What is a married girl to do? what am I to do when I know the things that attracted me to my husband are naturally going to be attractive to other women , and while yes, I realize that this works both ways - that yes, men are and will be attracted to me too sometimes, though perhaps not often, but regardless, enough that I notice, what am I to do about those women who are insistent - those who keep knocking on the door and won't go away and seem hell-bent on barging into my home and smashing every little precious thing to tiny, little bits? I realize i am not alone in this; that this is every marriage or any long-term or committed relationship or any relationship in which you are, quite simply, smitten - in love, wanting. You want to keep what is rightfully yours, you think. No one will take that away. This is what i speak of here - and while people are yes, free, we belong to one another in ways that are hard to define and i won't try here, for these ways often defy language.

It hurts. It hurts to think that anyone would do this, and it hurts even more to know that a lifetime ago, I fell in love and did a similar thing to someone who, thank god, forgave me and is now one of my best friends.

How odd that my husband's ex-wife should be now one of the people I care about most in the world and how stranger still that she could find it in her heart to forgive me. To do this must take practically superhuman or inhuman levels of forgiveness and understanding. I think really she is a candidate for Dalai Lama. I mean, why not? If she can forgive me, then she can move mountains, and i mean this truly.

These days, we have people knocking at the front door, the back door, the side door. Men, women, children, boys, and girls, all of them wanting a piece of our marriage. As for me, I do my part and dutifully turn away those who perhaps wish me well and wish to invite me to their next Dungeons and Dragons game or into their weird erotic fantasy in which I feature as Lara Croft (because I wear my hair in braids, a - ha!). None of this means anything; not to me, and not even to them , though they may not know it yet.