I Couldn't Just BtB

For the sake of the children

According to KitDeLuca164 there is blanket permission by George Anderson tor anyone to write follow-ups to his thought provoking story: February Sucks. I wrote to her for permission to write a follow-up to her story: F. S. - the Details Matter. I have received her permission. She appears to have Jim and Linda reconcile as did George Anderson in the original. But it seems to me the reconciliation is on shaky ground.

Neither author explains why Linda seems to have gone off the rails. Both authors essentially rely on the two main characters to reconcile and make their marriage work by making an even more determined effort to be committed to one another and their nuclear family. Jim must find it in his heart to forgive Linda. Even though L.W. in the George Anderson story tells Jim that things will never be the same, there seem to be no substantial changes to their marriage after their reconciliation other than an implied deeper commitment to one another, to their nuclear family and to the marriage.

In KitDeLuca164's story Linda seems to attempt to force Jim into forgiving her by threatening to divorce him if he does not. This type of power play in a marriage seldom has long-lasting good results

In the following story Jim has an epiphany that he shares with Linda which makes it much easier for them to move ahead by - - - Well, if you want to find that out you'll have to read the story.

Jim begins the narration.

After looking at the laws of my state concerning divorce, if I wanted to divorce Linda over her abandoning me to spend time with Marc, I would probably see my kids only every other weekend and on holidays by arrangement. I could not do that. I wanted to be a full time dad. That meant I would have to live in the house with Linda. And if I wanted the kids to have a normal childhood, I would have to forgive Linda and try to restore a loving relationship between us - for the sake of the children. I've always felt that love is a choice we make. I would choose love. The alternative would be bad for our family and wind up making me a bitter old man.

But it was not all smooth sailing between Linda and me. She wanted us to have sex again. I just did not feel comfortable with that. When I would try to explain how I felt uncomfortable being put in a position of being in competition with Marc, she would quickly counter with statements like, "But it's you I love." What was worse was that my feeling uncomfortable with having sex with her she concluded to be a sign that I had never forgiven her.

And so the enforced alone time that I had when she insisted that I not come home from my business trip unless I was prepared to forgive her gave me time to once again sort out all the things that were still going through my head. Some of the things I thought about were things she had brought up months before, but I was not mentally prepared to look at things from that point of view at that time. However, by the time Thanksgiving rolled around, I think I had finally gained some real insights that we had not yet considered. The few added hours of alone time gave me the opportunity to organize these thoughts so that I might be able to present them in a reasonable manner.

When I saw that Linda had come home from picking up the children from school, I waited a few moments for her and the children to enter the house and get settled. Then I pulled into the driveway and Linda came running out to greet me. "Have you finally found it in your heart to forgive me?" she asked with some enthusiasm, clearly expecting me to acknowledge that I had.

I picked her up in my arms, swung her around almost full circle and kissed her before putting her down and saying, "I forgave you a long time time ago, as best as circumstances have allowed. Forgiveness is not the problem. What is better still is that I think I have found a way forward, but we'll have to talk - not a bad, 'We'll have to talk,' but a good, 'We'll have to talk.' Will you do that with me?"

She looked at me with some disappointment on her face. It looked like she was thinking, "Oh no, here we go again."

I saw it on her face and said, "I promise I will not just rehash old issues. If I bring up old issues it is because I have a new perspective that I did not have before. In at least one case I will acknowledge that you were right but I was still feeling so hurt that I did not see the validity of your statement. But of greatest importance is that I see a way forward which neither of us has talked about before.

"When you left with Marc, Dee told me, 'You know she'll be willing to do whatever it takes, for as long as it takes to make it up to you.' I don't know whether you authorized her to say that or not. But when you came home from being with Marc, you said, 'I know I need to make it up to you and I will, whatever it takes.' I'm not asking you to climb Mt. Everest or swim the English Channel. All I'm asking for is that we talk with one another and listen to one another."

"Okay," said Linda. "I'm assuming that we do this after the children have gone to bed?"

"Exactly," I said, "and we may have to stretch this out over several days and come back to it from time to time. But I think we have a chance to have a relationship that is better than our first ten years - and I thought our first ten years were pretty good."

We went in and ate supper. We had a pretty normal conversation around the kitchen table, each child having an opportunity to talk about the highlights of his day and highlights from the days when I was gone. Linda was not too talkative. I did mention a few items of interest from my trip away from home on business. The meal was over. We cleaned off the table so Linda could load the dishwasher. Then it was time for homework. After that Linda read a couple of chapters to the rest of us out of one of the "Little House," books and then it was time to get ready for bed. It seems like bed time was the time that if anything bad happened to a child during the day, they would want to talk about it with dad or mom, whoever was putting them to bed. Fortunately for us both children seemed to have had a trauma free day.

I was downstairs first. I popped a bowl of popcorn and got something for each of us to drink and moved to the sofa in the living room. We sat with one leg up, facing one another with the popcorn bowl between us.

Before I had a chance to say anything, Linda spoke up. "I'm so glad you called Marc by his name instead of by that other term you usually use for him. He really is a nice man and I hope you've come to realize that."

"Oh, Linda," I said. "I wish you would not have gone there. It is not where I would have wanted to start, but yes, I used his name because I did not wish to start things off on the wrong fooot or offend you or make you upset. But as long as you brought it up, let me ask you a few questions. If this last time when I was off on a business trip I went to a club in the evening to relax, and there spotted a married woman whose husband was getting more and more drunk, so I waited until he was pretty much oblivious to what was going on around him, and then I went up to his wife and hit on her so that eventually she came with me to my room and we had sex a couple of times, when I called you up and told you about it, would you have said, 'Way to go!' or 'Good for you!'

"Well of course not!" Linda replied.

Before she got another word out I continued, "When we go out to a social function together in the future would you be pleased if I was always trying to get some married woman to go to bed with me?"

"Absolutely not!" she again replied.

I went on, "Under normal circumstances do you like it when a guy comes up to you, flirts with you, and when you show him your ring and tell him that you're married he responds, 'That doesn't bother me,' and keeps on pestering you?"

"Well, I guess when you put it that way, I certainly wouldn't want you to be hitting on married women, and I get very irritated when a guy won't leave me alone after I've told him I'm married, and not interested in accepting his advances" Linda replied.

"I don't know about women," I continued, "but among men, an honorable man will not go after a married woman. And the converse is also true. If a man knowingly goes after a married woman, he is not an honorable man. Marc has put himself in that position. Any decent man, if he hears of Marc's behavior will lose all respect for him for Marc has shown that he has no respect for a married woman nor for her husband nor for the institution of marriage. He only wants what he wants. He may be very smooth in the way he seduces the woman and so may leave his victim feeling like she has been treated like a queen. But he is still a man without honor who deserves no respect. But for your sake and in your presence I will call him by his name. When we get done with our conversation or conversations, I believe that he will become much less of an issue between us."

"Can't you please just forgive him?" Linda asked.

"I've forgiven him already," I replied, "as much as I can. I'm not plotting any sort of revenge or seeking to do him harm. But that forgiveness does not remove the fact that he is not an honorable man. It's like this: If a man were to have murdered my father and I forgave him, that would not change the fact that the man is a murderer.

"But Mark makes it hard to fully give him forgiveness or for him to receive it. Look at how forgiveness usually works. Len from down the street has his lawn mower break down. We are gone. He knows where I keep my mower so he comes and gets it. He does not return it. But then his conscience starts bothering him so a few days later he comes back to our house with my lawn mower. He hopes to sneak it into our garage without anybody knowing he was the one who took it. But he gets caught. I happen to be in the garage when he tries to return my mower. So he owns up to having taken it and asks for forgiveness. He has already returned the lawnmower. He also advises me that he changed the oil in it and returned it with a full tank of gas and then hands me a twenty dollar bill to make up for my inconvenience.

"Len has asked for forgiveness. He has made restitution. When I forgive him he feels he has done everything he should to merit my forgiveness, so he feels forgiven.

"Marc has not asked for forgiveness. He has not made any restitution. I don't know what he could do to make restitution. But that is fully on him, not me. But rather than an attempt at restitution he contacted you and wanted to take you away from me permanently and wanted to take my children away as well because he said he could give them more things than I can. There's not even a hint of giving me generous visitation rights. So Marc has not asked for forgiveness, he has not made restitution. He wants to take more away from me. Even if I have forgiven him, he doesn't feel it. What he has done and continues to do would keep him from feeling any type of forgiveness from me. He has enough common sense to know that he has done nothing to merit my forgiveness. So he doesn't feel forgiven.

"To a lesser degree but in much the same way you are having a problem feeling my forgiveness. While you have apologized for leaving me the way you did, you have found no way to make restitution. There is no way you can give to me the night we were planning on spending together which you took away from me and gave to Marc. You have no time machine that can do that. And while you promised to forsake all others and to be wife to me as long as we both shall live, you cannot undo the times that you had sex with Marc instead of me on that Friday night and Saturday morning. So while you have asked for forgiveness, there is no way that you have thought of that can provide a meaningful restitution. The result is that even to yourself your request for forgiveness seems hollow and meaningless because of the lack of restitution. You have enough common sense to know that you have not done anything to merit my forgiveness. Therefore you do not feel forgiven even though I tell you that you are."

"No! It's more than that," replied Linda. "It is your refusal to have sex with me. And the few times we have attempted to have sex have been so without passion that I cannot for a moment believe that you are putting your heart and soul into it. That is how I can tell that you have not forgiven me."

"I fully understand that that is how you feel," I replied. "But that is not what is on my mind when I struggle to have sex with you. You know you have described your sex with Marc as being the best you have ever experienced. You wrote that to me, Marc said it over the phone, you've said it to me. That leaves me feeling very insecure about having sex with you. I don't even want to try, knowing that I cannot live up to the standard that Marc has set. If you have sex with me, I worry that you are just giving me pity sex. I wonder whether you are inwardly laughing at me and my lack of ability to satisfy you the way Marc satisfied you.

"And your memory of the event with Marc will only make it more glorious. You will remember giving him a blow job and the tremendous size of his cock and how hard it was and how good it tasted but will not remember the time he passed gas. That's the way our memories work. We remember the good and filter out the bad. So in your memory he will only get better than the reality was as you forget anything and everything that could be considered to be negative, and you will only remember the good parts and will probably embellish them over time. So in comparison to him my skills as a lover will only seem to get worse. I'd rather not have sex at all than have sex and always seem to be inferior or inadequate. That has nothing to do with forgiveness. It has everything to do with my own insecurity and the way you perceive my skills as a lover compared to his."

Linda replied with a point she had tried to make months ago. "But we each had sex with other people before we met up with one another and decided to get married. You don't worry about how you compare to any of my previous lovers and I don't worry about how I compare to any of your previous lovers. What's the big difference?"

"I suppose I could find some differences but they would all be essentially irrelevant," I replied. "The observation that we have done this before is what is the key point in my new understanding of what happened and where we can go from here. I know you've told me that same thing before in earlier discussions, but I was too stuck in my own pain to understand the full import of what you said. But you are absolutely right. And there is more."

"What's that?" asked Linda.

"Let me sound like I am changing topics for a while. It will all come together a little later," I said.

"Okay, I think," said Linda.

"I want you to think of the word, 'slut,'" I said. "It can have two meanings. It can be a put-down, accusing a girl of being promiscuous in an attempt to be popular with guys. I used that word last night on the phone and you exploded in rage and used some harsh words on me in return.

"But if your friend Dee calls you up to say, 'I was such a slut last night,' you know she is using it to compliment herself and her sexuality. It means that she did something or a series of things that made her attractive to a man or group of men and she wanted to be that sexual center of attention. She knew what she wanted sexually and she got it. She considers the term slut to be a compliment on her ability to be a sensual, sexual and attractive woman.

"Before we got married and before we met one another and got serious about one another we were both somewhat slutty - by that second definition. You knew how to make yourself attractive to guys in such a way that you could get a guy who you thought was attractive to want you physically and sexually. You had the sexual power, physical attractiveness and knew things you could do to make a guy want you. As a result, as you said, you have had many lovers in your past. I was a man-slut in much the same way. I purposely did things and said things that made me attractive to women sometimes with the express purpose of wanting to take a gal to bed. And I succeeded.

"Furthermore as we got to know one another, you learned about my past and I learned about yours. Our sluttiness was part of who we were and part of what attracted us to one another. It was part of what we fell in love with. I wanted to marry a girl who liked to have sex and who liked to have sex with me. I wanted a girl who was skilled in the art of seduction and would use those skills on me. And I assume you wanted me to do things to seduce you as well. I appreciated that you had an inner slut and that your inner slut liked to come out and play with my inner slut.

"And then we got married and quickly began to take one another for granted. In the process, we put our inner sluts to sleep. Now that we were married, I didn't have to seduce you any more and you didn't have to seduce me any more. After all, we belonged to one another. We had the paper to prove it. In addition there were the constraints of time. You had a job, I had a job. Along came children. We both had to take care of them. We let those demands push aside the desire we had in us to let our inner sluts come out and play. And so our inner sluts have been put to sleep and have stayed asleep for most of the ten years of our marriage. We fooled ourselves into thinking we had more important things to do than play. We each buried an important and essential part of our personality, thinking that as married people, it was the right and universally accepted thing to do. In retrospect I think that in putting our inner sluts to sleep we each hurt ourselves and we hurt our partner by denying that essential and valued part of our personality.

"What happened at the Morrison? We had done a few things to begin to awaken the inner sluts, if only for an evening. We had not verbalized that that is what we were doing, but that is what we were doing. You wore the exquisite dress. We had the romantic meal. We were now dancing, beginning a little bit of vertical public foreplay. We were in seduction mode. The inner sluts were maybe just at the point where they were thinking, 'We haven't done this for so long. This is cool!'

"And then along came Marc - a mega hunk well experienced in seducing women, whose dysfunction was in going after married women, and whose inner slut was fully awake and eager to play. And after a ten years' sleep your inner slut which was just beginning to awaken - still a little bit groggy - was suddenly overwhelmed and unprepared to deal with the highly charged sexual situation he put you in. Your inner slut suddenly became fully awakened and ready to play. Pretty much ignoring all else she played until she came back to me on Saturday.

And since then we have considered that awakened slut to have been a bad thing for our marriage and have tried to get our marriage back to where it was when both of our inner sluts were fast asleep. But that is not enabling us to put our marriage back together so that we both feel satisfied and fulfilled. It's like we are trying to get back into our old comfortable rut when, in fact, the old comfortable rut was not comfortable and was not good for us.

That comfortable rut actually made you vulnerable to Marc and made me vulnerable to Ellen, and we would have continued to be vulnerable to temptations from other predators. For it seems there are predators who can recognize a person who has put his or her slut to sleep, and who can awaken that slut to their own advantage and for their own purposes but not necessarily for the good of the person who has been awakened.