Okay, this should be interesting....
It's being said that America is in a divorce mentality. Americans don't like Americans who hold different beliefs anymore. We can't seem to just agree to disagree and continue to be productive. One side is loathing the other. How exactly did that happen?
Partisan and for profit news, instant media, Internet, too much information finally coming out about the "other" side, and so on. Also, power plays, big money, greed and ignorance. Ignorance in the face of so much information people can't absorb it all or tell reality from lies any longer.
Progressives react against the extremes of ridiculous religious mentalities, conservative extremism, Republican fiscal ridiculousness, and so on.
Conservatives react against that response to them because they do not see themselves as defective in beliefs or actions. They are sick of being ignored. Even though so many of their beliefs should be ignored, or better, massaged into non existence and a better more useful way of viewing the world. While they mean well, they wonder why they are they held in such disdain? And so they react equally against that.
We're all equal, or supposed to be, so why do they not feel equal? First of all, if you hold a foolish view, you have set yourself up for that in the first place. And there are some progressives who do go too far into utter ridiculousness. But not overall.
If we need to follow one group or the other, regression and fear int he conservative mentality surely isn't the path to better living. A shark, as they say regarding a relationship, always needs to move forward, or it dies. Just like a country. Conservatives want to be that shark that refuses to move.
Progressives need not to loathe their "spouses" in the other side, but see them as the ignorant, dysfunctional, damaged goods stuck in ancient ways in this marriage they are joined to in perpetuity. The need not to hate their partners, but love them and exhibit understanding. Manage the relationship somehow into functionality. They obviously are moving too fast for conservatives who in their best of times, fear reality and the future, change and new and novel things.
Those on that other conservative side need also in a way, to do the same. Only they also really need to begin that long uphill road in seeing how they are viewing things... incorrectly. How they are steeped in unfounded and unsustainable realities as we move forward into a future that will not put up with their beliefs any longer without killing and damaging the planet and multiple economies.
Yes, I clearly see where that is all a contradiction, an unequal playing field, how each side sees the other as being wrong. Where one side is wrong to a degree, but the other side is wrong to a much larger degree. We need to be moving INTO THE FUTURE, not BACK INTO THE PAST. Not back to dysfunctional antiquity.
Bring back the coal industry? What the hell is wrong with your mind? Nothing? So it's just all about politics and money, greed and clutching unto death, old ways designed for a long past lifestyle? Oh, I see....
The bottom line is this, either way we need to get along and move forward, no matter how much conservatives keep wishing to weigh humanity down into a sticky pit of smelly old ways and sad, dysfunctional beliefs.
And yes. We need to keep this marriage working. Even if one side is delusional and unbalanced.
Showing posts with label divorce. Show all posts
Showing posts with label divorce. Show all posts
Friday, June 16, 2017
Monday, September 12, 2016
Personal Strength
Yesterday was 9/11. There were thoughts of pain, death, strength, power, terrorism, reflection on who we are as a nation, as a people. Life, is more complicated that most of us can handle. We tend to buffer it with emotions, drama, even lies. Some of us use conspiracies as a buffer. It takes strength, more than we have sometimes, to handle reality.
Life is far more complex than we can typically see. But that is on a larger scale basis. I tried to pull it down to the micro level, to the individual level. To the level of two people, of one person. About how we perceive strength, what it is, when it should be used, how it relates to our lives.
In order to evoke thought on this 9/11 and its fifteen year anniversary, just another attempt at pointing out a few of the dangers to America today, not in order of import (or contempt):
-Religious fundamentalism with a death slant to it.
-Conspiracy theorists who mostly don't know what they are talking about and have based theory on conjecture and agenda based partisan politics.
-Nation building as we have been attempting it.
-Attempting to spread democracy in tribal nations without a cohesive nation.
-Using military power where any other power would work better.
-Putin and Putin's view of Russia.
-Kim Jong Un, and his and his military handler's view of North Korea and its relation to the world.
-China's fear of North Korea and it's lack of acting.
-Donald Trump, his lies, immaturity, self important narcissism and ignorance.
-Hillary, IF she doesn't change up our direction and continues to use old paradigms in world and national politics.
-Political and extreme Conservatives and Evangelicals.
-Unclear understanding of reality in national and personal considerations.
-Old paradigm views on running America and its interactions with the world at large.
-Maintaining wars to allow otherwise unallowable issues to play out.
-War.
-Military, industrial, corporate complexes to rule over the needs of people.
-Poor education.
-Cyberterrorist by international gangs like ISIS and cyberwarfare attacks by nation states like Russia and China and maybe if not probably also, NK. But really, wouldn't it make more sense for Russia to lay blame on NK, while China would not for obvious reasons?
-Poor infrastructure.
-Ignorance. Ignorance supported as intellect and occult knowledge of what is unknowable.
-Giving a voice to those ignorants and old paradigm thinkers (including racists, misogynists and bigots) who should not have one on a national basis and have quite simply not kept up with the world in our psychological, sociological and technological advances.
-Forcing others to continually have to prove negatives on a national basis.
-Terrorism
I'm pretty open minded. I accepted people voting for Mitt Romney, and even miniBush.
But supporting Donald Trump simply makes a travesty of our election process and you really need to face up to that if you support him.
Hillary, is no reason, no excuse to vote instead for Trump. It just exhibits your ignorance more grandly.
Voting for Trump puts one in a similar category with words like grandiose, delusional and self important.
IF you can't vote for Hillary, I do get that. Though you're probably wrong there too but that's another topic. I mean, you may be right in not voting for Hillary but from what I've seen, it's probably for the wrong reasons and the incorrect priorities.
However, if you can't vote for Hillary and you can somehow come to your senses, though if you vote republican I really don't have high hopes anyway, then simply do not vote.
Cast your vote as many do in casting for a third party.
Vote your conscience. If you can't vote Hillary, then do not vote.
Someone just made that clear this past week.
That some people simply should not vote. We shouldn't force people, pushing them into voting. If they don't know what they are doing or if they think they do and yet they don't; if they are smart enough to know not to vote, perhaps they know what they are doing, perhaps we should leave them alone.
For all the rest of us, vote sane, at the very least.
You know, the original intent of the Founding Fathers was NOT to allow everyone to vote anyway. Just those who could vote intelligently, with informed consideration, with a standing for and with the needs of the country and not simply for needs for themselves, but with a true and honest consideration for themselves and therefore...all of us.
I'd like to move beyond 9/11 today though. I want to move closer to home to each of us. From an international, from an national, to a personal level. From world or national strength, to interpersonal and personal strength and what that really is.
I realized something about strength today.
I was watching Woody Allen's film, Manhattan. There a scene, after he was with Mary after he had been with Tracy, after Mary had been with Yale, while he was married to Connie, after the divorce of Isaac (Allen) who was now with, as I said, Mary. Yale calls her, in the next room from Isaac.
Life can be in reality, hidden behind the scenes, out of our sight, complicated. It's one of the things Allen basis his films on, pokes fun at, brings up in various lights and tries to make us realize, life is not black and white. We tend to categorize things as good or bad but in reality, it is a very grey kind of thing. You see something bad, but in shifting focus sometimes, just a little, it becomes humorous, or understanding, even... noble.
Yes, some things are just bad, just pure evil. However much of what we label as such, simply isn't due to ignorance or a lack of understanding, if not simply of maturity.
It occurs to me, and I'm single now, but a while back I was married, married to someone I thought to be a very attractive woman. Attractive overall, not only in looks. Before I had met her, I was trying to get another job. After a divorce. And I found one. But the woman who interviewed me for the job, an attractive woman in her early 30s, from the beginning was extremely attracted to me.
I got the job. Eighteen months later I quit that job, at that point, with a new wife, the attractive woman I mentioned. I then contracted for some years (as a Senior Technical Writer). I ended up eventually at the company I've been now working at for twenty years.
During that first year or so, the women who had previously hired me elsewhere (the UW), was working then for a contract employment agency. We had both left the University of Washington where I had worked for seven and a half years, the final eighteen months for the department the woman had hired me for.
I was going through more than one contract agency and so wanted to give her my business as we had been friends and coworkers. Kind of like, we were family. When I had heard what she was doing, that she also had left the US, I looked her up. Then after talking with her, I signed up with her at her new agency.
See, I had accepted a job (where I still work for twenty-one years now at this point) because I had to, in the hope that I wouldn't work again for a large company. The new company was a thirty person company, but a subsidiary of a much larger company, which I had wanted to avoid after working for US West Technologies, a thirteen state company at that time in the 1990s.
The potential that I might find exactly what I wanted, was alluring. To exemplify my worry, I said I'd accept the job at the thirty person company as long as they guaranteed I would never work for the larger company, and because I had been out of work for five and a half months and we really needed the money. I had a family to support, a wife and two kids.
One day this woman called me to ask me to lunch. Nothing unusual there, I was used to agents taking me to lunch to woo me to a new job or consideration, and them picking up the tab. And she was female and attractive. I was married then and was not looking for anything outside of my marriage, but would you rather go to lunch with an ugly person who was interesting and funny, or an attractive woman who was? So I went, innocently.
We went to a nice restaurant near to my work at Von's ("Best martinis in town"). We had lunch. It was tasty, as usual. Then she hit me with it, taking me totally by surprise. Her husband was a real hot mess. He had gotten into drugs, he had robbed a store, gotten caught, ended up in prison for a couple of years or so.
She had her needs, she had her fantasy about me all these years and she had her proposal. We could have an affair while her husband was gone. I could have her. It would never affect my marriage, she wanted no more, just compassion, a friend with benefits, a friend. Someone to help her through those next two years. Would I consider, she wanted to know, that kind of a situation. I was still at that point in my marriage where I was completely satisfied at home.
Something that changed radically only a few years later as I entered into a nightmare of a marriage. One where only a decade or so later I realized there were serious surreptitious mental and emotional problems on my wife's side, potential for her having had affairs while she was away for weeks on her job. One beyond most people's imaginings. One that could easily make a MOW, a "Movie of the Week" type of heart wrenching type of a film.
What I realized today, while watching the film, Manhattan, was this... I should have turned her down as I did. But perhaps I should have had the strength to give her a good, deep kiss and then, let her go, forever. To release her from her fantasy about me, but give her that taste of what the imagination had been desiring so that from then on she'd have had a feel for the reality and thus, somewhat temper her imagination and desires. At very least, she'd have something based upon what could have been.
Considering after that day that I never saw nor heard from her again, I now feel some regret. Though at the time I would have felt betrayal to my wife whom I loved and lusted after very much, Lust appropriately place. I now feel if I were as strong an individual as I believed I always have been, then I should have said goodbye, given her that final gift, that present from one friend to another, on our parting forever, between two who could have been, and yet, never will be.
That is what I realized today when I paused the film, Manhattan, and thought about all this, realizing, I needed to write it all down and share it.
Still, I had to consider it all first.
What IF I had kissed her and after all, why DIDN'T I?
It's obvious, I suppose.
Was I THAT strong in denying her? Was I just immature? Would I have gone off with her, to have had an affair as she desired?
You know in hindsight, the affair would have been okay, possibly. Sometimes in doing what is wrong, you speed up the demise of something that will die, you save everyone pain, you save yourself grief, but you may also cause yourself the pain of knowing to thine own self not true.
My marriage in the end didn't work out. I have reason now to see how much I deserved al lot more compassion and affection than I got through much of that final marriage in my life to date. Perhaps I was the only strong one in denying another an affair with me. I was true to myself though, in not having that affair.
Had I not been married, had she not, I would most surely have had a relationship with that woman. No doubt in my mind. But I had a rule not to involve myself with those who were attached to others. Or when I was attached. I have higher standards than that. There are so many single people why would you ever get involved with someone with a potential for excessive drama?
Still, that's all not the point here.
The point is... reality. Just what IS, reality?
Life is far more complex than we can typically see. But that is on a larger scale basis. I tried to pull it down to the micro level, to the individual level. To the level of two people, of one person. About how we perceive strength, what it is, when it should be used, how it relates to our lives.
In order to evoke thought on this 9/11 and its fifteen year anniversary, just another attempt at pointing out a few of the dangers to America today, not in order of import (or contempt):
-Religious fundamentalism with a death slant to it.
-Conspiracy theorists who mostly don't know what they are talking about and have based theory on conjecture and agenda based partisan politics.
-Nation building as we have been attempting it.
-Attempting to spread democracy in tribal nations without a cohesive nation.
-Using military power where any other power would work better.
-Putin and Putin's view of Russia.
-Kim Jong Un, and his and his military handler's view of North Korea and its relation to the world.
-China's fear of North Korea and it's lack of acting.
-Donald Trump, his lies, immaturity, self important narcissism and ignorance.
-Hillary, IF she doesn't change up our direction and continues to use old paradigms in world and national politics.
-Political and extreme Conservatives and Evangelicals.
-Unclear understanding of reality in national and personal considerations.
-Old paradigm views on running America and its interactions with the world at large.
-Maintaining wars to allow otherwise unallowable issues to play out.
-War.
-Military, industrial, corporate complexes to rule over the needs of people.
-Poor education.
-Cyberterrorist by international gangs like ISIS and cyberwarfare attacks by nation states like Russia and China and maybe if not probably also, NK. But really, wouldn't it make more sense for Russia to lay blame on NK, while China would not for obvious reasons?
-Poor infrastructure.
-Ignorance. Ignorance supported as intellect and occult knowledge of what is unknowable.
-Giving a voice to those ignorants and old paradigm thinkers (including racists, misogynists and bigots) who should not have one on a national basis and have quite simply not kept up with the world in our psychological, sociological and technological advances.
-Forcing others to continually have to prove negatives on a national basis.
-Terrorism
I'm pretty open minded. I accepted people voting for Mitt Romney, and even miniBush.
But supporting Donald Trump simply makes a travesty of our election process and you really need to face up to that if you support him.
Hillary, is no reason, no excuse to vote instead for Trump. It just exhibits your ignorance more grandly.
Voting for Trump puts one in a similar category with words like grandiose, delusional and self important.
IF you can't vote for Hillary, I do get that. Though you're probably wrong there too but that's another topic. I mean, you may be right in not voting for Hillary but from what I've seen, it's probably for the wrong reasons and the incorrect priorities.
However, if you can't vote for Hillary and you can somehow come to your senses, though if you vote republican I really don't have high hopes anyway, then simply do not vote.
Cast your vote as many do in casting for a third party.
Vote your conscience. If you can't vote Hillary, then do not vote.
Someone just made that clear this past week.
That some people simply should not vote. We shouldn't force people, pushing them into voting. If they don't know what they are doing or if they think they do and yet they don't; if they are smart enough to know not to vote, perhaps they know what they are doing, perhaps we should leave them alone.
For all the rest of us, vote sane, at the very least.
You know, the original intent of the Founding Fathers was NOT to allow everyone to vote anyway. Just those who could vote intelligently, with informed consideration, with a standing for and with the needs of the country and not simply for needs for themselves, but with a true and honest consideration for themselves and therefore...all of us.
I'd like to move beyond 9/11 today though. I want to move closer to home to each of us. From an international, from an national, to a personal level. From world or national strength, to interpersonal and personal strength and what that really is.
I realized something about strength today.
I was watching Woody Allen's film, Manhattan. There a scene, after he was with Mary after he had been with Tracy, after Mary had been with Yale, while he was married to Connie, after the divorce of Isaac (Allen) who was now with, as I said, Mary. Yale calls her, in the next room from Isaac.
Life can be in reality, hidden behind the scenes, out of our sight, complicated. It's one of the things Allen basis his films on, pokes fun at, brings up in various lights and tries to make us realize, life is not black and white. We tend to categorize things as good or bad but in reality, it is a very grey kind of thing. You see something bad, but in shifting focus sometimes, just a little, it becomes humorous, or understanding, even... noble.
Yes, some things are just bad, just pure evil. However much of what we label as such, simply isn't due to ignorance or a lack of understanding, if not simply of maturity.
It occurs to me, and I'm single now, but a while back I was married, married to someone I thought to be a very attractive woman. Attractive overall, not only in looks. Before I had met her, I was trying to get another job. After a divorce. And I found one. But the woman who interviewed me for the job, an attractive woman in her early 30s, from the beginning was extremely attracted to me.
I got the job. Eighteen months later I quit that job, at that point, with a new wife, the attractive woman I mentioned. I then contracted for some years (as a Senior Technical Writer). I ended up eventually at the company I've been now working at for twenty years.
During that first year or so, the women who had previously hired me elsewhere (the UW), was working then for a contract employment agency. We had both left the University of Washington where I had worked for seven and a half years, the final eighteen months for the department the woman had hired me for.
I was going through more than one contract agency and so wanted to give her my business as we had been friends and coworkers. Kind of like, we were family. When I had heard what she was doing, that she also had left the US, I looked her up. Then after talking with her, I signed up with her at her new agency.
See, I had accepted a job (where I still work for twenty-one years now at this point) because I had to, in the hope that I wouldn't work again for a large company. The new company was a thirty person company, but a subsidiary of a much larger company, which I had wanted to avoid after working for US West Technologies, a thirteen state company at that time in the 1990s.
The potential that I might find exactly what I wanted, was alluring. To exemplify my worry, I said I'd accept the job at the thirty person company as long as they guaranteed I would never work for the larger company, and because I had been out of work for five and a half months and we really needed the money. I had a family to support, a wife and two kids.
One day this woman called me to ask me to lunch. Nothing unusual there, I was used to agents taking me to lunch to woo me to a new job or consideration, and them picking up the tab. And she was female and attractive. I was married then and was not looking for anything outside of my marriage, but would you rather go to lunch with an ugly person who was interesting and funny, or an attractive woman who was? So I went, innocently.
We went to a nice restaurant near to my work at Von's ("Best martinis in town"). We had lunch. It was tasty, as usual. Then she hit me with it, taking me totally by surprise. Her husband was a real hot mess. He had gotten into drugs, he had robbed a store, gotten caught, ended up in prison for a couple of years or so.
She had her needs, she had her fantasy about me all these years and she had her proposal. We could have an affair while her husband was gone. I could have her. It would never affect my marriage, she wanted no more, just compassion, a friend with benefits, a friend. Someone to help her through those next two years. Would I consider, she wanted to know, that kind of a situation. I was still at that point in my marriage where I was completely satisfied at home.
Something that changed radically only a few years later as I entered into a nightmare of a marriage. One where only a decade or so later I realized there were serious surreptitious mental and emotional problems on my wife's side, potential for her having had affairs while she was away for weeks on her job. One beyond most people's imaginings. One that could easily make a MOW, a "Movie of the Week" type of heart wrenching type of a film.
What I realized today, while watching the film, Manhattan, was this... I should have turned her down as I did. But perhaps I should have had the strength to give her a good, deep kiss and then, let her go, forever. To release her from her fantasy about me, but give her that taste of what the imagination had been desiring so that from then on she'd have had a feel for the reality and thus, somewhat temper her imagination and desires. At very least, she'd have something based upon what could have been.
Considering after that day that I never saw nor heard from her again, I now feel some regret. Though at the time I would have felt betrayal to my wife whom I loved and lusted after very much, Lust appropriately place. I now feel if I were as strong an individual as I believed I always have been, then I should have said goodbye, given her that final gift, that present from one friend to another, on our parting forever, between two who could have been, and yet, never will be.
That is what I realized today when I paused the film, Manhattan, and thought about all this, realizing, I needed to write it all down and share it.
Still, I had to consider it all first.
What IF I had kissed her and after all, why DIDN'T I?
It's obvious, I suppose.
Was I THAT strong in denying her? Was I just immature? Would I have gone off with her, to have had an affair as she desired?
You know in hindsight, the affair would have been okay, possibly. Sometimes in doing what is wrong, you speed up the demise of something that will die, you save everyone pain, you save yourself grief, but you may also cause yourself the pain of knowing to thine own self not true.
My marriage in the end didn't work out. I have reason now to see how much I deserved al lot more compassion and affection than I got through much of that final marriage in my life to date. Perhaps I was the only strong one in denying another an affair with me. I was true to myself though, in not having that affair.
Had I not been married, had she not, I would most surely have had a relationship with that woman. No doubt in my mind. But I had a rule not to involve myself with those who were attached to others. Or when I was attached. I have higher standards than that. There are so many single people why would you ever get involved with someone with a potential for excessive drama?
Still, that's all not the point here.
The point is... reality. Just what IS, reality?
Monday, October 14, 2013
I am...a Murderer
I am a murderer. It dawned on me the other day. Murderer.
It's my fault and that makes it thus: I murdered. Kind of by definition.
First let me say when I was younger, I used to blame other people, other things for my difficulties in life. Mostly my parents. And rightly so, as they really screwed things up, and me. But they also gave me things, like genetics and an orientation in life to survive, to succeed. Mostly though I owe my Grandmother, my mother's mother. But still, I moved out of my parent's house (mother and not very well liked step-father from since I was five, in either direction) at seventeen with a chip on my shoulder. Eventually I joined the USAF at twenty. Life was going no where for me and I thought this might turn things around. It did in a way, it didn't, in another way.
Eventually though after the military, during my University years toward getting a degree in Psychology and while working things out with my primary Psych Professor and Adviser, I came to realize that I needed to take responsibility for myself. Actually it was that Prof. who shoved that one down my throat until I finally understood and began to get it. Finally I realized that after I moved out of my parent's house, whatever was wrong or right with me became fully my own responsibility, to blame or to praise. And that was perhaps the biggest revelation in my life. It turned my life around. Failures started to turn into successes. Though I'll have to admit a nod to my mother and her mother for my persistence is surviving nearly anything. A troubled childhood, a difficult adolescence, a difficult decade in my twenties that didn't really stop there. Why? Because the paradigm I had grown up with, was faulty. But that is another story for another time.
So what's this about murder?
My first wife and I ended it on good terms. I was in the end, probably just too young to get married at twenty years of age. But that was only the beginning.
See, I have married three and a half times so far, in my life.
My second (non-wife as we were together long enough at around six years, but we never married) went through our college years with me, before and for a little while after. But that was just never to be in the end. I seem to find relationships end at seminal moments. Like when I got out of the USAF. And when my University years were over. Then things changed.
Divorcing the first time had traumatized me and I never wanted to do that to another. Regardless of whose fault it was. That first time had been my desire to marry and later my desire to divorce since it had just stopped working. It wasn't my fault, it wasn't her fault, it was our fault. But my second long term relationship was doomed to failure.
My (legally) second wife said she had really wanted me from the start, no matter what, from the time she first saw me, she later said she was going to have me. I on the other hand, wasn't interested. Not so much because of her, but because I had recently been run through the wringer after my University years and the preceding military years and by this time I had really had it with romantic relationships.
From the TV show, "Elementary", words spoken by the modern times, Sherlock Holmes character:
"I've lived most of my life with the firm conviction that romantic love is a delusion. It's a futile hedge against the existential terror that is our own singularity."
He then goes on to say that he then went on to meet a woman he fell in love with, who turned out to be, a criminal, the modern day, Moriarty. To which he said he now feels, liberated on the topic.
So I was taking a break when my second wife found me. Still, she put her mind to getting me in any way she could. And testament to perseverance and desire, she got me.
My third wife, loved me a lot. I loved her a lot. But in the end, she loves herself more than anyone. Still, in her universe, I had murdered...us.
See I didn't live up to her expectations of me. I didn't fulfill the concept, of who she thought I was. I broke her view of who I seemed to be and so in the end, I killed that view she held of me. It wasn't very long after, that the marriage ended, and well, I had murdered it.
I murdered it for my last wife, my next to the last wife, my unwife (the point five wife, as we had lived together a long enough for common law though we don't have that in Washington state, but I figured she earned, deserved, at least a half listing as a wife).
But still, I am a murderer.
I murdered my marriages. I murdered another's self delusions and misinterpretations of who I was. Who I was supposed to be, to them. Who they needed me to be. Was that their fault? Was it mine? Was it my responsibility to live up to who they expected me to be, even if I didn't fully know, or realize who that person was? Maybe.
Because when you take on another person as your responsibility, and when you marry, you are, isn't it at least somewhat your responsibility too? Isn't that the reason to be really damn sure of what you are getting into when you marry? Maybe that is why so many are choosing now a days not to marry but to simply live together.
So in a way I had murdered. I had murdered multiple times, multiple relationships.
Perhaps if I had known more fully who I was but more importantly almost, who others perceived me to be, and specifically who I was perceived to be by the women in my life, perhaps then I could say that I was responsible and had lived up to those expectations.
Because mostly, and this is the weird part, I was who those women thought I was. But not in the way they thought I was. Mostly from what I could later deduce, they saw things, saw me, in black and white. And I see things in various shades of grey.
My last wife actually stated it in those words, saying: "Life IS black and white." to which I responded, "No, no it isn't. Life is various shades of grey. Life is complicated. It's easier to live life as if it were black and white, but that is missing so much of what is going on. It is missing making the best decisions possible. It is setting yourself up for failure in the future. It is a temporary fix seeing things as black and white, an easy effort to come to a quick conclusion for something that may work for now, but in the future will turn on you and ruin your plans."
Okay, I didn't say all that. I just said I disagreed and that I saw things as various shades of grey.
My point?
I have been taking time off from relationships for a while. Trying to see who I was, what I was doing. So that next time, if there is a next time, I will chose more correctly. I will have more to bring to the relationship rather than needing someone to "complete me". One of the stupidest things to think a relationship will do for you. First, you need to bring a whole person to the relationship, to add to it, not take away from it to "complete you". That, is just a drain on the relationship doomed to failure.
Next time I decide to enter into a relationship, I will take my time on who I choose to spend my time with and who I allow to spend their time with me so as not to waste their valuable life time. Because their decision is in part my decision too. I will use a different set of criteria for making these decisions. I will give more weight to what they need and if they are looking for me to "complete them". Because if they are, I'm running the other way.
Actually, I will politely beg off and walk away with my (and their) dignity still attached.
And because, I don't want to be a murderer anymore.
It's my fault and that makes it thus: I murdered. Kind of by definition.
First let me say when I was younger, I used to blame other people, other things for my difficulties in life. Mostly my parents. And rightly so, as they really screwed things up, and me. But they also gave me things, like genetics and an orientation in life to survive, to succeed. Mostly though I owe my Grandmother, my mother's mother. But still, I moved out of my parent's house (mother and not very well liked step-father from since I was five, in either direction) at seventeen with a chip on my shoulder. Eventually I joined the USAF at twenty. Life was going no where for me and I thought this might turn things around. It did in a way, it didn't, in another way.
Eventually though after the military, during my University years toward getting a degree in Psychology and while working things out with my primary Psych Professor and Adviser, I came to realize that I needed to take responsibility for myself. Actually it was that Prof. who shoved that one down my throat until I finally understood and began to get it. Finally I realized that after I moved out of my parent's house, whatever was wrong or right with me became fully my own responsibility, to blame or to praise. And that was perhaps the biggest revelation in my life. It turned my life around. Failures started to turn into successes. Though I'll have to admit a nod to my mother and her mother for my persistence is surviving nearly anything. A troubled childhood, a difficult adolescence, a difficult decade in my twenties that didn't really stop there. Why? Because the paradigm I had grown up with, was faulty. But that is another story for another time.
So what's this about murder?
My first wife and I ended it on good terms. I was in the end, probably just too young to get married at twenty years of age. But that was only the beginning.
See, I have married three and a half times so far, in my life.
My second (non-wife as we were together long enough at around six years, but we never married) went through our college years with me, before and for a little while after. But that was just never to be in the end. I seem to find relationships end at seminal moments. Like when I got out of the USAF. And when my University years were over. Then things changed.
Divorcing the first time had traumatized me and I never wanted to do that to another. Regardless of whose fault it was. That first time had been my desire to marry and later my desire to divorce since it had just stopped working. It wasn't my fault, it wasn't her fault, it was our fault. But my second long term relationship was doomed to failure.
My (legally) second wife said she had really wanted me from the start, no matter what, from the time she first saw me, she later said she was going to have me. I on the other hand, wasn't interested. Not so much because of her, but because I had recently been run through the wringer after my University years and the preceding military years and by this time I had really had it with romantic relationships.
From the TV show, "Elementary", words spoken by the modern times, Sherlock Holmes character:
"I've lived most of my life with the firm conviction that romantic love is a delusion. It's a futile hedge against the existential terror that is our own singularity."
He then goes on to say that he then went on to meet a woman he fell in love with, who turned out to be, a criminal, the modern day, Moriarty. To which he said he now feels, liberated on the topic.
So I was taking a break when my second wife found me. Still, she put her mind to getting me in any way she could. And testament to perseverance and desire, she got me.
My third wife, loved me a lot. I loved her a lot. But in the end, she loves herself more than anyone. Still, in her universe, I had murdered...us.
See I didn't live up to her expectations of me. I didn't fulfill the concept, of who she thought I was. I broke her view of who I seemed to be and so in the end, I killed that view she held of me. It wasn't very long after, that the marriage ended, and well, I had murdered it.
I murdered it for my last wife, my next to the last wife, my unwife (the point five wife, as we had lived together a long enough for common law though we don't have that in Washington state, but I figured she earned, deserved, at least a half listing as a wife).
But still, I am a murderer.
I murdered my marriages. I murdered another's self delusions and misinterpretations of who I was. Who I was supposed to be, to them. Who they needed me to be. Was that their fault? Was it mine? Was it my responsibility to live up to who they expected me to be, even if I didn't fully know, or realize who that person was? Maybe.
Because when you take on another person as your responsibility, and when you marry, you are, isn't it at least somewhat your responsibility too? Isn't that the reason to be really damn sure of what you are getting into when you marry? Maybe that is why so many are choosing now a days not to marry but to simply live together.
So in a way I had murdered. I had murdered multiple times, multiple relationships.
Perhaps if I had known more fully who I was but more importantly almost, who others perceived me to be, and specifically who I was perceived to be by the women in my life, perhaps then I could say that I was responsible and had lived up to those expectations.
Because mostly, and this is the weird part, I was who those women thought I was. But not in the way they thought I was. Mostly from what I could later deduce, they saw things, saw me, in black and white. And I see things in various shades of grey.
My last wife actually stated it in those words, saying: "Life IS black and white." to which I responded, "No, no it isn't. Life is various shades of grey. Life is complicated. It's easier to live life as if it were black and white, but that is missing so much of what is going on. It is missing making the best decisions possible. It is setting yourself up for failure in the future. It is a temporary fix seeing things as black and white, an easy effort to come to a quick conclusion for something that may work for now, but in the future will turn on you and ruin your plans."
Okay, I didn't say all that. I just said I disagreed and that I saw things as various shades of grey.
My point?
I have been taking time off from relationships for a while. Trying to see who I was, what I was doing. So that next time, if there is a next time, I will chose more correctly. I will have more to bring to the relationship rather than needing someone to "complete me". One of the stupidest things to think a relationship will do for you. First, you need to bring a whole person to the relationship, to add to it, not take away from it to "complete you". That, is just a drain on the relationship doomed to failure.
Next time I decide to enter into a relationship, I will take my time on who I choose to spend my time with and who I allow to spend their time with me so as not to waste their valuable life time. Because their decision is in part my decision too. I will use a different set of criteria for making these decisions. I will give more weight to what they need and if they are looking for me to "complete them". Because if they are, I'm running the other way.
Actually, I will politely beg off and walk away with my (and their) dignity still attached.
And because, I don't want to be a murderer anymore.
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