by Alexa Lurie

Created on: July 16, 2008

I had suspected for years that my marriage would not work. I had always been taught, however, not to listen to my intuition, as girls so often are. I came from a divorced family, and regardless of what everybody else seemed to think, I wasn't going to let such a horrible thing happen to me or my children. Isn't it ironic, now, that it was my children that forced me to open my eyes and acknowledge that I had to end my marriage.

We had met as if in a fairy tale- I was on vacation in another country, we met at the pool in the hotel that he worked at. He was flirting with me, trying to get me to join him in the water. "Jump into the water", he said. I asked him what he would give me to jump into the water. His answer was "me". It was from that point that I knew I was going to fall in love. What I didn't know was that my fairy tale vision of love had nothing to do with reality. In three short weeks, he swept me off my feet. We were talking about plans to see each other again, to pursue this long distance relationship and make plans for further international travel so we could again be in each others arms. Once I was back home in America, he sent me pictures, gifts, letters; we spoke on the phone almost every night. He made me feel like the most beautiful, important, special woman in the world.

This went on for a year and a half, and we got engaged. Although we had spoken about me traveling to his country upon graduating my university studies, he convinced me that America was the better place for us to start out. He moved here on November 4, 1995. We got married alone, in a courthouse, by an in house religious figure. We told him it was to be a legal ceremony with no religion at all, that we were simply getting married legally so that he wouldn't be deported, and that we were planning our "real" wedding that would be the religious one. The first sentence that came out of his mouth was "Oh G-d, our father in heaven, in the name of the Father, The son & the holy spirit...". Talk about foreshadowing a marriage in which nothing goes as planned!

As soon as that paper was signed, our relationship changed. He started fighting with me, yelling and swearing at me, calling me names, and blaming me for everything that went wrong in his life. He went through jobs like cups of coffee. As soon as one got cold, he would move on to the next. That was, of course, except for the many times that he was unemployed. He started a business with loans from my parents, and relied on me to

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