I Was Drowning in My Marriage—An Impossible Crush Helped Save Me
It took seeing myself through someone else’s eyes to be able to realize my full potential and make the difficult choice I’d known I needed to make all along.
We’ve been sharing essays from the winners and finalists of our True Romance Writing Prize — a collaboration with actress Emma Roberts and her book club Belletrist — for a bit now, and we’re finally, sadly, nearing the end. Today’s essay, from finalist Nikki Campo, is one we loved anew every time we read it. Here, Nikki shares a bit about the piece: “In more conversations than I care to admit, when my first marriage comes up, I explain it away like this: ‘I’ve been married before, but he cheated.’ Super defensible, nothing to see here, end of story. Except, of course, it’s not the end of the story, and it’s certainly not the whole story. Lots of years — and probably 60 drafts later — this is.” How’s that for a mic drop?
On my first day as a summer intern at a management consulting firm, a petite partner in designer denim led 12 of us to a windowed conference room with a mountain of bagels. The room was up so high it swayed. She laid out an ice-breaker.
“You’ll each tell two truths and one lie,” she said. “We’ll guess which is which.”
One of my truths was my ability to sing a list of prepositions, in alphabetical order, to the tune of It Came Upon a Midnight Clear. Across the table, another intern grinned. “Nice,” he said. I’ll call him D. I liked his dirty blond curls, his crooked smile.
It was downtown Chicago, early summer. One afternoon, D. and I met for happy hour on a patio in the Loop. “You think you’ll work here after you graduate from Hahvahd?” he asked, poking fun at my in-process master’s degree at every opportunity.
“If I get an offer? Definitely,” I said.
The firm hired smart, funny, beautiful people who knew how to make 12 interns feel desperate to belong. But even if I was lucky enough to get an offer, the decision to work there after I finished business school in a year wouldn’t be mine alone. Back in Cambridge, my husband was rewriting M.B.A. applications to Harvard and MIT.
Brandon and I met four years earlier at a company picnic when we were living in Indianapolis. We were both financial analysts at a pharmaceutical company. I was 22 and he was 23. I couldn’t take my eyes off his basketball pick-up game and didn’t care to meet anyone else after that. I didn’t know my way around the city yet (this was before Google Maps was a thing), so when the picnic ended, he told me to follow him in my car.
“I’ll get you where you need to be,” he said, dripping with confidence.
Almost instantly, we were a couple, clawing our way up the corporate ladder together, sneaking out of work for sweaty midday trysts at his place. We shared colleagues, sushi orders and a dream of attending Harvard Business School. I fell harder for Brandon than I had for anyone.
“Think we’ll get married someday?” he asked me within a couple months of dating.
I devoured him with my eyes. “Obviously.”
But there was jealousy. The first time he lashed out was at a sledding party with a group of his friends. He said I was flirting with one of them. I wasn’t. At a Dave Matthews concert, he made a loud scene after I chatted with a friend’s boyfriend. I brushed off the incidents and focused on how good we were when we were good. But after months of fights, I stopped thinking as much about marrying him.