Dirty morals

I used to have a pretty hypocritical stance towards morals. Hypocritical, or maybe just “adjustable” towards what suited me at the time. I would get violently outraged by anything that involved animal cruelty or environmental destruction, or injustice towards a particulate demographic of people, however I felt very little guilt about cheating on boyfriends or being with a man who belonged to another woman. Somehow, it was always justifiable. It isn’t, and I apologise to anyone who I hurt in the process.

I could cop out and say that it was the way I was raised. Between my parents there was seven marriages, affairs, domestic violence orders, restraining orders, manipulation and more drama than a season of Game of Thrones. At a very young age the existence of many different activities, explicit in nature, was divulged to me. Activities that I now know are not appropriate for a pre-pubescent girl to be aware of. I witnessed my then divorced parents carry on relationships with multiple partners at the same time, hearing how dismissively they spoke about them, and assumed that this was the norm. Consequently I grew up with a very misguided view of what was morally acceptable when it came to love and sex. I learnt that the two were not always mutually inclusive, and spent the majority of my life to a point substituting one in search for the other. I believed that inviting another person to share my body was not something to be particularly treasured or revered. I was prepared to accept physical intimacy as a replacement for emotional intimacy, in an attempt to fill the gaping hole in my life. My need to be loved, or perhaps more accurately, my need to be acknowledged and validated was great, due mostly to the fracture and subsequent abandonment of the majority of my family at a young age.

As I approach my 30’s I have learnt to tell the difference between being horny and being any other emotion that could result in the need for intimate male or female companionship. I’m not chiding anyone that enjoys the odd one night stand, or a friend with benefits or having sex just for the pure enjoyment of getting it on. We all love to get freaky. I am simply stating that it is important to separate the desire for great sex and the desire for emotional justification. I was not taught this. As a result my moral compass spun out in many different areas of my life, one often enabling another. Because of my personal demons, I hurt people. I was selfish, cruel and unstable and it caused many problems that I have since had to face and overcome.

My partner, the man I hope to one day marry and start a family with, has a rock solid moral core. I have never met such an honourable, decent human being. As far as I have come, I am still not above nicking a few slices of bread off my flatmates if I run out. He on the other hand would be in the car on the way to the store before the thought ever crossed his mind. He’s a good guy. He was raised in a very different family situation to me, yet somehow, now, after the journey that I’ve taken the long way around, learning what I want and more importantly what I don’t want, we align on most of our principles. If I had been raised in the same manner as he was, I’d be an altogether unrecognisable being. I don’t believe in regret and I know that the choices I’ve made throughout my life have brought me to where I am now, so I can’t disparage any of them. However, sometimes I feel it is a constant battle within myself to feed the saint and starve the sinner.

My goal for the future is to be a better person. I’d like to live the sort of life that wouldn’t have made my grandparents recoil in horror had they known me. I want to be a better Christian. I’d like my boyfriend’s parents to embrace our relationship with joy. I aspire to be the friend to my inner circle that they have been to me over last 15 years, and make up for all the times I let them down. I cannot begin to explain the debt of gratitude I feel for the people that have stood by me through some of the lowest points of my life. I don’t want to be perfect. I don’t want to be someone I’m not. I enjoy my dirty sense of humour and my open mind. I am accepting of people and their mistakes in a way that might be harder for someone with less or different life experiences than me. But I will strive to make better choices from here out and hopefully be able to help others in similar situations to me make better choices, and learn from my mistakes.

Wish me luck.

* In writing this piece originally, I included a somewhat more graphic account of some of my experiences growing up. As the person I bounce most of my ideas off, my partner read it before I published, and was not entirely comfortable with the content. His concern stemmed mainly from the possibility that I would be judged too harshly by persons who might have a less accepting opinion of such things. I have had to weigh the odds of whether it was more important to me to lay my soul bare and present the harshest, rawest version of myself, or respect the wishes of a person who holds great value in my life. As I am trying to mature and grow, I decided to respect his opinion and lower the shock factor.