When I was five or six years old, I had a neighbor who listened to Spanish music late into the night. I could not understand a word of it, but there was one particular song that always made me cry. I had no idea why. I only knew that something in that music reached me in a way I could not explain.
Around the same time, I saw a movie that completely captivated me. The main actress was assertive, fearless, and tough enough to stab a man right in the heart for disrespecting her. But she could also turn around and be tender and loving with the people she cared about. I had grown up around strong women, so her strength was not what fascinated me. It was the combination of toughness and tenderness. To my six-year-old mind, she became exactly what a woman should be.
Somehow, in that wonderfully irrational way children make sense of the world, I put the two things together. The Spanish music became Mexico. The actress became the kind of Mexican woman I wanted to marry. I decided right then and there that when I grew up, I would learn Spanish, go to Mexico, and find a woman just like her.
I had no idea that I was building my future on pillars I did not understand.
When I eventually went to college, I ended up studying foreign languages: French, Spanish, and Japanese. For my first study abroad, I went to Mexico. I ended up in a city about 90 minutes south of Mexico City. I could not believe that I was actually in the country of my dreams.
During my second semester there, I met a girl who was everything I had ever imagined my perfect girlfriend would be.
She was assertive and had a take-charge attitude. But with me, she was the sweetest girl in the world. She had very long, jet-black hair, just like that actress in the movie, I said to myself.
My Sarita spoke English with the most awesome Salma Hayek accent. Her skin was that cinnamon-orange color that drove me crazy. And most of all, her “I love you” flowed so freely from her lips. It felt like I had finally found the place where I belonged. She had no problem telling me exactly how she felt about me and enjoyed watching me blush every time she said it.
Big Man Don’t Cry
To understand why that was such a big deal to me, up to that point, the words “I love you” were something that happened on television or in the movies. I come from a family that did not appreciate expressing feelings openly, and much less in public. Positive feelings were best left unspoken. And if there was something someone did that hurt, upset, or made you feel devalued, you did not talk about that.
You pushed that nonsense down and buried it deep. Because no self-respecting adult, especially a man, would lower himself so far as to admit his feelings were hurt and ask to be understood.
As far as I can remember, romance was something that should only happen behind closed doors. In my family, we were much more comfortable lobbing criticism at one another and telling others what they had done wrong. Though it was never said out loud, we all learned by osmosis that paying compliments to people would swell their heads. They would become arrogant and unbearable.
So being with someone who could vocalize her romantic feelings unambiguously made me think and feel, “This is what I have always been looking for.” She did not put me through a thousand and one trials to make me prove I was worthy of her love. She asked for nothing from me except that I love her.
Before meeting Sarita, I was so emotionally repressed that it pained me to even hold a girl’s hand in public. It felt inappropriate. That was something done in private, away from strangers’ judgmental eyes.
With her, I not only held her hand in the street, I kissed her in public without feeling a hint of embarrassment. No more looking left and right before responding to her request for a kiss to make sure no one was watching us.
She also had a few things going for her that were important to me. She was studying for her degree, she already had the ability to travel to the United States, and she shared many of my conservative views.
When I was with her, I felt completely immersed in love. And as if that wasn’t enough, her family liked me, and they welcomed me with open arms.
The Japanese Surprise
For about two years, I went back and forth between Mexico and my studies in New England. Then came the time for my studies in Japan. I kissed her goodbye in Mexico and promised to return to her. That promise would come back to haunt me.
Then it came time for my next study abroad. I went to Japan, and things went horribly wrong. As much as I did not think it could happen, I fell for a girl in Osaka. I wrote to my Mexican girlfriend and told her we had to break up because I had met someone else.
Her response shocked me. She told me I was making a mistake because she was the one who truly loved me. Besides, I had promised her I would come back to her. She told me that she loved me and wanted me. She did not care that I was with another girl. She loved me, she wanted me, and she wanted me to come back to her. That was not the response I was expecting.
I have always considered myself a man of my word. I did promise that I would return to her, and I felt terrible about breaking my promise. I felt like garbage inside and was riddled with guilt. Here I was, in love with two girls: Mariko and Sarita. It was something I never thought possible.
It was an excruciating decision for me. But in the end, I decided to keep my word. I broke up with Mariko and returned to Mexico a year later.
I Won. He Lost. Victory!
After I finished my undergraduate studies, I started a business. I put my head down and worked an exorbitant number of hours, getting ready to be a good and responsible husband. When I felt the time was right, I asked Sarita to join me and officially start our life together.
Within weeks of her arrival, I felt that something was not right. I could not say exactly what it was, but I had that knot in my stomach that would not go away.
At the time, we shared a desktop computer. One day, when I sat down to use the machine, her user account was not fully logged out, and there was a letter on the screen. It turned out that after she told me she did not care that I had fallen for someone else, she did care. She wanted to punish me. She was seeing someone else because she wanted to pay me back for what I had done to her.
I confronted her, and she fessed up to the deception. She told me she could not believe that after I had pledged my love to her, I had decided to be with someone else. She wanted to hurt me and make me experience what it felt like to be betrayed.
I was enraged.
“Why did you make me leave Mariko if you did not want me back?” was the first sentence that came out as I screamed. I felt like the victim because, from my viewpoint, I had told her the truth. I was honest with her. She, on the other hand, had lied to me. She had pretended to want me back, but her real objective was revenge.
I can’t remember the last time I felt so humiliated, if there were ever such a time. I could not believe I had been such a fool. For the first time in my life, I felt like a total failure. I was hurting inside.
When I told her parents what happened, they hopped on a plane the next day and came over to set things right. We talked among ourselves. Her parents told me something to the effect that we all make mistakes and that I should not throw away a really good relationship that could still be repaired.
She agreed to stay with me, and I agreed to make things work between us. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I was not sure I could get over what she had done. At the same time, I was relieved that I did not come out as a total loser in the situation.
Yes, I was full of myself. I was educated, driven, and an overachiever. No man, especially an intellectually inferior one, was going to take MY girl away from me. I won, he lost. She is staying with me. Victory!
What I did not realize at the time was that my overinflated ego was seeing the situation simply as a competition over a girl. I had to win at any cost. At the time, it did not even occur to me that winning had a price. I was so blinded by my fury, pride, and drive to win that I could not see past the moment. I won, and that felt very satisfying.
Winning Has a Price
As the months went by, resentment toward my now-wife began creeping in. She was no longer the girl of my dreams. She was the woman who had betrayed me and needed to be punished. I never asked myself why she should be punished when I was the one who had asked her to stay. I was the one who had chosen not to tell her to pack up her shit and go back to where she came from. I was the one who wanted to win. And I won.
Those thoughts did not cross my mind. Resentment turned into a need to exact revenge for the way she had humiliated me.
I was hurting. It was about MY feelings. What mattered was that I had done the honorable thing by being truthful. She paid me back by punishing me for my honesty. And now, it was my turn to punish her for not being as righteous as I was.
My failure to keep my word, my inability to make a decision based on what I wanted, and my willingness to do whatever it took to win had all completely disappeared from view. The desire for retribution had now replaced my desire to win, but I could not see that.
Decades Later
It took me years, long after the divorce, to realize where I had gone wrong. Had I had the maturity necessary at the time, I would have seen so many points at which I could have made different decisions.
Instead of relying on her to forgive me, I could have decided that our relationship was over and moved on in Japan. I did not do that. My ego about “keeping my promise” was more important than making a decision that was mine alone.
When I discovered that she had chosen someone else after she came to live with me, I could have let it go and let her go back to her new man. But I could not see that as an option because that would mean I was a loser. That would have been an admission that another man had bested me. My ego could not allow that to happen.
There were many other instances where I could have made different choices and taken responsibility for them. But I didn’t.
Looking back, I realize that I did not have the courage to do what I thought was right for me. I did not want to be the villain in the story, so I left it to her to be the one to decide. And when she did not make the choice I expected, I blamed her.
This episode in my life has been extremely painful to admit and take responsibility for. When I realized what I had done to her, I reached out and let her know how remorseful I was. I was not trying to get back with her. That train had left the station long ago. I wanted her to know that our breakup was on me. It was all on me.
Why couldn’t I see that in the moment? Why do we allow our pride and assumptions to blind us so completely? These are questions I try to constantly ask myself, especially when making decisions that have long-term ramifications.
Back To The Beginning
There is something else about this story that I did not discover until many years later. When I finally became fluent in Spanish, I listened to that song that had made me cry as a child. It was about a man leaving behind all he loved, but promising that he would return. Then I discovered something else.
The actress who had planted the idea in my six-year-old head that I wanted to marry a Mexican woman was Raquel Welch, playing the role of a Yaqui Native American–and the Mexicans were the bad guys.
The movie I remembered as my first glimpse of Mexico had not been filmed in Mexico.It was produced in Spain.
The music ended up being something of a presage of a pain I would suffer, but neither the woman nor the landscape was what I had attributed to them in my fantasy.Yet it was all real to me.
Those childhood impressions became memories. The memories became a dream. The dream became a destination. And eventually, I built part of my life around a reality that had never existed quite the way I remembered it.
Perhaps that is one of the strangest things about being human. We can take a handful of things we barely understand, fill in the missing pieces by layering our assumptions on them, and then spend years living inside the story we created.
Sometimes, we do not discover how wrong we were in our assumptions until the story has already become our life.