TerriD - Gotta Love It!

Okay, so you have this female friend who’s having an extramarital affair. The thing is, it’s not just a lust thing. And she’s isn’t having some kind of crazy mid-life crisis. In fact, she has a decent marriage. She just seem to need…something more. And maybe that “something more” gives their life just enough spice and meaning to keep her marriage intact. Rather than driving her crazy, the affair makes her a nicer, calmer, more patient person.

Unlikely? It’s apparently happening all over. So says Iris Krasnow in her book The Secret Lives of Wives: Women Share What It Really Takes to Stay Married. As reported in Maclean’s Magazine, women do all sorts of things to stay happily married. Having long-term, secret affairs is one of a number of popular techniques that help a woman create an identity for herself that’s not totally wrapped up in her husband’s.

Well…yeah. So would taking a job as a foreign war correspondent, or camping out in a protest to occupy Wall Street (Yeah!), or starting a stamp collection, for Pete’s sake. Why stick a knife straight into the heart of your marriage by cheating on your husband, whether he quickly notices that knife is in there or not?

I have another explanation: Love (and lust) happen at inappropriate times and places. Think about it. Have you ever in your life been attracted to someone you know it could simply never work with? Maybe they were unrealistically too old, too young, too different, living too far away, living a life too out-of-synch with your own.

Usually when that happens, we shrug and dream about it, or maybe pursue it a little, accepting it as a short-term fling, but we don’t usually let ourselves get wrapped up in knots of fantasy and regret. Unless we’re…oh, I don’t know…seventeen? Then that Faerie prince looks pretty hot. Who cares that he regularly kills people as part of his position? Better than that vampire dude from last night who was about two hundred years old and sucking out the blood of deer and rabbits so that he didn’t suck mine.

Or maybe when we’re a stuck in a marriage that’s gone a little flat, just needs a little danger to juice it up?

Come on! Get real, girls! Attraction happens. Whether you let it go beyond attraction to become something more is never forced on you. This is why God gave us brains, not just hormones. We can look at the guy who’s zinging our pleasure receptors and ask a few pertinent questions like: Is he worth it? Is the downside something I can handle? Do I really want to wake up beside this guy in the morning if it goes that far?

And you know what? Sometimes the answer is yes, yes, oh my good lord, YES! Most of my stories are about exactly that. (The Interview, pictured above and left is actually about finding that possibility while you’re trying to get a job.)

But not when you’re married, please. In my books that’s not inappropriate, it’s inconsiderate, often cruel, usually shortsighted, and usually just plain dumb. Even Ms. Krasnow, for all her reporting of modern women’s extramarital hijinks, would seem to agree, advocating you “ride that hormonal surge straight to your own bedroom and initiate great sex with your spouse.” And she goes on at length about the advantages of marriages that last, pointing out that even if a marriage has even just a spark of love left in it, it can often be saved.

So if you’re not married yet, girls, follow your heart, but let your brain hang around to help you know whether to move from lust to love.

And if you’re married already, read lots of romances and let your fantasies soar, then direct them to that real-life vampire/faerie prince/firefighter/alpha male you married in whatever guise he may be wearing now. Who knows, maybe he’ll become more than you ever dreamed was possible.

This was actually sparked by yet another go-round with Amy Chua’s parenting memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. A disclaimer up front: I haven’t read the book myself; only read reviews of it. And the mixed nature of those reviews suggest it’s probably wonderfully written and thought-provoking. Heck, it’s thought provoking just reading the reviews and torrent of responses from everyone who agrees or disagrees with the parenting style discussed.

But what really turns my crank is the greater issue of controlling someone out of love. When a child or a husband/boyfriend/significant other cries on your shoulder, do you give them comfort or demand they buck up and jump back into the fight to deal with whatever’s upset them? Do you just listen and affirm or do you problem solve? Do you tell them you love them and you’ll do whatever you can to help them through, or do you actually do something to help them through?

Fact is, I bet we’ve all done all these things at one time or another, because when you love someone, you want what’s best for them. It’s just so often hard to 1) know what that thing is, and 2) know how best to help them get it.

And then there are our own needs. If our loved one is truly hurting and we can’t help, it’s awfully hard to listen and affirm. Maybe instead we crawl away into our own feelings of inadequacy. Maybe we lash out, ironically hurting the thing we treasure most.

Lord, if there was one kind of wisdom I wish I had, it would be to know the best way to respond when your loved one needs help. Until that wisdom (or delusion) settles on me like a great gift from above, I guess I’ll just muddle along, loving the best I can, using what knowledge I have, and always learning – about my love ones, about myself, about psychology and values, about ways to help and love better.

Still thinking!

But in the meantime, I just wanted to thank the 6500+ readers who have downloaded “The Swimsuit Shop” so far, both for free and for 99 cents (since Amazon.com never recognized the drop to free). It’s put the story near the top of the free e-books in Amazon.uk, rising as high as number four, and at the very top of the free romances on Amazon.com. (I know, it’s not free on that site, but such are the mysterious ways of Amazon.)

It’s a very short story but it’s got lots of heart…and legs! Thanks again, all. I’m working hard to get another novel up for those who like to have something they can really sink into for a spell.

Until then…kisses.

I really should post something about love this week, but I’m in a time crunch. So let me just say I love y’all, and that’s my love for the week.

Quick update on “The Swimsuit Shop” – it’s currently been downloaded over 200 times from Smashwords and bought with real money by seven people through Amazon, which hasn’t yet marked it down to free. It also doesn’t seem to have shown up yet at the various distribution channels that Smashwords distributes to – Sony, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, Apple, etc. It will be interesting to see the “sales” figures when it’s free in all those markets. And whether it bumps the sales of the novels hyperlinked at the end of it.

The second item is a quick plug for a program developed by a guy named Marcel Popescu, in answer to a blog post by Dean Wesley Smith about how difficult it is to keep track of online sales because of all the different distribution channels and the ways they report their figures. Marcel’s a programmer and took up the challenge. He designed a nifty little program that my publisher and I use called Indietracking, from www.indietracking.com. Still being developed, but if you or someone you know is publishing stuff online and can download the various sales reports from Amazon, Smashwords, etc., you might want to download this and give it a try. Pretty darn slick.