Haqpy Birthday to Me

Well, I had to change my profile this morning as I have reached the grand ole age of 33!

Yes, another year added and a palindromic one at that. Nothng like working on my B-day but hopefully I will get out of here at a decent hour.

So far I got a bunch of books (yes I am a geek), the second season of Veronica Mars and a new ipod.

Mmmmm, materialism - gotta love it.

"Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same." - Oscar Wilde

I wish to start out today thanking everyone for sharing their advice, stories and comments to my last post on this site and via email. You have given me no small amount of both comfort over these past very difficult days. I was not surprised by the majority of the responses to my previous post being generally sadness, anger, frustration and a general desire that I end my marriage. I have not really written a post before responding to what people have written back, but I think the time has come.

And I realize that many of you may not understand why it is that I am even having this dilemma. The answer seems so clear to many of you. I feel personally that in this situation I either lose the person that is the most important person that I have and have had in my life or I lose my own self dignity and self worth. This is hardly a wonderful or even remotely easy choice to make. But unfortunately, as with so much else in life I have found, dichotomies don’t really exist as clearly as we thought as kids.

I strive to be as honest as I am able to be in this blog. Part of this exercise for me is to explore my life and what is going on. And it serves no purpose to try to embellish it. But a first-person narrative will always be clouded by the perspective of the writer. And as with any story, there are things that have gone on before the first chapter presented that colours every characters actions without the reader every really becoming privy to that “backstory”.

I remember an episode of “Sex and the City” (shocking, a gay man quoting that show!) where Carrie said to Miranda, “No one else will ever know what happened in your relationship but the two of you.” And the truth is that no relationship of one month let alone four years can be distilled neatly into the confines of one post (or for the habitual reader, this entire blog). Epic novels have been written on the relationship between two people in love and even then, the full story is never told. Taken on its own, in my post, there is the paradigmatic villain and victim. But no matter how much I can reduce what has been transpiring in my relationship to a post on this blog, it cannot possibly tell the entire tale anymore than this entire blog can give you a complete picture of who I am as a person.

I can hardly claim to have been the innocent at every point in this relationship. I have been the villain and Bud the victim. I have done things that Bud could have justifiable left me for. I have not been the perfect mate either.

And for me, breaking up is the easy solution to our problems. Easy in that it will require none of the difficult work in growing together out of these situations. It is the staying together in the hope that we can work this out, that we can both grow up in the ways that each of needs to, that each of us can come closer and closer to “we”. As Joan Baez once said, The easiest kind of relationship is with ten thousand people, the hardest is with one."

Will we be able to save our lives together? Will I be able to save myself at the same time? I don’t know. And maybe my story will follow the same path that many of you who have commented went down. I hope not. It might last another day. It might last another year. I cannot say.

I might not be strong enough to stay in this relationship.

I might not be strong enough to end it.

But all of your kind thoughts and kind words have given me the firm knowledge that if my marriage crumbles (or is already in ruins and I am but a crazed fiddler ignoring it burn), there is still life and love in my future.

Thanks again.

The Test

Well, I guess its about time that I put everything that has happened down on this page. I was expecting to be able to write this great post after my vacation about all the good times from the Outgames in Montreal, but alas, that is not to be.

The catalyst for our current problems occurred the day after our guests for the Outgames left. Bud came up to me and said some guy that he had met online had invited him to go on a gay cruise around the Mediterranean – not us, him (I doubt if he even knows I exist). Bud is adamant that this is not sexual in nature but that they are just friends. Regardless of whether this is true or not, I just don’t feel comfortable with him going off somewhere on a trip where some guy I have never met is paying for it all.

I have also repeatedly asked Bud to stop using these websites but he has consistently refused (more on that later). Of course I said hell no! When you are with someone else exclusively, let alone married, you don’t go off on a vacation with some other random guy. We were planning on a European trip in September, and Bud felt that he would just meet up with me after the cruise. He also had the gall to state that anyone else but me would be happy to have their boyfriend go off and have a nice free trip if it was offered (I kid you not).

Then he comes to me about 30 minutes later and says that some guy that he went to the beach with about a year ago invited him to Florida. Once again, I say no way. We are going on a vacation soon and trying to save the money and he wants to spend $1000 to go to Florida with some guy I have never met? He gets into a huff about how everyone else would let him.

I respond that we are going on vacation in less than a month and that he has basically been on a vacation for a year and half. Last September he promised me that he would look for a job. He hasn’t even written up a resume in the past year. Now I let this slide because he was waiting to find out if he would be able to work as a nurse. And every month they told him the decision would be soon. But it has been two months since he got that decision and still he hasn’t applied for even one job.

And so I have been getting very frustrated. I’m feeling walked on and over.

See, I don’t feel that I ask very much of Bud although he feels the same. Over our time together I have asked him to do things that he has not wanted to do on very rare occasions. I caught him arranging a meeting up with someone on a well known gay internet site. I asked him to remove all of his profiles. He said he did – but he did not.

Even the very small things he will not do. When he stopped going to French school, I asked him to make sure that the house was clean then. Since that time, I think he has vacuumed the floors once, the bathroom is ready to crawl out on its own. All because he, as an unemployed person, is “too busy”.

I know that these are in some cases petty, but in others they are much more substantial. Bud always gets into a state because he “doesn’t like it when someone tells him what to do.” And I understand that. But to be frank, the things that I have asked of him are things that I shouldn’t have to ask. If work 60-70 hours a week at work and he doesn’t work at all – why should I be cleaning the bathroom on the weekend. I shouldn’t have to ask him to stop using cruising websites whether or not his conduct is benign. I shouldn’t have to say that he shouldn’t go off on a vacation with what he laughingly is calling a “friend” when it bothers me.

Bud is well aware of how important these things were to me. But he did nothing. Now he either does not care about me or only cares about himself. I tend to lean towards the latter that he is a complete narcissistic hedonist who cares only of his own pleasure.

When he threw his fit over my not wanting him to go to Florida, he screamed “Don’t tell me what to do.” And so I told him that he could do as he wishes, but that if he went he shouldn’t come back.

And so I get an email from him at work and it confirms all my suspicions about him. The email is completely all about himself. Never once is the word “us” or “we” mentioned. It talks about how I am not supportive of him and that he “needs” to go to the beach. And then it ends by his saying that he has booked a ticket and is leaving last Thursday.

So I look online and see that he is spending over $1000 to go for three days. And then I discover that he is not paying with our credit card (and therefore someone else was paying for him). And then I discover that he is not going with who he said he was but someone else entirely.

Now, I blame myself for Bud thinking that I was not serious about his not returning if he went. He refused to do what I asked before without consequences so why should this be any different? And I have sat here thinking over and over again that he was going to grow up. That he was going to at some point realize that we were an equal partnership. I kept thinking that at some moment, he would come to the realization that as an adult something you need to make sacrifices, do things that you do not want to. And that if you really love someone, you have to be willing to make that person happy or make that person feel safe. But this has not come.

And I don’t think that I am being at all unreasonable in not wanting my husband to go on some trip with some guy I have never met.

And I guess that I have been blind to all of this because I do love him. But I can’t treat myself this way. I can’t let myself be treated like this. I deserve someone who will consider my feelings (whether justified or not) and someone who will care for more than his own pleasure.

And so he returned on Sunday and we’ve had the “talk”. He finally admitted that it wasn’t the friend from the beach whose house he went to in Florida but the same guy that asked him on the cruise. He lied because he knew I was upset over his wanting to go on the cruise so he thought I would like it better if it was someone else.

Too many lies.

But then the kicker really comes out. Yesterday as I am fuming he actually has the balls to say that he wants to go back this weekend to go to Disneyland. He knows how upset I am and yet that doesn’t quite enter into his head. And he says that since he decided that he wouldn’t go on the cruise then another weekend in Florida shouldn’t be a problem.

What planet does this guy live on, you ask? Well, he is a child – gimme gimme gimme all the time. He believes that if he does not think that my feelings are valid and reasonable then they don’t matter. It basically comes down to that. If he disagrees with me then it’s a “fuck you, I’m doing what I want.”

I then thought about it for a minute.

And I think this has to do with being married of all things. I know that if we were not married, this would definitely be over. But somehow it is not yet. Now I know that some of you after reading all of the above will be in shock that it hasn’t ended yet, but here’s what occurred.

I realized that my greatest pain comes from the fact that he even asked. It would never have occurred to me go on a trip like that. Its not his going but his thinking that it is at all appropriate.

And I realize now what people mean when they say that they have grown apart. Bud and I begun our lives together when we were both carefree souls just enjoying every day at the beach or relaxing. Well, things have changed for me, but not really for him (except the beach part). I told Bud that I needed him to grow up. He is still in so many ways a kid.

But that is who I married. That is the person that I said I would be with forever. And I can’t claim that I didn’t know what I was getting involved in.

But I can’t stay in a relationship if he doesn’t grow up.

But I also don’t want to be the “wife” who is always trying to change the “husband”. I guess that I have resigned myself to letting him do what he wants since trying to get him to do anything else is completely fruitless.

And the thing is that this has been quite liberating for me in an odd way. But it has a price.

I am giving him his freedom but its all really a test of both myself and him. Will he grow up on his own? More importantly, will I be able to accept this? That is the test for myself. I told him that he can go on that cruise. I honestly am at the point where I do not care if he goes. But I do care about how I will feel if he chooses to go and how I will feel when he is gone. I really have no idea whether I will decide that I don’t want to be in a relationship where someone acts in that way. I just know that I don’t want to end a marriage because he is not obedient.

And so the saga continues. I am trying to salvage my marriage by trying to accept him the way he has remained. I don’t know if it is salvageable but I need to try.

Am I being an idiot, a doormat, a completely blind fool? Probably. But I did make that vow nearly four years ago and that vow has certain powers. But I cannot sacrifice my own happiness or my own self-worth to that vow. I have seen the devastation wrought by such thoughts.

In many ways it will come down to honesty. How honest will Bud be and has been with me and how honest will I be with myself.

Entry-less

I have not posted much of anything lately and what I have has not been very personal at all. It seems that my marriage is coming to an end. I have avoided writing about what is going on because in the blogosphere nothing is real until you publish the post.

When I get the courage to write about all that has happened, is happening and will happen, I will return.