Psychotherapy is a funny thing when you’re a smart person: you can see five different therapists and you will get five different answers to your questions, and you’ll pick the therapist who gives you the answer you want, even if it’s not necessarily the answer you need. Considering my ex and I probably saw at least a dozen therapists between us, both individually and as a couple, you might understand why it took so long for us to recognize that what we needed wasn’t therapy: what we needed was a divorce.
Of course, no therapist was going to tell us this, just as no therapist was going to tell me I was gay when, 12 years into my marriage, I found myself hopelessly in love with a woman. And I’m glad nobody did, because I’m too smart to have believed it anyway. I would have questioned it just as I’d questioned myself in my 20s, and had continued to question myself in my 30s. Besides, that’s not what good therapists do. What good therapists do, I have come to understand, is hold your hand while you try to figure out the hard shit on your own. And if they’re really good, and you’re really stubborn, they wait until you’re ready to hear the truth, and then they hit you with it. What I’ve started to realize is that sometimes they hit you with contradictory truths. And it takes a really smart person to understand that that’s ok.
The problem isn’t that we can’t figure out the answers on our own; the problem is that often the answers we come up with are challenged by external forces: our family, friends, spouse, society. And I know very few people, myself included, who are able to stay comfortable with answers that make other people uncomfortable. Add to that, the answers make you uncomfortable yourself, or make a relationship uncomfortable, and well–you either figure out if the answer can be changed or if you can change to accommodate the answer. It took me too long to figure out that I could; by that time my ex had decided he could not. Not that I blame him. We had a good run together, had two awe-inspiring children together, grew up together. We helped each other survive our 20s, put up with each other in our 30s, and now that we’re in our 40s, our marriage seems to have outlived its purpose, or more likely our marriage’s purpose no longer fit our individual needs, we got too selfish, too impatient, or some other shit. As we ran down the reasons why our marriage wasn’t working for either of us, it became less important why it wasn’t working. It just wasn’t.
The beautiful thing about being in my 40s is that I am finally learning that I don’t have to give a fuck. Not giving a fuck in my 20s looked a lot different than it does in my 40s. In my 20s, not giving a fuck meant outwardly eschewing labels while inwardly craving them. Although I considered myself bisexual, and had since high school, I hated the way gay women insisted that I was “bi now, gay later.” Even more–I hated that I wanted it to be true. I didn’t like living in the middle, felt like bisexuality was a copout, a holding pattern: it felt like I was straddling the fence and afraid if I fell into one yard or the other, I wouldn’t be able to climb back up that fence to get out. If I was dating guys (and I was), I was continually declaring my adoration for women. And if I were to date women (but I wasn’t), I would have to prove to them that dating women wasn’t an experiment, a phase, or a game.
Not giving a fuck in my 40s means that when friends and family, potential dates, and anyone else confused because I had divorced a man and was now (pretty much exclusively) dating women ask me the question I’d been asking myself for the past 20 years, I don’t break into a sweat trying to figure out the answer. Not giving a fuck means that when people ask me whether I am bisexual or gay, pansexual or fluid or queer or anything in between, I can shrug my shoulders and say, “I just am.” I am here, on a date, with a woman and enjoying myself. I am at home, with my kids and loving it. I am at work, inspiring kids to figure out who they are. I am daydreaming about sitting on my porch, living out the second half of my life with a woman who gets me, and grateful for the man I spent the first half of my life with. And I don’t give a fuck whether you like that answer or not.
(mostly) full disclosure 