Jeff and I had to testify in front of a grand jury yesterday, but I can’t really write about it even though I want to. Here’s the summary: we found out more about the car-crash, which was pretty interesting because neither of us remember anything at all about it. But I can’t write about it while the case is still open so TOO BAD FOR YOU, you don’t get to hear about it!
Oh well, there’s one more thing I will say about it, which is that the DA asked me what my relationship was to Jeff—because Jeff was driving the car and I was the passenger—and the DA said, “Would you say he is your partner?” and I said yes, and then the DA said, “How long have the two of you been together?” and I had to hesitate, and I was like, “Uh thirteen years.”
It wasn’t like—the first time I had recently considered that it is now thirteen years or anything, it was just—a revisit of that. And I realized, yeah. That this is now officially the longest relationship that either of us have been in.
So, I got to thinking about that a little bit. I guess in part because we have been talking a lot about how happy we are, lately. And we both know that happiness isn’t static, it’s not a “destination,” this doesn’t mean its a permanent state or anything, but—we are very very happy these days. These last couple of years have been the happiest years of my life.
Now, by the way, I have more thoughts on the Man-in-a-Suit thing that I posted a couple days ago, but I have decided not to post that writing yet. I mean, I wrote more about it yesterday, but I need to let that writing sit for a while before I should hit that “publish” button.
Maybe a long while.
So instead, I’m going to write about a different thing. I’m going to write about the lady in the photograph, above.
Wait, but I’m thinking about how to even preclude it.
First of all, I was thinking this morning about my relationship with second ExHusband, which is currently at “friendly” status. Like, I think we really like each other these days, after a period of long bad dark terrible bitterness. But we get along really well now, and I do like him. He is still one of the funniest people I have ever known, in certain ways. Unfortunately, not in the ways I relate to the very best, which isn’t a criticism of him. It’s a criticism of our relationship, which was kind of…I don’t know…fucked-up? I don’t know how to qualify or characterize that without really delving into way too much shit, so instead I’ll explain something else about him.
I met him, and then developed a big crush on him, when he was my manager, at a really dumb production job I had from about 1997-1999. When I met him I was married, though things were kinda on the skids with my marriage, despite it being a brand-new marriage—it was already pretty clear it was not going to work out.
Actually, my now second-exhusband, i.e., my manager that I developed a crush on was also married, but was split up from his wife with no plans to ever officially get divorced, because why bother? He did have a girlfriend, who he usually spoke of in a way that made me think he wasn’t that “into” her.
Here’s something relevant to what I wrote yesterday: I said that, prior to about 1998/1999 I lived mostly by impulse control. But it was actually around 1996/1997 that I started to really ponder how to stop living by impulse control, and that figured very heavily into why I decided to marry my first husband. I knew full well that I was not “passionately in love” with first husband but I had decided that it did not matter. Part of why I had decided this was because my mom, who is a Mormon, kept telling me that the most important thing was really shared values and whether you like each other. And in some ways, my mom wasn’t wrong. But actually, it is also a good idea that you be passionately in love with the person, too.
Now, the trouble was—first husband and I thought we had shared values, but it turned out—we actually didn’t, at all. I did like him, I liked him a lot. But—that is definitely not enough. I have said that a big part of why we didn’t make it was because of the lack of the passionate love, but it’s also because we really did not have shared values. Those are kinda like three points on a triangle… similar to “Sternberg’s theory of love,” (not exactly the same, but similar),— and if you have two of the points you can make it, but if you have only one point—you kinda can’t make it. According to Sternberg, if you have only one point, it’s an “empty relationship.” (Again, his theory is a tiny bit different from what I just said—but pretty similar. I’m not breaking it down, never mind OKAY MOVING ON)
I’m also not gonna break all that down as to why things also didn’t work out with my second husband, because that will get long. But I’m gonna talk about some other things that are related to that.
Second husband and I didn’t “get together” until about two years after we met, and by that time, there was even more drama and mess associated with our relationship-lives. Okay, well, that’s all convoluted and long to explain, and maybe that’s the primary point I wanted to get into, about him. The relationship was something of a mess, in the sense of like, convoluted exes, and quote-unquote “drama,” and some other stuff, but—again, I would have to delve into a bunch of mucky details to qualify that, and I don’t want to, for a bunch of reasons.
Now, what I was really thinking about this morning was more of a mood. See, when I was first getting to know him, he and I used to go out on the fire escape of the building where we worked in order to smoke cigarettes without having to actually go downstairs and go outside, where there were usually tons of spare-changers lurking around the building. We weren’t supposed to be on the fire escape, but he was the manager, so we did whatever we wanted.
From the fire escape, we could see a good swath of downtown Portland, Oregon. We could see Pioneer Square, which was where community events and protest marches and other interesting “weird Portland” shit sometimes happened. We had a clear view of the upper floors of the Meier & Frank building, which has swastikas incorporated into the design on the terra cotta façade. You don’t necessarily notice that from down on the street, but from the third-floor fire escape we were looking just down at the swastika design, almost dead-on, making it impossible to ignore.
While smoking on the fire escape, we would shit-talk and joke around. We talked a lot about music. He was in a band but he was sick of “band lyfe.” He was only still doing it for the sheer enjoyment of playing music; he was a huge guitar nerd, especially very distorted guitar, and agreed with me completely about what constituted cool vocals versus really fucking stupid-sounding vocals; we had some of the same favorite bands and favorite genres. We had an inside joke about “improper use of saxophone” and we hated a lot of the same overrated punk bands. We did disagree about a lot of music, too—don’t get me wrong, but we focused more on what we had in common versus what we did not have in common, because that’s what you do, at first—when you start to “like” someone. You focus on what you do like about the person, and you ignore whatever you don’t have in common; you ignore red flags.
Like, that’s what it is to quote-unquote “fall in love,” right? Ignoring all the red flags.
We objectified each other. I figured this out early on in the marriage, I mean—that I had been doing it—but it took him a lot longer to figure it out about me. He wasn’t “handsome” by conventional barometers, but he was very cute, which sometimes counts more than being handsome, or at least—it always has in my book. He used to have a huge pompadour and sideburns and he wore “Mr. California” vintage shirts with buttons on the sleeves and collar loops, (Omygod, check it out he had this exact one,) and he wore oxblood Doc Marten oxfords that always seemed ill-fitting in a way. Like, they seemed too big for him somehow, even though he was tall and a little bit chubby. That was how he was cute. Oddly specific, and oddly awkward.
That’s an uninteresting description for anyone who isn’t me, probably, but look: within about two years of our marriage, it seemed like he was a completely different fucking “person” than the guy he became, when he started wearing elastic-waist chinos and golf shirts. However, I immediately realized of course that he was the same exact person, but I had been objectifying him, which people sometimes do to each other.
Okay but anyway, Portland, in my mid-20’s.
That’s the mood I was thinking about this morning. Portland, in about 1997-1999, smoking cigarettes on the fire escape of that building downtown, with the noises of hissing bus doors opening and the ding-ding of the light rail and distant music from street musicians, watching the lunch crowd flock to all the food carts that used to be in Pioneer square and the bike messengers dodging traffic and all the young crusty spare-changers who could live off the excesses of this crowd, because there were excesses, in the 90’s. There weren’t desperate homeless encampments everywhere like there are now. Nothing felt dangerous, parking was cheap, public transportation was cheap, apartments were cheap, my right to get an abortion if I wanted to seemed like it could never get taken away. I took so many things for granted.
I want to remember that mood always.
But gosh, I wasn’t even going to write about that at all! I was going to write about something I discovered when I was doing some genealogy shit, way back in about 2012, which kind of sprang back into my memory because I’m helping my mom format some genealogy book.
I wanted to talk about how there’s this interesting mythology about how life used to be “simpler,” and people didn’t used to have “crazy drama” and “messy relationships,” back in the “olden days.”
Ha. Haha. HaHaAhaaaaahahahaaaaahahahahahhhhhhhh
Okay, where do I even start with this? This could be SO FUCKING LONG.
Because, okay, here. Let’s start with this picture, this one right here:
Okay, so I’m related to some people in this photo. But, uh, it’s kind of awkward and messy to explain how I’m related to whom in the photo, for reasons that have to do with two things: Polygamy, and distant cousins who marry each other.
It’s a fucking mess, my relationship to the people in the above photo. But let’s focus on the girl who is sitting between the two parent-figures, who is arguably the prettiest and most charming-seeming, maybe because she’s the only one really smiling, or maybe because her hair is different from the other ladies, or maybe because her dress is more distinctive than the other ladies’ blouses-and-skirts. Now, she is not my direct ancestor (though others in the photo are my direct ancestors, she is not.)
Check out the below image, probably taken the same day, where again she’s the only one smiling. I find that interesting for some reason. I guess just because people didn’t usually smile in photos back then. But it seems to indicate that she was an especially cheerful person, maybe. Who knows, though? Maybe she was terrible, who can say?
Maybe this was her wedding day? Why else would they all be holding flowers, I guess? Why else is she wearing a different dress, a fancier dress, than the others? Well, if it is her wedding day, she sure does seem happy; but the others seem kinda, you know, “meh.”
So, maybe she feels romantic love for whomever she is marrying? Is that possible?
Now, one might think that everyone looks dour because of like, I dunno, Polygamy. But this photo was taken in 1909, and Polygamy had officially ended in 1904. So, maybe that’s why she’s so happy?
Whatever, I’m just thinking about the Portland Mood that I describe above, and also about the happiness thing, in my own experience. About being so happy lately. She looks happy in that photo, she looks genuinely happy, which is a large part of why those photos are so striking.
Her name was Keziah Stevens, which has always stuck in my brain. This is probably because I’m a direct descendant of her aunt, and her aunt’s name was Keziah, too. So that’s part of why I always remembered the name, because I knew that there was a “Keziah” involved in the convoluted fucking mess of gene-pool craziness that happened on my mom’s mom’s side of my family. Uhh because I am also a direct descendant of Keziah Stevens’s sister. Got that? Yeah.
OH also, these girls’ mother’s maiden name was Brady, which happens to be my brother’s first name, because he was named after this cesspool of family drama.
Now, I have crazy stories all over my family history, but I always paid special attention to the Brady-family stories, at least in part because my brother’s name is Brady.
Okay SO, these young ladies’ aunt Keziah, that is Keziah Brady, was in an arranged marriage with someone much older than herself—forty years older, to be exact—a guy named Silas Richards who already had two wives, but that’s just how it was done back then in Utah. (But it’s okay if they were not passionately in love, because, as my mom said: shared values, and whether you like each other is more important, which—who knows? Maybe they did have shared values, and maybe they liked each other?)
There are no photos of them together. But they had 8 kids, so I mean they must have at least occasionally…hung out together I guess.
Alright, so let me just break real quick here to refer to what I was writing about earlier, in regards to relationship drama and mess and how there’s a weird misconception about simpler times and also, you still hear weird conservative politicians squawking about the sanctity of marriage, for some fucking reason, but—uh I’ll hold off on too much about that.
Well anyway, arranged-polygamous marriage Keziah Brady and Silas Richards went on to have 8 kids, and then they had a bunch of grandkids, including one grandson named Silas Brewer who married…one of the other girls in the above photos. Yes, the dour-looking one on the far right in both photos, whose name was Sophia, was married to her…I dunno, her second cousin once removed, or some fucking shit, I don’t even know.
Sophia Stevens was my great-great grandmother on my mother’s mother’s father’s side. Let’s see, so she married her…aunt’s grandson? Like, how does that work, how are you related to the child of your own cousin? First cousin once removed? I don’t know. Either way, by today’s standards it’s fucked up and weird.
But ANYWAY! I’m a direct descendant of…more than one person in the Brady family.
That shit was of course incredibly common, and that story may not be interesting to anyone else; but to me, I always thought it was pretty interesting, and then it got slightly more interesting when I considered some things about this photo, below, which I just pulled from the Mormon Genealogy site:
So, who the fuck are these people to me?
Well, I’ll try to explain. It will take me a minute, because whoah, mess.
First, let’s consider the awkward-looking fellow with impressive hair on the far right of this photo. That guy’s name was Jacob Hafen Jr., and I have no idea why that name ever stuck in my mind for any reason, but it did.
When I was doing genealogy stuff back in about 2012-ish, that guy popped up somewhere that I didn’t expect him to pop up, and the place he popped up was in Jeff’s genealogy.
I was doing Jeff’s genealogy because mine had already been largely done by my mom and my dad’s mom, and I had heard about it in great detail for my entire life, and so there was no point to doing my own. I have a huge huge phone-book sized printout full of my own genealogy charts, (It’s called my Book of Remembrance, and every good Mormon has one). I had also already done tons of genealogy for my second exhusband, so that was done too. I really like doing genealogy, so—I didn’t know anything about Jeff’s, and I was bored and unemployed that summer. I had an account with the free Mormon genealogy site, so I was looking at stuff on there because, well, I didn’t really have anything better to do.
Now, I want to break here also to write about how that was a difficult and depressing summer, for both of us. Jeff had just started to get cluster headaches, and they were really bad, like—worse than they are now. A lot worse. Jeff’s and my relationship was also very rocky, for the first couple of years, for longstory reasons I don’t want to write about, but in essence—I kept dumping him, between 2010 and 2011. But by 2012, three years into the relationship, I had made a firm decision that I was not going to dump him anymore. We were going to stay together and that was that.
Yeah there’s so much more to say about it but I don’t want to say too much of it. I mean I do want to, but I would start to get really angry about a couple of dumb specific things; namely, how a few idiot people in my sphere—mutual friends of ours— felt like it was necessary to shame us, for dating each other, due to drama and messy circumstances?
Like, who does this to their friends, exactly? Why would you do this to your friends, exactly?
Here is a thing I do to a fault: I analyze peoples’ motives for their behavior. When people I know do shit I don’t like, I just—can’t stop trying to figure out exactly why they did it. Because the action itself often isn’t quite what pisses me off; what pisses me off is sometimes the motive that I perceive, the explanation for why they did/said the shitty thing. And none of the stuff I come with as an explanation to the above feels very…good.
I mean, there are multiple explanations, but any possible explanation for why you would do this to your friend leads me to: why would I stay friends with someone who would do this?
It’s insulting on so many possible levels.
Now, it seemed to me that the reason some of my longtime male friends felt the need to be so snarky/snide about it was something along the lines of, “Well, you’ll fuck this up just like you’ve always fucked everything up.” I mean, that was almost overtly stated. The undercurrent of many of my male-friends messages to me about my various relationships have been, uh, slut-shamey.
Something I’ve considered about that for many years is that women generally have kind of a code about things like this, and the code is that women know they have to be really careful if they think they “need” to tell their friend that their romance/relationship is maybe a bad relationship or not going to work out, or something of that nature. Women know that it’s a really cruel and shitty thing to want to knock your friend off cloud 9 when she’s “in love,” so women know that you have to approach that with extreme caution, or else you are a really shitty friend.
Not all women subscribe to this code, obviously, but, uh, in my experience almost no men subscribe to it, and in fact, some men seem to delight in knocking their female friends off cloud-9, usually in very overtly slut-shamey ways.
Or, well, let me rephrase that: many of my male friends sure as shit did do that, because I can recall plenty of times that certain of my male friends felt the need to sneer and scoff and scold about my relationships, sometimes in, yes, needlessly shitty ways, and usually in extremely slut-shamey ways, referring to any dude I got involved with as my “victim,” which is a really interestingly misogynist way to look at it, when you start to break that down. Like, so…men are just dangly, helpless puppets and women are conniving vampires who can somehow…hypnotize them? Why, exactly do women have all this “power” and “control” in the relationship that men simply do not have? Are men like…not able to make their own choices, somehow? Are men like…remote-controlled objects, and women hold the remotes? And when women end relationships, you know—they’re…always an antagonist?
Like, what if the man was an enormous asshole dick, in that situation? What if he was abusive, or threateny, or manipulative, or…
But no, he’s the victim if she ends the relationship for any reason. He is the victim and she is the antagonist.
When Jeff and I got together, our marriages were just barely ending, like—it was definitely a rebound, which made a lot of observers feel that it was fair game.
I’ll say nothing about his marriage, because it was frankly too much of a mess to even talk about, but—as for me, I had been married for almost ten years, and that relationship was as dead as a fucking doornail. Between me and second husband, we both really really wanted out. We had been through two marriage counselors, both of whom told us both that the relationship was beyond saving, because we were too different. One of the counselors—a guy who had written a book about marriage counseling—told him in a solo session that we were just a “horrible match,” and then the other counselor told me, in a solo session, that I had three choices: stay married and be indefinitely miserable, have an affair, or get a divorce.
She recommended divorce.
So, the point I guess I was trying to make… when Jeff and I became a “thing,” it had been a long, long, long, time since I had felt that whole “new relationship” feeling, which was why I couldn’t shut up about it to all of our mutual friends. It was why I was very shout it from the rooftops about it, I guess.
But it was also because I just somehow kind of inherently knew that this relationship was different, and I don’t know why I knew, but I did know.
My exhusband, meanwhile, had rather boorishly given us his “blessing,” in ways that I might struggle to explain…he was, in a nutshell, really mean to me as we were splitting up, saying things like, “Well I’m glad you’re with someone already, you sure as hell can’t take care of yourself,” and “I knew you’d wind up with some old friend because you’re still stuck in your past, but Jeff seems like a good guy—he’s one of the only ones out of those douchebags I don’t completely fucking hate.”
I felt really depressed and defensive about my exhusband saying those things, but was also relieved that he was so determined to end it. I was also enormously relieved that he had, by the way, gotten a girlfriend within about six weeks of our breakup. She was his co-worker, and I strongly suspected that they had been having an emotional affair—but I could not have given a rat’s ass about that—even if it had been a physical affair, it did not upset me in the slightest. I kept joking that I wanted to send her a fucking fruit basket as a thank-you for taking him off my hands and expediting the “real end” of the whole thing.
But yeah, he said a lot of shitty things to me that were deliberately designed to put me down and mock me in very specific ways. That did hurt my feelings, even though it was a signal I didn’t have to worry about him trying to drag it out, which was my greatest fear—because that was what had happened in my first divorce, and there was no way in hell I wanted to go through that again.
But you know, it was real fucking interesting to hear even shittier things about Jeff and I getting together from the mouths of my own “friends.” Like, I mean to say—my exhusband was more supportive of the relationship than some of our own mutual friends were.
Well, despite all the excitement of the early days of our relationship, Jeff and I did keep breaking up prior to 2012. I guess specifically, I kept dumping him, and uh, let’s just say that it was partly because I kept succumbing to a lot of bad feelings about a variety of things, including the fact that a couple of our friends were so oddly shitty about it, and…okay, how about this—it was also because Jeff’s… life drama was sometimes too much for me, despite having tons of life drama of my own. BUT, what I had to come to terms with, was whether I actually really cared about the life drama for my own sake, or if I cared about it because it looked bad to other people, and because other people kept shit-talking it.
But it was by 2012, the summer I was unemployed, that I had decided that actually, I didn’t care about it that much. I had been letting the shit other people were talking get way too far under my skin. By 2012 I knew it was worth it to just—accept the life drama for what it was, and not break up with him anymore.
So, we didn’t break up anymore after 2012. That was ten years ago, and altogether we’ve been a “thing” since…sometime in the spring/summer, sort of, 2009. 13 years ago. We don’t have a proper anniversary, because we don’t even know when we were officially “together,” I can’t actually remember the first time we kissed or anything, but…sometime in the spring of this year we are officially each other’s longest relationship.
Now, here I will say this one thing that is kind of hard to say without feeling like I’m being too “vulnerable” or letting too much dirty laundry kind of private shit hang out…but I remember having this reckoning in around 2011/2012 over the fact that I was definitely done having kids, and this reckoning was related to Jeff, in the sense that I was brought up to believe that it was like, romantic and important and meant something to have a child with someone, right? I was brought up Mormon, which should be plain and obvious by now, but it’s worth repeating. I often tell people that my core is still culturally Mormon on a number of levels.
So I had this whole like…difficult thought-process about how Jeff and I would definitely never have a child together, and that meant something to me, because I was so crazy about him, so I felt like, we should have a child together, right? Like, you’re supposed to do that. But I didn’t want any more children, and neither did he, so—we weren’t going to do that. I felt dumb about it meaning something to me that we were definitely not going to have any children together, but it did mean something.
We used to joke that it was best that we would never have a child together, because we are so alike in fucked-up ways that our offspring would necessarily be…too fucked-up.
Well, anyway, so it was that I started doing his genealogy, with…some of that stuff, on my mind.
So meanwhile, in looking at his family history, I happened upon this Jacob Hafen guy. And I was like, uh-oh, I sweartogod I recognize that name from somewhere.
But…sorry guyz, substack says my post is too long. So you’ll just have to wait to find out more about this until my next post.