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A story about Brigitte and me in german weekly ZEIT

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brigittes hubbie
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A story about Brigitte and me in german weekly ZEIT

Post by brigittes hubbie »

Hi there,
I want to share the artcile that was published in todays print issue of the renowned german weekly paper Die ZEIT (Time weekly). Sadly it isn´t published in the online issue and I can´t tell yet if it will.
As I didn´t find the time to scan my paper issue in the office today and as it´s a german paper anyway you´ll have to live with the pictures I took from it just to give you an idea how it looks.
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The whole story started last may when the author posted at TDF asking for a volunteer to share his story and it took some time but I think it was worth it.
There are a few details that were altered on purpose to guard for cover-up but the rest of the details are correct.
The pics in the story were made by dutch photographer Christel on several occasions. I met her on the first doll meet I attended and she´s happy about the exposure in the big german weekly tabloid.

I hope the pics give you an idea how the paper looks but I think I´ll do you the best service with the following translation, right. :wink:

Here we go:

Title: Just you and me

Subtitle: In the court room Tom is holding convincing pleas, at home he shares his life with Brigitte, a silicone doll

Credits: by Constantin van Lijnden and Christel Mitchel (pics)

Text:
Tom had waited for Brigitte for four weeks. But when the delivery man finally brought her to his place and he took her out of the cardboard box she was just lying in front of him, motionless, bald, 48 kilos of weight. Everything she was wearing was a cheap white bra, panties and socks. But Tom was prepared.
In his cupboard there´s a lot of lingerie,suspenders and nylon stockings from Agent Provocateur, bought for more than 500 €, and a short leopard print dress from Wolford together with a brunett shoulder lenght wig and a pair of black rimmed glasses waiting for her. He just forgot to buy a wheel chair.
But apart from that there´s everything there just the way he had imagined it: she´s got green eyes, cup size 85 C, 64 cm waist, 105 cm hips. He´s not alone anymore, now they are the two of them, Tom and Brigitte, his new girlfriend. He speaks her name in french language.
It´s 5 1/2 years ago now. It was the first of august 2011, Tom recalls the date without hesitating. When he had finished dressing Brigitte and had put on her wig and glasses he grabbed her bridal style with her head resting on his shoulder and carried her around the flat he´s leaving in. Even though he knows he´ll have to drive her around for a long time in a wheel chair in the future in that moment he just wanted to carry her on his arms.
Room for room he carried her through the rooms of of his appartement in this old building with it´s high ceilings and wooden flloor, through all four rooms. He first introduced her to his living room with the bookshelves left of the sofa, stuffed with hundreds of books with erotic photography and literature. He introduced her to the open dining room and his office room.
Tom is walking around with her slowly to avoid banging her body against the walls or furniture, and to give her time to get accustomed to her new home. He stopped in the bedroom last, the room where she will sleep from now on. Above the bed there´s a picture of a woman in bondage. "Now this is your home from now, your kingdom", he said.
Since that day he and Brigitte, a siliconedoll from manufacturer Mechadoll - price almost 8000,-- €, fast delivery time, no import tax - are a couple. A year ago they had a wedding ceremony, on the sofa in their living room, just the two of them. Tom put his old wedding ring, made on equal parts of white and yellow gold, on the ring finger of her right hand. He doesn´t wear a ring.
A man who´s living with a doll is amusing for most people at best, disgusting at worst, for some simply scandalous. These dolls are artfificial woman after all, considered to be the ultimate sex toys: always available, dependant, mute.

Of course Tom knows the reservations people have against reletionships like his. He is a smart man. He´s 49 years old. As a lawyer he is holding convincing pleas week after week in court rooms, is holding up against managers and CEO´s of big business companies, that´s why he´s called Tom, which isn´t his real name.
Tom says, Brigitte made him a better person, more confident, relaxed and happy. We he speaks about her he still sounds surprised, like someone who´s been disappointed a lot and hasn´t hoped for a happy ending any more.
Isn´t it right for every person to love whoever he or she wants, even if that someone is a something? Not a person but a doll?
We are in a hip cocktail bar that gets crowded with young beautiful people, situated in the city center of a mid-size town in Germany. He´s drinking Mojito, he has suggested to meet here to meet with me. The owner is a friend of him.
His friend doesn´t know about Brigitte. He doesn´t know as well that Tom is a member of the online community The Doll Forum since march 6th 2013, that he has done more than 15000 posts there calleing himself "brigittes hubbie" and just has become a moderator of the forum. But he knows how Tom has been before he met Brigitte. He raclls a lonesome man who showed up at the bar one night and showed up ever since very often. He always showed up alone and left alone.
Tom says, since he was divorced when he was 45 years old he was kind of a sad sack, broken by a wife who who was indefferant towards him before she became cruel, cheating on him for years until he dared to separate from her very late, unbelievably late.
It was a different feeling to be alone again. He hit the town in the night, looking for someone new, sitting in the bar of his friend at the counter, looking at the crowd dancing to the music. He felt odd, too old for that shit, what am I doing here after all, he asked himself.
Tom isn´t unattractive, just a little overweight perhaps. He visits hockey games in his free time, a few years ago he ran a marathon in 4 1/2 hours. He´s meeting relatives and friends, male and female.
"It´s not that I´m unable to have a conversation with a woman", he says, "it´s just that I don´t know how to trun a conversation into something romantic, just thinking about it makes me nerveous and shy."
Tom got desperate. He could have ended tunring into a loner, buying some kind of affection from a prostitute but that wasn´t something he could imagine. He was not looking for sex but for intimate togetherness.
It wa she film he saw that changed it, "Monique", a french film made in 2002. It tells a story about a man who´s left bis his wife and buys a doll called Monique while being totally drunk and who finds with her something he thought he´d lost forever: love.
Tom liked the film a lot, he began searching the net, registered at The Doll Forum that has around 50000 registered members who share their experiances and post pictures of their dolls, presented like mannequins. He read about the pros and cons of different kind of dolls. There are "Real Dolls" that can be configured considering everything from skin colour to pubic hair style, manufactured according the wishes of the customers. These kind of dolls can hold poses thanks to their rigid skeleton other dolls can´t who have loose joints. Those kind of dolls can cost more than 10.000,-- €, depending on the configuration.
Then there are "Teddy Babes", they are cheaper, weigh a lot less and are easier to transport, but they look less like a human being. There are "Honeydolls", "Dreamdolls", hundreds of models from dozens of manufacturers. There are dolls with interchangeable heads, mit removable inserts for easier cleaning, or heatable dolls with electric wiring to heat the body up to 37 degrees celsius body temperature.
Tom decided to buy a doll from the then french manufacturer Mechadoll. Even though she looked a bit too voluptuous for his taste and a bit too busty. He liked her hair and her eyes though, and the soft platinum-silicone skin that felt extra soft. It makes her more easily damageable though, the softer the skin the more her skin is prone to tear and lint. He liked her feet as well a lot that are covered with a harder silicone layer which makes her feet feeel more real than most doll´s.
He called her Brigitte as the manufacturer called the face. Brigitte like Brigitte Bardot, he liked that name, Tom likes french names.
Then the day came when Tom took Brigitte out of the box and dressed her. He says he fell in love to her in an instant. Brigitte is beautiful, Brigitte doesn´t cheat on him. He powders her face and puts makeup on her face. He puts lipstick on her lips, lipstick from manufacturer MAC, every day of the week a different shade of red. He put extensions on her eye lashes he bought at a drugstore. He doesn´t use mascare as it clumps her artificial lashes. And he doesn´t use nail polish as he fears it might damage the silicone of her fingernails. He glues small tears together that you can´t avoid over the years. But he says that they don´t really bother him, thyt he thinks that they make her even more beautiful.
Tom rarely has sex with Brigitte, he says, probably every other week. But´the good thing is that the sex doesn´t get less over time. he says. Brigitte can´t say no after all. Every morning he spends almost an hour cuddling with Brigitte, and when he feels his body warming up her body it almost gives him the feeling that he gives her life, he says.
"Of course I know that Brigitte is a doll, not a human being. I know too that she can´t really feel neither my cuudles nor anything else. But I like the imagination that she can", he says.
Whether living with a doll is sick, makes sick or cures illnesses is something psychology hasn´t really researched. Agalmatophly as that is called in psychiatry is just getting into the focus of psychiatric science in the last years.
One of the very few scientific data collections come to the conclusion - on a rather small basis - that doll owners aren´t significantly different from the average human being content with their life or regarding the percentage of psychic diseases.
A study from Cal Poly University says that there are hints that sex dolls give their owners relief, security and happiness. On the other hand there´s a possibility that they may intensify a tendancy to withdraw from humsn relations.
Tom has become less athletic and gained weight since he´s living with Brigitte. He doesn´t run a marathon anymore as well. He´s unable to invite buddies to visit him. His colleagues don´t know about her. Tom says that he looks very close into whom he trusts about her. Just his parents and his niece visit him from time to time. They got used to Brigitte, they think he´s better than before.
As Tom doesn´t want Brigitte to be lonesome when he is in the office during the day he bought Martine, another doll, in 2013, and then a year later LEF, a doll with three different interchangeable heads that he calls Laurence, Emmanuelle or Fabienne, according to the heads on her body that he´s changing on a weekly basis. But he just has sex with Brigitte, he´s faithful to her.
During the night one half of the 180 cm wide twin bed belongs to Brigitte, he´s sharing the other half with LEF, and he´d make room for Martine for sure if she wouldn´t be stuck to the office chair because of her damaged hip joint.
Tom says: "Most human beings are giving their plush toys personality and soul when they are kids, and some gromn ups are still able to build up an emotional relationship to an object." But when you expect profound conversations, intellectual discussions or common activities in a relationship a doll won´t be able to make you happy, of course.
But when you accompany him to his flat and watch how he looks after all of his three dolls, getting the hair of her wig out of the eyes of one, kisses the next on her forehead and puts a head on the third, draping a scarf around her neck, the way he takes pictures of them, kisses and cuddles with them you realize what they mean to him. He can shower them with tenderness, they never are annoyed by his need for closeness, they´d never abuse his thankfullness.
What I need most is feeling needed, Tom says. And his dolls need him for everything.
His ex-wife was totally different. He met her in his legal clerkship. They´ve been together for 17 years. Tom can´t tell when love became hate.
He spend his 45th birthday in Hambourg, his wife had bought a ticket to a hockey game for him and booked a hotel room for him- a single room, while she met her lover in Munich. On their 15th wedding anniversary he spend the evening on his own as well as his wife firts forgot the date, then delayed their date and at last spent the evening on the phone flirting with her lover. After that she moved out without an explanation, came back again without an explanation as well - and he takes her bach, still hoping that everything will turn out well.
Actually it´s no wonder that Tom is able to convinve himself that Brigitte loves him, he was practicing for that for 17 years.
But Brigitte is different from his ex-wife. She´ll never hurt him and she´ll never leave him. She can´t walk after all.
Agalmatophily isn´t a new phenomenon at all. There are a few reports about relationships of human beings and statues in the time before christ. The story of sculptor Pygmalion falling in love to one of his statues until goddess Aphrodite turned her into a human being is a famous saga from ancient greek and roman ages. Dutch seamen used simple sex dolls in the 17th century. In Japan, one of the main producers of dolls, it is said that the government provided artificial female torsi to workers in remote areas since the 50´s.
Tom says, one of the most intimate moments between Brigitte and him happened in 2013 when he ran a marathon for the last time. As he wasn´t optimistac that he´d be able to go the distance he told nobody that he was going to enter the race. Nobody but Brigitte knew. Of course she didn´t stood at the course to support him but he was sure she would have come if she´d be able to. Thinking of her pushed him forward, way over the limit right to the finish line. At home he kissed her mouth and hung his finishers medal around her neck, it was their win.
He just made a mistake - that´s hwat he calls it now - once. In January 2013, Brigitte and Tom are living together for almost one and a half years now, he gets to know another woman, a real one, through a dating site. They exchange mails and they finally meet, in a casino, on her proposal. It´s his first date since his divorce. She´s a professional gambler and this evening he can´t resist her, handing her money over time and time again until his credit card reaches it´s limit. With 10.000,-- € lossed and alone he falls on his knees in front of Brigitte when he comes home at night and vows never ever to be so dumb again.
That´s how Tom tells it, we are still in the bar, his glass of Mojito is empty. He has never met with a real woman again for a date since then. He wants to get old with Brigitte. He says he likes to know that there is someone at home waiting for him. He´s happy with brigitte. There´s no stressfull up and down in their relationship, no unduly demands, no false expactations. He´d leave her for no one, not for one of the new sex robots that companies in the US and Japan are working on either.
The only thing he really is sorry about is that he rarely leaves his home together with Brigitte. Of course there is the annual Doll Meet in Hereford in the west of england he travels to with her seated on the passenger seat of his car where her meets dozens of other doll lovers. But Tom has a different dream, he´s dreaming of taking Brigitte with him to the ballett. He´d book a loge in the opera house just for them. Then they´d be able - he and his immobile wife - to watch the dancers moving, jumping and flying around on the stage, turning to pirouette.
Maybe someday, Tom says, maybe when he´s a pensioner.

End of the story.

Behind the story:
The question behind the story: Constantin van Lijnden had heard that there are men living with a doll. He asked himself: What is moving those men?
Research:

Van Lijnden wrote to the Doll Forum to find a doll lover. It was a moderator who proposed to meet him. Van Lijnden met him at a bar for four hours. And was invited to the man´s flat three time, on the condition to keep him anonymous.

That´s it.
I hope some of you take the time to read it. :D It took me more than three hours to do the translation so please ignore typos and similar translation mistakes. Don´t forget I´m german so english is not may native tongue.

It´s late now and I´m on a business trip tomorrow so I won´t be able to answer questions or comment your posts before saturday. If there are any posts at all. :haha4:
Cheers Tom aka BH aka Chris :D
Click here to see my Doll Album.

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brigittes hubbie
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Re: A story about Brigitte and me in german weekly ZEIT

Post by brigittes hubbie »

Hi there, no link to the weekly yet, it´s only for free in a few days.

Chris
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Re: A story about Brigitte and me in german weekly ZEIT

Post by Nescio50 »

Congrats :D :thumbs_up:

I haven't read it yet, I'll do so tomorrow (it's almost midnight here). But an article in Die Zeit must be great 8)

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brigittes hubbie
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Re: A story about Brigitte and me in german weekly ZEIT

Post by brigittes hubbie »

Nescio50 wrote:Congrats :D :thumbs_up:

I haven't read it yet, I'll do so tomorrow (it's almost midnight here). But an article in Die Zeit must be great 8)
Thank you, yes, I just send a pm to Constantin and will go to bed NOW. The girls want to go to bed. :D It´s a very long story so it´ll take a lot of time to read it. No need to hurry, it´ll stay at TDF for some time. :haha4:

Chris
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Re: A story about Brigitte and me in german weekly ZEIT

Post by scooter_ca »

Congratulations from me too.
Like Nes, I can't give the article the time it deserves right now, but after dinner this will be mandatory reading.
I remember when the call went out for someone to interview. Good for you with going for it.

Thanks,
scooter.
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Re: A story about Brigitte and me in german weekly ZEIT

Post by Hollywu »

Wow! Thank you for posting this. I'm truly moved to read your story. I know there are more of us out there like this.

Safe travels.

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Re: A story about Brigitte and me in german weekly ZEIT

Post by samara78 »

This is a great artickle. You and brigette are so sweet and romantic
The empty orchestra still plays.
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Re: A story about Brigitte and me in german weekly ZEIT

Post by Mondoon »

Congratulations 'Tom', great story and remarkable translation. Ihr Englisch ist viel besser als mein Deutsch.

I can certainly recognise you from behind, but fortunately most people won't. I didn't recognise Brigitte though, perhaps it's the image, or something is different from when we met.

Lovely story and anyone who knows you cannot fail to see the relationship when you are with any of your ladies.

Best wishes from me and Hanna.
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Re: A story about Brigitte and me in german weekly ZEIT

Post by shimu3z »

I loved it. Thank you for sharing the story with us.
shimu3z :angel:
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Re: A story about Brigitte and me in german weekly ZEIT

Post by Adventurer »

Fantastic. Great exposure for this community and for dolls in general. I'm sure there will be several new German members of this forum soon.
----
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Re: A story about Brigitte and me in german weekly ZEIT

Post by Begog »

I read the story and I approve. It's great to see a newspaper writing a subjective and factual story that is not derogatory or grandstanding. Dolls need more of this type of exposure to fully become "mainstream." It's a slow process, but I see this as a step in the right direction.

As for grammar and typos, I have always marveled at his mastery of English and other languages. I've always had the utmost respect for Chris, and we are proud to call him Moderator Assistant Manager.

:glou:

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Re: A story about Brigitte and me in german weekly ZEIT

Post by siliconefun »

Hi dear Chris,

sitting here in my comfy office chair next to Amy I really enjoyed to read this awesome publication about you and your doll relationship story.
I just want to say that this article is written in a very respectful way toward our beloved artificial companions and the layout is professionally done :thumbs_up:
Congrats from me and my gals and thanks for sharing this great story Chris :glou:

- SF & the team -

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Re: A story about Brigitte and me in german weekly ZEIT

Post by Nescio50 »

Hi Chris,

I just read the whole article. It's beautiful! Having met you (and Brigitte) a few times, hearing your stories, I know this article is true.

:glou:

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Re: A story about Brigitte and me in german weekly ZEIT

Post by Agent D »

Wow, that was really, really, great. Thank you for sharing the story, with the World really. It's good to see positive, real person stories about dolls. In American, we're still trying to 'free the breast'. But we'll get there someday....
D.

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Re: A story about Brigitte and me in german weekly ZEIT

Post by Swan »

Read it! :thumbs_up: exceptional article ... I tip my cap to you sir ... thank you for sharing it

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