Today, I received the following e-mail:
Hi Caveh,
I saw your film last night at the little Roxie and was deeply moved. It took a lot of courage for you to tell your story so frankly, and I'm sure your commitment to being so incredibly honest about your experience has led to a deeper level of surrender and serenity for you. I last swung with my wife a year ago, and I'm finding that the more I can be open about my story with people, either in the fellowship or outside of it, the more I'm strengthened in my sobriety. My wife still desires an open marriage, and I am definitely going to ask her to see the film to remind her of how crazy the jealousy and insecurity becomes, even with the best of intentions (best of denials). Your lines about transcending jealousy, rising above it, were right out of my playbook.
It wasn't until December of last year after my wife's third "date" out on her own (I left the lifestyle in May 05 and entered recovery but agreed to allow her "freedom" to continue dating; after all I didn't own her!) that I had to surrender my idea that I was God or pure Spirit and could live with my wife out fucking other men. I asked her to stop and she has. It turned out that this idea of me being God was just one more addiction or false idol that had to fall. Thank God life arranged for me to be in the 12 step program! I love sobriety!!
Your analogy of Jason and the Argonauts is so poignant, that a more beautiful music came into your life and drowned out the Siren call of sex to fill your void. I now recognize that I use sex as a substitute for a genuine need for communion with the Divine inside of me. I can experience this union in a healthy way during sex with my wife, but it has to arise from a place of wholeness already present in me, and not from the part of me that believes I'm incomplete, not whole, and that only connecting with the feminine can make me whole. That piece of emptiness inside of me is an emptiness that can never be fully satisfied, never be made complete from something outside of me. Looking outside of myself to fill it instead just increases its appetite.
You addressed all this in your film, and I just want to acknowledge you and thank you. Tears came to my eyes at the end, when I realized your story was going to close this chapter of your life with you wedding your princess. That is my sincerest wish, that it works out between my wife and myself and she finds a way to reconcile her desire to have other men and the reality of maintaining a relationship between two people who want to live soberly. And we are motivated to live soberly, as we have a 7 year old daughter and a 5 year old son. Next week we celebrate our 19th wedding anniversary; please say a prayer for us that we continue to hear that more beautiful music of Jason's and make it safely out of range of the Sirens of sex addiction.
Sincerely,
Robert
posted by Caveh Zahedi at
11:59 PM
