The Emotional Labor of the Unfaithful Partner

Jake and I had been college sweethearts, falling in love while kayaking on the Lower McKenzie river. He was everything one wanted in a boyfriend when they’re young and reckless: sassy, popular, an amazing athlete, fun. Our dates were running rapids on the various rivers in the Cascades, longboarding followed by beers and pizza at our favorite dive bar on 13th Avenue, and climbing nearby mountains to gaze at the stars on Mt Pisgah. He proposed to me in front of a beautiful old cathedral while we were backpacking in Rotterdam the summer after my junior year, and we planned to get married the summer after I graduated.

However, when I returned to campus, things swiftly changed for the worse.

My senior year at my university punched me right in the face. I needed to work multiple shifts at my job per week, while finishing an honors thesis, taking the GREs, completing a student teaching position, and taking a full load of courses in order to finish on time. It didn’t help that my house got robbed in the middle of all of this, and I sprained my knee while skiing one weekend, making it hard to hobble across campus and work.

Initially wanting to rethink the idea of getting married so young, Jake had broken off our engagement shortly before the school year began and stayed in our house in California as I moved back to Oregon to finish my undergraduate studies. Life soon became horrible for Jake at this time too. Weeks after he began working for his company, Jake’s father, a violent man with schizoaffective bipolar disorder, had disowned him, as well as fired him from their firm. Jake suddenly showed up on my doorstep in Eugene, and quickly moved back in with me from his freshly-evicted house in California, which of course, his father was the sole owner on the lease.

Gone was the strong, independent man I had once been engaged to: he was crushed and broken, a shell of what used to be an incredible human pillar of strength and love. He figured staying with me in a town that he knew and was comforted by would be ideal to find himself again. Even though he didn’t want to get married to me anymore, he desperately wanted someone who was stable to hold him together during this turbulent time. I did not want to be his rock, as he had become mean, condescending, and demanding, but I was the only one that he had left in the world. I did not know what to do.

Although he had graduated from a great university with an engineering degree, the 2008 recession had hit our university area hard, and there were no jobs in his field of expertise to be found. He took to drinking and living off of people’s couches, namely mine, and refused to find a job. Finally, even though he had broken our engagement to move back in with his father and work for their wealthy real estate firm, I was the first person he ran to when all things went to pot with his family--his brother refused to help him, and his sister was still a minor and unable to help in the midst of finishing high school. His friends, who were there for him when he had money and was excited to camp and party on the weekends, could not hold him together long term for him to stabilize. Jake begged for me to take him back, at least to help him back on his feet, and threatened to kill himself when I hesitated.

Just when I really needed someone to be supportive for me as I finished school, to help me make it through the struggles of the day when I was working eight hours and then needed to write a paper or study for an exam, I had no one. Not only that, but all of a sudden, I needed to emotionally and psychologically support someone who was truly broken.

Ultimately, this boils down to:

1) I was in a vulnerable state

2) Someone who was even more vulnerable needed my emotional help

3) I needed emotional support in order to provide that help

So I started seeing someone else on the side.

Eddie was an old boyfriend of mine from earlier in my youth, and we broke up because of the distance between his job and my school. He missed me, and I missed him--he was a talented musician, a brilliant engineer, and sweet, one of the sweetest people I’d ever been with to this day. You know the type—they insist on gifts you don’t need and help whenever you didn’t even know you needed it. A blanket when they see you slightly shivering on the couch, a warm cup of tea before you even realized that you were thirsty.

Eddie was a hard worker, putting his career first, often taking extra shifts to cover for friends and often ignoring his own mental health in the process. His touch was always gentle on my face as I slept, and he had one of the best laughs I’ve ever heard, a bubbling brook of joy when he found something funny.

He was the only one who could help me in the depressive and exhausting depths that I was in supporting Jake. For all the parties, clubbing, and fun I had with friends during my last, extremely busy year as an undergraduate, none had the loving security that a partner could provide. And that was what I needed in order to survive that year, to help Jake, to help myself.

The day Jake showed up on my couch in Oregon, sobbing, screaming about the abuse his father was putting him through. I was in the middle of writing a paper on, ironically enough, reflections of St. Augustine. So then I took a break from working on my bibliography to crawl onto the couch in my cold living room, and let Jake sob in my lap as I rubbed his back, like a mother would an upset child.

Once Jake had fallen asleep after a few shots of whiskey and an hour of crying, I walked back upstairs, and cried into my pillow from the stress of it all. I hated Jake, I hated his family, and I hated the world that we found ourselves in.

I then turned my computer back on, wiping my face on my hoodie sleeve. There, during all of my tears, were a sudden barrage of emails and instant messages from Eddie. He was telling me how badly he missed hearing my voice, and he needed to hear his little chickadee chirp and chatter to him about nonsense. That’s what he called me, his chickadee. I missed being called a sweet little name by someone I loved. Jake stopped calling me sweet names after he ended our engagement.

Suddenly, I had a little spark of hope, of feeling loved. I was somebody’s hope, and they were mine. I could survive. I would survive.

Soon, Eddie and I were calling and messaging each other constantly, even though Jake had taken to showing up at my house, demanded things from me, whether it was a backrub, a bowl of oatmeal, or a just an ear to listen to him weep and rant about how horrible his life. With Eddie’s words of encouragement, I could get through the day, Eddie constantly told me that I was beautiful, strong, and smart. How much he missed me, how he’d give anything to watch a movie with me--a habit Jake detested. Or how he wanted to show me his photography, or just talk to me about my dreams, something Jake could not do while he was drunk and crying, two activities he was doing constantly.

This gave me the power to make it through another exhausting day, another day of getting yelled at by advisers, reading rejection letters from graduate schools, surviving a long shift with no breaks, teaching a class full of energetic students, all of it. On top of it, half the time I would be going home to Jake, who had taken to sleeping on my couch, subsiding off my food and internet, and threatening suicide if I demanded he leave. Our relationship had fallen to that of a mother and child--Jake often needing me to literally stroke him to sleep as he cried over the loss of his job, his home, and his father’s love.

But I needed help too. My future was uncertain, and even though my parents loved me, they were very far away, and extremely busy with raising my three younger brothers. I was 22 now anyway, I was an adult. But I needed a fellow adult’s love and support. That’s where Eddie came in, and why I stayed for Jake. In the end, I saw Eddie as my true partner, even though he was not physically there--in a weird and twisted way, you could say that Eddie was Jake’s stepfather, as Jake’s mother figure needed to be supported for her to support him.

Because for every breakdown Jake had, there was a calm note from Eddie. Every time I woke up to Jake having climbed in my window and slept on my couch reeking of booze or pot, was me waking up to a sweet voicemail from Eddie.

And, perhaps, that’s the biggest issue of all here. Of all the characters laid out in this miserable and immature story of two people in a toxic situation trying to survive during the Great Recession in an impoverished part of the American West, it was the young woman who needed to pull things up by the bootstraps, who needed to work and support and love. Who would be slapped and screamed at and called names if it arose that she was unfaithful to the black hole that she found herself trapped to.

The man--older and more experienced in the world--was given the right to collapse and fall apart.

But the woman—whom he rejected--was expected to stand strong and keep him together*.

Sometimes I wonder, if women just stopped all these things, stopped supporting and loving and working for their loved ones, I wonder how our world would move forward, if at all.

That’s why I was cheating on Jake with Eddie, eventually meeting up with him for an intense week in his home city that gave me the strength to come back to town and slaughter the GREs, thus earning me a full ride to graduate school through a guaranteed scholarship and assistantship.

Because I just needed to survive. I needed that final boost, that last emotional and psychological calorie to just make it through one more day.

When people cheat, it is always, always because their needs are not being met in some capacity in their current relationship. And that was me.

I was no different. I was not the wild child, getting bits of serotonin from cheating on my partner; I was just a sad and exhausted person who needed to feel loved and supported in a sad and exhausting world.

---------

One phone call.

That’s all it was. One. Phone. Call.

One phone call, and all was forgiven. Jake’s bipolar father loved him again. His adoring arms were wide open again for the son he had made prodigal. After months and months of his son living like a vagabond in the Pacific Northwest, sleeping on his unwilling ex-but-not-ex-girlfriend’s couch and drinking constantly, his daddy called him home to the golden gates of California. All that I did for Jake, all the support, all the emotional labor, the dinners and giving of $20 bills on the side when he was hungry or thirsty, the encouragement and back rubs and laps to cry in--it meant nothing to the support and love of his father, who’s mercurial swings were like that of an Old Testament God--cruel and demanding, filicidal and filled with rage and love with the same movement.

But that phone call was relieving for me, because this meant that this 27 year old child was no longer mine to hold and nurture away from killing himself. And that was liberating. He was someone else’s baby to take care of, not mine.

Not only that, I knew from Eddie’s love that I was not destined to be with Jake. When Jake boarded his train home to the Bay Area, I felt free. Eddie also ended it with me around that time too--he quickly met another girl as I moved across the United States to start graduate school, who fell pregnant within the first few weeks of them dating.

Ironically enough, both male parties in this story wanted full time nurturers in the end, a role that a workhouse like myself was clearly unsuited to perform.

Two weeks after he boarded his Amtrak train back home to California, Jake called me up. I was getting ready to begin graduate school in the Midwest, and was in the midst of getting most of my meager possessions into two overstuffed suitcases. Over the phone, he claimed that he and Eddie met up and talked, and Jake smugly said he ‘knew all about what went down between you and Eddie. I know what you did.’

I felt nothing as he asked me that question. I heard him smirk over the phone.

“Did you get the answer you needed?” I asked, not knowing what else I should have asked, in a tone that was less like the unfaithful girlfriend caught in her lies, more like the disappointed mother who was picking her misbehaving child up from detention. He gave a little gasp, as if he was shocked that I had the audacity to ask such a question, and promptly hung up on me. The dial tone felt soothing, if anything.

I know I should have felt something deeper, I guess.

If that really happened, I truly, sincerely hope from the bottom of my heart that Jake thanked Eddie.

Because it wasn’t me that saved him, it was Eddie’s strength from afar, who was there with patience and kind words, supporting me as I supported Jake. Because Eddie was patient and kind, he gave me the inspiration to be as well. When you are surrounded by light, it shines through you as well.

Jake had no idea who really was there soothing him all of those dark months in Oregon.

-------

Like all terrible people and equally bad students, I eventually learned. When I moved on, and dated others, I always found myself asking: “Can I handle this relationship? Am I able to emotionally myself, as well as a partner?” Because we cannot support others when we ourselves are weak. Whether we are managers, teachers, spouses, friends, or partners, we must have our emotional baggage in check and our senses of self in order to support others. We all fall if we are not strong together.

Now, I’m as busy as I was as an undergraduate at University of Oregon, if not more. I work a very demanding job, and I finished my Ph.D at University of Michigan. I am raising a small family and taking care of a house with pets and a bustling garden. I serve on multiple boards, and I write when I can. But, unlike my previous self, I can handle all of this, plus some, without cheating on my partner.

I married someone who did not leave me wanting anything in a partner, who was strong and secure, and whose dreams matched mine. There is nothing wanting in this relationship.

Plus, he’ll watch a movie with me any time I ask.

* = (I can almost guarantee that plenty of people reading this are already typing up nasty responses: if Jake was such a whiny loser, why was I with him? Why didn’t I just kick him out? But I would be equally crucified if I slammed the door in his face and let him drown in his own sorrows on the street. Welcome to the tragic and unfortunate world of being a woman in the 21st century)