The Story I Never Thought I’d Tell: I Survived a Love-Bomber

Sitting on my shower floor with scalding hot water washing over my shivering body, I sob, listening to a new album by one of my favorite artists that has inspired this essay, as I’ve had to build my wall so high I didn’t think anyone could actually climb it, until someone did.

This essay is the story of how, in 2023, I was love-bombed into a year-long relationship with someone who had secrets that almost broke me - until I rescued myself - and how you can avoid the same fate.

To backtrack, I met a man who changed the trajectory of my entire life when I was twenty years old, working as a waitress and living with/caring for my alcoholic father.

He and I were married a week after I turned 23, turning me into a military spouse almost overnight.

Together, we navigated 2 deployments, my father's death, many moves, military life, infertility, and created two incredible children together.

For 14 years, I held down our fort while he served our country.

Throughout my marriage, I watched what I thought were my dreams come to fruition, only to then one day wake up and see I had lost myself and my confidence in the process.

From the outside, we looked happy, fulfilled, and content, but I had been waiting for false promises of marriage counseling for 5 years, and we had not been intimate for close to a year by the time a decision had to be made.

Just a simple chip of the first layer would expose a decade’s worth of resentment, trauma, and genuine indifference towards one another.

It was an ongoing theme for me to bring our issues to light, only to have them squashed with “this is normal for a long-term relationship.”

By January of 2023, tension and resentment had grown so deep that I was no longer able to keep fighting, especially alone, for something that was broken many years ago.

The band-aids stopped working, so I finally put my foot down and made the decision for both of us.

It was time for a divorce.

I moved out and onto my own for the first time in my life at 37, truly believing I was getting a fresh start.

Soon after, I was ready to rebuild on my own, but I was also reeling from the loss of intimacy in my marriage when this guy, a coworker of sorts, started noticing me at my part-time job.

It felt good to be seen again as more than just a blob in the hallway, as he took notice when I was out sick from work for weeks.

Being single was new to me, so I wasn’t ready for anything serious when I started it with a box of Nerds and a note from a “secret admirer”.

Within days of exchanging numbers in early 2023, I felt trapped.

After our first kiss in a parking lot, he led me back to his car to get out of the cold, chat, and give me “gifts”.

In the car came a deep confession of a mental health crisis he had experienced that led him to be hospitalized for months to recover, which I was not prepared to hear or process.

On our very first date, I met almost his entire family at his nephew's birthday party, which he took the opportunity to use to show off as a “look how good I am with kids” moment.

This date with his family had an extra awkward layer as he was also not officially divorced from his own previous marriage, so I was there feeling like the mistress.

Little did I know there were also looming family secrets I was not privy to that later became the catalyst for my escape.

The love bombing and trauma dumping started so fast, which I tried to tamper with quickly, without success.

I was processing my own trauma, grief, and loss while also trying to navigate this new, messy, intense, toxic relationship I had no idea how I got sucked into.

The I love you’s started almost immediately, to which I refused to respond until I was fully ready. Which led to me putting up boundaries of close to but not quite “I love you's”, which he would again trample all over.

My new apartment was supposed to be my safe space, but every boundary I placed around it was stomped on like a cockroach on a dirty diner floor by him.

Texts of me expressing a deep need to spend an entire week alone in my apartment were met with a constant barrage of “I miss you. I’m lonely. I’m bored. Can I come over? What are you doing?” texts.

More than once, I expressed clearly that I was spending my evening alone, only to have him send a text later saying he was coming over or just show up even after firm no's were set in place.

Then came a few confessions I was not prepared for. One being that he was a cross-dresser who was struggling with his own gender identity.

He used my pansexuality as a weapon when I expressed discomfort, confusion, and frustration at this information not being presented before.

I wrote out a long letter expressing every concern I had, and then a decision needed to be made in our relationship as well.

At this time, he had already met my children, and I had invested so much time, energy, and emotion into the relationship that I needed to process it all.

I even asked if there was more I needed to know.

He said no.

He lied.

In fact, there were a few more confessions that would come to light at the end of our relationship.

But the biggest and ultimate one came in May of 2024.

I had a plane ticket to fly back to my home state for a while, as I needed to be around people who know me well, and since we had already been broken up for a month at this point, I needed to get out of the bubble I had been in.

We were trying to work through things, but because we were both living in the house he had recently bought in the middle of nowhere, with my assistance, I had no real space of my own.

There was nowhere to go to collect my thoughts, emotions, and where my life needed to go without him constantly there.

I was sinking so deep into my depression that at one point, I couldn’t even wash myself or brush my own hair.

I became reliant on him for even basic hygiene, as my mind was checked out of my reality.

Then the night before the confession that had left me traumatized, we’d each had a THC gummy, and it hit him hard, which sent him into paranoia.

He kept asking if I thought he was a bad person and if he should go to jail. I had no idea why he was saying any of this and told him no, unless he’d done something bad.

He said he hadn’t, then told me to check his phone, muttering about there being no videos or recording devices on it.

At that moment, my stomach dropped. I screamed, asking if he had hurt me or anyone I loved.

He said no, I believe him.

Since we were already broken up and I had a plane ticket to leave in a few days, I sent him to bed and shut the conversation down.

The next day, he texted me from work saying he needed to come home to tell me something. I told him I didn’t want to hear it or know it, and to please just stay at work.

He texted again in the afternoon that he was on his way.

Once he had arrived, he sat me down on the couch and told me that, as a child, he had harmed someone in a way that could never be undone.

He described details I was begging to not hear, and he stopped me as I tried to get up to walk away.

I realized in an instant this person was not only not mentally well, but he may very well be a monster I now needed to fully escape.

My chest locked up. I screamed. I sobbed. I couldn’t breathe.

Again, much like the night before, but more intense.

I told him to work through it with a professional before even thinking about telling a future partner, and to never drop that kind of confession on anyone again without a therapist present.

The rest of the day was a blur as I was left feeling trapped, as I had no choice but to stay there a few more days, which made my skin crawl.

Once the day finally came to board a plane back to my home state with my family, I hadn’t seen them in 2 years, and I had finally gotten enough air into my lungs to feel a tiny bit of freedom.

The months that followed were an intense roller coaster of navigating a mentally unwell person, 1,800 miles away, who was surrounded by my personal belongings.

During that time, he, the man with the confessions spilling out like he was creating a new album for Usher, began sending me photos of himself wearing my clothing.

Dresses, overalls, even makeup.

He told me he wished he could keep them and that he wished he looked like me.

I allowed one FaceTime call so I could help him pick out some of his own makeup in hopes it would keep him away from my things. But also, because I felt guilty.

He had weaponized my sexuality in such a way that I felt guilt for not being fully comfortable with all he was presenting to me.

It was confusing and unsettling, and became a major part of the emotional weight I was carrying.

At the end, I realized I had ignored my intuition and forged ahead just like the Titanic so by the time I was ready to jump off the ship to save myself, I was trying to project I was one of the wealthy women in my life boat, all put together, prim and proper, ready to take on what the night has to offer with dignity and grace.

When really I was looking like Rose with the whistle, half frozen, half dead, but still finding a tiny bit of fight left in me after freeing myself from the cold, dead grasp of that situation and reaching out for help in any way I could, even via a dead man's whistle.

After two weeks with my family, I got to fly back to my babies- and deal with the aftermath of leaving.

My ex-husband was picking me up at the airport, as I had no intention to ever be in the same room as that person again, and I still needed to pack all of my things to move out of the house.

As I was sprinting to catch my connecting flight, I was also on the phone with his mother, asking her to please check in on him, as he’d been texting me the night before, saying he was drinking and punching himself.

I was worried about his well-being, so I did what I thought was right as a fellow human being.

I was met with a string of angry messages from him and confusion from his mother as to why we had even broken up and what was going on.

I didn’t really have all the answers for her, as I was boarding a plane, plus some of the story was not mine to tell, but I filled her in on the financial situation he was dealing with as well as the mental anguish he had been exhibiting, and let her take over the situation.

Once I was safely back with my chosen family, things had settled a bit, and I’d been able to fully move out and sorta move on- I decided to try my hand at online dating.

“You should really dye your hair before you put yourself back out there,” my ex-husband added as I was asking if my photos were good enough.

Well- about that... No.

I joined a handful of dating apps, downloaded my photos, rocking my gray hairs proudly, then got to swiping, mostly left.

Over two days, I’d had a few conversations that weren’t terrible with different people.

There were talks of judges' robes, homemade pizza, and our past marriages, which actually led to a date that I canceled the night before out of an utter disinterest in climbing rocks as he’d suggested.

I even had a few crude comments about pulling my hair- the same hair, I had just been told to dye before starting to date again.

Then I came across this profile that was so well thought out, so detailed, and so exactly what I was looking for that I hesitated.

I knew if I swiped right and we matched, it was game over.

I mulled it over with my ex-husband, who was sitting next to me, opening the world’s loudest bag of chips, before he finally told me to just do it.

“Just swipe already. This is a good thing.” He was right.

I was staring at this profile that highlighted every single attribute I looked for, but also all of the neurodivergent diagnoses and religious preferences, plus fundamental values, displayed openly.

Eliminating those big deal-breaker questions immediately.

The biggest thing I had noticed we had in common, though, and the reason I sent the first message, was that we were both “California” sober.

He was coming up on 4 years, as I was approaching my 2nd year.

I reached out to the milk-drinking, bathrobe-wearing weirdo that became my future husband, using that commonality as the opener, which instantly bonded us in a unique way.

From there, the conversation flowed so naturally, exchanging nearly a hundred texts a day, he’d forgotten all about asking me on a date for an entire week until I finally reminded him I was leaving for 6 weeks to visit family again, with my kids this time.

If we wanted to see what our connection was like in person, we needed to make it happen ASAP, so a date to a free zoo was set.

Now, I was on a short timeline, and I was deeply traumatized from my past, so I knew I had some massive walls up that I needed to make sure he could climb quickly.

Our first date started with “speed limit is 15”, a handshake instead of a hug, and proving our heights to one another using the ruler by the brown bear exhibit.

I’m 4’11”, he’s 6’1” but shaped like a yeti.

And that first date ended with a kiss by a pond on a park bench under a blanket and the stars.

He met me where I was- I laid it all out, and he never wavered once.

I dug deep, told him my experiences, asked hard questions, opened up so he felt comfortable as well, and made sure he was safe to allow my walls to fall and him to take their place.

On his drive home, he said to himself, “I just met my wife.”

5 months later- it was official.

I became his wife.

And together we actively work on our marriage, talking through conflict, struggles, and stresses.

We make it a point to actively love and choose each other every single day, especially on the days it’s hard, because he climbed my walls and secured the borders.