I Married The First Person I had Sex With. Here’s What I Learned.
Only do what you want
As much as possible, take action based on what you truly want, not based on what you think is “right” or “acceptable.” Every decision I ever made that went against what I truly wanted came back to bite me in the ass. Each of those decisions, which may have looked “right” to outside parties, or on paper, or to my conscience, ended up leading to outcomes that I wanted even less.
When my wife would not return from vacation in our country of birth with my baby son, I dropped everything to keep our family together. I reverted to my role as the problem solver. I bought and sold houses at great financial loss, compromised my career, left my community, relinquished my green card, and spent years entangled in complex and expensive international tax scenarios. I wanted to keep my family together, but I didn’t want all of that. I took action that I thought was “right.” I thought I was being a “good” husband. I thought I “should” put my family first.
With hindsight, I see that if I had not taken action, if I had stood my ground, if I had spent time feeling what I wanted, validating it, and enjoying the empowered feelings associated with that, I would have made very different decisions. The outcomes would have been very different, and probably much more in alignment with what I truly wanted. Perhaps the outcomes would have been less destructive for everyone, including my son, and including myself.
I’m not writing this to bitch about my ex-wife. I don’t even have anything negative to say about her. I’m also not writing this to dwell on mistakes and feel bad about them. I’m examining this part of my life with you, right now, in order to both gain and impart as much value from it as possible.
When I look back, I know that it was very clear to me what I wanted, and I chose to go strongly against that, to not trust that, to not honor that. I believe that everything I wanted, regardless of what was “right,” could have been available to me if I had stood firm in my authority and my power, the power of honoring what I wanted.
“Right” is just a dead mental concept. What you truly want is living and powerful, and your clear intuition, your drive and motivation, can be trusted. What you truly want is all you can really know for sure. whereas what’s “right” is usually wrong.
Every relationship is a success
All relationships are successes. We gain so much experience from being in relationship, especially a “bad” relationship. All of life is about relationship, and we get to practice relationship particularly intensely in intimacy with our partner. All of our transference comes up as we begin to see the positive and negative traits of our parents in our partner. We get to heal, or deepen, the wounds of our childhoods with our partner. And then we get to reflect on that, and to integrate and grow.
All relationships have a natural end. For some relationships the end comes with death. For others the end comes with separation or divorce. It might seem that some relationships would have been even more successful had they ended sooner, with less suffering and hurt. However, relationships always end when they do, and when they do turns out to be when one or both people understand that they should.
My wife divorced me. Even though it destroyed my life as I knew it, I don’t take it personally. It was her right. In hindsight, I would have been happier had she done it much sooner.
More on next page…
