The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

Dancing Barefoot

Seven years ago, I was in a different place.

My partner had red hair, and brown eyes and the whitest teeth I'd ever seen on someone who did not pay for them. He was handsome, yet pretty, and he was the sort of guy you noticed in a room, if not for his good looks, then for the fact that he was painfully shy and was the one who sat quiet amongst the herd. There were a lot of good things about him.

Somehow, I managed to find myself attracted to someone I worked with. By then, we were officially not working together, but the 'friendship' remained, and the emails and chats went on. He would send me articles and jokes and would ask me to send him some poetry I'd written. We'd talk about the fact that he was a little lost about what he wanted to do with his life, and I would tell him that I felt the same way. He visited me once, at work, coming all the way from the other side of the city to buy boxers at my store, and sit with me in the parking lot while we sipped iced tea and talked about superficial things. We did not discuss the fact that he was engaged. We did not mention my partner of many years. We didn't get around to talking about why he really came to see me.

He was younger than me, bore a strong resemblance to Jason London or his brother Jeremy (pick one, same difference), but a little cuter, and he had brown eyes, pale skin, and a lean, long frame. He wasn't particularly intelligent, wasn't driven or passionate about anything I could tell offhand, but there was...something. I think we both convinced ourselves that we were just friends, that the relationship between us was a harmless one that had no bearing on either of our personal lives, until one day it did. His fiancee broke into his email account and found all of the emails I'd sent, which he had apparently saved. The poems were what bothered her, but not for the reasons you'd think. They were not about him, most of them having been written long before I'd known him, but I think the fact that he read poetry at all and didn't tell her felt like something of an infidelity. A personal interest, a secret passion. When you're marrying someone, you tend to want to know what turns them on, and what doesn't.

He ended up attacking me verbally for the mess. She made him promise to quit any kind of friendship with me or she'd call of the wedding, and he had told her he would. Still, he decided to tell me off for nearly ruining his life, by calling me all sorts of predatory names, telling me that he knew all along I was trying to 'get him'. I was obviously annoyed and a little embarrassed by the whole thing. I'd never intended to steal him away from her. I barely even knew what I thought about him at all. I defended myself, though, because it was impossible for me not to point out that he was the one who initiated most of our correspondence, and he was the one who visited me without my input, so it seemed to me that whatever there was between us was being held up on both ends. He told me he never wanted to speak to me again, and I resolved that it was best that he didn't. What was I thinking, anyway?

During this time, I had a friend online in a chatroom. I knew his nickname, but that was all, and I often told him and the few others in the exclusive room about my 'man woes'. Surely, given that they were all so much older than I was, they thought I was ridiculously immature. Why would a woman in a secure relationship be mooning over a boy who clearly had no idea what he was doing, or where he was going? I remember my friend telling me that true love isn't that complicated, that it doesn't hurt like that or leave you wondering all the time. You know when you love someone with the deepest part of yourself, and there are no questions. I remember liking that idea, but not believing it one bit. Life is messy, I thought, so why would love be any different? He said that a perfect fit leaves no room for pain or uncertainty.

That chatroom buddy was M. These many years on, I know what he was talking about.

I am always astounded by what people put up with when it comes to loving another person. I think that sometimes we think we're sacrificing romance by being completely satisfied, like the pain of a relationship is the thing which stokes the fire. I admit that I sometimes found the arguments and the secret longings to be as gratifying as the intimacy and the affection. Looking back, though, I have to wonder if the disruption in the harmony was maybe part of what made the relationship(s) last as long as they did. The need to hold on, to make something out of nothing was a strange compulsion that I nurtured for all of my previous relationships. I knew, intuitively, that something was amiss in all of my romantic pairings, including the wonderful R., but I refused to stop working on things, because I believed that I needed them, that in some way I was more myself when I was paired with another person. In some ways, that still rings true, but the criteria has changed.

I complain about M. now and then, and when I do I always feel like it's important, but more often when I look back, I am able to see my faults in the arguments too. I can see M's flaws as well as my own, but they never shine brighter than his attributes, or the things in him that drew the love out of me. When I look back at my half-hearted friendship with the younger man, I can plainly see that I was attracted to him because he was handsome, and because he was attracted to me. Would it have ever amounted to anything? It's pretty clear that it wouldn't have. He was as lost as I was then, and we'd have never found our way together. I recently heard that he ended up marrying that girl, and I instantly recalled the day he emailed me after finding out that R. and I were done. He asked me if I'd go out to dinner with him, and I respectfully declined, privately feeling triumphant because I knew I hadn't been on my own in that crazy friendship after all. By then, I had become M's, and was proud to consider myself branded with him. It was the first time in my life that I seemed to enjoy the feeling of being 'owned', which is odd given that M. is the only man I've ever been with who didn't consider me a possession. Strange.

I've learned some things in my travels through love and lust. First of all, if my partner is doing something that hurts me on a spiritual, emotional or psychic level, then he shouldn't be doing it, and I have the right to tell him to stop. I get nothing out of waiting out his bad behaviour, because my silence only serves to condone it, which reinforces it and begs for an encore. If a man loves me, then that love will come through in his actions, not just his words. I will not share my man, ever, because it dismisses the exclusivity of the love between us, and true love, my dears, is exclusive. Some might argue about the benefits of open relationships or tolerating a second and sometimes third person in a partner's life, but to those people I say, it doesn't work. I state that in a very plain, black and white kind of way. If others are necessary, then you were never as important to them as they are to themselves. That's not true love. That's convenience. Now, having said this, I believe people are capable of change, but until that change comes around, I would remove myself from the situation. Life is too short to bear the strain of the repetitive stress of infidelity.

When I look back at the things I did, whether I admitted to myself what I was really doing or not, the fact that I disrespected someone who genuinely loved me is the hardest thing to accept. I hate that I could have made someone feel like that, and I would never do it again. I realized that the thing with my younger friend was an exercise in ego on my side, and I was not loving myself much when it began or when it ended, even if the middle felt okay. Now that I am beginning to like myself a little, I know that it would never amount to anything, turning my back on someone who loved and needed me genuinely. Bandaid fixes on gaping holes.

I hear friends bemoan the men in their lives, with their lack of focus and their incessant need to look at other women and I think to myself, why are you allowing yourself to be treated like that? If you say you don't love yourself, please shut up. It's too easy and quick an answer, and it's boring. I want to shake them and tell them that there are people on the planet who understand and respect the art of loving another. Everyone deserves to know that. Again, life is too short to allow all that pain to saturate us with respect to one person who didn't care enough to keep things pure. There are so many others, so many kinds of people who would be willing to do better.

It's funny that some women will go to great lengths to find the perfect fit in shoes, but they'll go too big or too small, or maybe just 'good enough', when it comes to giving their body and soul to another person. No self-respecting lady would ever tell herself that the shoe will eventually change. You give it a 'breaking in' period, sure, but if they still hurt you, you either toss them or leave them in the back of the closet to gather dust so you can go out and get a different pair. My thinking is that we need to get our personal standards in line, and begin to focus on the stuff that actually matters. There's no reason to lose ourselves in other people. If they love us, they wouldn't want us to do it, anyway. A perfect fit just feels so much better.

I love where I am right now, and I think it's mutual, but no matter what, I'd rather go barefoot than suffer ever again.