There were a lot of married men

Photo by Aleksandra Sapozhnikova on Unsplash

At one point in time, there were a lot of married men.

They did all kinds of things… to be around me, to be with me

Earlier in my life, one of them bought a condo closer to “work” to be… closer to me

One was a pastor who sent me many illicit messages… on AIM (I’m dating this)… while I was studying overseas. I was 21.

We never did anything physical. His wife found those messages. Then she died two years later. That was something. I held a lot of guilt for years about that…. Probably a half-decade.

Random makeouts in bars. “It’s fine.”

There was that blowjob I gave in a closet next to a broom and butler and some bag-in-box sodas.

There were so many.

The guy who rode the bus with me when I interned at MTV. I remember feeling him up against a glass door at Port Authority.

We emailed. Lots of emails. Guess it made the day go by faster. Television is boring.

I’m open about this, but I don’t write about it a lot.

The “last one” was my ex, in 2016.

He was married when we met and very shortly after, he wasn’t.

An aside, I know a lot of women might be activated, even angered, by this because they may see themselves in the positions of the spouses of those men. I really can’t do much about that. I didn’t see what I see now, back then. And, I wasn’t this person back then.

I also don’t attach moral righteousness or wrongness to this. This was just… what happened. And it happened with these men.

When it came to the specifics of my ex, I could bore you with the details. He and his wife were married for almost two decades, and he wasn’t even 40. We both drank entirely too much… I think we both fell into this intellectual affair that we wanted to make romantic.

But, like anything that’s reactive and based in escape, it went to hell…. Quickly.

The universe wasn’t kind. It started throwing wrenches in his business. It tested his leadership.

It tested me in that I couldn’t hold not only the guilt, the shame, etc, but I also couldn’t keep up with the life he lived. He traveled a lot, but he wasn’t funding that travel for me. (He did a little, but my bartender salary at a themed restaurant was not going to put me on airplanes twice a month.)

We got angry. We fought. I blew up to an almost-200-pound balloon. I was disgusting. I had brown inner thighs… One morning I vomited bright yellow, and in those moments, I questioned if I’d live much longer.

And then, he left me at an airport in the middle of the night when I didn’t have a flight home— the “spiritual awakening” moment I’ve talked about a lot.

His ex-wife, too, nearly died a year later. I prayed for her every day, and I said I’d never do it again… Never.

We’ve since made amends. Oddly, I am connected to her on social media. I have no contact with him. He’s remarried, from what I hear. I’m happy for him.

When it came to touching, sex, those sorts of things… That was the last time.

When it came to being out of integrity, it was not. There were two others.

Once was just “on the edge of appropriate.” The other was a full-on romance.

I’ve spent a lot of my life wondering what this was/is supposed to teach me.

I understand the inner workings, now, of what made me seek that validation in that way from these men. I understood early after my “spiritual awakening” the codependency that I had… The fears I had about commitment and abandonment.

I get what pulled me into those experiences. And yet, I feel there’s a bigger truth here.

Through this, in a deep way, I came to understand men.

I know that’s sort of a wild turn of script…. But I came to deeply understand these men through those experiences… how they love, and what they desire.

In all of those experiences, there were very few where it was about sex.

There’s this thing that society talks about- men and sex. Men do have a biological need for sex, a bodily need …

Some women have that, but from what I understand, not quite like men. I remember one of my trans male friends telling me how much he craved sex after starting testosterone. It’s hormonally different for most men.

But this, none of this was about sex.

These men were so deeply unseen in so many areas of their lives. They lived under heavy weights of expectation, much of it self-created, but larger than that, societally imposed.

They couldn’t be held, even by people who held them.

I don’t know why it was me. Maybe it’s because I don’t really understand marriage.

I really don’t know.

I see those possibilities now, but I don’t entertain them, mostly to stay in integrity to myself and who I want to be. I certainly can’t be responsible for the agreements between two people who are married, but to myself, I can be.

I’ve said I am polyamorous, and that’s true. Yet, I’m also monogamous, in that I tend to only have one romantic/sexual partner at a time. And, when those relationships inevitably change, I don’t discard them. I welcome them to stay in whatever form they take.

Usually, those changes don’t happen one-sided. It’s always a gradual shift… We tend to go into denial because of the system, not the truth.

I do wonder, though, what it all means. What was the learning?

At a basic level, we all want to love and be loved.

At a level above that, the performative aspect of gender roles and societal expectations can wear on a relationship.

And, at another level, people just want to connect deeper. Some of us connect deeper through one partner. Some of us, people like me and a lot of others, need many. And then, there’s this societal norm about getting married that has us questioning our value, worthiness, morality…. And it’s not about that at all.

I don’t write a lot about it, but it’s such a huge part of my past and my life, I want to share it. Coming to understand the nature and complexity of love is part of me.

There’s so much room for upset and activation because of people’s deep fears of being discarded, unwanted, abandoned, or seen as perverted, defunct, fallible…

A lot of people don’t write about this because we just don’t want to take the risk.

It is a risk.

I don’t have a way to neatly tie this up.

Stay beautiful.