For those that want some backstory…
The Daily Mail article “interviewing me” was originally posted before I was interviewed. They asked me if I would like to be interviewed, I said yes… and then they slapped up bits and pieces of the PopCrunch interview, scraped mine and Jennifer’s Facebook for photos including my children and published it. You can still see the Facebook tags on the photos. The article was basically a headline and garbage. The comments immediately started tearing me apart.
In retrospect, I don’t think they ever intended to actually interview me directly, but I did complain about the pictures of my children posted online without consent. By which I mean I very politely asked the Daily Mail to remove them and sympathized that the reporter had to work with deadlines. I got a very positive response from her and the photo with my children was immediately removed. I sent a copy of the book and they hunted through that for odds and ends and scraped the blog for more goodies. After that a second version of the article came out and the two posts Jennifer wrote were heavily sourced.
About four hours after that, I was actually interviewed!
I had a fairly decent conversation with the Daily Mail reporter and she was both sympathetic and interested. I think we talked for fifteen to twenty minutes and I managed to hash out a few of my key points and generally impress her that I wasn’t a nutball.
After that, the article was reworked heavily again and republished. Now there’s quotes in the article that I said in an actual interview. It’s not quite as perfect and clear as I would love it to be, but it’s not all that bad at all. I’ve started to quite like it I think and I am obviously quite pleased with the extra media attention and extra visitors to the blog.
The one niggle from the interview is that the timeline of the emotional affairs I’ve mentioned is quite unclear and no reasons stated for them either. I was never asked about those. They are extremely good questions though and I’ll explain them all in the next post. They were extremely difficult times for both of us and to be perfectly blunt, deeply private matters. We share a great deal of personal information and typically with dealing with affairs you don’t endlessly rehash them or the healing never takes place. It’s usually not recommended that you let the tabloids know about them…
Jennifer and I are a real life couple. Facing challenges to your relationship and beating them isn’t weakness, it’s strength. We’ve overcome many things together: severe illness, fragile pregnancy, miscarriage, distance, money issues, mismatched sex drives, opposite work schedules, a failed career attempt and… me starting to connect to someone else. Through all that, as long as we were physically able, we’ve continued to go to bed together and be sexual with each other each day. It’s a large part of what has kept us together as a couple.
Sex together 5000 times doesn’t matter. It’s just a big number. It’s not the real story. The real story is that we are still together, still happy, still laughing with each other, still holding hands when we walk and still believing we made the right choice sixteen and a half years ago. Our sex life is the explanation of how our story was possible. Sex is our glue.
Maybe it’s yours too.