When “I love you” were the hardest three words to hear…

There were four of us in a cab leaving the city to crash at a friend’s for the night. It was the first “girls night out” since She and I had been outed. We’d had a great night, tons of laughter, good conversation, maybe even a bar-top dance or two, and we were all headed our separate ways after lots of hugs and goodbyes. We had promised to call home to see how the night had gone with the kids before ending the night. Typical conversation when we called home (“how did baths go?” “did they eat enough?” “what time did they go down?”), but this time with an ending I’d never heard. Just as quickly as She started the phone call, I heard her final three words as She hung up – “I love you”. And just like that, the wind was knocked out of me.

When we had parked in the city earlier that night, She took off her wedding ring. It was mid-August, a little less than 3 months into our big change of heart. She had stopped wearing her engagement ring early on, but didn’t take off the wedding ring around the neighborhood. She wasn’t ready to answer the questions from the increasingly curious neighbors who seemed to have their eyes on everything. I’d gotten used to it, as used to living a lie as you can, anyway. But that night we knew we’d be seeing our girl friends, for the first time as a group, since everyone knew what was going on – and without her ex there. She told me it was important that they knew how serious we were, that we were moving forward with our new life.

The night was filled with all the usual catch-ups, old stories, and future plans. There were a handful of awkward moments as a result of our new couple-hood, but mostly harmless comments that we chalked up to it all being ‘so new’ for everyone. Including us. We had never been on a girl’s night out…with our partner, either. We were navigating how “couple-y” to be, if being affectionate was ok, what friends wanted to know, and what should be kept between us. I was anxious about a few friends’ reactions, how they really felt underneath about our choice to change our whole lives and be together. I wanted them to see we weren’t playing around, this was as real as anything, and our decision wasn’t one we made lightly. We weren’t uprooting everything for a fling, we were betting on forever.

And then there, in the cab, with two of our friends next to us, She tells him She loves him.

Every part of me knew why she said it and what it meant. I knew the very basic part of it that was a habit – that it’s how she always ended conversations with him, just like She does with us now. And that it was habit on a deeper level too, that as his wife She would tell him She loved him when they said goodbye, because that’s what you do. And then that She did still love him, in a way. Not in the I want to be your wife and sleep in bed with you kind of way, but in the way She had grown to love him in the nearly 10 years they’d been a couple, sharing and building a life together. I knew it was a complicated undoing, I knew that when She would tell other people that She would always have love for him, it meant that in many ways, for at least a long while, She would still love him, period.

I knew all of that, because I was living it with her everyday. But they didn’t know that. Our friends in the cab with us didn’t know that She could let “I love you” slip out as She was hanging up the phone and it didn’t mean that She didn’t love me, that She wasn’t sure about sharing her life with me, and that She didn’t have regrets about her choice. They heard those three words and immediately wondered if maybe She wasn’t ready to end a marriage, break up a family, and run away with me…

Well, I didn’t know that that’s what they wondered…but when I heard those three words, my heart sank because I wondered if hearing those words come out of her mouth made them wonder. I had felt so confident that we had had a good first “showing” with our friends. Our love, our connection, our thoughtfulness about every choice we were making on full display. And with those three words, it felt like it came completely undone. Now they had doubts, now they had questions, now they wondered how real our love was. Or so I questioned.

I was immediately quiet, She looked at me as soon as the words left her mouth and She closed her phone. She mouthed “I’m sorry” with a look of panic in her eyes. I couldn’t keep her gaze, I just looked down. Our friends were quiet.

As vivid as every moment of that phone call was, I can’t remember how the night continued on after that. I was hurt, I was disappointed, and those emotions were enough to cloud over my memory of what happened next.

I know She didn’t mean for those words to come out that way. I know She had no intention of hurting me or having our friends doubt our relationship. So I didn’t need to say much. I remember feeling like Julia Roberts in the scene from Pretty Woman when she looks at Richard Gere while she’s attempting to leave, standing at the elevator, tears in her eyes, and says “you hurt me” to which he acknowledges “yes” and her response is the only sentiment I needed to convey as well – “don’t do it again.”

She never said “I love you” to him again. Or at least, not that I heard (though I’m pretty sure not at all). She never put her ring on again either. She told me it was more painful to hurt me than it was to let go of those securities from her past. And I knew She meant it, even as scary as it was for her – for both of us.

It’s nearly 5 years later and those 5 minutes still stick with me. I have no idea if our friends remember that cab ride and I haven’t brought it up in years. But just recently I was telling a friend about this experience as she is currently navigating her own brutiful beginning, and I was honestly amazed how immediately I could place myself back in that cab.

The beginning of a big change of heart is both beautiful and brutal and in that beginning was the hardest lesson I am still learning every day. We hold both, always. We hold the past with the present. The love for him and the love for her. The fear of change with the excitement of what’s ahead. The sadness of loss and the joy of new love. And only when we’re ready, we let go of the parts we don’t need anymore.