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By Catherine Gryp, October 10, 2011 6:00 am

There it was, at the bottom of the tan purse I never wear: a grocery list from another life.

Toothpaste

Frozen dinners

Diet Coke

Ice cream

Cheez-Its

Oatmeal cookies

I haven’t thought of buying Cheez-Its or oatmeal cookies since the day I moved out of your house. This list was pre-breakup.

A year ago, finding this list would have been devastating. Alongside this list would have come tears, regret and hurt. This slip of paper would have been a painful window into a world where I was part of a “we” who were planning to get married and live happily ever after.

Today, this list is simply a reminder of my past. I feel nostalgic, but not sad. Pensive, but not overwhelmed. And I throw the list away.

I’m (almost) over you.

I’ve created this timeline of my life. There’s pre you – the years until I was 18. There’s you – 18-25. And then there’s post-you, my life after canceling our wedding.

I’m realizing that post-you are some of the best times of my life. I like who I am post-you more than I’ve ever liked myself before.

I’m (almost) over you.

I don’t think of you as often as I used to. In fact, this is probably the least in my adult life I’ve thought about you. Since we started dating when I was 18, it was all you, you, you. I liked you. I loved you. I worried about you. I cared for you. I thought about you. With you, I had some of the most romantic moments of my life. You, you, you.

And then it all came crashing down. You hurt me. You lied to me. You caused me pain. I was angry with you. I couldn’t bring myself to forgive you. I missed you. I yearned for you. I wanted you back. But I didn’t want you back. I wanted my old life with you back. You, you, you.

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By Catherine Gryp, July 25, 2011 6:00 am

Image by Mystic Musings via Flickr

“I’m 95 percent positive that we’ll be canceling the wedding, and I wanted to see if we could get our deposit back,” I wrote that April day.

This was the wedding venue for which I’d searched for months, the address that was printed eloquently on the invitations that were going out in just one week. This is where, in three short months, I was supposed to say “I do” to the man I had loved for seven years. Yet, here I was, about to cancel our reservation.

I was really 95 percent positive that my life was over. I had just spent days being a crazy-eyed sleuth, searching through emails and internet files, receipts and browsing histories, realizing minute by minute that my fiancé was not the man he said he was.

The lies–big and small–started to stack up. I could almost see them in a pile in front of me. He told me that I now knew everything. Yet, the pile got taller. No, now I knew everything, he claimed, but the pile continued to grow. He stood in front of me and told me that he was sorry, that he had changed, that all he wanted in the world was to marry me. What he didn’t know was that the pile of lies had grown so deep, so tall, it was now a mountain through which I could no longer see him.

I couldn’t go through with the wedding. No amount of work on this relationship would prepare me to put on my ivory, sweetheart dress and walk down that aisle. No amount of couples counseling would make me look past the mountain of lies and see the man that I had loved so deeply.

One evening, we invited his parents over, to tell them that the wedding was off. This beautiful couple, who had been married for forty years, were dumbfounded at our decision. We made it clear that he was to blame for the breakup, but didn’t go into the sordid details of what he had done. It wasn’t their business, and it wasn’t my place to ruin their perception of him.

As angry and as sad as I was, I didn’t want anyone else to see him the way I now did. I wanted to protect them from seeing their own son through the mountain of lies I now saw him through.

Continue reading 'Love Conquers All'»