You know, you can leave someone by doing everything to make them leave you.

-Catherine Deneuve, on ex-husband Roger Vadim

The Patterns We Learn As Children.

I've been looking at this person that I drew into my life, and have been trying to figure out how to trust men.  Well, I can't trust men, but I can trust my HP in regards to them.  And my HP gave me all sorts of bells and alarms to say, "Not this guy," and I didn't even notice them.  So now I'm learning to trust my intuition.

I've read a lot that we continually draw the same kind of person because they have a lesson for us, and until we learn that lesson, we'll keep getting that same kind of person.  I've also heard that we choose men modeled on our fathers.  If anything, when I met my ex, I thought he was the exact opposite of my father, and I thought I had done a pretty good job...now, not so sure.  I never, ever thought my father cheated on my mother.  Ever.  So I couldn't understand where I would have learned this pattern.  Then I realized my mother's first bf after her divorce from my father cheated on her.  Then her 2nd husband was addicted to porn.  Then, as I was driving down the highway today, I had a memory flash in my mind that I had never paid attention to.

I remember being a little girl of 11 or 12 and being the only one home.  So, I snooped.  (Careful, parents!)  I remember climbing into my parents closet, and finding a box with random papers in it.  (Financial?)  Then there were a few pictures of children I had never seen, and condoms.  I remembered wondering if my dad had an affair.  Then I thought I was just silly, and my mom probably didn't want to be on birth control.

The flash of thought I had was:  my mom had her tubes tied after my little brother was born, nine years before I found that box.

Therefore, my parents didn't need condoms.

Therefore, someone was having an affair.

I have heard that my father constantly accused my mother of having affairs.  I know from anecdotal evidence, and from my own experience, that those with disloyalty on the brain often see it where none is found.

I've always been a sucker for sensitive artist types.  I usually find out after I've fallen for them that they have a girlfriend, a wife, or a fiancee.

The patterns we learn.

How to unlearn them?

I was returning from an appointment downtown.  As I walked up the street, looking for the car, I thought I saw it and I crossed the street.  I walked up to it, and pushed the unlock button on the key fob.  Nothing happened.  I pushed it again.

It slowly dawned on me that the car was not a silver Corolla Sport, but a silver VW Jetta.  Our car.  Not my car.  The car I had with him.

I pivoted and continued walking.

One day, I will not think of these things anymore.

My X was jealous and controlling.  He always thought I was going to leave him for someone better.

Howard Hughes had several dalliances going at a time; he hired men to bug his women's apartments and hired other men to follow and track those ladies' movements.

Howard Hughes later descended into madness.

Every artist is a cannibal

Every poet is a thief

All kill their inspiration

And sing about their grief

How Do We Live With Somebody Else's Problems?

How do we live with somebody else's problems? In each case the answers are clear: We live with other people's problems by drawing a line in the sand and placing their problems on one side of the line and ours on the other, by naming the problems and notating their etiology in a little book we carry with us all the time, by saying: This problem of yours, however sad and complex, is wholly and completely your problem, beyond my power to heal and beyond my ability to cause; it is something I can only observe with great passionate detachment, and the minute I find myself doing more than observing with passionate detachment, that is the minute I lose myself in your enveloping darkness, and I must not lose myself in your enveloping darkness because I need to be clear-headed and functioning and alive and free not only for me but for you as well, so that I am here when you return from your mysterious and troubling journey. Meanwhile I must honor and protect myself with savage tenacity against the inward predations of my twisted little devil-mind, bequeathed to me by history and chemistry and biology, and so I say: Your devils, your disease, your insanity of the mind, your secretive smoking, your futile rationalizing, all this is yours and not mine; it is all the product of another history, another country, and there is nothing I can do except go on with my life and find strength wherever I can find it.

-Cary Tennis

To a Friend in Love with the Wrong Man Again

by Stephen Dunn


It was never meant to be sensible,
fully understandable. The digger wasp,
for example, goes up to the tarantula
like a friend and the tarantula freezes,
allows itself to be inspected.
Then it digs the tarantula's grave
while the tarantula watches. You, I bet,
would have guessed with a name
like tarantula, the tarantula would've been
the villain. But it is we who named
the tarantula and made the digger wasp
sound honest, hard-working.
And, of course, there is no villain,
only the scheme of things, only horror,
and occasionally the strange birth
of a butterfly and its short, gorgeous,
utterly careless season.
I should have mentioned the digger wasp
doesn't kill its victim, but stuns it,
drags it to the grave, lays one egg
on its stomach, and closes up.
You see, the instinct is maternal.
The newborn wasp feeds
off the tarantula for weeks,
digs itself out at the right time
and enters the odd, wonderful world.
I've no advice for you, my friend.
You, who would take it-
as all of us would-and offer it
up to the heart, like a sacrifice.

Persona: Man on Wire

The Ex's public persona was very, very different from his shadow persona.  It is easier to trust a player, because you know what he's about:  he tells you.  He tells you that he's not looking for a relationship, he's playing the field, and he's not trying to hide it.  The Ex kept his infidelities very, very secret, but because our work lives overlap...and because of the internet...his secrets came out.

I've had lots of guy friends who were players.  I never judged them.  Sometimes I slept with them if I wasn't looking for anything serious.  If they two-timed a girl, I'd let her know about it.  Or somebody would, because they weren't really secretive about who they were or what they were about.

I have a catalogue of memories of The Ex's responses to things, and how they don't add up.  What is real?  The public persona or the secret one?  Is it a Jekyll/Hyde thing going on?  An addiction of sorts?

Here is a memory:

We went to see the documentary, "Man on Wire," about the French tightrope walker, Phillipe Petit.  His dream is to walk a tightrope between the Twin Towers in New York City.  The film is all about his planning and scheming to be able to do it.  His friends all help him out, including his girlfriend.  Once he does it, he's a star!  A woman comes up to him and plants a kiss on his cheek and off he goes with her to a hotel where they disappear for days.  Fucking.  FFWD.   He is famous, but all of the friendships and relationships he had made to get to that point fell apart.  The girlfriend goes away.  The friends all go away.  No more, they say.  Can't do that again.

When we walked out, The Ex said that he loved it, but he thought the guy was a douche for disappearing to fuck this girl for a few days, ignoring his girlfriend and all of his friends.  And on and on about how much the girlfriend had helped the guy, and how he had just forgotten all about her the minute he got famous.

This from The Ex who forgot about me the minute I turned my back.

I would much rather deal with a player and know what I'm dealing with.  At least that's honest.

My Story

Dear Reader:

In December of last year, My Ex-boyfriend moved out of our apartment while I was in NYC on an overnight trip.  When he picked me up from the bus station, he kissed me and listened to me chatter.  When we got home, I noticed that all of his books were gone from the bookshelves in the living room.  He said that we were living too much of each others' lives.

I found out later that when I had met him two years earlier, he had been living with his fiancee, M.  M., coincidentally, was the wife of one of his "best" friends.  She is to this day, still not divorced.  He left M. mysteriously, just not showing up for Christmas celebrations with her family (including her daughter).  He had spent the weekend with me.  I had no idea she existed.  He made me feel like the only woman in the world.  M. called the cops and called his family.  He was found, days later, at his shop, with no explanation for where he had gone.  He told M. that he had taken a friend who had had a psychiatric break to the hospital, and that she was selfish for placing demands on him when someone's life was in danger.

The Ex and I had a whirlwind romance, and I am wary of whirlwinds.  A friend made me promise her that I would not marry him for at least a year.  I had promised myself as a teenager that I would never marry.  This seems, in hindsight, to have been a good move.

I found out after we broke up that he had been sleeping, sans condom, with his ex-fiancee throughout our entire relationship.  When she found pictures of us together online, he told her that I was a summer fling, and that he didn't love me.

He also slept with a number of other women, romancing them with flowers, cards, poetry.  Some of them didn't know about me, and were very apologetic, helpful, and angry with him.  Some hate my guts, and are mad that he never left me for them.

I've lost 25 pounds since I found out, and I was by no means a large woman.  I didn't eat for about two weeks after I found out.  My blood pressure shot up to that of a very obese man who ate cheeseburgers all day.  My pulse, which has a normal resting rate of 58, shot up to a resting rate of 155, which is well in the cardiovascular range for me.  It was like I was working out all the time.  I could run or it would go through the roof.  My walks pushed me up to 165 bpm.  My hair has thinned considerably.  I've always had very thick, lovely hair.  My friends called it my "lionness" hair.  Now it is incredibly thin, and I have put myself on a regimen of Hair Vitamins, Biotin, Amino Acids, and herbs, and will probably soon start Women's Rogaine and Nioxin.

Now I work an Al-Anon program (he's a supposedly recovering alcoholic) and a COSA program (because he sure as hell looks like a sex addict to me -- he's absolutely mortified and an emotional mess over it...but still manipulative).  I'm trying to put my life back together, and make ME stronger and happier, one day at a time.