My Dangerous Ex-Lover: I Played With Fire and Got Burned

“I need to speak with you.”

The message comes from Jared’s number, but something about it doesn’t feel right.

The words are so direct, so urgent.

I know Jared well enough to know he didn’t text like that.

My stomach twists.

I take five minutes to gather myself, then called, holding my breath.

“Hello?”

It’s not Jared’s voice on the other end.

Instead, a youngish-sounding female voice picks up.

She introduced herself as Iris, “Jared’s girlfriend.”

The words come slowly at first, then in a rush: Last night, Jattacked her and her elderly stepfather in a drunken rage.

She describes the violence, the chaos, the police arriving to pull him off of them.

Jared is in jail now, charged with both misdemeanor domestic violence and a felony for harming an elderly person.

“I had to call you because you dated him right before me and you’ve known him for years,” she says.

“Tell me — Did he ever hit you?” She asks me.

I draw a deep, long breath.

“No, he didn’t. But only because I avoided him when he was drunk. I avoided him a lot actually. To be honest — he scared me.”

I mentally recall his descent into darkness and shudder.

Once upon a time, I didn’t fear him at all.

In fact, when we’d first met, 7 or 8 years ago, I’d felt pure peacefulness wash over and through me.

At the time, I’d assumed that this sensation of exquisite inner peace was some sort of sign from Heaven.

Blinded by Lust: The Allure of a Dangerous Man

When Jared walked into the bar where I worked, chugging beers faster than I could pour them, I didn’t really notice him for awhile.

He barely spoke, offering only mumbled one-word answers.

I thought maybe he was socially awkward, even slow.

How sweet and sensitive, I thought. Like a child.

As I got to know Jared, however, I learned that he wasn’t shy at all — at least not when he drank, which was most of the time.

He was a ladies’ man, the life of the party, and unnervingly street-smart.

What’s more, the sexual chemistry between us was electrifying.

That’s why — even after learning he was “technically” not single, I kept flirting.

In fact, I even asked him to sleep with me, a favor he more than esctatic to fulfill.

Those sex-fueled summer days were idyllic, but with Autumn came dead leaves and disillusionment.

…

Truth was — the more I got to know him, the more I judged him.

He blatantly cheated, drank like a fish, brought me (and other women) around his teenage daughters, slept in and partied.

And that was just his charming side.

As time went on, I haplessly witnessed a few of his rage-fueled tantrums.

In his defense, I can’t say he never warned me. He had, early on.

He’d told me that he had another side to his personality, a side he hoped I would never meet, but felt pretty sure I would eventually.

Another time, he told me: “I’m like a pitbull. No one knows what to expect. Especially not the pitbull.”

I pulled away, turned off by his lifestyle and values but still smitten with his charisma and street-smarts.

I initially assumed that once I lost respect, I’d lose the physical attraction as well.

Much to my dismay, I learned that you can be turned off by someone’s negative qualities and still crave them like a hard drug.

Dammit.

Sucked into the Vortex of Pity for a Broken Man

The next few years we saw one another on-and-off, as I — ironically— both pulled away and clung to the fantasy of who he could be.

You see, despite my disillusionment with him, I couldn’t let go of those seemingly celestial first months of dating.

I felt I’d met somebody who, though broken, was also very special.

I clung to that feeling of specialness.

Whenever life got me down, or I became particularly lonely, there he was, living just down the street, ready and willing to sweet-talk me for a chance at another romp in the hay.

Years went by this way as our moments of passion became increasingly less and increasingly passionless.

Then, on Thanksgiving night of 2023, I received a text from Jared.

“You up?”

Normally I ignored his sporadic booty calls.

That night, though, I was feeling particularly vulnerable, broken and lonely thanks to a stressful string of recent events.

I was also tipsy off of red wine served earlier to me by my friend and her mother.

Just this once, I told myself. What could one silly little slip-up hurt?

…

As soon as I opened the front-gate to Jared that night, I regretted my choice to let him come over.

He was drunk and manic, clearly suffering emotionally but completely denying it.

I tricked him into eating some toast with me before I resigned myself to some quick, passionless coitus, after which he promptly passed out besides me in bed.

At 6 AM, we were awakened to the sound of furious banging on the windows of the house.

I knew instantly: it was his girlfriend.

She’s here to kill us both, I told myself as I headed downstairs to meet my fate.

…

Though she didn’t end up killing me — or even maiming — she did finally dump Jared.

With her, she took nearly everything he had: their business, their house, their two dogs, even his truck.

This was Jared’s rock bottom.

And it was about to get so much worse.

…

Jared was reeling, spending his free time drinking and paying strippers and sex workers.

Guilt-ridden, I felt an overwhelming urge to help him not be so broken.

As a result, I tolerated his tantrums, his drinking, his endless disregard for my boundaries, because I was terrified of abandoning someone who was already so lost.

Still, I felt a darkness swallowing him up, quickly.

I felt scared.

How much longer will this rock-bottom behavior last? I asked myself more than once.

Much to my disappointment, half a year later he was still spiralling.

In fact, he seemed worse, having recently lost his job building houses with his ex’s brother.

He’d been unemployed for months now, constantly wiring money from his pension account to pay for his constant partying.

When not drunk and partying with others, he was nagging me.

Eventually, I hit my breaking point.

I told him I needed a break from him.

I would find out later, from Iris, that their relationship began that same week.

When a Woman Loves a Dangerous Man

As I hang up the phone with Iris, her words linger in the air: “I think I can fix him.”

It’s the same refrain I’d once whispered to myself, clutching at a version of Jared that had never truly existed, desperate to be the light that pulled him out of his darkness.

But just like me, Iris doesn’t realize the cost of that hope — or that fixing someone isn’t love; it’s a kind of surrender.

That phone call wasn’t just a window into Jared’s spiraling chaos — it was a mirror, forcing me to see the journey I’d traveled and the cycle I’d finally broken.

I want to tell Iris everything, to shake her and warn her that love can’t save someone, love isn’t enough, love could destroy her and her daughter.

I pray she won’t have to learn the hard way.

I pray her daughter won’t pay the price.

I pray and I sit in silence.

I think about how it all started — about the peaceful bliss I’d once felt when Jared first stumbled into my life.

Now I know for certain that it wasn’t peace at all.

It was the calm before a storm I hadn’t seen coming.

And as for Jared?

I no longer hold out hope for his redemption.

Instead, I hold space for my own.

If you’d like to read more about my moral growing pains, check out the pieces below!

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