Just around this time at the beginning of August, twenty years ago, is when I first met Jyothi.
20 years is a long time, of which we have been living together for the last 14 and have been married for 12 and a half.
As we approach our 40 years milestones (I turned 39 in March, Jyothi in July) we have now known each other for more than half of our lives.
I am so blessed I met my soul mate, my lover, my best friend and the mother of my kids – and I would have certainly never imagined what booking that cheap holiday in ’95, after I had passed my high school exams, would have led to.
The best things just happen, you can’t stage them or set them up. You need to be in the flow.
While this post is obviously an open Love letter to my wife, you have to be warned that the rest of this article is NSFW (Not Safe For reading at Work). Read on at your own discretion.
As I was thinking about writing this piece and how to best explain what our relationship means to me, I stumbled into this article on the Huffington Post, which describes a relationship that looks just about the opposite… it’s so far from my views of how a relationship should be, that I’ll use it to explain by contrast what both marriage and feminism – and respect – mean to me, instead!
If I should summarize the article in a single sentence, I would probably do it like this twitter comment. But this post contains the extended version.
In the article, he author (a guy who has an ‘open’ relationship) mounts an articulate argument to attempt to preserve his self-esteem while his wife happily screws other men twice a week (and he’s also allowed to but doesn’t do it as much as she does…) and he is the ‘stay at home dad’ and he’s obviously very bothered by it but he’s trying to deny it and say he’s fine and he accepts this cross because he’s a Feminist ?!
Sorry but you guys are doing it all wrong. This is not feminism. This is American capitalism: you guys have chosen quantity over quality.
What I get from the story is that the author seems sincerely convinced he’s doing the right thing, but there is an underlying lack of respect for him in all that she does – or what he lets us know about it – and he lets her get away with everything. To me it doesn’t sound like it’s really working: you don’t sound happy. It sounds like she enjoys the other guys more, and you are losing her.
You guys should talk and dig deep and understand what’s she finding in those other men that you don’t seem to give her, but you should also make her stop hurting you. It’s also not clear why you really chose to make your relationship ‘open’ – there is a short explanation but is very simplistic. You should dig deeper there to analyze what led you to that moment, and how you felt there.
“All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become” – Buddha
Either get back in touch and try to heal each other, or maybe you should even question why you are still together. It’s not necessary that one of the two people in the couple has to take it all but then plays the martyr role. There is a lot of passive aggression that transpires from that article, while stating that he’s fine with all of it.
Is also not clear how the kids are taking this – they sound like a ‘burden’ to you. I am not sure how they are living what they see and what they are learning from it. I would think maybe – just maybe – two independent but fully happy parents might actually give a better example in this case than what you are showing them here.
But why did I pick on this article?
Well, it got me thinking because the topic of ‘open’ relationships has been another cause of bother in our permanence in the United States: wherever we went, we kept ending up meeting/hearing/reading about many ‘open couples’ and poly-amorous relationships – and we have even been offered (and gently but firmly declined, albeit temptations messed up our minds for months…) to do exchanges and swaps and orgies from people we’d never expected such proposals… never happened in Europe, seriously. Yes some people do those things, it’s known. But not that many, really, and from our recent first hand observation I believe the phenomenon is way bigger in the United States than I had ever known or suspected. We were not prepared for that.
Now you would think we are bigots. Moralists. Old fashioned.
It’s not the point, we are actually quite open – I am not saying people shouldn’t do those things. They like what they like, and that’s OK if it really works for them and makes them happy.
But I am, anyhow, stating polygamy and various degrees of ‘openness’ in relationships aren’t something for us, because we think they don’t work in practice, and everybody gets hurt.
One of my past girlfriends cheated on me once, and she told me, and I was very hurt but I forgave her. But I think she was unconsciously trying to push me away, and the relationship was never the same again. Then she cheated again, then eventually we split up and she went with her new guy, who incidentally was my band’s new guitarist – I had lost my girlfriend and my band at the same time. Neither the sexual nor the ‘professional’ relationships of that guy with my ex girl and the band lasted long, but it hurt like hell, and it took me a while to put myself together.
Jyothi’s ex husband used to cheat on her too (and he didn’t even tell her but was pretty obvious/under the sun). He also gambled and made them end up with debts. She took the hit for a while, but she eventually kicked him out and divorced him.
We all have had fantasies. We all have our weird thoughts and fears. Our animal bodies and senses, especially in this over-stimulating society, always crave for more. We are stressed and try to fill a void in the absurdity of our societies and workplaces. We are exposed to all sorts of programming and are actively ‘targeted’ by marketers who want us to always desire more, to buy more, to feel that we have never enough. This extends to desire for more sex, or more love.
There are even folks who start movements and write that they have ‘more’ love to give and one partner isn’t enough for them. Well, you know what? You might think you can handle it – and maybe you can, for a while – but I see you are spreading too thin. You could spend that time better to strengthen the relationships you already have, if you think they are worth it, rather than starting all sort of new ones. Aren’t we all already spreading too thin by time slicing seconds here and there for friends on social network, over life on this side of the screen?
But in relationships you need to tackle the issues you have, and you have got to make some choices. You can fight for and fix those issues when you care for it, or otherwise it sounds like you have already given up but can’t dare to admit it.
Either way, you cannot want it all and want it now and throw a tantrum like a baby and get away with it, that’s not how life works.
The guy of the Huffington post article mentions that when his wife was sleeping with other men he once got worried when she didn’t even come back late but stayed out all night. Gosh, I would die at the idea my wife is out for ‘fun’ on one of those dates! But this is not feminism, she’s walking over you! Feminism is about equality and fairness. It shouldn’t mean that women now should emulate and repeat all the bad/stupid bossy behaviors they endured for centuries from men. It’s bad and disrespectful behavior regardless of which side does it.
I remember with a lot of pain and solitude the many nights I spent out of the house, and not for fun, in a period years ago when we were living in Italy and I was travelling for work a lot, visiting customers all over Europe and Middle East.
I spent those many lonely nights in (sometimes fancy, sometimes crappy) hotels, often working extra hours not knowing what else to do, sometimes masturbating if I could not hold my hormonal levels, but eagerly waiting to get back home and make love with my wife again. And she spent those same lonely nights at home too, in the same frame of mind…
Did I have occasions to cheat? Plenty – the company I work for even hosts to conference in places like Las Vegas (what is more terrible is that this is a place where Americans families – with kids – go on holiday):
But I never cheated.
Many nights in those hotels I really missed ending the day together with Jyothi, after the kids are asleep, when we can sit or lay together and talk about how our days went and the things we want to do together, and everything and nothing… and when we are together we do make love, yes we do enjoy quite a bit of sex with each other, that really I don’t think any of us would even have energies to spare and go with someone else… without taking energy away from what we have. And we don’t feel the tradeoff is worth.
And even on the days when we don’t make love, we talk, read, we feel life together, we enjoy the little things. We really enjoy being together.
Now, when we moved from Italy (where my work was the one that made me travel so much) to the United States, I was hoping the new job to be done ‘at the office’ (as opposed to travelling to customers) would give me the time to be more present – not less!
Turns out I was physically present almost every single day now, not travelling every other week anymore… but after a while I fell trap to something else: my job’s rhythm became so intense that I stopped being ‘mentally’ present: for several months my head was just focused on the project I was working on, from the moment I woke up to the moment I fell asleep, and I stopped having a life… and I was ruining what we have, because I was becoming absent. Sure, I was working 80-hours weeks and therefore paying the bills, but I wasn’t doing anything else anymore, and I was growing distant and grumpy. Jyothi helped me see what I was doing, we talked about it, and she helped me remember who my better self was and how he looked like. Because that’s what you do when you care for someone – you fight for him or her, you don’t just let that grow more and more distant down any slippery slope. It was a very painful period, and Jyothi also got sick due to all the stress of having to do more alone than ever in a country with no other family or support system, and of what I talked about in the previous three posts on this blog.
I dropped some balls, I delegated more, we moved back to Europe and scaled back on the pressure. But in the end we both grew a hell of a lot stronger – and self aware – together, rather than falling apart.
I am a feminist, and I respect my wife by spending as much quality time with her as possible, whenever possible. Every night is a date night for us. This doesn’t mean we need to go anywhere or do anything fancy and spend a fortune; I just mean we are present for each other with emotional intelligence, which is what human beings really need.
Also, we share the load of things like cleaning, cooking, etc – those are not ‘mine’ or ‘her’ jobs, they don’t have anything to do with who works in an ‘official’ job and who works at home running after 3 kids… we are pretty fluid in that and naturally take turns – but it’s based again on being there and understanding the other “I see you are tired, today I’ll cook”, things like that. I am sorry for a period I didn’t do this anymore, when I had lost myself.
I am a feminist, and I respect my wife by not cheating, even if my dick sometimes does feel otherwise (and I won’t deny it). But those organs tend to have a mind of their own. Especially if your colleagues fed you Vodka at the company event and you normally don’t even drink coffee, let alone alcohol… But it’s safe to assume that pussies have the same impulses, and here’s the trick: you can actually ignore those impulses like you can control shopping frenzy. You can, right? Because *that* is exactly the problem, and that is the point I am trying to make – in all this flourishing of ‘open’ and ‘poly’ that we have seen in America and keep hearing about on the media, the problem is that people are not in touch with themselves – and with others. They think they can just ‘shop’ for happiness. Get more quantity. Bigger burgers! More dicks! More pussies! More everything!
This is caused by stress of a life that goes too fast, by being bombarded with horrible stimulations about how you should live, and conditioning of consumerism only seeking to make more money but give out all the wrong values and messages.
Why should you spread thin and handle multiple half-ass relationships, when you can have one that is just amazing?
You can do a million things and do them all crap. Or you can try to juggle a lot less and maybe do each thing you do properly.
Relationships don’t “just work” – you have to actually be involved in them and spend effort on making them work. From both sides. And the growth you get – together – is wonderful, and totally worth it.
When a hooker in Vegas tried to get my attention telling she would make me spend the best night of my life, I smiled and continued along my road, thinking the best night of my life had been the night my daughter was born and I had to argue with and shout at the nurse to be allowed to stay with Jyothi in the hospital. I helped her as much as I could, at least with my presence, hearing and feeling her go thru the pain of the delivery.
That’s why I am a very lucky man. Because with Jyothi we spend time together and enjoy the little things, and we are a fantastic team. Of two.