Delilah had been sleeping with her recent ex (they’d dated on and off since high school) and her brand-new boyfriend in close succession when she got pregnant. She was sure she got pregnant by her new guy, who’d she just met weeks before.
Another friend and I quietly did the math and explained that the timeline proved her ex was likely the father, not her current flame. I, for one, had once given birth so I had an understanding about the timing of these things.
At the time, she dismissed us outright. Then, the baby was born. A near replica of her ex — the illusion cracked. She came clean instantly. I was relieved — and regained much respect.
The fallout, however, was brutal. The man who believed he was going to be a father was crushed. He’d even flown in family from Brazil for the birth of his supposed first child. And the biological father? An emotionally vacant alcoholic bartender, he wanted nothing to do with his own son, despite living just a couple miles down the road.
When it became clear that the biological father was not going to pay or spend time with his baby son, Delilah moved on with her life. She started her own business, successfully branding and producing a dried jackfruit snack that earned accolades from the likes of Robert Downey Jr. after their mutual investor shared a bag with him.
She also began dating again when her son was about six months old and baby daddy still wasn’t coming around, despite “actually being a great guy with awesome manners,” according to her.
From Swipe to Soulmate in Three Hours
I remember her first date post-baby well. She had dropped her baby son off at my place while she went to meet a dude she just matched with on a dating app (Bumble, I think).
I casually logged into Facebook three hours later (long date, I know) and saw that Delilah had become Facebook official with the guy she was on her way to meet just a few short hours ago.
She showed up a little while later — glowing, claiming he was “the one.” She knew because they’d had the same dream about something, but she couldn’t tell me what because it was a secret between them.
I was stunned. How could she be so sure, so fast? Especially with a baby at stake?
Within a few months, she discovered by way of a mutual friend that her boyfriend was being discussed very negatively on a women’s local dating feedback Facebook page. Specifically, he was being accused of screwing many different women, usually BDSM-style, sometimes crying when he couldn’t get off.
This was her chance to get out with her son. Instead, however, she got pregnant by him. A girl.
They got married not long after and eventually had their second biological child together. A boy. Three kids total now.
A Perfect Life, Cracking at the Seams
Over time, he took control of her finances, monitored her messages and phone calls, and gradually cut her off from meaningful outside contact. Meanwhile, he continued to cheat compulsively, seducing and bedding countless women, some of whom later told her that he had physically harmed them as well (BDSM-gone-awry stuff). She would later reveal to me that he was diagnosed with both Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Sex Addiction with sadistic compulsions, though she didn’t know this info yet.
At the same time, they moved their growing little family to a picture-perfect white-picketed fence large old house in the countryside. They thought the isolation and boredom would curb his sexual appetite.
I visited them there once for their youngest child’s first or second birthday party, and I found the little town picturesque, but they hated it there, fearful of the rampant Trump supporters (eye roll). Soon after, they left for more civilized pastures: Bay Area, California. Still, the rampant cheating continued.
A couple years later, Delilah filed for divorce and they both moved — separately — to Boise, Idaho where the standard of living is considerably cheaper.
It was at this time that Delilah, who had increasingly cut off contact with us at behest of her controlling husband, reappeared fully in our lives via our Whatsapp thread. With full access to her phone and social media again, she came back full-force, messaging us daily with the details of her newly single and working-mom-of-three life.
A New Soulmate Every Week
A few months into living on her own with the kids part-time, she began dating in earnest again. First was a longtime friend, and she was certain he was the one until they had sex and she realized he wasn’t. She rejected him and began dating locally via dating apps, dating many men in quick succession and falling momentarily for each of them.
The intensity of her short-lived flings became startling — each one a new “soulmate,” each the real connection she insists she’s been waiting for. At one point, the introductions and declarations of deep love were happening weekly — sometimes every three days. Truly, I’ve lost count; there have been more than I can tally on both hands. It was definitely not normal. I remember in one case, she broke up with “the one” — who looked exactly like her brother, weird, but okay — because he didn’t pay her enough attention after his student died suddenly.
Marla and I both tried to figure out how the heck this guy’s seventh grade student died suddenly, but she ranted on about how she deserves attention no matter what.
When we began to question a little more forcefully her choices, the seeming cycle, the chaos, the love-bombing, she told us that we didn’t understand her and its because we were so deeply lacking in self-love and self-worth of our own. She added that she couldn’t relate to us anymore because of it — that our supposed deficiency actually worried her.
By this point, I had already been deep in the troughs of denial for months, brushing off Marla’s insistent pleas that this pattern was extraordinarily abnormal. Deep down, I knew she was right, but I didn’t want to face it. Maybe it was because I admired Delilah so much — admired how she managed single motherhood of three small kids (three!), while simultaneously juggling her business and teaching, all in the aftermath of surviving a marriage to a man with NPD.
That admiration kept me clinging to the hope that her choices made sense in some way I couldn’t see. I kept trying so hard to see the very best in her, although looking back, my view of her could never quite match up to her own supposed view of herself: a near-perfect being.
This is the thing: I know that nobody is perfect, least of all her with her messy trail of relationship fuckups, but she was perfectly pretty, perfectly intelligent, perfectly charming, perfectly successful.
A Character in Her Story, Not a Friend
At this point, I realized my concern wasn’t just about her choices. It was about the children — especially her oldest son, whom by the tender age of six had already cycled through four different father figures (fake baby daddy; real baby daddy; NPD dad; now a weirdo junkie dad she’d already introduced to her kids.)
I couldn’t help but think about what that does to a child’s attachment system, how instability becomes a template for love, how the sense of self begins to fracture when nothing in one’s environment holds steady.
So when she related to us that she had introduced the latest in a long succession of lovers to her kids as their new dad, I admittedly lost my cool. I exploded, I admit it. I told her she was a selfish mother — though I said this after she — out of nowhere — spat at me that her own childhood was better than my daughter’s. I found this strange: Why was she comparing her childhood to my own daughter’s?
I can only surmise that she made this comment because her stepfather had sexually assaulted her, and I often stated that the reason I hadn’t married was because of my fear of something like this happening to my own kid.
She often spoke with deep confusion and angst about the time she got shipped off to the other side of the world for a year after accusing her new stepfather of sexually fondling her. In the same breath, however, she raved about how well her stepdad treats her mother — never letting her pump her own gas, and otherwise waiting on her hand and foot.
Perhaps he does it to make sure she doesn’t ever decide to call Child Protective Services, I sometimes thought drily, though I never said it.
Orbiting Someone Else’s Story
Regardless — after my fiery outburst, Delilah discarded us both, cutting Marla and me out of her life without hesitation. Really, the devaluation of us had begun months earlier when Marla first popped off on her, questioning unsettling behavior and discrepancies. Increasingly, she’d expressed to us how troubling it was for her to try to relate to people like us, devoid of self-love and self-worth.
The rejection, howeber, came suddenly and completely, as she blocked us and cut us out, and I was humiliated by my own blindness, my months of denial despite Marla’s steady insistence that this was not normal. I had wanted so badly to believe in Delilah, to preserve the admiration I felt for her resilience as a single mother of three small children, a business owner, a teacher, a survivor of a destructive marriage. Admitting the truth meant admitting I had ignored my own instincts and Marla’s warnings, and that failure weighed on me heavily.
That realization rattled me. Had I been drawn into a pattern of her making, not just as a concerned friend but as a character in her curated narrative? Was I only ever safe in her world so long as I agreed to suspend disbelief?
Here is the hardest part to stomach: she is not faking her story. She believes it. That sincerity is what makes her narrative so seductive. But believing in your own illusions does not make them less harmful: Her children still absorb the instability. Her friends still bear the burden of playing along. And when anyone dares to question the script, they risk being cut out entirely.
I’m left with the gravity of a sobering lesson about how trauma can turn truth into something malleable, and how, when someone’s curated reality collides with your own, you must decide whether to keep orbiting their story or protect the integrity of your own.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
