Over and Over Again

Is it common for the one who has been spurned to pine for their wayward lover to come back to their senses and verbalize all those tragically romantic thoughts they are harboring? ”I’ve just made the biggest mistake of my life.” “I’ll never love anyone as much as I love you.” “I feel like we’re tangled up in someone else’s lives.” “I don’t know how I can live without you.” And finally, “Maybe we’re meant to spend some time apart so we can really appreciate what it is we have.” Isn’t that the call that everyone wishes they’d get so you can rush back into your lover’s arms and forgive all for the sake of love? How few of us ever really get that call?  I got that call Monday morning at 7:30 am. 

I think I must either be a cast iron bitch and my heart has turned colder than Cybill Sheperd’s snatch or I’ve begun to move on. In the normal course of events, a call such as that would have had my heart strings tugging but there was nary a plunk. Honestly, I thought it was rather amusing and vindicating in a way. You see, I knew he was feeling those things so it came with a sense of satisfaction to actually hear them. And yet, they didn’t move my in any way. In fact, the very act of hearing them allowed me to address them as a fact and then put them away. Dear has made a big mistake. A fact. Dear still loves me and more than he will ever love Twitch. Another fact. But it doesn’t want me to rush back into anything. It just let’s me feel sort of pleased (in a slightly malicious way) that he’s coming out of his befuddled fog. 

Are our lives made of patterns that we’re destined to repeat?

I’d like to think not but evidence points to the contrary. We seem doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again until we finally address them and move on. Will I ever be financially secure? Not if I keep frittering money away and not truly facing the fact that I simply must learn how to balance a checkbook. It ain’t pretty but I’m 41 and if I don’t figure out how to live beyond paycheck to paycheck, when I’m seventy-five, i’ll be living in a velvet lined cardboard box. 

A few weeks before all hell broke loose, Dear became quite frantic one night and insisted that he was about to repeat a pattern of his and I must help him. He begged me. At the time, I didn’t get what it was he was trying to say and what he needed of me. His pattern seemed to be that he’d get into a relationship and then the sex would evaporate and instead of facing the issues and dealing with it, he’d find someone else and leave the first behind with the first lover blind-sided and furious. (There is one that still won’t speak to him, over ten years after the fact.) I knew we were having issues with our sex life. The issue: no sex. But I thought if we actually worked on that, well, it might come back with time and nurturing. I thought we could beat any pattern. After all, we’d stayed together through the early years after rehab. If we could get through that, we could get through anything. And this was the longest relationship for either of us. We should be able to break a silly old pattern.

I’d been warned. Dear’s last serious boyfriend. The one that came two guys before me. Old Turtleneck warned me one day Dear would just throw in the towel and hit the road. I thought it was bitterness speaking as we’d been able to make a success of it, when Dear had driven Turtleneck into rehab.

Now between Turtleneck and myself was The Liar. The Liar is one of the chief reasons Dear ended up in rehab. The Liar not only was a rampant Meth user, he also would have sex with other guys every minute they weren’t together and then lie about it and swear they were monogamous. This slowly eroded Dear’s self-assurance and equilibrium and precipitated his slide down the slippery slope. The Liar had done quite a number on Dear and I had a lot of work to get him to a place where he could trust again. Now, the bizarre thing is that Twitch reminds Dear of The Liar. Not only in personality (secretive, non-communicative) but also the fact that Twitch is less than honest with him about his activities. Another pattern of Dear’s picking lovers that are dishonest to him.

Twitch has patterns, too. Twitch, it seems, has a history of leaving a steady, solid, stable partner to run off with a high-energy and extroverted, yet, unstable partner. It’s nice to know he’s fulfilling his pattern as well.

We can spend our entire lives swinging over and over again on the same trapeze. But what truly makes us break our patterns? Self-awareness? Strength? The will to change? Or just growing up? Facing your demons, realizing they no longer hold power over you and laughing them away. I feel I am moving forward. I feel that by truly living on my own and thriving, I will have broken a pattern. But what patterns are still spun around me like a web? Are we ever truly free? 

A House is Not A Home

I couldn’t quite put my finger on it but for some reason our house hadn’t felt like a home in a long time. Was it the broken dimmer switch in the living room? The leaky faucet in the upstairs bathroom? The overgrown garden? It was all of the above and yet something much deeper. Does a house stop being a home the moment the relationship is over or long before that? Does home stop existing the moment your lover gives love to someone else?

I didn’t understand why we’d spent last fall having all these fights about Twitch. It didn’t add up. Why was I having to fight for time with him? What I didn’t know at the time was that in a home across the bay, the exact same arguments were taking place between another couple about Dear.

I should have been happy for Dear. He was so excited to have a new friend. He claimed Twitch was turning out to be the best friend he’d made in years. Since he’d moved to San Francisco. Now Dear has many, many friends in SF and many people that care for him. After all, he’s a very charismatic and generous, if troubled, soul. He’s the sort of person that lights up the room when he enters, whether you want that glare of not.I sensed that something was different about this friendship but I couldn’t put my finger on it. He claimed Twitch was the first person he’d met that reminded him of his two best friends back on the East Coast. What he really meant was that Twitch was a big kid and encouraged his fantasies around recapturing his youth. A youth that his two friends on the East Coast had figured prominently in. I like these two friends but they are a study. Not at all alike but somehow they have managed to get into their forties without ever having a serious relationship.

I sensed something was wrong. Dear had become so volatile that, at times, I just tried to avoid the confrontations. This avoidance behavior of mine dated back to a period almost two years earlier. I had taken a severance package from a job I’d been at for years and decided to take some time off to write a book. We made the decision together and Dear was very supportive of this. At first. Then it slowly turned sour and he would get very disturbed about the bills and how he was carrying the entire financial weight of our life. True but also, he had at no time curtailed any of his extravagance. We bought three investment properties during this time. Three! He created an elaborate 40th birthday event for family and friends. We traveled. We entertained. Basically, we lived life as we always had yet now he had a focus to complain about our spending without actually addressing the issue of poor financial planning.

When I started to look for work I didn’t realize how long it would take me, being that I’m in a rather specialized sector. I knew I’d be in a good position when I did get back to work and that’s exactly what happened. However, during those final months of searching he’d grown into such an emotional roller coaster that I did anything to keep him on an even keel. I’d carefully screen the bills and try to present them in stages so as not to have to deal with a scene. In retrospect, I realize I was living through a mild form of emotional abuse but the problem is that often when you’re in situations of that sort, you don’t see it for what it is until you’re on your way out (or it’s grown so unbearable that you need escape). Thank god it never got bad. It was more like a year of walking on eggshells. Not pleasant but tolerable.

When I started back to work I thought everything would go back to normal but instead he got moodier and more irritable. This also happened to coincide with the beginning of his “friendship” with Twitch. Was it guilt the caused those reactions? Did our troubles drive him to seek companionship with someone that was “easy” and had no expectations of him? I know that it was a strange year. Now I realize I was feeling him leave in stages. Little by little, over the year, I felt him slip away and yet I couldn’t put my finger on what was happening. I hate to be the cliche of the spouse that can’t see what’s right under their eyes but that’s exactly who I was. Once he confessed, everything fell into place. Those feelings of having to fight for time with Dear. The rants whenever I didn’t want us to do something with Twitch and Mortimer or didn’t want Dear to go away with Twitch. Every nuance of the past nine months came into focus. The overwhelming feeling that I was the only person in my relationship. The only one living in our home.

And now, I am the only person living in our home. But I’ve gotten my eviction notice. Dear says I have to move out on April 1st so he and Twitch can move in. It seems that Twitch can’t bear to spend any more time living in a sublet so I have to move on. Not at my pace but at their selfish timetable. Dear says he’ll do anything he can to help me physically and financially to smooth the transition (and sooth his guilt). If I don’t leave on April 1st, he insists he’ll go crazy and Twitch will leave him. I told him that’s really not my concern and I also told him that if Twitch really cared about him so much he’d realize that Dear and I have a life to unravel and that takes some time and he would be willing to sit tight in a sublet for a few months more if it makes the separation process easier for Dear and I. After all it’s been six years. If we were getting divorced I’d have more than two and half months to get my life together. But I’m dealing with two adolescents that want their creature comforts. They can have the house but it’ll never be a home again.

I don’t know where I’m going. I know I’ll be taking things from our house but I’ll have to create my home from scratch.

The Little Things You Do Together - Part One

How do you measure a successful relationship? In years? In compatibility?  How important are all the little things you share together when you’re missing some other key element? And ultimately how much weight do you give sex? Is it the glue that holds you together or are the little things you do together more important than a physical flame that may burn cooler as the years pass?

Sex. As gay men, or men in general, we seem to spend a great deal of our time, energy and mind focused on sex. I suppose it’s because our dicks are just hanging out there like a Geiger counter gauging the heat around us and like a Geiger counter they often get us into some radioactive situations. If life really is a banquet, is sex the most important item on the buffet table or just a fascinating side dish that you may lose your appetite for over time? Why is it that the one thing that often brings a couple together can become the same thing that can tear them apart?

Dear and I had our issues. Actually, we really only had one big issue - I didn’t want him to smoke crack and disappear for days on end, having sex with people you couldn’t introduce to your mother. All our other issues revolved around this, most notably, our sex life.

The first time we had sex (coincidentally, it was also the same night we met, funny how that happen). Anyway, the first time we had sex was an incredible experience on many levels for both of us. Not only was it the most amazing sex either of us had ever had, the whole thing took on this “out-of-body/soul-mate reconnecting”other-worldliness. Granted, the drugs probably helped that a bit but there had been drugs before and since and nothing ever remotely like that moment in time. With it starting on such a miraculous flip-flopping high, it was bound to go downhill. After all, how could it ever be nearly as good?

Over the years, our sex life (with each other) had pulled a vanishing act. The wear and tear of daily existence, the occasional relapses, the circus freak sexshows, all contributed in their way. His post-rehab rants about how he hated and wouldn’t/couldn’t do “sober sex”, didn’t help. By the time he realized he could do sober sex and even enjoyed it, I’d lost interest in even trying. But through it all, we remained compatible, comfortable and our life seemed mapped out and easy. After all, we had the tough stuff (compatibility, common interests, mutual support). When we were 65, isn’t that what would really matter when the sex was just a faded memento (except with the random hired hand or poolboy)?

I used to believe this was true or I told myself I believed it. That wanting it all was selfish. That I had so much already. I could always find sex. The things I had weren’t as easy to come by.

I know a lot of other gay couples, together anywhere from 2 to 30 years in varying degrees of devotion and monogamy. Most of them fall on a continuum somewhere between the couple who have been totally monogamous for 30 years and have sex at least once a day to the couple that hasn’t had sex, with each other, in years but are still deeply in love. And though you never really know what’s going on behind people’s closed doors, when I take a closer look, the couples around me that seem the healthiest and most devoted are the ones that are actively engaged and enthusiastically still sexually involved with each other. I really bought into other people’s relationship PR (and have certainly spun my own PR over the years) and thought every couple is different and whatever works, works. But in the past few days, I’ve seen behind the scenes of two relationships where sex or lack of it is a major issues and I’m coming to believe that sex really is a very key component in a balanced relationship. It may ebb and wane but the sputtering flames must be actively fanned. The sexual health of the relationship seems intrinsically tied to the overall health.

Case Study #1

A few years back, a dear friend, I’ll call him Horatio, went through a breakup of a long-term relationship. His lover, a fraternity brother of my ex-husbands’, had been regularly cheating on him- Seems to be a trademark of that fraternity. The adultery finally reached became so rampant that Horatio called it quits. Now Horatio is a sexy guy but a little on the tightly coiled side, when he started seriously dating again it came as a real pleasure (and shock) that his new partner, of several years now, is anything but straight-laced.  He’s an absolute character - fun, goofy, cute and very sexually oriented. He’s really helped Horatio loosen up, become a little less rigid and really blossom. Unfortunately, the boyfriend has some sexual desires (or issues) that bother my friend and threaten their relationship. Based on his previous relationship history, Horatio has obvious issues with cheating. They have tried to have a monogamous relationship but his BF is just too much of a horn dog and though nothing has happened, that we know of, the pressure to open the relationship wears on Horatio.

Now this whole open relationship thing really deserves it’s own column (and then some) but I’ve always thought you need to listen to your relationship and listen to each other and find out what works for you at that time and place. The relationships that I think of as the most enduring have had periods of both monogamy and openness and everything in between but the key element they share is the ability to be open to your partners’needs and the health of your relationship.

Horatio isn’t the least bit interested in opening the door to his relationship the tiniest crack, which is fine but it doesn’t seem to be working for his BF. He’s very concerned right now because he found out that the BF spends a lot of time doing internet/cam chat JO sessions regularly with a variety of guys. Seems innocent enough on the surface, one might think, but more unsettling is the fact that there is one guy in particular, who lives quite near by, that he does it with regularly and has even tried to arrange something in person. Now, this is all after Horatio asked him not to keep secrets anymore and some tenseness early in the relationship around phasing out some regular fuck buddies. To Horatio this is strike three and he needs things to change or he’s out of it but is he asking too much of his partner? The “Jacking off on the computer with strangers” thing can be hot but also innocent. Since his partner clearly gets off on it and it’s something he can’t supply (though he could go in the next room, or to a friends house, and sign on and have a hot little stroke session fulfilling his partners desires and keeping it in the family), should he work through that as long as there are clear and honest parameters? However, as for the repeat nearby offender, he has a no tolerance policy and I’m 100% in agreement with him. It’s right to be disturbed and feel threatened. I know I would. I didn’t have a monogamous relationship because we couldn’t satisfy our sexual needs within the confines of our relationship but we did have agreement that excessive repeats could lead to emotional attachments and thus were unacceptable. An agreement, Dear obviously later flagrantly disregarded. Otherwise, Horatio and hubby have a very nice life and both have grown considerably through exposure to each other. How strong a stance should Horatio take? If your partner has sexual needs that you can’t fulfill, isn’t it healthier to accept and adapt? Or is a relationship doomed, when a partner can’t find sexual fulfillment within?