Skunks smell

Women love women so differently than the ways that women and men love each other.    I chance to say that most relationships between men and women are played like a game and are integrated with strategies like those used in warfare.  Women want to be loved and cherished, touched for touching's sake, and appreciated.  I have watched so many men dangle pieces of the aforementioned offerings, like a carrot before a horse, but all the while see them as bait to get what they want, sex.  Granted, I have little grace for the opposite sex, especially men who claim to be "christian" husbands.  I've seen too many husbands screw, both literally and figuratively, their wives, and in the end treat them as a piece of property.  I know there must be men out there that know how to be selfless and caring, those who can love for loves sake, in a lifetime, I've not known many. 
 
I recently watched a couple at Price Chopper as they slowly worked their way through the cooler of beef and chicken.  She pushed the cart and he wandered around teasing her and flirting with her.  He would come up behind her and nuzzle her on the ear and whisper things that made her giggle.  After twenty years of marriage I don't have a clue what that would be like.  It makes me sad, it makes me angry.  I wish I would have known in 1982 what I know now...that sex is one of the lesser important components of a marriage...that being friends is the cornerstone to being lovers...that even though hard times can draw two people closer, those same hard times can shine a light through a marriage built on illusions...that sometimes, no matter what you do, things don't work they way that you want them to...and, that life is too short to wrap your identity around another person or a relationship that has died.
 
Dead relationships rarely happen all of a sudden.  Usually one or the other person drags along the corpse of what used to be, or desire gone south, until eventually they realize that they are flat worn out from carrying the dead weight.  Or maybe, they finally are able to smell the stench of the deadness, not unlike the reawakening of smell after a long cold.  My cold lasted for over ten years.  I still get stuffy once in a while, but generally I can smell a skunk a mile away.