The Old Mattress, the Random Meeting, My New Apartment, and the Healing Ahead
The mattress.
The mattress with “Purchased May 2014” written in my handwriting on the sticker that you are never supposed to remove, under penalty of law.
I noticed the tag as my high school buddy and I schlepped the mattress into the bedroom of my new apartment.
The Old Mattress
Seeing the tag transported me immediately to the day that my ex-wife and I purchased the mattress. We bought it at a mega-furniture store. She said she needed a new mattress to recuperate after undergoing foot surgery in May 2014.
On the way home that day, I asked permission to get takeout lunch from a Mexican barbeque chicken restaurant we’d pass. I explained that the chicken would smell smoky. I double checked with her to make REALLY sure that it was okay, because the smell of smoke bothers her. She again said that I could get the chicken.
After we got home, she threw a FIT over the chicken’s smell. She ranted about it, demanding that I get it out of the house immediately. I scrambled outside to sit on a step and eat the chicken. It was either that or throw it away immediately to try to calm her down. I remember my frustration and how pissed I was that I fell for her typical switcheroo again.
She slept on the mattress for weeks following the 2014 surgery. Afterward, I was sleeping alone on it in the downstairs bedroom where she’d recuperated. I don’t remember what happened that kept us in separate bedrooms, but it was a manifestation of the state of our marriage.
I don’t know if we had sex during the subsequent months. I know distinctly, though, that we had sex on the last two days of September 2014 on that very mattress. Two nights in a row, she showed up in my room at 4 a.m., naked and telling me, “Naked girl needs sex.”
I was asleep both nights, yet years before, in an attempt to capitalize on whatever sexual spark she might have at any future point, I’d told her to wake me up whenever she wanted sex. All I asked for was that she give me 10 seconds to “get ready.” Yes, I was that starved of sex (after a recent three-year drought) that I could be ready in 10 seconds at just the thought of sex.
She requested both nights that we fuck in cowgirl position. It was emotionless sex, no intimacy or closeness. It was just another bizarre situation in our bizarre life. Even her words (“Naked girl needs sex”) seemed like a pathetic, random demand and plea woven together. The sex was forced, mechanical, passionless, and devoid of any loving feelings. I thought immediately afterward that if the genders were reversed, it would be in the realm of marital rape.
All those memories came flooding back instantly when I saw the mattress tag.
Those two nights, nearly ten years ago, were the last time that we ever had sex.
When I asked later if we’d ever have sex again, she said we wouldn’t. She said that the sex that night hurt. In her words, “Your dick is too big and too crooked, and your hips are too bony. That makes sex hurt for me.”
There you have it. Sex hurt for her because of things that I couldn’t change about my body. A body that was essentially identical in size to when she married me.
My body, which I can’t change, is wrong.
My body was THE problem. It became the vehicle of trauma and shame. Even now, I wince with the hurt and shame of her reaction to me physically.
The Random Meeting
There’s a tall, beautiful woman. We’ve known each other nine years. From the moment we met randomly on an airplane, there was an immediate connection. We talked non-stop for three hours on the February 2015 flight. She was to be married in only two months. I figured that she was just another fantastic woman who I’d meet and share my thoughts and feelings with more intimately than I could ever share them with my wife. And then we’d never meet again.
The exception, though, is that she tracked me down. She could tell (or maybe I said it) that I was getting violently ill near the end of the flight. She wanted to find out how I was doing. It took a year, but we connected and became business friends: networking, sharing our business aspirations, discussing strategies for small businesses. She made introductions for me that led to finally publishing a book.
We’d also talk about our personal lives. Then, in 2017 or 2018, she asked me, via text, “Are you in an abusive relationship?” She was in one, and thought, based on things that I’d shared, that I might be, too.
That was a turning point.
We formed a two-person support group. Listening to stories about the challenges and trauma she faced with her husband was the first time I realized that my marriage situation wasn’t unique. Our spouses seemed, in many ways, to be following the same playbook for agitation and drama. There was even one Monday where our spouses both started arguments on DIY home improvements. I wondered aloud whether there was a weekly email for difficult spouses with suggested topics to pick fights about in the coming days.
The pain and hurt that we both experienced started a bond.
Then, there was the pandemic. Not a unique story, I’m sure, but we grew closer emotionally in those years as both of our spouses refused to be emotionally intimate or even engage in physical touch. My wife outright refused a daily hug, asking whether I expected her to initiate it?
The plane friend and I started to meet up in parking lots every few weeks during the pandemic to simply hug and satisfy the need for some kind of human touch. There’s more to this story, and I’ll share it here at some point. Suffice it to say, though, that even without ever having sex, we’d reinforced for each other that the lies that both our spouses perpetrated about us were truly lies, without any shred of truth.
She was part of my close support network of friends (and even my wife’s relatives) who helped me come to grips with the difficult process of pulling myself away from my narcissistic ex-wife. Seeking the divorce, after her persistent refusals to participate in counseling, was an act of self-protection that nobody seemed to believe that I’d ever be strong enough to accomplish.
Except, I did accomplish it.
My New Apartment
Now, it’s 2024. My new apartment. The divorce is final.
The woman from the airplane and some of her friends were part of the group that helped me move. She returned the next afternoon to help unpack an additional load of stuff and get it to my top-floor loft.
After off-loading the truck, we attended Mass together. Together. My wife (now ex-wife) had told me several years earlier that she didn’t want to worship with me any longer.
Following church, we headed to a nearby, outdoor, multi-restaurant area to grab dinner and get to know my new neighborhood. We also stopped at a bar on the main drag near me, followed by a drugstore where we bought wine and Prosecco.
All along, with the significance of this second night in my apartment, I knew that we’d be close and physical with each other. I thought about making love on this mattress from May 2014 to reclaim it for me. This piece of furniture was the object of years of shame and pain. Perhaps the worst emotional abuse amid a ton of emotional abuse within my marriage happened on that mattress. I thought that making love on the only mattress that I had to my name, was the opportunity to accelerate healing my very self. Healing my beaten down mind, body, and spirit.
After the dinner and bar hopping, we returned to the new apartment.
We made love.
At first, it hurt. I immediately thought that my ex-wife was right: my penis is the problem.
But no, this wonderful woman — only the second woman that I have ever been with — course corrected and helped make it all work. Even though I came quickly, we continued to fuck for a long time.
We cuddled. We dozed off. She had to leave.
We talked on the phone the next morning about the experience and our feelings, both physical and emotional. It was loving, transparent, and authentic.
The Healing Ahead
She came over later to help me move more things around in the new place. Inside the apartment, she finally had to be direct with me, since I have a history of not getting hints: we were going to get back on the horse (ride ’em cowgirl) to make love again so that I could realize that sex doesn’t have to hurt, and my body isn’t an impediment.
I’m starting to realize that I’m not the problem. I’m also starting to understand what love making can be.
I told my plane friend that my belief in the Ten Commandments and the place for sex within marriage hadn’t changed in the last 48 hours. What I realized, though, away from my now ex-wife of more than 30 years, is how much damage that I must heal from in every part of my life.
I want to be faithful and obedient to God. I know, though, that I need to heal from my ex-wife’s dismantling of my confidence, all the shame attached to sex, and her statements that I didn’t perform to her liking.
I have so much work to heal.
Now, at least, the healing has begun in earnest.
If you are in a relationship where you feel threatened or unsafe to be yourself, seek help. I’ve left that type of relationship and am publishing content along my journey to healing as I progress. Subscribe to get an email as I share new articles.
