I think I loved her at one point. I loved her enough to marry her, to have children with her. One of my happiest memory's' was introducing our son to our newborn daughter. I thought that I would be a happy man, because I had a wife that I cared about and two beautiful children. But I knew that something was missing. The love I felt for her was the kind of love that develops over a long period of time. It was not jaw dropping mind-blanking breath stopping love.
We had settled into a routine, and that was before the election, before I was President. After the election it was much easier to keep up the charade – we were both so tired that we hardly spoke to each other, looking back that made it seem like our marriage was real. But we were just taking a break from reality – the cold reality that we were never going to be as close to each other as we were all those years ago, not when my heart belonged to another women.
As much as I hate to admit it, out of loyalty to Mellie. I Fitzgerald Grant was in love with a woman that was not my wife. The first time I saw Olivia Pope, was the first time that I experienced love the way I should have. She made by breath stop, I forgot what I was doing. All I could think about was her. I would be lying if I didn't say that I felt guilty, because at the time Mellie and I had been together for a while, and had two children at home. After a while I realised why I was guilty, and it wasn't because I was a married man in love with another women, but it was simply that I felt that my children would hate me, if I left their mother and wasn't there to put them to bed at night.
That was the only thing that was keeping me in this marriage, and the fact that it would be impossible to divorce Mellie and also run for President. Both of us had worked hard to get to where we were. But Mellie, she craved attention, and it was attention that I couldn't give her; she craved the power to have influence in the world. It was all these things that I could give her, if I were to stay President. But at what expense? That our marriage would fall apart, we would hardly speak to each other, would we be fighting over who got to have to children at Christmas if we divorced. Early on in the Presidency I tried to fight my feelings towards Olivia, and that became easier after she left the White House.
Once I was elected, and we had developed a routine, everything was turning out great. Mellie loved her newly found position in society, I had the dream job, the one that I had secretly desired since I was a teenager. I tried to fool myself into thinking that something wasn't missing, and that everything was fine. But it wasn't. I still remember the night that Olivia resigned –I worked late that night; after all I couldn't let my wife see my reaction to what she thought as a very good friend leaving and nothing more.
I blamed myself at first as to why Olivia was leaving; I thought that it was our carelessness that might have gotten us into some trouble, that quick kiss in the deserted corridor that apparently wasn't deserted. I was preparing for confrontation, whether it is someone asking why I was kissing the Press Secretary, or Mellie asking me why one of her friends was leaving.
But that didn't happen. I didn't have to announce my love – and consequential betrayal to my wife – to the entire world. Instead I watched as the love of my life slowly packed up her office, and by extension our relationship. Watching her leave was one of the hardest things that I had done, it felt as a piece of my heart had been crushed.
There was a void in my heart; I started properly talking to Mellie, something that neither of us had done since the early years of our marriage. For the first few months I fooled myself into thinking that the void was slowly filling up. But then the arguing started again, but this time it deviated between our personal and professional lives - over what Christmas presents we should get the children, over some backdoor political adventure that Mellie was participating in, over my stance in some aspect of foreign politics.
And then it began; Mellie and I would give each other the cold shoulder for a few hours, which turned into a few days, and that multiplied into when we would only talk to each other for press reasons. We should have been talking about how beautiful Karen's music solo was, or the excitement we felt about how Jerry's basketball team had qualified for the finals. That would have been good, that is how our marriage should be working, but instead we were talking to each other only when it would favour either Mellie or myself.
I like to tell myself that I moved on, that I learnt to live without Olivia. And it worked for the first few months – I could live without seeing her around. No matter how much I wished that I would turn the corner and see her standing in the Newsroom looking for some new crisis that needed handling. But those memories started to fade, and that scared me because although I thought that I could live without her I realised that I wasn't really living. I didn't want to keep reliving the memories that we had, I wanted to make new memories. Memories of our wedding day, how beautiful she looked in that dress, when she told me that she was pregnant, and watching our children playing on the grass as we sat there talking about our days.
Olivia is what I had been searching for in life. She gave me the breath taking, non-stop heart crushing love that I had believed I had found when I married Mellie. I love Mellie, I do, it doesn't matter what we are bickering over because she is the mother of my children and she will always hold a special place in my heart. But I am not in love with her. That place in my heart will always belong to Olivia Pope, the women who taught me what it truly meant to feel in love.