In the model I was given, it was the woman’s job to “be with the kids,” while the man went out
into the world and “did things.” One of the things I eventually wound up “doing” was having
flings with other women, and finally, a full-fledged affair. That led to the end of my first
marriage, and turned into my second.
I was never proud of the way I behaved, and my deep sense of guilt only ripened through the
years. I’ve apologized to my first wife many times, and, because she is and has always been
a gracious person, we have maintained cordiality for many years. But I know that I hurt her
deeply, and I wish there were some way a person could go back and redo, or undo, or at
least do a diffl’rent way, what was done.
My second marriage failed, and led to a third—which also ultimately failed. I didn’t seem to
know how to hold onto a relationship, and the reason was that I didn’t seem to know how to
give. I held (although not consciously, I don’t think) the extraordinarily selfish and immature
view that relationships existed to bring me pleasure and convenience, and that the challenge
was to keep them going while giving up as little of myself as possible.
In truth, that is what romantic relationships felt like to me: interactions requiring me to give up
bits and pieces of myself until I had all but disappeared. I didn’t want that, and yet I didn’t
seem to know how I could be happy without a “significant other” in my life. So it was always a
question of how much of myself I was willing to “sell out” in order to have the security of a
permanent source of love, companionship, and affection (read, sex) in my life. As I said, I’m
not very proud of any of this. I’m trying to be transparent here. My friend Rev. Mary Manin
Morrissey, founder of the Living Enrichment Center in Wilsonville, Oregon, calls me a
Recovering Male.
By the end of my third marriage I thought I was ready to quit, but I was actually to go through
this two more times before I was able to make a long-term relationship work. In the process I
fathered seven more children—four with a woman with whom I had a long-term relationship
without becoming married.
To say that I have acted irresponsibly would be generous in the extreme, yet in each instance
I believed that (a) this was finally the relationship that was going to last, and (b) I was doing
everything I could to make it work. Given my complete misunderstanding then of what love
really is, I realize now how empty those words were.
And I wish that I could say that these behaviors were limited to those partnerships, but that
would not be telling the half of it.
Along the way and in between, I involved myself with many other women, conducting myself
with equal immaturity and selfishness.
Now, I fully realize that there are no victims and no villains in these matters, and that all life
experiences are co-creations, but I acknowledge the huge role that I played in these
scenarios. I see the pattern that it took me thirty years to break, and those are ugly realities I
am unwilling to try to cover up with New Age aphorisms.
So it is not suprising, then, that in my late forties I found myself alone. And, as I have said
before, my career and health were in no better shape than my love life. It was with
hopelessness that I watched my fiftieth birthday approaching. This was the state of things
when I awoke in utter despair in the middle of a February night in 1992 and wrote an angry
letter to God.
I can’t tell you how much it’s meant to me that God answered.