of Love and Houses

Just after I moved into my dream home with Neil, his infidelity and sex addiction came to the fore. I had, maybe 10 days of innocent enjoyment.

Straight after I went back to work full time after Connor was born, Simon attempted suicide, and was committed to a mental health clinic. I had maybe 10 days when everything was going swimmingly, a baby, a working husband, a career a family income we could live on.

And now, I have grasped feminist nirvana. I have bought a house, on my own where I can live safely with my son... and again 10 days in Ex23 instant messages me. He loves me more than breathing. I have to go overseas, live near him and give "Us" a chance. I confess, I am lonely in my fortress.

He refers to my need to side with the sisterhood, and my refusal to cheat on his wife with him as "seeking the high ground" I really can't get my head around that. Marriage clearly is not sacred to him or he would not play with it thus. What? a normal (non prosthelytizing) person would say ah well, it feels good, its his choice to cheat on his wife, nothing to do with me, or what I do... crap.

He thinks I can give up a career, take my son away from his dad and travel across the world for the life of a concubine and a chance at true love.

Life turns on a dime. I've learned my lesson. This time I am going to take (attempt to choose) the security, not the man.

Be the man I'd like to marry??

I think in taking up with Ex23 in revenge for Neil's SA I was somehow responding to the mantra

"be the whore you wish you're husband wasn't"

These past few days there has been a lot of pain, over something there shouldn't've been. For about six weeks I have been "No touch dating" (not at my instigation) a man who I have come to like a lot. He is, as well as being all the things on my latest "check list", financially secure. Frankly I wish he wasn't really or at least that he was only as secure as I. AKA "A battler" I absolutely hate that he can use his success, and my child, to write me off as a romantic possibility.

Read the story of our last date below, and perhaps you'll see why I have a new mantra

"Be the success you would (once) have liked to marry"

10/19/2010

By the time i arrived home I was feeling pretty uneasy. Eventually I plucked up courage to call on the pretext of thanking Him for the night. Pleasantries completed, he was about to hang up when I blurted out...

"John. Are we just friends?"

He had clearly been awaiting this call. And listened calmly as he told me the following.

• His life is in too much of a state of flux to commit at the moment.


• He doesn't want to rush into anything that would leave him with 'obligations'.


• He is pretty secure in his life and could retire and doesn't want anyone or anything to jeopardize that.


• He has found relationships with women who have kids of Connor's age rarely succeed.


• In such relationships he has found that he has to assume second place or lower
  

There were some vague remarks about knights in shining armour. . And to my questions about
chemistry or if he found me attractive...his response was "I won't even go there .."

I cried after we hung up and again the next morning. But what really was the source of these tears? I genuinely liked him. I haven't lost his company, he is quite happy to be friends. Maybe I was fostering a dream? Maybe I am lonely or sexually frustrated. But the truth is in saying all that he made a judgement of me. i.e.

that I am more liability than asset and that I am not worth the risk.

My attractiveness or otherwise remained steadfastly, tactfully, unassesed leaving me paradoxically even more insecure, and needy like I had never been when I thought he liked me.

I truly, honestly, vehemently hate the place I am in right now. I work extremely hard, I have a good professional job. And yet I am a dating pariah on account of being "down at heel" in relation to single men of my own generation who have been more strategic and/or lucky in their choice of job and investments and ex-partners. No! I don't want a knight in shining armour! I don't want to be rescued! I want to make my own way in the world with a loving respectful partner at my side. When I stop spitting tacks I might puke, or cry. I'd've been better of procreating with a millionaire and taking him for everything he's got. Many women in my "posh" suburb are there purely on account of their rich husbands. I, unlike them, am a good, hardworking, solid woman of integrity.

But then I hear the first tiny voice... Did I see him as a way out? in some way? given my earlier post I knew perfectly well that it would not be easy to invite a man into my chaotic lifestyle, so why would this outcome surprise me? The last two comments I think were encompassed in point 3 of Neil's exit report. If you have a child it makes it harder to look after a man, and men like to be No1. Those last two points hurt because they are true. It is incidentally also true of married men, but they have obligations to their children.

In the earlier post I think it is paradoxically that it was connor's behaviour, my gritty self reliance and my assets rather than lack thereof that I saw as a barrier.

Then I hear the second little voice. Maybe he's just not that into you. If he really found you as mesmerising and "right" as you find him he would overcome those things.

Yes, and that is a topic for my next post. I have suddenly got a whole bunch of inspiration. Look forward to my writings on

• Another offer to wait
• Arbeit macht frei
• The price of this child
• Perfect single (parent) lifestyle

Letting Ex23 Go

I have finally let ex23 go. And it hurts. But in all honesty my conscience got the better of me. Surprisingly, his didn't. I can now re-embrace the sisterhood. Accept my slap on the wrist and promise, as far as is humanly possible never to do it again.

Two posts helped me. This one, oddly annoyed me, because I used to be that person, a wronged woman who would never touch a married man, I had firm lines around what I would and wouldn't do, until I re-encountered Ex23. My defenses were down, and my sense of wrong and right twisted. What started as a one night stand turned to love and besottedness. And it was shown to me, graphically, that we are all fallible.

I apparently have some sort of daddy hole it wouldn't be my choice of nomenclature, but none the less after Neil cheated, came out as a sex addict, and treated me with indifference, I had a hole in my soul that badly needed plugging by "Just a boy" (credits to Get to the inside) the thrill of reuniting with someone I had last been with half a life ago (in 1986 to be exact) was absolutely and utterly overwhelming, intoxicating. We were 23 again. How was I to know it was, in fact fake love? Actually I remain in doubt. I still harbor a suspicion that it is the real thing. But I cannot bear to be kept on a string. I said to him when I ended it, what do you expect? for me to wait 30 years for you? "Yes" he said, "because I'm worth it". That has a very narcissistic after taste I can tell you.

I will miss his daily sms, and declarations of love, and midnight phone calls. Perhaps he did truly believe we belonged together, but the facts remain, as long as it stayed as it was, he still has an in tact, functioning family to go home to, who have the benefit of his presence, love, and money. Whereas I have nothing... I'm sure a dozen married men in my own city would be more than willing to offer what he was offering when it is boiled down... occasional no-strings-hotel-sex and (fake) declarations of love.

But what of "Just a boy"? get to the inside describes him as "a boy or man who has yet to learn how to love outside of himself; a boy/man who unknowingly and unintentionally hurts others due to his inability to consider other people besides himself" awww little innocent lamb. I think I specialize in these.

I listened to quite a funny radio show about cheating today, it was a variation on the sex-addict meets love-addict theme. Suggesting women cheat because they are looking for love to fill and emotional void, and men do the same thing, but they are incapable of expressing their emotions except, as validated by society, by hitting someone, or by having sex with them. At the end of the show the panel were clearly divided between the kick-him-to-the-kerb camp and the you-shall-learn-and-grow from this camp.

Loving the unlovable meets the love that dare not speak its name

This has been going on for 2 years. It has never been a transactional sort of arrangement, but just this week. I receive a gift. An unmarked CD of songs that apparently remind him of me. How romantic. I find a time when I am all alone driving and relish the message that it brings. But wait. All the songs, it turns out one by one, are trans-global tales of Hapless females being done wrong by dirt bag philandering males. This isn't how I see myself or how I wish to be seen. It is, if I let myself think about it, somewhat demeaning. I am, if not crushed, strangely unsettled, unconsoled, and disappointed.

Then tears prick my eyes at the thought of just how compromised I have become, that I would yearn for human contact, appreciation, love, being fully willing to return it to someone who cannot do the same for me.

Yet to be given this, this offering.

He urges me to tap my feet to it, and not read too much into it. I guess there are people out there who don't really listen to the lyrics of songs.

I recall a time almost half a life ago, when a fellow at work developed an admiration for me. He was a good looking young chap, and he too had a girlfriend and he too expressed his pent-up, unexpressable emotions by sending me a tape of songs. Loving those who cannot love me back has been a theme of my life. Played out in return, in these instances, by a love that dare not speak its name.

Post (traumatic) Script

I left, I did it. I put all my stuff into storage^ and I fled the country. The sleepless nights I was having over the unbearable weight of leaving my beloved home evaporated, and suddenly I could live with it. Although my life savings are still tied up there.

I am living with my parents on the other side of the world, part working, part recouperating I believe, I feel like Anne Frank scribbling in an attic room.

Simon has let me bring Connor for a protracted stay. However Simon is back in the Psych clinic having split from his partner of 3 years (coincidentally)

I am still fantasizing about true love with my ex of 23 years. He feeds it but has no intention of leaving his wife. And anyway he is in another country, further away now. I'm sorry about this one, but I have to be honest, since this blog is becoming my online diary.

By and large I have disengaged from my life to survive. I don't dare take a good hard look inside my mind, because when I do this is what I see....








Little tightly wrapped packages, they're not labelled, but I know what's in them.

See! this one is packed full of reflections on what happened with Neil and what that has done to me ... all my deepest darkest fears, that he manipulated me, was never faithful to me, converted me to his wrong way of thinking, abused me, abused my child, and is now trying to sabotage our financial future.

Here, this one contains the damage I may have done to Connor through my divorce, through working too many hours, through being stressed, indulgent, inconsistent...

Still another contains the ghost of Simon and our 16 year marriage. Will he try to get back with me? control me? Am I responsible for his illness? for him? What about all those years? were they happy, how do I account for them?

Then there's Ex23. This is possibly the only one I can unwrap with any clarity. It probably needs to end, but I am not ready to end it. I like it. He makes me happy. I am deluded.

Then there's one containing THE FUTURE. By the end of this decade I'll be in Menopause. With a teenager.

Ooh look, this little one is my health. Gone in one year from master's athlete, to hopeless cripple who can't run across the road. Terribly bereaved by this loss of capacity. Getting flabbier, floppier, more unfit.

Yet on the surface I am a survivor, a funny, sanguine, magnanimous, good daughter, attending to her career, bravely accepting single mother hood, forging ahead.

^I think my life is in storage

A Villanelle

Did my fifth decade forge in me
a fiery ship of burnished steel?
A long withheld capacity
to love you and to let you be
the helmsman of my wheel?
Did my fifth decade forge in me
a passion from across the sea
So strong, and desperate and real?
A long withheld capacity
to be myself and truly see
the way you make me feel?
Did my fifth decade forge in me
A softness borne of misery
of wounds that never really heal
A long withheld capacity
to give you all that I can be
Since you laid down the keel
Did my fifth decade forge in me
A long withheld capacity

Does my ass look guilty in this?

Since my last post a number of sequels have come into my mind. I usually don't put pen to paper until I have the thoughts well formed in my mind, but I think I need to take the taste of the spectacular misbehaviour away!! I got less comments than I expected. An ominous silence. Anyway here are the three possible sequels:

(1) Why I never need a counsellor again, and have reached serenity in my life
(2) How infidelity looks now I have tried it on for size
(3) Vote on my next step (in which I put up a reader poll and you tell me what to do)

So I will opt for number (2) with the others coming up shortly

My higher power, in their wisdom has brought me two pieces of reading material this weekend. The first was from a british newspaper. Why I cheated, inside the mind of an adulterer which tells the story of an affair from a man's point of view. The line that really was a wake up call for me came near the end where he describes the reaction when they were found out.

"Emma was stigmatized as a cheating spouse and a disloyal friend. People reacted less violently to my betrayal. The fact that I was a man seemed to make it easier to understand. But the societal condemnation of Emma, the woman, was brutal. It was too much for her. She went back to her husband"

He thought, as a man might, that he could have it all. Love his wife, and indulge his passion for her friend. The second was about sex and the dems by Michael Wolff in vanity fair in which he asserts that

"Men in public positions who have sneaky sex are weak. The very fact that they would risk their public positions for sex (just sex) is a sign of their weakness. "

It is clear to me sadly that when I move aside from the quasi-romance of being with someone from 20 years ago, and dreams of what may have been. The risk of being found out is too high. Apart from the damage to our small children. I am the one who has most to lose. I would be stigmatized and hated, he would at worst be considered "weak".