Even as it was happening I was writing about my divorce long before things broke. I was sending love letters via email and they were not being received. Songs, pouring out my heart to her. Zip. She was no longer hearing me.
Odd how that happens, and I hear it’s frequently. Woman falls in love with a musician then wants him to quit being a musician. My wife always resented my continuing push to write music and poetry. Even as the world was collapsing around me, I was crafting some wonderful sounds in the garage turned studio when I was kicked out of the house by the second kid.
It got me thinking about each of my post divorce lovers, the real tries, I would call them. And how, why did things end? Without doing the research I have the feeling that I was in the driver’s seat of breaking up, but that’s not exactly true, but I don’t know that yet. I’m about to write it back into being.
The first woman I dated more than a handful of times is still an acquaintance. From her I learned how a loving relationship felt. Someone who would say freely, “I love you.” And, “You’re great.” I was shocked when I realized how little of that I got in ten years of marriage.
The second woman was the first woman’s best friend and a full professor at the University of Texas. A tennis player. We broke up over and over and wound up back on the court and ultimately back in bed. I recall a conversation on her back porch where she continued to repeat her mantra, “I don’t want to be in a relationship.” What I learned from her was that I wasn’t interested in a relationship that wasn’t aimed at forever. Forever. Not half in. Not sort of. Nope. Either full-tilt boogie or I’m out. I didn’t know this before her. After her, I streamlined my search.
The third woman was the most fit person I’d ever known. I think, if I was in love with anything, it was her fantastic body and bright white tan lines from all her running training. “Have you ever dated a marathoner?” she asked, early in our courtship. She did not disappoint in stamina and multi orgasmic bliss. She had a relationship with alcohol that I thought I could temper. (I figured I would’ve learned that from my father’s fall, but no.) I learned that I could not be in a relationship with someone struggling with addiction. Al Anon was great, but I was in it for me, to get healthy. Not to stay in a relationship with an alcoholic.
The fourth woman taught me what unhinged uninhibited sex was like. And how damaged she was inside later as she bolted during a dramatic moment in my life. My brother was dying in my mom’s house. I bought a Boston Terrier, Tempo. I needed a distraction. This woman showed me some sensual goals for future relationships, and the risk of someone that’s too kinky.
The fifth woman still feels from time to time like the one who got away. She taught me about loving someone so deep that I began to put up with emotional abuse. And I broke up twice to make my point, but I was addicted to her mothering love, her eight year old son, and the hippie vibe life we lived together. She didn’t know how to trust or give herself fully to our relationship. She was too wrapped up, enmeshed, with her son. Still putting him to bed at night years later when he was ten. It was her and her son against the world. I was a nice to have, but not a required participant. She would be fine with her son without me. And thus she is. I learned how to stick up for myself, or I think I will in the future if the same warped relationship begins to go south.
The sixth and final woman (so far) loved me more than all the others. I felt, for the first time in my life what it felt like to be loved without fear. Secure attachment. We thrived. But, I realized just last week, we did not reach ecstasy. Not even a little. She was amazing, beautiful, and in great shape. A winning smile. All I could’ve imagined wanting. And… something extra was missing. Something critical in her relationship skills that her history thus far had not taught her. An emotional element was missing. I know she sensed it too. Several times across the three years we dated she asked, “Am I enough for you?”
In fact, I didn’t know it at the time, but she was not.
In a discussion with my son this evening I expressed how hard it was letting go of someone who was so good to me. I knew it was time to go. All of my blood was moving in a different direction. We were no longer aligned.
Alignement is the word I use. I like it. A near miss passed by last weekend. She lives 3 hours away. If things had gone as planned I would be talking to her in her city this very night. I have to work tomorrow but not until 1 pm. I was going to drive home tomorrow morning. Instead, she dropped the “overwhelmed” bomb and put a pause on the entire escapade. I wrote her a nice letter. How I will honor her request and would likely be around if she came out of her crisis and wanted to give it a go.
I resisted sending her a text or a song today. She made her case clear. I gave her my swan song and promise that I would not pursue if she wasn’t invested. We will see.
She was a vision of what I think I want.
A bit younger. A reader. A writer. Has two kids. Taught yoga for twenty years, so… I’m guessing in shape and in touch with her physical side. I wrote something the other day about the first kiss and how much sensual information a first kiss can provide. Going as far as saying you can tell how someone will make love by how well they kiss. And that’s true so far, in my experience. The sex goddess could kiss for twenty minutes with heat and energy. The boy-mama had a great sensual and awake kiss, so that was a good indicator of how “eyes open” our sex had become.
Oh, that’s a second thing I learned from boy-mama, how good sex could be. Encouraging. Persistent. Cooperative. Deep connection and eye contact. Mostly, she was what’s known as a “verbal.” She told me, on-going, how good I was as we were making love. I think I missed some of that in the next relationship. She gave me a new plateau of sex that I aspire to. Hippie sex.
As I’ve been working in a job where the most beautiful people pass by, it’s been easy for me pick up more of my attractiveness DNA. What type of woman I am into. What turns me off. How fat is too fat, even if they have a radiant smile? I have a flexible range, I think, both in age, fitness, and looks. I don’t need a 1% beauty. But I’m definately looking in the top 10%. Only one in ten women, even in my store at work, inspire me towards “next.”
Somehow, as I was going through my divorce, the real one, I imagined my ex-wife writing a book called, “Leaving John.” Her side of the story. How hard it was to be married to genius. All hours of the night, zooming off in epiphanies and reveries. It was exhausting. And her art drive was dead, so she wasn’t happy about that either. She complained about my wanting to nap on a Saturday or Sunday. Ever! There were always chores that could be done. “Always laundry to be folded,” was her favorite rationalization about not wanting to have sex or join me for a nap.
I’ve learned to nap. I put a value on napping together. It can lead to closer things. And drive as I do, I often burn the midnight oil and catch up by napping. Regularly. It’s part of my program. It’s working for me.
A part of me always wants to drive to the beach. The Texas beach. Hot. Sticky. Boring waves. Kitsch. Mediocre TexMex food. Alone I often find solace in the beach at night, the sound of the waves. A part of my childhood reconnects at the beach at night. Wander around to a few beach fires on a weekend night. The salt air, crisp wind coming in from the ocean, and the stars.
I don’t have any desire to run, at the moment. I’m in my state. My house is good. My rhythm is good. Job sucks, but a few prospects seem promising. Creativity is great. Fitness and nutrition is good. I’m living a big life in a little moment. Crap job, long hours, exhaustion, and taking all of that and using it to create a new work of art, The Happy Cashier has been born. I am happy.
Even when things are shitty, when there’s a crisis, when my feelings are hurt: I am happy.
The book my ex-wife was going to write was going to sell well. My writing would be discovered off the back of her fame. Somehow she painted me as a generous and loving man with a fatal flaw she couldn’t fix or live with. She got famous. Talk shows. She looked great. Divorced her neurotypical husband, who had served his purpose.
Of course, I’m giving my ex-wife way to much emotional credit. I put the emotion in things. She just white knuckles it and complains. There’s no book in her because there’s very little feeling in her soul. She’s calculating, mathematical, and logical, with a touch of “mom” that was nearly successful in cracking her hard outer shell. Instead of opening up and digging in, she opted-out. I was writing the poetry and songs. She was just singing the song because it fell in her vocal range. Nothing really.
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