So Here's the Thing . . .: Notes on Growing Up, Getting Older, and Trusting Your Gut by Alyssa Mastromonaco

Author:Alyssa Mastromonaco
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Twelve
Published: 2019-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

I think I’ve established how dysfunctional the Kerry campaign was, here and elsewhere. Well, it’s possible I was a gossip angel during that time period because I knew how it felt to have your personal life dissected behind your back. On the Kerry campaign, everyone was saying my boyfriend was cheating on me. And he was!

The revelation came thanks to a series of technological loopholes. Many of you won’t remember this, but in the BlackBerry era, you used to have to empty your email inbox when you had between four hundred and five hundred messages. You could only accomplish this online, on a desktop. (No wonder nobody’s using them anymore. But I’m still a fan.)

Doug didn’t have a laptop on the road, so sometimes he’d call me and have me dump his inbox for him.

He must have trusted me a lot. Of course I abused his trust. But of course he was abusing my trust first, and in a worse way, so here we are. If you feel you have to read your boyfriend’s emails, you kind of already know what’s in there. (For the record: It’s never crossed my mind to care about my husband DK’s inbox. I’m sure it’s all golf and…golf…) It became a real tool for me. I’d hear from people that he’d always visit a certain woman in Iowa…so then I’d look at his emails. (It never occurred to me, though, to think about what motivated people to alert me to these visits.)

What I found was that he was receiving messages and not replying. Boilerplate sexy messages. Descriptions of outfits, expressions of yearning. I somehow learned she owned red leather pants. And she was married. Which meant, to me, that he was responding via text message or some other medium.

When he got home, I called him out on it. He was cheating on me with a married woman in red leather pants!

He just looked at me and said, “My emails are none of your business.”

Was this a fair assessment? It’s complicated. But it shut me up. And I stayed with him.

I know, I know. I chalked it up to the campaign being crazy and high pressure, and we all do things we regret. But I also think that the haziness of gossip allows you to delude yourself and to take things with a grain of salt. I had no actual proof that Doug was seeing the woman in the red leather pants—maybe he really was receiving unsolicited emails? Not likely, but certainly within the realm of possibility. Right? Right?! The fact that he’d made me a target of gossip among my team should have gotten me angrier than it did at the time. I was always the boss over people my age; “Well, her boyfriend is cheating on her” is a great way to deflate the person you’re being forced to respect. When the women would say they couldn’t believe we hadn’t broken up, it was easy to discount them because I thought they were just taking out their resentment of me on my rumored relationship problems.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.