PART 6 – I Had Made Two Different Promises to Two Different Women, and I Was Still Hoping Neither Would Ask Me to Explain Them

I used to think the hardest part of living a lie was remembering the details.

I was wrong.

The hardest part was knowing that the people who trusted you were making plans around something that wasn't true.

Emma had planned an evening with me.

Caroline had accepted a relationship with me based on what I had told her about my marriage.

Neither woman had the full picture.

I did.

And I kept it that way because the truth would have forced me to make a decision.

I wanted to avoid that decision for as long as possible.

I wanted Emma to decide the marriage was finished.

I wanted Caroline to believe I had already made that decision.

Those were different things.

I understood the difference even while I pretended not to.

With Emma, I wanted the responsibility to belong to someone else.

With Caroline, I wanted the outcome to seem settled before I had done anything honest to settle it.

I was trying to have the ending without the difficult part in between.

I didn't think about what it would mean if either woman learned the truth.

I thought about how I might explain it.

That was the order of my thinking.

Protect myself first.

Understand the damage later.

If Emma asked why I hadn't come, I could say work had kept me late.

If she asked why I had stopped making time for us, I could talk about how difficult things had become.

If she asked about the money, I could tell her I was still working through it.

I had an answer for every question that might give me another day.

I had no answer that would make the whole situation honest.

That should have told me something.

Instead, I treated the lack of a good answer as a reason to keep waiting.

I told myself that speaking before I was ready would only make things worse.

It sounded responsible.

It wasn't.

I wasn't waiting because I wanted to be careful with Emma's feelings.

I was waiting because I wanted to avoid seeing her hurt.

There is a difference between those things.

One puts the other person first.

The other puts your own discomfort first and calls it concern.

I had been doing the second for a long time.

The anniversary brought that habit into focus, though I still refused to look at it directly.

Emma had chosen a restaurant.

She had made the reservation.

She had asked about my shirt.

She had checked that the time worked for me.

She had given me every opportunity to tell her I couldn't make it.

I had accepted the plans and allowed her to believe they mattered to me in the same way they mattered to her.

Then I sent the message about work.

I made it sound like something had happened beyond my control.

Nothing had.

I had simply chosen not to be there.

I could have told Emma I was unhappy.

I could have admitted that I had become involved with Caroline.

I could have said I didn't know how to repair the marriage.

Those would have been difficult words.

But they would have been mine to say.

Instead, I wanted Emma to discover the distance between us and decide what it meant.

I wanted her to carry the weight of naming the problem.

I wanted to stand nearby and agree that things had become impossible.

It would have allowed me to feel less guilty.

It would not have made me less responsible.

I can see that clearly now.

At the time, I kept telling myself that the marriage had already changed beyond recognition.

I used that thought to make my choices seem like the natural next step.

But a relationship can be troubled without being finished.

A person can be unhappy without having the right to deceive someone.

And being uncertain about the future does not excuse lying about the present.

I knew none of that in a way that mattered.

Or I knew it and chose not to act on it.

The result was the same.

I continued to make promises that helped me avoid the consequences of breaking them.

I had promised Emma I would meet her.

I had promised Caroline, through my account of the separation, that she was not becoming involved with a man who was still presenting himself as a husband at home.

I had made both promises easier for myself by leaving out the parts that contradicted them.

I wanted each woman to believe I was being honest.

I wanted neither woman to have enough information to question me.

That was not an accident.

It was the arrangement I had created.

And the longer I kept it going, the more I depended on both women believing that I was better than the choices I was making.

Click here to continue reading: PART 7: The More I Tried to Keep Everyone Calm, the More I Needed Them to Believe Things That Were Never True