This has been one of those horrible, horrible nights that I have when sleep will not come and it all comes flooding back as if it were yesterday.

I waited a long time to fall in love. I dated a lot of guys but no one ever quite measured up until I met Gordon.

No one ever wooed me harder nor treated me better. He made me feel as though I were the most special person in the world.

But when he told me he loved me too much to take advantage of me even when I told him he could, I knew I had finally found the one person my mother said did not exist--a man to whom love meant more than sex. From that moment on, I trusted him.

You see my mother always said a man would tell a girl anything, including that he loved her, just to get her in bed. She drilled it into my head never to trust any of them.

I had never fully trusted any man before. So, when he asked for a night away from me, I said, "yes", though I worried.

But, you see, I trusted him. When I would wonder if he was doing something he shouldn't be, the one thing that kept me from being overly concerned was that I was 100% sure that he would never do anything that would hurt me.

When L finally told me because no one else could have and even begun to make me believe it, I still told her it had to be a case of mistaken identity--that Gordon would NEVER do that.

"It's not a case of mistaken identity," she said.

I still had to hear it from him. When he immediately starting trying to lie, I knew she was right.

But I had to hear it. When I told him that I didn't believe him, he finally admitted it was true.

The Calmez Hotel in Clinton had once been a respectable hotel; but with the popularity of new travel lodges, it had fallen into disrepair, becoming a meccas for drunks, derelicts, drifters and worn-out prostitutes.

The terrible vision I have of Gordon standing naked in that cheap, dingy hotel with his friends, each waiting his turn to go into one of those ugly, filthy, disease-ridden prostitutes. I fight to keep it out of my mind; I pray for God to take it away...but it always comes back.

Then the jokes they must have made on the way back to Weatherford about each of their turns. I have wondered so many times what his friends must have thought and what questions they must have asked him about why he was even with them.

They knew he had a girlfriend who had his fraternity pin with whom he spent every single moment day and night, except that one night he had requested to have a night for study and maybe an occasional night "with the guys."

How he could have led such a double life as long as he did, completely fooling me, I will never understand. He never once seemed any different around me. Every now and then he would almost slip up, but he always lied his way out of it so easily that I still did not get suspicious.

To think that he could kiss, caress, and love me with those same hands that just the night before had touched that filth turns my stomach yet today. Even worse that he could lie so easily to me. I have hated liars since that moment when I discovered just how many lies he had told me.

Then, to have to face the fact that all my friends and all his knew and had known for quite some time while I was completely ignorant of what he was really doing just completely devastated me.

My heart was already broken; now I was humiliated on top of that.

How they must have been laughing at how stupid and gullible I was. It took every ounce of courage I had to walk into the student union where we all gathered to visit and to sit down with them as though nothing had happened. The quiet that first few weeks was deafening.

I suffered and I suffer to this day. You see, I am a one-man woman. He was my love for a lifetime. He was the man with whom I wanted to spend my life and with whom I wanted to have children.

Some people can fall in and out of love as though it were nothing. I'm not that way. I knew from that moment I had to confront him that my life was over--that I would always love him but the thing that made our relationship so special--the trust--was gone.

Even months later when I suggested we might try again, I never meant that things would be the same...I was just going to suggest that he might like to come over to watch a movie at home now and then. I missed him so much that I thought we might at least be able to be friends. I wasn't anywhere nearly ready to be seen in public with him. Plus, there was that trust issue. I was never going to get past that--not for a very long time, if ever.

By that time, though, his mother had got her claws in him, just making up her own reality with not a single shred of truth or evidence to support any of it. The woman spent one weekend interrogating me like some Jewish matchmaker for twenty minutes, then ignoring me the rest of the time. She just created her own reality the way she wanted it with no regard for the damage she was going to cause others.

Nonetheless, the thought of going through life loving him but not having him in my life was something I just did not know how I was going to do. And it has been every bit as hard as I knew from that first night that it would be.