weddings suck

predictably, i have come to really recoil from the idea of weddings and marriage...

i recently found it necessary to attend one, since my boyfriend's brother married.  i found the experience to be like suffocating under a pile of heavy wool blankets.  bearing witness to this 'commitment' that these two people were making together, observing all the effort they made to create their special day, watching them celebrate with their loved ones, made it very difficult not to think back to my own wedding day...

when i think about all the many hours, and the many, many dollars, that were spent planning and creating that day, it makes me nauseous.  none of it meant anything, in the end.  all the tiny details i labored over, the fancy private club, the flowers and pumpkins everywhere, the Italian silk gown, the platinum rings, the vows written and spoken for all to hear, it was all folly.  we were two people, clinging to one another out of fear -- nothing more -- and we engaged willingly in this charade of commitment.  it was like, the bigger and more elaborate the affair, the more we believed it was true and right.  it wasn't...it really never, ever was, and yet, onward we marched.

despite my realizing that i was not meant to be with my ex husband, its difficult not to allow myself to become incredibly jaded about marriage...and even love.  my experiences thus far have demonstrated to me how fickle it all is, how love can be turned on and off like a light switch, even in two people who really do care deeply for one another.  any day, any moment, one of the two can decide it no longer suits them...that its easier to run away, than to stand by one's heart.  it doesn't seem fair.  i think its the universe's cruelest joke...

maybe its why i ended up being drawn into the BDSM lifestyle...i wanted to be truly considered by my partner, deeply understood and appreciated for who i am.  a Dominant or Master chooses his submissive or servant, and not for just any old reason.  she is selected for her obedience, her ability to serve, her willingness to please, her impressionable nature, among other things.  she is cherished...and yes, she is used.  there is a contract, and a collar, and the bond is not dissolved unless it is agreed upon by both parties.  the more i explored the various dynamics within the culture, the more it appealed to me.  

discovering my submissive qualities was no surprise to me, but it was thrilling to me, because i felt as though i had finally found myself...like looking in the mirror for the first time and really seeing who you are.  i understood myself within the context of BDSM almost immediately: i was a type A perfectionist, overachiever who's parents directed her every move in her early life.  the only physical affection or contact i ever got from them was an exasperated grab of my arm, a spanking, or a slap across my face.  my experience of love was that it was violent and extremely conditional.  it came as no surprise to me that i responded so strongly to these kinds of expressions of love...it all made perfect sense to me.

my ex husband is a submissive, but not for the same reasons i am.  he is merely weak and lacking any will.  his submission is automatic and natural.  mine is complex, and almost paradoxical -- i've spent my life waving the flag of feminism and striving to be an independent woman in a patriarchally oppressive world, and here i am, getting moist because a big strong man could come along and tell me to drop to my knees in such a way that i can not help but obey.  and its not just any man who can trigger such a response in me.  he must be worthy -- of me, and of my submission.  my ex husband was never worthy, of either, and to be fair, he never asked or demanded my submission outright.  instead, he found subtle ways to exert control over me, manipulating parts of my life or my psyche so that i had no choice but to rely upon him.

i hated him for that...for all the little ways he tried to keep me underneath him somehow.  it is what i look back on and have the most acrimony about with him.  for instance, the household maintenance was my job, naturally.  getting him to participate in the upkeep of the house was like battling a child to clean his room, only this was a grown ass man with a mortgage.  i was not allowed to use the bank card, and therefore had to rely upon him for almost every necessity.  he would go to the store with a written shopping list, and he would purposely return with only half of my requested items, or the wrong ones entirely.  repeatedly.  sex, of course, was expected.  i could be fondled and accosted at any moment, in the midst of any task, so that he could take five minutes to get off and go back to what he was doing.  i would have to beg for money for the smallest things, and yet he would go out with other girl friends for expensive dinners at Left Bank.  and then, there was the way in which he would emotionally beat me down, any goal i set, any task i set out to do, was derided for some reason.  it was clear that i was not good enough for the good old, Doctor Kxxxxxx.

so why did he marry me?  i never pressured, in fact i invited him to move along if he wasn't sure about me or any of it.  i made it clear that i did not plan to have children, and so he should part ways if that was important to him.  he and i came to so many crossroads over the years, and each time, we chose to move forward together.  

better yet, why did i stay?  what was i so afraid of?  because surely, being alone had to have been better than what i endured for so long with him...

i want to believe that love is real, and it can be pure and good.  i want to believe that it is possible for two people to come to regard and care for each other so deeply that no force can tear them apart.  i want that bond with someone.  i want someone to wake up each day with me, just wanting to make each other smile and laugh, even when life is shitty...because how shitty can it be if we're together, right?  i want to be someone's reason, and i want our love to be epic and eternal.  i don't want to have to kneel and beg for it, or be humiliated into it, or degraded for it.

and i certainly don't need a wedding, or even a ring, to know that i have it.  

you can tell a lot about a person by how they fuck

i'm going to begin by warning you right now that this post is going to be dirty and vulgar.  if your delicate sensibilities cannot handle it, i welcome you to move along to some other waste of your time...

if you have been following my story from the beginning, you know that i have not kept it a secret that the abhorrent sex life i shared with my ex husband, the good Dr. Kxxxxxx, was one of the primary reasons for our demise as a couple, married or otherwise.  when i was in the thick of my miserable marriage, trying desperately to reconnect with my sexually frustrating husband, i had a good friend advise me that if things were not good in the bedroom, they were never going to be good outside it either.  i remember balking at that idea, that a marriage would sink or swim merely because of the quality of a couple's sex life; but now, looking back, i see the wisdom in such a tenet.  if there is no intimacy, no bond or connection beyond playing house and paying bills, there isn't really a marriage, is there?  its roommates.

sex between my ex husband and i prior to our marriage was decent, somewhat plentiful, and vaguely satisfying.  after more than a few years together, a little boredom was to be expected.  i was always the more adventurous half, and so i was always seeking ways to keep things fresh, like lingerie and toys and role playing.  my ex husband had different ways of tackling the issue, i suppose, by seeking the attentions of various other women behind my back.  however, that was prior to him developing his speedy 'little problem' in the bedroom.  i always wondered how he handled that with the other women he bedded down while with me, because surely, he didn't suddenly gain control and endurance simply with a new pussy.

after we married, the sex we did have, those few and far between occasions, became increasingly strained and strange.  my ex husband began to develop certain obsessions and fetishes that became  increasingly more difficult for him to hide or suppress.  for instance, he had always loved and enjoyed my breasts, but in the last few years we were intimate, his fixation on them turned somewhat uncomfortable for me.  he seemed to enjoy suckling, like a child...and he would even call me 'mommy'.  it was strange to hear, but in the midst of our passion, it was accepted.  it was weird and unsettling, but i understood it on some level -- his mother is a very cold woman, very impassive.  i have never seen her display anything but uncomfortable intimacies when she must.  she is restrained, with a smile always forced across her face.  Freud would have chalked my ex husband's sudden 'mommy' fetish up to his mother's lack of affection during his childhood.  i learned to rationalize away a lot of aspects of my husband and his behavior this way.

it's why i was not the least bit surprised that my ex husband went out and got himself a 'best girl friend', in the form of a large, motherly nurse who worked with us at Children's Hospital.  she was one of those nurses that kissed his ass right away, and she tried desperately for a while to befriend me (she even made some sexual advances toward me on more than one occasion while we were out socially).  when my husband wasn't getting the emotional mothering he required from me, he went straight to her.  no surprise, she had huge breasts.  she tended to his every boo boo, physical and emotional.  if he got a sniffle, she swooped in with IV fluids and would confer with his mother by the hour.  they spent a great deal of time together, no doubt recounting all his dissatisfactions with me and plotting his escape.  you could always tell when he had been talking to her, because he would grow bold and more insolent.  she was his main confidante (makes me wonder how she's coping with his new wife).  they would travel together, and then he would try to tell me that 'there was nothing sexual' between them.  right...and i'm sure her husband believed that too.

sometime during residency, my husband came to me asking for anal play -- not for me, but for him.  he admitted that he enjoyed doing it to himself, and because he knew i was sexually open minded, that i would be open to joining him in the experience.  my ex husband was right, i am open minded, and i accepted these desires of his and even happily indulged him;  it was the neurotic, shameful, and self loathing parts of him that these things elicited that i despised.  he expected me to accept these parts of him, but he could not accept them about himself...so he would come to me begging for me to fuck him in the ass, but he would be riddled with shame about it.

after a while, sex was only acceptable upon my husband's terms -- when he wanted it, where, what position.  it always began with some overt and cheesy pick up line, accompanied by an aggressive groping of my breasts.  he became sexually bold, but in a sort of condescending manner.  when that stopped working on me, he resorted to demeaning me or making me feel shitty about myself in regards to our sex life, as if this would somehow convince me to fuck him.  sex became another power play between us, another factor to be manipulated and controlled.

there was a time, very early in our relationship, before all of his philandering, before all of his neurotic, narcisstic abuse, when fucking my ex husband was an enjoyable experience.  he may not have been the kind of guy i was into, but he was cute and he was equipped, and back then, he enthusiastically engaged in our escapades with this sort of 'sweet' vigor and passion.  of course, according to him, i was his first, so it explains his genuine eagerness.  the longer i shared a life with my husband, the more i got to know him, the less i wanted to fuck him.  he began to feel like my brother and an authority figure, not a lover.

i stopped fucking my ex husband for a couple of reasons...

1. he continued to show more affection and consideration towards other women, even right in front of me, and i just decided it was time to take my dignity back.
2. he admitted to fucking a girl in my architecture program, a girl i asked him specifically NOT to go near or get involved with because it would make going to school every day extremely difficult for me.  he fucked her in my house, on my couch, in our bed, all weekend long when i was out of town.
3. he persisted in refusing to address his premature ejaculation problem that left me frustrated, demeaned, and unsatisfied.  he would orgasm in two minutes or less, and then descend into a self deprecating, tearful rant about how he wasn't satisfying me.  this, instead of just relaxing and tending to my needs too...
4. he became increasingly mean and nasty toward me, and his passive aggressive behaviors made me literally cringe and avoid him on a daily basis.  there was no way i was going to lay on my back for him and spread so he could get off and then go back to treating me like shit.

as our relationship inside and outside the bedroom continued to degrade, he seemed farther and farther away from me, and any hopes i had for rekindling and strengthening my marriage began to fade. 

socially accepted prostitution...

i gave You my heart, very purely and truly from the moment i committed to You way back in 1995. i never cheated on You, i loved You, adored You, lusted after You, made sure You knew it all the time...Your first blow was choosing to bring a girl home that summer night when i had to work, march her right past Your parents and up to Your room, so that You could 'listen to music'. You and i 'listened to music' all the time up in Your room, didn't we? 

i know that i should have walked then, but i didn't. and how was my love and adoration returned to me? You joined volleyball, and then began fucking around with a skank on Your team, so much so that i had to come out to see it for myself, and after four long island iced teas, You watched me drive myself home to lancaster from angola. what a gooood and caring boyfriend You were, Jxxxxx Kxxxxxx...

Jxxxxx, even if You didn't ever touch a single one of the handfuls of girls that You have associated with outside of our marriage, it was the ILLUSION OF IMPROPRIETY on Your part that crushed me. You failed. You failed to make me see or feel Your love. Your only demonstrations of love from the very beginning were monetary and material. do You recall that first christmas? You went way overboard, and You set the tone for the rest of our lives together. it taught me that well, if i couldn't have a real act of Your love, at least You would buy me something...You created a brat in me, the way Your parents and family made a brat out of You.

see? what i have never, ever heard from You is a truly genuine apology, one that reflects that You took me and my heart and You crushed them both from the very beginning, unprovoked. no one around You knows that...how You are an attention whore so badly that You will break commitments and vows and crush people who love You deeply, just so that You can get the fix You need from someone in the moment You need it. it happened again and again, and each time, You had a choice: You could have said no, i have made a commitment to someone; or, if You did not want to be with me, and You were unhappy and just wanted out, You again had a choice to buck up like a MAN and just tell me so that we could part and go be happy. instead, You let it drag out for fifteen years. 

do you know why i really asked for the open marriage? it was not just because Your limp dick became useless after only two minutes in the bedroom...it was because i wanted to know that You would fight for me, that i was worth THAT much to You. You don't believe this, i know, but if You had simply looked at me from across that dining room table that evening when we discussed it, and said, 'i love you, you're my wife, and there is no way i'm going to let you go be someone else's...i will do my part to make you happy.' it really would have been that simple -- all of our lives together -- all i needed to see was that i was cherished and loved above all else in Your life, like i was supposed to be. i would have never moved away when i did. and as for my final infidelities to You, they were absolutely retaliatory for Your treatment of me. i'm no whore...but i am human, and i deserved to be loved and touched and satisfied just like You. You reduced our marriage to prostitution -- every single time we tried to make love, You came in less than two minutes. DOZENS of times. it was as though You were pissed and resentful that You were 'footing the bill', and You felt like i owed You something. whether it was Your sentiment or not, it is exactly how it was perceived. i didn't emasculate You...You did it to Yourself. You have to be a man with a spine and a set of balls before someone can take it from You...You never grew up and got out of that sick bed, Kxxxxxx, and i was tired of waiting for You to come join me so we could enjoy our life as Man and Wife.

i guess i am starting to realize that You -- pathetic and childlike and spineless as You are -- were my first Dominant.  my self imposed inertia in our relationship was my tacit allowance of Your horrendous treatment of me for so many years, especially in the beginning, and long before i went seeking something like that out for myself...