Hi ladies!
OOL, I hope the funeral went as smoothly as possible for you. Loss is never easy, especially when it is compiled with the loss and grief of infidelity.
Ellie, I love that quote! I also love that you have a wall of sass! I also just love the word sass.
I guess I have the same thing, just in Pinterest board form (the board is called Badassery, by the way). It's crazy how the internet can connect us to little nuggets like this. Before we were lucky if we had one or two sassy friends to throw out a jewel every once in a while, now we have 24/7 access to all the sass we want!
gmc, I hear you, and I feel the same way. I always try to talk about waywards in general, because ultimately wayward thinking is not unique to any one gender. It's just a soup of entitlement, insecurity, FOO issues and general assholery. Everyone's soup may vary because they threw in different measurements of each ingredient, but it's all the same unappetizing and even poisonous mush at the end of the day.
I just read somewhere, I can't say where without being reprimanded, that men have more to lose financially and biologically (??) by staying with their wayward wives than women do staying with their wayward husbands. Bish what?
Chaos, I agree with you, a good review/edit is often necessary, but damn if I don't also want to come out swinging with a 2x4 every once in a while!
But apparently the male ego is a much more delicate thing than the female one
I laugh, but there are actually a few men here who really don't seem to have this stereotypical ego. If they're not just avoiding the topic altogether, they usually respond with metered, well reasoned thoughts on "those" threads, , and I PM them to thank them for not being douchebags.
I don't think ego is an issue genetically predisposed in men, I work in the entertainment industry and trust me, there are just as many women with over-inflated egos too. But they don't often get ahead in the same ways men with big egos do, because it's not considered to be an acceptable trait for women - we more readily recognize the assholery and shut it down. I just think we as a society tend to socialize men to serve their ego above all else.
LadyG, I forget, are you in Oz?
20, of course, that's what we're here for!
You all probably know my thoughts on porn by now. I think we as humans, when not well in the mind, tend to abuse our bodies and minds by using substances to excess. Porn is one of those substances.
Working out is good for you, until you do it for hours a day, every day and you become exercise bulimic.
Playing video games can be a fun way to relieve some stress, but staying up until the wee hours of the night every night and ignoring your other responsibilities isn't healthy.
Drinking a glass of wine with dinner each night is fine, drinking a bottle, not so much.
Smoking a little weed to unwind every once in a while, not a problem. Smoking when you wake up, then every 30 minutes until you go to sleep so you can maintain your high, that's addictive behavior, whether or not the substance is actually "addictive."
Same goes with porn. Some people can use it in moderation, others can't. My XH was in the latter category. I'm positive that many of his strange ideas about sex came from porn. 20, I agree, I think it can make it hard for them to see their partner as human. My XH was actually very good in bed. He boundary crossed like nobody's business, but he wasn't a selfish lover. He really wanted me to finish, to the point where he was always doing "research" to find the newest best things for me. Even though I told him time and time again how good what we already did was. So much money spent on toys bought on my behalf, that were then thrown in a drawer or thrown away because I had no interest in them, I only wanted him. He took offense to this, like I was throwing him away and not the toy. I couldn't understand it, because what I was actually asking for was him, but he had such a weak sense of self that these toys and techniques and whatever felt like an extension of himself.
This is where I think the porn may have informed some of this insecurity. He was hitting all the right buttons, but he wasn't getting the output he was looking for - really loud, over the top orgasming and a lot of dirty talk, like what he had seen in porn. Sure, I had done that more in the beginning, but that's when we lived in separate apartments, so it was easier to get alone time away from the girls. I enjoy a loud session too, but I have the wherewithal to understand context and my surroundings and adjust accordingly. What he couldn't seem to grasp after we moved in together was that the dynamic necessarily had to change. Our daughters' bedroom shared a wall with ours, so every time we had sex and they were in the house (more often than not), I intentionally controlled myself and was as quiet as possible. But he thought *do the good tongue thing* was the input that used to get the *writhing in pleasure, very vocal, bed banging against the wall* output, and he couldn't understand why that had changed.
In our case, the input that needed to be changed wasn't the actual sex acts, it was the environment in which sex happened. This would have looked like encouraging the girls to get out of the house more and hang out with their friends, planning time where he and I could be truly alone together, booking us a hotel room, etc. Instead he did nothing to encourage that, didn't plan hotel dates for us to get away, was super protective and weird whenever the girls wanted to hang out with friends so they just stopped asking, so that type of true alone time was exceedingly rare. On the few occasions when the girls were say, staying at their grandma's, and I was actually able to be as free and vocal as I wanted to be, he would act shocked and say something like, see, why can't it be like that all the time? Ummmm, dude, I really don't understand how I can explain this to you in any clearer terms. Can you not see how *girls out of the house* plus *sex* = louder, raunchier sex? I swear it was like I was telling him that 1 + 1 = 3.
Another one he couldn't wrap his head around was sucking on my breasts. I don't like it. Never have. I don't even have biological children, but I feel like I'm breast feeding. I know some women have receptors there and it is an erogenous zone for them, no judgment for those who like it, I just know that I don't. It doesn't feel good to me, it just feels weird and slobbery, and kind of like why are you doing that? Like if he were to suck on my knee or my elbow or something - it just feels strange and out of place.
So when he would do that (the breasts, not the knees/elbows) I would ask him not to. I lost track of how many times I had to tell him not to do that. It was like in the heat of the moment his brain didn't work correctly and he would go for it again, and I would have to pull him away and say hey, stop that, you can kiss anywhere else but there, please. Often I would just pull his face up and kiss him, to get him away from the boobs. Now there were some times where I was so close to finishing, that when he would ignore all of the previous conversations and do it anyway, I would just let it happen. I still didn't like it, but I didn't want to kill the mood, and I was much more focused on the sensations going on below the belt that I kind of just pushed it out of my mind so I could focus on finishing.
Then the next time we would be having sex, and he would go for the boob again and I would say no, he would act confused again. Well I just don't get you, you liked it so much last time! No, dude, I didn't like it. I tolerated it for the sake of my own orgasm! All of that pleasure you saw was because of the other things you were doing, and in fact happened in SPITE of the boob sucking. When you hear hoofbeats, why are you assuming there are zebras instead of horses?
Sometimes he seemed so truly confused. Imagine George of the Jungle trying to figure out life in the city. THAT was my XH trying to understand, well, most social norms, but especially sex. I could literally spell it out for him and he would just be like "wow, you're such a mystery!" I think a significant amount of my time was spent face palming. And on the rare occasion that he got the output he wanted, instead of examining all of the ways in which the context was different this time, which led to the output he desired, he would just shrug and say "Mr. HHADL just lucky I guess."
I wonder if watching porn can cause this George of the Jungle naiveté in some men. Like they're so used to living with the gorillas (watching hardcore porn) that they can't wrap their brain around living a normal human life (actual sex with real women who have feelings and autonomy). But after a certain amount of time, and so many women telling you the same thing, I no longer believe it's naiveté, I think it's willful ignorance.
ETA: The physical similarities between Brendan Fraser as George in the Jungle and my XH are striking. Body type (long torso, shorter legs with wide shoulder to hip ratio, aka swimmer body), height, long hair etc. I don't know how the analogy of how their brains are so similar hasn't come to mind before, now that I've thought of it, it feels so obvious. But the fact that they are so physically similar too is, I don't know, weird. I feel like this is a weird revelation I'm going to have to explore with my therapist haha.
[This message edited by HeHadADoubleLife at 1:26 PM, July 26th (Sunday)]
