For the first time in my life, I understand the pain that I have heard many women express. Pain they have endured after encounters with men who have pretended to love them. I can identify with the confusion they faced in not knowing what they had done wrong, because I myself cried until there were no tears left to shed. I, too, have suffered days that have turned into weeks of sleepless nights.

It all seems strange now. After all, I used to be the kind of man who caused such pain. You know the type—a ladies’ man, a player, a pimp, the man with all the right words and all the right moves. I am not proud of my past or the way I treated women. I apologize to any woman that I hurt. And as I accept full responsibility for my actions, I believe I must take this one step further. It is time for me to stop taking and give back. As a matter of fact, it’s time for men in general to do more than just take. The time has come for men to give up their “player cards” and the tricks that go with the trade.

In order to explain how I arrived at this decision, I must share some details of my past. For about 14 years, I was engaged in a game not unlike the game of chess. In a chess match, the objective is to place the opponent’s king in an inescapable position on the game board. In the game I played, my objective was to persuade women to maintain casual, uncommitted, sexual relationships with me. By the time they realized that my intentions were purely physical, it was too late. They were already addicted to the experiences we had shared and could not or would not let go. Checkmate.

However, it was on a sad day a couple of years ago that I realized the tables could turn…and had indeed turned. You see, the woman I loved walked out of my life without any warning…ON OUR WEDDING DAY! This time I was left to pick up the pieces without any understanding or explanation of what had gone wrong. Before that day, I was sure we would be in love for the rest of our lives. Yet, on a beautiful fall afternoon, I stood proudly wearing a white tuxedo in the presence of family and friends, waiting for my bride to walk down the aisle. As the music played, everyone smiled and waited anxiously. But she never showed. Here I stood, brokenhearted, lost, confused, and alone.

Words cannot express how I felt. I thought to myself, “How could this happen to me? I am a master of the craft. I am at my peak. I am the man.” What I didn’t realize was that this time I was playing the game under love’s influence. I had put on love’s blinders that blocked the flashing red lights warning me that a train was coming. I had put on love’s headphones so I could hear only what I wanted to hear, ignoring the train’s loud horn, its final warning device. I was determined to cross the railroad tracks, only to be struck from the side by the moving train of betrayal.

So I stood there smiling and trying to keep my composure. But after the last note was played and the last “I’m sorry” was spoken, I realized it was time for me to face my destiny. I dreaded taking that long walk back up the church aisle. I had dreamed that my new bride would be there to accompany me. But now I had to make this walk alone.

Once I passed the last church pew, I looked back one last time before I pulled on the brass door handle opening the ten foot maple wood door. The burst of light from outside temporarily blinded me. I blocked the sunrays with the back of my hand before I took my first step into the rest of life. I paused for a moment, looking around to see if any of the guests were still there. I just wanted to be alone. I took a seat at the top of the concrete steps and looked out over the church’s parking lot, staring into my mind’s eye. It was at that moment that I began to reflect on how I found myself in this place. “Why me?” I yelled before dropping my head into the palms of my hands.

I couldn’t hold back the tears any longer. I thought about all the things I could have or should have done differently to avoid this feeling of emptiness inside of me. But what else was there to do? I had done all that I could do to convey my love for her. It was difficult to digest that my best wasn’t good enough. But then I began to hear in my head the sinister voices of women I had deceived over the years. They were saying things like, “You are going to get yours one day.” And, “You are wrong, Mark. Just watch and see. Your turn will come.” I had finally reaped what I had sown.

After temporarily bandaging my heart’s internal bleeding, I mustered enough strength to drive myself home. In my car, I had the CD player queued up to play the song my bride-to-be and I had picked to take us back down memory lane and to remind us of this day for the rest of our lives. I quickly hit the FM button on the car’s radio in order to avoid the floodgate of tears bound to be opened again. Once I reached the house that we were together going to call home and I opened the front door, memories of the past 30-plus years hit me simultaneously. I had pictures of the two of us as kids growing up together displayed around the room, as well as recent portraits taken of us draped all over the living room walls.

Over the next few weeks my home became my prison, isolating me from the rest of the world. I didn’t want to hear, “It’s going to be all right,” from another person. And the words, “God has something better in store for you,” or, “It’s best it happened now instead of a couple months later,” just didn’t seem to make sense. I questioned God’s mercy and why He would allow this to happen to me.

One evening, while watching television—alone—the phone rang. I checked the caller ID and saw that it was Mr. Rodgers, one of the few men that I loved, admired and respected. He just happened to be the father of the woman who caused me all of my pain.

He called to tell me that my ex-fiancée had just married another man. Not only that, he went on to explain that his daughter had resumed a relationship with a man from her past while we were engaged. “What?” I said as the muscles in my hand relaxed causing the phone fall to the floor. My heart skipped beats. Not one beat…but three! I could hear Mr. Rodgers calling my name through the phone’s receiver. “Mark…Mark.” I picked the phone up from the floor and listened to the excuses he made about why he didn’t say anything to me about this sooner and how he felt he should be the one to tell me about it now. He provided me with more words of encouragement before finally ending this troubling call.

Now, all the hopes of her calling me to say she had made a mistake vanished. For weeks I tried to heal myself through self-talk and busy work, but my heart was hurting even more and my masculinity felt challenged. So I did what any man would do in a situation like this. I went out to popular hot spots looking for a woman to help me take my mind off of my troubles. I called Tammy. I called Rochelle. And I called up Carmen. All old girlfriends whom I had already known intimately and whom I thought would provide a smooth transition back to single life. But what happened was just the opposite. Although the times would pass and I would feel better for a while, I would still find myself speaking about my love for my ex-fiancée. Every woman I brought into my inner circle would inevitably become burdened with my tears and sad stories and find me to be a big disappointment. Instead of them dealing with a man they could enjoy, what they found was a man lost in his own sorrow. I was like a beautifully wrapped box placed underneath the Christmas tree, with no gift inside.

That following Monday on my way to work, I stopped my car at a gas station to refuel. Standing there pumping my gas, an older man wearing a pair of dusty blue jeans and a dingy white shirt unexpectedly stopped and asked me, “Do you know Jesus?”

“Of course,” I said, taken aback, but then he asked another question. “Then why are you running from Him?” I looked at the old man with uncertainty. What is he talking about? How can he say that to me? He doesn’t know me. I was born and raised in the church. I politely brushed him off and returned the nozzle to the pump before getting back in my car to head to work.

But sitting at my desk, I pondered the old man’s question for the rest of that day. Why am I running from Him? My mind began to think back to those nights when I woke up in a cold sweat with dreams of running and running, not knowing why I was running or who I was running from. Just running.

The first eighteen years of my life were spent preparing me to lead my father’s church. The last fifteen were spent destroying the vision that he had for my life. My father was the minister of a church that he built from a small membership group in our living room to one of the city’s most prominent churches. I would spend many hours researching and studying the Bible and helping him prepare his lessons and sermons, and it soon became the assumption that I would follow in his footsteps. His guidance through the Scriptures was his way of preparing me to do just that.

But after graduating from high school and accepting a basketball scholarship that took me away from home, I soon discovered a life very different from the one I had always known. I began to explore things that my father would consider sinful, such as drinking, clubbing and sleeping with several women at a time. And to avoid the continuous harassment from my peers, I abandoned my religious beliefs and seldom picked up a Bible again

The new life felt good. I enjoyed the freedom and the ability to do what I wanted with what appeared to be no consequence or no harm. For the first time in my life, I had the freedom to make my own choices, and my choices were made based on one thing and one thing alone…what felt good to me at the time. I was no longer looked upon as the preacher’s son and no longer used the Bible to make decisions. Yes…the new life felt good. But what I did not realize was that those days were the beginning of a fifteen-year lifestyle that would ultimately crack the very foundation that my father had worked so hard to build.

My heart still ached from not knowing what I had done wrong in the eyes of my ex-fiancée or why she no longer loved me. But now I pondered the many things I had done wrong in the eyes of my fathers….both heavenly and earthly. I wondered now if they even still loved me.

I tried everything to bring closure to this chapter in my life, to move passed the pain. But it was not until I allowed my heavenly Father to take the leading role and began to have serious conversations with Him that I truly began to move forward in my life. He comforted me and gave me strength, and that’s when my true healing began.

I have since vowed never to cause a woman the pain that I experienced, and this book is a step in keeping true to my vow. As I wrote each word of this book, I felt the pain of the hearts I manipulated over the years being finally lifted from me. I felt the weight of guilt that I have been carrying around over the years being relinquished from my soul.

So you see, I speak from a perspective of experience from both sides of the game. Through my personal tragedy, I have seen the errors of my ways and turned away from them. I have grown in many ways during the years after my devastating break-up and have survived a truly difficult period in my life. In sharing my story, I hope to help others see that God has always been there, calling out to them. He has and will continue to use their heartaches to bring them close to Him. He used this experience to mold me into the man He wanted me to be.

I hope that this book will particularly help strengthen women and give them a new understanding of the men they love and provide them more of the tools they need to play the game of love and relationships on a more even playing field. I want to give women the chance to be the ones to shout, “Checkmate,” and not always settle for being the ones who are checked. The pages of this book are written like the pages of the rule book. And the stories will show you the practical illustrations of how they apply to the men who fall into the category of the man I used to be.

In addition, I want to give men whose manhood has been beaten down by a situation similar to mine hope that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I want the men to understand that there is a different definition of manhood besides what society has classified manhood to be. I hope the stories inside of this book will magnify how a man’s actions can negatively or positively impact the lives of women.