At the end of the year I quit my job, moved to the South, and took a job in education. At the job interview I lied and referred to Cheyenne as my “fiancé.” Originally I had not wanted to move in with her—primarily because my job would be requiring me to get up at 6:30 and, as a graduate student, she would often sleep until noon. However, she managed to browbeat me into moving in. This, my therapist would later tell me, was another red flag.

Living with Cheyenne was pleasant at first. But she continued her efforts to pressure me into marrying her and into having a baby. Someone had told her once that writing your PhD dissertation is the best time to have a baby. She then became determined to have her baby during this time regardless of any other factors such as her current relationship, finance, etc. (I made more than twice as much as her so paying for her baby was apparently my job.) She told me that that she wanted to get married the summer of 07 and have her baby in the summer of 08. She hadn’t ever mentioned this timeline to me in 05 when we first met.

It became apparent that she was dead-set in this plan whether I was willing to go along with it or not. I had already changed my life-plans considerably for this relationship. She had made no sacrifices whatsoever. She seemed to feel guilty about this but began to tell herself that I had no plans of my own, that I “didn’t know what I wanted.” Nothing could have been further from the truth, but this made her feel better.

I loved Cheyenne but I didn’t want to be a father so soon and I didn’t want to string her along if she really wanted this baby. I suggested that when our lease came up we should decide whether or not we wanted to continue the relationship.

That year I was working about fifty hours a week at an incredibly stressful inner-city school. I was also doing research projects on the side. Cheyenne was totally oblivious to how hard I was working, probably because she has been a student for her entire life and never worked a real job. We began to grow apart.

Cheyenne started to make a lot of strange off-the-cuff remarks about our sex life. She said she was bothered by the idea of never having sex with other people and suggested quasi-jokingly that we have an open relationship. She also started to express an obsessive interest in strip clubs. I couldn’t reconcile this with her stance as a feminist. She had asked me once, “You would kill yourself if you ever cheated on me, right?” She still seemed so “nice” to everyone, that it was easy to simply dismiss all of these comments.

We got into a heated debate one night when she said she wanted the Virgin Mary tattooed on her inner thigh. I was raised Catholic and I didn’t see anything clever or artistic about this idea: I thought about looking at the Virgin Mary while we had sex and I found it repulsive. I told her how I felt about the tattoo and she gave me a bunch of feminist bullshit about how she was reclaiming a symbol that had condemned female sexuality. I told her there were other ways to reclaim a symbol.

One Friday I came home from a long day at work. I was always sleep deprived in those days because Cheyenne would climb into bed around 2am and wake me up. Then at 6:30 my alarm would go off. Friday was always the worst because it meant I had gone five nights in a row without a good night’s sleep. Cheyenne said she wanted to go the bar with some friends and I thought that was a great idea: I could use a drink.

End of Part 2. To be continued. Soon. Part 1