Tag: husbands and wives
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I am a Good Wife
Conventional wisdom always encourages people to be vulnerable, open & honest. But I struggle with the reverse- the feeling that it isn’t okay to withhold & keep thoughts to myself.
Especially in marriage. James wants me to tell him everything & says it is damaging if I don’t. Which is great in theory, since I have the desire to share all my thoughts & feelings. But in reality it doesn’t work out so well. Frequently he will get angry about my thoughts or tell me why they are incorrect & then I am forced to go through an endless wrangling process trying to defend them. The process is confusing & doesn’t end until I have either accepted his replacement thoughts or am too tangled up to function anymore.
Now to someone else this might be no problem. They would just share what they wanted to share and keep the rest to themselves. But I have this compulsive feeling that my perceptions must be validated by another person before I can trust them. I can hardly be certain the sky is blue without first asking someone. And I also have this compulsive feeling that I must obey James. I can’t withhold information unless he gives me permission to do so, regardless of how much confusion & discomfort sharing may cause. Basically I don’t trust my own mind & have no will of my own.
I guess this traces back to when I was a teenager & my first husband was my spiritual guide & I needed to tell him absolutely everything so he could remove my ego, realign my thinking & enable me to achieve enlightenment. The process involved lots of screaming & public humiliation, including sexual, since these are the most tried & true methods of ego removal. Since then, I have never been able to regain that feeling of trusting my own mind and feeling that I am my own master. I don’t even know how to explain it to people who take having their own mind and will for granted.
I am trying very hard to put these boundaries back in place but it is a struggle. I don’t feel I have the right to make choices for myself without asking someone else’s permission and am scared of what will happen if I do.
My husband likes control. I don’t mean this as a bad thing and maybe it is even a quality I admire. But one rule of our relationship is that he is allowed to make decisions while I am not. He can decide what to do with money- and spend enormous sums- without consulting me. I cannot access money without consulting him and telling him what I wish to buy. The flip side is that he is much more financially generous with me than he is with himself. Generally he will get me whatever I want- even if it is frivolous or wasteful- while being stingy with himself. And this same pattern applies to all aspects of our relationships. If I want something & it is within his power to give it to me, he probably will. But I am not allowed to make decisions without consulting him, whereas he is allowed to make decisions without consulting me.
I am supposed to trust him. But he isn’t supposed to trust me. I am deemed incapable of making any significant decisions even if they impact no one but myself. As an example, I want to see a shrink & there is one nearby I can see for free. Not because I am looking for guidance, I just want the experience of talking to a human without feeling it is such a struggle to get my thoughts out and have them heard and accepted. I just want to experience something new- the feeling of noncombative communication.
But James is against this. So what are my choices? Try to change his mind? Trying to convince James of anything is impossible. The certain outcome is that I will end up adopting his perspectives because anything else becomes too unpleasant. I could go behind his back, but that would violate my compulsive need to be transparent with him. So the only real option is to tell myself it isn’t a good idea anyway.
The official justification for obeying him is that he is more grounded than me and makes better choices. (I should add here that I am sometimes allowed to make choices- it is just that he decides which choices I am or am not allowed to make.) But the truth is I am just scared of what will happen if I don’t obey him. I am afraid he will find a way of punishing me or else stop loving me which is a punishment itself. Any time I attempt to assert my will it turns into a horrible fight from which it can take me a long time to recover.
I feel like everyone reading this will think either A) Holy shit you are a dumbass or B) Wow, what a horrible wife writing something which could cast her husband in a bad light.
And I have no defense against being a dumbass. I am a fucking dumbass and I live this every day. But I am not a bad wife.
The other day I told James I was suffering from having no one to talk to, that I couldn’t be real with anyone or even on my blog. He said, “Why not? You can write whatever you want.” I said, ” Well I’m worried that you won’t like it.” He said “Just try it and find out- it will be fine. You’ll see. Trust me.”
So I am trying it. And trusting him. Just like he told me to do. I am a good wife.
Husband 1, in a past life, belonged to a race known as the Wise Ones. Wise Ones lived in lavish castles. They did not work. The vibration of their souls attracted great wealth to them. When Wise Ones incarnate on the earth plane however, they struggle to survive without the riches their soul is accustomed to. This can lead to depression and even heart failure.
Sometimes husband would lie on the floor with his hands on his chest, struggling to breath, too heavy for this world. The only thing that could save him was millions of dollars.
It seemed unlikely he could earn the money himself. Years of job aptitude tests had uncovered only two potential career options- wine tasting & boob feeling. I tried to find him a job in the boob feeling industry but massage therapy was too demanding. He got a job in a wine store but they only paid minimum wage.
I painted, wrote songs & made a little money but not enough to support us much less give him the lifestyle he deserved. Then he read a book on channeling and decided that I could channel information on how we could manifest millions of dollars straight from the ethers.
I didn’t feel great about this. Becoming a hollow tube for other beings to speak through wasn’t my cup of tea and I didn’t think I could do it anyway. But he needed millions of dollars within the next few months and I didn’t have a better idea.
So…. to make a long story short, I channeled that we should rename our apartment Archimedian Estates and paint everything inside it pink, gold & black. And we needed to fill it with 100 species of plants & a pet from each animal kingdom. This would make us millionaires.
A couple months later, the whole place was pink, black and gold. We had 26 plants, one snake, two birds, a fish and an eviction notice. Far from being millionaires, husband was now hitting up my friends and family for money- a humiliating fate. We separated then. I felt maybe, just maybe, I could eke out an existence alone, but there was no way in hell I could support a Wise One. They need all of life’s finest things just to survive.
The world was harder than I imagined though and a year later we were back together. The need for channeling picked up. Could I channel Mary, Archangel Michael, the Moon, the spirit of Fame? It made my head feel weird. But if I objected he would say “Hang on- I need to ask Auriel about this!” He yelled at me constantly but never at the other beings. Sometimes I would switch into them just as a safe spot.
Channeling snowballed fast. Before long Julien had been pushed out altogether and replaced by an ever growing cast of characters. It was no longer about channeling advice either. Now it was about him connecting to different women who were his wives and all these different humanoids who were his children.
His children included 5 giants- Brownie, Big Stuff, Ned, Ted & Fred. 1,000 genies called ‘the Hectors.’ And various others such as Sweet Cookie, Shelley, Fufu, Hunkdehunk, Sweetsie & Cherry Lemonade Spritz.
His wives are harder to remember but included Clementine, Ambrosia, Auriel & Earth. He would have sex with them. In general he preferred a different type of female than me- the Strong Business Woman. His wives were closer to this ideal. They even had different bodies.
I don’t know how long the period lasted in which I was continuously other people. Maybe 5 years. During this time husband got a job at Target. I would stay home reading books on magic & trying to do impossible things. Home was various places, like motels in the middle of deserts. Basements on the outskirts of Brooklyn.
I no longer ate normal food but subsisted on weird things like Chuckles & Jello. I liked these foods because they resembled the jell loafs Auriel ate in her world. I didn’t have normal clothes either. At one point the only thing I had to wear was a little girl’s cheerleading skirt he brought me home from Target & a teddy bear sweater (a sweater made for a teddy bear) which I wore as a hat.
Sometimes I would write songs but mostly I was plagued by weird fears, like my legs falling off. Unresolvable mental dilemmas would torture me for days like whether my soul smelled more like rose or ylang ylang. I would prank call people or send them weird letters & they would think I was scary.
I knew I had fallen out of step with society & felt ashamed but couldn’t find my way back. The only person I spoke with was my husband but he didn’t speak to me, just through me to his wives and children. I could no longer choose to not channel them since that would mean separating a man from his entire family, an inhumane act by any standards. They seemed to bring him joy.
And to this day I struggle with dissociative identity disorder. Maybe. But I don’t know if this is related to the time I spent being other people or not.
The End
Categories
Submission
Here is my feeling on submitting to your husband- it is inevitable. Wills are made of iron & men have more iron than women.
Still, it annoys me when submission is made into a moral accomplishment. Is falling down the stairs an accomplishment? What about riding down a mountain in a grocery cart? I don’t see anything particularly noble about yielding to someone else. It is more a practical choice.
I don’t like it to be sugar coated either. The happy submissive wife holding a tray of cookies. In real life, submission is an extreme sport. Like surfing. Giant waves come at you and there is nothing you can do to change them, just learn how to not get knocked down. Maybe there is value in living that way.
I recently read the autobiography of Bin Laden’s wife and couldn’t believe how much her life resembled mine. She must follow her husband around and not ask questions. When he comes he comes, when he goes he goes. Things blow up and she isn’t supposed to cry. He moves her to a frozen mountain top with no water or electricity and she doesn’t complain. Only once does she make a request from him- that he spend more time with his boys. He complies by encouraging them to become suicide bombers.
What resonates with me most about all this is that conservative propaganda leads people to believe you submit to your husband in exchange for security. False! There is little security in it. For Bin Laden’s wife, machine guns, bombs & grenades were everywhere. Even if your husband doesn’t lead a militia, full dependence puts you in a precarious position. If he leaves you or you leave him, you are doomed. Yet the odds are over 50% this will happen. If he goes insane you are also doomed. The odds are probably high for this as well. I recently took a poll of women asking what percentage of men- that they have known behind closed doors- were decent & the response averaged out to around 5%. So the probability of dependency meaning security plus home sweet home cookie platters is somewhere around 2%*. And you have little control over whether you end up in this 2% or not. From what I can tell, men are like movies. We can watch them but not impact what happens on the screen. Following a man’s will is not for the faint of heart.
Men seem to think women are obsessed with empowerment and proving they can do what a man can do. But I don’t know any women like this. So called “empowerment” usually serves the more humble purpose of not dying & ensuring your kids survive as well. I imagine most women would prefer decorating cookies for their loving husband to working in a sausage factory making ends meet. They just aren’t in the mood to play russian roulette when the odds are 98% not in their favor.
And it is really really hard to be both the empowered woman and the not-empowered woman at the same time. To devote oneself to home, wife & motherhood while also having a high-powered law career to fall back on.
There are definitely advantages to being a traditional obedient wife. You lose one type of freedom but gain another. The freedom of not having the spend the majority of your energy making a living. This allows you to devote yourself to what you find most meaningful. Maybe you will raise kids. Maybe you will learn to fly. I don’t think being a submissive/dependent wife is a bad option. But it troubles me that the cultural forces which promote it are the same one’s unwilling to acknowledge its true risks & challenges. Conservatives say things like “ a woman can’t be abused unless she wants to cause otherwise she would leave.” Well, how do they figure that? How does a person with no access to resources or survival skills just walk out the door?
This is why conservatives annoy me even though I am one. They are not realistic at all when it comes to women. They love to say that women abuse men just as much as men abuse women. But how exactly? Normally they fall back on the idea that women must be doing some super subtle form of invisible evil which ends up being the exact equivalent to all the dastardly deeds men quite obviously perform in the world. I don’t believe this at all. At the risk of giving someone a hernia, I do believe men are more “bad” than women. Because the masculine principle relates to power. The feminine principle relates to love. There is a reason the taliban is male. It’s not a coincidence.
So what is the solution? I don’t know. Submit to your husband or to your boss at the sausage plant. Her choice. Personally, I avoid the smell of sausage at all costs.
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.
Recently I have been writing a ton of blog posts but not publishing them. I have a lot to say but feel hung up about saying it.
In some cases, the things I want to share fall somewhat into the #metoo category. Although the excesses of #metoo (Believe Women. Believe the Victim.) are frightening, it is also hard to overstate the value of sharing true stories of victimization. There is simply no other way these processes can be understood and prevented.
We know this when it comes to wars and large scale atrocities. Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. But the principle applies equally to the issue of predatory behavior in relationships, which- while less dramatic- causes just as much carnage in totality.
In astrology, the sun rules the government and husbands, while the populace and wives are ruled by the moon. With apologies to men, it seems accurate to say that governments and husbands are more likely to abuse power than the reverse. The people & wives have to be aware of this possibility to ensure safety. They need knowledge of what can happen, a clear sense of rights & boundaries so they can tell when these are being violated, and some form of power so they will have the possibility of fighting back if it comes to that.
Of course, the government also has to fear the population rising up against it. Likewise, women sometimes kill their husbands. But this most commonly happens as a response to tyranny (in the case of the government) and physical abuse (in the case of the husband). Conversely, men- who kill their wives far more frequently- generally do so in response to the woman trying to leave.
I know many men object to abuse being made into a gender issue and I understand the reasons for this. The fact is, some women are inclined to use false claims of victimization as a tool. I have known them. But the only reason this works is because it is believable. It is believable when you accuse a gorilla of tearing a sink out of the wall with its bare hands, less so for a cat. This is one of the risks of power. But pretending to not have power so that you can’t be falsely accused of abusing it is not the solution.
Lies breed lies and truth breeds truth. One facet of that truth is that women are more vulnerable in relationships. Men have more force and hardness built into the structure of their beings. They are less permeable. Marriage is like throwing a chunk of quartz and a chunk of calcite into the same pocket. If these differences are not accounted for, it is easy to predict which stone will get fucked.
P.S. I realize that when a person’s mind is far from root level concerns and focused on things like movies and restaurants, the power differential between genders and government overreach can both seem like the far-fetched concerns of the paranoid. Sure men CAN overpower women, but so what? We live in a post-physical power reality, right? Sure, governments HAVE killed their citizens, but like wasn’t that in the past?
A decade ago, my perspective on these issues was very different. I thought women could just as easily abuse men and there was no legitimate reason people needed guns. When you are focused on trying out new falafel recipes, it is easy to pretend these red levels of power don’t exist. But once you are forced to confront them, you see how these lower frequencies of life have actually been influencing your choices all along.
This song makes me miss Kentucky!
City people are different from the rest of us, because they feel they have options. Their minds are in two places at once- half on what they are doing, and half on all the other things they COULD be doing. In the country you think, “Yay, I have a husband, and he is way better than nothing!” but in the city you might think, “Hmmm… could I be kissing Rod Hotwings right now if I weren’t tied down to this guy?”
To make matters worse, cities lead to hierarchies, so it’s not just that you could be with someone different, you could be with someone better. Someone richer, funnier, more metrosexual… Whereas in the country, people see themselves more as puzzle pieces. When two puzzle pieces fit together, you know things are as good as they’re going to get.
Download MP3: Love It Don’t Grow on No Trees