TIFU by getting involved with a married woman who I think put a curse on me
I know, pretty standard run-of-the-mill stuff. This happened damn near seven years ago now, but I’ve been watching a lot of Reddit Stories lately and thought I’d try my hand at this since I have a modicum of stories to tell.
For background, I, a 22-year old man at the time, had gotten out of a particularly long term relationship toward the beginning of 2019. My ex and I were engaged for a few years, waiting until we were a bit older to really start planning things out for the wedding, both going through college, both working, and had moved in together the year prior. Things were okay at first after moving in, but I started to realize that we wanted different things, and we were very clearly in two different places in life. I’ll get into that story as well as the story of my subsequent girlfriend in separate posts somewhere on this site, but for now, let’s focus on October of 2019.
I’m depressed. I bought a house a few months prior and had a friend move into my spare room because I was just so lonely that I didn’t know how to handle it. I had taken up working out my liver most nights of the week, doing 12-ounce curls at a local bar called The Park. They had karaoke at this place, and well, turns out I’m quite the singer. This particular night, I believe it was the 11th, I’m sitting at the end of the bar already a bit blitzed and waiting for karaoke to begin when I hear “oh my god!” come from behind me in a sort-of familiar voice.
I turned to meet eyes with a woman I had met in this bar maybe a year or two prior (yes I drank underage, I know, terrible) and had taken a bit of a liking to at that time, but never saw again. We’ll call her Bridgit here. Bridgit would have been 26 years old at the time, and she greeted me with a warm hug and a huge smile that could’ve filled that little dive bar. She asked if I remembered her, and of course I said yes. She had me sing The Middle by Jimmy Eat World for her the last time we met, and when I brought that up to I guess prove that I did remember her, she told me that that was legitimately like her favorite song. What followed were hours upon hours of deep conversation that flowed from the bar to the tables to the smoking area and back again, stopping only when one of us was up to sing. Turns out, we had quite a bit in common, and I already felt myself sort of falling for her. There was just one problem: she was married.
When she told me this I was understandably crushed, but she was such a unique person that I felt confident we could be friends and very much wanted to do so because having her in my life in any capacity would be worth it. She gave me her phone number (as friends) and we went our separate ways after closing down the bar and having an additional half hour of conversation outside in the parking lot once we got kicked out. The next day, that whole “Your new contact Bridgit is on Snapchat!” notification popped up while I was at work and I went ahead and added her. She added me back almost immediately, and we began talking.
The first couple days or so, we talked about everything under the sun. I told her about all my recent traumas, my job, the two exes I mentioned above, she told me about her husband and daughter (I think she was 7 or 8 at this time), what she did for work, etc. Toward the end of that first week though, she was messaging me late at night and the conversation turned. We were having one of our trademark deep discussions, I was at a Halloween party, she was at home. Out of nowhere she texted me “I have something I want to say to you but I don’t think I should.” I told her in that case we’d play a guessing game for me to try to figure it out. Eventually, once I figured out what she was trying to tell me without actually telling me, I said “well in that case, I love you too.” And she responded simply with “fuck.”
Over the next few months I fell completely head over heels for this woman. I began visiting her at work on Fridays when she was there by herself, she’d come over to my place for a few hours once or twice a week while she was supposed to be at her sister’s house, I even took her on a whole ass date one night. She explained to me very early on that she was a witch and practiced magick, and this was absolutely captivating to me. To this day I still consider myself to be Pagan as well. She also explained the terms of our relationship and her relationship with her husband, telling me that their arrangement was nothing more than complacent and they were really just together for the business and their daughter at this point. She even went as far as to tell me that he was mildly abusive, and this made me genuinely believe that I was doing the right thing here.
We called it the New Years Project, where after the first of the year she would start the process of getting a divorce to be with me. She always told me she “couldn’t wait to love [me] loudly.” That day never came. In late January of 2020, we broke up after she realized that she wanted to fix her family. We had a long, hard conversation about this and I agreed that that would be the best move for her if this is how she was feeling. We made an agreement that we would stay best friends from that point on because neither of us wanted to have the other leave their life.
This agreement lasted maybe a month. It started out slowly, but little by little she began to become unrecognizable to me. Little bits of the personality she had put on for me started to fall away until eventually we were talking less and less. Of course I still wanted her back as a partner through all of this, but feeling her push away and change who she was (or who I thought she was) was incredibly devastating for me. The pandemic hit shortly after and I ended up getting laid off of work, and suddenly it felt like I had nothing left. On April 11th at 3 in the morning, I made the decision to end my life.
I chose to do so through an overdose of prescription antidepressants that I had been put on at this point, and I took them just before bed while playing Xbox with one friend and two people I didn’t know. My goal was to quietly disappear in my sleep. The next morning I woke up shaking and drifting in and out of consciousness. Scared and realizing what I had done, I texted Bridgit for help. Keep in mind though, I didn’t tell her the circumstances and to this day I still don’t think she knows what happened. All I said was I thought I was having a seizure, and her response was “well, don’t die I guess.”
Two or three days prior I had written a short poem and posted it to Facebook. The theme of this was coffee and how I had made some for the first time since the last time she was over. She hated that. She chose that moment to bring it up and told me “you don’t get to decide how I feel about all of this, you don’t know what I’m going through.” So I told her I would give her some space and she could come back and talk to me about everything when she was ready. A week passed. Then two. Then months had passed. After six months, now a year since we first connected, I reached out to her and received no response. Then I texted again and realized that I had been blocked.
This period of time and the year that followed were one of the hardest of my life. When I returned to work, I saw a car that looked like hers on my commute in and almost crashed my car I freaked out so bad. My therapist concluded that my time with Bridgit had caused me to develop PTSD. I believe she worked some sort of dark magick on me to make me pay for what I did. Here’s the kicker — while we were together, she had convinced me that we were connected on such a deep level that it would’ve been impossible for us to be separated. She found an article about a concept called Twin Flames, and sent it to me saying it sounded just like us.
For those of you who aren’t privy, a twin flame is basically if your own soul had been split in half and put into two different bodies. It’s essentially a soulmate on crack. I know that about a week prior to my suicide attempt that she had performed a cord cutting spell on me to get over me, and I felt the effects when this happened and later confirmed it with her. I don’t know what other kind of magick she could’ve worked on me after the fact but I do know that for a very long time afterward, I struggled in almost every aspect of life.
I know now that I was probably just a bit of fun for her at the time, and looking back I’m glad that it happened because it really taught me a lot. I think it’s abhorrent to lovebomb someone as hard as she did just for a bit of sex and the thrill of sneaking around, but I’m not mad at her anymore. Somewhere around a year after my suicide attempt I received a text from her husband who had somehow figured everything out at that point, and he said they were going to work through it. I have no idea how he found out but I’d have to assume it was eating her alive and she told him. It was certainly eating away at me. That was when I think I finally got at least part of the closure I needed and was able to truly start to move on, though bits of what happened still haunt me. I don’t know if they’re still together or not, but I hope they are and I hope they’re happy.
Bridgit, if somehow you find this post, I’m sorry for how I acted toward the end and I want you to know that I’m not upset with you anymore. You were a very important person in my life for a short while and getting over you was one of the hardest things I ever went through, but I’ll never regret that any of it happened. I am married now to someone who suits me very well, and my life has turned out better than I could’ve hoped. It’s always the journey rather than the destination, and I’m glad that you were a part of mine. I do hope that I never run into you in public again, but I also hope you’re doing well.
TL;DR I had an affair with a married woman and all I got was this lousy PTSD, though I did eventually rehabilitate and move on