Monthly Archives: October 2013

An Open Letter to Married Men Looking to Cheat – From a Divorced Woman

Dear Married Men,

You are extremely fortunate to have found a woman to love and take care of you.  Hopefully she’ll live with you until your last days on earth.  The boredom and tedium of being with the same partner every day might be getting to you.  Maybe you don’t have sex as often as you’d like, or you think other married couples are getting it on more than you and your wife.  You might get nostalgic about your youthful encounters with women. New partners may have been in and out of your bed on a regular basis.

The younger, attractive women on the subway, down the hall, or in the elevator at work seem almost within reach.  You think to yourself – if only I was single.  You have delusions of gorgeous women falling for you like they did when you were in college.  Only now you’re not in college, you’re a married father, or at least a husband.

So you go out after work and leave your wedding band in your pocket. You walk just to the edge of doing something inappropriate and then pull back.  I know you do this, because I’ve been that woman you’ve talked to in the bar, on the subway, or at the party.  A few times I’ve even seen you slip the ring off the finger, or keep your left hand mysteriously hidden in a pocket, for most of the evening.

Being single past a certain age, say 35 or 40, is not the party it was in your twenties. You’ll find a lot of younger people don’t want to date you, unless you are incredibly charming, extremely good looking, or have some power, influence or money.  The older you get, the less likely anyone will want to stick around for the long haul.  You are also competing with young perfect bodies of men half your age. They might not have the wisdom and experience but they have stamina and washboard abs.  The young ones can also stay up until 4 am with ease and don’t have aching joints, bad eyes and sensitive stomachs. They might not have your sexual prowess, but they are like energizer bunnies in the sack.

When you get invited to parties you’ll find yourself surrounded by couples and married friends.  The dating pool is half-dried up with potential age-appropriate prospects, and what is available is largely damaged goods. Women who have been through brutal divorces or breakups.  Finding time to date will also be tricky.  Your job is more demanding, with longer hours and higher stakes.  Most potential partners are also extremely busy with their own kids, epic work schedules and other obligations.

So before you decide to cheat on your wife, please take this as a word of warning.  If you get along with your spouse, and things are generally pleasant at home, do everything you can to make that work.  The alternative is a lot of lonely nights eating greasy Chinese takeout by yourself, and wondering how you got there.  You might also lose most of what you have worked so hard to get your entire life, your apartment or home, time with your children, investments and security.

If you’re miserable in your marriage and you’ve tried everything to fix it, then get out. Walk away without causing more pain by cheating.  I’ve had more than a few friends use infidelity to end their marriages.  Cheating was a means to an end.  But infidelity will just cause more damage and wreak havoc in everyone’s lives.

I’ve known more than a few couples who decided to transform their marriage into an open one, where both partners have affairs outside of the marriage, or at least multiple sexual partners.  The key to making these marriages work is lots of communication, honesty and equitable treatment.  If you want extra partners, expect your wife will want some too.  It’s not for everyone, but it might be the perfect option if you want to stay together but are finding yourself stifled by traditional monogamy.

Who’s going to take care of you when you are in your seventies, eighties and beyond? You might get lucky and meet the perfect partner and have a wonderful second marriage, or you could end up alone and more frustrated.  Never assume that divorced women are going to find you that compelling, or have sympathy for your divorce sob story.  Our spouses may have cheated on or betrayed us, and we are the last ones who want to hear a biased account of marital turmoil.  You don’t want to end up stuck on a pity treadmill going nowhere. Single woman might not want to date a guy with a wife, and any woman who is so selfish as to lack empathy for your spouse, will probably lack empathy for you in the long run.

Love is a precious and rare commodity.  Think long and hard before you throw it away. Before you decide to betray the trust of your spouse remember, there is a reason you got married.  Try everything in your power to make it work, and please stop hitting on me, as lonely as I get sometimes, I’ll never get THAT lonely.

Sincerely,

The Not So Bitter Divorcee

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Burkas or Booze – Neither matters to a Rapist

A Kranz (wreath) of Kölsch beer.

A Kranz (wreath) of Kölsch beer. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In Slate.com Emily Yoffe makes the argument, The Best Rape Prevention: Tell College Women to Stop Getting so Wasted.   She begins by pointing to three high-profile rape cases which involved alcohol but did not occur on a college campus.  Yet most of the research she cites are studies about sexual assault on college campuses. Then Yoffe warns of the potential perils of binge drinking including accidental death.  At times I couldn’t tell if she was advocating against binge drinking or rape.  Finally she used herself as an example, “I enjoy moderate drinking and have only been hung over three times in my life. I have never been so drunk that I browned out, blacked out, passed out, or puked from alcohol ingestion.” Well that’s great Yoffe, but you are a grown woman and in the three cases you cited in your opening paragraph, all of the victims were minors or extremely young women.

Of course no one is for underage girls drinking alcohol.  But who is more likely to make a mistake and accidentally consume too much, an adult woman with some life experience or a child?  Is it really the fault of a child for curiously getting into the liquor cabinet, or the 18-year-old boy who raped her when she had too much.  Women and girls are responsible for their own actions, but so are the boys and men who rape.  And why did Yoffe use examples of teenage rape victims, and then rail against college aged drinking binges?

Ironically in one of the high-profile cases Yoffe cites, the victim was so viciously blamed for her own assault her mother’s house was burned to the ground.  Why would anyone blame a teenaged victim? Perhaps because they are feeding into attitudes that somehow this girl deserved what happened to her. Unlike the “good girl” Yoffe, she couldn’t use restraint.

Articles like these are dangerous because ultimately they are feeding into the culture of victim blaming. Binge drinking is dangerous for both men and women, and women do metabolize alcohol at a slower rate than men.  Regardless women will still get raped. Women get raped in countries where alcohol is largely prohibited.  Women get raped while wearing full length burkas.  Women, children and men get raped for doing absolutely nothing except being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I would also agree with the author that we should arm young women about risky situations.  But as much as she claims we are Infantilizing women by ignoring risks such as binge drinking, she is Infantilizing men by not making them more responsible for a culture that not only obscures responsibility but blames victims.

In my youth, I had more than a few sexually intimidating and threatening situations where alcohol played no role whatsoever.  When a college professor made me feel that my grade and future education depended on me humoring his constant advances – I wasn’t exactly drunk.  When an older boy repeatedly forcibly fondled me in a friend’s pool – I was 12 years old and no alcohol.  When I got roofied in my freshmen year of college at a party and woke up on a loft bed with a naked man on top of me – was I being irresponsible when I had only sipped on a Diet Coke?  Luckily in the last scenario I managed to escape the assault without being raped, but only barely.

The common denominator in my own experiences were men who enjoyed dominating, intimidating and controlling women.  If we want to put an end to rape culture, we need to warn women of the dangers, but we also need to change our attitudes towards male sexuality.  Men are not wild beasts who cannot control themselves in sexually charged situations.  The men and boys who rape, make a conscious choice to view their victims as less than human.  Rapists attack anyone who is weaker or vulnerable including children and even other men.  In rare cases even women rape.  The source of sexual violence goes deeper than a 20-year-old at a college party who had one to many beer bongs.  Instead of focusing on the victims of the abuse, perhaps we should focus on why rape is so pervasive.  What causes a man to view a woman as prey?  Why is there so much confusion about constitutes consent?  Why is their one set of standards of behavior for men and another for women?  Why do we so often blame the victim?  What about our culture produces men who rape?  Until we face the harsh realities that feed the culture of rape: misogyny, male aggression, fear of female sexuality, and a firmly entrenched madonna whore complex, we are never going to solve the problem of rape.

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Sean Saves the World – A Straight Spouse Perspective

SeanSavesWorld

NBC’s new Thursday night comedy, Sean Saves the World stars Sean Hayes as a gay single dad who suddenly finds himself the full-time parent of a teenaged girl.  I’m excited about any show which features a gay parent.  It’s also great to see another show tackle a mixed orientation marriage, like Fran Drescher‘s “Happily Divorced“. As a straight spouse myself, it’s good to see anyone telling our stories. Many straight spouses continue to hide the sexual orientation of their former partner or at least stay private about the reasons for their divorce.  Most people have no idea around 2 million straight spouses live throughout the country, in every economic, racial and cultural background.

Sean Saves the World has only aired one episode, and here is what we know so far about the characters:

Now that she is living with her father full-time, his daughter Ellie suddenly thinks to ask. “If your gay, how did mom and you have sex?”

To which Sean responds, “Gay, tried not to be, was, was again, was one more time because it was not unpleasant…am”

So the character knew he was gay before he entered into a marriage with a straight woman.  He either misled his bride about his true orientation, or she knew and thought they could work through it.  Their specific past is left ambiguous.  He never once says to his daughter that he hurt his ex-wife, or that he made a mistake when he married a straight woman.  I guess no child wants to hear that she is the product of a mistake, but he could have shown at least some empathy towards his ex.

Sean’s ex-wife Jill decides to take a job out-of-town, and Ellie makes the choice to live with her dad full-time to stay in the same school.

So far the premise is perfectly reasonable although most single parents would at least wait four years until their kids are out of high school.  Relocations are a common issue with shared custody agreements.  The point where the show started to physically hurt me came early when Sean’s mother played by Linda Lavin exclaims, “She (Ellie) has been abandoned, she has no one.”

Sean then tries to defend his ex-wife “Jill didn’t abandon her, she took a job.”

Later in the episode the daughter laments, “I was abandoned, and she sucks (Her Mother)”

I know these are fictional characters but I couldn’t help but think of the same woman, watching her marriage dissolve soon after the birth of her child.  That is hardly an easy situation under any circumstance.  So far the viewer knows very little details.  We know their marriage ended soon after the birth of their daughter but that’s about it. Did his ex-wife know he was gay?  Or did she have to find out the hard way?  From the character’s own admission it would seem infidelity had something to do with it.  There is also no mention of a second husband, so we are to assume, Jill is still unmarried and raised her daughter as a single parent.  Unfortunately for most straight spouses we find out the true sexual orientation of our partners after years of betrayal, secrets and lies.

Television producers have long been obsessed with single dads.  Although in reality, most primary single parents are mothers, network executives can’t get enough of the fish out of water scenario of the harried father trying to raise children.  Notable examples include such classic shows as, The Andy Griffith Show, My Three Sons, Full House, Different Strokes, Blossom, Punky Brewster, My Two Dads, Two and Half Men, Full House, Silver Spoons, Who’s the Boss, The Nanny, Arrested Development, and Louie.  So many shows feature single fathers a comprehensive list is at www.TVDads.com

My hunch is that NBC wanted to give Hayes his own vehicle, and decided to go with the popular single dad storyline.  I get it, and again I’m glad to see a positive portrayal of a gay single parent.  Sexual orientation has nothing to do with anyone’s parenting skills, and it’s about time another sitcom followed the lead of the extremely popular Modern Family in which two gay men lovingly raise an adopted daughter.

I just wish the straight spouse wasn’t vilified.  Many of us have gone through absolutely dreadful experiences, especially with divorces involving children.  In some circumstances when the gay half of these mixed orientation marriages comes out of the closet, they find themselves eager to re-live the years they lost.  Some regress so strongly, they quickly forget about the responsibilities of parenting altogether.  Others might fight viciously for full custody when they were the ones who lied, cheated and may have even exposed their spouses to STD’s including HIV.

Sean Saves the World is extremely formulaic and over uses canned laughter throughout. Hayes is a likable actor with great comic timing, physical comedy and intensity.  The writing is nowhere near the level of Will and Grace the long-running hit that made his career.  Chances is are, Sean Saves the World won’t make it a season as it scored a 43% on Metacritic and has had disappointing ratings. Despite its name, a television sitcom isn’t going to change the world.  I just wish instead of showing a warped, biased view of a mixed orientation marriage they might have made a show about a gay parent in a loving relationship, or at least made his ex-wife an actual character on the show.

I can’t help but think of the fictional Jill holding her newborn daughter and hearing the following words from her new husband, “I’m gay.” Instead of raising her child with a man she thought she would spend the rest of her life with, she is going to have to raise her with the part-time help of the self-admitted “fun weekend dad.”  Most of us don’t immediately bounce back after finding out our marriages were fraudulent. Many straight spouses continue to have a strained if not openly combative relationship with their former partners, and a few are flat out abandoned.   Maybe the show will turn around and become a huge hit, but if it does I would love to see more equitable treatment of one of the few straight spouses on television.  Reality doesn’t make for a fun wacky sitcom I guess.

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