QUOTE : I put the water on scalding, and climbed inside. Then and only then did I finally, finally let it out.<br /><br />There was the pain at first, just the raw, brutal sensation of love lost, of a future I had been planning on disintegrating, leaving me to have to rebuild a new one. <br /><br />After that, oh yeah, that was when the bitter set in.<br /><br />Five years.<br /><br />Five freaking years and he dumped me because Mommy and Daddy didn't approve? What a pathetic, weak-willed, co-dependent excuse for a man. Any real man would have flipped them off, told them to take their money and shove it, and went home to the woman they loved and made plans. <br /><br />And it was an awful, ugly thing to realize that I had been all-consumingly in love with a man who loved money more than he loved me. <br /><br />On that thought and knowing to my soul that I was not going to be the type of woman who broke herself into pieces over a man who didn't deserve it, I wiped the tears away, I got redressed, I ate half my body weight in sweets... and I decided to move on with my life.