Stripped

It seems impossible for Mina to open up like she did, and not post my part as well. For me, I felt like Ahab, gazing into to the slate sea, waiting for that ivory skin to break loose again. This ball of anger, guilt, resentment, fear, and self-loathing continued to ply the depths, out of my reach to contain, to slay. For me, I always retreat to intellect. I try to fight with the cold, relentless march of logic. But, as I have lectured so many of friends, emotions are not logical, and will not submit themselves to logic. You cannot reason your feelings away. You can talk, you can plumb the depths, and try to find the source of the roiling waves on your surface. But you can’t just tell yourself, “This is illogical.”

If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

-John Donne

The signs of trouble came in slowly. Blips from her phone, obssessive time spent on Twitter, a mind clearly preoccupied with nothing to say, foul moods without cause. Of course, deep down, I knew what they meant, I had exhibited those signs myself once. But it wasn’t until they became too strong to deny, till I saw the incriminating words with my own eyes in a stolen glance, words that hit me like a cold knife pressed into my abdomen, words that reflected more than a flirtation, but a emotional bond. This was more than I could handle, I had no experience with this. I went to our blogger friends, people that had relationships similar to the one I suddenly understood I had, people that cared for us both. How does this work? How do you people deal with this? Honesty…the one common thread was honesty.

So I finally demanded to know: what are you doing? And, eventually, she began to tell. First, who it was that day. Then I asked, who recently. Name after name came out. Some I had long been suspicious of, some I had never known. So many names, so many names. It could have been five, it could have been a million. I don’t remember. I deleted every trace of that conversation from the record, and my mind.

Some things stood out. Discovering that she had written about her interactions with someone else, and posted it. A guy I knew, who had taken it upon himself to introduce himself to me after getting to know Mina. I wondered if he had started his cyber dalliance before the introduction, and said hello to throw suspicion off, or introduced himself first as part of his bigger plan, or had the best intentions, and then started losing interest in talking to me as Mina’s libido preoccupied him. It didn’t matter. Each scenario was brutal in its own way. The idea of being tricked like this, when it was so obvious. And there I was, so aroused by this fantasy that never appeared in our bedroom, and it was just the reflected glow of her secret life that I was willfully ignoring. I was such a fool.

The confession of the phone calls was another sore point, and as you now know, the source of so much damage later. Someone I didn’t know anything about, that had never been mentioned. The cloth lifted from my eyes, I blinked and strained to stare into the painful light that now flooded my senses. The pupils of your heart take a long time to contract, and you have to stare into this sun of pain for a long time before you can focus.

But there, ruling it all was my mind. She had confessed. You asked, she answered, and she told you the truth, you can’t punish her for doing what you asked. It’s not fair. So, I told her, that it was okay, and that it was over. She had told me, and I would deal with it.

Yeah right.

Of course, there was the matter of the incompleteness of the phone confession, which, in my gut, I knew. But like a poker player calling when he knew he was beat, I tried to believe it. I even wrote, behind closed doors, that I would always suspect more. Over and over I hinted I didn’t believe it, I told her I didn’t believe it, I tried to open the door for her to tell me, but the die was cast, and she would not back down from what she already said. I was hurt, and I was angry, and I didn’t trust her.

This emotion was like a black fist clasped around my head shaking me furiously. I had to let it out. I had to let it out. So, finally, I broke down and vented to yet another blogger friend. Which brings me back to my John Donne quote above.

There is no such thing as an outside observer. Every time you go to someone for advice, they can’t arbitrarily tell you what is the best thing, because what happens with you affects them, too. If your relationship is going to work, it has to work like theirs, because if it doesn’t, then, does theirs really work? When my marriage failed, I realized one day, in a cold shock, that people were not responding to my relationship, but their own. Those fiercely clinging to miserable failures railed into me at my lack of desire to keep it going, how weak I was. Yet, somehow, I forgot this lesson:

If you ask someone for advice on your relationship, you will get advice on theirs.

At best, the people who see your relationship works differently, will see it as a byproduct of some sort of deficiency in either you or your partner. The only way to get good advice on a relationship is to find someone in a happy relationship. Which brings me to the point of this cruel conundrum. Because of this blog, because our relationship is so public in this way, and now, because this was so intimately tied to our problems, we couldn’t ask our normal friends. The only people I could talk to were bloggers. And, the sad fact of life is that few people blog because they are happy. Mina and I met as we blogged about our shared misery, and without that history, this blog would not exist today. This leads us to the lesson I should have known:

Searching for good relationship advice from bloggers is like panning for gold in your bathtub. You’re just looking in the wrong place, and you are in a world where there are too many precious illusions to find the truth.

As this happened, I did boil down my hurt over what Mina did to one simple thing: intimacy. Seeing her intimacy with others, be it discovering a new fantasy role, exploring a fetish, killed me. I tried to vent the anger elsewhere. I shared it, I opened myself unfiltered to another. And I shared everything, because I needed to, with someone, because Mina had done her part, now I had to live up to my end of the bargain. But like Promethius, every day I cut the weight of blood and bile out ,and every night it grew back. The anger never went away.

Our relationship became more fitful, more chaotic. The sex became stunning, exquisite museum-piece fucks punctuation the morbid quiet. I tried to put this away, and it still lurked. Finally I had to know what had really happened. I had been debating an intrusive search, going through her twitter account, for a while. Finally, on this one fateful day, I heard the suggestion from too many corners and I did it. I hit the ceiling, crashed through, hit the next ceiling, burst through, and continue into orbit. Besides the incontrovertible direct proof that she had come on the phone, which she insisted she hadn’t, I read so much more that just ripped my guts out. I saw the strange men picking up her turns of phrase, her complaining about her boyfriend getting upset over her Twitter use. I was apoplectic.

I wanted to hurt her.

But then, I had wanted that for a while, hadn’t I? After the first confession, I thought, “Oh, we’re calling people now?” So, I decided I should make some calls. I realized, when I confessed to her the day that my emails with “my lady friend” had gotten sexual, and she said “I already assumed that,” why she had assumed that. Was I thinking, “this’ll show her how it feels.” No, but when this came to light, I certainly hoped she would realize that. And, when she did, and said the words, “If what I did made you feel anything like this, I am sorry.” I felt wonderful, if “wanting to crawl into an acid vat for a painful death,” is wonderful. Somehow, in my life, when I had always taken the high road, and when I thought I was doing the right things, my actions were taking me someone else. And we all know what speaks louder.

Without consciously choosing to, I was taking out my revenge on her, one step at a time. So you tell me, who’s the bad guy? The person who made a mistake when the rules weren’t set, or the person who set the rules, and chose to disobey them out of a desire, conscious or otherwise, to make the other hurt, too? I realize I was out of control, again.

Again, you say? When were you out of control before?

I guess, then, it is time to show a little bit more about me.

I grew up in a conservative religious family. Though I didn’t go on to attend church, I certainly followed what I was taught. I didn’t want to go to hell, after all. I waited till I was married before I had sex. I wound up waiting till after I was married. Three years after I was married, and then only after threatening to leave. My ex-wife made me stop believing in God, which finally got me out.

But Sylvanus, you are such a sexual person. How did you get to your mid-20’s as a virgin?

I cybered, and with more women than I could ever count. Several hundred at least. I was incredible, and it was the birth of my identity as a blogger. I phoned, too. And I was great at that, too. Have the voice, have the rhythm, the words, I got it all there, too. And, I realized, I was an addict. I was pouring my whole sex life into the words I could weave without any conscious thought. I could cyber with four or five people at once, every one in a different stage, and keep them all happy. Not a skill to brag about. Eventually, the day came where I stopped. The day started with one person I had “been with” on the edge of suicide. I got her through the night, and then vanished into the ether, never to speak to her again.

I realized it wasn’t just a game, it was real. The time in my life I was pouring into it was real. The energy I could use to do so much good was being diffused into thousands of filthy sentences I could write in my sleep now.

I broke my abstinence not long after I began blogging. With Mina. Later, I broke my phone abstinence as well, as I became the first person she would give her number to. The, rest, as they say, is history.

And then, before me, I saw men in her life, cybering, and then phoning. How special am I, I wondered. Can no man do what I did? I’m not that special…And there, deep down, was the terror. And there, deep down, was why I was reaching out, and why I couldn’t seem to control what I was doing, the realization that the only thing that makes me special is her love, and my returning of it. It’s nothing I can hold in my hand, it’s only an ethereal thread that I can choose to leap from solid ground and hold, hoping it doesn’t break. I can’t reach it from the safety of distance, and my own secret space, I have to take that risk, and be willing to be the fool, again. It is only here, hanging from this wispy idea of a life we can have, no net below, no promise of land over the horizon, suspended on hope and trust, that happiness can be found.

Since the truth is out now, and Mina and I are human, now you see me. Flawed, idealistic on my best days, deeply cynical on my worst. I am tugging the rope up the campanile, tolling my bell, if you will hear it.

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The Epilogue is here.