It’s been more than twenty years since my mother died. So long I squint every time the thought comes to me. So long that I’ve finally convinced myself there isn’t a code to crack. The search is over. The stones I once gave my mother have scattered, replaced by the stones my children give to me. I keep the best ones in my pockets. Sometimes there is one so perfect I carry it around for weeks, my hand finding it and finding it, soothing itself along the black arc of it.
Yours,
Sugar
HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE’S BOYFRIENDS
Dear Sugar,
I’m a freshman in high school, and everyone knows how high school is—drama, drama, drama. And my best friend (let’s say her name is Jill) is at the center of it.
See, Jill’s dating this guy (let’s call him Jack) who has a girlfriend who goes to another school. As Jill’s best friend, I already don’t like Jack. He doesn’t want to break up with the girlfriend for Jill (he and his girlfriend have been together over a year), but, in my opinion, this situation is unacceptable. Jack seems like a nice guy, but there’s that underlying scumbag quality that I just can’t get past. It’s obvious that Jack really likes Jill, but he just won’t drop the girlfriend—or Jill.
I don’t know which way I want it to go. On the one hand, I want Jill to be happy, so I want Jack to break up with the girlfriend. On the other hand, I want to punch Jack in the face and I think he would do the exact same thing to Jill that he’s doing to his girlfriend. I’ve been thinking about having a “talk” with Jack, but I’m not sure if that would help the situation. Sugar: How do I make at least one of them see the light and realize that what they’re doing is wrong?
Worried Friend
Dear Worried Friend,
Drama, drama, drama indeed! Oh, but this one’s easy, sweet pea. And hard. But best to learn it now, since, as a freshman in high school, you’re only at the very beginning of these sorts of hijinks. Jean-Paul Sartre famously said that “hell is other people,” which is true enough, but truer still is hell is other people’s boyfriends (or girlfriends, as the case may be).
I’ve been witness to those I care about cheating and being cheated on, lying and being lied to, emotionally abusing and being emotionally abused by their lovers. I’ve consoled and counseled. I’ve listened to long and tedious tales of spectacularly disastrous romantic woe that I predicted from the start because that same friend chose the same wrong person yet a-fucking-gain. But the sad news is that this is the way of the world, darling, and there isn’t a ding dang damn thing you can do about it.
Have you read Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet yet? People die because they want who they want. They do all kinds of crazy, stupid, sweet, tender, amazing, self-destructive things. You aren’t going to make anyone “see the light and realize that what they’re doing is wrong.” You just aren’t.
And you shouldn’t even try. What’s happening between Jack and Jill is between Jack and Jill. Jill knows that Jack is involved with someone else. She chooses to be in a romantic relationship with him anyway. Jack chooses to deceive a young woman he presumably cares for and string along another. These are not pretty things, but they are true things.
Don’t get me wrong: I sympathize. I know I sound calm and collected, but the truth is I rather regularly come at least internally unglued over some buffoon or scoundrel that one or the other of my intimates has deemed to “love” (see: hell is other people’s boyfriends). It’s dreadful to watch a friend make choices that you fear will cause her pain. But this is where boundaries come in, my dear Worried Friend.
Do you know what boundaries are?
The best, sanest people on the planet do, and since I have no doubt that you will become one of those sorts of people, you might as well learn about them sooner rather than later. This little pickle with Jack and Jill and the young woman at the other school has given you just that opportunity. It’s clear to me that the emotions that have arisen in your concern for Jill and your subsequent dislike of Jack have blurred your ability to understand appropriate boundaries. Your impulse to swoop in and set these lovebirds straight tells me that you’re overestimating your power and influence, and you’re also disrespecting Jill’s right to romantic self-determination—which she absolutely has, no matter how maddening her decisions may be to you.
This isn’t to say you should remain silent. Another thing that the best, sanest people on the planet do is they have the guts to tell the truth. You should tell Jill what you told me—that you want her to be happy, but because Jack is a two-timing tomcat you fear he will someday treat her the way he is treating his other, “real” girlfriend. Listen to what she says with an open heart and a critical mind. Love her even if she doesn’t do what you hope she does once you point out the fact that her paramour is a scumbag. Wish her the best without getting yourself emotionally tangled up in a situation that has nothing to do with you. (Remember those boundaries? Her life is not yours. Yours is not hers. Et cetera.)
And then, Worried Friend, just let whatever happens between Jack and Jill happen. Laugh if they end up proving you wrong. Be there for Jill if you got it right. And in the meanwhile, cultivate an understanding of a bunch of the other things that the best, sanest people on the planet know: that life is long, that people both change and remain the same, that every last one of us will need to fuck up and be forgiven, that we’re all just walking and walking and walking and trying to find our way, that all roads lead eventually to the mountaintop.
Yours,
Sugar
THWACK, THWACK, THWACK
Dear Sugar,
Two days ago my boss let me out of my shift early. I tried calling my boyfriend on the phone but he didn’t answer. When I got home and opened the door to our apartment, I found him standing in front of our full-length mirror in my panties. He slammed the door shut and locked it before I registered what I saw.
I was surprised, sure, but I was more surprised that when he opened the door back up, fully dressed (in his own clothes), he acted as though it never happened. We’ve always had an open and fun relationship, both sexually and emotionally, so I was thrown by this secretive behavior. I’ve always showed willingness and interest in experimentation. I can’t understand why he’d keep this from me. Should I say something to him or, better yet, do something to show that I’m not turned off? Or do I continue to follow his lead and say nothing at all?
Yours,
Sharing Panties, but Not Fantasies
Dear SPBNF,
The first time Mr. Sugar spanked me we’d been lovers for a week. By then we’d fucked so hard, so often, so enthrallingly and excellently and shatteringly that the heat of what lived between us practically scorched the paint off the walls. I was jammed up against the bathroom sink and he was jammed up against me, both of us facing the mirror. I saw how his expression went serious and studied and a little bit hard the moment before that first thwack.
“You like that, baby?” he whispered into my hair, and I made a little moan of assent.
Thwack, thwack, thwack.
I didn’t actually like it all that much, baby. But neither was I opposed to it. He was such a stellar man, such a stunningly adept lover, so unlike anyone I’d ever met and so profoundly much like the best, most secret parts of me that I was willing to put up with a mildly battered bum if that’s what got him off. The thought of him being aroused by spanking me was more than enough to convince me to play along that first time, as we worked our way hotly down the sink’s white porcelain pedestal to the dank underworld beneath, where we finally went still on the cream-colored vinyl floor among the grimy silver pipes, wondering exactly how we got there, so exquisitely spent that it didn’t matter.
“Did you know your sink was made in Argentina?” I asked when I was able to speak.
“Argentina?” he replied.
By way of answer, I reached up and ran my finger over the tiny sticker on the bottom of his sink that said Made in Argentina.
“That was fun,” he said. “W
asn’t it?”
“It was,” I said. “Really fun.”
Thwack, thwack, thwack, we went, all through the next month. (“You like that, baby, don’t you?”/“Yeah.”) Thwack.
After a while, in spite of everything, I grew the slightest bit annoyed. His timing often threw me off my own little pleasure ride. His hand occasionally landed painfully on my tailbone instead of the fleshy bottom of my rump. “Can you please hit me lower?” I once snapped so sharply in the middle of the act that I ruined the mood and we had to stop.
“What turns you on about spanking me?” I finally asked him.
“It’s sexy,” he said with a nonchalant air.
“But what’s sexy about it to you?” I pressed.
“That it turns you on so much,” he answered.
“That it turns me on so much?” I replied.
“Yeah,” he said, and his eyes met mine.
It didn’t take anything more than that. The way our eyes locked, we both understood in a flash that we’d been acting out our own pornographic “The Gift of the Magi”—each of us making a sacrifice that nullified the gift of the other. I no more wanted to be spanked than I wanted to fuck a kangaroo. And vice versa. We were doing it because we thought that’s what the other one wanted to do.
After we stopped laughing, we traced it back—how we’d come to this misunderstanding. Turns out, I’d made a comment on something like day three of our relationship that had to do with sex and control and submission and domination, tenderness and surrender and the social construct of gender and desire and incest and transgression and masculinity and power and a teenage fantasy I’d had that involved the Super Bowl and a bunch of men in business suits, and he took it to mean that I wanted to be punished like a naughty girl in a nunnery so he spanked the motherloving breath out of me for a month.
Isn’t that the sweetest thing you ever heard?
“Actually,” I said, “spanking doesn’t do a thing for me.”
“What does?” he asked.
And that is where we began nearly fifteen years ago. With his question, followed by my answer. With my question, followed by his. It was how we proceeded. Not on the heat so powerful that it might possibly scorch the paint off the walls, but with the sturdier, this-is-scary-but-let’s-do-it-anyway nerve that it took to say what was true not just about ourselves, but about our sexual selves.
Which sometimes oddly, sometimes thrillingly, sometimes amusingly, sometimes darkly, sometimes depressingly turns out to not be terribly much like the sexual selves we’d choose if we got to choose them.
There is no question that your lover is embarrassed about the fact that he likes to wear women’s panties. Who wouldn’t be? What man would ask for such a thing? This isn’t to say he can’t cozy up to the idea—and I sincerely hope for his own sake that he will. But it’s clear he isn’t there yet. He’s ashamed of it. Very likely he loathes it, and yet there it is and he can’t deny it and so one day when he’s got the place to himself he caves in and strips himself down and dresses himself up and without warning you appear—you! His emotionally and experimentally open lover!—and he slams the door in your face and pretends it never happened.
You know why? Because no matter how experimental he is, his life isn’t an experiment. His life is like your life and my life and all the lives of all the people who are reading these words right now. It’s a roiling stew of fear and need and desire and love and the hunger to be loved. And mostly, it’s the latter.
You walked in on him at what he perceives as his most unlovable moment. The pervert in the girly underpants. You saw his secret self before he told you his secret and that humiliates him beyond words.
There is no going back. You can’t unwalk in on him. You have to address what you saw, but I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to “do something” to demonstrate that you’re not turned off. You need to talk to him, honey bun. It’s going to be scary and awkward, but you can do it. When I have something to say that’s particularly hard to say, I often write it down first. If what happened to you happened to me, I’d write: “I want to talk to you about that day I came home from work early. I’m nervous about having this conversation, but I care about you, and our relationship is important enough to me that I’m willing to risk feeling uncomfortable. First and foremost, I want you to know that I don’t judge you for what I saw—in fact, I’m intrigued. When I opened the door and saw you standing there in my underwear I was surprised because I thought you’d been open with me about your sexuality and desires, but I was far more surprised that you shut the door and didn’t discuss it with me later. It’s been bothering me because I want you to trust that you can be honest with me and also because I want to be intimate with you and I don’t think we can do so with this silence about what happened that day between us. Will you talk to me about it?”
If he says no, your relationship is dead, though you may continue to fake it for a while.
If he says yes, that is the place from which you will proceed.
It’s a real place, an underworld place, a place where we are all spent and crouched among the pipes, fingering the foreign and covert origins of our most primal desires. While you’re down there with your guy, I suggest you share some things of your own. Give him a peek at whatever would make you slam the door shut if he walked in and caught you in front of the mirror.
That Made in Argentina sticker isn’t under the bathroom sink anymore. We don’t even live in the house with that bathroom sink. Before we moved out—years after we first became lovers—Mr. Sugar meticulously peeled the sticker off and with it he made me a card.
Made in Argentina it says on the front. Inside he wrote, “But it feels just like home.”
Yours,
Sugar
THE WOMAN HANGING ON THE END OF THE LINE
Dear Sugar,
I need your help with forgiveness. I am carrying a fierce anger in my body every day, and I can’t seem to find my way out of it. Last year, I discovered that my husband and a young woman I hired were having a relationship. This woman who I’d invited into my life, who I’d helped with her career, who I’d invited into my family, responded by meeting secretly with my husband and writing him histrionic love letters pressuring him to leave me.
My whole view of the world has gone dim. People are capable of the most astonishing and selfish acts. I used to focus on pursuing real joy and delight in my life, and sharing that joy, too. But now it feels like that light has gone out forever. This woman has caused damage in my family that I never imagined possible. I know it harms me to say so, but I really, really hate her.
Recently I discovered that she is STILL writing my husband letters, some six months after he broke it off. I have a white ball of rage about it, a monster in my chest. I imagine terrible fates befalling her, and that consumes me every day. How do I find my way back to compassion and the joyful life I once had? Can I find even a little shred of peace?
Mourning and Raging
Dear Mourning and Raging,
How painful. I’m sorry this happened to you. There are few things more devastating than a betrayal such as the sort you describe. It’s no wonder you have a mega-hot white monster ball raging inside of you. It’s a reasonable response to a hurtful situation. And yet, as you know, you’ll only destroy yourself if you continue to allow your rage to consume you. So let’s talk about how you might find some peace.
Your letter implies that you and your husband have stayed together through this turmoil. You didn’t ask for marital advice, so I’ll refrain from giving it, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that I think a huge chunk of your other-woman fury will be diffused once you and your husband repair the damage his affair has caused. What strikes me most about your letter is how little you say about him. Your rage appears to be directed solely toward the woman with whom he had an affair. You write that she has “caused damage in my family that I never imagined possible,” but of course she couldn’t have caused damage if your husband hadn?
??t let her. They both violated your trust, but your husband committed the graver offense. He took a vow. She only took a job.
I don’t point this out in order to dismiss her transgression, but rather to call your attention to a dynamic that’s worth examining. To have a covert love affair with one member of the couple who employs you is bad form indeed, but why is your rage focused on her rather than him? Is it possible that you’ve subconsciously redirected your anger to the safer party, since hating her doesn’t require you to dismantle your life, as hating him would? How did you express your anger toward your husband when you learned of the affair? How did you forgive him? Did your rage toward the other woman increase or decrease after you forgave your husband? Why? What does forgiveness in this context mean to you?
I encourage you to spend some time reflecting on these questions. Answering them may restore at least some sense of balance regarding your rage, and it will also require you to contemplate core issues that must be resolved before you’ll be able to find “the joyful life” again. When bad things happen, often the only way back to wholeness is to take it all apart. You have the strength to do that, no matter how marriage-mucking and soul-shaking that will be. A terrible thing happened to you, but you mustn’t let it define your life. Couples survive all kinds of shit, including shit like this. And individuals survive too, even when their marriages don’t. There is a way forward.
You asked for help with forgiveness, but I don’t think that’s what you need to reach for just yet. You know how alcoholics who go to AA are always using that phrase “one day at a time”? They say that because to say “I will never drink again” is just too damn much. It’s big and hard and bound to fail. This is how forgiveness feels for you at this moment, no doubt. It’s the reason you can’t do it. I suggest you forget about forgiveness for now and strive for acceptance instead.