Rage.

I was 15 years old and she was my first real girlfriend-- real in the sense that we spent a lot of time together, we cared for each other and, most importantly, we had sex (and the kinds and variety pretty much spoiled me for life).

She'd a rough time, as long as I'd known her. She'd been raped. Her father was long gone. Her past boyfriends tended to be gangbangers with uncomfortable nick-names (Face-high was the one I recall).

When we'd first met, she'd been called over my house by two friends who were tentatively planning to get her high and "run a train" on her. I had no plans on joining-- I was a virgin at the time and that wasn't how I saw myself stepping off the starting block. She came in, she smoked, she saw what was up and, instead, decided to take a nap in my room.

I came in, put a blanket over her and let her sleep. She wasn't sleeping, of course-- I found that out later. That was the moment, she later told me, that she fell for me. We became friends. We later became more.

She was a good girlfriend. She defended me like a Rottweiler. She wrote me poetry. We had some really great sex, for a 15 year old. All because... I was a nice guy and most people weren't.

It's important you understand that. Because later, when, in a moment of blind rage, I shoved her to the ground and some dark thing crouching in the back of my mind howled for her, when I looked into her eyes it was the nice guy she'd fallen for reflected back at me.

The argument was stupid and petty and involved my little sister: I didn't want her around, she did, and we argued, I suppose; she insisted, I suppose; and, I suppose, I got very, very upset. I barely remember the whys. Only the effect it had on me.

I never wanted a woman to look at me that way, ever again.

Perhaps, in her eyes, I saw my mother.

I have fragmented memories. None of the act, really-- just the fallout. When my mother "fell down the stairs" and had to have stitches in her face. I stayed with my grandmother, that time. The house with blue walls. Memories of screaming, through those walls. The constant, constant fear.

I remember going to school and there being a class on domestic violence and I went home and I told my stepfather to stop hitting my mother. I was in 3rd grade. Gawky. Small. Big headed. Standing up to a monster.

And it stopped, for a while, that's one thing I will never forget-- for a while, God help me, it actually worked.

Until it didn't.

I'm sure at the time I could never fathom why these horrible things had to happen. And then I got older. And I got into an argument. And the chittering, insectile thing perching at the base of my skull hatched from its egg.

I know what it's like to feel a bone deep, monstrous rage. I know it feeds on itself, builds itself, takes off like a run-away train. I know what it's like to want to beat someone you love. Not hit. Beat.

They say that the most common indicator for future violent behavior is a violent environment. I've spent my entire life very much aware that I am a statistic.

I have an affliction, is all. I do my best to keep it under control. Sometimes, it's hard.

I dated a woman who had just left a physically abusive marriage. One night, during an argument, she began pushing me-- she gripped an argument and chewed on it, pushed the topic, backed me into an emotional corner.... She goaded me, almost taunted, and I knew she did it on purpose because she'd done it before... in her marriage. The psychodrama was playing over for her and all I had to do was play my part.

It became physical. She started kicking at me, willing me to hit her. I didn't. I left.

No similar incidents happened. We broke up soon after. She'd later tell her friends I was emotionally abusive-- I suppose the physical was just too big a lie to pull off. See, she was very used to be a victim. Abuse was part of her identity, at that point.

I had a fight with a female friend, one of my best friends. I said some pretty terrible things and I said some pretty honest things but mostly I said things she didn't want to hear. We were shouted, she was emotional and it became physical.

She came at me, scratched me. Left marks. Pushed me further than I've ever been pushed until I grabbed her by the throat and held her against her car and I thought, then, that I would love to see her lip bleeding and tears in her eyes. And then I let her go. And I walked away.

I had a long distance girlfriend I hopped onto a bus to ride 5 hours to see, to repair a break in our relationship. It was a lovely romantic gesture, I thought. She didn't see it that way. We immediately got into an argument, at my hotel room; her pacing, me sitting very, very still.

We get closer and closer to resolution only to break into fighting again until she leaves, refusing to talk to me face to face-- only phone communication, she says, and I'd had enough, I'm frustrated, I'd gone so far and she could only insist on her position, she just wouldn't back down, that bitch, and there I was, outside, in downtown Minneapolis, screaming into a cell-phone, kicking newspaper holders and slobbering like a beast. I'm lucky I wasn't arrested.

I left a voicemail message that probably sealed the deal on our breakup. And made her friends think I was psychotic.

People think that men who commit domestic violence are all just rotten human beings but I know better. They're people like me.

There is a rage that boils up so strong it can take days to come down.

It comes from this little voice that whispers... disrespect. That whispers, she should know better. It's defensive, this voice. It's always their fault. It doesn't like being pushed, it doesn't like it when someone doesn't listen, it doesn't like when someone makes it feel small. It hates to be pushed. Just do what the fuck I say, it hisses. Submit.

It has it's own logic, this rage. And it is intoxicating. That is sad, sad truth.

Do you want to hear horrible thoughts? I once got into such a rage wanted my stepfather back to beat the living fuck out of my mother. I am not proud of that moment. But it was true.

It's made relationships hard. I avoid conflict. I avoid intimacy. I actually fear getting worked up with a loved one. I know what will happen, I know that rage is waiting with it's terrible logic ready to goad me.

It sometimes feels like the safest route is solitude.

All this and I've yet to lose control.

I know both men and women can be guilty of domestic violence but this is largely a male problem. There are ads out there, saying things like "Real Men Don't Hit Women." Real men.

I don't consider myself better than anyone else because I keep myself in check. I consider myself a sick person whose disease is in remission. An alcoholic who hasn't touch the bottle in 10 years.

The rage is there and it will always be there. Waiting.

And I'm a nice guy.

Why Men Cheat. No, for real. I have all the answers.

I cheated.

Years ago, while in a loving and committed relationship, met another woman, we hit it off and in the electricity of the moment we were damn near fucking. Were it not for the intervention of a good friend, we would've had sex that night.

Didn't matter. Fuck the Clintonisms; it was still cheating.

Let me tell you, though, that I can say without any reservation that cheating was the best mistake of my life.

It seems the entire world is obsessed with cheating right now. The reasons are simple, of course. Jesse James, Tiger Woods, any given congressman, an episode of South Park and every cover of every women's magazine--- the entire world is obsessed because women are obsessed- and scared. If some other man cheated well, then, your man's gonna cheat.

So women want answers. As a cheater, I can very easily give those answers.

But first, a story.

The reasons behind my cheating may be rendered in complex terms: my ex and I were at a crossroads, an ebb in the flow of our relationship. She was suffering from a libido-killing depression, I was feeling tied down and unattended to and into this mix came my very own Manic Pixie Dream Girl... and movie magic happened. Or some approximation.

As far as I'm concerned, the why doesn't matter-- well, not until the end, that is....

It's what happened afterwards that's important.

I woke. I looked over, seeing the pantied and snoring form of my mistake. I went home. Not mine. Hers. I crept into my ex's apartment with her spare key and I wept. I cried as if some important person, my mother, my sister, my child, had died. I grieved.

I called my mother, weeping like a widow, bargaining with her and God to somehow make this not-alright thing, alright. And then, later, much later, I sat my girlfriend down and I told her.

And then... she told me. Yeah. She'd cheated too.

It was years ago, with someone who I used to joke about her cheating on me with.

She told me she was afraid. She told me she knew, the way I was, that I would leave her the minute she told me. Leave her and hate her for it. She was absolutely, 100% right. In hindsight, I approve her actions-- they showed she knew my character better than I did.

If I remember correctly, I laughed. And in those moments, I had an epiphany that has since changed my life: people cheat. You can't control them. You can't figure out reasons, you can't guilt or bribe them and you can't even love them into not-cheating. Some people cheat and some people don't and that's the universe, in a nut shell.

Let me tell you something I believe about human nature: we are all, each and every one of us, the protagonists of our very own living novels. Humanity, being what is it (a rational-seeming being in an largely chaotic, irrational set of circumstances), tries to make sense of the world through narrative. We tell ourselves stories, about the trees, about the rivers, about the Gods and about our own motives.

Ask yourself, after all, which comes first? The emotion or the action? The feeling or the processing of what that feeling is? Do you feel anger and then realize it is anger you felt? Do you feel love first, then call that feeling love?

We're all in a story, written by ourselves, starring ourselves and let me tell you, we are very, very unreliable narrators. Whatever our actions, most people, at core, believe they are good... or at keast just. Everyone believes there's a good reason for whatever it is their character is doing. Just ask a rapist-- that bitch always deserves it, doesn't she?

This may seem like a philosophical digression (and it is), but there's a point.

Would you like to know why men cheat? It's the same reason why women cheat.

Because it felt good at the time.

We'll call it sex addiction, we'll call it a moral lapse, we'll call it a drunken escapade; we'll blame our spouses for not loving us enough or loving us too much. We'll need space, we'll need attention, we'll need whatever but in the end those are just the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of an irrational chemical instance: we fuck because it feels good. We flirt because it feels good. We cheat... because it feels good.

Got your answer? Good. Now stop freaking the fuck out. You can't control other people any more than you can control the weather.

All you can do is all you can do and the rest? The rest is just someone else's story. Live on, writing your own.