I was molested from age eleven to age thirteen and a half. A mere two and a half years later, I met the future ex and we got married not much more than three years after that.Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.-- Aldous Huxley
Although the marriage helped me recover from the trauma, in some sense our relationship never recovered from being formed in the relatively recent aftermath. I once had a dream about my marriage being rooted in a gaping wound in the landscape of my life.
As part of my long, strange journey of healing from things the world seems to think one cannot heal from, I had an affair that I mostly haven't talked much about in public, though it's certainly no secret. I haven't talked about it much because planet Earth is inclined to interpret it in sexual terms and act like I'm trying to tell people I'm open to having more illicit affairs with married men or some shit and that's absolutely not what I want to say.
I've been celibate for roughly two decades and I say that a lot more than I say I once had an affair, so it baffles me that people are so inclined to interpret my remarks as me loudly announcing I'm DTF, would probably even hook up with them in specific because I clearly have no standards of any kind etc.
People hear only what they want to hear, don't confuse them with the facts and LA LA LA not listening to anything that contradicts the conclusion they want to draw.
Sex is relatively hard to arrange sufficient privacy for even if you are in a legal and socially accepted relationship, like marriage. It's vastly harder to arrange when you need to hide not only the fact that sex is happening right now, but that this relationship is a sexual one.
In the movie A Good Woman, people infer an affair that isn't happening simply because a married man is meeting secretly with a woman and paying her bills. And the entire town actively looks for juicy tidbits they can spin into imagined drama, even pulling out binoculars to watch them while claiming they "can't help but see it."
Contrary to what movies so often depict about affairs, I read once that an affair was typically a lot of phone calls and very little sex. I had an on-again, off-again relationship to this man for several years in part because I sometimes didn't hear from him for a year.
We managed to have sex four whole times.
For a time, I had a PO box so he could write me without it coming to my house and I used to get free phone cards from offers on the backs of food products and mail them to him so long distance calls didn't come out of his household budget and didn't come out of mine and could be covered up.
There's a high cost to keeping a secret and even many years after both that relationship and my marriage ended and in spite of me being "a shameless hussy" willing to run my big fat mouth about it, the bizarre and problematic reactions of other people continue to make it tough to talk about, so that cost continues to this day.
The man I got involved with took a huge risk to sleep with me. His life could have been ruined six ways to Sunday by it.
He said something once about the affair being a case of "MAD" -- mutually assured destruction -- as his idea of why we would both protect the other and keep our mouths shut. I judged him to be an idiot when he said that.
I wasn't betting on him keeping my secrets as my justification for taking the risk. For one thing, that implicitly assumes that him blabbing is the only way it might come out and I felt there was far more risk of it being revealed inadvertently by some other mechanism.
I had the affair because my marriage and my life did not work. I didn't want to have an affair but like most men, my husband felt my sexual and emotional issues were my problem and I should go get them fixed and stop imposing on him.
I ultimately concluded that if I didn't have the affair, my marriage was doomed. I was financially dependent upon my husband and we had a child already.
I had the affair because if I didn't find some means to fix my shit -- and without imposing on my husband -- my life was bound to get vastly worse. If I had the affair and it fixed my shit, maybe my marriage wasn't doomed and maybe I could sort my shit and eventually resolve my issues.
I took the bet because my marriage was already doomed, I didn't have a career and worst case scenario was if the affair was discovered, I might end up divorced. I was on track to end up divorced already and trying to stop that.
I decided there was no real risk to having the affair. Maybe it fixes my problems or maybe I end up divorced ANYWAY.
So I decided it had potential upside and no real downside for me. I couldn't imagine why my illicit lover was willing to take such huge risks that could utterly ruin his life and I didn't poke at it.
Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from making bad decisions.— Mark Twain
I felt that there was no real cost to me in part because I didn't have a career. I was a homemaker.
What I didn't realize at the time was that this pattern of thinking and the need to keep it secret would be a barrier to establishing a career.
As I write about elsewhere, men get raised to have public lives -- AKA careers -- and women get raised to have private lives -- to be wives and moms. Or sex objects if they can't manage to marry well.
Heteronormative culture has exactly one plan for all women everywhere: You fall in love, get married and have kids and your husband pays your bills and you are set for life and get to live happily ever after. And if you can't pull that off, fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
That expectation that men have careers and women get married and her husband pays her bills is why almost all men everywhere all the time listen to everything that comes out of a woman's mouth and wonder what she is trying to tell them about how she expects to interact with them SEXUALLY.
Ergo if I say I had an affair, I couldn't possibly be wanting to talk about the problems with heteronormative culture and how women get held back in a million subtle, unspoken ways. No, the only possible reason I could say that is to suggest I'm looking to have an affair with them in specific and never mind I'm saying it PUBLICLY on a blog or in a discussion on a well trafficked forum, it must be a coded secret message for them in specific that I'm DTF and I want them as an individual to hit on me.
Because I'm a woman, so obviously I'm inconsequential and that will never change and talking about sex means I'm a floozie -- aka even more inconsequential than the kind of woman you marry.
Age difference -- men preferring younger women -- is typically attributed to men being shallow jackasses who treat women like sex objects and thus mostly care how they look.
What if it's mostly about something else?
What if it's mostly about the fact that men have power and cute little tarts are less trouble because young women are unlikely to have any power and unlikely to understand the potential consequences of a fling?
To have power and keep it, every decision you make has to be run through a filter that assesses if this action is a threat to your power. Sex with floozies and mere sex objects is easier to navigate because it simplifies the complicated equation they filter such questions through.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
-- Aldous Huxley
Women have two options in life for paying their bills. They can pursue a career or marry well.
Men generally need a successful career to get laid at all, much less qualify for marriage and children. So for men, desire for sex and desire for money align and come up with the same conclusion: They need a successful career.
For women, desire for sex and desire for career are substitutable and in competition. We get pressured to pick one or the other.
Because for women, marrying well is a means to pay their bills and this fact means men are less likely to really trust a woman at work because when the going gets tough, she may get pregnant and stay home with the baby rather than rise to the occasion.
Men don't have that option and don't spend all their time whining about how work is hard and other people are assholes for not making it easy for them and it must be because of the bits between their legs.
I recently read a whiny bitch post again saying that men don't take her seriously and it's because she's a woman and they are sexist pigs.
In the same discussion, she also ranted about established women doing the same meanie faced shit to her men do, waah.
So you're telling me women with power behave like men with power in spite of having different bits between their legs BUT you want them to be your FWEND without earning it because you got girl bits just like her.
Maybe it's not the bits between your legs that makes men not respect you or take you seriously at work.