A Tangled We - Leslie Rule Page 0,12

for nights on the town. “I remember a group of guys hooting when we walked down the street together,” he says, recalling how Liz turned heads in a short skirt. The guys gave Dave the thumbs up as they hollered their approval.

Liz was a lot of fun, most of the time. But there was a “real issue. She resented the amount of time that I spent with my kids.” She was worried he was hanging out with Amy when he went to Council Bluffs. While Dave and Amy eventually got over their disagreements, they went through a rough period when they split. Their breakup was so contentious that they tolerated each other only for their children in the first months after their relationship had disintegrated.

“Amy and I got along like two pieces of sandpaper, so I didn’t hang out at her place. I’d just pull up, pick up my kids and leave. I was living in Omaha, a twenty-minute drive, so we’d find a place to sit down and eat and drink coffee.” Glancing around the casual restaurant where he met with this author, he adds, “My kids know this place way too well. We spent a lot of time here early on.”

Liz, however, regularly dropped by and made snide comments when he returned from visits with his children. “Oh,” she’d say pointedly. “I see you spent a lot of time with Amy.”

“I wasn’t with Amy. I saw my kids,” Dave would retort. “But it’s none of your damn business what I do with my time.”

Liz’s approach was passive aggressive, often so subtle her resentment was barely noticeable as she quietly fumed, but before too long, it began to sound like nagging. “As time went on, it would get worse and worse and worse, until I’d say, ‘You know what? That’s it. I don’t need this bullshit. Goodbye.’ And then she’d go away for a week or two. Then she’d call and say, ‘Oh, can you help me out with this or that?’”

Once Dave had helped Liz with whatever thing she needed help with, she’d get back in his good graces by initiating sex, and the cycle would start all over again. Liz was an expert seductress, and she knew exactly what Dave liked. He was too nice of a guy to tell her to take a hike right afterward, so she would spend the night, the blowup all but forgotten.

All humans are influenced by biology whether we’re aware of it or not, and studies have shown that a hormone released by the hypothalamus during sex can create such a physical high that both males and females are often confused by their feelings. Are those warm, fuzzy feelings a genuine indication of caring or are they a temporary rush of “feel good” chemicals? The answer is not always simple. Oxytocin, dubbed “the love hormone” and “the cuddle hormone,” fosters bonding in couples, and the natural high can be so powerful that it overrides common sense.

Research continues on the sometimes controversial and debatable effects of human-generated chemicals and how they affect social interaction, but there is no denying the fact that sexual connections make it much more difficult to sever relationships. Dave did feel more fondly toward Liz because of their physical involvement. Sex relaxed him, numbing his concerns about her possessiveness. After their reunions, things would be peaceful for a couple of weeks, and then Liz would once again begin to pout and insinuate he had slept with Amy.

Neither Amy nor Dave had any inclination to rekindle their romantic relationship, but Liz refused to believe that. It was exasperating, he recalls. “It was just nag, nag, nag, nag when I’d already told her a thousand times, ‘It’s none of your damn business. If I get back with Amy tomorrow, that’s none of your damn business.’”

The longer he knew Liz, the less inclined she was to back down when he told her off. With each passing week, she kept count of the time she had “invested” in him since their first meeting, as if she were counting dollars deposited in the bank.

“I would think you would give me a little more consideration with three months invested in this relationship,” she said in the middle of one of her snits over her suspicions that he was hooking up with Amy. Even the weeks they had spent apart counted as “time invested,” as far as Liz was concerned.

Sometimes it was easier to ignore her than argue. As long as he steered clear of

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