Carl Martin of Nashville, Tennessee, recently rose like a phoenix from the ashes of his shattered six-year relationship with his (now) ex-girlfriend Carla Jones.
“People used to joke around all the time about our names,” recalled Carl. “They'd tell us, 'Carla and Carl, isn't that cute? You two must be made for each other.' I used to hear that constantly.”
And he, himself, had no trouble believing it. Carl and Carla shared a passionate, fiery relationship, with a vitality and spirit not often witnessed among typical late-40-something couples in Music City, living out mundane lives of dry, amiable companionability. “Not me and Carla,” said Carl. “We could never keep our hands off each other. I can't tell you how many times we were told to get a room.”
That all changed, however, on the day that Carla took it upon herself to have a brief but torrid affair with a fellow member of their congregation - a female. For Carl, things could never be the same after that.
“I'm a forgiving man," he emphasized. "Infidelity is one thing. But gay-cheating? I hold no truck with that.”
Carl says that, for a short but painful period, Carla's foray into the world of same-sex promiscuity even caused him to question his own desirability.
“I wondered if I wasn't enough of a man for Carla," he confessed. "My sick head kept thinking that I was such a sorry specimen of a masculinity that she'd been forced to turn to the fairer gender.”
Fortunately for Carl, that sick line of thinking didn't persist for very long. Early one morning, before dawn, he had a vision. He saw himself bathed in a glowing light, naked except for a sort of loin cloth, radiating sheer virility as he stepped out of the flames of the eternal fire to which Carla had risked herself by opting to lie with a woman.
“In that moment," said Carl, "I realized that the problem wasn't that I wasn't enough of a man; it was that I was too much of a man. So much of a man that her flawed womanly spirit was no match.”
Like a phoenix, Carl has since emerged from the ashes of his broken relationship with a new confidence, a new inner fire, and a raging manliness that has made him all but irresistible to the ladies.
“Like moths to a flame,” he said modestly. “Everyone wants a piece of this.”
