The Exiter

The Moment of The Great Idea

The saying goes 'it's not how you walked in it's how you walked out." I have taken part in not only saying this but demonstrating it on many occasions. The first time I really practiced what I preached was with my first wife. She was always the grand entrance and always leaving me to be her backdoor exit. It always seemed like we could never make it through any door together, be it the front or back. We stayed married for 10 years. It was enough time for us to decide that we were young enough to not make long term decisions, but old enough to choose our short term goals. We worked together to buy our first house, open a business, and travel around the world once. We worked on opposite ends of the spectrum when it came to our ideals. We could agree on our goals, but when it came time to reach the moment of the "Eureka", we turned into a theater stage, she was the character entering and I was the character exiting. The role play was the best part of our marriage, being that our foundation was not stable. We never had a strategy or structure for our relationship, even though we were married. After a while, a 10 year while, I decided to exit before her entrance.

The party started at 8:00pm. We figured the guest would arrive around 7:30pm, so we planned to have about 2 hours for ourselves to get ready and relax before our guest arrived. We were throwing a 15 year anniversary party for our close friend. We had known them before we got married, they were our marriage mentors. Always giving us advice and encouraging us to work things when we didn't want to. So of course, we wanted to do the honors this year because we both had been considering that next year might not be an option. I found out that he was having an affair with my wife and that they both planned on keeping it a secret from me and his wife. I wasn't surprised, but I know his wife would be if she found out, being that his wife and my wife had been childhood friends. He had the best of both worlds, allowing my wife to again, be the grand entrance, while his wife had a front row seat in the VIP section. In light of the performance that my wife had planned out tonight, I acted as if I would again compliment her entrance with my expected exit. I let her know that I was going to step out before the party. She did her usual look of OK What Ever and kept doing what she was doing as if it didn't matter. That is when I decided to leave and not come back. I made my exit.

I never looked back at that night or my first marriage. I had already arranged for a friend to pick my stuff up, and because she knew the situation, we never talked about what my wife said to her when she had the packers and movers collect my things and dropped of the divorce papers. I wasn't worried about what was going to happen or how she felt, because I knew that this was the way out. So for the next few months until the divorce was final and we dissolved our business, I decided to date a girl that lived in the same building as me. She lived on a different floor, but we would always see each other in the elevator.