As a married woman, I have eaten alone with male friends many times. I have exchanged emails containing personal writings about my life and past. I have gone on long walks with a male friend. I have drunk beer alone in an apartment with one. I have stayed up talking to a male friend on our own couch after Lloyd has gone to bed and left us in the living room. We have texted and talked on the phone. Men who are not my husband have been confidantes. Sometimes we’ve hung out as a group with my husband, but I’ve had a distinct friendship with men apart from their friendship with my husband.
I don’t say these things to shock anyone or to show off how open and comfortable our marriage is. I want to talk candidly because I think some people don’t know that these things can happen within a healthy marriage. It is possible between two mature, self-aware partners who communicate honestly about their feelings. Is it the only way? No. Are my husband and I so highly evolved that we are immune to attraction to the opposite sex and hints of jealousy or discomfort? No.
When I say these things here, part of me worries that people will think I’m a bad wife who is playing with fire and will eventually get burned. This is ridiculous because you know who thinks I’m an awesome wife? My husband. And I think I’m a pretty good one, too.
Why have I spent time with these men? Well, I felt a soul connection to these people. I liked their perspectives, their life energy, and the energy they brought out in me. I don’t think I need to cut myself off from the potential to learn and grow from half of the population.
The line
“Stay far away from the line” was advice I heard given to a room full of couples on a Christian marriage retreat. The line is the place where you cheat on your spouse with a physical or emotional affair. You can’t cross the line if you don’t go anywhere near it, was their reasoning.
Now, I would never want to do anything to jeopardize my marriage. I know Lloyd and I have built something that doesn’t come along every day. It’s hard to imagine anyone caring for me so fully and tenderly. Now that we have a family, I will do everything in my power to provide a stable home from which my son can venture out and confidently explore.
For a few years, I thought that being a good wife and safeguarding my marriage meant staying far away from the line. Whenever I felt myself approaching what I thought was the line by feeling overly friendly or excited about ideas with a co-worker or feeling too close to a male friend, I got nervous. I thought I was doing something wrong and being reckless. I tried to rein myself in, to make myself less sparkly with that person. Even when the real line of having a potential affair was a football field away, that hyper awareness of the line made it feel like it was dangerously close and getting closer if I wasn’t actively trying to stay away from it.
Challenging the line
My husband and I had been married five years when I brought up the conversation on a long walk. A wise mentor once counseled us that difficult marital conversations are best had while driving or walking. It’s easier to talk about difficult things when moving shoulder to shoulder rather than facing each other in stillness.
“I feel worried to be my full self around men. I worry that if I let myself be my whole beautiful, intelligent, storied self, that I am being a temptress. As narcissistic as it sounds, I worry that I’ll make men fall in love with me. I feel like I need to be less, to tone down my sparkle, so that men won’t be tempted to fall in love with me.”
I was thinking of a couple relationships in my life in which I had developed friendships with men, wondering if it was a safe thing to do for our marriage.
We pondered the different angles of what I had said. When our dating had entered the serious phase years before, I told Lloyd one night, “I want to talk to you forever.” It’s true. We still have honest, open-minded, energizing conversations.
That day on the walk he said the words that made me release my fear of betraying him. “Be yourself. I want to see you be yourself. It’s not your job to ensure people don’t fall in love with you.”
When I allow myself to live fully into my beauty outside of our marriage, it makes it easier for me to move with beauty inside our marriage. When I say beauty, I’m not talking about high heels and lipstick. Sometimes I use those. No, I mean, the beauty in connecting to my light-filled core that radiates out and touches those near me.
Obsession with the line
There was another layer to what I was feeling that I couldn’t see that day. I was so focused on not wanting to lure in men that I couldn’t see that I was afraid of falling in love with someone else, too. Deep down, I thought I was programmed to be unfaithful. I now see that wasn’t true, but I WAS programmed to believe that I would be unfaithful. My ex-boyfriend Sean told me the night he raped me, “You’re going to hurt and leave everyone who loves you. You’re going to abandon your children.”
It didn’t help matters that when I was with Sean, I did develop romantic feelings for other men. It made me feel like he was right about me. Could it really be a surprise that I was interested in other men when I was a college student desperately seeking to be really seen and loved while in a relationship that was demoralizing and emotionally abusive?
I now see that I carried those fears of being unfaithful into my marriage. Add to that the fact that I had come to see any relationship with a man outside the family as brushed with faintly sexual strokes. So every encounter with a man was a potential threat.
I had to pretend like other men didn’t exist when I was with Sean. He once broke a CD in half that a friendly man I had interviewed for a newspaper article made for me. If I mentioned a guy’s name, he would say, “Who’s he?” in an accusatory manner, followed by a line of obscene, half-joking questions and statements. “Do you want to suck his cock? I know he’s thought of you naked.” I tried to brush it off, but looking back, it was humiliating.
So let’s go back to the advice to “Stay far away from the line.” For ME with my history, that was an agent of the oppressor. It activated the part in me that oppresses all that is light and truth and replaces it with darkness, anxiety, and fear. When I was trying to avoid the line, I thought so much about the line that it dominated my thoughts when I was with interacting with male friends and co-workers and changed how I acted sometimes. What otherwise would have been a completely innocuous, non-sexual situation became one that had the line in sight. The more the line is in sight, the closer the line feels. It’s like a Chinese finger trap. The more we try to pull away from the line, the closer and more tightly it pulls us in.
Being honest about our feelings
Sometimes I’ve developed feelings for male friends that made me nervous. I started to feel like we were getting too close and like emotional lines were becoming blurred. I’ve worried that I could do harm to our marriage.
Questions I’ve asked myself in these situations: Am I searching for something in this relationship that would be better found in relationship with my husband? Is growing closer to this person making me more distant from my spouse? Is there anything that has been said or happened between this person and me that I would be ashamed for my husband to hear or see?
It takes some emotional plunging. It can be an awakening to the fact that the love flow with my husband got stopped up somewhere down the line. Where’s the clog and how can I break it free? You can’t see the clog, but you can feel it. Most often it’s just the gathered gunk of daily shedding and life debris that builds and builds in the darkness until one day you’re standing in two inches of water up your ankle in a shower that won’t drain. Keep the line clear.
I can tell my husband anything. I can tell him anything because I don’t have to tell him everything.
“Let there be spaces in your togetherness,” as Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet. We don’t tell each other everything, but we can tell each other anything. That’s some powerful, grace-filled love.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t conversations that I let germinate within me as inner dialogue for awhile before I open the conversation with my husband. It doesn’t mean all our conversations are easy. But I know I can tell him anything, and he will remain calm and loving. That doesn’t mean he’s not allowed to have strong emotions about what we’re discussing. But he can hear me without fear; he can hear me from his loving self. He can become detached enough from how what I’ve said may affect him, our marriage, or our family to entertain the idea of something unexpected.
He can monitor and control how his emotions impact his actions. And the rare times when he can’t, he tells me. He says he needs some time to think on his own. In those times, it’s not easy to leave my feelings hanging between us without closure and knowing that he is processing something difficult. But it’s just as much my responsibility to control my own desire to have answers NOW in order to give him the space he needs.
These conversations have made our marriage strong and given us both the breathing room we’ve needed. When you feel like you can’t share certain feelings or like you aren’t allowed to have certain feelings, your relationship feels fragile. Like those feelings could break it if they were discovered.
The rigor of emotional work
It takes two people who are willing to learn about themselves and their emotions, who are capable of doing the work. I know what it’s like to be with someone who is not. On some nights you end up with sulking, the silent treatment, tears, insults, and hours of consoling and reassuring. On other nights you can end up with holes punched in the walls, suicide threats, being coerced into doing things you don’t want to do, and being held hostage in your own car.
I lived in fear of being sucked into the emotional vortex. So I stayed out of tornado country and learned to keep my feelings to myself. I never knew if that day I would meet the F4. In order to not let my internal emotional pressure swirl into their own funnels, I learned to just push my feelings down, to pretend they weren’t there. I denied myself the feelings that made me uncomfortable. This included denying doubt about the relationship, shame in myself, and anger toward my boyfriend. I told him a lot of lies in order to keep the peace, and I told myself even more. My friends learned to stop asking questions.
Once I emerged from that relationship, I became a storm tracker of sorts. I learned to look for those pressure systems and swirling clouds. I spent a long time looking up at my sky–identifying cloud formations, closing my eyes to feel the strength of the wind on my cheeks, and breathing in the air. I learned what different feelings felt like inside me. I actively worked to acknowledge my feelings. If I found one that made me nervous, I didn’t run from it. I followed it.
Any feeling I want to run from, I try to notice. The feelings I need to run from are the very ones I need to invite in for a long tea and get to know. “Who are you and what is your purpose? Tell me your story. What’s it like to be you?” I try to listen to them without interrupting them, without judging them. “Where were you born? How did you grow?”
If I don’t get to know them and become comfortable with them, I’ll be running from them my whole life. I’ll be running from myself my whole life. Instead of running, maybe I can learn to live peacefully with all the parts of myself. When I can accept the parts of myself that sometimes worry me or scare me, those pieces become integrated into a larger picture of a person who is learning, trying, growing. Yes, sometimes failing and missing the mark. But when we’re running from ourselves, we can’t appreciate who we are now. We’re looking forward at where we’ll be when we outrun our demons and looking back to make sure that the shadows aren’t gaining on us.
Listen to your feelings. All of them. The sunny seabreezes and the sideways rain. The cumulus clouds and the swirling funnels. They all have something to tell us about who we are and where we have been, and if we learn to understand them, we can better determine where we’re going. The hurricane doesn’t catch us off guard and unprepared. And we don’t find ourselves driving straight toward the tornado.
The lessons of boundaries
Here’s a little wisdom inspired by my yoga instructor this morning.
Boundaries are good. Staying within lines is vitally important sometimes. It keeps us alive when we’re driving with a semi on either side of us. But sometimes we just want to live like the kid scribbling all over the coloring page with furious joy. We want freedom.
Balance is important. We need to find our own boundaries, our own lines, and figure out what our discomfort at those lines means. We need to investigate which lines are helpful to us and which ones are stifling and anxiety-inducing. We need to know which lines makes us uncomfortable because they’re challenging us to grow and which ones are uncomfortable because they’re holding us back, binding us to a life that is smaller than what it could be.
In the first couple years of our marriage, I needed to know that Lloyd would be there for me as I found my own balance. I needed to know we could practice moving our boundaries together. I needed to know I had freedom inside and outside of our relationship. We were in the toddlerhood of marriage. It’s the job of toddlers to test boundaries. They test boundaries to figure out how they fit into the world. This was me in our early marriage. Will Lloyd still be my safe place if I _____? Will he still be my safe place if HE ____? I got my answer. He showed me how calm and steady his love could be. Our love felt less and less fragile. And I felt less fragile, too, as I felt less dangerous.
We’re partners. We’re not just partners in what serves each other. We’re not just partners in what serves our marriage. We are partners in life and self-growth. We are partners in struggle and shadow.
When you grow a love like that and keep working on it every day, the line that society draws for you matters a whole lot less. You forget it’s there. You know you’re not going to cross it.
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