I keep having big crushes and thoughts of stepping out on my wife, and I don’t like that part of me.
Part of it is due to a mid-life crisis. I’m not constantly in a state of debilitating crush, and when I’m moseying along in my standard day-to-day my desire for sweeping life changes tends toward other flights of fancy: quit my job and move to Europe or Asia, sell most of my possessions and live in a van for a while, make a huge change in career…like…be a fry cook or something. Desire for sudden, big changes is a sign that you’re going through a mid-life crisis and the general advice is that you should re-examine your life state without doing anything you can’t take back.
Getting sexually (or even emotionally) involved with another woman would definitely be a big jump into something I couldn’t take back.
Part of it is due to the fact that I’m not completely satisfied with my marriage and I don’t think my wife and I connect in a meaningful way. This is probably typical of many long term relationships. I’ve been reading a lot about the nature of modern marriages. We expect our spouse to be our soulmate, our best friend, our financial and emotional supporter, a great parent to our children, a kind and obedient in-law to our parents, and a super hot lover in bed. That’s a lot to put on one person, and when life turns up the heat we start to think of ways things could be different: not just in marriages but in any long term relationship. The difference is marriage is forever, or so we think, and you’ve made a legal commitment that we all hope is stronger than a non-marital relationship.
The wife earns a ton of money and is a smart, empowered intellectual. I respect her intelligence, though I do find her a bit naïve into the way the world really works. (Arrogant of me, I know.) She’s still beautiful and I still find her attractive. We have great sex with mind-shattering orgasms. There’s plenty of physical warmth there. What’s odd for me is sometimes I do feel myself forcing the warmth or sexual energy. I don’t know if that’s true for her? For me, it’s that disconnect in companionship with her, and by companionship I mean friendship, that I’m not satisfied with.
Part of it (I realized today) is my own journey through therapy. I’ve been working with a therapist for a few years now and I have a lot of past trauma I’m working through. In many ways I haven’t allowed myself to feel healthy emotions for years, and as I start to peel back the layers I think I’m exposing certain reservoirs of old pain and ugliness. Another way to say it might be that things are bubbling up in my subconscious and welling to the surface, and I’m only partly understanding them in my conscious mind while the feelings themselves are there and they are raw. I’m not sure how to control it.
What kind of trauma do I deal with? Mostly it comes from childhood, but I was physically abused, mentally abused, sexually abused, and had no real safe zone. I don’t want to dig into it today but looking back on it I’m in awe of how shitty my home environment was and how (by contrast) good my current home environment is. My own issues aside, I think my wife is pretty happy overall and I feel like we have a reasonably good environment for our kid. Oh yeah. I have a kid! Even more reason not to suddenly quit my job and buy a ticket to Europe.
And finally, I’m beginning to think that my constant crushes are an extension of my own private identity crisis. This ties back to the mid-life crisis above. Who am I? Where am I going? What am I doing? What are my goals? More than just a desire to make an easy friend in the form of a lover and transfer some longing for non-platonic friendship and intimacy onto them, I think my crushes represent a way for me to re-affirm who I am, or who I think I will be.
I want the crush to make me feel ‘cool.’ (I’ve never been cool…) I want the crush to make me feel ‘special.’ (I often feel decidedly unspecial.) I want the crush to re-affirm those aspects of myself that I like best: that I’m fun and creative and giving and sensitive. Things I think my family overlooks.
The odd part is the gamut of people I’ve crushed on don’t fit any particular type. They’re almost all women and they’re all reasonably close to me in age. They may be educated or not.
They may be any particular race. Usually I get that they’re into me before I start to crush on them. They’re almost never the type I find physically attractive, though as the crush progresses I start to find them much cuter than my initial impression. I wonder if that has something to do with it? A subconscious desire to find a partner to fling with that I ultimately feel reasonably confident I can walk away from.
Using people like that is monstrous.
So where go the crushes? Usually I have the god-given sense to stay the HELL away from them so I don’t get into trouble, but not always. I had a close call a few years back with someone else who was in a long term relationship. She actively pursued me and about the time my CRUSH came online she lost interest…probably because she got what she wanted (reciprocation), but her situation changed and her long-term relationship got sick, which might have called her off due to a sense of obligation OR a renewed sense of…connnection? Need for her long-term thing. Either way, better for me because it went no where. Not so good for me in that we were reasonably good friends before it went haywire.
The other potentially close call was a crush I didn’t know well and had tried to avoid, but she has a strong online presence and I kept virtually coming across her. I harbored elaborate fantasies about how great my life would be with her instead of my spouse (hint: it really wouldn’t be better AT ALL…that’s why it’s an elaborate fantasy). I learned a new word for this kind of behavior (limerence) and recognized it as unhealthy, but the crush came back again and again.
Finally as a form of catharsis I drafted a “would you like to go out” kind of message to her and sat on it for a while. I meant to delete it but sent it instead (oops…more slips from my subconcious?) and next thing you know she’s into it and wants to give it a whirl. Before the actual set date though I started over-sharing via text and email, so soon enough I get the ‘thanks but no thanks, you’re creeping me out, don’t contact me again.’
I felt so bad for agreeing to the date, so bad for going behind my wife’s back, and so bad for potentially using this person who I had grown to respect as a potential source for a romantic fling that I know in my heart would ultimately go no where. I still feel like a monster for setting that date and introducing a nugget of discomfort into someone’s life because I’m too selfish and stupid not to. Maybe I sabotaged the whole thing myself? Maybe I never wanted the date? I don’t know. It’s possible. It was never healthy behavior on any level.
Awful.
Disgusting.
But what have I learned?
I learned that I need to protect myself from the crushes. As soon as that little pang starts I need to delete the profile from my webzone and avoid said person at work or tennis practice or wherever they are.
I learned that I am capable of dark behavior. If either of the two crushes above had played out a little differently I’d be sitting her a cheater (possibly divorced). What I’ve done is bad but it’s not complete betrayal as of yet.
I learned that if I want to stay with my wife I got to fix myself then fix our relationship, or else our break is inevitable.
I learned that I need to get a handle on myself: who I am and what I want. If I don’t then this shit will just continue. I need to find a way to affirm my identity and my place in the world without using other people as some sick way to fill the gaps in my crooked heart.
If you read this far then we’re just getting started. Buckle up.
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