Vacations with my boyfriend

He was actually my husband, but I like using boyfriend because it sounds cuter. We took so many wonderful trips together. Many for birthdays and celebrations, but also to visit friends after their mass exodus to Europe when you started dropping evidence of their involvement in my “plan” or “game” whatever you wanna call it. France, Italy, Greece, you name it. We went so many places, usually on my dime, but that’s love right? Financially it worked in his favor that I carried so much guilt for being a mostly shitty person. I have since shed the shackles of societal shame, embraced my shadow side. I’ve done this with a lot of help from kink culture. You can normalize maladaptive tendencies for things like emotional abuse by calling it “Emotional Sadism” and claiming you’re a “Dom” doing it to better your “Sub”. Of course, in kink culture they highly stress the concept of consent, so I have things I still need to work on.

Boyfriend and I loved to travel. Even though I was the Emotional Sadist in the relationship he was the extravert, I’m the introvert (INTJ), highly insecure and therefore easily stressed by travel so I would use him like a security blanket. He loved to feel needed, but it can still be emotionally taxing to constantly be at the whim of another person’s irrational feelings all the time, especially when they’re not a toddler and they control the money and everything else about the relationship. Anyway, I’m getting off track…

For a long time, I was basically in the closet. I don’t feel a need to reveal my sexuality to the public. I dropped enough clues in my song lyrics to keep everyone guessing. Clearly that’s my bag, creating confusion and intrigue around my persona. I’m not big on social media, at least not using my real-life identity, so in the first few years of our relationship there wasn’t much of us online together. That worked in my favor with you. The characters I created for you to interact with kept referencing a relationship (see, I do tell the truth) but you never saw any evidence of one, so you thought that detail was part of my storytelling. As time went on, I loosened the reigns on what I allowed my friends to share on their IG accounts. It was a masterful move on my part. I let a slow trickle of information come your way, pics of us floating around in our swim trunks at beachfront locations with friends, etc., while simultaneously denying it when I would text you from burner phones or DM you from my other accounts. It’s not a lie if I never told you it was really me sending the messages.

Obviously, his existence for you wasn’t a question of if you wanted to be with me or not, by this time the answer to that was a definitive “NO.” For you the need to know the truth on that topic was about fully understanding the level of cruelty involved in what I was doing to you, the scope of my game design, and who the other players were. I was excited for the moment of discovery, too. Finally, I did my big reveal, instructing my donkey friend to post photos of me and BF kissing. Like the plot to a bad 80’s movie where the cool kids dupe a nerd into thinking they were part of the in-group only to deliver the crushing blow of realization that they were being made a fool of the entire time, I did my best to smash your spirit to bits. Unfortunately, you cared less about being cool than I thought you did and more about collecting all your “evidence” and now my BF was on your radar. I will admit, you were playing my game better than I expected you would. You did create quite a bit of chaos in our lives. En-garde!