This past weekend, I welcomed Casey and Mary to my front porch. We hugged and scanned each other with our usual chorus of, “Dang, girl. You look good.”
Still, our hearts were all a little battered. We had all said goodbye to Bernie in the spring. Physically, we were also compromised. Mary had just undergone a major surgery. Casey was consulting with her own surgeon on breast reconstruction after her double mastectomy. I was struggling with prolonged insomnia; I had lost sleep, weight and hair after also losing Bernie.
Nevertheless, we put on our mascara and boarded an Uber to a bar downtown. There, the bartender provided generous pours. A cranberry vodka for Mary. A pineapple vodka for Casey. A dirty martini for me. Three vessels as different as the women who held them.
We raised a collective cheers: “To freedom.”
Only six months prior, we had discovered each other in a way Bernie never expected. Our suspicions had been rumbling for months, however.
The early days of dating Bernie had been euphoric. He made even the most ordinary moments — sitting on my couch, passing through the drive-thru, catching up after work — special and lighthearted. He nearly split me in half a few times with how hard he would make me laugh.
However, even at the beginning of our relationship, I observed Bernie’s attention was divided. He would take hours — sometimes a full day — to respond to a text. He often had to hang up quickly from a FaceTime call. I chalked it up to his frenetic schedule that came with working a full-time job and running several side hustles.
On Thanksgiving, I spent all night massaging Bernie’s aching back. He had health issues due to a serious injury he had suffered years before, and often thanked me for sharing “my gift of the healing arts” with him. After that night, he thanked me by ghosting me for three days.
“That’s not cool,” I had told him. My friends encouraged me to disengage. Somehow Bernie flipped the script on me. He explained I wasn’t the victim of his neglect. It was he who deserved all of my compassion and care. He was, after all, the one with health issues who was working multiple jobs. He reeled me back with an appeal to my good nature every time.
Not long after, when I had noticed curious comments from a woman on his social media — she of the generous array of heart emojis to all of his posts — my antennae spiked. Naturally, I ferreted out information about this woman with the prowess of a private investigator. When I discovered her LinkedIn page indicated a common work background with Bernie, I cast her as a former co-worker (surely an innocuous connection!). However, when I saw her pass through the receiving line at a wake for one of his family members and observed her drape herself in a hug around my man, I could not help but wonder if I was being bamboozled.
When I asked Bernie, point-blank, if he was entertaining other women, he replied rhetorically, “With what time?!”
It did seem impossible that I could be part of a rotation, given his nocturnal work hours and the family that constantly surrounded him. I had met his mother and brother, and was present several times while his nephew FaceTimed us. If I wasn’t the lonely only, wouldn’t he be paranoid that his family would call his bluff?
And then there was the very abject reality of his physical limitations. When he explained how the demands on his body compounded his forgetfulness and busyness, I tried to be more understanding.
Until I could no longer understand. Eventually, I was receiving such a small sliver of Bernie’s time and energy, I leaned in. I made more offers to help, call, visit. The tension between us crescendoed.
One day, after he had worked a double shift, I decided to drop off some bakery items at his home. I did not announce myself, as I believed he would be sleeping, and quietly left the bag on his back porch. I hoped it would be a nice surprise when he woke up and headed to work.
Instead, I received a curt text instructing me never to do that again. Bernie then iced me out for several weeks before finally declaring he was done. He said my innocent DoorDash drop-off had been completely “out of pocket” and that he was no longer interested in dating me.
During the months after Bernie kicked me to the curb, I languished on my therapist’s couch. I pawed at possible explanations, trying to examine every facet of our failed relationship. In offices in other parts of town, Mary and Casey were having the same conversations with their own therapists.
As summer rolled in, Bernie began to drift back into my life. First, with his trademark “How you doin’?” texts, and later with calls and links to videos he’d hoped would make me laugh. One morning, he called me from a nearby store, asking if he could drop by my apartment. I told him I wasn’t in town. In truth, I wasn’t ready to trust the man who had so recently and swiftly dispensed with me.
When I then found myself on an online forum designed to expose cheaters, it was not as a casual lurker. I was a woman on a mission. I was familiar with this page, with dedicated groups in all major U.S. cities, where women warned other women to avoid certain men. The women generally posted anonymously, and included a man’s picture, his initials and age. Posts typically queried, “Anyone know if he’s married? Dating anyone?”
A quick search of the forum surfaced a post, published within the last month, that made me believe I had been dating a liar, if not a serial sociopath. Mary and Casey had contributed to the post with Bernie’s unmistakable picture, but several other women weighed in with similar stories of his deception.
The commonalities were staggering. We were all single mothers and worked in similar fields. Our hair color, eye color and body types were all alarmingly similar. We had all been introduced to his family. We had all been told that we were the only woman in his life. The man who had overcome so many barriers had treated each of us as just another conquest.
I took a day to process what I had read, and then I reached out to Bernie via text. I did not intimate how I learned of the other women. I simply told him how shameful he should feel about what he’d done.
“How dare you judge me,” he replied. “I will not have this convo. I wish you all the best.” He then blocked my number.
Mary, Casey and I exchanged messages and calls, and the full spectrum of Bernie’s actions was shown in technicolor. The man’s ability to wend his way into all of our lives was unbelievable. He had curried favor with Mary’s son by buying him expensive presents and attending his football games. He had ferried Casey to her doctor appointments when she was fighting breast cancer, ensuring his loyalty and caretaking were on display to her whole family. I became profoundly aware that I had not been playing second fiddle to my man’s busy work schedule; I had been unwittingly riding third wheel to his other girlfriends’ full lives.
The revelations came fast and sometimes knocked me breathless. For example, I realized the only reason I had been able to whisk him away for his birthday weekend was because Mary had been overseas for work and Casey had been recovering from her latest surgery.
How could I have cared so completely for someone who was so wicked? I stewed in anger and shame for weeks as I processed everything with Casey and Mary, my new comrades.
I have a screenshot of one text that Casey sent me saved to my favorites album in my phone. “I have sought meaning out of this situation for many months,” she wrote. “Maybe I needed him through the cancer. Maybe I needed to learn this lesson about listening to my gut. ... But the more I distance from him and talk to you both, I have to believe it was to bring you both into my life. We were disposable to him — which feels like a stab in the heart, but it doesn’t when you realize it’s not personal. It’s him. How he treats others is a reflection of his feelings about himself. Not about us.”
Casey’s sentiments encapsulate everything wonderful and true about the heartbreak that has netted me two of the truest friends in my adult life. Because of our shared trauma, our healing has also been a mutual aid society of three.
Since I discovered the truth about my relationship, I have been in touch with Mary and Casey every day. We leave voice notes about first date fumbles and parenting victories. We share photos and memes and wisdom. We have met each other’s children and refer to our “sister wives” to friends and family who know the story. It’s a tale that once brought us pain and angst, but as Casey put it, that story was never about us, it was always about Bernie and how he treated us.
Together we are writing a new story. We are casting ourselves as the main characters — the single mother she-roes of our own destinies. The villain of this latest tale is not a handsome prince, but simply anyone who would dare to damage our peace or spoil our fun.
Kendra Stanton Lee is a teacher and writer in Boston. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post “On Parenting,” The Boston Globe, Slate and others. You can find more of her writing at www.kendrastantonlee.com.
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