My boyfriend and I were relaxing after spending the afternoon with his mom who is in town for a few days.
I was at the computer desk he was watching the basketball game and we were chatting about random things when out of the blue he said “I’m going to live in Colorado one day”.
I asked him why and he said for skiing. I immediately thought of Unmentionable, an old boyfriend who I hadn’t seen or heard from since 1997. Unmentionable used to take off from Long Island to Colorado to work at some ski resort and drive a bus in trade for free ski slope privileges. He’d be gone for the whole winter and never call me.
Needless to say it wasn’t a great relationship, very much in the unrequited category with me doing all the requiting. And it ended very badly. After one of his Colorado trips,he’d been back for a week or two before I even found out he had returned. Not only that but he’d finally gotten Ms.Thing to be his girlfriend and hadn’t bothered to let me in on it. Our mutual friend The Other Ms.Thing was the one who let me know. It was really devastating. Real Lifetime Movie Materiel.
So when Awesome Boyfriend said skiing and I thought of Unmentionable, I said so. And without thinking I began to describe some of the bad associations I had with men and skiing and Colorado and I happened to mention that Unmentionable and I were “together” for about 6 years.
Awesome Boyfriend took this hard. I think it was the 6 years part that got to him. Rather than the fact that I’d had a boyfriend before the boyfriend before I met him…if that makes any sense. I might have had a few boyfriends but I never had a good boyfriend until Awesome Boyfriend.
Most of my relationships prior to Awesome Boyfriend looked very bad on paper and this one I’m talking about was the worst and why would I want to talk about that with Awesome Boyfriend? I’d already told him the other guys I’d been involved with had failed me in the commitment department.
The 6 years spent being tortured by Unmentionable was just a hap-hazard grouping of painful events that yes, spanned 6 years of my life but no one could ever describe what went on as me and Unmentionable “being together”. And if Unmentionable and I had not had The Other Ms. Thing as a mutual friend it wouldn’t have lasted more than 1 day.
I tried to explain this to Awesome Boyfriend but I was feeling horribly guilty because of his reaction and I couldn’t verbalize that well. He just got angrier, like I’d been hiding something all this time we’d been together.
I do not feel I had been hiding Unmentionable or the length of time I knew Unmentionable. I just didn’t think it was an important aspect of my life previous to Awesome Boyfriend that he needed to know; such as if I’d ever been married or had had a child ( No, No ) before I met him.