This, Everybody, Is Why People Have Affairs
It's easier to run and hide than it is to deal with this.
Here I am staring at what has and hasn’t transpired and going:
What the hell?
Third jilted party in an affair: There’s no doubt, looking at their transits (student astrologer here), that the ultimate fate of that marriage will be decided about two years from now. Stand or fall, stay together or leave, happily or unhappily.
In the meantime, the person who so (not-so-obviously) lurked on my Facebook page two years ago, lurked on my website until I figured out it was him last March, showed up on Medium last August, and then back on my website again last fall up until I made that post in February, appears to be long gone.
G, O, N, E, gone. Gone, g-g-gone-gone-gone.
I have zero idea how the rest of any “life” was supposed to occur, with a guy who lurks but never speaks, leaves and never comes back. If this goes on much longer, we’ll just forget each other. End of story; oh-the-fuck-well.
I need to understand that the unfortunate factor of cowardice rules, here, and cowards aren’t likely to ever speak or come back, no matter how unhappy they are. (And you’d have to be pretty unhappy to check my blog twice a day or on Christmas.)
It simply doesn’t matter. No is no, gone is gone, and that’s that. I need to just learn to erase this person from my mind and go on and live the life I have.
I really don’t want to do it. I love this person.
Yesterday I took a long drive with the convertible top down, and ate at one of my favorite little places in … well, if I’m going to x out his location, I guess I had better not name this one, either. It calls itself the Center of the Universe. Enough places call themselves that that you can take your pick.
It’s such a beautiful small town. I didn’t realize just how lovely it is until I started taking walks around there after I eat, and walking to different areas of town I’ve never seen before. You could have filmed the Andy Griffith show there and it wouldn’t have looked more perfect.
These are the kind of walks he would have liked to take. Although we did get around to trading dick-pic kind of stuff six years ago, I realized from the quality of the relationship that this guy was just lonely.
All he really wanted was someone to talk to. The one time we took a brief walk together like that, he had to cut it short because it so upset him to be walking with another woman, he got sick on his stomach.
I wished the other day that things were different, and he was there with me. If he ever showed up, those are the kind of walks we would take, and the kind of talks we would have.
Unless somebody overcomes her strange muteness and learns how to have an actual conversation. The visits to my website suggest that hasn’t happened yet.
Oh, well. Doesn’t matter.
It’s far easier to stop looking back when you have something in front of you. Most of my life, I thought I had something in front of me.
(The truth was, I never did, but I thought I did. That’s easy to do when you’re a kid in America, pumped full of This-is-America-you-can-be-ANYthing-you-want-to-be bullshit. Especially by parents who couldn’t love their kids, but only be proud of them.)
At fifty-three years old, what’s ahead of me? Nothing, really.
I’m just going to go along, doing my day job, and that will be about it. I’m going to keep the house clean, of course. I’m going to pay off bills. I’m going to try to put a little something away. I’m going to start rolling up my life, get things in order for whoever will be packing up my stuff once I’m dead or in the nursing home. Make out a will, finally.
And try to eat healthier and try to get some exercise. But the fact is that being flat on my back for most of 2020 due to depression, two painful injuries, and covid-19 has pretty much wrecked any hope of my body being like the young person’s body I used to have.
The Big Gramma fat pads on the lower tummy and below the bra band are here. They have transformed me into a dumpy, matronly old woman. The tendency I have to get sprains and strains in places I didn’t know a person could get sprains and strains, and their tendency to turn into nagging, chronic injuries instead of healing, means I am going to have to be very careful about strenuous exercise as I get older.
I’d probably feel younger and better if I could work up to jogging a 6K again, but all I need to do is strain the other hip and I’m down for another year.
I have way less energy than I used to.
I look like an ugly, frumpy, dumpy sack of potatoes. I feel like an ugly, frumpy, dumpy sack of potatoes.
All I need now are the wrinkles, the gray, and the rest of the female pattern baldness, and old age will be complete.
Who can have a libido looking and feeling like this?
I’m pretty much done with relationships, anyway. Chi the Affair Guy was “grandfathered” in, but after this, I can’t even really envision being with anyone else.
Who the heck would I be with? What would I even do with them? I really can’t envision another future with a man.
And fuck knows, I do NOT want to online date! All I’ve ever found online was trouble, and since I have no sex drive anymore anyway, why would I do that? If you’re a man and you’re looking for a woman, you’re looking for a lean, tight, hardbodied woman, and you’re looking for her for sex.
I think I’m retired from all that now, thank you.
I believed once that I would be a novelist, and then I could be proud of myself, and life would have meaning for me as I wrote things thousands of people loved and I had fans to correspond with.
Hah. Hah. Hah.
Turns out, nobody, but nobody, but nobody, but NOBODY “gets” or likes the last novel it’s taken me six years to even struggle toward the end of.
I think that idea is finito.
Worse, it never really came from me, anyhow. It came to me as I struggled with the fact that I chose the career I chose because I said I was going to do it at age four and family held me to it.
I realized I was unhappy going in, but I couldn’t back out and face looking like a weenie to family members who would snipe, “She could have been an XYZ, but instead she dropped out of school!” for the rest of my life.
I didn’t know what else to do then, anyway. I didn’t even know who I was or what I liked or wanted.
What would have made me happy? Fuck if I knew.
I’ve been a stranger to myself my whole life.
All I knew was, I sure had better learn to do something that would pay bills and enable me to live on my own, because I was never, never, never, ever going to go back home to live again.
And I did that. But I was unhappy, and for many years, it looked as if I would fail.
So I came up with this dream. I would be a novelist!
Then, when I made good at that, my family would have that to be proud of, and it wouldn’t matter that I was a failure in my career anymore. They would have something even more public and dramatic to point to.
Turns out, having teachers in elementary and middle school say you have talent and high verbal ability isn’t enough. Nowhere near.
The point is, my entire life has been geared toward doing the impossible, saving impossible people like my mother (oh, and Chi the Affair Guy, by the way), and making a big, flashy success. To prove to my family, finally, that I really am good enough to be loved.
Never mind that if you have to do all that, they don’t really love you anyway, and, oh! I outgrew them years ago and am not even in contact with any of them anymore.
So, all the aims in my life were a six-year-old’s ideas about how to get a six-year-old’s developmental needs met.
And none of them are going to happen. And now I’m a dumpy, frumpy old lady and I have to give them all up. What does that leave me?
This, everybody, is why people have affairs.
They don’t want to deal with deep, existential questions like that. It’s so, so much easier to just keep running, running, running away into an infatuation they don’t have the guts to make themselves available for or to.
Oh, the drama of the heartbreak! Oh, the chaos when the spouse finds out! Oh, the heightened emotions of the trysts and the sex!
Fuck that. I choose to be honest instead, so I’m stuck here figuring out a declining and lackluster life.
What was I supposed to do now? Fuck if I know.
The obvious answer is to just be contented with whatever it is I have to get up and do everyday, secure in the knowledge that one day I will keel over with a heart attack or a stroke, or get that terminal cancer diagnosis, and it will be time for hospice and to push up daisies, and leave this thoroughly unsatisfying existence behind.
Or I will just become too feeble to work anymore, like an old toy winding down, and then I will be too feeble to do the housework and somebody will call social services and I will spend the rest of my days regressing to childhood as I sit in a nursing home on Medicaid and look at TV, peeing relentlessly in my Depends.
This is the way of human existence. This is the way we all end up.
The problem is, I am not happy with it. Until I don’t have the marbles to interface with it anymore, I wanted life to be about something more.
I just have no idea what.
All I know is, every time I’ve picked something out to want, I’ve been a six-year-old, unloved by parents and family and picked on in school, struggling furiously to find something that would make people quit picking on her and want to bond with her and let her belong.
And choosing that way has never, ever worked. I don’t expect it to start working now.
So, as I say goodbye forever to the one who never had the courage to come back, what was I supposed to have done next?
Fuck if I know.
Hi Other Woman!
Ur stack is inspiring me to write more on relationships in my stack. Thank you, in advance. I have a hard time going back and recalling my love life, now at 70, let alone writing about it. But as someone with no skin in the game anymore (literally), I think I can say something about younger men in relationships with others, as I recall.
So many younger men act in the ways that you describe here, and there; that is all so true, and I can attest. I was a younger man once. Seen it all (believe me, married 4 times and had countless GFs), and done it all (except anything violent or illegal). So let me tell you, all that you describe is true, and I don't think there is anything one can do for a young man exhibiting these behaviors (from the odd to the odious), except for the said man himself to pull out of the spinning dive. Good pilots survive, others don't.
I know that might sound harsh or stupid from an old fuck like me, but I am telling ya what I know about men born between 1920 and 1990. Behavior is better than it was in the 1920s and maybe in the 2020s things will improve, but don't hold ya breath girl!
Sincerely,
Jigs in the Jungle