An empty house, the once bright future tossed to stone broken battered dreams, two lawyers square off with a realtor in between, their clients nowhere to be seen. The cold war has begun.

But to understand how it began, we begin at the beginning of the story. Just as Russia and the United States had a "decent" working relationship before the cold war, so too did she and I. We had not started to move yet, but our relationship was slowly going uphill from the previous problems we had encountered (listed in the previous post) and I was sure we were going to start making it work...how wrong I was. (This is going to be a trend in these posts).

My basic thoughts were this, we had been living together now for 2 years and were spending so much money on rent that it just made sense to buy a house and spend that money on the house instead, right?

In retrospect though...mistakes were made.

I didn't see those big fat blinking signs that said "Danger Will Robinson!" that was fully covered in the previous listiepoo.

To her credit it wasn't her idea, it was mine. Not so much to her credit...she never had any actual ideas of her own to begin with. That isn't a dig or an insult by the way, I mean literally no ideas of her own ever. The way she saw it if she made me do the decision making anytime something went right she could celebrate and every time something went wrong I was to blame and shouldered the problem on my own. She wouldn't ever phrase it that way, but you know...#dealwithit

I asked, she said yes, we did the thing, and bought a house. realize buying a house is far more complicated than that is, buuuuut for brevity's sake it gets a footnote.

I desperately tried to get her involved, but at every turn she went out of her way to avoid getting involved. I did the house searching. I did the house touring. I showed her two places I liked. We bought the house.

Like I said...mistakes were made.

So we purchase the house together, do the downpayment and start moving.

Now when I say the words "A fight happened." our fights went like this, every time. I got frustrated with something for 30 seconds to a minute. She got pissed for 30 minutes to an hour. Then, she applied her patented silent treatment, which was generally locking herself in a room with some form of entertainment, usually my stuff and completely ignoring my existence. And to be clear, this wasn't "Hey I need some time to myself. We can talk later." it was complete shut out, shut down of the relationship. Occasionally punctuated by emails or texts that were thousands of words long.

During the move she started moving everything and didn't tell me about it. I got home and thanked her, to which she responded with telling me how I wasn't doing enough. I was at work.

A fight happened. Silent Treatment.

We got to the house and things were not fully unpacked within the first day.

A fight happened. Silent treatment

The next day I was building IKEA stuff and I had left a box by the stairs.

A fight happened. Silent treatment.

The next day I was doing dishes and left a bit of water on the counter.

A fight happened. Silent treatment.

She demanded intimate time, which I did not want to do because...well we had just fought.

A fight happened. Silent treatment.

My memory at this point gets a bit hazy because I start having a complete mental breakdown, which included the inability to speak, no appetite, issues at work, completely shutting out friends and family, panic attacks, mini heart attacks, and a complete breakdown of my capacity to be...me.

After a few days of this I took back control of my mind, the relationship stabilized, and I began to think. And so on that next fateful night I came home, gave her the last kiss I would ever give her, and said the following words. "I love you. Please stop abusing me." and her response was exactly the same, except for one important addition. Three days later she broke up with me and moved out.

And this is when I got my first piece of vindication, though at the time it didn't feel like it. She immediately was seeing a new guy. When I say immediately, I mean like...a week later. I can only surmise they had been seeing each other prior. But even more

And that was when the knife turned. She was seeing someone new the next week, a guy she had in passing told me about two months prior and then as if by magic stopped talking to me about.

I was asking myself questions like:

"Why him?"

"What does he have that I don't?"

What I would not realize was the small taste of my great victory had begun. And this guy would factor into it heavily.

And now we come to the conundrum that I would soon face. How do I get her off the title of the house? We had bought it together and she was a part owner. That is when lawyers got involved.

Join me next time for Act 2 of The Fake Divorce. The Cold War begins.

Before we