Anchor away

Cliff is on his way home. He called me at 7 a.m. to say goodbye. Very sweet.

Funny how I found my anchor. Funny what kind of anchor I found, too: a moving one. My biggest fear is that I lose Cliff. I fear the day when he finally won't come back anymore. Although he says he will and that his prospects for business here is very good, I can't lose the feeling of dread.

Cliff is married, with grown kids. We met online through a personals site. (I pour my heart out online, so why shouldn't I date online? Or is my logic skewed?) He started to look into online dating because after 15 years of begging for sex from his wife, he'd just had enough. So he thought of hooking up with someone in the country where he was headed.

To make a long story short, we started seeing each other whenever he was in town. I'd spend weekends with him and, after 18 months of this, we finally admitted to each other that we were more than just friends with benefits.

So there.

Now, we're giving things 12 months to sort themselves out. Like his marriage. He finally confronted his wife with the fact that, although he still loves her and will always love her, his sexual desire for her has gone out the window. He has promised her that he will never divorce her, will never leave and abandon her, and will always be her best friend.

According to Cliff, his wife received all this calmly, not surprised at all with how things have turned out. In fact, she seemed relieved that she was no longer obliged to have sex with her husband. This is a very Catholic woman, suffering from the usual notions of how a wife is supposed to sacrifice everything for her husband and children. You know, the martyr syndrome.

Cliff is not sure whether his wife has really understood the implications of this new paradigm. He has not divulged to his family his relationship with me. His kids know that something is wrong between mom and dad but they have not brought this up with either of them. I agree with Cliff when he says the time is not yet ripe for them to know about his relationship with me.

His wife knows that I am someone whom Cliff hires to assist him in his projects in the Philippines, and I am that. We have started a professional relationship with me doing report writing and content analysis for him. The story is that one of CLiff's contacts here referred me to him.

Some months ago, Cliff and I spent the weekend out of town. He informed his wife about it and that I would be going with him. His wife took it all in stride. This was before they discussed the new structure of their marriage. Two weekends ago, he again told his wife that he would be spending the weekend out of town and I would be coming along.

This time, his wife went very quiet over the phone and said, "You're dating, aren't you? I know you're dating."

I asked Cliff what he said to that; he said he just sighed very deeply and told her this was something they should talk about when he got back.

I know how it looks like. This could very easily be a case where the guy's just leading the girl on. A couple of years ago, I'd have just dismissed Cliff as another one of those guys who's living a fantasy, a lie; someone who's jazzing up his otherwise boring life. After all, it's so easy to lie when you're thousands of miles away from home, alone in a strange country where everyone's a stranger. That was then.

I'm so tired of suspecting everyone of bad faith. All these years, I've locked nyself in, sheltering myself from the wild world, thinking that maybe if I stay in here long enough, I'll learn to not need the world. Four years ago, I gave it up; there is simply no way I was going to unlearn genetic memory. I am a victim of evolution.

Four years and I'm still learning how to deal with how I deal with the world. Until I met Cliff and learned more about myself. Seems like my emotional aspect is so underdeveloped, I might as well consider it imbecilic. I'm such a thinking person that when Cliff gave me an MBTI test, I came out thinking = 100%, feeling = zilch. Scary.

So now, I'm taking the big leap, the leap of faith. I believe and I trust. (Not blindly, of course. I may be emotionally stunted but I'm no idiot. It's all in the balance.)

And should Cliff turn out to be an asswipe, I'll simply move on to the next big adventure and keep all the wonderful memories for my old age, warts and all.