Hey Tiger and Pat --

I spent 12 years alone between the end of the passionate marriage of my youth and meeting P. I was a career girl. I spent a lot of time with my dog, sometimes in the woods. I had my writing and intellectual activities. And I was a part-time barfly. Boyfriends, yes. Steady bfs who lasted, no.

I was 40 when I met Paul. He seemed to respect me and was willing to do more than his share. So pretty soon I didn't cook anymore -- something I'd always liked to do -- because he was "taking care" of me. Graduate school kept me busy. And he shooed me out of the kitchen.

Pretty soon I didn't walk my dog anymore and missed that. But he was looking out for me, wasn't he? (And, apparently, building up a huge stash of resentments.)

O, gawd, I don't want to relive all the the minutiae of the things that happened, the small compromises that left me where I am today -- him living with another woman and me trying to rebuild my cognitive functions and remember who I am.

This is why people say -- Oh that's what a relationship is. You make the compromises. It a constant process of negotiation.

I learned a lot about how to love and not be selfish in the relationship. I thought like you, Tiger, that I had lived alone too long to be able to have a loving relationship. I actually studied books and research about having relationships.

I guess, in the end, I prefer to have had the relationship than not to have had it. But I should have ended it a lot sooner, at the point when I realized that the sex was bad and wasn't never going to get any better.
I wish I hadn't been so desperate for companionship that I was so willing to trade away the last 15-years of my premenopausal sexuality.

Another place where I might have drawn a boundary and didn't. One of those people who hate change so much I'll chew off parts of my being -- in this case, my sexuality -- to avoid it.