[chckn_tender_mercies]

Groundhog wrote:

Anyway, I wonder if in two more years someone else will discover this again.

Here I am! 6 months early to the party

First off, I want to say thank you for leaving this thread open. The most recent posts have given some good insights for me to consider. Every other post/article I’ve read has been very dismissive of the person experiencing this. It’s like I’ve got a nail through my hand, I’m asking for help, and people are saying “well be grateful, you’ve got two legs”.

So, I’m going to try to not add anything that’s already been said before. I don’t want to beat a dead horse. But there will probably be some repeat information bc it’s cathartic to write all of this out and is helping unwind some of the thoughts I’m having.

I have been dating a girl, who is divorced, for around 6 months. I’ve known from the get-go that she feels a bit less strict about sex, in principle. I also know that she values her relationship with the church and wants to have that in her life. She’s a great person and has many of attributes that I’d like to see in a long-term relationship.

Over the last few months, I’ve picked up on some information that maybe her past is a bit more checkered than I had originally thought. But I didn’t really put it all together until yesterday. Something she said made it click and it all kind of caught me off guard. My brain hasn’t been able to turn off since.

I’ve always felt it important to be generous and empathetic with people’s past issues and I don’t love how harshly we seem to come down on people for their pasts. I’ve dated girls before with colorful histories. So it surprised me when I started to feel quite a bit of anxiety about what I was finding out.

(Pause to note that I haven’t talked about this with her in depth yet. I plan to, but I feel like I need to get my feet under me and process this so that I don’t say something hurtful or untrue. I fully recognize that I’m operating without a lot of knowledge and might be putting monsters in the closet where they don’t exist. Even so, I’d like to explore why I’m feeling this way in general.)

I’ve been trying to understand why I feel the way that I do. Is it my rigid religious upbringing? I don’t think so (at least that I can identify). My views have shifted a lot over the last decade. Is it that I feel jealous, insecure, or like I’m owed something? Again, no. I like to think that my ego is pretty small about most things. I also find the idea of expecting someone to “save themselves” as a gift to their future spouse to be a bit gross (not the practice itself, just the expectation). If you do it, it should be for yourself. I also don’t think it’s about insecurity; I feel confident about myself and our relationship. I’ve also considered if there’s a biological/evolutionary aspect here (and I’ve seen a few articles suggesting this that males have come to fear rearing another man’s child). I don’t think that’s what is going on. Her past relationship with her husband doesn’t bother me at all.

From what I have talked about with her, it’s clear that she believes sex to be a deeply connecting act; if so, she has a number of people that she’s deeply bonded with. But she also feels it’s not that big of a deal to engage in before marriage; if so, where would the meaning be between us.

Or… it’s both. It’s a deeply connecting act, but it’s value is attenuated, or diluted, with each passing partner. It may not get to the point of being “meaningless”, but it’s value and meaning are reduced.

I think this is part of what I’m getting hung up on. Where do I fit in in this picture? Am I just one of many meaningless partners? Am I one of many meaningful partners (also a discomforting thought)? Am I important but sex is just no-big, in which case our values maybe aren’t aligned?

Or… maybe I’m wrong and the only meaning in the act is the meaning that we ourselves create and attach to it. In which case, nothing is diminished by her former physical relationships.

I want to be fair here and not paint her in a negative light. She’s an amazing person. If she wasn’t, I wouldn’t care about all this and I’d move on in my dating life. She’s thoughtful of my needs and proactively communicates with me and is striving for a long-term, committed relationship. I guess I’m just having a hard time processing my emotions about this.

A portion of my negative feelings come from the acts themselves — the fact that they happened and live on in hers and their memory. The other portion of my negative feelings seem to be about her views/attitudes towards it. I don’t want anyone to feel extreme guilt or shame over mistakes. But what feels off to me is that she doesn’t seem to view them as mistakes. And if they are not, then I feel like I become just another guy in a series of intimate relationships.

This is tough for me because, when I think about it logically, it seems so childish and full of jealousy and insecurity. But at the same time, I feel what I feel. And I can’t ignore those feelings. I need to process and understand them. And at the moment, I don’t understand them.

At the moment, I don’t know the depth of her history. From what I do know, nothing is a dealbreaker for me; just a massive struggle that I need to work through. I will need to have a conversation about it at a greater depth at some point. I don’t know what questions are important for me to have answered yet but I lean toward wanting to know the bare minimum possible, but enough to make an informed decision on the relationship.

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