Stephen and I: Part One

I’ve struggled to figure out how exactly to write this post. It’s a post I’ve wanted to a do for a while, but just didn’t have the time or opportunity. Now that we’re approaching the one-month anniversary of our marriage, I feel like I should explain our story. There are a few juicy bits I never mentioned…

A while back, when I mentioned our upcoming wedding, I received an email from someone who regularly comments on my blog. She asked if things had improved between Stephen and I, and you know what? I immediately felt guilty.

When Stephen and I first met, it was instant-attraction on both sides. However, we were met with quite a few obstacles. We lived about an hour apart, I was one month fresh of an awful breakup and…well, Stephen had a girlfriend. That last one was pretty much the biggest issue, considering he’d been with her, on and off, for around three years. Their relationship wasn’t a great one. Things had happened on both sides solely to cause pain to the other. It proved to be very tumultuous while Stephen was in Iraq for a year and a half, with both committing egregious acts to cause the other pain. I think his ex said it best when she told me in an email, “right from the beginning of our relationship, things weren’t right. It was always awkward, confusing, and neither of us had the balls to admit so. Our way out was doing horrible things to each other.” I’m not saying what either of them did was right and I won’t name any specifics, but the relationship wasn’t healthy.

The night I met Stephen, I sensed that he wasn’t single. And when I confronted him, he told me he was single. In email conversations to Heather a few days after I’d met him, we properly coined the nickname, “DB” for Stephen. There’s still a tag dedicated to “DB” in fact, it was how I referred to him on my blog. The DB was because the morning after I’d met Stephen, I found out through a few channels that he did have a girlfriend. And I called him out on it. I wasn’t overly attached to Stephen, I’ll admit. Sure, I’d never experienced such a pull towards another person, but I had only known him like 20 hours. I was annoyed, but I didn’t let it bother me. He admitted it to me when called out, but I wasn’t letting him off the hook for lying that easy.

In discussing with Heather how I could blog about him, we decided DB was suitable enough and I used it in my very first blog post about him. I used it on twitter quite a bit, too. The only ones who knew exactly what it stood for were Heather and I, so when Stephen commented on that blog post, using the DB handle, I couldn’t help but laugh. What did DB stand for?

Douchebag.

Yes, my first nickname for my now-husband was Douchebag. Why? Because he was! The morning after, when I called him out on having a girlfriend, he admitted fully and I said I just was not down with that. He proceeded to try and have dates me with all that following week. I didn’t budge, until Thursday, when I went to his friend’s house for an impromptu wii bowling party. The entire time, I wanted so badly to snuggle with him, but he was a taken guy. I was NOT down with that. I didn’t want to be THAT girl. When I left that night, things were fairly unresolved. I told him I pretty much couldn’t be around him, not with the whole girlfriend drama going on. So I left that night, fully expecting to never hear from him again. I was sitting in the McDonalds parking lot at 2 AM, listening to Queen and eating cold French fries, trying to be okay with the whole thing. I made it home, went to bed and woke up the next day, Friday, went to work then home. I received a phone call from a fellow Vermonter who had found me through my blog, who I had been talking to for a few weeks. He was much older than me, but had his shit together, ie: NO GIRLFRIEND. We were making plans to meet up the following day for a luncheon, after I’d stalled meeting him long enough. And then call-waiting kicked in, guess who it was? Stephen.

I answered and he asked me to meet him at his friend’s house to talk. So I went.

To be continued…. Including how I dated the older blogger and Stephen on the same night….