My Ex Said, “Men Need Women to Need Them”
Translation: “Without a woman I can control, am I even a man?”
A few minutes after we got home from a party at my (former) MFA professor’s house, attended mostly by professors, creative writing students, and their others, my husband at the time — my “other” — invited me to sit next to him on our bed. He said he thought we should separate.
Incapable of making sense of it— the giddiness of alcohol and camaraderie and outdoor cigarettes in freezing winter air still lingered — I asked why.
“We’re going in different directions,” he said.
Before that party, there’d been no indication that our directions were in conflict. We were both in college. We both worked to pay for our classes and the rent on our main floor unit in an old single-family home. He was studying one thing, I was studying another.
But being subjected to those couple of hours in a professor’s home filled with writers — myself among them — had apparently shattered his tightly held delusion of the way things ought to be in a way my previous behavior hadn’t.
Before the party, as many times as I’d told him who I was by being upfront about not wanting kids, arguing with him when I didn’t agree with his beliefs, and being openly and actively interested…
