My first husband told me, before bed on our wedding night, that we would be having a sexless marriage. It was fine with me, if two people of the same sex loved each other. I knew from a very early age that the opposite sex attracted me. Husband #1: JP and I had sex before we were married. I did get the feeling that it meant more to me than it did to him; but this post-wedding decree was a total shock to me. There was a cold finality to it. My first thought was, "He can't be serious!... Can he?" My second thought was that he would change his mind. I mean, he can't be gay, he just married me! Right?
I was on my own with this secret. I was too stupid to get an immediate annulment, and I had convinced myself that I could not live without him. When we began as travel buddies, my severe depression lifted, and I thought he was the drug that kept the hellish depression away. I had no one to explain to me, how I was supposed to live like this. I went from feeling beautiful and desirable, to feeling like I was truly sexually unattractive. I would beg, and cry for an explanation, or a kind touch, only to be ignored or chastised. Nothing about it made any sense to me.
I kept up a pretty good front, but I was miserable, and I kept thinking, if I just waited for a while, he would start to be more like he was before we married. Surely he couldn't resist my charms for long. Wrong. I did wrangle him into the act a few times, but he would get very angry with me after. Even an innocent touch of his hair was met with a cold stare. I tried to do things the way he wanted them: I ate what he ate, strict vegetarian; I did yoga, because he did yoga; I gave away all of my clothes and possessions except for a bare minimum because he didn't want excess possessions and what we didn't give away he sold. We were a cult of two, and I was the one who was brain-washed, willingly. Sure, there were happy times and times I thought I couldn't live like this for another day.
How did this stretch into a six year relationship? There were so many layers to those six years that I can only focus on one at a time, so it will take me a long time to uncover those years. I tried to leave him many times, but we were so poor, that many times, I literally did not have a dime for a phone call or any way to get to a phone to make a call. I'll cover the starvation, homelessness, his voracious appetite for peyote, mushrooms, LSD, Marijuana,....etc., in other essays.
I've told you that we eventually had a son. The way that happened is that we went to a yoga retreat, and I asked the yogi in front of a group, that included JP, "How often should married people have sex?" I had nothing to lose, and I was pretty sure the answer would not be: never. The Yogi said:four times a month. So after that I was allowed 4 times a month, and JP made sure I knew that it was not something he looked forward to. He hated the chemicals from my birth control foam, poisoning his purified body, and he refuse to get rubbers. Possibly he thought he had found a loop hole that would make it impossible for us to continue with sex. Then, in the health food store book rack, there was a book called "Astrological Birth Control". Don't look for it, it doesn't work. I wrote the authors to tell them that I was pregnant. Hmmmm... You're the only one it hasn't worked for, you must have done it wrong.
And so we have a precious son.
29 Aug 2019, Post Script: I did not finish this because bringing up the pain from the past felt so wrong. Why willingly dive into it again. Fourteen years later, I have come a long way in sorting it out. My first husband took a massive amount of LSD at Woodstock, before we were together as a couple. He was different after that. What he became focused on after that was purifying himself in every way. He warned me that he did not want anyone or anything in his life that interfered with that. But, I didn't understand clearly what he was about. I reacted to everything as though he was trying to hurt me. And I was very hurt. Only as an older, wiser person do I understand that if I had the courage, I would have known that I should not try to make a life with someone on a journey like his. He was being true to himself and I was not being true to myself, that is not his fault.
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