Jan,
I wanted to respond that I agree that confession is often a mistake, as bad as that may sound to some here. A few things happened that required I come clean with some of this stuff to my wife. Otherwise, I wouldn't have. I think it was just unnecessarily painful. I have divulged as little as possible.
Having said that, I think having this out in the open is making a big change for the better in the marriage, even though this has been a remarkably good marriage in a lot of ways. And Ranchette, I know that this is going to be a serious and challenging time for both my wife and I.
Part of the reason I brought this up so openly is that I found leaving the Witnesses made me question the whole idea of vowing ourselves into relationships that might be different with time than what we thought they were. For instance, I broke my dedication vow and no longer believe in a god. And it also made me wonder about a religiously-based marriage vow that one makes at 20 (in my own case) and that you are expected to honor FOREVER.
My wife and I are seeing a marriage counselor, and we've discussed this idea quite a bit in counseling. I've made it clear that I can't make a promise that I would NEVER be with another woman again. That seems ridiculous to me, and I cringe at the idea of making another vow that I might not keep. We have agreed that we both can say that as far as we can see right now we WANT to be together and WANT to limit ourselves sexually to just the other person. And if that should change where we didn't want to be together, we'd talk about it before one of us decided to leave the other.
I brought this subject up because I wondered if any others had been through something similar. For me, part of it was realizing I was going to grow old and die somewhere down the road, and there were certain experiences I wanted to have before that happened. Selfish? Yes. But then again, as far as any of us can tell, we get one life, and this is it, so we need to make the most of it. My wife and I also have an unusual situation in that we are the only couple I know of where one partner has totally left the Witnesses and the other remained, AND the marriage has stayed together. And happily so, I might add, despite what you may think of my sexual escapades.
I'm struggling a bit to understand all this because both the marriage, our relationship and my own experiments are not quite like anything I've ever heard of before. I was just wondering if anyone out there had anything to contribute to all of this. It seems that, except for Xena, there's a lot of silence on the matter. Understandably so.
But leaving the Witnesses left me with this incredible sense of life as an adventure, of an opportunity to say yes to a lot of things in life that I had always said no to. And doing so openly and without blinders on as to the possible consequences. That was certainly part of the draw of being with these women, the sense of total involvement in life. When I've talked with the women about it, they've agreed that the experience has left their lives richer and fuller as well. And they have all remained friends of mine. Does that make sense in the world of conventional morality? No. But does it make sense in the context of a life fully lived at the limits? Yes. Does it mean there has been no pain in the situations? Of course not, but a life fully lived has both pain and joy - not just one side of the coin.
So, those are some of the ideas that moved me to open this up to discussion. I'm sort of feeling my way along here in a life that has little precedent, and that is certainly quite different than the one I led as a JW. It's just that, when the life draws to an end, I want to be able to feel that I lived it as straight out and fully as is possible.
Does this make sense?
S4
