Falling in Love with Spiritual

I am not sure if this post is sexual and hence inappropriate or not sexual at all. It isn’t sexual to me. If it is sexual to you, then apologies. But there are things I am feeling compelled to talk. They are like giant bubbles rising up from my stomach and forcing their way out of my mouth. I may need to write a number of somewhat personal blog posts to get to the bottom of why I can’t stop talking about dicks. I don’t know where to begin, so I will just vomit up one little bubble about my life.

This is the story of how I fell in love with husband #1. Some of this has been shared before. So apologies for any repetition.

We will refer to this husband as Spiritual, because that was his name for part of the time I knew him. He goes by a different name now & this post is not intended to impact his reputation.

Spiritual was driving me to Michigan to attend a spiritual retreat. Spiritual was my spiritual guide, not my boyfriend. The eastern philosophies I was absorbing had taught me that obedience to a guru was the surest way to achieve enlightenment. God had contacted Spiritual and told him to be my guru. This seemed like a miracle, an answered prayer, since I had been praying for somebody to guide me.

Spiritual had made it clear that attending this retreat would be the key to getting rid of the ego. I had no idea what to expect. Getting in the car with a odd smelling male and going on an unknown retreat was not my cup of tea, but I had already accepted that the process of becoming enlightened was gonna suck. I was majoring in Tibetan buddhism & most of the stories of enlightenment involved eating shit, murdering people & doing all sorts of distasteful things. Crazy wisdom, they called it. But it was just the ego that found these things distasteful. Once you reached enlightenment, it was all worth it.

So we were speeding 80 mph down the highway in his van, when suddenly Spiritual said “There’s something we need to talk about…. THIS” and firmly grabbed my crotch, leaving his hand there. I froze. I tried to remember that it was just molecules touching molecules. It had no meaning. This is something I would tell myself when things were gross.

Then he pulled the car over to a rest stop. He said to get out of the car and stood there and said I needed to kiss him. I couldn’t do it. It’s like when you are trying to get yourself to eat a slug and you can’t. We stood there for the longest time. Finally he started screaming at me and I pecked him on the lips. We got back in the van.

We drove to his parents house. This was a shock to me, since I thought we were attending a spiritual retreat center. He introduced me as his girlfriend. I was confused. I thought he was my spiritual leader. I didn’t say anything. Then he went up to his parents room and lay on the floor naked. He said I needed to touch his whole body admiringly because he hadn’t been appreciated enough in his life. I did it.

Next, he said we needed to get married. Because he was Catholic and I had touched his naked body. (Catholicism had not come up before.) This idea repulsed me. I was still a teen and had no desire to be married, especially to him. So I agreed and started wearing his mother’s engagement ring.

As soon as we were engaged things changed instantaneously. He started yelling at me constantly. Making humiliating scenes every time we were out in public. He had yelled at me before (he called it giving me an ‘ego bat’), but now it was unrelenting. It never stopped. But still I fell in love with him. A cascade of molecules caused me to feel high when I touched his hand. I became very attached to him. Inseparable. It got to where I literally could not think a single thought without running it through him to see if it was true or false.

Technically him grabbing my crotch on the way to the spiritual retreat was not the first time we’d had physical contact.

After he became my spiritual guide, Spiritual told me that God had presented him with two choices. I must choose one or the other to stay on the path of enlightenment. Either ask my best male friend to “go down on me” or if I wouldn’t do that then Spiritual would need to perform the procedure.

This was far outside of my experiences and the thought of having to ask a male friend to do it would have been worse than eating a live heart. I would rather have killed myself. So I agreed that he would do it. On the appointed date he took me to a hotel room. I will spare you the details. But don’t worry- this is not an erotic story and it was not an erotic experience. I just lay there with most of my clothes on. I had had surgery on that part of my body as a kid and also many medical procedures. They hurt, but afterwards I got oatmeal cookies. This wasn’t too different. He stuck various things in me. I don’t remember what they all were. One was a blow pop. When I was a kid I would always get to choose a lollipop before the most painful procedures making them bittersweet.

He said he “came twice.” This didn’t have a precise meaning to me. He said it might be useful to touch other body parts. I said okay. That didn’t mean anything to me. I was just a bunch of molecules lying on a table on their way to achieving enlightenment. Afterwards I felt kind of relieved like how you feel when you are leaving the dentist office and are patting yourself on the back for being responsible. Poor Julien. What a doofus.

And not even that experience was unprecedented. It is just that I had this way of completely tuning out anything remotely sexual to the extent that it didn’t exist in my mind. I have told people before that I’ve never been hit on once in my life, but maybe it only seemed that way because my mind just wouldn’t process the sexual implications of any encounter regardless of how blatant they were.

Once for example, this guy kept putting my hand on his dick and I kept moving it off his dick. This didn’t register as sexual to me (despite being an adult), it just seemed like nonsensical behavior, as though someone was trying to touch my elbow with his nose. I didn’t want to touch the gross slimy slug but I didn’t see the male as sexually motivated.

So anyway, before I became his girlfriend or even his disciple, Spiritual insisted I hug him every time I saw him (which was not desired since he reeked of b.o.) and then he would sing this song, “You always give me a boner.” Then he would explain how he got a boner each time he hugged me. Obviously this should have been a warning sign as to what would happen if you got in a van with this guy. But I had changed a lot of diapers as a kid and babies sometimes had boners. So I just saw it in that light, not a sexual one.

And he would sometimes ask if I could remove undergarments so he could study their fabric due to his interest in fabrics. Luckily, I didn’t do that. If he had said it was necessary for spiritual reasons, I would have, but I didn’t want to do something icky just to increase his knowledge of textiles. He would also say weird things about how my br–sts seemed to be attached to my chest. I just filed this under molecules talking about molecules. Things that had no rhyme or reason. So many things in life, so many things people did, just seemed nonsensical to me. They had no explanation. Molecules talking about molecules.

And it worked both ways- I would frequently say and even act out sexually explicit things, like writing songs about rape that (in my mind) were songs about colors or turning in a giant picture of a dick for my final art project which in my mind was a picture of a tree. But this is a subject for another post.