It's story time, children...

Once upon a time, there lived a princess…well, for the purposes of our story we’ll call her a princess but really she’s just a girl like many others out there in the kingdom.
Anyway, she lived with her family in many different places because they moved a lot. She had a mommy and daddy who loved each other but sometimes had difficulty showing this due to their different but equally troubled pasts. She also had a younger brother and a younger sister whom she secretly suspected were both more loved by their parents than her. Probably at least partly because of this suspicion, she was a bullying and overbearing older sister although at the time she did not realize this. She grew up and had what she had always considered a relatively normal childhood. There were bad times but for the most part, she was loved and cared for and no one ever really hurt her so she figured she was doing okay.
Then came boyfriends…she picked nice boys who generally loved her more than she loved them and she felt safe. And she cheated on them. Pretty much without exception. There was one boy she loved more than he loved her when she was 17 but she scared him with her intensity and he ran away. She learned another valuable lesson about opening up to people.
One day, the princess met a prince. She liked him immediately and set about pursuing him…she already had a boyfriend (who happened to be friends with the prince) but that had never stopped her before. This prince was different and she knew it…he was smart, funny, good-looking and above all, he was independent and capable. Unlike all the other boys she had chosen, this one did not need or want to be mothered and would not allow her to walk all over him…finally, here was someone with whom she could be an equal in a relationship. And miracle of miracles, he loved her too! They both quickly dispensed with all impediments and moved in together and they were married less than 2 years later.
They lived happily ever after…for 2 more years anyway.
The princess had vowed, before family, friends and whatever God there is, and even more importantly to herself, that she would NOT cheat on the prince. She loved him and if that was true, she should not need anyone else. Then the first true test of their marriage came along.
An evil witch came to the prince’s place of employment and for reasons known only to her, she hated the prince. It became her personal mission to make the prince’s life a living hell…and she was VERY good at it. This made the prince very unhappy and caused a great deal of stress for him…he needed the princess to be there for him and to make their home a refuge from the storm. She however, was ill prepared for this aspect of married life; in all her previous relationships, when the going got tough, she got going. So she withdrew emotionally and left the prince to deal with his misery on his own while she sought to soothe her feelings of inadequacy elsewhere.
She fell back on her tried and true patterns, as people tend to do. There was a pretty boy who worked next door to the princess and he had troubles of his own…she felt better able to help him with his problems as he was easily consoled with an illicit romp in the afternoon while the prince was slowly losing his mind at work. The boy soon moved away but that door, which had remained closed for 4 years, was once again open and the princess felt powerless to stop herself from going through…
The princess put her life with the prince in a little box in her head and kept it separate from the things she did outside their marriage. She told herself that this was something she needed that he could not give her and therefore, she had no choice in the matter; in order to be able to stay with him, she HAD to do these things. To make life easier for herself, she brought one of these boys into the lives of the prince and her whole family…that way she had a legitimate reason for being with him and did not have to be as careful about sneaking around. For 9 years, they did their thing right in front of the prince’s eyes and believed that he did not know. Although he confronted her on more than one occasion, the princess thought that her assurances that nothing was going on were accepted as truth because that’s what she needed to think in order to carry on with her addiction (since that was what it had become).
Until the 10th night of July in the year 2005…
That night, the prince went to bed before the princess as usual…it was a Saturday night and he worked the next day but she did not, leaving her free to do as she pleased. A couple of hours after he had retired, the princess was chatting on the computer with her latest conquest, a boy she worked with who lived far, far away. Although they had not yet done anything to consummate their infatuation, they had begun to make plans to do so. When the prince appeared in the doorway looking angry, after apparently lying in bed stewing for hours, she steeled herself for whatever was coming next. Nothing she could have done would have prepared her for what the prince was about to say. He confronted her again but this time he had proof of her infidelity, which he had gotten by hacking into her email account. She was trapped; all the boxes she had erected in her head to keep her lies (and lives) separated came crashing down.
There followed an all night yelling-talking-crying-denying-then-admitting-fest wherein many truths were revealed. They talked of things that she had NEVER admitted to anyone, least of all herself…it was horrible and heart wrenching and humbling and more than anything else, she felt relieved. She no longer had to pretend that she was happy and that everything was fine…the illusion of their perfect marriage and relationship was gone leaving behind the possibility of replacing it with something REAL.
Which is how they have spent the year since then and how they intend to spend every day from now on…until they have their happily ever after.

The End (but really, just the beginning!)