A letter

I have a highly recommended book called Writing Alone and With Others, with exercises that I plan to start using to spur my daily writing. Darcy is writing actual stories, while I write lists about what annoyed me today. However, today I wrote a letter in response to Cary Tennis' column on Salon.com. I don't normally post letters on such websites, but this advice seeker reminded me of myself 15 years ago, and I thought Cary and the other commentators were too hard on her:


Dear LW,

I’m sorry Cary and everyone else is being so hard on you. I don’t think you deserve it.

When I was 20, I met a basically good guy. I married him when I was 23 and divorced him when I was 26. I was ambivalent about the whole thing to begin with, but I married him because he loved me and I thought I should love him back. I married him because I was young and inexperienced and the world seemed scary as hell, and he was a good guy who seemed to offer some comfort and security. He was a good guy but he was just not the right person for me. By the end I couldn’t stand the sight of him. I hated the hair on his back, he was too short and he sweated too much.

Several years later, I was hot as hell for a short guy with hair on his back. But with the ex-husband, these were symbols and symptoms for the ways he was not right for me. I came to realize it was cruel of me to marry him in the first place, and even crueler to stay with him when I couldn’t appreciate him in the way he deserved.

So I think you should strongly consider divorce, for the sake of both of you, but I have some caveats. For one thing, there is absolutely no correlation between how good a man looks, or how tall he is, and how good he will be in bed or in a relationship. In general, you have to accept the uncertainty that you will end up in a happy, permanent relationship with someone who suits you better. Maybe you will, and improving your own mental and emotional health will certainly better the odds. Or maybe you will be alone in 10 or 15 years. I’m an introverted loner, so to me being alone is far better than being in a bad relationship or even an okay relationship. If it’s important to you to be in a relationship a man, you will have to adjust your expectations. But I think you got married too soon. Date a variety of men, and make a wiser choice when and if you marry again. And then stick with him.