A few years later, when I didn't have to work anymore, and I was able to go on little road trips to Boston or Washington, or longer ones to Canada, California or Texas, Donna never wanted to come with me, because of her agoraphobia. So I went on road trips alone, again, but she and I were connected on the phone 24/7. By now we were using cell phones and we had unlimited plans. But other than that the 24/7 phone connection was just like it used to be when I still lived in Germany. It started to drive me crazy. It was like she was trying to keep me on a leash through the phone at all times.
One day I drove through a dead spot where my phone had no signal, in the mountainous forests of the Poconos. She redialed my phone over and over and over, and left a bunch of messages.
The first one was friendly: "Hey, sweetie, we lost connection. Call me back!"
But each subsequent voicemail got more impatient and belligerent: "Why aren't you answering the phone? What's going on?"
"Are you ignoring my calls on purpose? Are you with some girl?"
"Who are you with? Are you fucking her? What's her name? I hope you DIE!"
Her voicemails escalated from a loving "Hello sweetie!" to a hostile "I hope you die!" within about 15 to 20 minutes.
And then, when I finally had a signal again and I called her back, she acted like the biggest bitch for the rest of the day, for absolutely no reason.
Deep down of course she knew that I really didn't cheat on her, and I really just lost the signal for a few minutes. I was in the Poconos a lot, because I didn't think the Internet fountain of money was going to last forever. It was just too good to be true. I was sure that sooner or later the money would dry up. So I wanted to have a back up source of income. I decided to invest in real estate and started buying lakefront lots in the Poconos.
The Poconos are a mountain range in Pennsylvania, about 90 car minutes from Manhattan. It's beautiful. Donna and I decided to build a house there. At first I was looking for a modest log cabin. But every builder I talked to tried to sell me a bigger and better house. The house we actually ended up building was a 5000 square foot mansion on a 5 acre property next to a beautiful lake.
During the construction of that house, everything went wrong. It almost felt like the property was an old Indian burial ground and there was a curse on the house. The builder went bankrupt. So I hired a second builder, and he went bankrupt, too. I ended up suing the first one in court, and threatened to do the same to the second one, if he didn't finish the house. Altogether that whole ordeal took about 4 years, and I had to drive to the Poconos many times to monitor the progress, or lack thereof.
So Donna already knew that the phone signal in the Poconos was very bad. But that didn't matter. It seemed like she was making my life miserable on purpose, simply because she was bored, and conflict was her only source of entertainment while she sat home alone.
I was under constant stress while living with her, because she went from being nice to being a totally psycho hostile bitch from one minute to the next. I never knew what would set off her next tantrum. Looking back at it later, I realized how abusive her behavior was. But at the time, while I was going through it, it just seemed like normal life to me.
Early on in our relationship, when I just moved to New York, I was writing a letter to my parents. I was answering one of their letters. They had written that the girl who cleaned their house, an architecture student from Bulgaria, asked them to tell me she said hello. Donna didn't like that, so she told me to ask my parents not to ever mention that Bulgarian whore in their letters to me ever again.
So in my reply to them, I asked them not to mention the Bulgarian girl anymore, because Donna was kinda sensitive about things like that. Donna decided to proof-read my German letter, even though she couldn't read German. She asked me to translate word for word what exactly I wrote about the Bulgarian whore, while she stared at my letter.
When I got to the part where I had written that Donna was a little sensitive when it came to other girls, she asked me if that word she saw in my letter meant sensible. I said, no, it means sensitive.
She completely lost it and went on a rampage. She started screaming at me that I was making a fool out of her and she smashed plates in the kitchen. She grabbed my 6 page hand-written letter and ripped it up. I tried to stop her, and she screamed for help, as if I was raping her. Her younger brother still lived with his parents upstairs at that time. He heard Donna's screams, ran down the stairs, broke down the front door, and threatened me with a baseball bat, while I calmy tried to explain to him that I hadn't even touched her, and she was the one attacking me, not the other way around.
All that drama, because she felt that I should have used the word sensible in my letter, and that calling her a little sensitive when it comes to other girls was making a fool out of her. So it rrreally didn't take much to set off one of her over-the-top tantrums.
I read an article on domestic violence and abusive relationships that said that people who grow up in an abusive home, tend to end up in abusive relationships, because that hostile dynamic seems normal to them. Without even realizing it, they are attracted to people who will abuse them in some form or another.
Back then I didn't even realize that the tension I always felt around Donna was very similar to the anxiety I had when my biological father was still alive and he would always start arguments with my mother for no reason, just so that he would have an excuse to storm out of the house and go on his next drinking binge.
The constant anticipation of Donna's next tantrum was not unlike the feeling my mother and I had while sitting on the living room couch, watching a movie, but always alert, and with our hearts pounding if we heard the front gate creak in the wind, always anticipating that my father was about to come and kill us.
One time Donna and I were arguing about some trivial bullshit. The next day, neither one of us could remember what we had even been arguing about the night before. It really was a non-issue that nobody in their right mind would ever argue about.
During the argument, she became completely unhinged again, as usual. She always figured that if she got crazy enough, I would give in at some point and do what she says. I had learned to just walk away from her when she got totally mental like that.
So I was trying to walk out of the house and go see a movie. She blocked my way by standing in the bedroom doorway. I shoved her aside and walked out. She started smashing the bedroom door with her fist, and punched a large hole in it. Almost like the hole my dad had put in the bedroom door when he tried to kill my mother and me.
THE DIVORCE
"When people divorce, it's always such a tragedy. At the same time, if people stay together it can be even worse."
Monica Bellucci
"A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you."
Margaret Atwood
"Divorce is just the most awful thing in the world."
John Denver
"Divorce is probably as painful as death."
William Shatner
"I was so devastated by my second divorce that I had a nervous breakdown."
Jane Fonda
"People that go through what I went through and people going through divorce, it's really a difficulty process; it's heartbreaking and it hurts really bad. It can really mess with your head."
David Arquette
"Breakups are a horrible thing for almost everybody I know. For someone who is a love addict, it's debilitating."
Alanis Morissette
"To get over my divorce, I got a prescription to live at the Playboy Mansion for a while."
James Caan
Year after year, I told myself that I wasn't going to put up with her crazy bullshit anymore. I told myself that the next time she had one of her totally pointless, unreasonable, uncalled-for tantrums, I would get a divorce.
But then the next time we had a huge fight, because she didn't want to go to the movies, or she accused me of purposely buying the wrong kind of pea
nut butter, or I supposedly fucked a whore in the backseat during the few minutes my phone had no signal, I always felt like I would be totally overreacting if I got a divorce because she didn't want to go to the movies. That just sounded so silly. Why did you get divorce? Because my wife didn't want to go to the movies with me.
But I was really just making excuses, because getting a divorce and totally changing my life was scary. She had managed to drive away all my friends with her tantrums. If she didn't want to go see a movie, I figured maybe I could go with my friend Kenny. But she became insanely jealous even when I hung out with other guys. She acted like any time I did not totally focus all my attention on her, and I dared to speak to another human being, I was doing something wrong, and it had to be met with fierce vengeance.
Even when I talked on the phone with my mother in Germany, Donna acted like my mother was "the other woman." She always accused me of conspiring against her with my mother somehow. And she often asked me, if I had to choose between Donna and my mother, who would I pick?
I did ask Kenny to come over once or twice, so we could play video games. Donna acted normal for the first few minutes, and then started some kind of argument over nothing that quickly escalated to the point where Kenny was really uncomfortable being in the middle of all that screaming.
Of course he didn't really feel like coming over anymore after that. And I didn't really want him to come over anymore either, because it was embarrassing to have one of my co-workers witness what a psycho Donna was.
Little by little I lost all my friends, and Donna was now the only person I hung out with. Especially after I quit my newspaper job and I didn't have to work anymore.
To be honest, I didn't even mind hanging out only with her. I'm not exactly a social butterfly. I'm perfectly content spending my nights cuddling on the couch with my special someone, watching a good movie or playing video games. I'm not a big fan of parties or large social gatherings.
I would have loved being married to Donna, if she didn't always go out of her way to make me miserable. She wasn't just my wife, but also my best friend. She really was the only person I wanted to hang out with. If only she could have stopped throwing these pointless tantrums and if she could have gotten over her damn agoraphobia and come on little road trips with me, or go to the mall or a county fair with me or something. I would have been sooo happy and content.
One day, while I was at the Six Flags Hurricane Harbor waterpark in New Jersey, alone as usual, I finally had to admit to myself that no matter how much I wished for things to get better with Donna, they were never going to change. I was floating down the lazy river on a rubber tube, alone, while watching all these happy couples around me, floating down the river in double tubes, kissing, laughing, splashing, and holding hands. It hit me like a brick wall that day that I was never ever going to have that kind of experience with Donna.
That was the day I decided to get a divorce, because I realized that she wasn't just ruining her own life with her behavior, but my life as well. I didn't want to wake up one day, and be old and gray, and my whole life passed me by.
I knew that if I told Donna I wanted to get a divorce, she would fight me tooth and nail, to make my life as miserable as possible. Whenever she got something in her head, she couldn't let it go, like she was OCD or something. And she was relentlessly vindictive.
So if I was going to go through a long, drawn out divorce with her, she would sit there day and night, trying to find new ways to make my life miserable. If I was going to get a divorce, it had to be over as quickly as possible.
I started googling divorces. I knew that Las Vegas was the capital of instant marriages. I was hoping that getting a divorce there was equally easy. But, turns out, it's not.
Then I read that you can get a quickie divorce in the Caribbean. That sounded promising. But then I read in the small print that US courts don't necessarily honor a foreign divorce, and Donna would still have been able to contest it in a New York court and make my life miserable for months.
After some more research, I discovered Guam. Lovely, lovely Guam. You didn't even have to go there. All you had to do was mail the divorce papers there, a judge stamped the papers, and you were divorced. Boom! Just like that. And since Guam is part of the United States (Surprised? Google it.) every court in every State honored the divorce. I had found the Yin to Las Vegas' Yang!
So if I filed for divorce in Guam, it would be over instantly, and then Donna would not be able to contest it in a New York court. The only catch was that she had to sign the paperwork before I sent it to Guam. I knew there was no way she was going to do that, unless she thought the divorce was her own idea.
I tried to figure out a way how to approach her, so that she would think the divorce was her idea. It took me four more years, until I finally had the courage to actually go through with it.
She had been the only person in my life for the past 15 years or so. I had no support network, no friends, and no family in the States. I knew that the divorce would be very very hard on me, and that was a scary thought. I knew I was miserable with the way things were now. But what if I was going to be even more miserable after the divorce?
Week after week, month after month, I made excuses why I wasn't going to file for divorce this week: well, it's almost Christmas. I can't divorce her right before Christmas. That would be terrible.
It's almost Valentine's Day. What kind of a cruel scumbag files for divorce right before Valentine's Day?
It's her birthday next week. I can't divorce her on her birthday.
The truth was, I was really just scared of the great unknown after the divorce.
By now I had heavily invested in real estate, and I owned 2 houses in Canada, a few condos in New York, 4 or 5 houses in Florida, a rental house in the Poconos, and the big mansion that was still being built in the Poconos.
After I had bought another house in Florida, I told Donna that since the mansion in the Poconos was probably never going to be finished, we should move into the new house in Florida. It was 3000 square feet and in a beautiful gated community called Olympia Pointe, on Lee Boulevard in Fort Myers.
Of course she didn't want to. I knew she wouldn't. But I wouldn't let it go. I kept asking her, showed her pictures of the house, and tried to convince her how awesome living in that house would be.
It didn't take long until she pulled out her nuclear option: "Well, if you really want to move into that house, I guess we are going to have to get a divorce, because I'm not going."
I had anticipated that response while I had learned to navigate around her tantrums. I didn't like to be manipulative, but it was really the only way to survive the relationship with her without constantly arguing about every God damn thing. I had learned that with a little bit of reverse psychology, I could make her think that whatever I wanted to do was really what she wanted to do.
If I wanted to drive to the Poconos the next day, to take a look at the progress at the construction site, I knew she would have a tantrum and find 10 reasons why I shouldn't go tomorrow. It was like that every single time.
Everything was some sort of weird mind game with her. She always had to have the feeling that she was the boss and that I only did what she told me to do. If something was my idea, and I wanted to do something without her explicit orders to do it, she was against it. Every damn time. And not only did she not approve of whatever I did on my own accord, she turned it into something horribly bad that I supposedly had only done to spite her, and now it was her turn to take revenge by doing something spiteful to me.
In the animal kingdom, when lions or apes live together in groups, they establish a pecking order. They fight to see who's the strongest, and once everyone knows their place, they get along just fine. Humans do the same thing. When you start to work in a new office, you quickly learn who makes coffee for whom.
The idea that I was going to take orders from Donna went totally against my grain. Not because I'm some sort of male chauvinist p
ig who feels it's my God-given right as man to boss women around. I believe in equality. I looked at Donna as my partner, with equal value and equal say. But she constantly tried to be the alpha, the one who got to boss me around. Since I was never a follower, that just didn't work for me. And I stubbornly refused to do what she told me to, even if it was in my own best interest.
Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey Page 10
