You’re awesome! So are my wife and I, both old fuckers (vulgar expression intentional) in our fifties.

We each had a different upbringing than you, and from each other. We also each had a first practice marriage when we were each in our early twenties and didn’t know each other.

But now, in our real 21-years-&-counting marriage, we are both also powerful in the way you describe, happy to be in love with our monogamous partner, each other.

Good on ya’ mate! for getting there so early! To your power. Before we were in our thirties, we’d both had all that shit your mom warned you about. Especially my wife, because women have it worse in America’s patriarchal and now with Trump, proven white supremacist society. (Always has been since 1776, but now even white people have to admit it explicitly is so).

We both drank and used drugs as children and young adults, and we had indiscriminate sex with dozens of strangers, in drunken attempts at finding human connection. It wasn’t as bad as your mom said, but it took its toll. Had my wife not been physically unable to bear children, she’d have been babymomma to half a dozen guys. I was “lucky” and had only one girlfriend have an abortion when she was 15 and I was 16. It was one of the saddest days of our young lives. Maybe not THE saddest. That would be a hard choice, as we’d both come from broken families in many ways, on our own, as teens, from households where sexual and physical abuse was always there.

I believe everyone is “prolife”, aborting only in the most desperate circumstance, as we were then. And I helped to produce a beautiful, strong and feminist, brilliant PhD candidate daughter.

The End

The story of two sexually active married folks who messed it all up like your mama warned, when we were young, but found our power to love and physically express unconditional love, for life, when given a second chance.