My ugly night

My wife and I had another argument last night, and it isn’t any better this morning. I had told her last night that I wanted to try smoking weed – just once, you understand. She’s done it, after all. I thought that that was a fairly reasonable thing to want to try, but mentioning it to her it was like throwing a match into a tinderbox.

I’ve mentioned that I’m living with a lot of regret right now. I’m angry that there are so many things that I haven’t tried in my twenties. I guess I feel inferior for not having had those experiences. I’m angry that I isolated myself from all my friends and the only people left in my life validated the really dumb things that I was doing.

A week ago I told her that I wanted to build experiences that were separate from her – I wanted to do things that didn’t involve her. What it come right down to is that I feel inferior to her and I wanted to do things that she hasn’t. Evening the lover imbalance isn’t a possibility – I know that now, although I wasn’t sure at one time. I’m not going to break my marriage vows, no matter how much it hurts me thinking of her past boyfriends. I was thinking more along the lines of going out with friends, or maybe going on a short trip somewhere, or taking up a hobby outside the home. I’m already exercising a lot without her.

It was about a week ago that I realized that my wife has nothing to do with the regret that I’m feeling. It really is my own sense of inferiority to her. I don’t need to build these ’separate experiences’. Of course I’ll end up having them – how can two human being spend all of their time doing everything together? But I don’t *need* to look things that I want to do for the specific purpose of excluding her. That would be cruel, and it wouldn’t make me happy anyways.

When I told her about my wanting to try weed, she thought that I was still hung-up on excluding her from my life. I’ve told her that that isn’t true, but she’s still angry. I’ve put her through a lot the last few weeks. I’ve been badgering her for the details of her past – a past she isn’t interested in thinking about. When I told her that I wanted to try marijuana, she got angry and said that she didn’t know me anymore, and that she wanted a divorce.

I’m not sure what’s going to happen.

Regret pt. 3

One night I had a terrible dream. It had been four years since I dropped out of high school and I was still depressed and suicidal. In the dream, I was still 18 years old, but I was meeting with all of my high school friends like S and C and they were 40. Somehow I was stuck in time while they went on with their lives. C was married and had children.

The next day I registered for night classes to finish high school. After that, I registered for university and eventually got a degree in physics. I didn’t really like physics, but it took me four years to figure that out. And I given that I didn’t like it very much, I wasn’t very good at it, either. I’ll talk about that later.

I didn’t really know what to do with a degree in physics (and a degree with some very mediocre grades behind it), so I spent another four years in school getting another degree, this time in computing science. It worked well for me given that I had already spent four years in a basement room working on a computer. It was something I was good at, but I don’t think that it really challenged me, in the ways that I needed to be challenged. I now think that I probably should have gone into an arts program instead.

During this whole time I lived at home. I didn’t date, I didn’t have any friends, I didn’t socialize. I didn’t go to parties or concerts, I didn’t take advantage of the university social scene, and I didn’t have any much fun. I was sleepwalking through life – depressed, negative, and uncommunicative. I didn’t know how to make friends. I didn’t know that I could make friends. I know that it sounds silly, but at the time I thought that most people just kept the friends that they had in school and after that you didn’t make new ones. The thought of asking another human being to go out for a drink or something seemed strangely impossible.

I’m really angry and frustrated about this right now. I’m going through a sort of mid-life crisis, at age 35. I missed my twenties because of clinical depression and social isolation. Why did it have to be that way?

Much of my regret is cast into sharp relief against my wife and her experiences. My wife has had a lot of friends and a lot of lovers over the years. She had a lot of boyfriends, and even a few one night stands. My wife left home when she was 18. She lived as an independent adult, working jobs, attending school, making friends, meeting people, and engaging the world. This makes me really angry. Why was I living as a shut-in when my wife was out in the world? Why didn’t I get treatment for my depression? Damn it, I missed my twenties, and I’ll never get them back.

My wife has had so many experiences that I haven’t had. She moved out of her house and worked at a hardware store where she started sleeping with the store manager. She had a stormy relationship with a band drummer in university, and left him when she found out he was cheating on her. She drank like a fish when she was young and tried smoking weed.

What did I have? I spent 10 years living in my mom’s basement. My only lovers were in my imagination, my only one-night-stands were masturbating myself. I yearned for companionship, but I didn’t know how to get it. I thought it was impossible, when it was always within sight along a convoluted path of self-realization, making peace with oneself, and socializing.

I don’t know what to do at this point. I don’t feel like I’m ‘even’ with my wife. She mentions how she goes to lunch with ex-boyfriends and I wish that I had ex-girlfriends to talk to. She mentions things that she’s done with ex-lovers like golfing or rock-climbing and I don’t feel comfortable doing those things anymore. I’m tired of her being my ‘teacher’, but I have so much less ‘life’ to draw on that it seems like we’re always doing something that’s already in her past.

Swimming

I’m swimming now. I’m still trying to run when I can, but I’m also taking swimming lessons and really enjoying it. The other people in the class all have issues with being in the water – most of them were traumatized when they were young and don’t like being in the water. One girl was pushed into the water at the deep end of a pool when she was 6 and nearly drowned. I don’t have any of these issues. I like the water and I’m pretty comfortable going into the deep. The only reason I don’t know how to swim was that I was never signed up for lessons when I was a child.

The really interesting thing is the mammalian water reflex. Without conditioning, it’s really difficult to just blow air out of your mouth underwater. I’ve taken enough classes now that I can do this without much trouble, but it was surprising how my body seized up when I tried to do it the first time.

The big reason I’m swimming is that I want to have an attractive body, and swimming seems like a nice way of exercising to get t. I don’t seem to get as exhausted when I swim as when I run. I think this has to do with the thermodynamics of water versus air. One of the things my wife told me about running is that it’s a lot easier to do in the rain or at night, because keeping yourself cool is so important when running. I’ve noticed this myself, and I expect most runners have, too – I can always run longer at night than during the day and on a cool day than on a hot day. Anyways, I’m guessing that the reason I don’t get as exhausted when swimming is either that it isn’t as strenuous as running (and I don’t really think that’s the case – running got easier when I added swimming to my regimen), or the water surrounding you when you swim helps keep you cool better than the air surrounding you when you run.

Or maybe not. But I like swimming all the same.

Regret pt. 2

When I said that I didn’t have any friends, it was a bit of an exaggeration. I did have a couple of friends. One of them, S., was with me during most of middle and high school. Also, I made some friends in my first year of high school in grade 10. I was in the accelerated program and rather than attending mixed classes like the rest of the high school, we were all in the same class with each other all day. It was the same group of 20 people all the time and we all got to know each other really well. In fact, the first girl that I fell in love with was in that class. Her name was C., and while we never got together, I think I can still see her face when I close my eyes. I can only imagine how vivid the memory of her would be if we had dated.

That was probably one of the best years that I had in the public school system. It helped that I was in a different school in high school than middle school. I was with different people and those two idiots who made my life so difficult were gone. It has to be said that I don’t think I had any friends that I was completely honest with, though. I knew that S had never had a girlfriend before, for example, but I demurred when I was asked the same question. Even at that age I was too good at keeping a secret. If I had been honest with people earlier, I can only imagine how my life would have been different.

I also had my first heart-break that year. When I first met C, I was told by a mutual friend in that class that she was interested in me and wanted me to ask her out. That wasn’t going to happen without a lot of patience on her part, of course, because I didn’t have any confidence in myself. I wasn’t athletic so I was very self-conscious about my body, and I didn’t think that I had much to offer anyone. Anyways, she eventually discovered my best friend S. S and C were dating on and off for most of that year. Neither of them knew just how infatuated with C I was, and when they found out C was bemused and S felt betrayed because of how he had taken me into his confidence.

I want to emphasize just how obsessive I was about C. She was really my first love, even if she never felt the same way about me. I’m not sure that I’ve ever felt so much pain associated with love since. I’ve experienced plenty of unrequited love – so many women that I’ve known and wanted to be with but never would – but hers was surely the most painful. The only thing that would compare would be what I’m going through right now with my wife.

Anyways, C left the school, indeed she moved to the other side of the country in grade 11, and I dropped out of the accelerated program and entered the general student body. In grade 11 and 12, I was anonymous. I lost touch with most of the people I knew in the accelerated class, and I didn’t make any new friends in any of my other classes.

Fast-forward four years and I’m now 22 years old. I’m well into my twenties, but I’m spending them in my mom’s basement. Occasionally I get a phone call from S – he’s attending a liberal arts school in the US and is telling me about his classes and all the people he’s meeting and the new ideas he’s being exposed to. Most of our phone conversations are monologues – S tells me about his life, and I listen. I don’t have anything to offer – how could I? What have I done? I’m spending all of my time playing computer games and he’s become an adult. I yearn to be an adult, but I’m so depressed.

This is something that really bothers me about my mother. She was told to wait out this strange stage in my life, but I was also clinically depressed. I was attempting suicide and I never got the help that I desperately needed. I should have been seeing a psychologist as soon as I dropped out of high school. But instead, I just lingered in childhood. I was Laura in The Glass Menagerie. I was paralyzed by depression and feelings of worthlessness. I needed to be woken up, but no one would do that for me! Why not? I really wish that it hadn’t been up to my mother to wake me up. I needed to be pushed out the door, but she was so accommodating that I hid out in that basement room and missed what could have been some of the most exciting years of my life.

Regret

I live with a great deal of regret. I’m not sure what to do about it. Worse, I’m not sure that I’m not doing things now that I’ll live to regret. I think in addition to turning my life around and living more confidently, I need to learn to put my past behind me, and to stop seeing the decisions that I made as being as bad as I think they were.

I had been bullied relentlessly all through middle school, and I had learned to think very poorly of myself. I lost my childhood best friend when he decided that he was more popular than me and didn’t want to hang out with me, and by then I just couldn’t make new friends because I hated myself and didn’t think that anyone would want to be my friend. I was in a small school in a small town so it was hard to socialize outside of the people that were tormenting me. At the same time, my parents were telling me that there wasn’t much to see out there, anyways. My mother didn’t have any friends outside of work either, and spent most of her time watching soaps on TV. My father didn’t want much to do with the family and spent most of his time at work on night time shifts and at home sleeping through the day.

At any rate, in middle school (grades 7-9 in Canada), I was made to think of myself as nothing much at all. I wanted to go out and do things, but the idea of asking someone else to hang out with me seemed scary because I was certain I would be rejected. No one really wanted to be my friend, after all. So I was isolated and spent most of my time outside school at home. I wonder sometimes what happened to those two who bullied me so much. That bullying defined the arc of my life for 15 years. I just thought differently – the very way I would think about things changed – after they got through with me. I’d like to think that I could have pulled myself up by my bootstraps and shaken it off, but I wasn’t even aware that I had changed. That’s what was so insidious about it – how can you change back if you aren’t even aware that you changed? I lost all of my confidence in myself. I became unreasonably self-conscious. I stopped doing things for the sheer selfish pleasure of doing them – it was more important that I not become vulnerable to criticism and ridicule. If I had had someone, a concerned parent or someone, anyone, who could have woken me up, maybe things would have been different, but I didn’t have anyone to help me. For 15 years I tried to live my life as something less than a man – because in my mind I wasn’t a man. I was a failure as a human being.

At the same time, my father was looking for new thrills outside his marriage and managed to hook up with a stalker. She would call us at all hours of the day and leave weird messages on our answering machine about her abortions and other strangeness, she would visit our house and throw rocks at our windows, she tried to run us off the road in her car when we went out, and there was plenty of craziness that went even beyond that. Needless to say, my parents’ marriage came to a screeching halt and my mother, after years of enduring my father’s countless affairs, filed for a divorce.

This was about when I dropped out of high school. I think I had about 2 months until graduation, but I was having a nervous breakdown. No one cared. I was attending so little school by then, and skipping so many classes, that the school administrators were happy to be rid of me. From then on, I spent about 4 years in my mom’s basement using my computer. Yes, four years. I had scarcely any contact with anyone else other than my mom and my brother. I don’t know why they let me go on for so long isolating myself. Apparently my mom had asked someone (I want to think that it was a clinical psychologist, but I suspect that it was probably a priest) about me and they counseled patience – they said that I would come out of seclusion when I was ready. Four years later, I had a dream that chilled my blood and woke me up in more ways than one.

Facebook

Alright, so I’m not on Facebook or Myspace or any other social networking site. Am I still a worthy human being?

Facebook is so ridiculously popular here in Canada that it’s a bit strange being the only one who isn’t a member. Why have I held out? I’ve portrayed myself as an anti-social-networking curmudgeon to the people who’ve asked, but the truth is that I don’t have many friends, either in the present or from my past, and I’m ashamed of it. It’s just that much more sad when I compare the number of people that I could possibly get into contact with on Facebook with my wife.

I don’t know that anyone who isn’t a top-tier blogger is quite as plugged-in to Facebook as my wife. She’s on Facebook, and she has hundreds of friends. She was extremely social when she was in high-school, mostly because at one time or another she had a crush on or dated just about every guy in her school (you think I’m joking, don’t you?) All of those high school friends are now her Facebook friends. She was similarly social when she went to university and over the years she’s met a huge coterie of fellow students who’ve all joined her online. Even her job exposes her to more people than mine does – she works in an overwhelmingly male-dominated workplace so she stands out among her co-workers, and she interacts with a large number of people both in her day-to-day routine and on her business trips.

The funny thing about my wife is that she claims that she’s anti-social. As far as I can tell, she’s actually one of the most outgoing people that I’ve ever known. When she was growing up, she had a courage to go out and do things that I just didn’t have.

At any rate, I just can’t bring myself to get on to Facebook and let everyone know just how uneven we are. That stupid ‘# of friends” counter is a painful reminder of the sad life I lived even just five years ago. It says to anyone who visits, “this man was a shut-in who couldn’t make friends and knows little about other people.”

Excercise

I’ve never had a very good relationship with my body.

It has to be said that my dad didn’t really help things. I inherited his perfectly silly-looking body (thanks dad!) with his narrow shoulders, his pot belly, his wide hips, but NOT his majestic, towering stature. On top of that, it just seems like my whole body is grossly asymmetrical – twisted and misshapen. I think I first became self-conscious about my body when I was in my pre-teen years. It was really, really early – probably around age 9 or 10? I hated taking my clothes off around other people and did everything I could to avoid it. I remember when my gym class had a swimming unit for a few weeks, I feigned illness (sea sickness?) to get out of wearing a bathing suit. So I sat there in a chair, by the side of the pool, watching all of the other kids swimming and just generally having fun, wishing I my body wasn’t so un-presentable.

I hated the locker room and all the humiliations of high school gym class so much that I managed to get out of it all together, eventually. I claimed that I had debilitating joint pain and that I couldn’t participate. I was a medical mystery – one doctor claimed it was ‘juvenile arthritis’. They even gave me a cane to walk around with – not that I took it anywhere outside my house. I was too young and stupid to realize that I was only cheating myself out of regular exercise. I still can’t believe that I lied like that to all those people, but I’m sort of willing to forgive myself given that I was also clinically depressed and regularly attempting suicide – lying about joint pain and getting out of gym class was a venial sin.

Anyways, I’m older now and I’ve never run more than maybe a mile in my life, prior to a few weeks ago. I’ve been running at night the last few weeks, working my way up to 10K. I feel fantastic. I have more energy and my body just feels like it’s working properly now. I had so much energy this weekend that I stormed through the yard work and still managed to clean up much of our basement.

I spent 10 years trying to make weight training in gyms work, and it just didn’t. I’m so done with lifting weights. If it works for you, that’s nice – I’ve pumped so much iron and exhausted every muscle in my body so many times lifting weights, with absolutely no results to show for it, in spite of having hired professional trainers, that I don’t think I’m ever touching another dumbbell. Phooey.

Tonight’s run was hard – I ate too much for dinner and that made it really uncomfortable. My wife has been running all her life and she’s been giving me tips and instructions – I guess I would have gotten the same thing from a gym teacher if I had one. Oh well.

I’m not sure whether I’m going to try to run more than 10K. My body still looks pretty silly. It’s looking a little bit better, but whenever I want to get a better idea of how my body looks, I stare at it with two mirrors. That reverses the orientation – my left side is my right side and vice-versa. That makes my body look less familiar – it looks more like someone else’s body and is more like how someone else would see my body, I’m guessing. When I do that, I still look pudgy and asymmetrical – I still have narrow shoulders and a big gut, and if I were a teenager I would still be reluctant to take off my clothes in front of anyone. But I’m not a teenager anymore – I’m old and I don’t care as much about what other people think of me.

My wife has nightmares

I’m not sure about this, but my own informal and somewhat anecdotal research suggests that most people have a recurring theme to their dreams and nightmares. I spent a ridiculous number of years as an undergrad and it seems that that left enough of an impression on my psyche that I always dream about my days in university. Typically I remember that there’s a class on my schedule that I forgot about and I haven’t attended all semester. This actually happened to me – I had a seminar component to one of my classes that I forgot to attend right up until the midterm exams. Anyways, in the dream, I haven’t attended any classes at all right up to the final exams, I’m completely unprepared for the exam, failure is almost certain, I’ll probably be expelled, and on top of that the world will probably end.

When I met her, most of my wife’s nightmares were about elevator shafts, but since we’ve been together, it’s been something different. In her dreams, she panics when she realizes that she didn’t marry me – instead, she’s either married to someone else whom she can’t remember, or she’s married to her last boyfriend.

My wife, like a lot of women who have bad relationships with their fathers, spent years seeking male approval and attention, and most of the men who gave her that attention weren’t at all equal to or worthy of her. None of them physically abused her, but her last boyfriend verbally abused her, and it has to be said that none of her exes really treated her as well as she deserved.

After we got married, she told me that she actually felt guilty – she felt like it was her fate in life to marry a man much like her father – a man who would abuse her – and that by marrying me she had cheated that fate. She felt like it was her fate to learn to deal with that abuse and, I guess, to accomodate her abuser, and that by marrying me she had chosen “the easy way out” (her words). I think these dreams are a manifestation of that guilt.

Just like the movie…

I was a 28 year old virgin. That bears repeating. At 28 years of age I had not had sex with a woman (or man). Why not? I’ve thought about that at length and I think it’s because I’m asocial. I’ve never been able to form friendships – not intimate relationships, but just plain old friendships – with other people. That’s a serious problem in itself (one that I still suffer with), but it turns out that if you don’t have any friends outside of classes or work, you don’t get introduced to or meet a lot of women. Not having friends means you miss out on a lot of social events – even just casual stuff like going to a pub or hanging out together in a common-room. I’m not fat, or especially unattractive. I’m not athletic or particularly fetching, either, but as a friendless loner, it just doesn’t matter.

Mind you, it’s not that I didn’t have opportunities early on. I was asked out by a few girls in high school. That’s not necessarily a chance to lose your virginity, but at least it would have been companionship. I turned every one of them down, for a lot of really dumb reasons. Anyways, after high school there was university, but I waited for a few years before going, so no one that I had known in high school was there. And after school (the first degree) there was work, and while I had thought in university that I couldn’t possibly be more alone, it was even worse in the working world.

There’s a story in a book that I read by a psychiatrist who’s counseling a patient who complains that he can’t find any friends. Paraphrasing, the psychiatrist responds, “Joe, in all the world, you have no friends waiting to be found.” His patient is shocked that his doctor would say something so blunt and cruel. Eventually, after his patient has grown even more despondent, the psychiatrist continues, “There are no friends out there in the world waiting for you. You have to MAKE friends!” I’m mentioning this because I don’t want to leave the impression that I’m blaming anyone else for my friendlessness. I know that I’ve wasted a lot of time and let go of a lot of chances to connect with other people. It’s my own fault. Friends are made, not found, and I just haven’t tried hard enough to make them.

Anyways, back to my virginity. A man’s virginity, in his youth, is precious. Sometime around 22 or 23 it becomes a painful annoyance. By 28, it’s a humiliating reminder of failure, so I decided that I was going to pay for sex. I called an escort service, and asked for a girl. I think when they asked me for any preferences, I said that I’d like someone ‘athletic’. I might have also used the word ‘lithe’.

She arrived a few hours later. She was an ex-stripper who found she could make more money as an escort. I think when I told her that I was a virgin she felt comfortable enough to tell me that she was married. Apparently her husband got a charge out of knowing that she was going out to have sex with a stranger. As fetishes go it’s a strange one, but even then there were ground rules – she said that he’d get really upset if she didn’t tell him about it. I find that really interesting – it wasn’t the fact that his lady was going out for the evening to be penetrated by another man that bothered him. What upset him was when it became an experience that was exclusive to his wife and some other guy – when it was a secret that she kept from him and shared only with that other man.

Anyways, we had sex, and I was finally rid of my virginity. As sex goes it was OK – It was over much too quickly. I called on the services of that same girl a second time a few weeks later, and the sex was much, much better. In fact, it some of the best that I’ve ever had, really. She was tall and had a beautifully proportioned body that fit together with mine just perfectly.

Aside from this, my only other sexual experience was with my only other girlfriend – a girl that I met at a dance class. We went on a couple of dates together, and on our second date there was a lot of intimate touching, but not really any sex. At any rate, we broke up shortly after – I think we had an argument on the phone and just never called each other again. It seems pretty silly now, thinking about it.

My wife had a lot more experience with men than I had with women. She was having sex early and often. She lost her virginity just after high school, and went on to have sex with at least 7 other men in her early 20’s before she settled into a long term relationship. Moreover, she’s had an innumerable number of boyfriends – she couldn’t even count them when I asked. She had plenty of opportunities, and she took them. While I was thinking of stupid reasons to turn away friends and say no to women, my wife was enthusiastically saying yes to the men she met.

My Wife

My wife and I have been married for about 5 years now. I love her, and I’m quite sure she loves me. We’ve had some difficulties in our marriage, but we’ve always persevered because I think we’re both much happier with each other than we were before.

We met each other at school. We were both about 28 and were both working on our second degrees. We were in the same degree program. Also, we were taking a martial arts class on campus together. Still, I don’t think that I ever noticed her. She tells me that she noticed me, mostly because I always sat near the front of our classes. The first time I remember talking to her was when I struck up a conversation with her in one of our labs. I can’t remember what we talked about, but that was when we started our email correspondence.

We became friends, and she tried to set me up with one of her friends. At the same time, I’d met an exchange student from Argentina that I was interested in. I didn’t understand why at the time, but the only person I was thinking of was my friend. She was unavailable – she was already in a relationship – but I still couldn’t stop thinking about her.

We were at a pub on campus. It wasn’t a busy night, and it was late – near closing time. I think we were the only customers there. We’d spent the evening talking, and we’d had a bit to drink. I told her that I really felt like kissing her, and she told me that if I did, she’d leave her boyfriend. I kissed her, and we fell into each others arms. I don’t how long we were making out with each other, but I can only imagine what the barmaids thought. It didn’t matter – we were in our own little world together, and we were happy there.

I dropped her off at the bus stop that night, after leaving the pub. She asked me, “Why me?” I didn’t know what to say, mostly because I wanted to say something meaningful. I can’t remember what I said.