The Secret Sauce
I know WHY I married the man I married. I may have touched on this somewhere. It was a long long time ago and it's no longer something I feel I have a compelling need to keep secret, but for a long time it was a very secret thing.
When we were seventeen, we were platonically best friends and he had his first girlfriend and when her period was late, she was convinced she was pregnant. So he and I cooked up a plot to use my ID card to get her an abortion when I turned eighteen.
Her father was abusive and would have beat the hell out of her if she had to admit to a pregnancy or even to being sexually active. Her period started a few weeks before I turned eighteen, she promptly dumped him and went right back to her previous boyfriend.
He and I got together shortly thereafter. A few days or so later.
Whatever his shortcomings, I felt he would have my back in ways that mattered to me when the chips were down. And when I turned up unexpectedly pregnant with our first child, he didn't say one nasty thing about it even though my flakey birth control failed and I asked if he was mad at me and he said "I AGREED to it."
He made sure he was there for the birth of both kids and, with a military career, that's not easy. That involved going to some trouble to be home at the time of the birth.
Our sons knew we were both very big on agreeing about certain parenting things and they have talked about being surprised to eventually learn not all men do stuff like that. Not all men jump through hoops to be there holding her hand as the baby is born.
They never had to ask if certain things were true. They knew without discussing it. Actions speak louder than words. It went without saying.
He was difficult to deal with. So was I. I like to think we constituted strong medicine for each other and we parted ways amicably when that was no longer a thing we needed.
Like with actual medicine, once we no longer needed it, it was like poison and I finally told him "I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to hurt you anymore. I don't want to be hurt anymore. I think we have both given it our best and if we could do this dance, we would have figured it out by now. I want a divorce."
And for the first time, he breathed a sigh of relief and agreed instead of scooping me up in his arms and telling me no and letting me cry.
And he eventually moved out and I have been alone ever since. I'm celibate for medical reasons.
But I haven't really met anyone where I really felt like "Damn! If only I weren't so sick! Damn. Damn. Damn. I wish I could marry him."
It's been more like "Gee, I don't really need to fight with this guy about the fact that he smokes and that's a big problem for me. I have a polite excuse."
And I've known some incredible men that I felt extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to get to know, but I also felt fortunate that I didn't have to make any hard decisions about "Do I love him? Really really love him? Enough to give up my hopes and dreams and resume being the little wifey?" or "Does he love me? Really really love me? Enough to listen to my concerns about what marriage typically does to a woman and genuinely try to not only understand my point of view but actively work on making sure that's not how this goes?"
"I'm CELIBATE for medical reasons and I have an incurable genetic disorder and I may NEVER again get laid for reasons beyond my control that have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with you." didn't simply put a stop to nasty arguments, it made sure those arguments never even began.
It meant we didn't have to talk about whose country to live in or why. It meant we didn't have to have conversations about "Well, he has the income and for practical reasons we should do (the heteronormative patriarchal thing)." while I tried to say "Yes, but if we didn't both do the heteronormative patriarchal thing in every detail every day, ***I*** could have a career making money like a man and then doing blah wouldn't always automatically be the obvious answer."
It meant I didn't have to choose between "my left arm and my right" -- between wanting a career or wanting a man in my life. I couldn't really have a man in my life. So I didn't have to wonder "Am I being a FOOL tilting at windmills to persist in trying to figure this out??? Why should I try so hard to pursue a career when it's not paying my bills adequately and it seems like it will be YEARS before I figure out how to do this or what's wrong at all, IF I EVER figure it out."
My husband and I graduated from the same high school together. We were the same age. Both our fathers had been career military.
I never needed to try to justify or explain "Why him??" No one ever went "Gee, with being the same age and having so much in common culturally, it seems weird you two would get together. There must be a story there."
I never got those kinds of questions even though I have always been quite open about having been molested as a child. No one ever asked what made me think I could trust him or what test he passed or how he proved himself to me.
No one ever inferred that he must have done something noteworthy that I chose him. They bought this bullshit of "high school sweetheart, nothing to see here." in spite of mountains of evidence worn on my sleeve that's not really how my life works, no.
He got those questions because he's a painfully shy introvert and I was a non-stop talker social butterfly and people who knew him first would meet me and go "Uh, how did you end up with HER???"
All my people were like "Makes SENSE!!!!" even when they were so blatantly wrong about why they thought it made sense that he and I both LAUGHED out loud and he said "No. She didn't marry me because I'm a good looking, well dressed man. I'm a good looking, well dressed man because I married her."
I recently wrote a couple of things that roughly boil down to "If I were a beloved, famous celebrity, I would be one of those people they do YouTube clips about how SHE HAS NO FILTER."
I spent a lot of time in therapy and I just don't buy a lot of bullshit other people buy and trying to figure out how to be me in public has been a long, hard journey.
AND having spent a lot of time in therapy and made peace with an ugly past that I am open about, I seem to COMPLETELY unintentionally be a magnet for all the walk-in closets worth of skeletons in the lives of so many people who then panic and throw me off their forum or whatever because my big fat mouth plus their BIG FEELS about something or other I've said is looming large in their mind as an imminent train wreck.
So I imagine that when push comes to shove, I will likely remain alone for the rest of my life because I have no idea how to recreate the recipe that birthed a shockingly successful marriage that lasted more than two decades though neither one of us should have ever been functional.
Because people seem to imagine that I can accept ANYTHING about them no matter how TERRIBLE and that this somehow means they can OPENLY admit ANYTHING if I am their lady and that somehow works socially.
As if they think I would marry a toker and drug addict and proudly admit they are a drug addict though I don't do drugs and I'm allergic to marijuana and SOMEHOW MAGICALLY that would make it FINE to be a drug addict and openly admit it while making ZERO effort to get clean.
Sweetie, that's not how reality works: Al Gore as vice president didn't magically make Bill Clinton's shortcomings FINE. It just got Al Gore smeared.