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The great thing about the Facebook feature “On This Day”—that invention where you get to see what you posted on this date in 2012 and this date in 2016—is that it becomes a lot more difficult to do that thing where you romanticize the past and forget about what a disaster your last relationship was. I had a tendency to do this in the past, and I used to allow my convoluted emotions to draw me back to bad situations most of the time. These days, however, I log on and I see some reminder of the sexless and altogether unhappy home life I left and that affords me some valuable perspective.
Initially, when I moved out on my own last year, I got involved with someone I had been cyber-flirting with while I was still living with my ex. I never crossed the line into all-out infidelity while she and I still lived in the same house, but I did notice that I was engaging in the type of thing that is referred to these days as micro-cheating. As it turned out, that dalliance never went anywhere and the search continued.
I had put enormous pressure on myself to get involved in a physical relationship. I felt like I had to prove to myself that I was still desirable. I always knew I had been in the past, but what I had just gotten out of had been nothing short of traumatic. I was working 70 hours a week, playing the part of the sole breadwinner, and trying to navigate the trials of new fatherhood. For almost four years, I felt as if I literally had to plead for some semblance of a physical connection.
I tried to remain as understanding as I possibly could right up until my mate brought up her desire to have another child. It dawned on me when she was able to make herself available for sex four or five times a week when she was ovulating, that her protestations of “just not having the time” for weeks on end when she wasn’t ovulating, lacked honesty.
So finally, I was able to screw up enough courage to strike out on my own and, unfortunately, the year of dating I just experienced could best be described as one unsuitable situation after another. This is, of course, to be expected when we first get back out into the dating world; probably more so when we hit middle age. What made it doubly hard to live through was the fact that I followed each one of these tattered threads right up to the bedroom even when it was painfully obvious that it was not going to last.
This sort of behavior is generally viewed as being tinged with malice, but it is my firm belief that a steady diet of sexual rejection in a relationship will inevitably change us psychologically. It almost certainly led me to what looked like wanton promiscuity.
This is obviously not an excuse for poor behavior and I put it in check almost as soon as I noticed what I was doing. The point is that when we are rejected—and I believe this is true for both men and women—we tend to do whatever it takes to try to shed those inevitable fears of inadequacy. Unfortunately, there’s no chance of this being a quick fix. Being hurt like that in a relationship often fills us with a vacuum that cannot be filled with anything external. It requires the hard and oftentimes uncomfortable work of loving ourselves again.
Even more damaging is what we tend to do to the unsuspecting potential partners that we engage with and then subsequently dispose of as soon as they feel comfortable enough to allow us into their bedroom. There really are no winners here.
These days, as I take in the lessons I so recently learned, I move around my world with a bit more caution and not a little regret. I understand what drives people to do the things they do a little better than before. Hurt people do, in fact, hurt people. Whether it’s done intentionally or in the name of personal reconstruction is entirely beside the point. And I’m learning to do the work I need to do that will help me to restore my self-esteem without the need to blindly hurt others.
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Photo credit: Getty Images
The post My Wanton Promiscuity: What Led to It & How I Changed appeared first on The Good Men Project.