Manipulation!

Darrell and I have been talking about our relationship tonight. This evening, a friend, Sami Lambert mentioned, how she never knew, how easily, I was manipulated. Darrell and I have been together a long time and in all honesty over the duration of our time together, everyone has respected our relationship.  It wasn't until the last two years that things changed, We met different people, new people, untried and untested, and we took them at face value.  Darrell and I are very trusting, OK too trusting, but I  would hate going through life judging everyone I met instantly.  It's not a great way to build up trusted friendships.

It isn't until you move away from a group of people that you realise the true extent of the damage caused. As we look forward to our Marriage together, we are discussing, just what got us here today.  Coming to terms with the past, is the best way to move forward, a great healer and a warning for the future!

I am a thinker and writer; it is good to challenge ones own thought processes.  As people become closer friends,  I start to notice negative, rather than positive influences.  I am observant, intelligent or as they would frequently say, paranoid.  You are being over sensitive, reading too much into stuff.  That is my weak point, I believe and trust them enough to doubt what I know is true.  That is a real problem, because when these things crop up again, I trust them not me; manipulation at work!

Over twenty years together, we had never split up until recently, twice in two years, not through things we had done, but rather the people around us.

A group of us went out to the club, I remember we were all stood at the bar, and I was the only one with a jacket on. The music was playing on the down stairs dance floor, it was a bit noisy and hard to hear properly! I remember James handing me, what I thought was his wallet and I mouthed, something like 'Do you want me to put it in my pocket?' I was the only one with a coat, so guessed he wanted me to look after it. I put it in the inside pocket and thought no more of it.

We went back to James afterwards. I rarely went back there, but promised not to wake Darrell up, so had little choice. In the early hours, I decided to go home, well I said I was going for a walk, If I had said I was going home, they would have come with me and Darrell would have gone mad! I wanted to stop off on the way and get some cigarettes; going home would mean, they would not be smoking all my cigarettes. None of them worked and had any money, and I was getting sick of dishing out cigarettes I was paying for, I left, went home and got straight in bed!

When morning came, I remember looking through my jacket pockets for some change, when I came across the wallet. I text James and told him I had it, just in case he thought he'd lost it. Probably about five minutes later, he replied, saying he did not know what I was talking about, he denied it again and again. Eventually I looked inside the wallet, to discover, it was not even his, it belonged to someone else. James had lifted the wallet off a table in the club and I had put it in my pocket, I was livid.

After confronting him, he told me I had stolen it from a guy up Southampton Common. At that stage I thought he'd lost the plot, he had stolen the bloody wallet and had made up some cock and ball story, to deflect from the theft.

It was Halloween, myself, Darrell and a couple of mates were walking down to the club, wearing very little at all; It was snowing. I was walking ahead with Paul, Darrell was behind us with Chris under an umbrella. Darrell my partner was acting odd as soon as we got there, which was unlike him.

Two weeks later we headed out to the club again, Chris was also there. Darrell had had a rough few weeks, he was put on anti depressants and was feeling the worst he'd felt in a while. We returned after the club, where I spent most of the time talking to a mate on the bed.

Things started to get a bit strange, Darrell had informed me he was going to have a bath with Chris. I said I would rather he didn't, he ignored me, they both went in the bathroom and locked the door! I was still on the bed chatting at the time, gobsmacked. My mate was going mad and threatened to kick the door in;  I told him to leave it. We had a massive row after they got out the bathroom, and he stayed with a close friend that night; upset and angry, I was looked after by my mate.

When he got home the next day we shouted and screamed and low and behold the truth, according to James and Chris, Darrell had been told I had be having sex at the common with this young lad and I had stolen his wallet; a fantasy made up in his head. For reasons, he never explained, Darrell was also confronted by Chris on Halloween night, saying, that because I had cheated he should also do the same. Darrell was put on antidepressants over the whole thing and finally told me on that night. Darrell assured me nothing happened in the bathroom; I believed him, why wouldn't I.

The whole thing was made up, to cause maximum damage to our relationship. Darrell was vulnerable, through stress at work and this caused him to start medication. Our relationship was being used as a game by James and Chris for their own ends. I do not know what they are.

My relationship had faltered through lies. He was told by them and others afterwards to leave me. When he said no, they said they would wash their hands of him. Darrell was a state.

Even when I tried to kill myself, after Darrell walked out, after just coming out of Hospital, I received an anonymous phone call telling me who he was staying with and there was a lot more to it. I suppose after the amount of interfering we had had in our life, I had become immune to it. I have never had such manipulation, lies and rubbish thrown at me before, ever. I became resistant to it; I was just dead inside.

Of course, we both know the truth now. It was the worst, sustained assault of untruths and game playing with our lives, we had ever had, and for what? We just don't know. Not much shocks us, but we felt sick at what could have happened.

Luckily we are free of them now, but we both realise just how close we came to ending it, over the most disgusting bunch of manipulative people I have ever met. It still shocks us even now!

Why do people do this? For what ends? In all our twenty years together this has never happened. It has been quite weird writing this down with Darrell. Looking back at it now, we just can't believe it.

All names used in this piece of writing are fictitious!

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