It’s like they expect Samantha from Sex in the City but I’m far from it. If a guy tells me he’s married and just wants to be friends, I believe him. I don’t look to seduce him and don’t assume he is trying to seduce me. But tell this to most people and they’ll shake their heads and tell me “tsk, tsk,” as if I am in the wrong for not reading between the lines.
I was so ready to build a future, to move on and away from trauma, to be free and to be a grown-up that I allowed myself to ignore all kinds of warnings, and to consciously convince myself that this person would bring stability to my life. I threw all my eggs into that unstable basket.
Give me a guy ballsy enough to tell me in person what he’d like to do to me and not one who casts a wide net of selfies to see what he can drag in. And as someone who has been painfully sensitized to a partner’s ability to be unfaithful, I don’t think I could ever trust that the guy who is unable to start a conversation with an attractive woman in real life would be able to be truthful with me about the really important stuff.
If you are from the southwest or San Francisco, you are used to hippy-dippy, new-age spiritualism and will not laugh when I tell you what kinds of referrals I got. Everyone else, know this: ask for therapy here, and you get referrals to: reflexology, aromatherapy, crystal therapy, hot stone therapy, sweat therapy, neuro-linguistic programming, massage, scare therapy, rebirthing and on and on. I was really asking for talk therapy, but I figured, what the heck, I should be open to anything that might open my heart again to a man for whom I’d lost all respect. Marriage was forever, and maybe there was a magic therapy I could sign up for?
At least in high school, my peers and I all had the commonality of believing that everything sucked. College, by contrast, was a world of people talking about how great college life was,.
I would never have predicted that the person who would understand best what was going on in my marriage would be a celibate priest.
I might suffer impostor syndrome in my career, but I have never doubted that I am the best person to be raising my children.
The reality is that I’m still angry and I suck at pretending. Women coming out of bad marriages need to find their strength, and that strength might only come by hanging onto some anger.
I thought somehow that rules were made by wise people who knew best, and didn’t realize until way late that most of them are just a form of mob rule.
