I so didn't want to know that

You know when you're solving someone else's problems, because that's way easier than solving your own problems, and suddenly you flash on something so super obvious that while you're focused in that direction, admiring your brilliant work, you don't notice the missile of a revelation about yourself that's about to stab you in the back?

Had one of those last week.

It's taken me this long to write about it because I haven't been able to decide whether to toss it out there onto the naked whiteboard that is the internet. Especially since, as it turns out, some of my family has only recently learned about 117 Hudson. I thought about waiting, seeing if they'd keep coming back before I did the whole soul searching thing that's happening right now.

Then I figured, fuck it. I'm from New England, my family knows that if you can't say something pleasant then you should repress the everloving crap out of it.

At the time I was focusing on a wish for a friend. A younger man than I whose mother treated him very poorly when he was a child, blamed him for some things that no child should be blamed for. I was thinking about how he's treated some of the women in his life that have come after his mother and I realized why he's probably doing that. I hope to hell that he doesn't spend his life treating women badly as a test but I suspect that he's waiting for the woman (women) who will love him even after he's done something reprehensible. Since his mother didn't then someone who will, well she must actually love him.

I was pretty proud of myself, I must say.

You know, until I got zapped by the arrow of epiphany.

Fucking arrow.

When I was about 12 my dad started to leave. He didn't really, honest to christ, finish the job until about a year ago. Leave my mom? Yeah. But when you're a kid and there's no discussion of who you'll stay with (even though you probably would have done it the same way as the non-discussion way) there is an element of being left behind. Left to help rebuild out of the rubble, as it were. I don't spend all my time thinking about it that way, and I surely didn't then.

But.

Yeah, there always is a but.

I have a relatively...let's call it liberal attitude toward relationships. I've been willing to date people who are attached, even married, I don't object to a guy getting his porn on or going to strip clubs and I've even been known to tell a guy to go ahead and sleep with someone else. Some of this is stuff I'm sure I'd do anyway. If I like porn, I mean, exactly how am I going to get away with telling someone else to go cold turkey? (There's a joke in there about choking a cold chicken but I can't quite get to it.) Some of the other stuff has been, if not destructive, at least a serious impediment to my living a life where I can be happy. Well, a romantic life at least.

Not blaming anyone here, just want to make that clear. Nor am I justifying past shitty acts on my part. I can take the blame for being an ass.

My thing, though, my thing like the one for my young friend, is probably that I have to give a partner (hate that term, can't come up with a better one) complete freedom to do whatever he wants because if he doesn't choose me, choose me over every other possibility his life has to offer then it's not love. It's not enough love or reliable love or trustable love. Or something.

As Pony Express said to me the other day, "What you're saying is, we're all fucked up. Right?"

Yeah, ignorance was bliss, no doubt, but maybe I'm better off knwoing. Only time will tell.