our relationship. And things were only going to get worse.

  I soon figured out that Steven was a pathological liar. He would lie about things that made no sense to lie about. He would lie when the truth was better. Some of the lies I caught him in were absolutely ridiculous, like pretending to be sick so he could stay home and have his buddies over to watch a ball game instead of coming to a work function with me. Of course I got home later that night and figured out from the beer cans and pizza boxes cluttering the garbage can that he wasn’t really sick. So why lie instead of just telling me that he’d rather hang out with his friends than go to dinner with me and my coworkers? Big lies, little lies, they were all the same to Steven.

  It was a month or so after we moved in together that he got physical with me for the first time.

  Arguing a lot was normal for us, and screaming matches frequently broke out, but on this particular night, Steven was even angrier than usual. He was stalking around the room, ranting and raving and shaking his fists. When I went to speak up, he thundered over to me and kicked my feet out from under me as I stood on the hard tile kitchen floor. I crashed to the ground, my ankle pinned beneath me at an unnatural angle. At first he ignored my screams of pain, telling me I was faking my tears. It was only when he saw me attempt to stand to my feet and my legs crumpled beneath me that a look of guilt started to register on his face.

  I called in sick to work the next day, pretending to have the flu. And I limped for three days after. But only in private. In public, I steeled myself to walk as normally as possible to keep anyone from asking questions about what had happened. I protected him, while he was doing nothing to protect me.

  Slowly the violence started to escalate. Steven would grab my arms and shake me, leaving dark purple bruises all up and down my arms. Bruises that my coworker Jane would notice.

  “Mandy,” she said with concern the first time she saw them, “what’s going on?”

  I looked down at my arms. Darn it! I had absentmindedly worn a sleeveless top to work that day. Looking back on it now, maybe it actually wasn’t absentminded at all. Maybe it was a cry for help.

  I immediately went into defense mode.

  “Oh, nothing! It’s fine. Steven and I got into an argument, and he grabbed me a little too hard, but honestly, it was my fault. He was exhausted, and I was nagging him to take out the garbage. I can be so overbearing sometimes!” I laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world, barely even recognizing the sound of my own voice. My entire life had become one big lie.

  Soon the grabbing and the shaking escalated to the next level. While on a weekend trip to the mountains to try and work on our rapidly deteriorating relationship, Steven head-butted me in the parking garage of our hotel, causing me to fall to the ground and literally see stars. I laid there, a searing pain shooting through my head, unable to move.

  “Mandy, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” Steven knelt next to me and gently picked me up from the pavement. “Please forgive me. I just love you so much, sometimes my emotions get the best of me.”

  Here’s a hint, ladies: there’s no such thing as “loving someone so much” you’re forced to hit them. True love doesn’t hurt, and it doesn’t hit.

  A few weeks after the disastrous trip, we were having one of our usual arguments outside because he would dart out of the house the minute I tried to communicate with him about anything. It was impossible to have a normal, adult discussion with Steve
n because he would instantly accuse me of nagging him and either start screaming and hitting or simply run away, like a child. I was getting so desperate to make things work, I chased him out the door to continue the conversation. That’s when he turned on me, slamming me down so hard against the hood of my car, I thought I was going to black out. I slid off the hood and to the ground and just lay there in a heap. Instead of staying to see if I was okay, Steven jumped in his car and peeled out of the driveway. I limped back inside and lay down gingerly on the couch, wondering what in the world I was doing and why I was choosing to remain in such a toxic situation.

  I knew where a lot of my hesitance to sever the relationship stemmed from: Steven and our dysfunction had become my whole world. Because of my embarrassment about the violent, unhealthy nature of our relationship, I had started dodging my friends’ phone calls and avoiding anyone in my life who knew me well enough to take one look at me and know something was desperately wrong. This included my friends, my coworkers, my parents, and my church. I had done what so many victims of domestic abuse do—I had closed myself off from any other lines of communication outside of my abuser. I didn’t want to look in the faces of the people who loved me and see how far I had fallen mirrored in their eyes. I had frozen out my support system, the very people who cared about me the most in the world, and all the while I was clinging for dear life to a sinking ship.

  One night he told me an old female friend that he had known for years was coming into town later that week, and he wanted us to have dinner with her. This sounded reasonable to me, so I quickly agreed. Obviously he was including me in the plans, so he must not have anything to hide, right?

  Wrong.