Hehe… Taken out of context of today’s musings one might ask “I thought you gave up men like a bad habit. Why are you writing about them?”

I’ll tell you why. Because they still make up half (ish) of the population on this planet we call home, they still hold an inordinate amount of power… financial, political, etc. Society still tries to push the idea that the family ideal is a man and a woman, and that if you aren’t striving for or achieving this ideal, then you are failing. And they behave like entitled children… because, lets face it, there are a LOT of guys out there that aren’t looking for a partner to share their lives with, no, instead they are looking for a mother-like figure to care for them as their mother did.

What’s that? Not all men, you say? I agree, every queer man I’ve met falls outside of this description.

In my youth it felt like I was failing and unfulfilled. This stemmed from that social norm that we’re force fed that as a female I should be striving to find a man to spend my life with. Like that was the end all, be all of what my existence should be. I tried to fit into societies expectations for me, I REALLY tried. But that only resulted in an unhealthy relationship with myself, and eventually an unhealthy relationship with the man I fell in love with the idea of. Sure, he fulfilled that idea at times, but that only fueled the idea that I had to perform in certain ways to maintain the relationship.

Don’t be demanding, clingy, nagging, high maintenance etc. The list of negative female personality traits, as described by men, goes on.

I thought I wanted a relationship, what I really wanted was a genuine emotional connection. What I got was unfulfilling sex that stood in for emotional connection, a new venue for unhealthy coping mechanisms, and yet another adult that I had to emotionally regulate for. I took the learned behaviors from my childhood and applied them to my new relationship without realizing I was doing it.

I lived with blinders on, not realizing what I was doing. Not seeing the pattern that I was perpetrating. Being blind to the fact that I was padding truths for fear of how he might react, like a child might when the truth could result in punishment.

Now, don’t get that statement wrong. He never laid a hand on me in anger. It wasn’t physical punishment that I was trying to avoid, it psychological punishment that he seemed to wield unknowingly.

But it took me falling out of love with him for me to see what I was doing and not only actively stop the behavior, but call myself out on it to him, so he could see it too. And so he could see it for the unhealthy part of our relationship that it was.

After being faced with reality, he spiraled. He had already been spiraling but I only had the vaguest of a clue about it, which arrived in the form of the faint smell of stale cigarettes as he re-entered the house after work and his obsession with cleaning and deodorizing his truck before I would ride in it.
But it got worse. He began openly smoking at home, not in the house. He started going out to a bar for dinner every night and driving home after drinking with dinner (something he never would have done before). He stopped using his CPAP machine, I could tell because he stopped using the distilled water and when I would walk past his room late at night on my way to the toilet, I could hear him snoring just as loud as ever. At one point he even went off his anti-depressants cold turkey, in spite of his psychiatrist advising him against it.

Every act of self destruction, every intrusive interaction (physical and verbal), and every triggering conversation made it more and more clear that my impressions of how unhealthy we were for each other were correct.

At one point in the recent past I kind of lamented to someone that I hadn’t even gotten to explain to him about the gender fluidity, But that he probably would have reacted badly to the idea that there is a dude in my head more often than he would suspect.

So realistically I’m still performing emotional regulation, because I’m evidently worried about how he’ll react if I open up about that part of me too.

But to be fair, every time we’ve had a productive conversation, maybe a little vulnerable on both sides… he says something triggering and related later in the day or the next morning.

So I really just don’t want to let him into that part of who I am, I don’t want any more emotionally productive conversations with him, I don’t want to hear him speak his perceived obligation letting us know that he’s going out or that he’ll be back in a little bit, and I really don’t need to know how his dating experience is going.

I’ll be happy to sell this house and file for that divorce, even with the uncertainty and potential for chaos it brings.