Chameleon Woman

I have a good friend, let's call her C. C. is an unfailingly kind person, honest and loyal. The friend I was chatting with yesterday, who we'll call N., is also a close friend of C.'s. C.'s deep traits, her virtues, are solid and do not change.

Her more superficial traits do. I've known C. for almost twenty years, and I've barely seen any of her hobbies. She does whatever the man she's attracted to does. I knew the men, not all of them were very good but most weren't manipulative or pressuring about these things; and C. takes them on when the relationship is just starting, not when she's trying to keep it. With hardcore RPG guy she was a gamer; with athletic guy she was an aspiring athlete; with fishing and hunting guy she's a fisherwoman. Chat friend N. and I talked with C. about this because it seemed a bit worrisome, but nothing came of that.

N. feels that my second wife who's now divorcing me, T., has changed enormously in recent years. Neither of us knew T. for very long at all before T. became attached to me. I came along at a very difficult time in T.'s marriage, as I've told, and comforted her and praised her and gave her backrubs and encouraged her to get back to sex with her husband since she still loved him. He left her for his best friend's wife and she fell in love with me, and I with her.

My friend N. thinks that my wife T. did the chameleon thing with me. T. became a regular churchgoer, which I don't think she was before; she started target shooting and carrying a sidearm; she thought highly of the value of regular sex in a marriage. But she didn't talk deeply about any of these things. All of them have disappeared now.

T. has said she lost herself and had to find herself. That didn't make a lot of sense to me. I wasn't pushing her into being something or other; I was no pushier with anything with her than I am online about monogamy. I pretty much encouraged her in every interest, when she wanted to travel for work, anything*. But apparently she could not be herself with me, and had to find herself somewhere else.

Before we got married I laid all that emphasis on the importance of sex to me in a marriage. She agreed, apparently wholeheartedly, but it was a superficial agreement. She fooled me and I have no doubt she fooled herself as well.

It's kind of weird that my first wife left me for her "safety" and my second left me because she needed to find herself, away from me. I've got a lot of flaws, but neither violent nor controlling are among them. Both cases point to areas where I'm actually already really good. It makes learning from the experience more difficult. Maybe lesson 1 is some people are really hard to please.

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* There's an exception to this. We both were RPGers at first. I came to resent them because having sex with me was always something she didn't have the time or energy for at 9 pm, but she kept staying out until 2 am at RPGs; I kept asking her to wear costumes for me that she wore to cons, but she didn't; etc. Role-playing sex was a fantasy of mine, but here my wife was role-playing with everyone but me. In the last six months or so of our marriage I was not encouraging her much in gaming. There were probably some looks and heavy sighs when she'd tell me about the games afterward.

Cheered Up

Last night I had a little emotional collapse. For those not keeping scorecards at hand, in the past year:

One of my dogs was killed by a car when she escaped through a hole in the fence.
My job was outsourced. (Disappearing jobs happens a lot to software contractors, so I live well below my means and keep a considerable buffer of savings.)
My wife left me and initiated divorce proceedings.
The (totally fair) settlement with her wiped out my buffer of savings and left me in debt to my father, (but left me still owning my old fixer-upper house outright.)
I discovered that there were practically no software contractor jobs available in the recession.
I broke my neck and have a framework bolted to my skull to support it while it heals.
I had to move in with my parents because while it heals I can't drive or live alone or work. (Help with this kind of thing is one of the reasons I value marriage.)
I stopped getting unemployment because I'm not available for work.
Last Tuesday I found out I'm not healed enough to remove the framework and it has to stay on for another three weeks.
I just realized that I feel being born male is something I have to make up for.

So, I'm really not in the best emotional state. This blog is where I do almost all of my whining; I put on a pretty cheerful face in meatspace.

I need to fill in some backstory about my father too. He's an interesting guy; he grew up in the Depression (and had kids quite late). He makes large donations to charity. But when they send him a request for more money (they send a LOT) and he doesn't want to donate at that time, he'll take the SASE they sent, cross out the addresses, and write in new ones to save the price of a stamp and envelope. Debt is anathema in my family. It's part of the lives of virtually all Americans, but not us.

So some friends came to visit and took me out for burgers. My dad asked how I handled paying for it and I mentioned that I still had some left in my bank account, though I have some credit card debt. He said "Pay off the debt, they're probably charging about 20%", in a very imperative tone. I didn't say anything, but brought up so many of my troubles and so many ways I'm helpless right now. I feel guilty about carrying debt. I want to get back to work, but I can't. I've been wanting to fix up my old '95 Buick and sell my '04 Volvo to pay the credit cards, but I can't. There's an invention I've been working on, but I can't work on that. I want to get the hell away from here and go home, but I can't. I always put a huge premium on independence and now I'm trapped and dependent. So it kind of all came crashing down on me.

I sat in bed for a while praying and crying and feeling sorry for myself. Then I decided I should initate a long upgrade process I was meaning to do on the laptop I'm typing this on, and headed to the room where it is. Just then one of my friends who'd taken me to the burger place went online on IM and I totally and uncharacteristically blabbed to her for about four hours.

I think I made her feel a bit better; before we both married other people we'd been friends that danced around becoming something more. I never asked her out because of something she said that made me think I was too kinky to make her happy; I've regretted that decision a few times. She thought it was because of her weight, an ongoing problem. I think she felt a little better when I explained that and added some compliments that I tried to balance between heartfelt admiration and decent reserve for her marriage. (Her husband is awesome as well as her; way better for her than I would have been.)

I know she made me feel much better, taking all that time for me. We talked about my wife a bit and while I think I may have made things a little worse between them, that being why I generally don't talk about my wife with anyone who knows her, my friend had an insight that couldn't have come from anybody who didn't know her. I'll explain that in another post.

But something I think is interesting is that although I think this friend and I could have been happy together, we would not have been nearly as good for each other as she and her husband are. He was older than I am when they met. It's a good sign.

Dominant Male, part 0

(If you're just joining us, um, well, this may not be the best time. Here is context.)

So, I've mentioned before I that I'm a switch and have a dominant side as well. And I haven't talked about it much here. One reason is that I have some serious hangups talking about it. Partly I fear Ickypoos is going to show up to tell me that turnabout is not, in fact, fair play, which would bother me lots more than it would a normal person.

It would bother me because of fear that Ickypoos would somehow be right just because I am a lesser being. I am totally comfortable with how I put one of my wife's old belts over my neck, with most of the belt pulled through the buckle, as a makeshift combination collar and leash, and encouraged her to lead me around a little; I'm kind of uncomfortable with the way I asked her to do same thing. There's some fear that somehow I was taking advantage; taking advantage of the good nature of my better half.

Ugh. I really want to get myself over this. It's ugly. It's not going to be quick, either. After I get another job I'm going to think about talking to a professional about this. Which unfortunately I regard almost like "I shall consult a highly paid witch doctor," but, well, I really want to do something about it, and I'm not really used to my emotions betraying my mind on such a scale.

One thing I absolutely need in a future wife is eagerness to talk about sex. The lack of this in my marriage is one of the major factors in difficulty in expressing my dominant side; it was hard to know what was OK until I actually tried it. Asking would likely kill her mood and I'd have to wait another two weeks for it to come back. Our play was never something that required a safeword, (and I'm think that for my part I want her 'no' to always mean no). But I don't want to deal with the situation where I'm trying to dominate and 'no' or wet are my only guide to what is OK, let alone what's hot.

I had a femdom/malesub story in my head that is totally going to have to wait. I thought about transposing it to maledom/femsub but I can't write that story at this time.

Neurotic by proxy

Most weekends, some of my friends come by my parent's house where I'm recuperating, for a visit. It's kind of a big thing for me because it's basically the only time I talk to them now; but I don't mention it to my parents other than the "I'm having friends over at X time" that's polite in someone else's house.

My mother keeps asking me, "Are they coming?", with a frequency approaching once an hour as the expected time nears. Telling her "yes" doesn't reduce the frequency but changes the question to "Are they still coming?"

Rrgh. To quote Fraggle Rock, "I fear I may lose my implacable calm."

My best antidepressant

The best thing I've found for depression is to do something constructive. This is specific to a couple of things about me. One is that what depresses me the most is my own tendency to laziness; thinking I'm useless and don't do anything. If you get depressed you know that it makes you not want to do anything; you feel like it's not worth it, you'll just fail at it, which is a vicious cycle.

The other thing is I value effort over results. So I remind myself of that. I haven't really failed until I've stopped trying.

I tend to do something fun to distract myself from feeling bad, but this doesn't really help because afterwards I feel even worse about not doing anything useful. Instead I have to do something I don't want, then later I can get back to something I do want.

So, I'm going to go write some thank-you cards, and sharpen some kitchen knives for my parents (I'm good at that).

Super Uncomfortable Self-Realization

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The Treacherous Adaptability of Libido

I find my fantasy imagination tends to adapt to a level that seems plausible at the time. To explain this, I need to make a distinction between the fantasies I let myself dwell on when I want to wank and the ones that keep popping into my head all the time whether I approve or not. The ones I let myself dwell on are safely unconnected to real friends and acquaintances who might not like being the subject of a fantasy; they're generally porn-assisted and don't change much. The ones that pop into my head almost always are about real friends and acquaintances.

It's the ones that just pop into my head that really change. I'm not going to describe them in my usual graphic way. I started this blog to give myself a place to talk, to work things out in my head. It has evolved into a place where I can also get really valuable discussion and advice. I hope it's interesting to others because it provides a very intimate window onto one man's thinking about sex, and thus a clue as to what people who are less open might be thinking.

I'm not going to describe these fantasies in my usual graphic way, because they could be taken as requests. Even though they're the ones that just pop into my head, not the ones I let myself dwell on, something that seemed like it could be a public request would change the whole feel of the blog in a skanky way. This is where I share my thoughts and feelings, not where I troll for cybersex. (Which isn't to say that cybersex is bad, or even that I will necessarily abstain from it after the divorce is final, just that this isn't the place.)

So let's just say that the fantasies are about virtual contact not physical contact, and often pretty simple, low-bandwidth virtual contact.

What is required to get me excited has really changed a lot since the last time I had sex in February. Even then, as I've described, I was feeling starved. Now, I feel like all I want is the littlest bit of personal sexual acknowledgement. Then, feeling starved, I was grateful to indulge my foot fetish by masturbating while licking my wife's feet, but also resentful that that was all I had to be grateful for. Now, even thinking about getting to do that is wank material.

I think it's important to know how these things change before embarking on a long term relationship. Foot-licking sounds super hot to me now, but that's the treacherous part. I know it's not something that can make me happy as a major component of my sex life. Before my first marriage, I didn't know what I wanted, and I thought the sex I'd never had would be enough despite what I'd fantasized about. And it wasn't.

When I marry again, I do not ever again want to be in the position of being so sex-starved that I'm grateful for foot-licking as the hottest thing available to me. I would like to be in the position where once in a while I do that exact same action as part of submissive play, as a way to show her how great and wonderful and desirable I think she is. (And if I don't think that of her I'm not going to marry her.) The difference in motive is crucial. A woman who liked the footplay would want a happy husband to show that her littlest acknowledgement was hot and desirable, not her desperate husband to show how desperate he'd become.