I won't always be..., 2

I've been thinking a little more about this post that I published last night, and I realized that I should probably explain some of the emotional background that makes my attitude relaxed or resigned if not quite complacent. The short version is that it's really not news.

The possibility that Wife might be some day free of me has been in the air for over twenty years, nearly as long as we have been married. When she got involved with Boyfriend 1, a scant two years after the wedding, she thought about trading me in for him. Already, though, she decided against it because of "all the history" that she had "invested" in the relationship with me. (We had, at that point, known each other slightly over three years, for two of which we had been married. Of course, we started living together within a week or two of the first day we met, so that "history" was pretty compressed.) And, in fact, Wife told me that Boyfriend 1's brother had told him, "If you really love this woman you should persuade her to stay with her husband. They may have problems together, but if she sets up a pattern of leaving a relationship after only a couple of years -- without allowing time to work those problems out first -- that pattern could be bad for her in the rest of her life."

Girlfriend 1, a few years later, asked Wife to leave me and go live with her in the San Francisco Bay Area, but that was the kind of dramatic life change Wife was not really prepared to make.

By the time Wife got involved with Boyfriend 2, we had children; and while it was some years before I ever met Boyfriend 2, Wife was very casual about meeting him in a park while she had the kids with her. At some level, I believe her idea was that it would be good for the kids to get to know him and he them, because that way he would have some idea what he would be taking on in case she were to leave me for him and bring the kids as part of the package.

Boyfriend 3 was a very deep emotional relationship, but the affair was tempestuous and short. He was already married (for the third time) to a woman who wouldn't sleep with him (although apparently they had fucked vigorously and often before the wedding), so the question of a future together was a lot more tangled. And before they had time to get very far with it, his wife found out and brought the affair to a screeching halt.

With Boyfriend 4, as I have noted in an early post, Wife felt immediately homey, comfortable, and at ease; and I am reasonably certain (from putting together little things that I heard over the years) that at one point she offered to leave me to marry him. (He turned her down.) In time, though, his alcoholism became a show-stopper for her as far as "happily ever after" is concerned. At some level she still loves him, though.

And actually, by limiting myself to people that I've featured in the blog, I have left out one or two others. There was a time a few years ago, when I was last unemployed, that Wife had a very serious emotional affair going with the lead tenor from the church choir. (I am reasonably sure that it was never consummated -- at the time he was in the middle of a nasty divorce and had just undergone prostate surgery.) This fellow had the advantages (compared to me) of being self-employed and rich; he was also on an emotional wavelength much closer to Wife's than I am. And I think she believed that "some day soon" she would file for divorce and he would pay her legal costs and then the two of them would marry. And live happily ever after.

There might have been other times, that I can't think of right now. But basically this brings us up to the present, with Boyfriend 5.

Now, the first couple of times that I heard Wife talk like this, I was really upset. I felt terribly hurt for what I thought it said about me, and I felt panic at the prospect of losing Wife. And in fact, during the period when I was unemployed, I think she almost meant it. Wife can't stand being subject to forces out of her control (see my long essay "On power") and there was absolutely nothing she could do to get me another job. She couldn't even strike out on her own because her illnesses kept her from working. Divorce would have done nothing to increase her income (unless she succeeded in marrying Lead Tenor), and it certainly would have increased her expenses. But it also would have given her a sense that she was in control, that she was doing something. And I think her desire to be in control of something could have overwhelmed any sense of how irrational such a move really was. Fortunately I found work.

As I say, I used to panic when I heard Wife talk like this. But she has been talking like this for twenty years, and only once (yes, during that time I was out of work) has she ever said she went so far as to talk to a lawyer. (We never got a bill, though, which makes me think this means "chatted with a lawyer in the supermarket checkout line" or something similar.) So maybe I have just become a little jaded. Or, more exactly, I think I have come to see that Wife's desires exist at many different levels; so that even if she wants something desperately at this level, you can't assume she will want it enough at that level to act on it. This is one reason that I was so struck by the quote from Ender Wiggin that I published a while ago. It speaks to exactly this question.

If I have to come up with some kind of bottom-line assessment, I have to start by pointing out that Wife has always felt a profound internal struggle between the need for Roots and the need for Wings. Before her depression was ever diagnosed, when she had no psychiatric medication at all, her regular springtime depression would always take the form of an inconquerable Wanderlust. At a certain point she would be unable to stand it -- anything! -- one minute longer; so she would hop in the car and start driving. It hardly mattered where she went, so long as it was far away. For several years she regularly spent spring break (back when she was a teacher) visiting a friend of ours who lived on a remote farm eight hours away. (I sometimes wondered if he might have been another lover -- he was single, and Wife certainly had some kind of emotional entanglement with him -- but I never worried much about it. He never left his farm if he could help it, never interacted with the outside world, and was therefore never going to have any long-term impact on my life or our marriage. Wife insists that he told her he was gay. Not that it matters -- neither of us has seen him in years, now.)

So much for Wings. At the same time, Wife can be very cautious, almost timid, about other things. She needs security (Roots) as badly as she needs freedom. The same woman who can drive off into the sunset with no plans and no maps and no preparation won't let our kids go on an overnight campout with the Boy Scouts without checking and re-checking their backpacks against the list of recommended gear. They'll never bother changing into that spare pair of clean underwear, but she has to make sure they have it.

And I think that this struggle between Roots and Wings may explain the dynamic of our marriage, or part of it. However she may complain about me, rail at me, or struggle to break free of me, I think that being married to me gives her a kind of security. She knows she has a roof over her head, she knows where her next meal is coming from, and she knows that somebody will pick up the pieces from a dozen little things that she somehow forgets to do. At the same time, she feels this powerful need for freedom; so she has affairs, gets emotionally involved with other people, complains to all of them about what a prick I am, and talks to all of them about how some day in the future she will be free of this ogre she is married to now and can spend time with them alone. And maybe, ... just maybe, ... this pattern of griping and wishing and doing nothing about it is a clever technique she has evolved to satisfy both longings in a delicate balance.

Or maybe not. I like the idea because it has an elegant intellectual appeal -- and as you have all learned by now, I am a real sucker for that sort of thing. But I suppose I shouldn't go quite so far as to let myself get complacent.