Self Respect

I guess I was twenty-four. He was twelve years older than me.

He was warmer than my husband and having sex with him that first time resolved my issue with reaching orgasm. I wanted to believe that meant it was love. 

I married the second guy I slept with. His wife had been with twenty men before marrying him.

They were both hippies and drug addicts before he made a radical conversion to Christianity and ultimately became a minister.  She was still an alcoholic.

I took one toke off one joint at age sixteen under enormous social pressure, then said no when the pressure continued. That's the extent of my experience using illicit drugs. 

I know from second-hand exposure that I'm allergic to marijuana, not from imbibing per se.

The longer my relationship to this man went on, the more outraged I was at the idea that if he actually left her and married me, I would be publicly dragged as a harlot destroying the life of a good woman and the presumption that she was a good woman would be hung ENTIRELY on the detail that her husband chose to become an ordained minister. 

I rarely drink alcohol. I can usually say something like "Two years ago at my cousin's wedding is the last time I had a drink." She got a job after he left the military and was having trouble learning it because being an alcoholic isn't exactly great for your memory. 

I knew him a few years and like any long-term relationship, it wasn't any one thing that caused the demise of the relationship. There were a bunch of things that added up to the final death throes.

But this idea that a woman who was a former drug addict and current alcoholic who had ten times as many lovers as I had prior to our respective marriages would get painted as a paragon of virtue while I got smeared in comparison to her is the primary thing that caused me to research how to reframe my mother's dark Greek Tragedy beliefs that if you dream it, it WILL happen and cannot be stopped. That detail made me look for ways to use my premonitions to find another path, one that led to some other outcome. 

I was having dreams that I felt predicted my husband's death and dreams that I felt predicted that I would marry this minister. I increasingly dug my heels in over imagining a future in which a man who supposedly loved me would make choices that would make me a whore in the headlines for marrying him.

I balked. That was a NO from me.

If you love me, then you don't do something like that to me. Full stop. 

You somehow make it possible for me to publicly admit to the relationship without having to abandon all self respect in the process. And he wasn't on track to make that possible. 

We eventually went our separate ways. At my behest.