Like Heather wrote in Busting Out, we had plans for when we were sprung from the joint. Big plans. And we spent hours and hours on the phone discussing them as our soul-sucking marriages crumbled around us. Our unholy unions seemed to mirror each other’s. We were both frantically clawing our way to the surface from the hole of unhappiness we were buried in, and we were covered in resentment and bitterness. But we were evolving. We still are and those conversations were our release, they were our hope. We perfected our diabolical laughter, and we schemed about all of the ways we were going to fuck when we escaped our self-made prisons. The explicit scenarios we rattled off sounded like scenes ripped straight from the pages of a hardcore erotica novel. We meant business. Wait, we weren’t planning to fuck each other. Well, not at that point anyway.
Unlike Heather, I didn’t have the added worry of my kinky desires affecting the custody of my children so I created a profile on FetLife and OKCupid in addition to my Ashley Madison account. They became the gateway to getting what I’d been missing for so many years, and I admit that for a short time, the word “no” disappeared from my vocabulary altogether. I came (literally), I saw, and I conquered.
And then one day, I abruptly woke up from my orgasm hangover and realized I had been thinking with my vagina and started thinking with my head. As I sifted through the trash heap of messages from men who claimed they were the solution to what I needed, things were suddenly different. I no longer felt the rush of planning my next orgasm. The outlets I was using to rediscover the deeply sexual being I was once upon a time transformed into more of a nuisance than an answer. Every day life took precedence again and I grew less tolerant of bullshit. I judged grammar and typos harshly, and swore if I saw one more LOL scattered throughout another trumped up profile, I was going to scratch my eyeballs until they bled profusely and stab the next man I saw with a rusty butter knife just for the principal of it. I knew then that I had reached the point where it was time to find my pants and delete my profiles.
The harsh reality is that life doesn’t wait for you to get off of your back or sober up after divorce. It doesn’t change speeds according to what is going on in your world, and it doesn’t politely give you time to adapt. It punches you in the throat with the precision of a ninja and moves ahead whether you keep up or not. I had to re-prioritize my life without the security of a unaware husband backing me up. I got pickier. I chose quality orgasms over quantity, and I chose real life over a fantasy one. The day to day tasks are still there and new ones have been added. My book still needs to be finished, bills still need to be paid, and kids still need to be taken care of, now more than ever.
I am now officially a divorcee, a single mother, a statistic. I’m the woman, the writer, the full-time student drinking coffee in a Barnes & Noble on Saturday night while my offspring pick out books to help them reach their reading goal. I’m a survivor, and I emerged on the other side of “divorce sex” a more judicious person. I’m happy, and I smile for multiple reasons. I smile because I’ve accomplished things that I never thought I could, I smile because I’m proud of the person that I am today, and I smile because I still have lots of orgasms.
