Oh, the red flags! Now that I look back, they seem to litter the landscape. Strange how at the time they hardly seemed noteworthy.
One night while hanging out with his high school friends, they had a good laugh over how some kid gave him the nickname of "Captain Porno". Hahaha, isn't that funny? The husband (then the boyfriend) was pretty quiet about it. I felt uncomfortable, but didn't want to be that uptight girlfriend. Didn't every boy look at porn in high school? You'd have to be a total prude to think they didn't!
Another night, we were visiting his mom's house an hour away. I slept in his sister's room. For whatever reason, he left his cell phone with me and he slept in the basement. I still can't remember why he left his cell phone, but no matter, I knew it was the perfect opportunity to poke around a little bit. Even though I was snooping, I was shocked to see pictures of a girl in lingerie on his phone (keep in mind this was years ago with the old flip phones that were so cool because they were also "camera phones". The screen was tiny and resolution was bad, but it was still pretty clear what it was.) They didn't look like professional photos. I made the assumption that they were old pictures from his old girlfriend he had slept with. Pioneers of sexting! But did I say anything to him about it the next morning (or ever?)? Of course not! I couldn't admit I had snooped! Plus, then I wouldn't be the "cool" girlfriend either.
He made comments sometimes about how he liked women's bodies, even to go so far to say specifically how he liked a woman's pubic hair. Even then, I thought that was a pretty jerky thing to say, but I didn't know how to approach it, so I continued to be the cool girlfriend and swallowed my shock and disgust.
One day I noticed a DVD on the floor in the corner of his closet. Not with the other DVD's on his shelf across the room. It seemed odd, and I think I maybe mentioned it later, but he dismissed it, saying he didn't have any DVD's in the closet. The cover and the title didn't give anything away, but it seemed so odd to me. (I came to find out after we were married that it was a soft-core porn. He had put it inconspicuously on the shelf with our other DVD's, but never mentioned it and we never watched it. I finally put it in one day while he was at work, and then angrily marched out to the dumpster.)
He managed a retail store and had to close one night a week. Often, he'd tell me over the phone around 6 pm that he would just say goodnight to me then, rather than call me on his way home, because it was too late. Uh, 9:30 is too late? Considering I regularly stayed up past midnight, it struck me as so odd. I'd often challenge him on it, but he was adamant and acted like it was no big deal.
My friends told me they never pictured me with a guy like him. My mom said she felt like she didn't know him. My dad came into my room one night and told me he didn't think he was The One. I could not, for the life of me, figure out what on earth they were talking about. Actually, I still can't. I knew how I felt, I was sure of it. I figured it was Satan trying to keep us apart. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. I don't know.
Now that I look back, I want to slap myself. For the sake of brevity, I'll leave out some of the other signs that something was amiss. Why didn't I ask more questions? Why didn't I trust my gut on certain things? Why didn't I think about MY concerns once in a while? Why was I so worried about impressing him, rather than worried about making sure he was right for ME?
However, despite all the red flags, I knew that I loved him. I knew it almost from our first date. I just felt I was supposed to be with him. So that's what I did.
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