My boyfriend lied to me to break up. We’ve been married for 22 years and have 4 kids together.

Carles Navarro Parcerisas/Getty Images My boyfriend tried to break up with me by telling me a lie involving a friend of his. I wasn’t ready to give up on him so easily, so I chased after him. He came clean, and we’ve been married for 22 years.

We met in a chat room in the late ’90s, when people were still side-eyed for online dating. I was teaching English in a high school in northern France. Because my French was in transition when we met in person during my spring break, I thought I was meeting a romantic mechanic who took long bike rides on his lunch break — but he was in fact a mechanical engineer doing research in nuclear physics, and a cyclist.

I told him about my own dreams of graduating with my double major, joining the Peace Corps, going to Africa, and being a pioneer in foreign-language education in American public elementary schools. I did not tell him about finally being in a place where I didn’t need a man to be fulfilled. We spent a week living a French movie montage, complete with Alpine sunsets, riverside walks, and stolen kisses.

Seven days was all it took for him to wear down my resolve of not needing a man. When I returned to my classroom in the north, I ignored my students and chatted on the clock with my new lover. He told me his friend was in love with himOne morning in our chat, he told me he’d announced our budding relationship to a friend — a woman from his hometown.

Instead of being happy for him, she’d suddenly admitted she’d always had feelings for him. “How do you feel?” I typed, swallowing the lump in my throat. “I don’t know,” he responded.

I was madly in love, but I also cared about him. If he wasn’t sure about me, it probably wasn’t meant to be. I wished him all the happiness in the world.

This magnanimity lasted about 10 minutes before I switched gears. “Actually, no. ” She’d had years to express her feelings.

She’d had her chance. It was my turn. He agreed but was unsure.

“I don’t want to hurt anyone. “Never had I been so ready to fight for someone. No one had ever deserved it.

I thought that if only we could talk in person, he could see reason. I left work early, packed a bag, and jumped on a four-hour train to his city. But when he picked me up, I could see in the ghostly pallor of his face that I’d lost.

I asked anyway. He broke up with me, but it was all a lie”You’ve made a decision,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

He nodded. “And it’s not me?”He shook his head. I felt the blood drain from my face.

I wanted a time machine to take me back to when I was fine being fueled by my goals for the future. When we got to the apartment, I pilfered through his cupboards and found a bottle of pastis — a liqueur meant to be diluted with water — and drank the anise liquid straight. By my third glass, I had used his phone to call nearly everyone in the US I hadn’t talked to in the nine months I’d been in France.

I didn’t talk to them about him; I just wanted to run up his phone bill. It was the only way I could think to hurt him. When I’d exhausted my phone book, he pulled me to him and said, “OK.

” He said he wanted to try to be together. I was so relieved that I didn’t even ask for the details. I just held him, willing him not to change his mind.

“She’s going to kill me,” he said. In a voice still triumphant, I maintained that she’d had her chance. “No — if she ever finds out.

“He explained that his friend’s profession of love had been an elaborate lie he’d made up in order to break up with me. He was terrified I would go back to the US and break his heart. He wanted to head that off at the pass.

He had never expected me to chase after him. We married two years later, nearly 22 years ago. We have four kids — the oldest starts university this fall.

Every year he expresses his gratitude at my having chased him down. I try not to think about where we’d be if I hadn’t had that coup de folie. To this day I’ve never met the friend, and she still has no clue about the big lie that almost broke us up.

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