Flogging yourself over television?

This morning I had to take the boys to an activity that lasted an hour and something. When I came back, Wife was in bed watching TV. More precisely (this becomes relevant later) she was watching an episode of a TV show on a rented DVD. OK, fine, no big deal. Right?

Wrong. No sooner do I walk into the bedroom saying "Hi, we're back" then she stabs the Pause button on the remote and starts talking compulsively about all the chores we have to do today.

Pause for cognitive dissonance. In the first place, if she really intended to turn off the show she would have hit Off or Eject, not Pause. In the second place, she was halfway through an episode and none of what she wanted us to do was that blasted urgent. Why not finish the episode first? I know I hate it if I get halfway into a story and then get yanked away from it without a good reason.

I could have understood it if we were talking about a show that would take all day to finish, but it was going to be another half an hour. I could have understood it if she had been watching something like pornography which would be totally unacceptable around the boys, but she wasn't (and doesn't): we're talking about Charmed, which is not exactly salacious or dangerous material. I could have understood it if she were a couch potato who spent hours in fron of the TV anyway, but she doesn't do that either. Most days -- the vast majority of days -- Wife spends zero hours and zero minutes watching TV. Catching an occasional episode of Charmed from rented disks is one of the few TV-like pleasures she ever allows herself.

And she is always furtive about it. I don't get this. If we walk in on her while she is watching one of these episodes, she acts like we caught her masturbating. This baffles me. I mean, it's only TV.

I asked her what was the problem, and got this tortured explanation that made no sense at all ... something about how since I work to support her, she thinks she has no right to spend even a single minute on anything but work around the house ... or at any rate it was something kind of like that and just as asinine. I don't pretend to have understood it very well.

I could be catty and point out that if she truly feels this way, a look around our house would persuade you that she has masterfully overcome this particular disability. But more important is that this whole concept -- I mean, that she somehow owes it to me never to have any fun -- is crap.

Not only is it crap, but it is poisonous crap at that. She will feed herself this diet of battery acid every day, and then suddenly -- without warning -- she can't take it any more. The problem is that when she hits that point, it suddenly all becomes my fault somehow. One day a switch will flip in her brain and she will start railing savagely at me that she can never have any fun around me, that I am a complete wet blanket, that it's no surprise she'd rather fuck anybody else in the world but me because I'm such a slave driver and I insist that she stay cooped up in this crummy house doing crummy housework all day long and she can't even take an hour off to watch an innocent little TV show and how can I possibly be such a horrible tyrant in the first place?

The first dozen times that I heard this tirade, I was completely baffled by it. I had no idea what she was talking about, or who this mysterious fellow was who was forcing her to do all these things and whom she had erroneously confused with me. But then after a while I began to catch on, and the furtive guiltiness over finishing her TV show today is the kind of thing that gave me a clue.

The fact is that she is the tyrant who drives herself like this -- or at any rate, if she doesn't get around to doing all the things on her to-do list, at least she berates herself mercilessly for falling short. She is the one who has set these insane standards for herself, and therefore she herself is the one against whom she rebels when she can't take it any more.

Now, I can sympathize with rebelling against the idea that you can't even squeeze an hour out of the day to do anything fun. That's just lunacy. But why does she do it in the first place? And why does she blame it all on me?

Admittedly, since I know her mother, it's not too hard for me to play sidewalk-psychologist and surmise that the reason Wife holds herself to these punitive standards is that her mother held her to those standards when Wife was still a little girl living at home. But then her mother was a bitter, evil, vindictive harridan who deliberately set her children at each other's throats; I would like to hope that when Wife got out from under her thumb, she would have been able to break free of this pattern.

"I would like to hope" it, but I guess I would be disappointed. Wife recognizes intellectually that the way her mother raised her matches every single line of the dictionary definition of child abuse -- and I am deeply grateful that she doesn't treat our boys exactly the same way -- but she can't free herself from believing in her heart that her mother's sadism is the true touchstone of personal virtue. And if she doesn't measure up to these impossible and contradictory standards, she flogs herself.

My wife sees nothing wrong with sleeping around, but she flogs herself relentlessly over watching a single hour of television. And then it is all my fault that she can never have any fun or a moment's peace. Is it just me, or is there something wrong with this picture?

Is it infidelity or polyamory?

If anybody ever reads this blog -- and maybe they won't -- I'm going to get a bunch of angry replies telling me that all of my wife's extramarital sexual experiences are by definition "infidelity"; and I'll get another bunch of angry replies holding up the allegedly good name of "polyamory" by quoting some exact definition that spells it all out. But I have to put this question front and center at the beginning because real life is not so tidy as anybody's definition, and because I really don't know the answer. That's part of why I'm writing this blog in the first place.

I guess (from what I see on their websites) that the first question the polyamorists would ask is what ground rules Wife and I set up about extramarital sex when we first got married. But we didn't really set up any. We talked about it a bit before the wedding, but we didn't really come to any kind of conclusion. We both said we couldn't imagine it happening. (Ah, young love!) When we sat down with the pastor who married us, to plan the service, he outright said that he didn't believe the line about "forsaking all others" should be in the vows because he certainly hadn't forsaken all others and he didn't expect anybody else to, either. (In retrospect, this guy was a real piece of work, but I didn't see it all so clearly at the time.) I had some idealistic notions lifted from Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land that made me think objecting to extramarital sex was silly and irrational, and I probably said as much to Wife. I even read that book aloud to her over a couple of weeks -- how romantic! I do believe (though I can't remember for sure at this late date) that I said I would at least want to know if it ever happened.

Wife met Boyfriend 1 at the end of our second year of marriage, and for a variety of reasons fell into bed with him almost immediately. I was out of town that week, and when I came back she told me the first day, ... in the middle of a very long conversation about a whole bunch of other things too. It had been a really rough two years, and my immediate reaction was to be glad she'd had the confidence to tell me. But over the next year (which is about how long she was involved with Boyfriend 1) I found myself on a violent emotional roller coaster. Turns out that the ideas in Stranger are really interesting at an intellectual level ... but in actual practice, let's just say that your mileage may vary. It didn't help that Wife and I had plenty of other things to fight about during that time, too. I said the first two years were rough, but so were many of the others after that.

Next was Girlfriend 1. (Yes, you read that right.) I knew about her even before anything happened, because Wife told me she thought this girl was chasing her, and I -- having loose gravel for brains and therefore having learned nothing the first time around -- asked "Gosh, what if you let her catch you?" So again, everything was all above board, and you could even say that in a sense I encouraged the whole thing from the beginning. (I should add that Girlfriend 1 was really, really hot, which may have colored my thinking; she had, of course, less than no interest in me even though she had a monster-sized crush on Wife.)

I'm not going to go through all the rest of the history right now except to say that, after Girlfriend 1, I told Wife my emotions had been through the wringer and I didn't think I could handle any more of this. Wife seems to have taken this to mean "Please don't tell me about any more romances that you decide to have." So when she took up with Boyfriend 2, she was scrupulously careful to say nothing. When I figured it out any way and confronted her, she denied it hotly and on oath. It was probably eight years that she was with Boyfriend 2 before she finally admitted it; and by that time Boyfriend 3 was on the horizon and Boyfriend 4 shortly thereafter. She was a little easier about admitting them, because I lied and said that it didn't bother me as long as she told me what was going on. That's not really true, of course. The truth is that it bothers me, sometimes intensely; but even so it doesn't bother me nearly so much as having her hide the truth from me. But when I tried to explain the more complicated version first, the subtle distinction was lost on her. Finally I went with the other version instead. The irony is that I had to lie to her about my feelings to get her not to lie to me about her affairs.

Fast forward to the present. She still sees Boyfriend 2 every so often, supposedly to get his help in solving her computer problems. Boyfriend 3 dropped out of the picture almost immediately. Boyfriend 4 was a steady item for a couple of years, but moved out of town last spring. He dropped in to see us for Christmas, though, and left before I got home from work. Wife tells me "nothing happened". Anybody taking bets on how much time they spent trimming the tree?

The history is background -- it may be necessary for you to understand the setting. But it leaves me all confused. I look at this and try to figure out how I feel about any of it, and the fact is that I don't know! And trying to put definitions or labels on it leaves me just as confused. Is it infidelity or polyamory? Boyfriend 2 fits all the classic descriptions of infidelity: she skulked and hid, she lied through her teeth about it, there was zero openness and honesty ... the works. Girlfriend 1 was at the other end of the spectrum: we talked about it before anything "happened" and at an intellectual level I even gave my consent. (I was an idiot, but never mind that.) The others are all in some kind of nebulous middle ground: in all three cases (that's Boyfriends 1, 3, and 4) she told me only after fucking them and not before; but in all three cases she told me pretty soon after first fucking them (anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks), and in all three cases I didn't throw a fit or get mad or insist that she stop, ... and in all three cases she continued to fuck them after telling me until the relationships fell apart on their own. (Or didn't, depending on what the truth is with Boyfriend 4.)

My emotions are all confused. Looking at the same events on different days, I feel dramatically different things. And when I try to make sense of all the hubbub, I keep coming back to the same basic questions. Is the fact that I get upset a sufficient reason to say Wife is behaving badly? Or do I have to just suck it up and get over it? Should I have done anything differently? Should I have been more accepting? Or less? Is this OK, or not?

Is it infidelity or polyamory? And how can I tell the difference?

Setting the stage

Why am I writing this blog? After nigh on a quarter century, I still find myself confused by my marriage. But I have also learned that I can understand things better if I explain them to others. Maybe this will help.

During that time, my wife has had five affairs that I know about. I wouldn't be surprised by one or two more, but who's counting? Two of these affairs were with men she still sees ... at any rate socially, as friends. She tells me there is nothing more at this point, and maybe there isn't; but she has also said that plenty of times when there was, so what do I know?

I'm going to need to give these people names, but obviously I don't want to identify them too closely. So let me refer to her amours with numbers: Boyfriend 1, Girlfriend 1, Boyfriend 2, Boyfriend 3, and Boyfriend 4. Of these, she is still in touch with Boyfriends 2 and 4. The others are long gone, for one reason or another.

This background sets the stage, so that you have some idea what I'm talking about and who these people are. In the same spirit, I will refer to my wife as Wife, and our children as Son 1 and Son 2. I suppose I could make up names for all these people, but it would be way too much work to remember them. And there's no way I'm publishing their real names all over the Internet.

That said, I'll click "publish" and off we go ....