The adultery-graduate school model of married liberation

“You did some shit? I’m gonna do some shit too. And I’m gonna write about it.”

I drafted this post on November 28—the Tuesday after Thanksgiving.

Yesterday afternoon, on my six-mile walk, I noticed I was angry, agitated, feeling like shit.

Why?

Because (as Byron Katie would say) I was arguing with reality.

According to my brain, a whole bunch of things shouldn’t have happened:

Geranium shouldn’t have invited his family over for Thanksgiving without asking me.

He shouldn’t have withheld an apology, when I told him his unilateral move had made me angry.

Three days after the party, he shouldn’t have tried to make the case that it had gone great for everyone, including me.

But wait, brain—all those things did happen! Which means that they definitely should have—and that they are conspiring to offer me a gift I might as well receive.

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Three years ago—the day I learned that a video VICE had made about my cult story had gone viral—my mouth exploded in excruciating pain. I felt it most intensely in one spot, but my entire mouth was throbbing. Had I injured one tooth? All of them? I had no idea. I felt awful.

Of course, I believed this shouldn’t have happened. Further, I should not have indulged in cane sugar-sweetened bar chocolate (as opposed to the homemade, honeyed version I usually ate) during a two-week trip to Earthaven a couple months earlier.

Bad! Wrong! Mistake! WHERE WAS MY TIME MACHINE?

It seemed I’d mislaid it. So I set about addressing the pain.

I cut out coffee and chocolate, which I relied on, at the time, to power myself through the work I did for money. I persuaded myself to try this by billing it as an experiment—and concluded, at the end of the day, that I could indeed revise the hell out of some college application essays without alkaloid-based bribery. I also determined that I did not want to use these sacred substances to get dumb shit done, ever again.

I cut out sugar and alcohol, and cut back on fruit. I started taking small quantities of fermented cod liver and high-vitamin butter oils. I stopped eating popcorn for lunch. I chewed up plantain leaves and applied them, as a poultice, to my gums. I found and read books about curing tooth decay naturally, and the catastrophic blind spots built into conventional dentistry.

Within a few weeks, my mouth had stopped hurting. But I didn’t think I’d solved the problem. So I kept the appointment I’d made with a local dentist.

He and his assistant identified, on my X-rays, a hole in the tooth occupying the spot where the pain had been fiercest. He recommended a root canal. I protested that the tooth had stopped hurting—my approach must be working! He insisted that the pain had subsided because the tooth had died.

I didn’t believe him.

Geranium took me to his dentist—who billed himself as “holistic”—for a second opinion.

Mr. Holistic told me to have the tooth pulled, and replaced with an implant. He denied that changing my diet or applying an herbal disinfectant to the gum surrounding the tooth could make a difference. He assured me that I was no longer feeling pain in my mouth because the infection that had caused the cavity had also killed the tooth.

When I protested that it lived, he tapped my knee with a tiny hammer and used the result to prove (to himself) that he was right.

I left his office with a hefty estimate for an extraction, an implant, and a multi-phase descaling process requiring anesthesia. Once again, I felt awful. And trusted myself enough to heed that feeling. Also I remembered: when someone presents you with just two options, both of which suck (in this case, undergo costly and horrifying procedures or succumb to a riot of dental decay), STEP THE FUCK OUT OF THEIR BOX.

Over the next few months, I overhauled my diet—emphasizing vegetables and the kinds of animal foods my ancestors would have eaten, when they were indigenous to the British Isles. I developed and followed a daily regimen involving tongue-scraping, oil-pulling, salt water, aloe, goldenseal-echinacea tincture, gum oil, tooth powder, etc. I continued to exclude alcohol, sugar, and coffee; I ate homemade, honeyed chocolate (at a Sunday-morning ritual I called Chocoalte Church) just once a week. In short, I fiercely prioritized my teeth.

The upshot? The hole healed. My knees stopped creaking. My hair stopped turning gray. I get hangry less often, now that I eat more fat. I enjoy my food more—and find it more satisfying—than I ever have. Plus, I’ve learned a ton about how my teeth work. I know they’re alive, and can heal themselves (with my help). And I’ve seen that when my body tells me the “experts” are shitting me, I can trust myself. (Nowadays—three years after the initial crisis—I do drink coffee and alcohol periodically, and eat a ghee-based form of chocolate, while writing, every weekday.)

By thoroughly composting that toothache, I turned it into one of the best things that had ever happened to me.

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Back to the hidden charms of Thanksgivingate.

Walking along the river path yesterday, I retold the Thanksgiving story in the third person, referring to myself as “the protagonist.”

What does the protagonist want at the start of the story, when Geranium tells her he’s issued his invitation? She wants sovereignty, in the form of a chance to opt out.

As the story develops, she continues to want that—while expecting Geranium to deliver it, within the small world of their marriage and home. Things get worse and worse; he keeps doubling down on the righteousness of his position.

Until, finally, she realizes that he won’t grant her sovereignty! But she can grant it to herself. She can even give herself permission to separate from Geranium and spend a year at Earthaven—where most people grok the difference between requests and demands, welcome honest nos, and value enthusiastic consent.

As of this morning, I’m thinking that spending a year at Earthaven, without Geranium, might be just right. It might be the most loving thing I could do for myself, for him, for our marriage. It does fit quite nicely into the adultery-graduate school model of married liberation: “You did some shit? I’m gonna do some shit too. And I’m gonna write about it.”

I got this model from Louise DeSalvo, my favorite MFA professor. In her memoir Adultery, she recounts learning, as a young mother keeping house for her doctor husband, of his affair with a nurse. She considered leaving him, but didn’t. Instead, she used his transgression to give herself permission to enroll in graduate school. She went on to become a prolific author and distinguished professor. She stayed married till her death.

Let’s extrapolate.

You’re married, partnered, in a relationship. You abide by a set of unwritten rules. Your partner breaks one or more of them. You can get angry and leave. Or you can get angry and ask yourself, “What do I think I’m not allowed to do?” Then you go ahead and do that. You break one or more rules.

A caveat: This doesn’t work when you’re simply trying to retaliate.

For example: Your partner has sex with someone else. To get back at him, you do the same—and accomplish the goal of inflicting pain. But you don’t free yourself. Or cultivate your own boldness. You don’t reclaim parts of yourself you’ve unwittingly sacrificed, on the altar of keeping the peace.

In other words: Don’t come up with some great idea for a trespass. Just look inside yourself, discern what you already want—and allow that desire, like an egg bursting from a follicle, to emerge.

The third part of the model only applies to writers. (On behalf of all writers, I offer my condolences to those who’ve chosen writers as partners.) I started writing about Thanksgivingate as soon as it began. I’ll keep writing about it until it’s turned into soul-soil. That is my work.