Wounded puppies

I got a little more insight today into what attracts Wife to Boyfriend 5 (in this case I mean the middle one, the one about our age). He is a wounded puppy, and she is just the kind of girl who drags home wounded puppies and pleads "Look, his paw is hurt! Can we keep him while I nurse him back to health? Can we, huh, can we?"

More exactly: Boyfriend 5 is weak, sensitive, and incredibly emotional. He lives with his father, who loves his son but has no use for weakness. And every single day he [the son] bends Wife's ear for hours about some trivial problem that has gotten him totally overwrought.

Wife just eats this up. She coos, she coddles, she consoles -- so far as she is able, from thousands of miles away. She has to be extra careful how she says things, for fear he'll take an innocent remark the wrong way and plunge off the deep end into hurt or despair. She gets to be a lover to him by whispering sweet nothings as encouragement; a mother by holding him to her bosom and telling him she believes in him; and a priest by giving him sober counsel on how to find the right road out of the tempest in a teapot that he has brewed for himself. [Of course I mean these physical images figuratively, since all their communication is over the Internet.] Then his aged father will log on, complaining that his son has once again gotten himself worked up over a triviality, and Wife gets to play the priest and/or the spouse once again, smoothing Father's feathers, telling him the right way to handle his son, and commiserating with him about how the kid seems to make things so hard for himself.

And I think this is part of what attracts her to Boyfriend 5 ... exactly that he is so incredibly high-maintenance. In fairness I also suspect that if she had to live with him for a month or six the charm would rapidly wear off. I think she would start being profoundly frustrated that Boyfriend 5 is so chronically needy. I think the only thing that makes this situation livable for her is precisely that he is not closer by, and that the relationship is new and probably not permanent. (Don't say that last part to Wife's face, however; she still seems to think this romance will outlast the moon and the stars.)

It sounds odd to say that Boyfriend 5's weaknesses and emotional pathologies are the things that attract Wife, but in fact it is not such a strange concept. Peter D. Kramer, in his book Against Depression, writes of the erotic charm that depressives (often women) hold for non-depressives (often men). He instances Marlene Dietrich's characters in The Blue Angel or Stage Fright. And he writes of numerous patients who have confirmed that this attraction is not uncommon -- non-depressives who find themselves helplessly in love with depressives (even against their wills), or depressives who find themselves chased by non-depressives.

What is more, truly, I think those same features -- pretty exactly -- are part of why I myself stay with Wife. Oh, it is surely more complex than that; there are any number of reasons that all build on each other to account for why I am too damned stubborn to leave, no matter how badly my feelings get hurt this day or that one. But it is clear to me that part of what makes her still attractive to me, in spite of everything, is her depression. I can't explain it rationally, but love is not a rational thing.

On the other hand, I sure wish I understood better what this means and where it leaves us.