It Happened To Me: My Husband Dumped Me On Face Time

PLUS something happened to Jane also. Console them both here.

Hi funkies!

I’m doing some very rough math and figuring that since I started this “It Happened To Me” feature in the first issue of Sassy magazine, I have received maybe 50,000 submissions. Or so. Some are so easy to say yes to from the subject line alone. That was the case when I received this from Alexis, but then her telling of it took it beyond just that whopper of a headline. So I'm going to say no more about her provocative and beautifully written story and let you experience it for yourselves.

Instead, I'm going to give you a little bonus It Happened To Me of my own, to maybe brighten up your Thursday. It's called I Got Permanently Banned from Whole Foods. Here's the short version so that you can get on to the good writing below it:

I go into the Whole Foods in my neighborhood looking for supplements and watermelon for my daughter who is home sick (watermelon good for hydration). There are no carts when I go in and though there is a clear sign saying not to shop into your own bags, I ask someone in front (on behalf of a bunch of us who have gathered there) if that's OK to do since there are no carts and he said he can’t find any coming anywhere soon. “Go ahead,” my green-aproned accomplice in crime (you’ll see) says with a wave gesturing to the racks of kale chips and beyond. The group of us take him up on his offer.

I walk around the store gathering what I need into my bags and at one point, I go near the front of the store, but not outside of the store, for reception and quiet so I can call my daughter to see how she's feeling and make sure I got all the right stuff. While I'm talking to her, a swarm of burly security guards comes over and says I need to come with them. I tell them I'm not done shopping yet and they clearly don't give a shit. I tell them that I haven’t yet paid for what’s in my bags and they don't care about that either. So they take me to an eerie tiny room (I want to say a “back room” because that sounds like where it should be but actually it's right up in the front, behind the ostrich eggs and bananas!).

Besides me and the four or five security people, the room is filled with electronic surveillance equipment, tons of screens showing aisles of shoppers whose videos seem to zoom in and out, and a militaristic cold steel vibe, everything grey with a depressing low dropped down ceiling. (I hate dropped ceilings.) And why is it so dark in there?

They ask if I have the funds to pay, which thank goodness for credit cards I do. So they take me to the checkout where I pay for what's in the bags (even though I wasn't even sure I wanted all of it, but whatever at that point when I was more intent on showing them that I am not a thief, because I have a guilty conscience that makes me think I'm carrying a gun every time I go through a metal detector anyway - but that's another mental health issue).

Just as they are telling me I can exit out the front, one of them gets an alert on his walkie-talkie (for real) saying that the policy has changed as of that day and they now need to get a record on everyone they catch, regardless of how it’s resolved. So before I go, they take my picture and have me sign a document saying that if I even enter the doors of another Whole Foods anywhere in the world ever in my life into perpetuity, it will be considered a felony and prosecuted as such.

This was very shortly after Jeff Bezos took over. And I'm happier not to support him, so joke’s on them. Plus I think I helped those security guards meet their quota that day, so that's something.

If any of you knows someone who works at Whole Foods, look in the system and take a picture of my little face which is apparently in some database that all Whole Foods’ can access. I want to see it!

And now on to today’s worthy featured story. Let's all talk more about it with Alexis in the comments.

xox Jane

PS Send your “It Happened To Me” on any topic at all to jane@anotherjaneprattthing.com. I would love it and I read them all. I haven't read all 50,000 but I read them all now.

Me on my way to live in Amsterdam for one year after subletting my BK apartment. I’m still here almost 6 years later.

By Alexis Mera Damen

“I love you, but I’m not in love with you. I don’t want to have sex with you, and I can’t make plans with you.” My husband read those words straight from his iPhone Notes, sitting beside me after weeks of couples therapy in early 2019.

I met my husband on OKCupid in 2013. I was 27 and he was 32. He had recently moved from São Paulo to New York City for a software engineering job, and his English wasn’t great. When we met in Williamsburg for our first date, he said, “Wow, you’re big.” He had meant to say tall, perhaps the first in a long list of miscommunications.

Ten months later, we were married. I wore a short green dress with a beautiful crocheted shell over a silky underlayer. My new husband wore a blue-striped button-down and khakis. We hopped on the subway to meet my friend (our witness) at City Hall, put rings on each other's fingers, and then went to ABC Kitchen for a burger.

Exactly a year later, on June 6th, 2015, we celebrated our marriage with friends and family. This time, I wore a long, off-white crocheted dress with a cream-colored slip. My husband wore a gray suit and a blue tie that my dad had handed down to him.

I never dreamed of having the perfect wedding, but if I were that type of person, our intimate celebration at a restaurant in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn—the neighborhood where we lived—would have been it. After the ceremony, we turned up the music (a playlist my friend created for our wedding day) and the party began. We danced late into the night, and, by the end, my friend and my sister-in-law were dancing atop the bar. Even the restaurant staff joined our party.

Our wedding.

Perfect wedding, yes. But it wasn’t the perfect marriage. When I said yes to his proposal, I hadn’t felt certain that we had what it would take to sustain a long-term relationship. As two Type-A overachievers, we bumped heads constantly, awakening the worst in each other, one screaming match after another. But as a woman nearing 30, I had felt pressure to find someone and settle down. All my friends were doing it. I felt like I had to be next.

The first few years were exciting, filled with new experiences and adventure. We traveled to Southeast Asia on our honeymoon: Singapore, Cambodia, and Thailand. We went to Brazil, visited a few European countries, and celebrated our birthdays together at the same Brazilian restaurant in Williamsburg, where we had our first date; we were born on the same day, but five years apart.

But the leaky pipes of our relationship started bursting one by one when he accepted a job in Seattle the summer of 2017. It was a great opportunity, so we made a one-year plan to split our time between the West Coast and Brooklyn, sometimes together and sometimes apart. It was fun at first. We explored the Pacific Northwest, and it felt like we were growing together, but as we approached the one-year mark, he revealed it had never been a one-year plan for him.

He had hoped that I would come around to leaving the place where I had grown up to start over in Seattle, but he never came out and said it until our relationship was unraveling.

What I wanted, including returning to the life we had already built in NYC, never really mattered to him. I felt like I had been tricked into his life plan. Eighteen months into our bicoastal life, my husband came home to Brooklyn for the holidays.

“I want to get divorced,” he said, in the middle of an average fight.