Husband Chronicles Part Five: David

The Husband Chronicles · Part Five

Some people walk into your life and rearrange all the furniture. David didn’t walk in — he pulled up in a beat-up lifted truck, climbed out looking like Jason Momoa’s considerably more chaotic little brother, and I almost hit the floor before he even said hello.

We met on a dating app, which feels almost too ordinary a beginning for someone as extraordinarily not-ordinary as David. We had a date planned, and then — because neither of us had the patience for a normal timeline — we moved it up a day and changed it to dinner at my place. I cooked. He showed up.

And that was basically the beginning of the end for my normal life.

I heard him before I saw him. His truck was loud — lifted, beat up, utterly unbothered about it — and the second it rumbled down my street I thought, okay, this is a man who does not quietly exist anywhere.

Then he got out of the truck.

Lord.

David is average height. Filipino from his mother’s side, Persian from his father’s — and those two things combined into something genuinely unfair. Beautiful olive skin, long black hair, a vintage tee, cutoff shorts, and Nike SBs that somehow pulled the entire thing together into an outfit that had no right looking that good.

He has a swagger. Not the kind men perform when they know someone is watching — the real kind, the kind that lives in the body and doesn’t ask for your approval. It is completely, utterly, undeniably there.

He looks like a thinner, slightly shorter Jason Momoa. I have photographic evidence:

I was standing outside because he needed to be let in the gate to the apartment complex, he climbed out of the truck and looked straight at me, a slight and clearly mischievous grin on his face, and I had to physically remind my knees what they were for.

Here is a fact about David and me: we had zero interest in doing anything slowly. He moved in after the first date. Not officially, not with boxes and a lease — but in the way that matters, the way where someone is just there, and then keeps being there, and eventually it would feel stranger if they left.

And the kids — mine and his — took to each other almost immediately, which is one of those things that feels like a sign from the universe, or God, or whoever is in charge of such things. Our kids loved each other. That matters. We really just became a family — loud, blended, and somehow seven people deep before anyone stopped to question it.

We did a really fun photo shoot in the city together once. My favorite of those photos is of myself, Hannah and David’s middle daughter, Abby. Aren’t we precious?

But David was a lot. That’s not an insult. That’s just an accurate description of a human being who arrived on this earth with the volume turned all the way up and no particular desire to turn it down.

David had a meth problem. He also had fairly severe bipolar disorder. I want to say that plainly and without performance — not for shock value, not to make him a villain in my story, because he isn’t one. Pretending it wasn’t there would be dishonest, and dishonest isn’t something I do here. But all of this I was unaware of until I was already wholly committed.

What followed was the kind of love that looks like exhaustion from the outside. Fighting. Breakups. Physically chasing him to try to get him to rehab. Rehab. Sober living. We exhausted every version of trying that two people who love each other can manage when one of them is fighting something that doesn’t fight fair.

I loved him through all of it. That’s what I want you to understand. Not in a martyred way — in a real, present, stubborn, I choose you way. We fought hard to get to okay. More than once.

But it wasn’t all bad chaos. A lot of it was good chaos. That may not make sense to you, but to anyone who has ever loved David, it makes perfect sense. It was random fishing trips in the middle of the work day. It was whole days spent at vintage thrift stores. It was camping trips. It was countless dinners crafted by both our hands, together. It was handmade gifts and the perfect chair for our living room that he spent days hunting down.

David wasn’t just wild. He was fun. He was real and raw. David loved me and our family so fiercely that he couldn’t stand it. I mean, it was clear as day when he looked at me:

I truly believe that the way he loves is so intense and so deep that it can actually make people not love him back.

We got married on my parents’ wedding anniversary — and as it turned out, his parents’ anniversary too, which felt less like coincidence and more like the universe insisting. It was also my daughter’s 10th birthday. I cannot fully explain the logic of that decision except to say that it felt like we were stacking something sacred on top of something sacred, and at the time that felt right.

We were together for almost five years. None of it was easy. Not one day of it arrived without some version of effort attached — but it was passionate, and it was real, and I have never once questioned whether any of it was worth it.

Ultimately, we had different ideas of what our relationship should look like. We had different ideas of what our lives should look like. And we could not — no matter how much we loved each other — stop fighting about it. So he moved out.

And then for months after that, we saw each other in secret. Because we did not know how to be done. The passion between us was that intense — the kind that doesn’t get the message when you tell it the relationship is over. The kind that shows up anyway and looks at you and makes you forget all the reasons you ended it.

Eventually, I moved on. Not because I stopped caring about him — but because I needed a true partner, and we were not going to be that for each other anymore. Some loves are real and still not right. David was both.

It’s been years since we’ve spoken. That part is strange, given how much space he took up in my life for so long. But that’s how some chapters close — not with a dramatic final scene, just with silence that slowly becomes permanent.

Here is what I want to say about David, and I want to say it clearly: of all my ex-husbands, this is the relationship I regret the least.

That might surprise you. The meth. The bipolar. The intervention. The months of secret visits after it was already over. That’s a lot of material for regret.

He was sick. He was immature. He was wild in ways that were not always wonderful. And he ultimately did not want the life I wanted. Those things are also true. But they exist alongside all the other things — the laughter, the kids piled in the living room, the truck in the driveway that I learned to hear as the sound of someone coming home, the memories that still make me smile when they surface.

He was a ton of fun. His kids were amazing. Our families were loud and warm and chaotic and full.

And for almost five years, we had a life together that was absolutely, completely, genuinely alive.

That’s not nothing. That’s actually everything.

I hope he’s well. I hope he’s healthy. I hope wherever he is, he’s found his version of peace. I don’t say that for anyone else’s benefit — I mean it, the way you mean something about a person you genuinely loved, even after everything.

— Moe