I’ll let these ladies sing it for me.

A while back, I got into a conversation on Twitter with @flymaine about the pop artist, Adele. I’d heard the name but didn’t really know much about her. @flymaine provided a link to her music video, Rolling in the Deep, on YouTube. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a watch:

I watched the video and listened to the lyrics. Could she possibly be singing about an unfaithful partner? I tracked down the lyrics and read them. And when I got to this, I cried:

The scars of your love remind me of us
They keep me thinking that we almost had it all
The scars of your love, they leave me breathless
I can’t help feeling
We could have had it all

This is what has been going on in my head since the reality of my situation hit me: While he’d been bouncing from one dead-end job to the next, with periods of unemployment in between, I’d been working my ass off to achieve a goal for both of us — a goal he helped me set for our future. While he was dealing with (and complaining about) the nine-to-five grind, I was doing my best to make us financially independent and get us a great place to go and work and play together every summer. But when it came time to join me as he’d promised he’d do, he made excuses to stay behind. And then, while I was gone this year — my best year ever — he dumped me for a woman he’d known less than a month.

We could have had it all — we almost had it all — but now it’s all gone. It’s still hard to believe.

The rest of the song pretty much covers what comes after the pain: the anger. I have that, too. Hell, it was almost as if she wrote this song with my situation in mind.

Or are there that many women out there who have been burned by men they loved?

And that got me thinking about the Scorned Woman Playlist. A list of songs that express what I’m thinking and feeling about my situation. I bought Adele’s song from iTunes and added it to a new playlist.

I already had another song for the playlist: The Carolina Chocolate Drops’ Hit ‘Em Up Style. I bought it about two years ago, back before I ever thought something like this could happen to me. The only video I could find was this live performance. It rocks:

This one is a lot more fun — and definitely more upbeat — but these lyrics still make me cry every time I hear them:

There goes the dreams we used to say
There goes the time we went away
There goes the love I had but you cheated on me
And that’s worth that now

There goes the house we made a home
There goes you’ll never leave me alone
There goes the lies you told
This is what you owe

“There goes the house we made a home” — that line hits hardest right now. As I pack and store and discard the things I added to our house to help make it a home, the place we made together is disappearing before my eyes. Every day it’s less like the place I spent the past 15 years of my life. Less like the place I worked so hard to get paid off by the time I was 50 and he was 55 — so we wouldn’t have to be slaves to nine-to-five jobs to pay a mortgage. So we could go into a sort of semi-retirement while we were still young and have some fun. Together.

In this song, the woman scorned gets revenge with a credit card. I wish it was that easy.

@flymaine also suggested Carrie Underwood’s Before He Cheats, but I’m not a big fan of country music. And her other suggestion, KT Tunstall’s Black Horse and the Cherry Tree, doesn’t quite say it like the two I’ve got.

Any other suggestions? Remember the theme: a woman scorned. Use the comment link to share your suggestions; I’ll add the ones that I think fit to this blog post.