Addicted to love

When I learned about the other “other” woman, the defense my lover offered up was that he feared he had a sex addiction. I panicked, because an addiction means it is likely to happen again, as does the general pattern of his behavior.

I poo poo’d the sex addiction thing as just lip service to soften the blow to my ego. 

He was offering me something worthy of marriage level commitment, but because I was SO embarrassed and distressed for him to have to admit it to anyone, I shut it down immediately. 

That is something I don’t think he ever thought about doing for his wife, at least he never mentioned that he did, which says a lot about his love for me. It was something I should have embraced, because what is important was that HE was willing to be embarrassed. 

I should have encouraged it, because here is where we stand today. He is remorseful and I’m wrecked and waiting for him to re-offend. And without treatment, maybe he will.

I am charmed by the fact that we are still excited to see each other, and that we still party and stay up too late and lose track of time. I am amazed that at 67 and 53 years old, we still love to be in each other’s company.  It’s surprising that we’ve met every week for 14 years, mostly in the confines of a hotel, yet we still laugh and connect.

Has all that all become boring to him?

Maybe I don’t look the same to him.

Wondering if his eyes find me beautiful is a sick feeling, much like the one that had me on the xanax diet for two weeks.

I am angry that his infidelity stole my ego from me.

I know I can’t bring it up and harp on it. He is not my husband, he is my boyfriend (what’s wrong with that statement?!) and it needs to be beneficial to him to have me be a part of his life. Whining on the regular about how unattractive I feel and rubbing his nose in his puddle of pee is only gonna get me a pass for so long, then I’m just a bitch like the wife. 

Genuinely forgiving him required swallowing my pride, and I deemed it worthy of doing so. But tonight, I’m struggling with my wounded dignity.. 

What makes it so much harder is that there IS NO time to waste being angry. The truth is, I am a secret and he is a secret and one of us is gonna die first. That means one of us will wake up one morning unaware that we have lost the other. One of us will suffer first an agonizing silence, followed by an interminable wait, and finally, great shock with the discovery that the other is gone.

We will grieve silently and have to swallow our pain and be sick to our stomachs because the world keeps turning but for one us, it will have stopped.

There will be nobody to express our anguish to over the loss of the other.

I know it doesn’t seem like a big thing to some people, but to me it seems like the worst pain I could ever suffer. Because we don’t share relatives or friends, I will never have a tangible connection to the man I loved the most. He will have existed to nobody in my life but me.

There is no shared house full of things he left behind, no clothing casually  draped over a chair to put to my face and inhale his musky scent. He will have left no footprints anywhere besides in my heart. 

That’s what makes this time so precious. Fate can snatch it away at any time, and he will choose his wife over me if she catches him cheating. I’m not being self deprecating, he TOLD me this a hundred times.

If I get caught, I’m prepared to get a divorce to keep seeing him. He doesn’t afford me the same guarantee. Fate doesn’t determine our future, his wife does.

When she came back last year, he was angry and cold and distant. He flipped like a switch and shut me off and turned the other other woman on. I knew then that something was wrong.

What makes the hurt so deep is that this is the same man that has consistently loved and spoiled me for almost a decade and a half. He has lavished me with good food and drink and attention, tons of it. This is the same man that never let me hang up angry or sad, who refused to let me stew or be confused or hurt. 

Never.

That’s what elevated him above all the others, that feeling of being wanted and loved and having him refuse to let me hurt or suffer. If he fucked up, he owned it immediately, and swiftly reconciled it.

That same man is now content to hang up and forego talking about it. That same man is now content not talking at all.

That same man let me choke down silent tears alone and vomit up my own snot for two days after he fessed up, avoiding my angry wrath.

He has told me he wants to be a hermit more than one time recently. He has isolated himself for days at a time from me, leaving me confused and anxious.

Yet he has not recognized that he has every symptom of depression and that his bad marriage may be the primary cause. The first change in him came when his wife returned from her winter retreat and the subsequent change occurred when she wouldn’t leave to go back this year and he wasn’t sure she ever would. 

Now he is planning a new phase of life with her and could be using his self admitted addiction to cope with the distress he knows is gonna come along with that choice…all her, all the time. Just like a junkie, the more miserable he gets in his heart, the more he wants to snort, smoke or in his case, seduce and conquer women.

Either that, or my first theory holds the most water and he is planning an easier and less expensive affair, tailored to fit his next phase of life, spending 24/7 with the wife.

Or maybe he hurts so much that my hurt is irrelevant. 

I just can’t find it in my heart to feel angry with him because how could I… when for two or three weekends now I’ve been treated like the absolute princess of his life. It feels so good that I forget all about the hurt.

Until he goes to leave.

That’s when I fall apart.

He lights me on fire and then religiously applies the salve to heal the raw skin he burned.

But when I’m in his arms and know that he is sacrificing his time and energy, when he doesn’t feel well,  to prove his love for me, how could I be angry? How can I be angry when my lover/ daddy/ King is fluffing my pillow and running my bath and feeding me sushi?

Nope. My heart is not angry. I love him even more watching him trying to please me.

I have a somber new awareness that I’ve bet everything on the hand that has always fed me.

NOW if I starve, it is nobody’s fault but my own.