CHEMISTRY vs. COMPATIBILITY part 1
The Other Woman Was Never the Enemy
I once tried to rekindle a fifth-grade fantasy.
Because apparently adulthood wasn’t complicated enough, I decided it would be a good idea to revisit a boy I had dated briefly in the fifth grade and see if maybe, after all those years, there was some great unfinished love story waiting for us.
There wasn't.
There was a dumpster fire.
And, because apparently I enjoy learning lessons the hard way, I stayed in the dumpster fire for way longer than any reasonably functioning adult should have.
This man had a cheating problem.
I remember the first time I really caught him.
I was standing in front of one of the mirrors in my room doing my makeup. And when I say mirrors, I mean mirrors everywhere. Walls. Ceiling. If I'd figured out how to put one on the floor without breaking my neck, I probably would have done that too.
I loved mirrors.
Which is pretty fucking ironic when you think about it, because at that point in my life I apparently wasn't looking very closely at myself.
He was sitting on my bed behind me.
There was a mirror on the wall behind him, and while I was doing my makeup, I caught the reflection of his phone.
He was on a dating app.
Swiping.
Left. Right. Whatever the hell the little digital roulette wheel of infidelity was doing.
I confronted him.
And this man actually tried to convince me he wasn't swiping.
I'm not even making that up.
He was the world's worst liar.
I was looking at the reflection of his phone in a mirror while he was holding the phone in his hand, and somehow we were supposed to enter a courtroom where he was going to argue the evidence.
I should have left then.
I didn't.
At the time, I was in the middle of what had become about a ten-year battle with addiction. Looking back, it was probably somewhere around the height of it.
And honestly?
I must have had horrible self-esteem.
Because I was allowing this piece of shit to walk all over me.
He would break up with me and go fuck other women.
He'd get involved with other couples.
He'd have threesomes.
And I wasn't even necessarily against any of that. If that's what we were both into, fine. I'm not interested in pretending I'm somebody I'm not.
But if we're doing it together, we're doing it together.
Unfortunately, there were apparently a few occasions where I wasn't invited to my own relationship.
That should have been a clue.
It wasn't the only clue.
This man would go through my phone while I was sleeping. My friends would catch him on my phone or my laptop while I was asleep, digging through everything he could possibly find.
Old emails.
Old conversations.
Shit that happened before I even knew him.
He once found an email I'd sent long before we were together and started losing his mind over it.
Imagine being jealous of a version of your girlfriend who didn't even know you existed yet.
That's some Olympic-level insecurity.
And still, I stayed.
Every time he cheated, I'd get pissed. We'd break up. I'd start getting over him.
Then he'd come back.
Crying.
Apologizing.
Promising.
And I'd take him back.
Like an idiot.
This cycle went on far longer than it should have.
Then one night, toward the end, we were staying together in a little RV.
His phone started blowing up while he was in the shower.
It woke me out of a dead sleep.
I reached over to shut the ringer off, and the screen lit up with an urgent Facebook notification.
It was from a woman.
And unfortunately, I knew exactly who she was.
She had been at the center of one of our previous fights.
My first reaction?
Fuck her.
I opened Messenger and started typing.
And I was pissed.
Not regular pissed, either.
I was writing the kind of message that probably would have gotten me blocked, arrested, or at minimum nominated for some kind of Lifetime Achievement Award in Bad Decisions.
I was halfway through my vicious little masterpiece when something stopped me.
I looked at what I was writing.
And suddenly I thought:
Why the fuck am I mad at her?
She wasn't cheating on me.
He was.
She wasn't the one begging me to let him come back.
He was.
She wasn't the one lying to me.
He was.
She wasn't stealing from me.
He was.
She wasn't gaslighting me.
He was.
She wasn't making promises to me and breaking them.
He was.
She wasn't my boyfriend.
So why was I about to make her my enemy?
That was the moment something clicked.
I deleted the message.
And I started over.
I told her the truth.
I told her that when I first saw her name, I was pissed. I admitted that the message I had started writing was a nasty one.
But halfway through writing it, I realized she wasn't the person I was angry with.
I told her I knew he was lying to me. I knew he was reaching out to women. I didn't need another enemy. I didn't want more drama.
I just wanted the truth.
I asked her that if he contacted her again, she'd let me know.
And here's the part that stayed with me.
She responded with kindness.
She told me she had never had another woman approach her about something like that without immediately attacking her.
She told me that the way I handled it showed character and dignity.
That hit me.
Because I realized something I probably should have figured out years earlier:
Women don't have to be enemies just because the same man is involved.
We don't have to fight over men.
We don't have to threaten each other.
We don't have to tear another woman apart because some dude couldn't keep his dick, his lies, or his ego under control.
And more importantly, sometimes another woman can actually become an ally.
She can tell you the truth.
She can confirm what your gut already knows.
She can save you from believing another lie.
I realized I trusted that woman more in that moment than I trusted the man sleeping beside me.
And that told me everything I needed to know.
I finally broke it off.
Well...
Sort of.
Because let's be honest.
The man had good dick.
I'm not going to rewrite history just because I'm writing a blog.
I tried getting back together with him and starting over.
That's the problem with unstable bridges. You can repaint them all you want, but if the damn foundation is fucked, you're still standing over a canyon.
Eventually, every argument became about his lies.
And when I wouldn't accept the lies, the gaslighting started.
Except here's the problem with gaslighting me:
I'm pretty fucking connected to reality.
So when he couldn't convince me that what I had seen, heard, and experienced wasn't real, things escalated.
The gaslighting turned physical.
He assaulted me.
Not playfully.
Not accidentally.
Violently.
And eventually I had enough.
This little motherfucker needed to get away from me.
I finally got away from him.
But the person who ultimately helped me understand just how badly I needed to get away was a man named David.
David met both of us through a mutual friend.
We were all hanging out and partying, and David and I started hitting it off.
The douchebag noticed.
And he was not amused.
At one point, David and I were talking. David walked away with this huge grin on his face.
I looked at my boyfriend.
Smoke was practically coming out of both his ears.
Three days later, douchebag was gone.
And I was hanging out with Dave.
I didn't find out until almost two years later what that conversation between them had actually been.
David told him:
"Hey bro, I'm taking your girl."
Douchebag laughed.
"Yeah, right."
And David looked at him and basically said:
"Look, I got the 411. You don't love her. If you did, you wouldn't share her. You wouldn't lie to her. You wouldn't steal from her. You wouldn't cheat on her. And you sure as fuck wouldn't put your hands on her again."
That conversation stuck with me.
Because David wasn't talking about ownership.
He wasn't saying, She's mine now.
He was saying something much more important:
If you love somebody, your behavior has to fucking prove it.
Love isn't what you call somebody.
It's what you do.
Trust is earned.
Respect is earned.
Loyalty is earned.
And none of those things are owed to you just because you've decided to call somebody your girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, wife, partner, soulmate, twin flame, Facebook relationship status, or whatever bullshit title humans have invented this week.
And here's what I learned about women through all of this:
Be a girl's girl.
Not blindly.
Not stupidly.
And definitely not at the expense of your own safety.
But stop automatically treating another woman like the enemy.
If your man is cheating, ask yourself why the fuck you're fighting her.
If she's knowingly sleeping with your husband after being told you're married, that's a different conversation.
But if she doesn't know?
Tell her.
Don't threaten her.
Don't humiliate her.
Don't make her pay the bill for his bad behavior.
Give her the information.
Let her make her own decision.
Because I've been the woman on both sides of that conversation.
I've been the woman who wanted to rip another woman's head off.
And I've been the woman who realized, Wait a minute. She's not the one fucking me over.
And that realization changed something in me.
Women already have enough shit thrown at us.
We're judged for how we dress.
How we fuck.
Who we fuck.
How many people we've fucked.
Whether we have kids.
Whether we don't have kids.
Whether we're too loud.
Too quiet.
Too fat.
Too skinny.
Too emotional.
Not emotional enough.
We're constantly being compared to one another.
And then some of us turn around and help the system do the work for them.
Fuck that.
I don't need to hate another woman because some man couldn't behave himself.
I don't need to compete with her.
I don't need to be prettier than her.
I don't need to be younger than her.
I don't need to prove that I'm "better."
And I sure as hell don't need to fight her for a man.
Because if I have to fight another woman to keep a man...
He's already not mine.
That's the lesson.
Sometimes the woman you think is your competition is actually the person who can hand you the truth.
Sometimes she knows something you don't.
Sometimes she's just as clueless as you are.
And sometimes she's the one who gives you the final piece of information you need to walk away.
So ladies, maybe we stop treating every other woman like she's the enemy.
Maybe we start telling each other the truth.
Maybe we protect each other when we can.
Maybe we call out bullshit when we see it.
Maybe we stop helping shitty men create wars between women while they sit in the middle collecting attention from both sides.
And maybe, just maybe, we become the kind of women who can look at another woman and say:
"Girl, I don't have a problem with you. I have a problem with the motherfucker who lied to both of us."
Because that's where the real power is.
Not in being the woman who "won."
In being the woman who finally realized there was never a competition to begin with.
And if some asshole needs two women fighting over him to feel important?
Let him have his little fantasy.
I'll be over here with the other woman, comparing notes.
Because apparently that's how we find out who's actually the piece of shit. 🖤
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