Sometimes I do things that would be very bad things for other people to do. Most people shouldn’t head out to a non-sex party and pick up sex. For a variety of reasons this is true. Other people have different relationship agreements. Other people have a different emotional attachment to having sex and would be damaged long term. I feel more cheerful than I have been in literally years. Other people would be required to figure out how to get their mojo back in some other way. I don’t have to. I can go pick up a fuck. It is a coping mechanism. It is one that can be very broken for a lot of people. I’m not hurting anyone. I picked a marriage where my husband not only thinks it is ok, he thinks it is super hot. I found someone who wants to cheerfully enable me in that coping mechanism.
But I feel like I shouldn’t do it! It’s bad! Bad! But it’s not. I didn’t hurt anyone. Good golly, both me and the man I picked up went home and enjoyed our partners all the more for the diversion. We are equally as good of friends now as we were a week ago. My kids were not impacted in the slightest. Where is the harm?
I sometimes break the law in ways I will not enumerate online. *ahem* I do them with great forethought and planning. I do it by very carefully weighing my options and the weight of different factors. I then make a decision for myself. I don’t think that other people should make the same choice just because I do. I truly don’t. I don’t think that other people should use me as a role model. I think people should live vicariously as I do things they kind of wish they could do and ignore me when I do things they don’t want to do. But it’s never that simple.
Who am I to say that anyone else is wrong? Who is anyone else to say I am wrong? I don’t know. I know that my feelings of defensiveness come from reflex shame not any actual reservations about my choices. I think my choices are bad because I think I make bad choices. If that makes sense. I think that another person doing it might be making a good or bad choice and it depends on a lot of different factors. I hate meta shit.
Sometimes my friends can join me on journeys. Sometimes they can’t. That doesn’t make them my friend or not. If friend was defined as someone I could do absolutely everything with… that would be kind of odd. I think.
Maybe you’ve made bad choices in the past but have learned from them. Just because it happened before doesn’t mean you have to (or will) go down that path again.
I generally say that I learn from my mistakes/bad choices so that I can move on to new and different ways to fuck up. Generally I make it sound like a joke, but it’s really not one.
And there are choices that in the moment seem to be good ones, but after the fact you discover how bad they were (let me tell you about my horridEx…) And there are choices I’ve made over and over again that keep kicking my ass, because I’m stubborn and don’t learn from them the first time.
In other words, past bad choices don’t make us bad, or stupid, or whatever. They are what they are, and either we learn from them what we can, or we don’t. I can’t say that it’s wrong not to examine them and wring every last bit of processing and learning out of them just because I’m that anal (and I usually go overboard), because like you said what’s right for me may not be right for you, or for her, or for anyone else.
And, yes, you are not toxic. There’s no reason you shouldn’t have had a lovely fuck if you and the others potentially affected by it were perfectly fine with it. Screw anyone who thinks differently.