Episode 9: The Magnetic Pull of a Toxic Relationship

Brandon opens up about his conflicted feelings while recounting the story of his second significant relationship, expressing love and consideration for his current wife while sharing this challenging chapter of his past.

Please start with Episode 1. Go to my site BrandonHeld.com

• Meeting a beautiful redheaded woman at the gym who initially rejected him but later agreed to a date after learning more about him
• Discovering she was actually still married, not "going through a divorce" as she initially claimed
• Moving in together despite trust issues after she officially left her husband
• Experiencing a magnetic attraction that kept pulling them together through multiple breakups over five years
• Describing her contradictory nature - brilliant and capable (rebuilding entire kitchens after watching YouTube videos once) yet deeply insecure and inflexible
• Reluctantly marrying her after an ultimatum, then immediately regretting the decision
• Making the difficult choice to join the military to escape the relationship and restart his life

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:36

Hello, welcome back to Brandon episode 9. Where I last left off was the beginning of my introduction to the next significant relationship in my life. I'm having a tough time recalling these memories and trying to tell them as authentically as possible in what happened and how it happened at the time because my wife i love her very much and she is the best thing that ever happened to me in my life and i hope that i can get through this and do these things without affecting her in some type of way because this is just me trying to tell my story and there are some feelings that brew up inside me that make me feel bad about doing this because I'm recalling these memories and I'm making these memories public so Jew I love you and I hope that this is not bothering you and if it is please don't listen to these portions because these are really for everyone else not for you so having said that back to where i left off so my friend called me out and i saw this redhead girl at the gym that i was Insanely attracted to from the outside looking in. I didn't know anything about her. She walked with confidence. She had the face of Angelina Jolie, the body of a fitness model, and she dyed her hair red, not like crazy red, but like a red tint to her already naturally dark hair, but it made it look a little red. And physically the attraction was just there. She was just beautiful to me and sexy. And it wasn't just me. And I'll get into that in a minute. So I saw her at the gym the next day after my roommate calls me out. And I see my opportunity to ask her out. And I sit down next to her and I introduce myself. And I just come out with it. I say, hey, I think you're beautiful. I would love to go out with you sometime. And she just looks at me and she says, no, she's not interested. And I said, okay, thank you for your time. And I turn around and walk away. When I was like, ow, that hurt. Like getting rejected sucks. I don't care who you are. Getting rejected sucks. We all try to pretend it doesn't bother us. It does. I went back to a different part of the gym and I thought about what happened and I collected myself and I was thinking, everyone mistakes me for being younger than I am. I'm 25 years old. I have a son. A lot of people think I'm regular college age, 19, 20, 21. My whole life people have thought I was younger than I am. So I was like, nah, I'm not going to accept that. If nothing else, I'm going to go to her and let her know the whole situation. After I collected myself, I went back to her and I sat down and I just started talking. I said, hey, I know you said no and I respect that and I appreciate that, but I just want you to know I'm not just some other college kid here. I'm 25 years old. I'm divorced. I have a young son. I'm not just a kid hitting on you. And then she seemed really receptive to that. And then that opened up conversation. And that conversation led to her telling me she had two kids herself and she was 27. So she was almost two years older than me. I know 25 and 27 is two. When you put the birthdays together, it wasn't quite. And we just hit it off right away. It was fun. We were talking. And then at the end of the conversation, she said, yeah, you know what? I will go out with you. I walked away from that conversation, super excited. Went back to my apartment later that day, told my roommate, I asked her out and he was, yeah, see how they are. You can thank me later for calling you out, whatever. And we ended up going out and it was a blast. We had a good time. We ended up hooking up and all that. And then it wasn't until after that, she was like, I need to tell you something. And I was like, Oh God, what? And she said, I'm going through a divorce currently. I still live with my husband, but I'm going through a divorce. And I was like, of course I had questions who wouldn't in that situation. I asked my questions. She appeased me with her answers. And then we just kept going. We kept seeing each other, obviously not very often. Our situations were she was a college student, a mother of two, and I was a college student and I had Ethan who I did get half of the time during the week. I spent a lot of time with Ethan and sidebar there, that was interesting to me because I would get Ethan, pick him up from his mom. And everything was cool. He would come spend some time with me. Sometimes I kept him just one day. I'd still go back and forth and get him because me and his mother didn't live that far apart. Sometimes he'd spend two or three days with me. But as he got a little older, maybe less than one, I remember he was wearing diapers. I don't remember if he could quite walk yet. I don't think he could walk. I would pick him up from his mom and he'd be happy to see me and ready to go. When I would try to take him back to his mom, this is the part that really got me. He would wrap his arms around my neck and scream bloody murder. He didn't want to go back to his mom. My thought was, I feel so bad for her. Imagine being a mother and your son. is screaming like that because he would rather stay with his father. And then it made me have questions like, why would he behave that way? Is she mistreating him? What am I missing? What do I not know? And I never found out that there was anything wrong. I didn't believe that she would do anything like that because I thought she was a good person. So I didn't have any hints that there was any reason he was behaving like that other than He just missed me and wanted to be with me. And so I let it go, but it happened for months, months and months. I couldn't even tell you how long it went that he would just cry and scream and hang on to me when I would take him back to her. And I did not like that. I felt so bad for her. I felt bad for him. He had his reasons for feeling that way. And it was tough. It was really tough. So To advance the story of my next relationship, my second wife, Angie, and I continued dating. On paper, she was an amazing woman. If you were to put down a resume of a woman, right, and I were to say to you on that resume, oh, get this, she has the face of Jelena Jolie. She has the body of a fitness model. She has a master's degree or she's getting a master's degree in chemistry and she has a 4.0 GPA. She literally can do anything she puts her mind to. She can take wood planks and build dresser you would buy from a furniture store. She remodeled the kitchen in our house. I'm talking ripped the whole thing out, cabinets, sinks, laying down tile. We ripped out the bathroom of our home and moved the toilet from one spot to the other. She re-plumbed the entire home. She ran all the electrical outlets. She re-electrical the entire home because the old electrical wiring was bad and not, it wasn't up to code. There were parts in the wire that There were literally like two pieces of wire connected together, taped and falling apart. It was an old home that we eventually ended up living in. She was super smart, intelligence-wise, and also very attractive. On paper, you would think, oh my God, she's the perfect woman. But there's more to this story. After a little bit of dating, she comes to me one day and says, ah, no. I did it, Brandon. I said, what? She said, I finally told my husband I want a divorce. I'm moving out. And I was like, what? You told me when we met you were going through a divorce. And she tried to backtrack and say, that's not what she said. But I know what she said. And she told me she was going through a divorce. But I was so deep at this point. I just was happy that she was leaving him. And then it was going to be a situation where Where we had a real relationship. This made me question things. It made me question her honesty. It made me question her integrity. So I asked her, am I the first one that you've ever had an affair with that you cheated on your husband with? And she told me, honestly, she said no. And I learned she had other affairs and she had been with other men. And I was like, what's different this time? And she was just like, I love you. I want to be with you. I never loved any of them. I didn't want to be with any of them. You, I want to be with. I didn't have the balls to end it. I could have, I should have, but I didn't because I was so enamored by her beauty and what she was capable of as a person. I was like, all right, let's see where this goes. She ended up renting an apartment right across the hall from my apartment. I opened up the door, walked five feet. There she was, her and her two kids. That wasn't something she asked me if it was going to be okay. That wasn't something we discussed prior to that. She just did it. And it was just like, okay, I'm doing this. Deal with it. And so... I did. Eventually she asked me to move in with her. I took the difficult step of breaking it to my roommate, Jeff, that I was going to move out and move in with her. He took it in stride, even though I know he probably didn't love it. I felt an obligation to the woman I loved. She was putting a lot of pressure on me saying she can't afford to be on her own with two kids and needed help. She was really good to my son, Ethan. And that was also a swaying factor that led in her favor, right? Had she ignored Ethan or treated him like he was this burden to her or whatever, that probably would have really pushed me in a different direction. But she was so good to him. She treated him and loved him like he was her own son. That makes anyone feel... Like, oh, this is a good person that I'm with despite the other things that I know. Over time, as you live together with someone, you learn their other quirks and personality issues. She was deeply insecure, which I didn't know because she seemed so confident when I just saw her at the gym. She walked, she had pride, like she was just proud and confident, but She wasn't. She was deeply insecure. She had high anxiety, very high anxiety, anxious all the time, nervous energy all the time. I could never feel like I could relax with her because she was just so angst ridden and always needed to be moving around. She was a workaholic. She had things to her liking. That made me feel like she's not the right person for me. As beautiful as she is, she's just not the right person for me. I don't know if I could ever trust her based on what I know about her and the way this relationship started. And eventually we moved out of the apartment and into a house together. That's where the things occurred that I told you about ripping out a kitchen and a bathroom and redoing an entire house. She died. literally looked online how do you lay tile she could go lay tile how do you change the electrical wiring in a home boom done how do you do the plumbing she would watch a youtube video one time and she just did it you have to respect someone that has that kind of skill and ability how can you not i couldn't do it i still couldn't do it to this day i don't believe i could watch any video one time on something that significant and just go do it. But she did it. But we had a lot of other issues. And one of our issues was how to handle children. I felt her kids were young and like they were brats. I felt like they got away with too much, the way they behave, the way they acted out. And she just didn't handle them well. And I wasn't allowed to handle them, right? Because they weren't my kids. This was her job to take care of that stuff. And we would fight about how to take care of kids. We would fight about how to take care of exes. Her ex was still completely in love with her, didn't want to let her go, was inappropriately, for our relationship anyway, contacting her and trying to maintain some type of relationship that was clearly above exes that had children together. And we would fight about all these things. She was very... pigheaded and stubborn. She knew she was intelligent. She had a photographic memory. She was smart. And so that translated into all areas of life that she thought she was always right. You couldn't tell her anything. She was always right. And her point of view was the only one that mattered. I'm not the type of person you can be that way with. I look for compromise in a relationship. Two people don't get together. and just, boom, are on the same page on everything. It takes work, sometimes hard work. You have to be able to give in the areas you can live with. You have to be able to give and live to fight another day. And if it's an area you just can't give and can't live with, you have to draw a line. That person has to meet you halfway or on your side of the line, depending on the situation. And vice versa, you have to be willing to do that for your partner. You have to be willing to meet them halfway or sometimes you go to their side of the line. It just depends on what the situation is. And she just had it like, nope, I'm right. You're wrong. I do things my way. No one else is going to tell me how to do it differently. That literally the words that she said to me. So it was falling apart. It became toxic to some degree because she We just couldn't get along relationship-wise, but the attraction was still there. We were super attracted to each other. We were like two magnets, two heavy-duty magnets that you're trying to pull apart. And as much as we tried, we broke up multiple times. I moved out three or four times from living with her. We ended it multiple times. We just couldn't break away from each other. Finally, at one point, she gave me an ultimatum. She said, we either need to get married or end this. And at that time, things were good. It was a brief time towards the end where we were doing well. She threw this ultimatum on me. You need to marry me or get out. And I'm living back in the house with her. And I was like, I need to think about that. And she got upset by that, offended by that. And so I tried to let it slide and let it pass. And then about a week went by and she approached me again with it. She said, you either need to marry me or you need to go get a U-Haul and get out of my house. And she was dead serious, right? I could see it on her face. And I was really in a pickle. I knew I didn't want to marry her, at least not at that point in time. We had been together almost five years, but I also knew I wasn't ready to call it quits. There's a part of me that feels like I should turn back. If I would have turned back time and called her bluff, I gave in. I married her and almost immediately I regretted. We went to a courthouse, got married, and right away I saw a shift in her attitude, a shift in her personality. She became much more domineering and demanding, maybe a workaholic, maybe doing her own thing a lot. And I didn't spend that much time with her and she just kind of let me be, let me do my thing. But after we got married, she was pushing me like, okay, you need to get your career together. You need to get your life financially going because I'm not going to put up with someone who's not doing well financially in life and And the truth is I had been struggling to get a career and get a job going. And I had shared all that with her and I thought she was on my team. But once she portrayed this personality and this attitude, I was completely turned off. I also always had in my mind, I don't know if I can trust her. I never felt like I could trust her. I feel like if you have the ability to cheat on someone multiple times, what makes me any different? I never thought I'm so special she'll never cheat on me. No, I didn't think that at all. I actually thought when things weren't going well, she would go cheat on me, whatever she's looking for in the arms of another man. And frankly, I never knew if the times that we broke up, if she didn't. Go do that and finance. She says that she didn't, but who knows, right? So it leaves questions. I knew this was just a disaster, the sinking ship that hasn't sunk yet and I needed to get off. So I decided to move out and leave her for good. One of the ways I decided to do that was to join the military. Hmm. Because I knew if I lived in the same area with her and the same town with her, we would never completely separate. It just wasn't going to happen. She, like I said, that pool, that magnetic pool, it was too strong. We were bad for each other. We were never going to have a good relationship, but we also didn't have the power to break away. Neither one of us did. I can't get a career going where I'm currently living in Dayton, Ohio. I can't break away in this relationship. And just nothing was going right for me there, except for the fact, Ethan. I loved Ethan. I still spent a lot of time. He had grown close to her kids, which was also a difficult part of the equation. Her son was close to his age. They got along well and had a relationship. I was going through in my mind what to do. And frankly, it was my mom. That tips me over the edge. I was asking my friends and family, what would they do if they were in my situation? What should I do? It was my mom that said, you and Ethan, you have a strong bond. It's going to break that. You need to get your life together. If that means joining the military and doing what you need to do to get your life together, then that's okay. Do that. You're always going to have Ethan. He'll always be your son. You'll always have that strong bond. And I listened to that and I believed that. And so under that decision, I decided, all right, I'm going to go join the military. I'm going to become an officer in the Air Force. I'm going to get a secondary degree. And because this undergraduate mass communications degree is awful. It was a worthless degree, frankly, if you weren't going to be on the news or be a reporter or something like that. It was just a bad degree. And I decided I was going to follow the path of joining the military. Less than six months of marriage, I had moved out and I was going to join the military. I'm going to backtrack a little bit. I skipped over a lot. I went from being in college to talking about a relationship, marriage and divorce. So I'll backtrack a little bit on the next episode and I will tell you some other things that were important, pertinent. I'll talk to you next time.