God Bless This Mess(56)

We know a lot about each other. He’s safe . . .

After the whirlwind of two TV shows back-to-back; after the whirlwind of dating more guys in two months than a lot of women date in a lifetime; after kissing more men in one night than I’d kissed in my life and sleeping with two men in one week; after dealing with the pressure and hatred and adoration on social media; after answering ten billion questions from the press, all wanting to know answers to things I couldn’t tell them without giving anything away—at that point, I needed safe. I wanted comfortable. I wanted familiarity.

I’m not gonna lie, I still had feelings for Tyler and Peter. I felt like I had just started to get to know them. And I liked both of them. But neither of them represented what I knew, and that scared me. A pilot who lives in California? I knew nothing about that life. Tyler’s home in Florida seemed closer and more familiar, but then he worked in New York City, in construction and modeling. I couldn’t picture what life with either one of them might look like.

I could still picture a life with Jed, but it was complicated. I was so anxious a lot of the time. The show was airing. He kept asking about my feelings for Peter and Tyler, and I was honest with him. I did still have feelings for them. He didn’t like that. It caused all kinds of arguments between us. I kept second-guessing my decisions, and tried reminding myself that there were signs. Good signs. But the worry and the panic was starting to eat me alive.

Well, guess what? All of my worry was warranted.

The night before we left our retreat, the show got a phone call alerting them that People magazine was set to run a story the next day—about Jed’s “girlfriend.”

And on the way back to LA, while I was riding in the back of a car, a friend of mine texted me the hard truth: the People story didn’t just claim that Jed had a girlfriend. They interviewed her. She spoke on the record. She gave them her name. This wasn’t some anonymous source on social media.

I was so embarrassed. How could I be finding out about all of this at the same time as the rest of the world?

According to what the girl told People, she and Jed had last seen each other the night before he left to be on the show. She claimed that Jed had spoken with her mother. (Which only proved how serious the relationship was. You don’t speak to the mother of someone you’ve only “hung out” with.) And the last thing Jed said to her before the producers took his phone away was “I love you.”

Lesson: just because you can picture a life with someone doesn’t mean that it’s right.

I sat in silence the whole two-hour drive. I didn’t cry. I think I was in shock.

Jed and I had talked about this girl a few times in between, and every time, his story changed a little bit. He knew this girl. They were friends. They had been to the Bahamas together, but just as friends. He had told her he loved her, but he was drunk at the time.

Guess what? That’s gaslighting. That constantly changing story, making me doubt what I was hearing and thinking, telling half-truths and untruths while making me feel bad for questioning anything—that is the opposite of being sincere, honest, and trustworthy. Why was I allowing guys to do this to me? I mean, if you’ve read this far, you can’t help but see that this wasn’t the first time a guy had been less than honest with me. But I was just starting to see that pattern myself.

He said he loved me, and only me, and I kept giving him the benefit of the doubt.

I was so honest with him about how I was feeling, always trusting that he was doing the same, that I made myself vulnerable in what turned out to be an unsafe way. And now?

Once the People article came out, everything came out. This girl posted actual text messages from Jed, showing for sure that they had been together the night before he came on the show. He had not only said, “I love you,” but he had told her that he would call her as soon as he got back from the show.

I wanted to disappear. I couldn’t, but I wanted to. I had tried so hard in this experience to put myself out there, and to find out all of this just broke me. This guy I thought I knew had betrayed my trust, and the whole world knew it.

It turns out he had straight up lied to me, and I could not be with a liar.

“I didn’t lie to you, Hannah,” he begged me. “I just didn’t tell you all the details. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“Well, by not telling me, you hurt me worse,” I said.

Hiding something in order to “not hurt my feelings” is still untruthful. It’s trying to have your cake and eat it too, and while it might benefit you in the short term, this is exactly the kind of behavior that ruins relationships. Forever.

*

When I broke up with Jed, the cameras captured it all. But he seemed to walk away from that conversation with the hope that we might still get back together.

I called him later to make it clear: that wasn’t going to happen. He got mad at me for breaking up with him once and for all over the phone, but I just could not bear to see him. I felt so ashamed and just plain stupid for falling for the same old thing from another guy. By misrepresenting his intentions, he’d stolen the chance I had to find love with Tyler, or maybe with Peter. It was unfair to them. It was unfair to every single guy who came on that show with true intentions.

I also felt like I was letting everyone down. All the viewers who had watched this show and invested so much time watching this love story develop were going to be disappointed now. I hated that. But I couldn’t say anything about it.