Author: Inthegazeoftheother

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The Limerent

http://www.malsamore.it/Gustav Kimt

Limerent lover, you caught me when I fell from the sky, unable to fly any more, like Marquez’s winged Gabriel landed in the chicken coop, a mute wonder of decrepit miracle and obscene spectacle for sale. My wings had been clipped from the systematic circus of prosecutorial car clowns and elephantine asses braying in the windy tents of their failures. My flight was downed by opinion–a crippling injustice. You, imagining the first man bemoaning the lack of his mate, knew my journey even before I spoke it. I was the sign. You were the signifier.

Pouring into me the hope of a happy ending, the magic of healing and soul-worn revival of the A-1 amphetamine or the super pill of soporific splendor, I was your mother duck after the ardor of digging elongation from the dark enclosure and safety of the shell. You stretched. Your first light was the sun’s reflection in my tear-stained retinal orbs, blinding your peripheral vision forever and altering your perception of the pumping pinions of this bird, discerning a halo through the steaming breath in the cold of that fall night of your birth. I was your real.

Soon the collage I collaborated with in the making was filled with wind-swept plains of dust and despair or poppy plummets into sweet surrender-ful liquid love potion stares of hypnotic release. Wherever love and hate could be found I was there: in the trees that conspired to collapse the condor’s nest and in the giant avian mother’s courage to free her ovate unborn, in the evil of cardboard figures of terror-filled torturing shadow puppet fights and in the savior soldier’s merciful sacrificial sword of righteous right. I was the paste on your brush to sparkle your smile and the crusted crud on the blade of your unclean can opener.

Shooting up my words, your veins thicken even now long after the flash of my tail light has faded from view and the neon sign points to the hotel next door. Plum with the injected placebo of blossoming romance and forever ending rivulets of passion dribbles eked out of a nano-glance, a sliver of a smirk, an eye glimmer from a passing head light, you are confirmed. It means something. You have thought two thousand times in two thousand hours that it is so. In truth, you have obsessively intruded on the tale, remade the story.

You once threatened, the plot must end well or there will be no end to sorrow’s cascading falls into the mountain crevasses that poorly piloted Cessna’s crash into and crack up their cargo–ordinary men and women with a taste for the daring. The height of expectation and card castles is too great, the air too thin and be-speckled with polluting particles for a pure realization. Limerent. Listen. You.love.you.loving.me. That’s all.

credit: 2.bp.blogspot.com
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Fifty Observations About Married Cheaters

I came across the Dumas quote posted today while perusing yet another pro-con work over of the role of the mistress, this one conceding, as always a wee bit sheepishly for fear of being accused of less than stellar morals or lawfulness, mistresses are not always destructive but can actually spark renewed love and interest in a marriage. That they do have such a productive effect sometimes seems logical to me and has been my own experience.

In researching under the wide umbrella topic of the mistress, I have come across so many articles dissecting the causes for, effects of, and history of cheating spouses or partners. So much of what has been written, regardless of the insertion of a psychologist, sex therapist, counselor, attorney or theologian, are largely opinion pieces based on specific testimonials and experiences. People come to the subject with their own predispositions toward cheating experientially, religiously and intellectually. Generalizations in these writings and the overall attempt to be one size fits all denigrate what morsels of truth and advice there may be in them. The painfully obvious truth is, all situations are unique in so far as they involve individuals, who, though human and so patterned with some universal behaviors, are different from other individuals in their components and combinations, and so add the complexity to a very complex subject.

Reducing cheating to a ten ways, ten reasons or ten anything seems implausible to me. Most of those articles contain mere observations from specific experiences of specific people. I too have observed the behavior and words of cheating spouses–nearly my entire life. I have been cheated on and I have cheated, though not on my husband of 35 years. When he and I separated for six or more years in the late 80s to mid-90s and then again when we agreed to an open marriage in 2010, I engaged in long and short-term affairs/relationships including married partners. I did not seek married people; the relationships arose organically from circumstances I and the other party were in at the time. Like any relationship, they were based on mutual need, admiration, friendship, respect and often, love.

In addition, I was a divorce and bankruptcy attorney for 24 years. I heard so many stories of the whys, wherefores and whereabouts of the innumerable reasons for and circumstances of divorce, including cheating spouses, mid-life crisis dumps, long-term mistresses or misters, open marriages, and just a host of marital and non-marital arrangements.

The following list of 50 items is one I have compiled over the years by merely listening and observing (and yes, at times, judging). It is not a list I prepared with any intent. I am not sure I even prepared it at all. Living my life is all it has taken to come up with this list and remembering what I have done, what has been done to me, what I have thought and what I have heard. With respect to marrieds, I put this list together not to recommend, advise, admonish, judge or astonish. Nothing on the list is revelatory. These items do not purport to be causes, reasons, solutions or symptoms. They are merely observations about being human. I have no other intention but to share my observations, in no particular order, for whatever interest they may lend to the reader.

Married people I have had affairs/relationships with:

1. Are attracted to me because I am not their spouse.
2. Want more or different sex than what they get at home.
3. Want to be listened to and feel they are not.
4. Want to be prioritized over the kids, sacrificed for.
5. Love and are beholden to spouses who sacrifice themselves for the kids.
6. Want to be thought of as sexy, naughty, romantic and/or irresistible.
7. Want to be thought of as creative, intelligent and/or funny.
8. Want passion again or for the first time.
9. Want to live out their fantasies, some, all or any of them.
10. Want to be young again.
11. Want to have control and feel they don’t.
12. Want to be shown love and tenderness more, different or any.
13. Want to be the center of someone’s world, for the first time or again.
14. Want to experience vitality and power again.
15. Want a person with traits lacking in their spouses.
16. Want to conquer or be a savior.
17. Want to possess.
18. Want the excitement of risk.
19. Want their egos flattered.
20. Want to want their spouses.
21. Don’t want their spouses but don’t want to leave them.
22. Are very good at compartmentalizing.
23. Are very good at justification and rationalization–moral equivalencies.
24. Don’t want to disrupt their families: kids, parents, spouses, colleagues, friends.
25. Are afraid of divorce/loss of life they have known.
26. Are trapped in a marriage whether self-induced or otherwise.
27. Are guilty for perceived hurt of their spouse, for their own failures.
28. Are repressed sexually or otherwise.
29. Feel overburdened by the lives they themselves created.
30. Have overactive sex drives.
31. Express love through sex.
32. Escape into sex.
33. Need touch.
34. Are afraid.
35. Are angry.
36. Want to feel something.
37. Want to be understood.
38. Want to be validated.
39. Want to hurt their spouses.
40. Want revenge.
41. Are commitment-phobes.
42. Fear success.
43. Self-sabotage.
44. Have low self-esteem.
45. Are narcissistic.
46. Are sociopathic.
47. Are immoral.
48. Are amoral.
49. Are competitive, wanting to beat the system or someone else.
50. Feel comforted even as they are disconcerted by carrying a secret.

I could write at least 50 more, but they would be as banal as these 50.

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How-To Guides to Becoming a Mistress or a “Side Chick”

image
These two articles, “How to be a Mistress, the 1/3 Method” and “How to be a Side Chick: 11 Steps (with Pictures)” from the Wiki How series are hilarious. Who is the audience for these two, people looking to get into the mistress biz? Really? Does someone actually think about being a mistress and research it before doing so? My guess is it is something that just happens, in most cases. Even if there were such an audience of advice seekers, what kind of advice or instruction do these articles give: To be whatever the married guy wants you to be? They assume that there are certain universals regardless of the parties to the relationship of husband, wife and mistress, that individuals cannot act otherwise because it is a mistress-married man relationship. But stereotyping and platitudes about human behavior are dangerous, often make for validating prejudice and de-humanization (think about history of any genocide attempt). The instruction needs to be first, decide on what is acceptable parameters to each of the involved parties, including a wife who knows but chooses not to know. The assumption is that adults cannot communicate about what they are doing and that they all act the same when it comes to sex and marriage.

The illustrations and instructions are amusing, but the generalizations and assumptions that men want what they don’t have and some women out there are “ambitious” enough to consult a Wiki How to make sure they know how to be what any man doesn’t have–someone who doesn’t wear sweats and sneakers in front of her man or ask him questions, of any sort because this is what these simpleton folks–men–want (since they’re cheaters)–are lame. I am hoping these articles are ironic or comical by intent. Otherwise, I smell some moralizing in the manner in which men and women to “this type of behavior” are assumed to be: selfish and low self-esteemed. Each basically intimates that if you’re going in for this type of thing, this is the crap you’ll get–and you deserve it or you just shouldn’t.

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“Why It’s Natural to Have Taboo Fantasies”

Though this subject has been parsed on this blog in a number of writings, this article by goodinbed.com is very light fare (thinking of someone else during sex is taboo fantasy?), readable and succinct, even though questionable as to its definition of both taboo and fantasy.  There is nothing earth shattering but it is an assuring read for those of us with a host of tools to accomplish our sexual goals.  Enjoy.

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The Puzzler

Kelly and I did puzzles on Sundays, mornings mostly, when the New York Times double dared its daily puzzlers to take the bigger, harder challenge of the page-wide crossword. We were both super sleuths, so we toiled as two resolved to solve the mystery of the hour it took us to fill in all of the empty spaces between the black of the uninvited and irrelevant to the game–like our world on Sundays, just us. There were no other people or places more alluring than the chicory of our coffee, the shaded sun on our table, and the pencil and paper inked with our patience–unconditional time. We were peaceful and complacent then. The metronomic congeniality of our pocket of a world was no more, no less: in the middle of hurry and sleep.

credit: !1cpcache.com

Kelly was a mechanic. No matter the make, no engine escaped the exhaustive expertise of this meticulous and measured engineer with a temperament of a lover scientist: observant, percipient and objective, yet warm, conciliatory and intuitive. I often heard, “They all have the same components with a switch up here and there to make me go mad.” And even so, even after having handily fine tuned many similar models before me, the puzzler could not calibrate my candor nor loosen my brakes. Typically, my symptoms–the broken parts–never showed before a somewhat stranger (like finally taking the car into the shop for that noise that suddenly disappears), but with time and travel, the intermittent accelerator hesitation, piercing brake squeals and mysterious trunk rattles made the ride rough, uneasy. And so, after much studied twisting and turning and torquing, the chassis collapsed. I was an enigma.

When Kelly moved to the black, I would bring that scratch-pad stretch of space and moment to mind when suffering the turbulence of spinning-on-the-teacups Terry or enduring the ennui of Edward or Kim or Ken or Sam. Back then, I longed for presence of the puzzle, of even-keeled Kelly time in our kingdom of suspended seismography, no pantomime of the naked love or the jealous joust or the sentimental snore, just Cadillac calm and Bavarian precision.

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Writers Are Spider Mistresses

A time for telling truth has come upon us now.
We needn’t lie to get us through these times
You see it in my eyes and writ upon my brow.
No need to say you understand these rhymes.

When writing is the mistress:

“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.” – Winston Churchill

credit: a3.files.biography.com

First a mistress then a master, does Churchill mean that at first writing a book is alluring, a release into a world of pleasure, and then it becomes dominating, controlling, and confining like an addiction or a duty? In other words, it starts with the idea of writing a book, the germ of a subject that could spread into thousands of words, which inflames the contagion that impels the fingers to tap in order to scratch the itch and twitch of adrenaline desire-thought. The impassioned writer proclaims, “There is a book in me.”

But after the initial caffeinated burst of bluster-strained strands of webbed words–clever and comely–the chore of the work settles in, each day pouring water into the well to keep the once deemed fertile land irrigated and quell the fires of doubt and douse the flames of drudgery in the daily threat of stage five alert word draught. When the ideas stop flowing, the writing is a task of terrible resistance and fear sets in. The writer frets, “I don’t have enough, not good enough, not enough heart, authenticity, interest. But I have invested so much time and ink, I can’t stop now.”

Or was Churchill a switch hitter and he just means that writing a book is like loving a woman–not your wife–being in her control or under her spell, and then like loving a man?

No, he means that writing enslaves. It is an enormous envelope of time and thought, and the promise of her–writing–what she potentially makes of her lover–writer–is a sculptor of marble ideas smoothed into delightful statues of truthful experience and penetrating insight whose vision inscribes beauty into the minds of those envisioning the word figures and rests there completing that mind, that reader, who is forever changed or confirmed or comforted by some moral missive, sublime image, or worldly flavor.

In reality, the writer is a whittler of wood who shapes a block into a toy sailboat by toiling away at the carving craft hour by hour to make animation from the inanimate. The writer makes sound from ink. Perhaps it is this need to be heard and to connect with another human being that is the real potential that arouses the desire–the ultimate desire–that causes the penner to heed the call of the word, arise each day, wipe away the sticky, silken threads of the dreamscape, to hack away at the mental chains of complacency and write. That same desire thereafter ensnares her in the matrix of predator and prey, reader and read, writer and book, the book she violently tosses at her readers.

The itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout
Down came the rain and washed the spider out
Up came the sun and dried up all the rain
And the itsy bitsy spider went up the spout again.

Writers are spider mistresses.

credit: wondersinthedark.files.wordpress.com
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Ship of Cruel

Credit: horrorpediadotcom

Miss Carly is large and wide and witty in frills and curls.
She laughs her great big O lips open like sails unfurled
Revealing white washed toothy rocks beneath the bow.
Sweet meats and candied nuts, she eats stern to prow
Slicing, chomping and dipping her pain in syrupy swirls.

Her heart is big and soft and fat like the sloop of a smile.
She loves with cloying quotes of snips of poems in piles
Atop a pine dresser of smoldered stains of incense stubs.
Fond of scenes, the woman shouts, “Aye, there’s the rub!”
For no known reason nor time and place, none I reconcile.

Miss Carly is single and lonely and sad in her loft on high.
She peels the pity from artist friends like lemon to rind
Causing some internal cringe and outward nervous laugh.
Prizes, patronage, palimpsestic poems and photographs
She gives, sipping sweet tea afloat a sailing ship of sighs.

Her sunsets painted and sea becalmed, her puppet primps.
The magic made by canvas painters, mere circus chimps,
Is poor compare to bread and cakes Miss Carly foreswore.
For she is set on turbulent vomitous seas to settling shore
To lose her sea legs, her fine girth and sycophantic simps.

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Guest Post: Revisiting Shame and the Mistress

A regular contributor of comments to this blog, MPM, shared with me the rumination below in context of an ongoing discussion about the historical and modern day role and conceptualization of the mistress. It bears reproduction here in its entirety for another perspective and invitation for response.

Ruminations on “King Charles II of England and His Mistresses”
Everyone – and I mean everyone, including me – should have a mistress or be one. You can tell a mistress things that you can’t tell your so called life partner and vice-versa. For some it provides emotional stability. For others perhaps an emotional release. It’s obvious that the need for mistresses (and ‘misters’) has endured throughout human time, perhaps as long as the oldest profession. That is not to equate the two, but to state that the need for one or the other seems to be intrinsic. Perhaps even those who do not participate in such activity at least have the thought of taking on one or the other, if only in passing sometimes. The human mind is probably too complicated for some to burden a single person with all that it contains. Perhaps engaging with one or the other relieves a partner of a burden too heavy to endure.
But then again, perhaps I am wrong.
Earlier I posted this comment to the blogger’s article, “King Charles II of England and His Mistresses”. That the comment is full of “perhaps-es” is a clear indication of my own self-doubt regarding the certainty – no, the validity – of what I was stating. After rereading my reply I felt compelled to expand upon it in an attempt to answer, for myself, the questions I openly asked.
So that the reader may better understand the questions I raised in my initial reply I will share with you my current situation.
I am currently a “mister” to a married woman who is herself a mistress to a married woman. I have met her husband and we appear to get along fine. I only use the word ‘appear’ because I am ‘fine’ with it, but obviously I cannot vouch for nor ascertain his true hidden feelings. Indeed, no one else can be aware of the feelings all of us have decided to keep secret. The circumstances of their marriage allow each to have this type of open relationship. I will not divulge why this is so to protect their privacy, although admittedly this certainly opens the door for one to peer into. Why I chose this particular woman knowing about the circumstances she was in shall also remain private except to say that we genuinely are compatible. Interestingly, each of us has been involved in non-monogamous relationships in our pasts and are so now. When I asked her how she felt about the wife in those circumstances she provided different answers for each situation. Some were because the wife no longer desired to have sexual relations with her spouse. Others were for more personal reasons. However, the answer to one of those situations surprised me a bit. Although the initial intent of involving herself in this relationship was not to do so, she stated that she was certain that doing so saved his marriage. He is in fact still married to his wife yet maintains a fond and friendly bond with his one-time tryst mate. I have not been as fortunate. Each of my circumstances has ended with a bang or a whimper and I have “lost” all – partners and mistresses – I have been involved with except one. I’ll conclude this backstory by stating (admitting?) that, going back some 40 odd years to junior high school days, I have never had a completely monogamous relationship. In some it took me longer to stray than others. But the constant has been that I always have strayed.
In my original comment in reply to the article I declared that, “everyone … should have a mistress or be one”, and I gave my reasons why I believe this. But upon reflection I decided to take a step back to observe the issue with more focus from a distance. I realized I was only speaking for my narcissistic self. My grandparents had been married for over 67 years and neither of them ever strayed. Ironically, I always set my sights on finding someone with whom I could strive to match their record of monogamous longevity. Why then have I never been able to commit to a single partner? Why does anyone allow themselves to play this way or even stray but once? Is it really an intrinsic need as I suggested in my reply or is it more than that? Perhaps (there’s that word again) the “intrinsic need” idea is a vain and selfish rationalization proffered to attempt to assuage feelings of guilt and shame (see this blogger’s article “Shame, Shame on You–and Me” for more on this topic) for branching outside of society’s accepted standards. After all, if the hidden relationship is discovered there are always feelings of hurt, anguish, and betrayal felt by the one who has been deceived, and we are the reason, and suffer the burden of destroying or altering the course of another’s life, as well as our own.
But then I took a further step back and was faced with examining the reality that some of the world’s best known and most followed religions now have, or once had, traditions of allowing plural marriages. Although it was never an original part of Western culture, Islam is the most obvious example as polygamy is still practiced today. And even though it has been outlawed (and to be fair discredited by), the Mormon Church also preached and encouraged polygamy. And is it more than simply interesting to note that both Islam and Mormon allowed the male to have wives younger than what (our) society has deemed to be a legal age for such unions? Doesn’t our society and culture view these versions of polygamy to be child abuse and rape? I’ll save the reader the tedium of reviewing every instance of child sexual abuse perpetrated by priests and simply go straight to the top – the Pope – and cite but a few that have been historically documented to not only have had mistresses but children they fathered with these concubines: Pope John X; Pope John XII; Pope Benedict IX; Pope Paul II. And Pope Leo X had a homosexual mistress relationship.
There is also the circumstances of hut dwelling tribal cultures still extant throughout remote areas of the world today. Their communities of miniscule populations probably, in some cases we can at least speculate, allow for not only polygamy but also a fair degree of incest simply to keep the tribe alive.
With these examples in mind it seems logical to question why our culture decries the mistress. It appears it could be argued that our culture is actually an aberration for doing so.
Then I began walking backwards to take a closer look at and examination of “our culture”. In keeping with the blogger’s theme of political figures with mistresses, most historians now accept that Thomas Jefferson, our third president, had as his mistress a slave he owned named Sally Hemings. This fact was established in 1998 with DNA evidence. It immediately discredited all the historians who had denied it for the previous 200 years. In modern times we now know that JFK had Marilyn Monroe as his mistress. We know that William Jefferson Clinton had Monica Lewinsky as his, and before that Jennifer Flowers. We also know that presidential aspirant John Edwards fathered a child out of wedlock.
Turning now to sports figures, no one can provide an accurate account of the number of athletes who have had or still have a mistress in every town their team visits, and let’s not even try to imagine the number of children born of these couplings.
At this point I felt I no longer had to seek or cite examples of the mistress in culture, politics, religion, or in any aspect of man’s contrivance. It is indisputably obvious that mistresses have been around “forever” and will continue to be a part of being human. Although my own grandparents demonstrate that there may not be an intrinsic need for everyone to have or be a mistress, history demonstrates that the opposite is equally true; which, I feel, at least partially validates my declaration that everyone should have or be a mistress.
What to do, then, with the guilt and shame?

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