Bootleg Therapy: An Advice Column #8

A young mom, stuck in her hometown, in a dying marriage wonders if she ruined her life

Welcome to Bootleg Therapy: an advice column for wayward hearts. Think of me as your virtual stranger at the bar with a raspy voice and a weird scar on their cheek. The truth is in the worm at the bottom of the mezcal bottle. Submit your questions anonymously on brokebutmoisturized.com for a chance to be featured.

Enjoy an audio reading of this piece, or scroll down to keep reading. Bonus ASMR of my dog chewing his bone in the background:

If you’ve been here a minute, you know that I respond to two submissions in each advice column. However, I recently received a lengthy submission that warrants its own post. This woman’s plight is a tale as old as time for us small town girls. It hit so close to home that I can barely get through it without crying. In fact, I read it aloud to Andrew, sobbed through the whole thing, and even he said, “this one feels like a movie.” I hope you read this story and feel the weight of its everydayness. I hope you think about young mothers and the complex stories they carry, so honest and remote from us childless urbanites, yet only ever a decision away. And I hope you feel less alone in your own stories of “what if?” 

TL;DR: 25-year-old mother of one with another on the way struggles through a sparkless marriage. Has evidence of husband potentially cheating. Can’t stop thinking about her ex who moved to Nashville to pursue music, with whom she shared a creative, passionate love. Stuck in her hometown living a life she never envisioned for herself.

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The one that got away: is it me or him?

25 y/o female, married. When I was in high school through most of college I was dating a guy I thought I would marry. He is a (very talented) musician and I used to write a lot of poetry, so we had one of those fiery, passionate types of love that fucks with you for years. This relationship was definitely bad for my mental health at times, and he ended up moving to Nashville (we’re from Jersey) so long distance was hard. He wanted me to move with him and I refused in order to finish college, but when I finally decided I wanted to move there, he decided to end our relationship. I hated him for his decision, I always felt like he broke my heart willingly and purposely. He begged for my forgiveness and when I blocked him, I felt like I really did the right thing for myself and that he made a huge mistake. Fast forward to a year later, I started dating a guy who was very much the opposite of Nashville guy, but very kind to me and I ended up falling for him. We had a great, fun and healthy relationship, and we ended up getting married and having a child. Our daughter is now 2, and we have another child (a boy) on the way. We bought a house in the same county I grew up in. I gave up writing poetry or pursuing a career within my field, and settling for an office job to help support our family. Within that time, my husband and I grew apart due to everyday life, being new parents, and going through a pandemic. My husband went to Vegas to visit family in 2021 and while he was there (per our bank statements) he downloaded tinder and paid for premium (I think that’s what it’s called?). He lied until I showed him proof, and he swears he never met up with anyone just flirted online then deleted the app. I forgave him and we moved on b/c I understood his loneliness. However it’s now been over a year since that happened and our relationship hasn’t gotten better. We argue (over dumb marriage things) but we also don’t have any romantic connection at all. I find myself in a panic wondering if I ruined my life. I never imagined settling down in the same county I’ve always lived and never thought I would be a mom of 2 wondering if her marriage is failing.. I look back on who I was with Nashville guy and wonder where that girl is. I was creative, sexy, fun, powerful, confident, and witty. Now my only conversations are with a toddler and a man who doesn’t read books or seem interested in hearing my voice. I loved my husband when we met because he was fun and steady, and now I find it hard to trust him and we don’t even laugh together. Did I make a huge life mistake? How do I find who I used to be? Am I only missing Nashville guy because of the girl I was with him, or do I actually still love him? He appears in my dreams and I listen to his music, I cry thinking about him and wonder if he thinks of me. He appreciated my writing and we really connected over our creative sides. Is this a midlife crisis? Is my husband cheating? Do I need to leave him? Can you answer any of these questions or am I truly in a hole that cannot be escaped?

Dear The One That Got Away,

They write country songs about girls like you. 

Right down to the young troubadour who blows this popsicle stand for bourbon-soaked marquee dreams, whose blazing love you’ll mourn until your dying breath. Your story is raw. Diesel fuel for the engine of American heartbreak.

And damn, is it ever hopeful.

I’m obsessed with you because beneath this patchy, breathless cry for help is a writer’s ingenuity. You’re self-aware and clever enough to ask yourself questions you already know the answer to, but humble enough to enlist help. This is where I come in. And I pray I can be of service to you because in some ways, I’ve been you.

I was once caught between two worlds, two unique versions of my life playing out simultaneously, and I had to make a choice. One of those “damned if I do, damned if I don’t” situations where I should have dropped both dudes and marched on solo. But alas. I was living here in Philly, casually seeing my steady, country boy back home who never fucked me or read my writing… *and* my cool, foreign, artist lover in the city who taught me Italian and devoured my body around the clock. He was my Nashville Guy.

I chose my Nashville Guy because fire is hypnotic. And I learned the hard way that certain flames will never keep you warm. That unchecked lust will obscure your basic needs in a relationship, leaving you cold, lonely, and stuck in a 200 sq. ft. studio apartment with someone you can’t trust—sex, your last remaining connective thread.

In a way, I walked so you could run, i.e., I got burnt by my Nashville Guy so that you, and every other person with a Nashville Guy reading this, can see through the trope. So let’s first extinguish all thoughts of him. They say an idle mind is the devil’s workshop; all of the memories, the dreams that awaken you in a cold sweat, the music you play to keep him close—it’s an elaborate fantasy, born from your own boredom and discontent. 

You can’t possibly love Nashville Guy because frankly, babe, you don’t know him anymore. It’s just as you so keenly said: you merely love who you were with him. The good news is that girl never left you. She’s been dormant because life happened, but it’s your responsibility to resurrect her. Visualizing yourself as a poet-bombshell is way worthier of your creative brainpower than some ex from, essentially, childhood. Channel the energy you’re giving to keeping his memory alive into her revival. Get the fucking notebook. Write the fucking poems. Hone your aesthetic and consume the kind of art that you wish to produce. Let yourself be inspired again, independent of men. Being a mom in a dull relationship stuck in her hometown is not your identity; these are the challenging conditions from which you will make art once you realize your own mortality. Side note: I follow this dope, creative, (recently) single mom on IG, @samanthainperson. She’s a powerful writer who bares it all, from simple triumphs like getting the kids to school on time, to the desolation of divorce. Remember: motherhood is an art in itself, and there are full communities online devoted to it. Tap in.

As you detach from Nashville Guy, steadily grounding yourself in this tricky reality with your husband, it’s crucial to consider the timeline. One year between two vastly different relationships is not a lot of time, especially when you’re young and very much figuring out who you are. And for one of those relationships to turn into marriage and children cements the limitations of what you know to be true about men and love to two experiences. Two! You’re literally operating from a binary framework that recognizes love as either interesting/fiery, or predictable/monotonous. 

What if I told you the best thing—the right thing—is somewhere in between? Even the most exciting relationship needs to be fucking boring like, 80% of the time to survive. Because it is in those moments, sitting at opposite ends of the couch, silently buried in your laptops, that you know the love is real because it has nothing to prove anymore. I’m confident that if you still love your husband and want to make it work, you can find that in between with him. Or, you can leave him and find it elsewhere.

So, the question is: do you love him? To get more granular, assuming you do love your husband in some capacity, is this love romantic, or something closer to familial? You’ve described him as steady, fun, kind. I could describe my dad that way. Do you find your husband irreplaceable? Magnetic? Thoughtful? Present? Sexy? Loyal?

Let’s pause on loyal for a beat. When your husband told you he didn’t actually meet up with anyone off the *Tinder that you pay for* in *Vegas*, did you really believe him? I think cheating is nuanced and can sometimes be worked through depending on the circumstances, but honesty is the bare minimum requirement to move forward. Let’s say he is being truthful just to give old boy the benefit of the doubt. He’s still revealed his propensity for sneaking around, and you’d hate to let this slide only to one day get cheated on for real. So many victims of infidelity, myself included, look back on the early red flags we ignored and wish we would have left sooner. And your incident here isn’t some innocuous, flirted-with-the-bartender-that-one-time shit; this was betrayal on a silver platter.

Still, this is your husband. The father of your children. The person you’ve gone through so much with so young, including a pandemic that drove countless couples apart. Your mind’s been wandering, and so has his. But a relationship of this importance deserves a hard fight before throwing in the towel. Nobody fights for shit these days because before you can say “I’m married,” an algorithm has already seduced you with a smoother, tauter next best thing (as your husband demonstrated). But I promise you, each relationship will present its own set of quandaries, and you will eventually have to do this all again. So you might as well try your damnedest now when there’s so much at stake.

As for action items, have you guys taken the time to 1.) communicate everything that’s wrong in a respectful way, 2.) reflect on why you chose each other in the first place and why this is still worth fighting for (beyond the practical marriage and children stuff), and 3.) devise a plan to do better? Fighting for love begins and ends with intentional communication. Intentional communication even applies to the electric stuff, like sex and romance. The stuff society convinces you should be natural and overflowing. That’s a hoax, by the way. If you get chills whenever a guy touches you, that means he has like, three girlfriends and a burner phone. In real love, it takes work to keep the spark alive, especially when you’re settled down, and even more so when you have children. You need to plan date nights. Hell, you need to plan sex. Creating moments of anticipation helps restore the enchantment.

Back when my fiancé was still my boyfriend, we broke up for a bit. As I contemplated taking him back, the question that hit me hardest was, “can I imagine my life without him?” And I couldn’t. Not just in the “I’ve been living with this person for two years” way. But in the “I don’t want to experience the best life has to offer without him” way. Envision life without your husband. Co-parenting your small children as platonic teammates. Perhaps that image is depressing. Or, perhaps it is liberating. Either way is hopeful, because either way means forward motion.

There was one line in your submission that absolutely gutted me: “I find myself in a panic wondering if I ruined my life.” That feeling is so crushing, so lonely, that you can’t fathom how many people living your dream life—writing in a cool city, dating the artist—would kill for what you have. We are in the midst of a cultural reckoning. Creatives, corporate girlboss types, you name it, are all waking up to the emptiness of modern life. Most people don’t thrive in cramped, overpriced apartments, working into the night, ordering pho, swiping on Hinge, repeating that cycle day in and day out. You own a home. I’m picturing natural light pouring through the window as you sip your morning coffee. A quirky little mailbox. A parking spot where you never have to worry about getting your catalytic converter stolen in the middle of the night. You created human life, and have the privilege of raising them to be good people. To see this painful world through their eyes and regain a sense of innocence. If you can revel in the magic of what you’ve got, it will help bring back that girl you miss. And she will be more poetic and evolved than you ever remembered. 

So to clarify, no, I don’t think you ruined your life. I think your life is just beginning.