Part 7………..The Discovery of Relational Stockholm Syndrome and Lestat Rehab.

“Bad relationships are like a bad investment.  No matter how much you put into it, you’ll never get anything out of it.  Find someone that’s worth investing in” – Sonia Parker                 

After the revelation about Fiona’s affair with the pizza place manager, Lestat decided to enlighten me how he wound up in his supposedly unhappy marriage.  He began with when he was sixteen he saw this beautiful girl at a party (or celebration of some sort) and he sent his best friend to go and ask her if she would like to talk to him.  The stupid best friend walked up to the beautiful girl and began talking to her ugly cousin and that’s when Fiona walked over to talk to him and he was too embarrassed to tell her that he was interested in her cousin and not her. That was the beginning of how he met his Fiona Shrek looking wife.  Imagine that?  Going blissfully through life not knowing that your husband didn’t even want to talk to you and by some twist of fate and good fortune on your part, you married this man.  I asked him how come he never set the record straight that night and he said he didn’t have the heart to.

To a normal person this means he was too chicken shit to stop this miscommunication train before it jumped its tracks.  Then he proceeded to tell me that they began dating off and on until he graduated high school and moved to Austin, Texas to work with his oldest brother in construction.  They didn’t go to school together, oh no Fiona’s mom thought public school was too raunchy for her ugly daughter.  Fiona went to a private school, which really didn’t help her much I mean she wasn’t exactly the smartest tool in the shed and it’s not like she could get by on her looks because she was pretty much fucked in that department as well.  He lived in Austin for about three years and even began dating a nurse.  A fucking nurse, and a beautiful nurse at that! He once showed me a tattered, taped up picture of a beautiful brunette with green eyes, long tan legs and wearing a black and yellow polka-dot bikini.  I thought to myself, what the fuck?!  He left that beautiful woman to marry the ugly bitch he calls a wife?  What happened?!

He began to tell me that he began dating this nurse, but she moonlighted as a stripper (not judging we’ve all done things we’re not proud of, hence this blog) to begin repaying her student loans and he felt unsettled by the whole thing.  I think it was because he felt insecure after all he was only twenty, fairly young and immature.  Did I mention he has a stutter?  It’s not a bad impediment but he said that when he was younger, like in his teens and twenties it was worse and it made him feel self-conscience and insecure, which would explain why he stayed with this woman I suppose.  Back to Fiona, so he broke up with this nurse and stayed in Austin.  All the while Fiona was calling and writing to him, you know making her presence known to him or how I like to think of it, stalking his dumb ass.

He said he rarely wrote back to her or returned her phone calls (so he says) but the bitch persisted.  By this time he was dating another women and one day Fiona showed up, totally uninvited and unannounced at his apartment in Austin (where he lived with his other girlfriend).  He opened the door, his then girlfriend in the background making lunch and as Fiona witnessed this she somehow felt betrayed (WTF?) went off on him accusing him of cheating on her.  Apparently Fiona believed they were actually still dating, even though he’d moved away three years prior (crazy? Yes definitely a sign to stay away from her, but no, not this asshole).

To make a long story even longer, Fiona came back to El Paso where she was trying to finish college (I emphasize the word trying) and attempting to pass her teacher certification exam (which he mistakenly told me took her six fucking times) and before you knew it he had moved back too because he was homesick.  After he moved back they resumed their relationship and they dated for a while.  All this time Lestat thinking that Fiona was probably the best that he could do, so he settled.  They dated over the course of four years and then he began to ask her for adventurous sex.  But she made excuses that they couldn’t have sex because they weren’t married.  Do you see a set up here?  I sure as fuck do, anyway he didn’t want to get married and the dating continued.  He began asking her for sex yet again, and I guess she finally gave in because she may have sensed she was losing her grip on him, but it was not the kind of sex he wanted, or so that’s what he told me.

He told me one day they had gone to buy beer and she offered to get down at the store to do so.  As she got off his truck and walked in front of him he stared at her through the windshield and he told me he thought to himself, “what the fuck am I doing, I’m not even attracted to her?”  I swear this was what he told me, and I proceeded to ask him why the fuck did her marry her?  The answer totally blew me away (are you ready for this?) he turned and looked at me and said “because I said yes.”  I sat there and stared at him in complete disbelief and said “You mean to tell me, Fiona asked YOU to marry her and you said yes?  Even after you said to yourself that you weren’t attracted to her, what the fuck were you doing marrying her!?”  He got up from the chair he was sitting in and angrily said “Yes, yes I did marry her.  We all make mistakes right!?”  His voice began to get defensively louder and then he asked me “I mean you married you ex-husband and you turned out to deeply regret it right?”

The accusation that maybe I might have made a stupid decision like his made me angry but being the quick wit I am I responded with “Yeah I fucking did, but I was motherfucking sixteen years old, I didn’t know any better, so what the fuck was your excuse?!?”  He quickly turned to look at me, his glare acknowledged my assessment of his inept mistake.  He didn’t have a response for what I had just asked him because he knew I was right.  When your sixteen you are as naïve as a sixteen year old can be but when your twenty-five you have to have a gun to your head or be completely insecure and afraid to be alone that you marry a woman you’re not attracted to like he did, that’s far from being naïve, that’s plain stupidity.   We argued some more about his stupid decision to marry a women he wasn’t attracted to and that divorce wasn’t an option at this point.  On my way home I began to wonder why anyone would stay married let alone have kids with a woman he claimed he wasn’t attracted to.  The conclusion I came to?  Relational Stockholm syndrome, it’s a mesh of regular Stockholm syndrome and relationship dependence.

With the realization, that I too suffered from this so-called relational Stockholm syndrome came overwhelming floods of emotions I felt for him, both of love and hate and sorrow as well as sadness.  To explain just how much I loved this man, I would relate every single feeling of love about him to music, poetry and I would write, I would write a lot.  I have twenty-seven journals all about the entire time I spent in complete and total love with this stupid, emotional sucking, love draining motherfucking man!  How I hated and loved him and what I would go through and do for him.  I could express every single detail of just how much in love with him I was.  I would compare what I was going through to songs, the lyrics would stir these whirlwinds of gut wrenching emotions.  I would fucking cry just trying to express how deeply I was in love with him.  And what did he do?

He’d respond with “Me too” and to me, this was heartbreaking.  Because I knew damned well he could do more than answer with me too.  He was able to describe and go into detail about every sexual fantasy he ever had, he could verbalize just how, when, where and with whom, all of this and no sign of a stutter could be heard!  So I knew he could say more than just the “me too” and all I could think of was that he just didn’t want to at least not for me.  Just as a measure of how in love I was with this man and compared him to a song, the song that came to mind when we first began dating was Roberta Flask’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” because she sang each and every lyric of that song as if it were coming directly out of my heart.  If anyone has ever listened to that song, the lyrics, the haunting melody and every precise note and execution of her voice you know that is a true love song.   This is the time I was wholeheartedly convinced that this man was “the” love of my life.  I was in love and I was in deep, and I felt nothing but wanting to please him and let him know exactly what he meant to me.  And that was probably the biggest mistake I’d ever make with this man.

When you begin to stroke someone’s ego, let alone an emotional vampire’s ego it is as dangerous as it can get.  You build them up and then they begin to feel that they are what you think of them.  It doesn’t matter why they don’t return the gestures of love or reassurance of emotions.  They have been confirmed as the center of your universe and you are only a star orbiting every so often and not as important to them as they are to you.  Then when I saw and felt his indifference towards how I expressed my love for him, I began to slowly stop telling him and began to turn those feelings of love into, alienation and eventually to hate.  So, just to explain exactly how I went from love to hate I’ll put it this way. I went from Roberta Flack’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” to Alanis Morissette’s “You Outta Know” in the span of fourteen years.  During the first ten “honeymoon” years of our relationship we’d go through phases of emotions.  One thing that stuck out about this narcissistic vampire was that when we’d talk on the phone and at the end of our conversations we’d say “I love you” before hanging up, always.  That is of course unless we’d be arguing, and even then I would still tell him I love you at the end of our conversations and the asshole motherfucker would say “thanks.”

I said to him that I suppose that he would feel okay with this cold and unfeeling response, seeing as I believed he had ice running through his selfish self-centered veins.  His explanation for this was, that when we’d have arguments and we’d say our goodbyes on the phone he couldn’t bring himself to tell me he loved me because (and I quote) he was still angry and when he’d get over it he’d be able to say I love you again.  Now we had this conversation as I was driving home one day and I said to him “So if we hand up right this instant and I get hit by an eighteen wheeler and die, you will go to sleep totally okay knowing that the last thing you ever said to me after I told you I loved you was thanks?”

He stayed quiet and then said “well when you explain it like that I suppose you have a point” and as I drove into my parents driveway we finished our conversation and right before we hung up he said “I love you.”  I stayed silent for a second and then responded with “thanks” and hung up the phone.  Stay tuned for part eight….