Photo credit: gebauer on Flickr

The days and weeks that followed my husband's initial admission of infidelity blend together almost inseparably now. There are incidents that stand out in sharp relief, but they bear no relation to each other in time anymore. I got up each day, after barely sleeping (or not sleeping) each night. I ate only because I had to eat to nourish the life of my daughter, growing inside me. I cried and screamed and ruthlessly interrogated Mark, wanting to uncover every last detail, every last secret. I found that there were more women and more pain. I trudged and stumbled through what felt like endless darkness, not realizing that inch by inch I was moving up out of the chasm I was in and that as I reached out to feel my way, other hands reached back to help me.

The morning after that first horrible night when my world exploded with Mark's revelation, I stood in the shower sobbing. My tears scalded my face, hotter than the steaming water pouring down on me. I leaned against the wall for support, and it felt ice cold. I felt like a trapped and wounded animal: rational thought driven from me through intense pain.

While I struggled to stand, to move, to eat that morning, Mark was frantic, propelled into frenetic action by fear of losing the people he held most dear. It was a Saturday morning, and he was on the phone at 7 a.m., calling every marriage and family therapist in the phone book, one after another, leaving messages and begging one of them to see us that day. He was on the phone with friends, confessing his sins and begging for help watching our son so that we could see a therapist right away.

One of those therapists agreed to see us that afternoon, and Mark dropped our son off with some friends, while I stood by the car, never removing my sunglasses from my red and swollen eyes. The therapist told me the same thing Mark had been trying to tell me: that it wasn't my fault, that Mark's actions came from his own brokenness, that what he did didn't reflect on me or on our marriage.

As that day, and the weeks following, progressed, I would alternate between a bone chilling despair that left me wanting to give up, lie down and never get up again and a red hot fighting fury that left me wanting to kick the ass of every living being straight on up to God until I had won whatever battle I'd been thrown into. In my dark moods, I'd close into myself and wouldn't speak a word. I'd lock myself in a room alone or leave the house and sit silently sobbing in my car, wanting to drive off to a place where I'd never see another human being again but never turning on the engine. In my fierce moods, I'd fight the isolation, the aloneness of finding that I didn't know the man I thought was my best friend and truest partner in this life.

I went to S-Anon 12 Step meetings looking for understanding, connection and healing. I called on my dear friends, who carried me, just carried me, during those dark days. I had an impulse to scream out to the entire world "my husband is a sex addict and what he did was not my fault!" but I stopped short of telling people (like my family) whom I felt would take sides or might not be supportive in the way I needed then. After all, I was plenty angry and hurt enough for all of us, I didn't need anyone to join me in hating Mark, I needed people who would love him (and me) anyway. And I found that in the friends I had and the friends I made.

Mark began attending Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings in addition to weekly therapy sessions with the same therapist who had been kind enough to meet with us on that dark and terrible first day. He found he was not alone either, and was held up by some of the same hands that carried me, and some different ones.

Our old life was gone. Our old selves were gone. Our old vision of our marriage was gone. Our old understanding of the world was gone. But we were beginning to build a new one and a real one on our own separate paths of healing, together.

But I am still overwhelmed with a gratitude that brings me to tears when I think of how hard Mark has worked from day one, and especially of the support of the people who were there for me when I needed them. Many of those folks read this blog and two of them (Jay at Two Women Blogging and Mama at The Elmo Wallpaper) are active bloggers themselves now. (These women have been with me from the start!) And beyond all that, now I have a new group of supportive friends I've found in all of you here on the blogosphere. To say that I am grateful doesn't even begin to cover it. I am unbelievably blessed to have such love in my life and to be following a path of growth and recovery that makes me better able to give that kind of true love in return.

Thank you all for being here.

That statement, spoken nearly five years ago, was Mark's first act in recovery from sex addiction and brought the truth blazing upon us both at last. In seconds, I was on my feet, white hot with rage and pain. "I knew it!" I spat the words at him. "I knew it!"

Those words still seem strange to me, because to this day, I don't know exactly what I knew. But those furious shouts of "I knew it" were my mind's victory cry. Something had been wrong with my world and my mind had been struggling for answers for all the years I'd known Mark. Now at last, at long last, I could see that the answer to the puzzle that plagued me was within my grasp.

I burned in a fever of emotions. I wanted to run out the front door, to keep running and never look back, but the thought of my son sleeping in the next room stopped me, as surely as if I were bound to the floor. I thought about him waking the next morning to find Daddy or me gone. I would have had my limbs torn off before I left him. And as for kicking Mark out, what was my pain in the face what my son would experience if he found that I'd kicked his Daddy, the light of his little life, out of our lives? My body was straining to rush out the door into the night while my mind was pinning it ruthlessly in place. So I stood for a moment, screaming obscenities and shaking with impotent fury, before I ran into the bathroom, slamming doors along the way, and collapsed in hot tears.

I loved Mark and he loved me. We loved our son. We were happy together. We were so well matched. We were best friends. We were fabulous lovers. What the hell was going on? He had no reason to go off and fuck some other woman. He had every reason in the world not to. Why? Why would he do it? That question tortured me. Some things made so much more sense now, but so many more didn't. The thought of my son may have kept me from walking out of the house (and the marriage) in those first furious moments that night, but maybe that "why" would have kept me tethered anyway, unable to walk away without an answer.

Why? As soon as I was able to pick myself up off the bathroom floor, I rushed back into the living room and screamed it at Mark, still sitting on the sofa, "Why?! WHY?! Why would you do that?"

"I don't know," he replied, "I don't know."

What kind of an answer was that? He didn't know? I was insane with rage and pain like I'd never felt in my life, and that was it? He didn't know? I stood there seething, wanting to hurt him like I was hurting.

"I know you want to hit me." He took off his glasses and offered up his face. "Hit me. I deserve it."

I did something I've never done to anyone before or since: I smacked him as hard as I could in the face.

"Do it again," he said.

I hit him again: my hand stinging with the blows, my face stinging with tears.

"Again."

I hit him again and again and again: the ringing sound of my hand hitting his flesh punctuated by his tight, quiet refrain, "Again." As that first violent wave of pain and rage spent itself on him and started to dissipate, I could see that what was making me feel better was making him feel better too. He hated himself so much already, was so ashamed and horrified, that any horror I could conceive of to torture him was less than he felt he deserved. He was relieved. He wanted to be punished. And oh, how I was not going to give him what he wanted.

"Again," he said.

"No!" I hissed, "I'm done!" And I shouted again, "Why? Why would you do that? What were you thinking?" But the rage that had sustained me was ebbing; I felt weak and collapsed on the sofa in tears. "Why?"

"I don't know." There it was again, all the answer he had. "I don't know. I love you so much. I love our boy so much. You two are my life. I would rather die than lose you, and I knew that I would lose you if I did this. And I couldn't stop myself from doing it anyway. I don't understand why. I couldn't stop. I need help. We need help."

Recovery was upon us. Help was coming.

I would check each disk, discarding those that were unreadable and sorting through the remaining information to transfer anything worthwhile onto CD. In sorting through these disks, I found one containing old e-mail messages: among them a series from my husband to his friend Laurie and from Laurie to Mark. We rarely heard from her anymore, and Mark never mentioned her; it had been years since I'd given their friendship any thought. Yet here she was again, fresh as if she were writing that day. The ripple started years ago by that particular pebble was finally upon me.

As I started reading, I felt a burning sickness rise from my stomach to my throat and sear through my face. I'd forgotten just how hurtful and sexually suggestive the messages were. Somehow, without Laurie's continued presence in my life, I thought I'd overreacted as a nervous bride-to-be, but confronted with the communications again, the hurt and shame and fury came rushing back in one all encompassing wave. How could I have forgotten how really awful those messages were?

However, in addition to the messages I'd seen before, there were new ones: messages sent and received after Mark was supposed to have "toned things down," messages from after we were married. And the new messages were more sexually explicit than the old. The communication had broken off after the last time we'd seen Laurie, but it had gone on for far longer and was far more intimate than anything I had been aware of before.

At that moment, with a trail of five year old messages clear before me, the wave came crashing down. Suddenly every odd receipt, every strange new interest, every inexplicable friendship, every late night watching porn, every doubt, every splinter in my mind, everything, everything came rushing at me like a rapid video montage from some sci-fi movie. I could feel my mind on fire as a new possibility occurred to me for the very first time: maybe these weren't discreet events; maybe my marriage wasn't marked occasionally by a few bizarre, unexplainable events; maybe it contained a constant, consistent undercurrent. I saw a pattern.

I showed Mark some of the worst of the messages and told him we needed to find time to talk. So, one summer night five years ago, we tucked our son into bed and sat on the sofa together. We actually hadn't cleared our schedule, I had plans to drive a friend to the airport that night; for some reason, I (mistakenly) felt that this wouldn't take long. We'd have a nice chat, he'd see all the things that hurt me, and when he understood, he'd stop. He sat straight up on the sofa and I faced toward him, away from the room, with my legs stretched out on the sofa, my pregnant belly resting on his thigh and my head occasionally on his chest as we talked.

I started with Laurie and laid out every splinter. I hammered away relentlessly with the same questions repeated over and over: why? why do you do things that make me doubt you? why don't these things make sense? what is it that's wrong? what is going on?

I came at last to a receipt for drinks for two that I found while doing laundry. It was from a hotel bar where he had attended an event. I knew about the event, but thought he went alone. When I questioned him about it at the time, he told me that the listing of two guests on the receipt was a misprint: he had been there by himself, but had purchased multiple drinks.

"Don't you see?" I said, "I know you've been flirting with this woman who lives nearby. Then I see a receipt for drinks for two at a hotel? I just don't understand. Why do you act this way? I know you love me. I want to trust you, but when you flirt the way you do, it worries me. When I look at all of these things together, at everything that's happened since we've been together, and then find something like this, what am I supposed to think?" Maybe I said something else after that. I remember saying at some point that I need it all to stop. But those words -- what am I supposed to think -- are the last I remember saying before my world as I knew it fell apart, the wall hiding the truth crumbled and reality came rushing in at last.

"I think we need to call our friend and tell her we can't drive her to the airport tonight," said Mark. "Why?" I asked, trembling with anxiety at what I knew must be coming...

"Because I had sex with that woman."

That is when everything ended, and everything began.

That first year of my son's life is something we each seem to have merely survived. For all the love we had for each other and that baby boy, we existed in our separate dark places that year. Although Mark made a silent promise on the day of our baby boy's birth that all the intrigue, flirting and cheating would end, without the tools of recovery, each new stress was driving him to the only means of coping he knew: sex. And I was wrapped in a boa constrictor of anxiety that would squeeze tighter with each movement, crushing me with migraines and chest pains that would wake me in the middle of the night.

As the months crept on, I'd find that when I woke, from anxiety or the baby, it would be to an empty bed with Mark on the computer in the other room. I'd doze and wake every hour, only to find Mark still gone. It would be two or three in the morning before he would come to bed, and he'd be up again at five for work. I'd hear him in the shower, muttering and cursing to himself, as if he were talking in his sleep. I'd lie in bed, straining to listen, thinking those words held the answer to his secret.

What secret? I really couldn't tell. None of it made any sense. When I tried to talk about what he was doing on the computer or ask why he was talking to himself, I hit that soft barrier again: I was fighting to swim through sand, with only the illusion of mobility. I knew he was looking at pornography on the computer (whether because he told me or because I sensed it I don't recall any longer), but I couldn't understand why that should be a secret, nor why it would be reason enough to lose hours of already scarce and precious sleep. Why hide porn? I'd never had a problem with it: I viewed porn individually (as did he) and we'd view it as a couple. And why stay up for hours viewing porn night after night? I was there: a real live available partner. And sleep was there with me.

Something was wrong, really wrong. Something was being hidden from me, and I had to see that something. If Mark wouldn't pull aside the curtain, I decided I would rip it down. I sat down one day at our iMac (grandchild of our first computer, Abby) and installed software that would track each keystroke. Then in the morning, when Mark left for work after a night on the computer, I sat down to trace his footsteps.

I found he had an e-mail account I didn't know about (one of several, it turned out). I found that he had been frequenting a pornographic web site that allowed users to pay for access to adult chat rooms and pay still more for private video chats. I found that he had spent hundreds of dollars in a matter of days paying a woman to masturbate for him on camera and that he had been e-mailing her privately as well. I found that he had been attempting to set up our web cam to send video of himself back to her, but had been unable to overcome some technical difficulties.

I thought briefly about waiting until he got home from work to talk to him, but I knew I couldn't make it through the day with the blood pounding in my ears and my stomach churning in rage and pain and confusion. I picked up the phone with shaking hands and called him on his cell phone on his way to work. He heard the tremors in my voice, turned the car around and rushed back home.

The question I spat out over and over in my fury and bewilderment was, "What were you thinking? Why? Why? Why?" His answer, which seemed crazy, but which was delivered with utter sincerity was, "I didn't know I was doing anything wrong." I could see genuine bewilderment in his face. He didn't see the difference between his actions (which hurt and infuriated me) and viewing pornography (which he knew I was fine with). He told me that he was so worried about me and how exhausted I was with the baby that he wanted me to get as much rest as possible; he decided to use pornography and be as quiet as he could about it so he wouldn't disturb me. He said he had gotten bored with pictures years ago; they didn't do it for him anymore. So, he moved on to video, but recently that wasn't exciting enough either. He really wanted something more, so he sought out the video chats, which was just live, interactive pornography, right?

He was baffled that I was ok with porn, but not with this, that I considered this infidelity, betrayal, cheating. After all, no actual physical contact had been made. He looked like a soap opera amnesiac struggling to remember his true identity: furrowing his brow and saying, "Well, if you say I'm Dirk and I'm a surgeon, I think I might be able to see how that could be true..." There was something he was almost understanding, but not quite. And what he wasn't understanding was so. frightfully. OBVIOUS. It terrified me that he really couldn't see the difference between a Playboy centerfold and a live, online interaction. How could he not grasp the distinction? How could I trust him not to cross some other line in the future, something I understood to be there but he couldn't see?

Still, by the end of the conversation, he'd made it very clear that he was terribly sorry, that he never wanted to hurt me, that he loved and adored me, that he'd learned the difference between right and wrong, and that he was absolutely never going to do this again. He canceled his account with the porn site. He agreed to let me make decisions about the amount of rest and sex I needed instead of making that decision for me. He swore he knew right from wrong now and would never do wrong again. (And he never did do anything on the home computer again.) I was still hurt and uneasy, but we seemed to be back on the right track. Glad we talked about that. Problem solved, right?

"There's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad."
~Morpheus in The Matrix

Photo credit: TreMichLan on Flickr

Five years passed between the time Mark fell out of regular touch with Laurie and his entry into recovery for sex addiction. Those first five years of our marriage were magical, both in the sense that they were full of wonder and delight and that they were full of illusion. We moved out of our little one bedroom apartment and into a larger place. We were building successful careers. We paid off our debts and started saving for grown up things like babies and houses. We took romantic vacations, and everywhere we went we rained down happiness on people around us, who said they never had seen such a perfect couple.

The more time went on the more delightful things were, and it tickled me each time someone asked if we (laughing and skipping and singing through life) were newly dating and I'd get to say, "Oh, no we've been together for years!" (As if we were well into our golden years already.) Marriage was easy: all one had to do was pick the right partner and happiness rained down like gumdrops.

Everything was beautiful and wonderful and glorious, yet every now and then, something didn't fit. Mark was a friendly, good hearted person; he was a much nicer person than I was and had so many friends. Yet something about these friends, about the ease with which he took people into his life (our life), bothered me. He'd come home from business trips or from shopping or from eating lunch out having collected new friends, and he could be very enthusiastic about them. He saw the good in everyone: street vendors and coffee baristas and receptionists and hotel cleaning people. I found them totally uninteresting. Why was I such a bad, snobby person? Then again, what was so interesting about them?

I tried to talk to him about it, because we talked about everything (so I thought), but this was always different. Something about the topic was like swimming through sand to get to an answer. There wasn't any real resistance on his part; he was just watching me while I took swipe after swipe, only to remain locked in place watching the sand rush in time and again to fill the hole I'd scooped out.

Of course, while these people entered our lives easily, they also left before long. I never had to fret long about any one person, because these friendships seemed to dissipate as quickly as they emerged. It took me a long time -- years -- to start to see a pattern, and then only a vague one appeared. The pieces didn't all fall together until the very end. Still I started to suspect that Mark was looking for something he was missing, something he wasn't getting from me. I knew he loved me. I knew we had a fabulous sex life. I knew we were well matched in our interests, intellects and values. So, what could he be looking for that he didn't find in me? Why get excited about an e-mail from someone he only met once?

That's when I thought I had it all figured out and knew how to fix it too. He was looking for the one thing I couldn't give him anymore: newness. He liked the mystery, the flirtation, the thrill of the chase. He liked the fantasy. Well, that was easy. I'd just do what Dr. Ruth and Cosmo Magazine and all those experts say is perfectly good and healthy for a marriage: I'd inject more fantasy into our sex life. I'd role play. I'd dress up like a hooker or a teacher or a police officer. I'd create an alter-ego with an alternate e-mail address and the I would be the one sending flirty e-mails. He knew me, but did he know my alter-ego: Candi? Or when he was done with her another and another? I'd get a wig and meet him at his favorite flirty coffee shop and take him to a motel. I'd play out his fantasy in real life, and it would be better than a fantasy, because it would be with me.

I got far enough along with that plan to dress up once, in our own home, before the sex addiction house of cards came crashing down, and Candi's wig and bustier and tight vinyl mini-skirt and crotchless fishnets went into the trash dumpster with the porn.

Not everyone had an e-mail account or was Internet savvy at the time, but Abby and her modem were helping us both reconnect with a few old friends, especially as the wedding approached. Mark's favorite e-mail pal at the time was Laurie, an old friend from high school who lived out of state. The two of them had a flirtatious, teasing relationship. That wasn't unusual for Mark, so I wasn't sure what it was that made me so uneasy about Laurie in particular.

Something about their relationship didn't make sense; I couldn't understand what he saw in her or what he was getting from this friendship. He couldn't be looking for intellectual stimulation: Laurie was far from his intellectual equal and the two had very different interests. He couldn't be looking for support or caring: Laurie seemed to be getting most of the support in the friendship, and Mark was getting plenty of love and support from me and other people in his life. He certainly couldn't be looking for a sexual relationship: Laurie lived thousands of miles away and Mark and I had a deeply satisfying sex life. Still, she seemed to desperately want or need something from Mark, and he seemed disproportionately excited to hear from her, as if he delightedly craved something in her neediness.

He never had to say when he was writing to her or reading a message from her. I could feel her there in our apartment as surely and oppressively as if she were hiding behind our curtains and I could hear her breathing. On the few occasions when I really did see her, we'd greet each other tensely; I'd meet her big, false-feeling grins with smiles that didn't quite reach my eyes.

I don't remember how I first ended up reading one of her e-mails to Mark, whether he left it up on the shared screen, as sometimes happened, or whether I grew uneasy enough to actively start snooping, but I did read a message at some point. And having read that one, I actively searched for more. I didn't feel entirely right about it, but nothing on the computer, his or mine, was password protected, and why should either or us want to hide anything if there were nothing to be ashamed of?

What I read started a sickly burn in the pit of my stomach that worked its way out to my shaking hands. The messages were suggestive and intimate enough to shock, confuse and hurt me deeply. Still, I knew Mark truly loved me and wanted to build a life with me. When I looked carefully, I thought I saw a man having fun flirting and a woman desperately seeking attention and connection. I didn't think he was intending to cheat on me. My biggest worry was that he was unintentionally in over his head, that Laurie had mistaken his harmless flirtation as being part of a real, intimate relationship, and that she would somehow trick or guilt my goofy, naive, overly trusting and tenderhearted man into accidentally going too far.

I wondered how I might talk to Mark about it. After all, hadn't I had my share of weird friendships laced with sexual tension? Did I even have a right to be upset? Was he really doing anything wrong? And hadn't I read his e-mail? Ought I to have done that, even if what came out of it showed that I had a right to be concerned?

I was mulling all this, working on Abby one evening while Mark was still at work, when Laurie invited me to an instant message chat. Of course, she wasn't really inviting me; even though Mark and I shared an account, even though our screen name included both our names, even though I was supposedly her friend too, I knew she wasn't intending to talk to me, nor did she have any interest in me. The virtual phone was ringing, and Mark was supposed to pick up. Should I let it go? Or answer with his virtual voice and see what she'd say? I paused.

I answered. We didn't say much beyond "hi, how are you, what are you doing" at first, but her friendly, teasing flirtatiousness made it clear that she thought she was talking to Mark. I pretended to interpret her flirtations as mere friendliness and responded with friendliness in kind, knowing that I was misleading her. I think we were talking chatting about her plans to go out for ice cream when she finally said something so overtly suggestive, teasingly wishing that the Mark she thought I was could be there to lick her creamy cone, that I had to make a choice: either actively pretend to be Mark or call her on it.

I paused again, and in response to her come on, I typed, "I think you have the wrong M." The chat instantly went cold and we signed off shortly after. I was embarrassed for having impersonated Mark (because however much I wanted to pretend that wasn't the case, I very much knew that's what I was doing), but I was incensed at Laurie's behavior.

Not long after, I sat down with Mark on our futon, the very spot where he proposed to me, and told him what had happened: that I'd chatted with Laurie and that I'd read his e-mail. I told him I was confused and worried and hurt. He was angry and hurt that I'd invaded his privacy, but he assured me that he loved me, apologized for hurting me and said I was right about the flirtations with Laurie having gone too far already. He said his friendship with Laurie was important to him, and he didn't want to end it entirely, but he promised me he would be more careful of the tone and frequency of his messages. And he wanted to prove to me how serious he was about his commitment to me; he rewrote his wedding vows that night and added "I will be loyal and faithful to you." In part, that was for me, and in part, those words were a talisman for himself. Either way, the words didn't hold against the addiction. However, I was reassured; I promised in return that I would stop reading his e-mail, and I did stop. If I hadn't, perhaps this story would have a very different ending.

Laurie came to our wedding (and her presence fully failed to dampen that glorious day one bit). We saw her once more a few months later at a high school function, but after that she and Mark gradually fell out of touch. I never saw her again, and only heard from her once a year, when we exchanged holiday greetings. No doubt this was because Mark kept his promise to end his flirtations with her, and she grew bored without the sexual intrigue and moved on. What other explanation could there be?

Still Laurie, and her messages, were the pebble in the pond: they may have disappeared below the surface, but they sent ripples echoing into the future to lap at my toes on a distant shore.

Mark and I were in our early 20s when we moved in together. Our first apartment was like first apartments generally are: small, old, furnished with whatever came to us cheap or free. The apartment exists now only in photos and memories; the actual building was torn down years ago to make way for more luxurious accommodations.

The apartment consisted of one main room that served as both living room and dining room, a kitchen so small you could not stand with arms outstretched without hitting a wall, a bedroom and one bathroom. The floors were battered olive green vinyl tile throughout. The apartment came furnished with a burgundy vinyl sofa and mustard yellow vinyl chair that would stick to your flesh when you sat on them. (We immediately stowed both in the storage unit, which was (oddly) several times larger than the kitchen and replaced them with a futon.) There was also a dark wood laminate dining table, which we kept, although we rarely ate at it.

On our first night in the apartment, we ordered Chinese fast food and set the cartons up on the table: a feast for the friends who helped us move in. We ate off of paper plates, sitting on the tile floors because there weren't enough chairs to go around. We later created the illusion of a dining room for this table by erecting a Japanese shoji screen between it and the rest of the room.

I wouldn't have thought, given all the memories we created in that apartment, that the laminate table would play such a role. But it was sitting at that table that I realized that Mark was the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. It was one summer, I think. I had just been on a visit home, back to the room I occupied as a teenager, and I'd come back to our apartment with old cassette tapes I'd recorded in high school by holding a tape recorder up to my clock radio. (Old school, people. Long before the days of downloading music from the Internet.) The songs were filled with static and snippets of commercials and D.J.'s voices; sometimes they started well into the song if it had taken me too long to recognize that this was indeed one I liked.

We were sitting at the dining room table listening to song after song on the poor quality cassettes and laughing. Then "Easy Lover" came on, by Phil Collins and that other guy named Phil. (At least that's how I've always referred to it.) "I loved this song!" we shouted together, and started singing it in crazy laughing duet across the table to each other. I felt so comfortable, so free to be myself, however ridiculous myself might be, and I was so happy and crazy in love that in the middle of that song, I looked across the table at Mark's shining eyes and smiling face and thought, "This moment, with this man, is where I want to be forever."

We bought a computer together sometime after that, and it made its home on the laminate table. Our friends told me later that the purchase of the computer was when they knew we were going to get married. It was a Apple Quadra, and we gave it a name, like a baby. That's geek love for you.

And indeed, it wasn't too long before Mark asked me to marry him. With "our song" (not "Easy Lover") playing on the stereo, he knelt in front of me as I sat on the futon in our living room. I don't remember what he said, because I fell down on my knees next to him before I think he was fully done. And we laughed and cried together, kneeling on the cheap area rug we'd gotten to cover the battered olive tile floor.