NOTE: As a stay-at-home parent, my time to write is jambed literally into the dark crevices of my day. It is difficult for me to find consecutive blocks of time to write my ideas down, much less re-read them with fresh eyes or carefully edit them. I don't really care about small errors of grammar. In fact, I often make them with intention, much to my own detriment as a writer, just because I find them colorful, or I dislike the rules they break. However, if something is unclear or seems to be saying something contradictory to the flow of the writing, I do appreciate having that pointed out to me so that I can know specifically what writing I have done that really, actually needs me to sacrifice my sleep time or reading time or future writing time or even just a rare moment of time to relax, to go back and re-read with fresh eyes, and edit and change...vs what I might just be better letting exist as a confusing mess or write about again in a more organized or clear manner. In other words, don't hesitate to reach out to me if something I wrote seems off! It probably is.
After re-reading post 8 of 100, and getting to the last paragraph, I realized that I was transitioning into kind of a new topic/idea, “what is the deal with male-identifying folks getting their heart broken and falling Into pits of patriarchal misogyny?” And that that kind of weakened the thread of what I was focusing on in the rest of that post. Instead of trying to fix it/edit that part, and instead of trying to just continue addressing that question in another, more hypothetical and poorly researched psychological diatribe, I thought it might be a good time in these blog posts to go back and start talking a bit about my own personal rejections/heart breaks, especially since I am a male-identifying folk.
First of all, this is a topic that I have been writing about for something like 20 years. Seriously, in many ways, the first book I ever published, I Fucked Up, is pretty much a semi-fictional account of many of my many failing/failed romantic and intimate relationships and the life I have been inspired to live as a result of these wonderful and painful heartbreaks. I did digitize that book and turn it into a website that includes a lot of other stuff, but the original anthology can be read here.
I don’t want to basically repeat myself here, and I don’t want you to think that you need to go back and read an entire book to understand this blog post, so I will instead focus on one specific heart break that is only partially covered in this text, and how a lot of people expected me to react to it vs how I did react to it.
I think one of the classic “the world (in the form of this one specific romantic partner) has done me wrong” tale of heart break and woe, the kind that is supposed to leave people shattered wrecks is the tale of being cheated on by the love of your life. Personally, I think there are multiple tales of heartbreak that are much more tragic and dark, but few of them capture the fear of “ultimate betrayal” that get represented in the “cheated on” trope. Before I go into a super long mega post talking about why I think relationship ideals like “Loyalty” and “Honesty” are bogus patriarchal constructs (something I will probably save for a later blog post), I will just say that I probably don’t share the same ideas about intimacy and sexual relationships as many folks that might think people that look like me might think.
This can make it pretty difficult and awkward to talk about ex-partners in locations and situations where normal people talk about these things as form of bonding with other normal people. Like, you have to do a lot of explaining why the reason you were hiding, crywacking on a sunporch outside the bedroom of a long-term romantic partner you were wildly in love with while they had sex with some random person who you really don’t like and don’t trust…isn’t just because you are some kind of pathetic, pervy, beta cuck, but because you realize that your partner knew they had double booked their time with you, after you had hitchhiked 90 miles to see them, and they hadn’t told you that before you got there, so you were really just trying to multitask dealing with the emotions of feeling disrespected within a place of vulnerability while also trying to exhaust yourself enough to just go to sleep, so you could be in a better head space to talk about the issue in the morning, than you would be if you spent all night stressing out about something you had no control over.
This incident was neither the first nor the last, more even the most intense instance of emotional immaturity and failure to respect each other that would occur in my relationship with this person, from either of us.
I am not going to go into too many details about the “ending incident” here, because it doesn’t feel necessary to the purpose of talking about how it left me in the kind of position where my heart was fully shattered, not just because of what had happened, but because the “this is over”-ness of our now ex-romantic relationship left me in a position of extreme economy insecurity—essentially homeless in a city where I had no one I could stay with, and removed from a community of support that had shrunk down to include no one that was not directly connected to that relationship…except the boss at my job, who was underpaying me for the work I was doing, and thus offered to let me sleep in my office, because he knew the alternative was certainly me leaving town at a time he found me irreplaceable.
There are many men that I have tried to talk to about this story, usually trying to explain about how much I learned and grew as a person, and a romantic partner, from having had these experiences and how I don’t regret the choices I made that put me in that situation, even if they embarrassed and shamed me. Those conversations never go the way I want them to. Far too often, they have instead gone down the “That F’ing B!@(^ ! You are just too nice a guy” response, which has left me pretty hesitant to talk to men about it in the future. This “F’ing B—!” response always seems rooted in some imagined and imagined-to-be-shared patriarchal cultural knowledge that a man in a relationship with a woman, should be able to expected to receive assurances of emotional and physical security from “their women,” and when women fail to provide that security to their men, they have failed not only their men, but society as a whole.
But the thing is, I have never seen any man positively reflect upon their growth as a person from a relationship that they identify as having ended because their partner cheated on them (for the sake of simplicity, when I am talking about infidelity or cheating in this post, I mean specifically engaging in an act of physical intimacy with someone outside the relationship, without the knowledge or consent of the partner). Like it is a fairly common story, and I have a lot of great friends who identify as men and have had relationships end after an incident of infidelity came to light, but many of them still have difficulty talking about those relationships or being friends with their ex or their exes friends. Now, WARNING: It is ok, fuck it, it is even a sign of emotional growth and maturity, for anyone to establish boundaries for themselves about who they can and cannot be around. If you are reading this and feeling like this is you, GOOD JOB! You are doing the right thing. I would much rather see every man in the world walk away from and never look back at exes for whom they feel like they can never trust again or have any kind of rational or platonic relationship again, than have any men push themselves into interactions that they cannot handle emotionally, because that is how really terrible things happen to real women all the time.
At the same time, I think a lot of growth as a person can happen when you can look back at the relationship and realize that any act or acts of infidelity were not actually what went wrong with that relationship, but that there were issues buried much deeper in the relationship and that both the act of infidelity and its coming to light are probably really important signs that the relationship was probably only going to get a lot worse down the road if they didn’t happen or the feelings leading to them didn’t get resolved. If you were at a place in your own emotional journey where you are expecting your partner not to engage in certain behaviors, or to even just to not engage in those behaviors without talking to you about it first, and your partner is not ready to be in a relationship with those expectations, that is not a healthy relationship for either person. If even talking about what kinds of expectations you are going to put on your relationship with another person is too awkward an idea to even consider it, then you are not ready to be in a healthy relationship with that person, and if you just assume that patriarchal assumptions about loyalty and security in relationships should be enough to make those kinds of conversations about expectations unnecessary, then you are in great danger of slipping deeply into patriarchal misogynistic thinking when one of your relationships inevitably explodes because it was a relationship you were not really ready to be in as a healthy and mature partner.