Just When It Was All Tickety-Boo

Betrayal !  It’s an ugly word.

For me betrayal apparently happens over small things, it’s not the big thing that others describe replete with the frenzy of Armageddon.  In fact I think the worst betrayal I experienced was because she didn’t know she’d done it, despite it being implemented months before it was activated.

We had a primarily online relationship over many years.  I was probably a bit pushy as a sub and she was scared by commitment.  The pattern was played out many times, the emotional closeness would deepen and I’d start thinking that ‘this time we can break the pattern’.  Then the elastic would snap and she’d break.  Her go to strategy was a week of silence after which there would be a tearful email from the Middle East where she’d taken a short notice contract for a few months, we’d be back to square one and on hold until she came back.

I suppose that these days you would say that it was ghosting and quite refined ghosting.

By the time I am recalling she had enrolled in university and spending the summer holiday working in the Middle East was lucrative enough to pay for the rest of the year.  So it was no surprise when we had the conversation about her going and the dates.  What was important to me was that she’d expressed keen interest in attending an event with me late in the summer.  Something I was really looking forward to.

So yes, we discussed her dates and when she would be back in the UK in order to make the event – about a week before, she said.  It was all quite tickety-boo.

With that reassurance I went ahead, booked tickets and hotel etc, all in, over £1000 and settled back to conversations from the Middle East every couple of days.

With about 3 weeks to go to the event I wondered exactly when she was coming back and asked.  The reply was a kick in the stomach, she gave a date a week past the event.  Was that an extension to the original contract ?  No it wasn’t, that had always been the length of the contract.

She’d deliberately lied to me several months earlier, no intention of making the event.  Then she’d forgotten about the lie and revealed the secret betrayal.  Indeed, she never knew that she’d been caught out as I never raised the subject.

Each little betrayal is not enough to destroy everything, yet it becomes an unrecoverable path as small things are no longer shrugged off as a mistake when you’re more likely to wonder how deliberate they are and start to question everything.

No, I’ve never had that big explosion.  Instead a drip feed of little moments that destroyed the trust, the fantasy and the belief.  Death of a relationship by a thousand cuts.

It certainly helped me outgrow the limitations of a largely online relationship.  In future relationships I could touch flesh and blood, look into someone’s eyes for that mutual reassurance.

Written for the #WickedWednesday meme of “Betrayal”.  Why not go check out the other posts by clicking on the button.