Note to my “Almost” Lover’s Husband!
Alternative Title “Dear Ray”
I haven’t delivered this message to HER’s husband but i’m thinking at the right time and place to share it with him. I wish somebody, maybe another man had shared something similar with me 18 years ago when i faced something similar..I have been drafting this letter in my head for weeks but have been struggling because the topic is painful…
Ray,
27 years ago I met my wife, not quite 25 years ago I married her with every good intention…funny thing was, what I was to her wasn’t what she was to me…
2 years into our marriage she decided that or discovered…(its not really relevant to this story whether the decision was her’s or it just happened) that I wasn’t “the MAN”…what I mean by that it is that Is that I just wasn’t really “ringing her bell” I wasn’t “IT”…the funny thing about it was that I was totally clueless that I wasn’t meeting her needs…but to this day I can’t tell you why…our sex life was great (when we had a sex life) I could push all the right buttons and make things happen for her…(still can make all the right things happen…it actually almost a formula at this point…I can make her “go” roughly in about 4.5 minutes even with all my clothes on..not bragging just saying I can make the shit work just fine)
Our first house we bought, 2 days before me moved in I can still remember showing up to clean up the mess from her and her first guy she was screwing after they “painted the guest room” and cleaning their handprints off the mirror in the guest bath and trying to figure out how the handprints got there and being so totally naive and not understanding at all…
I wish that was it…but it actually went on for several years with several partners…I was totally clueless…in our 8th year of marriage she told me.. (that you can read about in Beauty for Ashes 1 through 3)….i was wrecked…no, that word doesn’t come close….I was destroyed as a man…to this very day she cannot tell me why she shared about the screwing around…she said she didn’t want a divorce but she also couldn’t tell me why she was sleeping and involved with other people and she also couldn’t tell me why she felt the need to tell me about what was going on..especially since I was so clueless…
That year afterward where she came clean with me was awful…like a dumbass- I asked for her to share everything and she did and the end result wasn’t healing for me, it was traumatic, because for the first time I was able to connect all the dots…pretty much everyplace in my world that I was comfortable was a place that had been corrupted by her…she gave me a small clue as to what might be happening, which is that she married me when she was 29 (I was 24 at the time) and there was such enormous pressure for her to be married before age 30…I was pretty much her only option…
I say that because for years after we were married when it was asked at family get-togethers and social settings, she was embarrassed by my career or other aspirations (and also my love for God) …and somewhere in second year of our marriage she realized I was not “the man” …in fact I am not sure I was ever “the man” I was just filling a space that she wanted filled..
It may sound crazy but I decided to stick with her because isn’t that what a caring guy would do? Well wasn’t I caring? God can fix it right? So i tried and if there is one thing I am good at it, it is sticking it out. One time as a kid I picked a bad campsite and was even warned by my dad to not put my little pup tent where I parked it..(basically right in a dry ditch) and it rained and I spent the whole night in 4 inches of water because I was too stubborn to get up and move to a dry tent on the principal that I would have to admit I was wrong..
I stayed in the marriage physically, but emotionally, and spiritually I was gone…the best part of me was crushed and wiped out and I didn’t even know how to get it back, so i buried it, every once in a while parts would come out, but for the most part…the old me was dead and broken and shattered into a million pieces that I had no fucking way to put back together…and believe me I tried everything I could think of to make that shit work…but you get tired…until you finally start to think that the old you wasn’t even you…you build walls and boundaries to stay away from things that might remind you painful things, you get therapy, and other coping skills…meanwhile far back in your mind..you just want to be that same person again..
The one that wasn’t afraid to love, the one that isn’t worried about being hurt, that isn’t afraid of rejection, or feeling dirty and unworthy…that is who I wanted to be, I wanted my innocence back..
I don’t have regrets for the past 25 years being in an empty shell of a marriage because I accomplished much and learned much but there is no way I am going back…on my horizon is a better future and I know I have to cross some barren ground to get there but I am going..Hell or High water I am on my way…
My Advice to you Ray, is to embrace the pain, use its energy to get on to the next thing, set your eyes forward not back, be an example to your boys…
I wish you the best…
-Beauty for Ashes