I should say she loves me deeply and, in some ways, when I demanded the full break, she took it harder than me.
I believe, as a midwestern lesbian, that I will never find this again and thus, I stay and tolerate her “rules,” her angst, her sexual anorexia despite being a lusty broad. Yes, I’ve tried taking lovers. It simply does not work for me. Though our lovemaking is rare (four to five times per year), when we’ve made love it has been transcendent.
I’m a quirky unusual complex woman and it is hard to find a match. What the hell? What do YOU think?
Signed,
Should I Stay or Should I Go Now?
Dear Should I Stay or Should I Go Now,
What the hell, indeed. It sounds pretty crazy to me. Breaking up and getting back together more times than you can count? Sexual anorexia and “rules”? Your use of the word “addiction”? All those things unsettle me. But you know what unsettles me the most? This business about your lover being the only one who has “KNOWN” you in a “spiritual, sacred way,” coupled with your conviction that you will “never find this again and thus” you stay.
Find what, pray tell? A sexually and emotionally withholding lover who is terrified of commitment and intimacy? If you and I were sitting at your kitchen table composing your ad for lustybroadslookingforlove.com, is this what you’d ask for?
You would not. I encourage you to contemplate why you’re accepting that now. This relationship isn’t meeting your needs; it’s pushing your buttons. Namely, the big button that says I’m a forty-seven-year-old midwestern lesbian, so I’d better take what I can get. You write about your lover’s fear, but it’s your own fear that’s messing with your head. I know it’s hard to be alone, darling. Your anxieties about finding another partner are understandable, but they can’t be the reason to stay. Desperation is unsustainable. It might have gotten you through until now, but you’re too old and awesome to fake it anymore.
This doesn’t necessarily mean you and your lover are doomed. Good couples sometimes get off to an appalling start. Perhaps the two of you will make it through, but you won’t if you continue as you are. I know your connection feels powerful, rare, and incendiary. I know it seems like this woman is your own personal intimacy messiah. But you’re wrong. True intimacy isn’t a psychodrama. It isn’t the “highest highs and lowest lows.” It isn’t John Donne whispered into your crotch followed by months of not-exactly-agreed-upon celibacy. It’s a tiny bit of those things on occasion with a whole lot of everything else in between. It’s communion and mellow compatibility. It’s friendship and mutual respect. It’s not having to say we must have an “absolute restriction on each other” for thirty days.
That isn’t love, Lusty Broad. It’s a restraining order. You don’t have intimacy with this woman. You have intensity and scarcity. You have emotional turmoil and an overwrought sense of what the two of you together means.
I believe you know that. I could put most of the letters I receive into two piles: those from people who are afraid to do what they know in their hearts they need to do, and those from people who have genuinely lost their way. I’d put your letter in the former pile. I think you wrote to me because you realize you need to make a change, but you’re scared of what that change will mean. I sympathize. Neither of us can know how long it will be before you find love again. But we do know that so long as you stay in a relationship that isn’t meeting your needs, you’re in a relationship that isn’t meeting your needs. It makes you miserable and it also closes you off to other, potentially more satisfying romantic relationships.
I am not a religious person. I don’t meditate, chant, or pray. But lines from poems I love run through my head and they feel holy to me in a way. There’s a poem by Adrienne Rich I first read twenty years ago called “Splittings” that I thought of when I read your letter. The last two lines of the poem are: “I choose to love this time for once / with all my intelligence.” It seemed such a radical thought when I first read those lines when I was twenty-two—that love could rise from our deepest, most reasoned intentions rather than our strongest shadowy doubts. The number of times I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence has run through my head in the past twenty years cannot be counted. There hasn’t been a day when those lines weren’t present for me in ways both conscious and unconscious. You could say I’m devoted to them, even in times when I’ve failed profoundly to live up to their aspirations.
I suggest that you devote yourself to them too. The question isn’t whether you should stay or go. The question is, How would your life be transformed if you chose to love this time for once with all your intelligence?
I’m not talking to your crotch, sister. I’m looking you in the eye.
Yours,
Sugar
THE BAD THINGS YOU DID
Dear Sugar,
For many years, to varying degrees, I stole compulsively. For many of the years I stole, I was on a “cocktail” of psychotropic drugs for depression, anxiety, and insomnia. In retrospect, I think the drugs made me powerless to fight against the compulsion to take things. An impulse would arise in my head—say, to take this pair of jeans from my friend, that book from that friend, or the abandoned flower pots that sat on the porch of an empty house. I even once took money out of the wallet of my future mother-in-law. When the ideas arose to take whatever it was, I would try to talk myself out of it, but I couldn’t stop myself ultimately.
I don’t do it anymore. I’ve been off all the meds for about six years, and I’m able to control the impulse, which, in fact, I rarely have now. I can’t totally blame the meds because before I was taking them I also had the impulse to steal and did on occasion succumb to it. I blame myself. I think, because of my complicated psychology—my abusive childhood (my mother screaming at me from time immemorial that I was a liar, a cheat, and a thief)—I was not only trying to fulfill my mother’s prophecy, but maybe trying to get people to hate and reject me for taking from them, for being a liar and a thief. I have also compulsively told whopping lies to people, over-the-top stories. They seemed to just come out.
I loathe myself for these acts. I don’t know how to wipe the slate clean. I am terrified that friends and loved ones who I deceived and stole from—whether by taking a material possession or by making up some story—will find out what I did. I am not that person anymore and I haven’t been for years. My greatest wish is to be able to forgive myself; to stop hating myself for these betrayals. I have tried to forgive myself for a long while, but I’m finding I’m no closer. I read a lot about this topic and I am back in therapy after years of being out of it, but I still hate myself for what I’ve done.
I know I will not take from anyone again in any way. Is that enough? Do I have to admit to those I stole from that I did? Or can I forgive myself without admitting to people how I wronged them? I know they would reject me if I were to admit what I’d done, even though I have not been a liar and a thief for a long, long time. I am so sorry for what I’ve done and would give anything not to have done what I have. Please help, Sugar. I’m tortured.
Signed,
Desperate
Dear Desperate,
Fifteen years ago I had a yard sale. I’d just moved to the city where I now live and I was literally down to my last twenty cents, so I put nearly everything I owned out on the lawn—my thrift-store dresses and books, my bracelets and knickknacks, my dishes and shoes.
Customers came and went throughout the day, but my primary companions were a group of preadolescent neighborhood boys who flitted in and out looking at my things, inquiring about how much this and that cost, though they neither had the money to purchase nor an inclination to possess the boring nonboy items I had to sell. Late in the afternoon one of the boys told me that another of the boys had stolen something from me—an empty retro leather camera case that I’d once used as a purse. It was a small thing, a barely-worth-bothering-about item that would’ve sold for something like five bucks, but still I asked the accused boy i
f he’d taken it.
“No!” he yelled and stormed off.
The next day he returned wearing a big gray hoodie. He lurked near the table where I’d set my things to sell and, when he believed I wasn’t looking, he pulled the camera case from beneath his jacket and placed it where it had been sitting the day before.
“Your thing is back,” he said to me nonchalantly a while later, pointing to the camera case as if he’d played no part in its reappearance.
“Good,” I said. “Why did you steal it?” I asked, but again he denied that he had.
It was a sunny fall day. A few of the boys sat with me on the porch steps, telling me bits about their lives. The boy who’d stolen my camera case pulled up his sleeve and flexed his arm so he could show me his biceps. He insisted in a tone more belligerent than any of the others that the cluster of shiny chains he wore around his neck were real gold.
“Why’d you steal my camera case?” I asked again after a while, but he again denied that he had, though he altered his story this time to explain that he’d only taken it temporarily because he was going to his house to get his money and then he’d opted not to purchase it after all.
We talked some more about other things and soon it was just the two of us. He told me about the mother he rarely saw and his much older siblings; about what kind of hot car he was going to buy the instant he turned sixteen.
“Why’d you steal my camera case?” I asked once more, and this time he didn’t deny it.
Instead, he looked down at the ground and said very quietly but very clearly, “Because I was lonely.”
There are only a few times anyone has been as self-aware and nakedly honest as that boy was with me in that moment. When he said what he said I almost fell off the steps.
I’ve thought about that boy so many times in these last fifteen years, perhaps because when he told me what he did about himself, he told me something about myself too. I used to steal things like you, Desperate. I had the inexplicable urge to take what didn’t belong to me. I simply couldn’t resist. I took a compact of blue eye shadow from my great-aunt in Philadelphia, a pretty sweater from a school friend, bars of soap in fancy wrappers from near-strangers’ bathrooms, and a figurine of a white dog with his head askew, among other things.
By the time I met the lonely boy at my yard sale, I hadn’t stolen for years, but like you, the things I’d taken haunted me. I’d meant no harm, but I had the horrible feeling that I’d caused it. And worse still, the intermittent urge to steal hadn’t entirely left me, though I’d kept myself from acting on it since I was eighteen. I didn’t know why I stole things and I still can’t properly say, though “because I was lonely” seems about the rightest thing I’ve ever heard.
I think you were lonely too, sweet pea. And lonely isn’t a crime. Maybe what happened in those years you were stealing and lying is you had a mother-sized hole to fill inside of you and so you stuffed a bunch of things into it that didn’t belong to you and said a lot of things that weren’t true because on some subconscious level you thought doing so would make the hole disappear. But it didn’t. You came to understand that. You found a way to begin to heal yourself.
You need to heal better. Forgiveness is the next step, as you so acutely know. I don’t think your path to wholeness is walking backward on the trail. The people you stole from don’t need you to ’fess up. They need you to stop tormenting yourself over all those things you took that don’t matter very much anymore. I’m not sure why you haven’t been able to do that so far, but I imagine it has something to do with the story you’ve told yourself about yourself.
The narratives we create in order to justify our actions and choices become in so many ways who we are. They are the things we say back to ourselves to explain our complicated lives. Perhaps the reason you’ve not yet been able to forgive yourself is that you’re still invested in your self-loathing. Perhaps not forgiving yourself is the flip side of your steal-this-now cycle. Would you be a better or worse person if you forgave yourself for the bad things you did? If you perpetually condemn yourself for being a liar and thief, does that make you good?
I don’t like the thief part of my narrative either. I struggled mightily with whether or not I should write about it here—it’s the first time I’ve written about it, ever. I’ve written about all sorts of other “bad things” I’ve done—promiscuous sex, drugs—but this seems worse, because unlike those other things, telling you that I used to steal things doesn’t jibe with the person I want you to perceive me as being.
But it is the person I am. And I’ve forgiven myself for that.
Years after I stopped stealing things, I was sitting alone by a river. As I sat looking at the water, I found myself thinking about all the things I’d taken that didn’t belong to me, and before I even knew what I was doing I began picking a blade of grass for each one and then dropping it into the water. I am forgiven, I thought as I let go of the blade that stood in for the blue eye shadow. I am forgiven, I thought for each of those fancy soaps. I am forgiven, for the dog figurine and the pretty sweater, and so on until I’d let all the bad things I’d done float right on down the river and I’d said I am forgiven so many times it felt like I really was.
That doesn’t mean I never grappled with it again. Forgiveness doesn’t just sit there like a pretty boy in a bar. Forgiveness is the old fat guy you have to haul up the hill. You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself, Desperate. I hope you will.
I don’t know what ever became of that lonely boy at my yard sale. I hope he’s made right whatever was wrong inside of him. That camera case he stole from me was still sitting on the table when I closed down my sale. “You want this?” I asked, holding it out to him.
He took it from me and smiled.
Yours,
Sugar
BEND
Dear Sugar,
I have been with the same man off and on for twenty-one years—we’ve been married for eleven. I consider him my soul mate and the love of my life, hands down. About a year ago I met a man who lives in my community and we developed an online flirtation that has gotten out of control. Why? A combination of reasons:
1. I was going through a bit of a midlife crisis (hello, forty!) and the attention of this particular man—who is attractive, sexy, successful, brilliant, etc.—was flattering.
2. My husband had recently had an online flirtation that I discovered accidentally and my feelings were hurt.
3. I’m a stay-at-home mom and I’m bored.
I am not and never was seriously interested in my online crush. It was an ego stroke and a diversion. I have completely cut off any contact with this man and sincerely want nothing to do with him in the future, but recently I’ve been doing some spiritual work and I’ve been advised to tell my husband the truth because “what you hide owns you.”
I do think my husband and I could work through this if I told him the truth, as I did not have a full-blown affair with this man, was not in love with him, etc. At the same time, I know it would hurt my husband deeply, and since I have no intention or desire to leave him, I do not see the point.
As many say, “love is complicated,” but mine for my husband is simple. I love him and want to be with him forever. Please advise.
Signed,
Can You Keep a Secret and
Still Feel Genuine About Your Love?
Dear CYKASASFGAYL,
I don’t think you should tell your husband about your online flirtation gone off the rails. Love isn’t the only thing that’s sometimes complicated and sometimes simple. Truth is sometimes that way too.
Truth is simple in the la-la land where most of us first hatched our love. Of course we’d never lie to each other! we smugly believe in the early, easy days. But every now and then love gets more complicated in the thick of our real lives than a simple black-and-white interpretation of truth will allow.
I believe I’ve made it apparent that I’m not
a fan of deception. Honesty is a core value in any healthy and successful relationship. To withhold the details of our lives from our intimate partners often leads to a hot mess. But there are rare situations in which the truth is more destructive than a confession would be.
If you’d had sex with this fellow; if emotional affairs were a pattern for you or even if you’d done this more than once; if this experience made you realize you were no longer in love with your husband; if you were continuing the relationship you know to be deceitful and destructive; if your gut instinct told you that you should reveal this secret; if you believed that keeping this to yourself would be more destructive to you and your relationship than sharing it would—in each of these cases, I’d advise you to tell your husband about what happened.
But it doesn’t sound to me like that’s what’s going on with you. Sometimes the greatest truth isn’t in the confession, but rather in the lesson learned. What you revealed to yourself in the course of your experience with the other man will likely make your marriage stronger.
Isn’t love amazing that way? How it can bend with us through the years? It has to. It must. Lest it break.
Yours,
Sugar
THE OBLITERATED PLACE
Dear Sugar,
1. It’s taken me many weeks to compose this letter and even still, I can’t do it right. The only way I can get it out is to make a list instead of write a letter. This is a hard subject and a list helps me contain it. You may change it to a regular letter if you wish to should you choose to publish it.
2. I don’t have a definite question for you. I’m a sad, angry man whose son died. I want him back. That’s all I ask for and it’s not a question.
3. I will start over from the beginning. I’m a fifty-eight-year-old man. Nearly four years ago, a drunk driver killed my son. The man was so inebriated he drove through a red light and hit my son at full speed. The dear boy I loved more than life itself was dead before the paramedics even got to him. He was twenty-two, my only child.
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