“Marital Relations” and Violence

I struggled to get up again this morning, even more than usual. I slept for about eight hours, after going to bed late, but then spent two hours in the zone between sleep and full wakefulness, too burnt out to get up. I guess, given the emotions of yesterday evening, it’s not surprising that I felt emotionally exhausted. It was well into the afternoon before I really felt able to get going.

I did various things today: shopping, cleaning the oven for Mum, various odd chores, and a 5K run, as well as half an hour of Torah study. Unfortunately, because I was late getting up, the run was after dark, which is always harder. It still felt like a slightly wasted day, with a late start and a big pause in the early evening when I got back from my run to exhausted to do anything for a while. I couldn’t really face doing any more than that, any more Torah study or any more stuff in general. I was too tired by the end, and rather depressed.

Possibly I’m just feeling pessimistic today.

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PIMOJ’s reaction to my novel makes me worry a bit how other frum (religious) people will respond. There’s actually very little sex in it, but there is some: a rape (which is over in a couple of lines; the book focuses more on the emotional after-effects for the female character), and also some frank discussion of sex (although no actual sex scene) where one character is trying to emotionally manipulate his wife into agreeing to have anal sex. I would say this is not what people would expect from a frum novel, except that there is very little frum serious literature to compare it with.

I didn’t want it to be “just” a frum book, but to be relevant to a wider audience. I fear I have fallen between two stools, with a ridiculous unwillingness to show actual sex for a mainstream audience, but much too much for a frum audience. The frum world won’t talk about sex except with strained euphemisms (hence Haredi comedian Ashley Blaker did a joke about the Jewish punk rock group, The “Marital Relations” Pistols). But I felt I couldn’t duck these issues, having seen (from neshamas.com, the Intimate Judaism podcast and elsewhere) that the nature of consent within marriage and the existence of domestic abuse are real issues in the frum community that we are rather in denial about and I thought it would unrealistic and untrue to duck those issues.

As an example that I should have known — in a sense, did know — what I was getting myself into, just before I started work on my novel, The Jewish News, a free Jewish newspaper, not particularly frum, ran this article about abuse (trigger warning for all kinds of abuse). The next week, they got a lot of complaints, saying it was too graphic for a family newspaper. (I’m not sure how many young children read newspapers these days.) Certainly no frum newspaper (Hamodia, Mishpacha, etc.) would ever run an article like that. But where can articles like this be run — and be seen by those who need to see them — if not in a newspaper? So I knew that if I got my novel published, I was likely to have negative feedback, but that just convinced me of the need to write it. But maybe I was wrong and this will do harm rather than good. I don’t want people to see it as saying that Jews are particularly bad people or that Judaism is a bad religion. I wanted my characters to see Judaism as life-supporting even when they were at their worst.

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On the plus side, PIMOJ and I are connecting again. Last night we “spoke” (in text — I wasn’t up to speak on Skype) about what we admire in each other and why we want to continue the relationship (although I’ve noticed PIMOJ doesn’t describe it as a relationship, just that we’re “getting to know” each other). We’ve been texting again today. I do want to talk about what happened in therapy and with my rabbi mentor, though, especially as I feel a bit self-conscious with PIMOJ now.

I worry that we are too different in terms of personality, and also that she doesn’t know many frum men; if she did, maybe she wouldn’t find me so interesting and unique. Sometimes, even before this, I feel guilty for dating her, when I should tell her to try dating other guys first.

I guess PIMOJ doesn’t fit my mental image of the type of person I would expect to marry. To be honest, the person who most fitted that image was my first girlfriend and that didn’t work out at all, because she was already becoming a different person. There was someone at university who I thought fitted the bill too, but she wasn’t interested in me. I’m not sure what this proves, except to note that a lot of people (most people?) end up with someone different from what they think their ideal mate would be.

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Predictive text today wanted me to say “I’ll have to wait until I get… arrested.” Now I’m wondering what my phone thinks of me and why.