The Problem Space in Question

I was born in Columbus, Georgia. My father was career army and stationed at Fort Benning, but there were a lot of babies born that year. They assigned my mother a civilian doctor for her pregnancy with me.

So I was born and raised in Columbus, Georgia. Prior to my memory of life, my parents briefly returned to Germany when I was a toddler and my father did a stint in Vietnam.

My memories begin in earnest the summer I turned three. One of my earliest memories is walking through the house my parents bought which is the house I grew up in which they lived in until a few years after I moved out.

Several of my immediate neighbors bought their homes that year as well or soon after. It was a new subdivision.

Andrea was a divorced single mom with a son named Paul. She worked in a restaurant and lived kitty corner across the street and to the right.

The Holts next door had eight kids. Six were sons and two were daughters. I think one child was from the father's previous marriage. Polly was about a year older than me and on summer nights we stood at our bedroom windows with them open and conversed until we were told to go to bed.

Across the street was a family that rented it out when they moved elsewhere for a time and I think ultimately one of their car-nut grown sons moved in to occupy the house.

To our left was a family that didn't stay and was replaced soon by a single mom with a boy named Paul.

Across the street from that house was a house with a fireplace and people came and went. I never got to know any of them particularly well.

Six of the people in my kindergarten class graduated high school with me. Two of those six, David and Louis, each lived about a block away my entire childhood. 

David and I both broke our right arm at age eleven like the same day or same week. We both had a green stick fracture where it cracked rather than shattered. My cast came off in three weeks. He couldn't manage to not be made of snips and snails and puppy dog tails for three whole weeks and made it worse and ultimately spent six weeks in a cast.

To be clear, David and Louis were not friends of mine. They didn't like me or respect me or invite me to their homes. But I knew where their houses were and we went to the same schools most of the time for thirteen years and we were frequently in the same classes together and I was acquainted with both for thirteen years when the three of us graduated from the same high school at age eighteen.

In spite of growing up in one of the larger cities in Georgia and not in a small town, I had a sense of community. I had social experiences and social expectations similar to someone from a very small town with a genuine sense of community.

I knew quite a lot of people fairly well in spite of not being particularly close to them. Because I happened to live near them and interact with them routinely in spite of not really being friends.

The garbage a lot of other people do makes no sense whatsoever to me and never has. The things people lie about that can be checked casually or revealed inadvertently like a scene from a sitcom are things I would never dream of lying about.

I wasn't friends with David. I can't tell you how he broke his arm or how he managed to damage it and require additional treatment compared to me. It sticks in my mind 49 years later because we were both in a cast at the same time.

Without asking him about his life, I knew things about him by observation. I don't know why celebrities (and other people) tell lies about their lives that then become Internet topics of discussion because they not only lie, they don't even make up plausible lies.

Some celebrity claimed they were in an airplane crash. The Internet says "Ha! No! Lying skank! Airplanes have to file flight plans and there's no record of such that remotely fits with your cockamamie story, not to mention any record of a crash. If there were such an incident, there would be records."

So I planned a life with friends and people knowing me and me having a full life and I married a guy that I graduated high school with who was part of my gaming group -- my core group of friends where we ALL went to see The Empire Strikes Back together as a group the day it hit local theaters -- and like me the ex came from a military family and knew what military life was all about.

And for one brief shining moment in my late teens I had the social life I dreamed of and the equitable relationship I craved or something. And then he joined the Army -- like was our plan -- and we left town -- which was the plan -- and all of that was gone.

I had no social life. We had no friends in common. I was suddenly chattel property and belonged to a man who talked a good game about being pro women's lib while expecting me to be a 1950s style housewife and actively sabotaging my desire to further my education and pursue a career.

And I've been analyzing my life to absolute DEATH ever since trying to figure out where I went wrong and why my life doesn't work.

A central plot point of my in-depth analysis of my life is that a successful marriage requires two pieces:

1. You need to somehow reasonably comfortably fit into the larger social fabric of each other's lives.

2. Ideally, you get along well personally as well.

If you are AMAB and married to a woman and wanting to transition, you are asking someone to continue to have a close, intimate relationship with you while you destroy the existing fabric of your life intentionally and theirs along with it because your lives are intertwined.

The reality is that however well I thought my husband and I initially got along personally, our love for each other died within a few years and what we had left was that he had the military career he said he wanted and I got to be a military wife which was what I wanted. That was enough to keep us together for about two decades in spite of the honeymoon being over long ago.

I still have absolutely no idea whatsoever how two people successfully intertwine their lives and establish a satisfactory personal relationship.

Heteronormative culture the world over asks all men to buy a woman and turn her into their personal servant and asks women to accept being some man's personal servant to have any access to The Good Life.

And it tends to gut the lives of women such that they don't personally have an interesting life and -- having been forced to give that up -- they aren't interesting people. Interesting men with interesting lives soon grow bored with such women, but may tolerate the situation because they need sex and don't want to deal with the PR debacle involved in trying to figure out how to be personally happy. 

Besides, if they ditch her, it will be new face, same shit.

To be honest, I still can't figure out how to make MY LIFE work. So this piece contains NO advice.

I'm just describing the problem space in hopes of it helping someone else, someone with more complicated problems than planet Earth asking all women everywhere to pick one: Your left arm or your right.

Presumably, if you are AMAB, you feel like the sacrifice being asked of you runs deeper than "be some man's servant or sleep alone."