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She asked me repeatedly for a sexless marriage. When I refused, she suggested scheduling. Maybe we could do it during commercials. When I exploded in anger, she got frustrated with me.

Sex was left up to me. She would give me her vagina whenever I needed. I just had to ask. I just had to come to her, like a good dog, and beg to be relieved. I stopped getting horny.

She was shocked when I wanted to leave her. She cried on the couch for hours. She pleaded with me. You made a promise to me, and God, and Jesus.

She was a Catholic. I was a Buddhist. We didn’t think the difference in religion would matter. It did.

When I left, she threatened to end her life. There was just no point to living now. She would never trust a man again. I was her life. I was her happiness. She loved me so much that she wanted me all to herself. We lived in a one bedroom apartment. We had no friends.

I stopped by to pack my clothes in moving boxes. She watched me from the window, sobbing. She pressed one palm on the glass and stared longingly at me. It was unsettling.

When I refused to go back after her first three months of begging, after she tried to get my best friend to talk some sense into me, when all her tactics had failed, she tried to have me committed. She wrote a four page, single spaced letter to my psychiatrist, Dr. Rubin.

She accused me of everything. I was a wife beating, whore chasing, drug sniffing menace to myself and society. I had threatened to kill her. I had assaulted her sexually.

Dr. Rubin read me the letter, slowly, deliberately. He asked me questions; he was laughing and smiling. He knew it was bullshit, thankfully.

You are not crazy, young man, he said, feeding the paper shredder, but you do need to learn how to be a fucking bastard.

If you aren’t happy in this marriage, leave it.

You aren’t your wife’s  keeper.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah! I was excited. I was tired of  her guilt trips. Fuck that bitch.

Then Dr. Rubin said something I have never forgotten. Don’t ever be a martyr to someone else’s bullshit.

It remains the best advice I have ever gotten from an older man. I listened. I became a real bastard. I became a real son-of-a-bitch. I was angry. I stayed that way for a very long time.

Dr. Rubin fell down the stairs a few weeks later. He was in his late seventies. He badly fractured his hip. The injury forced him to retire. I never saw him again.

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