Uncensored in Journal

I had a cathartic cry in therapy today. The session began with me discussing Esther Perel’s The State of Affairs. It’s rare for me to discover new ground in psychology, so I was refreshed by this candid and well-written dissection of a subject I’d long puzzled over in my own life and in others’ lives.

That discussion led us to the question of why I am carnally drawn to less-intelligent construction-worker types, and unable to sustain sexual attraction to men who intellectually stimulate me. Am I the female equivalent of the stereotype of males objectifying dumb bimbos, in the way I check out men on the street like they’re pieces of meat? M. assures me that I just haven’t met the right man. My guess is that my body is somehow reacting to the trauma of being groomed since the age of ten onward by an intellectual genius, culminating in rape and then later a confusingly consensual relationship. That pattern repeated later when a professor initiated me into sex work. Often I wonder if I’m doomed to always have an irreconcilable split between sex and love.

I pride myself on being 100% honest in relationships, which meant G. knew every time my eye wandered, every time I committed infidelities. I gave plenty of advanced warning and asked for either an open relationship or couples counseling, but he deferred endlessly. Finally, I just did what I wanted, and he never forbade me or broke it off. He just reacted with a martyred silence.

Unlike other couples who fall into a convenient lie because it’s too inconvenient to uncouple, we fell into a different trap: one with grappling hard ethical lines. He didn’t believe in making what he wanted known, and I didn’t believe in using him. These were our private fears and neuroticisms, unexpressed to one another. It didn’t help that I am the ultimate communicator whereas getting anything personal out of him was like prying teeth. The more he kept silent, the more I went running. In the end, his silence told me what he wanted, but it was too late. Now I use our former apartment as a temporary extended safe haven, and the collision of guilt and anger I feel over this fact exploded in therapy.

I’ve played with the idea of returning to sex work so that I can afford an apartment of my own (as rents have tripled in the seven-ish years we lived together), but a bitter part of me loathes to do it out of necessity. I privately celebrated when a world-renowned philosophy professor at my alma mater was exposed for trying to coerce his graduate student into sex in exchange for enough money to live on. The school, of course, tried to sweep it under the rug, but the media got a hold of the story. Students who have taken his classes are largely unsurprised. They just wrote him off as a sexist creep. The kicker is that this fucker successfully sued the city decades ago to remove rent control because he and his wife own properties in the area. It makes me rage. On the other hand, I laugh every time I think how this prestigious man will forever have a section in his Wikipedia page detailing the charges of his predatory behavior.

For now, I’m choosing the slow route to getting back on my feet, but it does require the charity of those who love me. I’m trying to keep focus on simple gratitude, rather than on the anger, bitterness, and resentment over being abandoned and exposed to danger and predation. As I’m slowly re-building my life, I want to delve into how I got here, and help myself and others channel all these past traumas into a brighter, stronger future.

Last updated December 06, 2017