It Happened To Me: My Boyfriend's Ex Faked Suicide to Lure Him Back
Happy leave your old Valentines alone Day! That's the message I hope all exes get from my crazy cautionary tale, today and always.
By Sarah Swinwood
The first time I lived with a boyfriend, I was in my 40s. Ricky and I met when he was 51 but we didn’t actually start dating until a year later when we ran into each other by chance. We loved to sleep wrapped up in each other's arms, snuggling and giving each other little kisses. It didn’t take long for us to figure out we wanted to always sleep beside each other, his huge, muscular arms and legs, my slender, tiny little frame. Our bodies fit together like a Japanese puzzle box. We loved love.
He had a place upstate and would come to the city just a few days a week. When we started seeing each other, he was still staying those days at his ex-girlfriend’s apartment, but not in the same bed, he told me. They hadn’t been intimate in over a year. At our age, it was understandable that we both had people from our pasts around. I didn’t like the arrangement, but I didn’t feel threatened by it either. He was transparent and had no reason to lie.
It wasn’t until week three when she phoned him while I was sitting in the truck beside him and I could hear her yelling at him about when he was coming home and how long he planned on staying before leaving her with his dog.
“That sounds like a woman who thinks she is in a relationship with you,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” he told me. “It’s not how it sounds. That’s actually why we are not together anymore, her constant yelling and erratic temper.”
“If you and I are going to continue pursuing a relationship, this is not going to be sustainable,” I insisted.
How could we allow falling in love if he had an ex that he was not only staying with but would call and yell at him? I didn’t know her— and I had a feeling that she didn’t know about me. We had been unfolding so organically, Ricky and I, that our mutual affection and attraction was the only thing I’d been noticing. But, after her call, I wondered what this woman looked like. She had no social media and he only had one blurry photo of her. I couldn’t get a read.
Then, I started noticing her name pop up on his phone more frequently. He’d brought me to his country house, introduced me to his friends and taken me for dinner every other night in the city. He wasn’t hiding me… but she couldn’t have known about us.
Ricky took me to his beach house. His efforts to make space for our blossoming relationship were sincere. I couldn’t shake the feeling that his ex’s life was more interwoven with his than he had admitted to me, or to himself. Her sneakers were at the back door, hair elastics stacked on the base of his drive shift in the truck. I finally saw a clear picture of her on the side of the fridge, with Ricky, in a photo booth, him in a rugby jersey and baseball cap, bashfully smirking and revealing his slight sexy gap tooth and bright blue eyes. Sadie with a golden tan, long blonde hair and toothpaste commercial smile. There was another photo of him with a woman who had long, curly hair, a huge grin and a helmet on, her arms wrapped around him on the back of a scooter.
“Is this Sadie?” I asked him about the blonde in the photo.