Escape to Fantasyland?

We have bad news from Boyfriend 4: he has colon cancer and tumors on his liver. Doctors have discussed a couple of (unpleasant) treatment options with him, but nobody will give hm an actual prognosis. They'd rather send him to another specialist instead.

A couple of years ago, Wife wanted to ditch me and marry Boyfriend 4; now she tells him she's concerned about him, and she'll go so far as to tell me she is "sure" he'll lose his medical insurance and won't be eligible for any kind of public support (an impressive bit of "awfullizing" insofar as she can't quote any actual facts to back up her nightmare vision), ... but then she goes running off to Boyfriend 5 to weep on his shoulder.

Boyfriend 5? Excuse me? She's never even met Boyfriend 5 in real life. And what does it say about all her protestations to Boyfriend 4 about her eternal love, that now she wants to escape his bad news by running away to another country to be comforted by somebody she doesn't know? It's the kind of reaction that makes me hope I never get terminally ill and need to rely on her for something, lest she run off to Kazakhstan or some place to get away from the demands ....

The thing is that Boyfriend 4, during the two years that she was regularly fucking him, hung around our place a lot. He helped the boys with their homework; he'd pitch in with dinner; in many ways he became a kind of extended family member. This set him apart from Wife's other boyfriends, most of whom wanted as little as possible to do wih her domestic life because it interfered with getting her in bed.

So let me ask you: when you hear that a family member has a terminal illness, how many of you run to seek comfort from romantic strangers? And what would you say about someone who did?

I understand being shaken up. I understand needing a shoulder to cry on. But I would have thought that the shoulder would belong to someone in the family. When misfortune strikes that close to home, I would have guessed that comfort would have to come from home too. The fact that Wife wouldn't even consider crying on my shoulder but wants to go spend all her time with Boyfriend 5 -- in his own country, even, thousands of miles from home -- strikes me as funny, somehow.

No, ... you know, "funny" isn't the right word. The right word is "cowardly". I mean, picture it to yourself. Suppose you saw a teenage girl whose beloved grandmother took deathly ill, so she suddenly threw herself frantically into dating some guy that just joined her math class a week before. On the surface that would look callous and uncaring. But you wouldn't have to look too hard to see that this girl was scared to death -- no pun intended -- and that her frenetic dating was a way of sticking her fingers in her ears and singing "La-la-la, I can't hear you!"

What is strange is that this isn't Wife's first brush with death. Both her parents are dead. Two of her brothers are dead. She has nursed the sick and the dying before. So why does she have such a problem this time, facing illness straight in the face? Why does she have to go bury her head in a fantasy?

I suppose one answer is that she was already totally infatuated with Boyfriend 5 before we got the news about Boyfriend 4, and now gosh ... what's a girl to do? Turn her back on a new lover (even if he -- or they -- is/are totally hypothetical) just because some old lover is having a bad day? God forbid! That might be rude, or violate the rapt attention she owes the new guy -- not to mention that it could actually interfere with her having a good time! Of course, it does make you wonder what all those former promises of eternal love meant, or what they were worth. There is also the lingering question what she might owe somebody that she loved only a year ago. But hell, that was then and this is now. Right?

Maybe that's too cynical of me. But I guess I am a little sensitive to the whole question of how Wife treats the people she used to be in love with, if only because she has had so many affairs since the day she married me.

I should ask what she thinks is going on. I should ask whether she sees anything cheap or slutty about seeking comfort in the [virtual] arms of somebody brand-new, when a man she could have married two years ago suddenly turns up sick. I should ask if she is able to summon up even the slightest shard of respect for the woman she sees in the mirror every morning.

I should ask, but I'll probably chicken out.