Filling a Void 10/9/09

I needed my wife to allow me to be weak.  To let my barriers down and show that weak, pathetic side of me, that part of me that needed to be let out.  Most people have someone they can do this with.  I didn't feel I did.  My wife and I had arguments; she would talk, I'd listen until the noise started repeating itself, and then I'd walk away.  I was emotionally detached.  I was indifferent.  I never thought about the problem that had caused the argument.  I didn't care.  This indifference somehow turned what was a simple problem into something of monstrous proportions.

On the other hand, I wanted sex at least once a week or I was plagued with thoughts that she didn't love me, and many other stupid, groundless, ideas.  It doesn't make sense but there it is.  My wife came to resent that being physical was the only way I'd show any emotion, and for me to have someone who said she loved me, limit how I expressed myself......It was like a small death.  Each and every time it killed me.  I began to feel insignificant and with the feeling of insignificance came the accompanying feeling of impotence.  There was a part of me that thought I wasn't worth loving.

I seemed to become two different people.  When faced with the everyday problems and challenges of children and my job, I'd devote all my concentration and energy.  But when nothing I deemed important was happening; I started to amuse myself with drinking, drugs, women, and deception.  I'd make excuses to do exactly what I wanted.  I was finding thrills that I organized both my daily life and sex life around.  I loved my wife but wanted to have sex with other women.  It made sense if I didn't think about it.

I wasn't screwing around for the sex.  I indulged in the sex offered by random women and each time a void was filled within me.  I was looking for that feeling you get when someone is holding you in their arms and nothing can harm you.  I tried filling that void with women who were funny and passionate, filled with questions about every subject that entered a conversation, and possessed a generosity that made me feel good to be around them.  And suddenly I'd have an overwhelming need for physical contact just to feel humanity and emotion rather than the cold.  I tried with women who had nothing to offer but their warm body.  I tried with many types of women.

I needed to find someone real enough where the sex was good enough, and then I'd be complete.  I'd finally be whole.  I believe it was detachment that made all this possible.  A sublime loneliness with which I moved through each day.  I was wandering through life without any real sense of who I was or where I belonged.  I was similar to a serial killer.  I believed that the next woman would be perfect, that the next experience would complete me, but they never did.

I know what it is to think your in love, to be blinded by beauty and made stupid by the feel, smell, taste, and warmth of a woman.  Maybe I'm just addicted to lust.  Part of this is what any healthy man wonders at least once, but the other part of it was me just looking for something I didn't have.  A possession or something else, I don't know.

I've never considered myself a ladies man.  I've loved their company.  I had come to see woman as friends or enemies, except when I was sleeping with them.  My sexual experiences began at a young age.  I spent my childhood engaged in an orgy of drugs, alcohol, and sex.  Those years have impacted my life in ways I'm just now willing to recognize.  I've also realized that I won't find what I was looking for in the arms of a woman.  I'll find it within myself.