Thoughts on Remarriage

So, I made a mistake recently.  Not just a small stub-your-toe dammit kind of mistake, but a I-think-I've-ruined-my-life kind of mistake.

I remarried.

I did so too fast, ignoring the red flags (again!) and am now sitting in my own mess (again).

I've read so many wonderful stories about straight wives who finally work up the courage to dump the gay husband and are swept off their feet by a fabulous straight man who teaches them to love again and redeems their shattered self-esteem by finding them sexually desirable ...

Yes, that was a run-on sentence.

And it's also what I THOUGHT or hoped or imagined had happened to me. 

I married the second man I dated seriously after becoming "suddenly single" after more than two decades of marriage. 

So yes, he finds me desirable and attractive.  Which is swell, just swell.  Only now that the infatuation and flattery has waned, I don't want him to touch me.  He irritates me beyond belief.  He has a plethora of incredibly annoying (to me) habits and idiosyncracies such as:

• Combing his hair at the table, raining flakes of dandruff as he goes.
• Spending hours in the bathroom producing sounds that sound like trumpeting elephants in the jungle and not cleaning up the remaining detritus.
• Not cleaning any of his detritus, for that matter.
• Blowing his nose into his hands (he says its more hygienic, for gosh sakes)
• Biting his nails.
• Picking his toenails and leaving the remaining debris.
• Forgetting to flush the toilet, no matter what "number"
• Lecturing on whatever topic he chooses for hours (he has a law degree)
• Trying to solve everyone's problems and oh, by the way, he's the only one with the real solutions.  Everyone else's ideas are just plumb stupid.
• Speaking "down" to my adult children and me.
• Being passive-aggressive.
• Staying out until 10 p.m. or even later every night at work.
• Referring to me and my adult children as "you people". 
• He hoards stuff and keeps insisting that we move into his home which is packed to the ceilings with stuff and has broken windows, broken plumbing and the like.  My condo, on the other hand, is clean, cozy, and well decorated, not to mention has a low monthly mortgage.  And it's entirely in my name.  

Need I go on?  So after waking up one day and realizing I felt like I was trapped in a nightmare and miserably unhappy, I called my friend who recommended a counselor.  The counselor is, by the way, very good.  She helped me unpack a lot of baggage.  But before I even saw the counselor, here is what I'd figured out.

With my fundamentalist Christian background, I taught my children that abstinence was the only way to go -- in other words, zero sex before marriage.  After all, the gay husband and I were able to do this and were proud of it.  I had sex with my current husband well before our marriage and I felt guilty, guilty as sin.  I wanted to be loved.  I wanted to know what it was to be desired by a straight man.  But, instead of understanding that as a very natural desire, all I could struggle with was what I'd done.  And I wanted to legitimize my behavior.  Now isn't that just a fine reason to say "I do" to someone?   I already knew my daughter had struggles with him, but I asked her if she thought I shouldn't marry him and she wasn't able to tell me what she really thought (which was "no!").  Now, she won't even come around if he's going to be there.  It's how she's protecting herself from what she calls "The Bulldozer".

Well, The Bulldozer loves me in his own way, and I'm going to have to break his heart, I guess.  One thing I have learned is that (a) you can't change other people and (b) there is a kind of healthy selfishness one must exercise in order to embrace your own sanity.  So, if I think I sinned by having pre-marital sex, you can only imagine my struggle in considering divorcing a man who is faithful to me and vows that he's committed to our relationship.  (Although I do observe the behaviors and find that statement a bit questionable.) 

What was it my mamma always said: Marry in haste, repent in leisure.  Well, at age 59, I don't have too much leisure time to waste. 

I have so many friends who lament their singleness.  And, ironically, I lament my second marriage.

Wounds

Last night I had a very healing and hilarious experience, chatting online with a group of straight wives via Bonnie Kaye's support group.  I was struck by how so many of us use humor as a coping mechanism.  Last night's chat got a little bawdy, but for me, it was filled with belly-laughs which are so very healing.

I also learned about Misti Hall's blog, Straight Spouse Coaching and was very taken by her most recent post on the wounded feminine spirit.  Misti articulated something I've intuited very deeply for years and I'd like to riff on it a little bit this morning.

Years before I truly outed my gay ex, I ran across a book by Linda Schierse Leonard called "The Wounded Woman: Healing the Father-Daughter Relationship."  This was one of those books much like Alice Miller's "Drama of the Gifted Child" which was very emotional for me to read.  (In fact, I think it's time to pull out "Gifted Child" again and revisit it!)  So here it was, somewhere in the 1980s, and I finally owned that I was walking around with a gaping "father wound."  My father loved me, but he had difficulty with emotional intimacy and my mother had basically kidnapped me when I was young, taking me away from a very dangerous situation (physically and emotionally), but depriving me of any contact with my dad.  I contacted him when I was in my late teens and we then attempted to rebuild our relationship, something that was ongoing until his death in 1997.

I wonder how many of us straight wives have father wounds.  I wonder if that puts us at higher risk of getting into an unhealthy relationship with a closeted gay man.  I know for me, I didn't know what "normal" male behavior was, because I am an only child, raised by my mother and my grandmother.  I had no male role models or connections growing up except my distant daddy.

Early in my recovery process, I was an avid participant of COSA (Codependents of Sexual Addicts), basically an AlAnon program but with a different addiction going on.  And, while I no longer attend meetings, I do still cling to the philosophy of the 12 steps.  I noticed that the overwhelming majority of us in the COSA group had some sort of sexual abuse or violence in our past.  Many of us -- myself included -- are rape survivors.  That's another kind of wounding, which also creates post-traumatic stress issues.

Like moths drawn to the fire, are we drawn to these dangerous men?  I think that on some level we are.  Until we are able to really dig deep into our own woundedness, own it and begin to heal, we'll be attracted to the relationships that feel like "home."  And don't get me wrong -- a great relationship CAN and SHOULD feel like a homecoming.  But not like Dysfunctional Family Robinson kind of home -- the abnormal "normal" so many of us grew up with.

Misti talks about how during the straight/gay marriage, the straight woman begins to lose her sense of femininity.  I also lost my sense of self -- what my counselor called my "voice."  We sense on some level that our husband isn't truly attracted to us physically.  Even as a newlywed, this fed into my already huge poor self-image and my thoughts that I was too fat, too ugly, etc.  Eventually, I became anorexic.  (Hard to believe if you see me now!)  I asked my ex once why he didn't intervene with the anorexia and he said "I didn't know what to do."  Puh-leeze.  But that's another story.  If we had an argument, he'd say that I couldn't expect me to "perform" or be interested in physical intimacy after "how I had demeaned him" and "made him feel shut down."  Finally, in my late 40s, I added to the litany of my faults that I was too old.  

Interesting, isn't it, that part of this toxic tango is that we are more willing to blame ourselves and build the house of cards that is denial even higher than to admit the honest truth: he's gay.