Where Have You Been All My Life?

The men in our lives.

The men we date.
The men we kiss.
The men we sleep with.

Yes, the men we love.

Every woman knows that we are blind when we are in love.
And it is when we are at our most vulnerable, that is when we ask ourselves....

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE?

In our hearts, we truly believe he has been waiting JUST FOR US to come along so that the both of us can live happily ever after.

THE FOLKS WHO LIVE ON THE HILL...sigh...

Even when the RED FLAGS are glaring at us everywhere, we choose not to see them.

My story.

Some twenty years ago, I fell madly in love with an unavailable man. I knew the woman in his life and she and I would have many a conversation about his his many flaws and his many indiscretions.

Still I fell...and I fell hard.

I was one of 4 women.
Obviously, the odds were stacked against me.

But it was in that moment where I decided that I could end it all by slitting my wrists or I could become the best little private investigator the world had ever seen when it came to matters of the heart.

Five years ago, a new neighbor moved in two doors away from me on the eleventh floor of my apartment building.

All my women friends were mad for his body, blinded by his friendliness, taken by his eagerness to help us carry our groceries.
In short, they believed him to be the perfect gentleman.

Right away, I knew he was an abusive man.
Call it experience.
Call it intuition.

One afternoon, I heard a huge slamming of a door and an even bigger, vulgar voice screaming obscenities. Yes, it was my new neighbor hurling his significant other against the wall. She weighed about ninety five pounds and he towered over her and came in to the fight at about three hundred twenty-five pounds.

The featherweight never had a chance.
 I asked the young lady if she wanted to come into my apartment for safety, a cup of tea, to call the police.

Whatever....

She politely declined my invitation.

Four years pass by, and I hear a knock at my door.
I open the door and there is the featherweight, she is ready to talk, she is ready to leave the heavyweight.

I listen to her story.

His parole is about to end.

His crime?

He had strangled this woman with a telephone cord almost to the point of  her death.

He had done time ( only 30 days) but he was still beating her up on a regular basis, however since they both owned cell phones now and landlines being a thing of the past, there had been no strangling attempts, well, at least not with a telephone cord.

She was educated holding a degree in psychology when she met her abuser right after graduating from university.

She felt lucky to find her dream man so early in her life. They had dreams, he was from a nice family, a big wedding, the apartment was temporary, of course, buying a home was in their future.

Yes, there were red flags but she put it down to his explosive European ancestry and she wasn't exactly perfect, was she?

How would she know that he had a prior record for assaulting a previous girlfriend?

How are we to know these things about the men we choose to love and move in with and maybe marry.

We never know.
We take a chance.
We toss the dice.

Last week, I was sitting in the mall when the heavyweight walked by me.
He was not alone.
He was with a new featherweight.

She was tiny, young and beautiful and probably feeling like the luckiest girl alive.

Never dreaming her life and the cards were stacked against her.

Yes, he was holding her hand while he carried a bag of groceries in his other hand.....just like a true gentleman.