Have you lost your faith in men?

That is what my friend Rod asked me after I told him what happened to one of my friends. Before I tell you how I answered him, and what happened to one of my friends, let me make the same clarification I always make before sharing information about a friend: I have no intention of making it apparent which friend or when it happened. Meaning, this could have happened 10 years ago, last night, last month, 8 or 5 years ago. It doesn’t matter when it happened because this friend is not the only friend of mine who has had something like this happen to her.

What happened to my friend? Let’s do it this way… How about I tell you what happened to many of my girl friends.

Two of my girl friends have found out that their husbands had sex addictions and were sleeping with hookers (their entire marriages—long marriages). One stayed with her husband and had two children with him. The other? She filed for divorce a day and a half later.

Four other friends have gotten divorced because they, too, were cheated on by their husbands. They experienced the normal, shitty kind of cheating where their husbands just cheated on them with non-paid hookers (with a stranger, or with a friend, or with a friend of their friend, or with a gal from the office, just some non-marriage respecting hooker), which is a devastation all the same. With these friends, all four worked towards a divorce. They didn’t file as quickly as the one friend who filed to divorce her asshole in a day in a half. She holds the record for: U-go-GIRL and tell’n her hooker-loving husband: F’ you, bastard! Get out! But, each friend reached the same decision, to divorce, in their quick-enough time.

Some women need the blinders on longer than others do, and that’s okay. That just means they are holding on tighter to the good they ‘thought’ they saw rather than easily letting the bad in that is now in front of them. Who wouldn’t want to grasp for the good a little longer? Bad sucks. Bad hurts. Bad means the person being cheated on was also being lied to.

What makes me sad is that women, well, people, always feel like they lived a lie when they find out that they were cheated on. But they weren’t the ones doing the lying so the life they lived, and the love they gave in that life, it wasn’t a lie. They weren’t living the lie. The person who was doing the cheating, the person who believed they could be irresponsible and reckless with another person's heart and life, they were living a lie.

They were lying to everyone, even their self. When a person makes the choice to do something in spite of how it will affect others (and make no mistake, it is a choice), that person is lying in the worst way. They have fooled themselves that others don't matter. They’ve convinced themselves that they don't need others; therefore it is okay to be selfish.
But we all need each other. We cannot escape that; no matter how much we want to lie to ourselves and pretend, that our needing each other is not true, that truth remains. To that end, because others DO matter, we cannot make choices that rob others of what we all need the most: to matter most to the people we need and love.

Another friend, she found out her husband is not a cheater, but a porno-loving cross dresser. He had a taste for women’s lingerie while watching porno. Another friend, like the aforementioned friend, also experienced a porno-loving bastard in her life. It almost tore her esteem in half as this sick schmuck made her feel like she was the problem, like she was not desirable enough, rather than manning up and admitting he was a sick bastard.

Another girl had a porno lover in her life. Me. My ex fiancé, he was a porno lover. When I found a hidden stack of about 40 playboys, and I asked him to get rid of them, he didn’t. (They never do.) Of course he told me he’d gotten rid of them. I wanted to believe him. So I did. Until I was walking up the driveway and the notion hit me: Those f’n magazines aren’t gone and then I walked right to the new hiding spot. (Even then my intuition was good.)

By the way, many folks are probably asking, “What’s wrong with porno?” Well, maybe nothing according to many sexual therapists. But, for many, and for me, porno is thought to be as much of an addiction and a gateway behavior as certain drug/alcohol use can be. (Yeah, yeah. This from the self-proclaimed wino. Hey! Never said I was perfect and I already said I’m opinionated.)

After the first try, once and for all my ex-fiancé told he had gotten rid of those magazines. Oh, and he did. He gave them to his brother for safe keeping. That numbskull ex of mine even brought porno into our new place when we moved together, only it wasn’t more magazines. He’d graduated to video.

It was the lies (that were just as bad as the porno loving), among other things, that made me leave him. But I was one of the girls who needed my blinders on for another 7 months before I had the strength to leave this man I had loved so much, this man I’d wanted to hold onto the good for.

Once I’d already been planning to leave, but he didn’t know (I’d packed a bunch of stuff w/out him noticing) I relished in finding yet another porno tape of his and in pulling all of the tape out of its casing so that I could lay it ever so nicely across the trash The hard, black, cracked VCR-tape casing and all the tape, piled like shimmering, brownish-black fettuccini noodles, was destroyed and on perfect display over an old piece of lettuce and a crusty can of chili. On top of that pile was note written on a small piece of bright pink paper (about the size of a Post-it ): Do we need to talk?

I didn’t want to talk. I was done talking. But I know men hate the words: Let’s talk. How could I not f’ with him?

It’s just like Rod and I joked about when we had dinner the other night. I told Rod that every woman knows inside of the first 5 seconds she sees a guy if she is going to sleep with him or not. What I didn’t say is that every woman knows by the first date if she could or would marry the guy. And, just as important, every woman knows when she’s done. It may take her longer to be done, but done is then DONE!

It is sickness, you know, when people behave so badly, cheat so heartlessly. Sadly, in my humble opinion, it is the kind of sick that often cannot be cured. See, it is often our very nature that keeps us from doing the things that others can do; things which go against their nature (so they say). But if they can do it, that means they are capable of it, whatever it is, so that behavior is within their nature. Nature is not a nurtured or learned behavior. You cannot cure a person’s nature.

Anyway, to continue on the path of doing what I always do (protect the anonymity of my friends), you can pick which incident it was, that happened however long ago, which I shared with my friend Rod during a dinner conversation and which thus brought him to the question: Have you lost your faith in men?

Now, for my answer: “No,” I said.

Rod’s eyes widened a bit in surprise at my “no”.

Rod, he knows me well. We used to work together and traveled together for work as well. You can’t not get to know someone when you travel with them. Fact. But I think there was a part of him that might have expected I’d say yes.

Then I explained to Rod why my faith has not been lost. “I’ve known good men,” I said. “I’ve dated a lot of assholes, but most of my serious relationships have been with good men. Good, good men.”

I went on to say that my father is a good man. He’s never cheated on my mother in over 40 years of marriage. All my father ever wanted was to be married. In fact, he tried it twice before he married my mother.

Rod is a good man. You should have seen how Rod beamed when he talked about his girlfriend. After he showed me a picture of this gal, a total petite, blonde, cutie pie with strong, gorgeous features, who is a girl he’s known and has been friends with for over three years, his face was so bright and proud I thought his skin could crack. It was awesome to see that adoration wash over his smile. It was music to my ears to hear him say, “I’m a lucky guy,” when explaining that slow and steady finally won the race for him. (Plus, all you want is to see the people in your life happy. He’s happy.)

Rod knows the value of a woman. He knows the value of the woman he is with. Rod knows his own value. That’s key. They say you cannot love another until you love yourself. I say you cannot love yourself until you know you are worth loving. Tragically, many people don’t know that.

Rod also has a strong faith. As you may recall, in one of my earliest posts, I explained that I felt it doesn’t matter whether you are spiritual or are religious, or are even neither but believe just in something (even a door knob), one has to have a belief system in something higher or outside one’s self. One has to believe in their self, which translates into to believing in others. If a person lacks in either category, they lack period.

Lacking, feeling less in one’s own heart, that’s what makes a person treat themselves and others with less than the respect we ALL deserve. That’s what allows them to not believe in something outside of their self.

I’ll keep saying it: No matter our age, our gender, our race, or the shell we’ve borrowed in life (our bodies), we are the same. We ARE connected. And we should NEVER care less for each other. We need to care MORE!

My heart hurts for any woman, or man, who has suffered through being cheated on or lied to by a mate. But, the only way through it is up. If something like this has happened to you, then you know that. You know you had to reach for your own heights, your own success, your own worth and value, in order to get through it. And, if you are spiritual or religious, you had to reach up and outside of yourself and you had to believe that you weren’t alone. You had to believe that you would get through it all.

If anything like this happens to anyone you love, remind them to reach up. Reach for the sky; don’t hit the bottom. That’s the answer. They’ll tell you to: Go to hell!, because they will feel like hell, but keep reminding them until they have gotten beyond their hell.

And, remember to believe. Believe in yourself and keep believing that there are good people. How could their not be? The person reading this is good. The person who wrote it is good. That’s a lot of good.