The Dark Side

Scott was a high school sweetheart that went off, as I did, got married a time or two, and then when he was single again, found me on Facebook.

The timing was perfect. I had just skidded out of the flames and debris of my relationship with J. and was quietly trying to figure out how to recover a life for myself. Scott came along at precisely the right moment. I had met a few decent  guys who were either geographically undesirable (a plane ride puts some limits on how often you can go out for drinks) or who were just revolting in some way (Casey and his breath fouling the air all over the township) and was ready to take a deep breath and dive into the pool again.

Scott "friended" me just when I was feeling the first twinge of loneliness. 

And we all know how that began, and ended.  Again, flames.  Flames of passion and then flames of destruction following a detonating bomb. 

And at the end, when he'd so cruelly let me "figure it out for myself" that he had unceremoniously dumped me, I went on Facebook and had clarified a bunch of my more vague messages of woe by changing my status from undefined to "single," knowing that any status change would be blasted out to my Friends as soon as I closed the page on the update.

My Friends had immediately begun to comment. Words of encouragement. Flirtatious messages.  "You go, girl"-s and invitations to step out.  Talk about taking a swan song and turning into a symphony. 

And I supposed Scott had been offended, because before morning, he had unfriended me and all of our common friends. As if to say, "You are not only single, I want nothing to do with you or anything that is remotely tied to you."  My kids, my sister, our friends from high school, my cousins, friends he'd befriended since meeting me, all unfriended.  His loss. These people became some of my biggest champions.

So putting a label on things when it ended was almost as damaging as it is suggested it would have been had I tried too hard to define things from the start.

But perhaps I should have tried to label things earlier on in the relationship.   Perhaps the ensuing argument would have given me a little insight to the dark side of Scott's character that eventually emerged.