Hot Toys November 2009
Get ready for Christmas: Here are 10 Hot Toys You Should Know About!Read more ...
Letters To A Cheating Spouse
Chapter 6, Part 1: Looking for something more, something right
So, was I able to find what I was looking for?
I was afraid that my fairy tale of a perfect marriage had burst like a fragile soap bubble. My feelings for happiness were tied to the children and the question how long I would have to be alone in a country I was not born in, in a culture I still try to adapt to.
Who would want me, especially if I was as bad as you said I was? Would I only be able to get who is left at this stage in life? Who is out there, if there are only happy marriages around us? That, in fact reminds me of an article I have read in Time, which you can read in its entirety here (a good read): Is There Hope for the American Marriage?
Here is the most important excerpt, in my mind:
“Watching the governor of South Carolina cry like a little girl because his sexy e-mails got forwarded to his local newspaper, the State, made me wonder whether the real secret to a lasting marriage lies in limiting your means of escape. Whether you’re putting the Buick Regal in reverse or hitting Send on a love note, you’re busting out of your marriage, however temporarily, and soon enough there will be hell to pay.
During the press conference in which he admitted his affair, Mark Sanford warbled that he had broken “God’s law,” a sentiment that served only to emphasize the narcissism that had gotten him in trouble. Wrestling with God’s law had apparently been the subject of many sessions of his Bible-study group, a seminar that may have spent a little too much time on the Song of Solomon, given Sanford’s e-mailed encomium of his lover’s physique: “I love the curves of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of night’s light.” Finally a bit of prose that makes us long for the clinical precision of the Starr report. Sanford told reporters the affair had begun “very innocently,” which reveals that he still hasn’t been honest with himself about the willfulness of his actions. When a married man begins a secret, solicitous correspondence with a beautiful and emotionally needy single woman, he has already begun to cheat on his wife.
Just a week before, another blue-blazered elected official — Senator John Ensign of Nevada — was forced to make a similar confession, although he left God out of it, which must have been a nice break for the Almighty. Ensign had done “the worst thing” in his entire life, he confessed: “I violated the vows of my marriage.” The mood on both occasions was funereal; it might have been touching to see two such buttoned-up guys welling with tears if the corpses weren’t their political careers.
The one thing both men refused to admit was that, back in the heyday of these affairs, they must have been having a blast. These were two middle-aged, conservative Republican men who had said, To hell with being part of the Cialis generation (midlife sexuality depicted as an aging husband and wife reclining in … side-by-side bathtubs? What is the drugmaker worried about — that randy Pa might jump in Ma’s bath and break her hip?). Their actions were so willful and blatantly self-centered that the two of them could have credibly fashioned themselves as rebels, possibly even as heroes, if they could have just stopped crying. They weren’t a couple of tools stuck in sexless marriages and making up for it with Internet porn. These guys had embarked on dangerously erotic rampages with real-life, unencumbered women, women who decidedly weren’t … Jenny and Darlene. The long-suffering wives, Fun Busters in Chief.
In the e-mails exchanged between the governor and his girlfriend, they trip over themselves to praise the other’s virtues. She was “special and unique,” “glorious”; he was a man of emotional generosity who “brought happiness and love to my life.” These two humanitarians were engaged not only in worshipping each other’s high-mindedness but also in destroying another woman’s home, hobbling her children emotionally and setting her up for humiliation of a titanic proportion. The squalor and pain that resulted from the Sanford and Ensign midlife crises make manifest a bleak truth that the late writer Leonard Michaels once observed in his journal: “Adultery is not about sex or romance. Ultimately, it is about how little we mean to one another.”
And so two more American families discover a truth as old as marriage: a lasting covenant between a man and a woman can be a vehicle for the nurture and protection of each other, the one reliable shelter in an uncaring world — or it can be a matchless tool for the infliction of suffering on the people you supposedly love above all others, most of all on your children.”
Makes you think. I think the author is right, even if I would say that not only men destroy lives. Women do as well. If you have some time, google the phrase “cheating wives”. I found it interesting how much I found that fits the picture of what has happened between us.
Here is one example published in Newsweek:
When Wives Cheat, It’s OK
It’s always his fault, never her fault.
“With the work place and the Internet, overscheduled lives and inattentive husbands—it’s no wonder more American women are looking for comfort in the arms of another man,” says Newsweek magazine, in a just-released cover feature. The cover sports an attractive, smug woman holding the hand of her husband and also of her male paramour, under the headline “The New Infidelity: From Office Affairs to Hook-ups, More Wives are Cheating, Too.”
Many popular movies, TV shows and books have celebrated the cheating wife, including the movies The Bridges of Madison County, and The Piano, and Danielle Steele’s romance novels To Love Again and Crossings.
When wives cheat on husbands, it’s because the wives are overworked and “overscheduled,” and their husbands are “inattentive.” Yet when the genders are switched, our culture is not nearly so understanding. Witness the unreal amount of vitriol directed at former President Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, the destruction of Gary Hart’s promising political career and presidential aspirations over his affair with Donna Rice, and the widespread public sympathy for Clara Harris, who repeatedly ran over her husband with her Mercedes after catching him having an affair. In the distant past, cheating wives were viewed more harshly than cheating husbands. Today it’s the reverse.”
Interesting. I think it is very close to what has happened here, well, with the exception of the overworked part.
So, is there the kind of attention I am looking for in this world?
An interesting question, which also reminds me of you sitting one night in the leather chair, crying and claiming that there is no one for you and me saying that one day you might find someone who will welcome you with open arms just as much as I did. Somewhat silly, particularly since there is Brian and you had found already what you wanted or believed you wanted.
In the end, it reflected what I had learned. Yes, that attention was everywhere around me. I had not seen it before, because I never cared, I never wanted to care and somehow I never had to care. Suddenly I cared and noticed how much pain and desire for attention there is. In all those cars going down Main Street, cars I once described to you as being meaningless on their own.
Standing at that hospital room window one day after the ambulance had taken you to the ER, I asked you who would care if there was one car less on that road. The answer is that they care, all individually, and many of them, like us, for themselves. In every car there is some sort of pain. And in many cars, there is similar pain I was going through and there is much desire for attention and beyond. Main Street has become an image for me how life passes in front of our eyes without us realizing it.
I felt I needed to stop every car, I wanted to learn about what I had missed in all those years before. I learned that there are people who would want the same what I wanted and it was right in front of my eyes. I just needed to be ready to accept it and there would be someone, sometime who would be willing to open her or his inner self.
That realization helped me recover as well: I will not have to be alone, if I choose to.
More Lifecasts: Allison Nazarian | Shannon Ball | Letters To A Cheating Spouse
About the Author: A man sends letters to his cheating spouse. Read how the story developed, his experiences and lessons over time.
