Twenty Years is a Long Time

For the first (and probably only) time ever, I'm taking you guys into my confidence. This is me, 'Cockatoo,' your humble author, not in character. Someone noticed that I didn't post anything at all in Literotica for 22 years, but now I seem to be back, and they asked why. So here we go.

I originally started writing Literotica stories twenty-odd years ago as part of my efforts to deal with an extremely painful and embarrassing divorce. My ex-wife had been cheating on me the whole time we were married, and then some. Her affairs lasted for at least six of the nine years we were together, involving at least three other men, more likely four. One of those was a serious relationship that lasted years- she even moved the guy in with us as a housemate. Another, she picked out to marry and have children with before she was even done with me. I'd like to say that I've since recovered from it and I'm fine now, but that would be a lie.

That was my first real relationship. I'd met her in college, after not having dated much in high school. Her betrayal and rejection left me PROFOUNDLY insecure. I felt disgusting and unworthy, I worried that no woman would ever want to have anything to do with me again. I wanted to use my writing as part of reinventing myself, to create something that was just mine, and offer it to the world on its own merits... and hope to god that somebody would find what I had to offer appealing, or at least acceptable. I succeeded, and got a lot of much-needed validation (and one significant romance) from it. Mission accomplished, so I funneled my creative energies in other directions.

I'd meant to write something different in each category, treating them like "assignments." I wanted to see if I could do it. I wanted to be creative and diverse. I didn't want to write variations of the same story to repeatedly satisfy my own fetishes. I managed to keep each offering unique, but I failed at working in every category. There were some things I just didn't want to go near, so I chose to respect my own boundaries and stayed the hell away from them.

One of the categories I couldn't touch was "Loving Wives."

I think that Loving Wives was originally supposed to have been straightforwardly smutty. It's still captioned as "These women really know how to please their men." But in the stories that get posted there, the men being pleased were NOT their husbands, and the husbands were decidedly NOT pleased with their wives. The category evolved into "true confession" tales of vile cheating sluts, broken hearts, and families in ruin. Distinct patterns emerged- some were tales of revenge ("BTB" or "Burn The Bitch" stories), while others featured "Reconciliation At Any Cost" (RAAC). Even the ones that didn't include violence or suffering after the betrayals were full of tragedy, heartache, and pathos. Not spank-bank material, just... awful, awful sadness. I'd had enough of that in my own life. I was trying to escape it.

Twenty years, though, is a long time.

A few years ago, towards the end of the COVID restrictions, following two solid decades my ex-wife and I spent ignoring each other, she contacted me out of the blue from three thousand miles away. She had an opportunity to come to Orlando, where I live (everybody visits this town sooner or later), and asked if I wanted to see her. After all, we'd "Parted Amicably." That's how she'd put it. "Parted Amicably." In reality, I had been stifling my acrimony in an effort to scavenge a few scraps of dignity.

I let my head spin for a week or two and eventually I told her no, I did not want to see her. I was even nice about it. We corresponded briefly, then my veneer of civility quickly wore thin, and now I doubt we'll ever speak again. My current wife (who is as different from her as another woman can be) had zero interest in meeting my ex, and told me "It's about time you finally told that bitch to fuck off. I'm proud of you." God, everyone should have a spouse like that. I'm proud of her, too, for more reasons than I can count.

Consequently, my head and my heart began to decompress from a tension I'd been ignoring so long that I'd nearly forgotten about it. I'd repressed most of what happened to me, determined to "move on," but I was finally able to let myself unpack a lot of history and emotion that I'd buried. I'd blinded myself to her affairs to an extent that's absurd even by "Loving Wives" standards. The most jaded readers would see my "true" story and say "What is this bullshit? That's ridiculous. What kind of an idiot is this guy?" So, no, I'm never going to be able to write that. Truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense. My first marriage didn't.

The term "gaslighting" was not yet widely in use during the nineties, but that was what had been done to me. If I voiced any concern, it was dismissed as silly. If I became accusatory, I was merely jealous. If I was depressed, I was imagining things. Above all else, any failure on my part to trust her and believe her meant that I was a bad husband, a bad man, and a generally awful person, because she promised up, down, and sideways that I had "Nothing To Worry About." I was convinced I'd gone mad. The level of betrayal I was experiencing was unfathomable, therefore it COULD NOT be real. I HAD to be imagining it. The worst part is that she watched herself do it to me. She saw me twisting at the end of her rope, beating myself up with my own misplaced faith in her, and she had no intention of ever stopping it.

Having reawakened to that kind of pathos, I somehow started reading "Loving Wives" stories to help process what I'd been avoiding. Honestly, it wasn't good for me. This stuff upsets me. It makes my heart race, my skin crawl, and puts the taste of metal in my mouth as I violently re-live the physiological sensations of betrayal. It has been, however, cathartic, and it beats keeping everything all bottled up. Once in a while, there's something real, and tender, and profound in there. It isn't sexy, but it speaks to a core of tragic misery that's familiar to anyone who's really been hurt... which is nearly everyone.

One of those stories is "February Sucks," by GeorgeAnderson.

https://literotica.com/s/february-sucks

The premise is simple, but expertly framed, and it lands like a punch in the stomach. Jim's wife Linda runs out on him for a night of sex with local hunky football hero Marc LaValliere, during a special night out with all their friends, who aid and abet the cheaters, all of whom presume that Jim will simply have to get over it. The first third (especially the personal note he's included which sets things up) really grabs you and forces you to wonder "What would I do if that happened to me?" The rest of it is pure nightmare fuel. Linda gets what she wants, she never feels more than a smattering of remorse for what she's done, shows zero empathy for her husband Jim, and does no psychological or emotional labor of her own to build towards the couple's reconciliation, which she consistently takes as a given. No one at all comes to Jim's defense or shows him an ounce of sympathy; everyone tells him to suck it up for the sake of the kids. Readers are left screaming for a greater sense of closure while the deeply unsettling and unsatisfying conclusion stays under your skin like a painful splinter.

As a result, it's perhaps the most riffed-upon story on the site. GA has long since stopped responding to requests for permission to post rewritten or alternate versions of his story. There are hundreds of them now, forming their own "FebSux" sub-genre within Loving Wives. It's become less of a story and more of a trope, an exercise in theme and variation like old Jazz Standards. Or perhaps it's more like the famous joke about "The Aristocrats," where the style of delivery is the point, rather than the punchline.

After I read that story and a few of its variants, I could think of little else. It lit a fire under my butt.

I mean, that DID happen to me, more or less. No football players were involved, and it was my ex that did the shitty rotten seducing. She was no one's prey, they were hers. But the selfishness, the cavalier attitude, and the sense of entitlement was eerily familiar: "This has nothing to do with you, this is something I have to do for myself. How I feel about you hasn't changed. This doesn't affect anything. I can't pass it up. I'm sorry that you're hurt, but not sorry enough not to do it." Yeah, I got blasted with both barrels of that.

How would I have written it? Very, very differently. Make no mistake- I actually WAS every bit the cuckolded simp that Jim was. I begged and pleaded for Reconciliation At Any Cost, but as soon as my ex understood that she could no longer simply lie to me and demand that I believe her, she had no further use for me. She dumped my ass, claiming that marriage is an oppressive institution that's all about the control and possession of women... then she married my replacement before the ink was dry on our divorce papers. It took me almost ten years before I was able to be in a healthy relationship again, and even then, the road was sometimes rocky. But even given all of that, I would have provided poor Jim some agency.

Writing helped me pull myself out of my funk before. Since I was re-experiencing repressed pain, I figured it could again. I know I'm a halfway decent writer, and I could do at least as well as the bulk of the FebSux expanded universe.

So, newly equipped with perspective, personal insight, and a fair amount of professional therapy, I poured myself into at least three different drafts of my own take on "February Sucks," the longest of which topped 100,000 words. The final version is complete. It's been submitted here as a four-part series, 'February Sucks: Same Old Me As Always.' It's 93,000 words altogether, no BTB, no RAAC, just awful sadness- nobody really wins, and everybody loses something. Don't read it if the length bothers you, and PLEASE don't tell me it's too long and then one-star it. All of the appropriate credits and citations apply; GeorgeAnderson is the owner of his story and all of his original characters. Other characters that appear in this variant have also appeared in other alternate endings by other authors, becoming part of the cooperative "Lore" of the world of this story. I'm trying to keep that as consistent as possible. For example, there are five couples at the dance club, but GA only names Dee+Dave, and Phil+Jane. Other authors created Rose+Andy, and Gus+Helen. Some have given the characters last names, which they lacked in the original. I've added Linda's parents, Rich "Pe-Pop" and Janice "Nana" Reed, Jim's mother Carol and her husband Bob, and others as well, but I make no claim on their authorship and leave them open as part of the Lore.

Along the way, a character I couldn't use emerged. Cookie Deathridge, a.k.a. "Doctor Heartbreak," completely upstaged the story of Jim and Linda. So, I had to fillet her out of that story. She demanded that I provide her with her own vehicle, using an entirely different trope and a new cast of characters. That became 'C is for Cookie' and does not contains any references to or affiliation with any other FebSux story. It's completely original.

I also quickly banged out 'Chekhov's Gun', a sequel to 'Strange Car In The Driveway' https://www.literotica.com/s/strange-car-in-the-driveway by edrider73. That story contains no text from the original. It functions only as acts two and three of Reg and Vera's one-act play, starting where the original leaves off. I went on to play around with alternates or sequels to 'Just Once If You Don't Mind' https://www.literotica.com/s/just-once-if-you-dont-mind by Kalimaxos, 'Another Love' https://literotica.com/s/another-love-pt-01 by RichardGerald, 'No Reply' https://literotica.com/s/no-reply-1 by Harddaysknight, and perhaps a half dozen others... all of which also have multiple alternates, stiches, and sequels by other writers posted on here.

But, after getting my FebSux story and Strange Car sequel bounced back by the mods, I lost enthusiasm for this kind of project. Besides, I HATE repeating myself. I originally wanted to create variety, and I still do. I really don't want to recast myself exclusively as a Loving Wives writer, either.

There's still hope for me. 'Good Girl' was actually written years ago, though I never posted it, and it's been pretty well received. 'Glitch (a love story)' has had its bones rattling around in my head for a long time, and when I sat down to write it, the damn thing fell right out of my fingers into the keyboard and I effectively 'read' it while writing it. I've never experienced that before. I banged out a 750 word challenge just for the hell of it, and there's an Erotic Horror tale in me which promises to be more challenging. I'm directing myself at it even as I write this.

Not much of this new stuff shows up just as racy smut. The raw sexuality is muted. Perhaps it's because I'm older. Perhaps it's because I'm more interested in evoking powerful emotions rather than powerful stimulation. Maybe I'm more settled and confident about my own sex life. Or, it might be that the tales I have to tell involve more complexity from the characters than just their horniness. The people in these more recent efforts seem to have more regrets and flaws than their predecessors.

Please enjoy these new stories- and by 'enjoy,' I mean cry your eyes out, jack or jill yourselves off until you see stars, allow your hearts to race, be ready to punch holes in your walls, and allow the core ideas of these sad, sick, scary, stimulating tales to settle uncomfortably into your collection of anxieties.

-Cockatoo