Relationships

I really hate the western attitudes towards age differences in relationships. Some people have a lot in common and get along well in spite of a big age difference.

The West: "The age difference alone suggests he's practically a pedophile."

The Middle East: "That's not really that big of an age difference. What are they going on about?"

My mom was one of twelve kids. She talked nonstop in an informative, educational way. I'm also part Native American and part Irish and those are apparently extremely talkative cultures.

The ex was extremely introverted and in my relationship to Navarre, I did most of the talking. 

The ex always acted like I talked too much and wouldn't let him get a word in edgewise. I would stop talking and wait for him to speak and he said nothing, so I would resume speaking to fill the uncomfortable silence. We just never figured out how to do this dance.

My parents met at a party. My mom spoke no English and my dad's German was so bad, she asked someone what language he was speaking. 

My childhood was an emotional war zone, listening to them nonstop argue and fail to get past communication issues. The stories from their early relationship were filled with humorous incidents about misunderstandings rooted in the language barrier, including finding it funny when she thought he was talking about poisoning her.

Then she learned English and they imagined they understood each other and they couldn't get past their arguments anymore. It no longer ended with laughing about some silly misunderstanding. 

My relationship to the future ex began when he picked a fight with me at age 16 "as an excuse to talk to a pretty girl." I heard that explanation after we were married, owned a house together and had two kids.

Mr. Introvert wasn't comfortable with feelings or intimacy. The arguing never stopped.

I had the highest SAT score of our graduating high school class and his verbal score was higher than mine. We had lawyerly-sounding fights nailing each other to the wall about imagining we understood each other because we both had a big vocabulary while digging our marital grave deeper and getting no closer to understanding each other.

We once fought for three days about $500 before realizing we weren't talking about the same thing.

By the time I got divorced, I was so done with all that and one part happenstance due to my life being online and one part intentionally trying to recreate the early years of my parents, I mostly got involved with foreign men who spoke English as a second language. On more than one occasion, I sincerely told some guy having a cow about something "I have no idea what you are talking about. I never said that. I never thought that. Can we not do this? I'm hurting,  you're hurting and this looks like a stupid misunderstanding."

My relationship to Navarre helped me put down a lot of marital baggage. I did most of the talking and would try to let him talk and he would say "I enjoy listening to you."

It was extremely uncomfortable at first but I eventually realized he did really listen and he asked questions about things I said. It was a little like that scene in The Bourne Identity where Marie says "We are not talking.  I'm talking. You've hardly said two words." and he says it's soothing listening to her and his headache is nearly gone.

Navarre once said to me "You don't talk more than other women."

I had an open relationship to Navarre because he was in Iran and I was in the US and we never actually met. I only knew him online and by phone. It made no sense to speak of monogamy or being exclusive but it became something of a formal agreement when we had some conversation where I said I would have an open relationship to accept someone and really get to know him for who he was.

That ended with him sending me an emoji rose in chat and we moved on to other topics. 

Intimacy requires around 18 to 20 hours a week of time spent together. It's a bit over two hours a day, day in and day out, or giving most of your weekend to someone after working long hours all week.

It doesn't have to be spent talking. You can get to know a lot about a person without talking about it by just being together and I seem to attract men who don't really want to tell me stuff about themselves and if it works, it works because I don't ask a lot of questions and I'm good at inferring what I need to know. 

I don't know if that's a normal gender difference rooted in the public-private divide I write about on Feminine Character Works or if that's just my life.

I got married at 19 to another 19 year old who wasn't any of the things I didn't want in a man. Unlike my coke addict brother, the ex didn't smoke, drink or do drugs and he never slapped me around. And shortly after we moved away from my hometown, I realized there was no there there. 

Him not being a violent addict didn't actually give me a happy marriage. And I began wondering what I did want in life and in a relationship and didn't get that question answered until I knew Navarre. 

When I met him, there were half a dozen men I never met talking about wanting to marry me. And once in a while I would hyperventilate for thirty seconds about "Oh. My. God! What am I doing???"

And then I would remember I'm not looking for a relationship at all. I'm online trying to make it to dawn without slashing both wrists because I'm in constant agony and trying desperately not to think too hard about how I'm facing a divorce and I've never supported myself and I'm too sick to work and I am terrified and don't know how I'm going to survive. 

Going along with "Yeah, sure, this is totes A RELATIONSHIP if you want to claim that though I can't count on bumping into you online, that's WHY there's six of you." was the small price I paid to buy myself some distraction from stuff I needed to not think too much about to get through it. 

And as I slowly got healthier and took less medication and was less desperate for any distraction and less willing to put up with their shit, one by one I dumped them all until Navarre was last man standing. 

And I was left understanding something about having a real relationship and what I needed. And that if I had that, I was capable of being faithful. 

Good luck finding that ever again, much less overcoming all the hurdles between here where we met and the other side of some metaphorical Grand Canyon where it leads to marriage without me once again being chattel property because I took a vow of marriage. 

So I've been celibate for over twenty years and I write in hopes of figuring out how to add value to other lives in hopes it will eventually pay my bills. Ha ha ha, no. So far, that's not working. 

But I still write. Because I'm still handicapped and it's My Occupation.