Vows, undeserved

So, we usually do Secret Subject Swap where we each get a prompt someone else submitted and no one knows who got what until the day we publish. It's been a blast writing and reading so many different perspectives, but it's been a lot of years now, and most people have sort of fallen off doing these challenges. I've kept going even with intense insomnia that keeps me from writing as well as I used to in part because this has been such a big part of my life for so long and because I know having a deadline keeps me writing. But mostly I just wasn't ready to say goodbye to people whose only real connection to me is these posts. But for the second time in just a couple years, one of the few regulars passed away. Today, our post is about her. Every prompt is hers, a memorial post from everyone in a way, and honestly probably one of our last as a group. It's been rad, y'all. I might still be here righting but I'm just not sure right now.




My “Secret Subject” is:

What is the most embarrassing thing to ever happen to you in public? Tell us about it.

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I've never had a soul crushingly embarrassing experience that I can reflect back on and still think was as mortifying as it appeared at the time. There have been little things here or there. There were times in my childhood that I thought I'd never be free of the weight of but looking back now I wonder what the big deal even was. Nothing that seemed soul crushingly embarrassing at the time has remained so. Does it count if it wasn't necessarily embarrassing at the time and just increasingly got worse?

Because I was married to a dumb asshole. And I married that dumbasshole in front of dozens of people who knew he was a dumbasshole and couldn't for the life of them get me to see it and he turned into an even bigger dumbasshole than even any of them could have predicted.

And I think about it with the complicated lenses of present me and it is fucking mortifying how naive I was and God all of it is just so goddamn sad.

I married someone who wasn't even an adult yet. For that matter neither was I. We weren't even 25 when we got together and moved in together. We weren't even 25 when we got married a year later. I had a kid at 25. With that dumbasshole. And instead of growing up together, he just seemed to constantly reverse. Every step forward he might make would come crashing to a halt then he backpedaled. He lied. About everything all the time. And when he got caught I was the bad guy for accusing him. He spent money like he actually had the ability to keep a full time job. He refused to learn how to do even the easiest of tasks and once just before I found out I was pregnant he let his still teenaged best friend pull him around the yard with the lawnmower and ended up in the emergency room. He gaslit me and punched holes in things. He drank too much too often He cheated at the end. It was so many things that left me looking like an absolute fool.

And the worst is when I tried talking to my friends or my mom, it was "well told you so" from them and "you expect too much out of men" from her. Maybe I do but I don't think that means stick with someone that makes me hate myself.

We split and he put every woman he ever dated above my kid for years. He wouldn't pay child support. He left me all the bills then begged me for a place to stay with one of his girlfriends or they'd be homeless but wouldn't pay rent and left me sitting with her many nights while he went out cheating on her so I had to be the one to comfort my ex's newbie. He constantly stole money out of my checking account and laughed about it to our friends who laughed at me with him especially when he'd insist I was just the crazy ex who'd die alone. He has a kid with one of these women that he's never seen. He's never paid her a dime. And then he knocked someone up who demanded he marry her or not see his kid again so he did and for a few years he really gave it a half hearted effort. He had kid after kid with this woman that he admitted in private he couldn't stand. He asked me to give her makeup tips. And fashion advice. He let her treat my kid like shit and they both made him uncomfortable with the way they talked about him. He didn't even have so much as a toothbrush at their house and when he eventually asked to not be treated that way and to have things there like he was part of their family too, they stopped speaking to him. Right after he came out of the closet and endured many a gay joke and being called princess all the time.

He hasn't spoken to his own kid in years. He missed every single bit of his own child's teens because he's a dumbasshole and I just keep being increasingly mortified that I was ever so fucking stupid.

Forever, every single time I hear the name Erik, I'm going to be embarrassed. But Im absolutely over the moon about the fact that he ended up with the life he deserves stuck with someone he doesn't like with kids he didn't plan on and absolutely fucking miserable. Good job, buddy. Karma got you.

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Baking In A Tornado https://www.BakingInATornado.com

What TF Sarah https://crazymamallama.blogspot.com

Part-time Working Hockey Mom https://thethreegerbers.blogspot.ch/

On the Border https://dlt-lifeontheranch.blogspot.com/

Life Is Evolution

Since at least the time of Socrates, there are records showing that older generations detest, criticize, and lament the actions and norms and beliefs of the next. It’s a given. It’s going to happen, and I guess it’s a coming of age sign that spans centuries of history.

There are a million memes online about younger generations that are no different than centuries’ worth of old curmudgeons’ quotes about the matter. Socrates himself said:

“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”

Which looks remarkably like:

And: 

So, it’s really no surprise to me that this same type of judgment is passed on the whole marriage/divorce thing with memes like this: 

It’s a cute quote, I suppose, but it doesn’t take into account the historical context of marriage. It was a business arrangement or at least was more a matter of money, power, and survival than about love. It evolved, eventually, to have a more intimate sentiment, and now, we find ourselves in another time yet again. And, like every generation before it, old people can’t understand that shit changes.

Marriage really didn’t become about anything remotely resembling love until the 20th century. And, it wasn’t until the 1950s that marriage became something that symbolized normalcy and was equated with the ultimate expression of commitment. It still wasn’t necessarily always about love, though. For women, it was almost impossible to survive without marriage and considered neurotic not to marry. It was still, even in the most iconic decades of the century, little more than a means to financially and socially make it in this world. Today, through media depictions of marriage and love, that image has changed into something that symbolizes the greatest act of love imaginable, but it is no longer a type of social contract that literally means forever through better and worse the way it began…it’s not a financial arrangement. It’s not about survival. It’s not business.

The 70s and radical feminism began to give women more freedoms and power, and while it is still an uphill battle to equality, marriage is not the necessary arrangement that it first was. Love reigns supreme and most people still get married at least once. But with those freedoms came the power to marry solely for love. There is no longer a need to be married. It’s a choice that two people make as an expression of the way they feel for one another and, often, a label for the benefit of others. It was these same freedoms and resulting empowerment that also enabled people to get out of marriages easily for the first time causing divorce rates to skyrocket and to remain high over decades of time. Forever vows no longer mean forever. Forever just sounds better than “for as long as I can stand the sight of you.” Marriage by choice instead of marriage to profit and survive is the new norm and with that norm comes the ability to change one’s mind. As it should be.

That’s where memes like the one above with its quotes about fixing something that’s broken really bother me. I don’t mean that I truly believe love can never be eternal. I don’t mean that marriage can *never* work in the long term. But, marriage isn’t a contract anymore. It can be unfixable, and there should be no stigma associated with that. There’s nothing inherently weak about two people changing in ways that are no longer complimentary and saying things no longer work.

My grandparents stayed married for more than 60 years. My grandmother is now a widow. Divorce, to them, was never an option. They slept in separate beds my entire life. They bickered and fought like any other married couple, but there was never any affection between the two of them. They were hardly even friends much less still in love. The two of them stopped being compatible long before I was born and stayed that way, living under the same roof resenting each other and honoring their vows, until the day my grandfather died. Is that really what love is about? Honoring your commitment? I’m sure they thought they were fixing what was broken, too, but there’s only so many times you can glue a leg back onto a table before you have to decide that maybe you’ve wasted all your time fixing something that repeatedly breaks for a reason…

Life is evolution. It’s change, growth, trial and error. In our lifetimes, we wear so many faces trying to figure out the one that really fits with who we are and who we want to be. Sometimes, when the dust settles and we’ve found out what we’re really made of, that person we promised ourselves to for the rest of our lives has evolved into something we no longer recognize or perhaps that person is still exactly the same as the day we met them. The latter is what happened to me. I grew and changed and evolved and realized that the person I was married to was absolutely stagnant. Maybe he’s happy being that person…maybe at 20 years old he had found himself because he’s still that same person 9 years later (though the chances of that is highly unlikely isn’t it? and I can tell you from experience in this case it’s a big resounding unlikely).

I changed. He stayed the same. And, the person I became wasn’t the one he wanted forever from nor did I want to give him forever. We didn’t fix something that was broken because what we had was unfixable. It’s like dropping your favorite coffee mug onto the kitchen floor and watching it shatter into hundreds of pieces... It’s clear from the start that the mess you’re looking at will never again resemble what it started as and will never work the way it was supposed to. It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t intentional. Sometimes life works that way, and you have to roll with the changes. You might get a new favorite mug. You might like a little more variety in your life than the same old mug day in and day out and that’s more than fine. Beating yourself up over not trying to pick up the shards of your broken marriage and super glue them back together is not an option, though, especially because some old assholes try to pass around an Internet meme that is pretentious enough to assume there’s only one right way to do things…

The only right way to do anything is to let people live the fuck out of their own lives and to realize that societies evolve and people change and there’s not a goddamn thing you can do about it but enjoy the ride. And, if you can’t do that then do the rest of us a favor and shut the fuck up.

Sunday Confessions is hosted by More than Cheese and Beer. Check out the other linkups on her blog and anonymous confessions on Facebook!

Gotta Have Faith

I decided to go with another Chuck Klosterman Hyperthetical for this week’s Sunday Confession. I talked

about the insane situations Klosterman, one of my favorite authors, developed sort of as a test for who he wanted to spend his time with in a confession a couple weeks ago. I don’t really have any sort of religious faith that I could talk about for this week’s prompt. I’ve already written so often about my lack of faith in the justice system, and I’ve certainly discussed the faith I need to have in myself to get over my body issues, so I felt like I should take a break from those two topics. And, let’s face it, the lack of faith I have in my country’s government altogether is far too encompassing for just one blog post. It would take me weeks of continuous discussions to actually air all my grievances. Instead, I thought I would get a bit off-the-wall but don’t expect my tendency towards heaviness to suddenly disappear.

On to the question…

“While traveling on business, your spouse (whom you love) is involved n a plane crash over the Pacific Ocean. It is assumed that everyone on board has died. But then the unbelievable happens: It turns out that your spouse has survived. He/she managed to swim to a desert island, where he/she lived in relative comfort with one other survivor (they miraculously located most of the aircraft’s supplies on the beach, and the island itself was filled with ample food sources).

The two survivors return home via helicopter, greeted by the public as media sensations. During a press conference, you cannot help but notice that the other survivor physically embodies the type of person to whom your mate is normally attracted. Moreover, the intensity of the event has clearly galvanized a relationship between the two crash victims: They spend most of the interview explaining how they could not have survived without the other person’s presence. They explain how they passed the time by telling anecdotes from their respective lives, and both admit to having virtually given up on the possibility for rescue. At the end of the press conference, the two survivors share a tearful good-bye hug. It’s extremely emotional.

After the press conference, you are finally reunited with your spouse. He/she embraces you warmly and kisses you deeply.

How long do you wait before asking if he/she was ever unfaithful to you on this island? Do you ever ask? And if your mate’s answer is “yes,” would that (under these specific circumstances) be acceptable?”

In a nutshell, this question is asking that under circumstances where my spouse felt he or she was never going to get off this island, would I or even should I maintain expectation that he or she would remain faithful?

This question never even considers what I would have done given the fact that I thought my spouse was dead and never coming back. Would I have moved on or at least slept with someone, gone on a date? It’s highly likely, isn’t it? If I thought this person was never coming back then I don’t think I’d have given up on having sex again for the rest of my life would I? Uh, no. A resounding no. So, how could I care whether or not my spouse had sex on this deserted island with someone he or she obviously formed a close, deep connection with during the most stressful, insane circumstances?

I don’t think this is the question of faith, of having faith in your partner, of being faithful the way it is proposed. Ultimately, how could you expect this person whose life has changed so dramatically to not roll with those changes? What Klosterman really wants to know, I think, is if you’re petty enough to let it eat away at you that there’s a good chance your spouse had sex with someone else under the expectation that he or she would never see you again. What he wants to know is if you’re going to be so consumed by jealousy that you lose sight of what’s actually important—the fact that you actually have your spouse back in your life, that you are once again reconnected to the love of your life, that what was once lost has now been found. It’s not whether or not you’re concerned about faithfulness because the expectation in this situation is for both of you to have moved on. It’s whether or not you’re insecure enough to be more worried about what happened on that island than about having your spouse back.

Would I ask? Never. It’s none of my business. If my partner and I both had a calm, loving discussion once things were settled down about both of our activities while he or she was on that deserted island, perhaps we would talk about it then. Maybe we’d make it through all the changes life has thrown our way—the assumed tragedy of loss, the new experiences, the hardships. Maybe we’d get back on track. If we didn’t, it would never be because I chose to hang on to some idiotic idea of what my spouse should or shouldn’t have done on that fucking island, and I hope that should he or she choose to move on and make a go of it with this person who ultimately saved him or her, their light in the dark,I would understand and wish the two of them all the best.

What about you? Would you ask?

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