Relationships

I thought I was being so smart, planning the perfect moment to tell my family I was pregnant. I even checked Renee's calendar to make sure she'd miss it — we all know how she gets with attention. Joke's on me.

I found it by accident while looking for the iPad charger. A phone I'd never seen, tucked behind his college textbooks that hadn't moved in years. Three years of messages. Three years of lies. And the woman on the other end had held my hand through the worst night of my life.

You know that friend who calls you crying at 11pm because her life is falling apart, but somehow never remembers you got promoted? Yeah, I finally did the math on mine. The numbers were fucking brutal.

I'm the friend who always says yes to everything, which apparently makes me the friend who's easy to leave behind. Last Tuesday I opened Instagram to see my entire social circle living my dream vacation without me.

So I need to preface this by saying I'm not someone who goes looking for drama. I'm genuinely the person in my friend group who always plays peacemaker. Which makes what happened last Tuesday particularly funny, in a not-funny-at-all way.

So I was with Marcus for six years. We ended things in March, mutually, which sounds clean but absolutely was not. My friend Dani signed me up for Hinge without telling me, and three weeks ago I went on my first date since I was 27.

I didn't have some dramatic moment of clarity the night before or a big sign from the universe. It happened while Dave was literally talking. Mid-word. And the worst part is I laughed. Not a nervous laugh either. A real one.

So I'm engaged. Have been for about a year now. The engagement party was this whole thing — maybe 40 people, her family, my family, our friends. And my best friend Danny gave a toast that genuinely made me tear up. I'm an idiot.

So this happened about three weeks ago and I'm still not fully sure how I feel about any of it. I've told like two people in real life and both times I ended up more confused than when I started. I need to just write it all down. Bear with me.

We'd been together since 2019. I thought I knew her schedule, her friends, her whole life. Then she referenced a movie night that I was apparently at, except I wasn't, and I'd never seen the film, and something in my gut just went cold.

So this is going to sound insane but I need to tell someone because I genuinely cannot talk to any of my friends about this. For obvious reasons. I've been reading a group chat about myself for three weeks and I think I'm finally ready to do something about it.

For eight years, I never questioned the $1,400 that left our account every month for his 'late sister's memorial fund.' Then she walked into our daughter's 6th birthday party, very much alive, and asked where she could find the bathroom.