I’m almost 100% certain at this point that absolutely nobody is reading my rant pages. I know my site isn’t getting any traffic. This has a lot to do with the fact that I registered on several major search engines months ago and I’m still not showing up. Makes you wonder who you have to kill to get listed on a search engine these days.

Note how this doesn’t stop me from writing something here anyway. Call is a small bit of mental masturbation, if you will. Maybe I like to see my “oh so deep” rants up on the web, even if it is just for me.

I want to talk about freedom here for a minute. I’m not talking about political freedom, or religious freedom, or freedom of the press (all of which are very important and dear to me). I’m talking about personal freedom. I’m talking about the ability to be the person you want to be without having to compromise your ideals. I’m talking about the ability to do what you want, when you want to, and not have someone tell you that you shouldn’t be doing it.

I’m talking about the kind of freedom that a teenager encounters when first moving out of their parents home.

I’m talking about the kind of freedom you remember when your wife leaves you.

Now, I know there are a lot of people who would read this and say “MY wife doesn’t do that to me. MY wife let’s me be my own person.” You know what? That’s great for you. MY wife didn’t. My wife constantly put herself and her desires and her tastes in front of mine and, being the person that I am, I let her do it. I spent five years being walked on. Five years of not being able to listen to music as loud as I want when I’m at home. Five years of being told that some of the movies that I like are “ugly.” Five years of not being able to express my political beliefs without it becoming an attack on her and having it start a big fight. Five years of my friends not inviting me to do things because “we knew she wouldn’t LET you go.”

Five years of my life.

I’m thinking about this now because there is a woman in Ft. Lauderdale who loves me. A woman who wants nothing more than to take care of me. A woman who has already expressed a desire to live with me for the rest of my days and who would want nothing more than to be Mrs. Michael McGreevy.

And a woman who I have almost nothing in common with.

I knew we didn’t have a lot in common before going into things, and in retrospect I should have spent more time dwelling on that before we got together. I thought my feelings were going to overcome our differences, though. I was wrong.

I realized this was going to be a problem after meeting her and, unfortunately, being intimate with her. This of course makes it look like all I was after was sex, which is entirely not the case. It wasn’t the sex that made me start thinking of things. It was the time we spent together when we weren’t having sex. It was the conversations, the observations, the subtle things that I wouldn’t have noticed before I was married.

I’m not going to go into detail about what I saw here. It really doesn’t matter, and it will probably come off as me trying to justify why I feel the way that I do. Suffice it to say that we come from some radically different backgrounds.

I feel like I’m not making much sense here. I hope that maybe she reads this one day, and that she understands. That’s probably more than I can expect, but it’s what I hope for.

Maybe one day I won’t feel like a complete asshole.

Won’t be any time soon, though.