I was married to the woman above, whose face I won't show you for the sake of her privacy. (If you really want to know I suppose you can look her up, because everything is in the public record. But you're not that prurient, are you? And shouldn't you be satisfied with the uncomfortable truths I've already revealed?)

We met when I was around twenty, and she was a year and a half older. Both tall, red-headed, and late bloomers, we de-virginized each other and decided to give "'til death do us part" a try. I never felt good enough for her, and that was probably true; she came from a higher socioeconomic class and had graduated from a mini-Ivy League school by the time I decided to get my ass back into college. Such things can be overcome, but a fundamental lack of respect can't. I remember to this day when she referred to my writing as "your tippy-tappy-typing"––a deep and fundamentally belittling cut to the quick of my self-worth.  

We decided to get married when I got into film school at Florida State, and the wedding didn't go well. I was on a ton of antihistamines from sleeping at her parents' house (allergic to dogs and cats! moron!) and I fainted right before the vows. If a tree falls in the forest..., I remember thinking as I went down. I got back up and went through with the vows, and it actually turned out to be quite the ice-breaker with her relatives. In hindsight we should have quit right then and there, but the party was on, you know? No turning back. 

Fainting at the wedding exacerbated her lack of respect for me and my lack of respect for myself, and things fell apart after we moved to Florida. She ended up having an affair with a fellow grad student of mine, a woman named D____, and it went on for a year and a half until grad school ended. To get away from the mess, I moved to Los Angeles right after filing for divorce. My wife denied the affair continually, even though we'd talked it through when she first started falling in love. Even though I found her lost earring (one of a pair I'd bought her) on the bedroom floor during a production meeting at D____'s  apartment. 

Why did she do it? Was it that our marriage never really "took," as she said, and she wanted a way out? I can't figure out her psychology. Hell, she couldn't even figure out her own psychology. She denied her affair with D____ for a year after we got divorced before finally admitting it, and eventually got married to another man. 

During my first wife's affair I almost ended up in the sack with D____ myself, and I can still remember the morning when I decided not to. We were making out in my new/used car, a gigantic beat-up 1973 Buick Centurion, at five in the morning after a film shoot. Minutes later my wife drove off to her job at a bakery, and D____ and I could have easily slipped upstairs and done the nasty. But we didn't, because we couldn't agree on terms. D____ wanted "us" to remain a secret from my wife, while I wanted all three of us to be out in the open with each other.

So there was no deal, and I'm grateful for that. If I'd stepped off the cliff into the waters of an open marriage at that point in my life, I would never have known what real marriage meant and would never have been able to do my part in keeping a family together. My life would have become a string of episodes of the long-running show Fuck Who You Feel Like Fucking, and I would have escaped from the prison of one woman's thighs into another ad infinitum. 

Which, as you'll see if you keep on this path, is exactly what I did for a while. Out of vengeance against my ex-wife, I told myself. But more likely out of vengeance against myself.