Deja Vu - revisted

I know, I know I am really behind the eight -ball on this one. When this movie came out - part of me wanted to go see it - mainly becuase I had heard it was hot. But part of me did not want to go see it becuase I knew I would re-live my own guilt and torment over having an affair.

But today being a Sunday and me here at home with some laundry to do - I saw that it was on and I decided since the shoe was definitely on the other foot now (so to speak) - I thought perhaps the timing was a bit better for watching this movie.

First of all I want to say that the hotness factor was there - definitely and I'd do that guy in a New York minute. I can totally understand her attraction to him - and of course I can totally understand 'reasons' for having affairs. Your wife/husband is 'boring', they are 'not there for you', the romance had 'lost it's spark' - all the myriad reasons we use to justify being 'Unfaithful'.

The part of the movie I did not get was the sudden plot twist where Richar'd Gere's character loses it and kills Olivier Matinez's characther.....um OK. The whole thing was shot for me at that point. Somehow I guess I just feel it lost it's edge, it's subtleness, once that took place.
The movie was very powerful nonetheless.

I remember, when I was in the throes of my passion - my God the sex WAS that incredible. On the flip side though, I remember how horrible I felt afterwards, the guilt, the beating myself up (rightly so) - I remember my husband finding out and how much worse that made things. The pain I caused, the hurt, the anger, the betrayal. I also remember wanting desperately for my husband at the time, to forgive me - because I knew if he could forgive me we could move on - put things behind us and become better. Unfortunately, he could not - he could not find it in his heart to forgive me, so we divorced. To this day I want his forgiveness - I think he has come close at times to telling me he does forgive me - but not quite.

Now here I am in those shoes and I say I forgive my current husband but the truth is I don't - I can't. In my here and now I tell myself I DO forgive him but it's different and I can't quite call this feeling forgiveness. I'd like to say I can be the bigger person here - but it's not happening. I understand now how my ex-husband must have felt (in fact I remember distinctly calling him to apologize all over again for what I did to us when this happened to me) - I think I could hear him trying to stifle an 'I told you so' or worse gloating over the whole thing. Life is funny sometimes.

When I decided to have an affair I had at the time, warned my husband it was coming - I told him that I could no longer live the way we were living that I wanted some happiness in my life and that if he continued to ignore me and our problems that I would end up with someone else. True to my word and being the horrible person that I am - I did just that - it was a self-fulfilling prophecy and/or just my own damn SELFISHNESS at work. I also tell myself that the circumstances were different - that I was honest with my ex-husband and somehow that makes what I did more OK. I guess I also now feel I deserved that same type of treatment - yea right - in a perfect world perhaps. But this ain't no Adrian Lyne movie.

Utimately WE all have things like this happen. I was reading one of my favourite columnists on sex the other day - Mr. Dan Savage - and in his advice column he was telling a young woman the brutal truth. At some point in your life - you are going to be cheated on - it all depends on what you do with it when it happens - no sense in worrying about it beforehand. And as the incredibly sexy French lover Paul from 'Unfaithful' put it: "There is no such thing as a mistake. There are things you do, and things you don't do." Great advice Monsieur. There's no mulling it over - is there - you either do it or you don't. And you can't always UNDO it. You can almost never UNDO it....too bad we don't have a rewind so we can 'unhurt' the ones we love.